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| Trust 4 April 2024 |
On BBC Radio 4 there has just been a
very interesting series of five, 15 minute,
programmes about trust presented by Rachel Botsman
of Oxford University. She dealt with various
aspects of trust down the ages.
At first, trust was confined to the members of your group or the members of your tribe. In small groups you would hear from other people in the group whether a particular person was trustworthy and, of course, reputation counts. Even in larger groups, there was still benefit from trusting other members of the group rather than complete strangers, if there was still a sufficient closeness to warrant caution by a potential cheater that his actions might come back to haunt him. It would also be possible to ask the leaders of the tribe to judge who was in the right and give recompense. So then trust is something we engage in providing that we can be reasonably certain that the trust is warranted. The need for the trust to be warranted was far more difficult to achieve in connection with international trade. The ability actually to know people, or at least to know someone who knew them, integral to being part of a smaller local group, was missing. This meant that other means had to be found in order to try to avoid buyers being ripped off by suppliers. There was no effective court system for long-distance enforcement of contracts. It was hardly going to make economic sense for a buyer to travel, perhaps thousands of miles in mediaeval times, in order to try to persuade a court in the supplier’s area that you, a complete stranger, had been the victim of a breach of contract. So then, amongst an important trading group, Maghribi traders, Jewish traders who operated in the Muslim Mediterranean in the 11th century, another system was put into operation. The traders all signed up to a charter which required that someone trying to defraud any one of the traders was black-balled by them all – permanently. A kind of early review system, and one which provided a massive disincentive to be an unreliable trader with such an important group of customers. As Rachel Botsman has pointed out, though, there are increasing instances where there is what she refers to as ‘distributed trust’ – the sort of trust which is not really amenable to any sort of court system...(continue) |
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| Reparations 22 March 2024 |
An investment fund called ‘Queen Anne’s
Bounty’ was set up in the reign of, well, Queen
Anne. Prior to the reformation, one tenth of the
income of the clergy was ‘tithed’ to Rome. After
Henry 8th decided to break with Rome, those tithes
were paid to the Crown. In 1704 Queen Anne decided
that they should instead be paid into an
investment fund to be used to supplement the
livings of clergy on low incomes. Not all were the
third sons of wealthy families.
The fund attracted other donations and
went from strength to strength. Of course it had
to find assets to invest in order to produce the
income needed.
Unfortunately one of its better investments was in the slave trade. In 2022 the Church Commissioners published a report which said that Queen Anne's Bounty had invested significant sums in the South Sea Company, which transported 34,000 slaves to the Spanish Americas in the 18th century, and had received donations from people with links to slavery, including that major benefactor of Bristol, Edward Colston, the one whose statue became so famous for all the wrong reasons. It was reckoned that the fund benefited
from the slave trade to the tune of about £200,000
– the equivalent now of about £450 million. The
Church Commissioners have therefore decided to put
aside £100 million into a ‘Fund for Healing,
Repair and Justice’. They have also asked wealthy
people, particularly any who are unfortunate
enough to have benefited from their ancestors’
misdeeds, to add to it to bring the total fund to
£1 billion...(continue)
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| The
commonplace of ritual 5 March 2024 |
We usually
associate ritual with religion. Religions rely
very much on the familiarity of their followers
with the ceremonies staged, the rituals. The
priest and others officiating, wearing the
clothing required by the rites of their religion,
go through the same actions week after week, the
same sequences of prayers, varied depending on
which part of the religious calendar has come
around. After all, ritual is repetition, whether
on a daily, weekly or yearly basis. In the Christian religion we have the major events such as Christmas, Easter and Whitsun with readings from the scriptures to fit the season and in some churches with variations based on which saint’s day it happens to be. All to achieve a feeling of order, of comfort, which seems to appeal to our psychological makeup and so to bind us closer to our religion. But I would like to suggest that ritual in fact permeates our lives. Although we don’t have the elaborate tea-drinking ceremonies of ancient china, we do still typically offer a visitor a cup of tea or coffee. Why? Do we actually think that they are thirsty? Unlikely. I would suggest that it is an attempt by us to indicate that we value their presence and, at the same time, a wish to present ourselves as being good hosts. Both parties to the ritual want to feel valued...(continue) |
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| Conflict,
extremism and arrogance 25 February 2024 |
There came a cry from the citizens of
this land that our politicians should decide what
ought to happen in a war between two forces in a
far-off land. And they all decided that we should
send arms and ammunition to Ukraine to fight off
the Russian aggressor.
But then there came another demand from
the citizens of this land, or at least some of
them, that our politicians should decide what
ought to happen next in a war between two forces
in a different far-off land. And this
proved to be a bit more complicated. This, because
they were being asked to decide whether there
should be a cease-fire, a temporary cease-fire or
a temporary cessation of hostilities for
humanitarian purposes. The difference
being...? Isn’t a ‘cease-fire’, by its
nature, a temporary cessation of hostilities?
But the Scottish National party went further: their motion condemned the "collective punishment of the Palestinian people" – a war crime, with overtones of Nazi policies. The Labour motion added that Israel "cannot be expected to cease fighting if Hamas continues with violence" and called for a diplomatic process to deliver "a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state". So then an attempt by the SNP to cosy up to the extremist Palestinian supporters and, more particularly, to put Labour in a bad light. And an attempt by Labour to continue to show that it was no longer an anti-Semitic party whilst hoping not to upset the Palestinians. |
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| An idea taken
too far 10 February 2024 |
George Soros is probably now best known
as the subject of crazy conspiracy theories
emerging from the dim recesses of the internet
into the thinking of populist politicians and
their supporters throughout the world.
Unfortunately for Mr Soros, he ticks all the boxes
for the conspiracists: he is Jewish, an ultra-rich
financier and an exceedingly generous supporter of
the Democrats in the USA. To the conspiracists he
is one of the mysterious cabal who control the
world.
He is also a great proponent of the thinking of my favourite philosopher, Sir Karl Popper, whose work ‘’The Open Society  and its Enemies’
(Volumes I and II) challenged philosophies which
undermined the idea of democracy and so sought to
limit the freedom of the people. Since 1979, inspired by Karl Popper’s
‘Open Society’, Soros has channelled his
philanthropic giving through the ‘Open Society
Foundations’, which work in over 120 countries
around the world. So far he has given over $32
billion to “support individuals and organizations
across the globe fighting for freedom of
expression, accountable government, and societies
that promote justice and equality.”
But he was also one of those who predicted the financial crash of 2008 – and made a lot of money out of it by ‘shorting’ various over-priced listed companies – the banks. In fact, over many years, a large proportion of his wealth has come from correctly predicting when financial bubbles were about to burst. In 2009 he explained his theory of market bubbles: ....(continue) |
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| “Prison works” 5 February 2024 |
David Green (Financial Times 2013):“Here is a thought-experiment: imagine that you have asked some mischievous demon to conceive the most counter-productive way of dealing with crime. What fiendish scheme would this diabolic agent devise? The demon could suggest a system where offenders are kept together with more serious and experienced criminals for months or years, and so can learn from them; where the offender is taken away from any gainful employment and social support or family network; where the offender is put in places where drugs and brutality are rife; where the infliction of a penalty can make the offender more, and not less, likely to re-offend; and where all this is done at extraordinary expense for the taxpayer. A system, in other words, very much like the prison system we now have in England and Wales, as well as in many other jurisdictions.” And I’m afraid that nothing has changed over the last 10 years. Well, not quite true. We now have prisons which are so overcrowded that Judges are being asked not to send people to prison, not because of a new-found leniency, but because we don’t have enough cells. In earlier times, prisons were where you kept those charged with a crime until their cases could be heard and the actual sentence, hanging, flogging or transportation – could be imposed. Imprisonment itself was not the punishment for criminal activity...(continue) |
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| Apocalypse
now 29 January 2024 |
Climate anxiety
featured in an article in a recent issue of the ‘New
Yorker’ concerning “the morality of having kids in a
burning, drowning world.” Our public health
infrastructure groans under the weight of a
lingering pandemic and we are told to expect similar
or worse contagions. Some of the directors of the
board of the company which developed ChatGPT think
that artificial intelligence could soon threaten
humanity with extinction. Meanwhile, with diminishing birthrates in so many countries, some are warning of imminent population collapse. Elon Musk, has called it “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Politicians speak openly about the possibility that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East could spark World War III. We are seeing the early results of global warming in the extremes of heat and storms. Extinction Rebellion believes that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness. None of this, however, is new. Apocalyptic anxieties have long afflicted human culture. The experts say however that they tend to come in waves. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they spike into brief but intense extinction panics - periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future - before going back into the background noise as those developments prove to be less problematic than imagined....(continue) |
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| The
Rule of Law - how to circumvent it 11 January 2024 |
We live in
strange times. We’ve had the government trying to
displace the role of the Courts in determining
whether Rwanda is safe. They’re just going to
declare that it is. And now the Post Office scandal
will result in an Act of Parliament declaring 900
sub-postmasters to be innocent and so all entitled
to substantial compensation from us. And this, in
breach of the doctrine of the separation of powers,
and regardless of whether they are in fact innocent
or guilty. In Parliament, in response to the
difficulty of acquitting guilty people, the minister
said:“You ask how many Post Office cases the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has decided not to refer to the Appeal Court to date. As of today’s date, there have been 33 such cases, out of a total of 101 completed CCRC Post Office reviews. Decisions not to refer have been reached for a variety of reasons, but a consistent feature is that there was cogent prosecution evidence in the case - extraneous to Horizon - that money was stolen by the sub-postmaster in question (for example: evidence of Post Office money having been transferred to the sub-postmaster’s personal bank account; or evidence from an eye witness who saw the sub-postmaster taking money). A number of the cases which have been turned down have also featured detailed and compelling confessions by the sub-postmaster, wherein they explained to investigators how they took the Post Office money and how they then used it.”.If the innocent are to be declared innocent within weeks, then so will the guilty. That is the penalty of not having resolved this outstanding scandal many years ago. The only safe-guard will be that, before compensation can be claimed, a statement of innocence will have to be signed by the claimant. If subsequently that claimant is found to have made a false statement, then he can be prosecuted for fraud. But why have we got to the position where legislation is required to put right a wrong which would normally be dealt with by the standard appeals process?...(continue) |
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| Conscious
decision making 7 January 2024 |
When I was very
young, my parents gave me a stamp album. I thought I
had lost it but, to my surprise, I found it again
the other day on my bookshelves. It is called "The
Improved Postage Stamp Album" with its "7400 spaces
and maps" and "updated with spaces for all the
latest stamp-issuing countries". It still contains
the stamps, bought in the 1950s in a shop in
Needless Alley in Birmingham. In fact, I found it next to a copy of a book given to my brother and me when we were kids. It’s a book of "100 new magic tricks" whose author was a person I vaguely remembered being called Bruce. I now see that the author was Bruce Elliot. Looking at the magic book again, I was reminded of the expression: 'The quickness of the hand deceives the eye'. The magician distracts us from where the action actually is so that he can make the substitution or change necessary to make the trick work. From my experience as a child with a magic kit, I can confirm that it certainly takes quickness (and confidence) if ones Uncles and Aunts are even to be able to make a pretence of having been fooled. No, I wasn’t very good at it, and neither was John. What is really needed is a lot of practice so that the movements barely need to be thought about, so that they happen almost automatically. Something-else I wasn’t very good at was sport. It appears however that there can be good reasons for a lack of sporting prowess. One is the ‘speed of sight’. A new concept to me. Our ability to perceive rapid changes in visual scenes over time varies a lot between people. This suggests that some people can track fast-moving objects – as in some sports - better than others because of their innately superior vision...(continue) |
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| Repetitive
behaviour 30 December 2023 |
In December, Novo Nordisk started a
trial of “pre-obesity” use of its anti-obesity
drug – Ozempic. Until then it had been used only
in people who were already obese. But now they are
trying to find out if it can stop obesity before
those who are just overweight get to that stage.
If it can, the implications could be very
wide-ranging.
The drug, first approved in 2005, helps
people lose weight by curbing hunger: it reduces
the speed at which the stomach empties after
having a meal. And so you feel fuller for longer
and have less of an urge for a snack between
meals.
But a very surprising collateral effect thing is that research now shows the drugs to have a similar effect on the desire for drink, drugs, nicotine and obsession with social media. In other words, on addiction and obsession in general. Through what must be another mechanism – so far unknown - it seems to be telling us that we don’t need to keep doing the same thing over and over again. It somehow reduces addictive and obsessive behaviour. So then, if the trials are successful and, if in our world with its increasing childhood and adult obesity the use of Ozempic became widespread, then we could see a lot of change in the way we live our lives. But people who were prescribed Ozempic for weight loss also found that ‘retail therapy’, amongst other behaviours, fell into decline. And so in October this year, Bloomberg, the business-orientated journalism group, ran an article headlined “Ozempic is Bad for Business”...(continue) |
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| The Elgin Marbles 4 December 2023 |
 I asked ChatGPT to write
a précis of the book kindly delivered to me by
Amazon on Thursday morning, but it tells me that the
books contents are not available on the internet. So
I shall have to do it myself. We start in 1799 when the Earl of Elgin was aged 32. He had impressed the Prime Minister, William Pitt, as an envoy in Vienna and then ambassador in Berlin at the Prussian Court. But now the government wanted him to go and work his magic on the Ottoman empire as ambassador to the Court of the Sultan. At his age, he decided that it would be best, before going, to find himself a wife. Within a few weeks of his return to Scotland he was married to a somewhat reluctant Mary Nisbet. She was a 21 year old society beauty from a very wealthy family. As ambassador, Elgin had already run up quite large debts and had no major source of income. But with the substantial marriage settlement which accompanied his wife, his financial problems seemed to be over. After a few months, he and his by now pregnant wife set off to Constantinople across a rather perilous, nausea inducing, Mediterranean Sea which was then the backdrop for naval battles involving, amongst other notable figures, Bonaparte and Nelson. At that time, many scholars and young men on their European tour were abandoning the previously fashionable Rome and going to Greece instead to study ancient history and art. Elgin saw an opportunity to use his time in Constantinople to get artists and mould-makers to go to Greece, then a part of the Ottoman empire, and produce drawings and copies of the Greek marvels at the Parthenon and elsewhere...(continue) |
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| Move
over Panpsychism: we now have Cosmopsychism! 19 November 2023 |
It seems that my old friend Professor
Goff of Durham University has reappeared. Last
time I came across him it was in ‘Philosophy Now’
in 2017. He was promoting the theory of panpsychism
as an answer to his difficulty in explaining
consciousness. The idea of panpsychism is that
awareness, consciousness, is inherent in every
aspect of matter, even though normally we only
recognise it in the animal kingdom. However, he
says that because atomic particles have
consciousness, we too can have consciousness. No
evidence is provided or explanation given as to
how this may work. It’s a ‘just so’ story.
Our human version of consciousness means that we are aware of ourselves, and of ourselves in relation to our surroundings. Sub-atomic particles have physical properties such as mass, spin, charge, etc. But it seems that now we have to add to them ‘awareness’. That they interact with other particles in predetermined ways is of course not disputed, but that’s not awareness. Panpsychists though argue that it’s a question of degree. And so, as we find it difficult even to imagine having the awareness of a mouse or a spider, we will find it yet more difficult to understand the awareness enjoyed by a subatomic particle. This, they say, leaves open the possibility that it has awareness in some way. But unless we want to be in Humpty Dumpty land, ‘consciousness’ cannot completely change meaning as it shrinks. If panpsychism is the best explanation currently available, I think I shall get out my self-aware Ouija board to see what’s next in line to ‘explain’ consciousness. But Dr Goff has moved on. To accompany his latest book 'The Purpose of the Universe' (£14.99), a summary of his latest philosophical theory – cosmopsychism - appears in ‘Aeon’, an online magazine. It publishes articles on a very wide range of matters. Dr Goff is himself an atheist but is
concerned by the meaningless of our lives in the
absence of a God able to give us that meaning. In
order to cheer himself up, he has further analysed
an old idea – that our universe is one which is
fine-tuned to permit life, and so us, to exist.
This is normally taken to mean either that God created it in that way or that it is a matter of pure chance that we live in such a universe. The improbability of our living in such a universe is explained by the simple fact that we are, by definition, here to witness it. He though takes the view that the universe itself has a sense of purpose, at least part of which is to bring life into existence...(continue) |
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| A Liberal
Democracy 11 November 2023 |
I see that the magazine 'Prospect' has
a ‘Philosopher at Large’, Sasha Mudd, who is a
Senior Research Fellow at Southampton
University. This month she has written an essay
entitled ‘A philosophical defence of democracy’.
As she says: “around the world, liberal
democracy is in trouble. Opinion polls paint a
grim picture: political dysfunction amid
overlapping crises has left younger generations
sceptical of the value of democracy and doubtful
it can deliver for them. Those rightly worried
by this call for urgent reform. But just what is
it that needs reforming? What, exactly, is
democracy, and why should we value it?”.
A former Lord Chief Justice, the aptly
named Igor Judge, who, sadly, died last month,
gave a lengthy lecture last year in which he
reviewed the system of government in the UK. The
wheels started to come off the monarchic system in
1609 with the arrival of the new King, James 1st,
the successor to Elizabeth, lately imported from
Scotland. As Lord Judge said: “He told Parliament
that ‘the state of monarchy is the supremest thing
upon earth’, modestly adding that all the
attributes of God agreed in the person of a King.”
That 1609 Parliament included about 100 lawyers
from the Inns of Court, many rather perturbed by
the new King’s approach. As a consequence, in
1610, parliament delivered a Petition of
Grievances. The Petition was a complaint against
rule by proclamations i.e direct rule by the king.
Things went from bad to worse and of course, his
son, Charles 1st, lost his head over his devotion
to the divine right of kings. Instead, we had a
parliament to govern us which, over the centuries,
gradually became more representative of the people
as a whole rather than just the big land-owners of
the day.
But obviously the modern equivalents of
the big land-owners are back in the form of the
richest of the rich, such as Elon Musk, Rupert
Murdoch and many others who have far more
influence with governments, and so power, than the
rest of us...(continue)
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| The Halloween
Edition 31 October 2023 |
Along with reclining seats and devices
to give new life to tired legs, preparing for ones
own funeral is now a major topic in the ads on
daytime television. Which tells us a lot about
their audience demographics. We are encouraged to
take out a life policy or funeral plan so that the
our children will not have to find the money to
send us off.
Co-op Funeral Care however is taking a
different line. It is inviting us all to have a
conversation with our loved ones regarding the
type of funeral we would like to have. Perhaps a
motor bike and side-car rather than the usual
hearse, a memorial service with jokey
reminiscences or something rather more
traditional, our favourite pop music or church
music.
Whatever our choice, we are told it is
better to have that conversation now, so that
those left behind on our demise will know what to
do, what we would have wanted had we been in a fit
state to appreciate it all – as if, in fact, we
had not actually been already dead and (almost)
buried.
Now, I know that many people, especially those who know that they’re on their final furlong, do sometimes make very detailed plans. The obvious truth, however, is that I wouldn’t really be in a position to appreciate the genius of my planning, the incorporation of extracts from my brilliant essays and tales showing what a wonderful person I was. And I also recognise that for the most part, people don’t want to spend too long listening to stories about the deceased’s life if there are some drinks and food available afterwards. So then, other than requesting that some decent champagne is served, I’m not sure that I shall be spending much time engaged in considering how I may be remembered. Starting
in the Stone Age, however...(continue)
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| Law and War 24 October 2023 |
The whole idea of law having anything to
do with war is a relatively recent concept. In
times past it it was normal to obtain a blessing
for the smiting of the enemy from whoever happened
to be the highest religious authority. The
blessing didn’t attempt to limit the damage which
could be inflicted. On the contrary, it gave the
dual advantage of encouragement to the troops and
the possibility of lining up reluctant allies to
be on your side in what was likely to be a very
bloody conflict.
In biblical times, we know that God, or
at least his spokesmen, demanded the foulest of
actions to be carried out in his name, including
rape, killing of all the men, including male
children and the enslavement of the rest – or on
some occasions, just the slaughter of everyone.
Good times! Sometimes, it was because the ‘enemy’
got in the way of the taking of the promised land
of Israel and sometimes it was that and because
they had other gods.
But revenge as justification for
violence was quite normal. From the days of the
code of Hammurabi, an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth was the basis for the legal code. It
reflected how people believed life should be
lived.
We now have the state imposing justice
via our admittedly imperfect legal system, a
system which has however removed from the
individual the right to seek retribution, even if
it’s difficult to enforce amongst mafia-style
law-breakers.
And it’s even more difficult to apply
as between individual states where there is no
over-arching authority which can take control. We
have the law relating to war-crimes, but it is a
law which is very difficult to enforce...(continue)
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| HS2 - a moral
dilemma 25 September 2023 |
Quite the moral dilemma.  If the Manchester arm of
HS2 is cancelled, then that means that very few
trains should come past on the viaduct being erected
high in the sky on massive pillars to the West of
Coleshill. Instead, other than a few trains going
North to the maintenance yard at Kingsbury, the
others would all stop at the Birmingham Interchange.
That is on the Southern side of the M6 and so about
a mile to the South of Coleshill. So then, good news for us in Coleshill. Not such good news for the good folk of Manchester...(continue) |
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| Ideology 25 September 2023 |
Karl Marx considered Ideology to
be the superstructure of a civilization: the
conventions and culture that make up the dominant
ideas of a society. But in his opinion those ideas
were mainly those imposed by the ruling class. And
so he came to the conclusion that ideology was a set
of deceptive ideas designed by an elite to keep the
rest of us in our place. As the father of communism
he knew what he was talking about.
As it happens, though, talk about elites and their wish to make the rest of us subservient to them is again very fashionable. Liz Truss tells us she was thwarted by the anti-growth coalition meeting around the dining tables of Islington. Trump, Alex Jones of Infowars and many other conspiracy theorists tell us that they are fighting for us against some ill-defined and rarely explicitly named elite. Fortunately, we now see some of their lies backfiring on them, with Trump's multiple court appearances as a prime example. Alex Jones is still broadcasting on his infowars channel but has a $965m damages award against him plus a further $500,000 in punitive damages for repeatedly pushing the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax and that those involved were actors. Another person telling us about the elites and their wish to control us through use of the Covid vaccine is that rather charming person, Russel Brand. He is accused of multiple sexual assaults but has claimed that his many relationships in his very promiscuous life were consensual. Fortunately he has many friends standing by him down in the conspiracy rabbit-holes, including Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Elon Musk. So he should be fine. I don’t think Liz has expressed an opinion yet...(continue) |
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| It’s
all so different in France…? 10 September 2023 |
I’ve just taken a
look at a few of today’s newspapers (5th
September2023). There is Le Monde (the equivalent of
the Guardian), Le Figaro (definite Telegraph
leanings) and Le Dauphiné Libre, a newspaper
covering stories from the Haute Savoie. The headline on the last of these was ‘Le cri de détresse des associations’. Mainly the story is about the French cost of living crisis, something which has hit various charities hard. Something they have been saying for quite a long time. But now the one closest to French hearts - ‘Les Restos du Cœur’ – has just said that it is in significant financial difficulty. It was established in 1985 by the famous comedian, Coluche, to provide food banks and soup kitchens along with other necessities for the poor. Every year there is a TV appeal, rather like our Comic Relief, which raise tens of millions of euros. But they are now running out of money and having to turn people away. This is because of a substantial increase in the number of people turning up at their doors and increases in the price of the food they have to buy, together with the increased cost of electricity. Such is the central position of the Association within French consciousness, however, that within just a few minutes of the appeal by the boss of Les Restos, not only had Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of an extreme left-wing opposition party, ‘La France Insoumise’, said that the raison d’etre of his party was ‘la solidarité humaine’, but, more usefully, a government minister had confirmed an immediate grant of 15 million euros (although, as it turns out, not all of it new money)...(continue) |
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| The Donald 26 August 2023 |
And now we have
the mug shot. It’s being printed on ‘Free Trump’
tee-shirts and coffee  mugs, all being sold to
raise funds for the Trump re-election campaign. An
American journalist being interviewed after its
release explained that it is in fact his "You're
fired" face, familiar to all those who watched the
Apprentice. I presume therefore that it’s also his
‘I’m the master of all I survey’ face. We’ll see. What we do know is that for his bail bond of $200,000 the Trump put up $20,000 in cash. The rest came from a professional supplier of bail bonds. I assume it worked out cheaper for Trump to borrow money rather than dip into his piggy bank. This, of course, assumes that he actually has any credit balances anywhere other than his campaign funds – funds which are technically, well, for his campaign and so not available to lodge with the Court in Atlanta. We also know that he is accused of ducking and diving in his business accounts, using inflated or deflated valuations of assets in order to obtain bank loans or reduce his tax bill. So then the state of his finances is, just a little, shall we say, ‘obscure’...(continue) |
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| Knowledge
and perception 15 August 2023 |
In the latest edition of Philosophy Now
there is the usual invitation to readers to send
the answer to a question in no more than 400
words. This time it is: ‘What Are The Limits of
Knowledge?’.
‘Knowledge’
implies something solid and dependable - actual
data we have about our world: an event or how
something works – seeing how a machine works
through the turning of its cogs. But... It is
obvious that whilst there can be a true,
all-embracing, description of an event, what is in
fact reported as having happened by each person
present at that event will differ. Each would say
it was what they saw and heard but it is actually
what they remember of what they witnessed,
something which is partial and changes with time.
Of course a truly comprehensive description would also demand a vast amount of data, which means that we limit ourselves to accepting what we perceive to be the important points as a description of the event itself. And these days, we are less likely to be able to see the cogs whirring. In future, we shall have to rely on information supplied by the algorithms powering AI, without any of its workings being visible to us. So then, not knowledge in a direct sense, but a computer’s representation of the facts. So then our knowledge looks to be set on a rather shaky foundation, rather than being the solid body of facts we would like it to be. It is inherently limited. It is further limited because the knowledge which I can store is limited and will all disappear when I drop off my twig. Before then, my memory will become increasingly unreliable. I can of course store my knowledge of things in some external memory. Diarists have always done just that. And, in principle, that store can be added to indefinitely. A store of memories however is subject to fire, deterioration and carelessness and, in the case of computers, changes of operating systems, hardware malfunctions and interoperability difficulties. So then, it is without any clear limit, but very fragile. And knowledge of how the universe actually works? Karl Popper tells us that we cannot prove our theories to be true, but our scientists nonetheless carry out experiments, for example to test increasingly impenetrable hypotheses with a view to solving the contradiction between quantum theory and relativity theory. How much shall we progress as humankind? Unfortunately, we cannot say what we will know – it would mean that we already knew it - so then in itself a major limit to our knowledge...(continue) |
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| Class 7 August 2023 |
More
than most other countries, Britain is generally
regarded as a class-bound society. After all, we
have a house of Lords and also a royal family
which many foreigners believe actually rules
over us or at least has a significant role in
government. We encourage this view by the
success of various of our television series around
the world, including Brideshead Revisited, Downton
Abbey, Poirot, Miss Marple and Midsummer Murders,
a series I first heard about from a French friend
who had seen it on French TV under the name
‘Barnaby’. We are shown as defining ourselves in
terms of a range of classes and sub-classes from
upper class to working class. And we look down on
or up to each other accordingly.
Class, however, is a very strange
concept. It can be very vague or can reflect raw
power.
Following the takeover of England by
William the Conqueror, it was he and his entourage
who took the positions of power in this country
and became the new upper class, as confirmed by
the Bayeux Tapestry. This was no doubt much to the
chagrin of the previous Anglo-Saxon aristocracy,
who would have regarded them as ‘nouveaux' and
‘arrivistes' and just, well, too français.
We didn't really have any other sudden
changes in the upper echelons until Oliver
Cromwell tried to alter the social order. The fact
that he didn't really do class, however, was
probably the reason why his new order didn't last
much after his death. After all, at the top level,
in those days the trappings of class and the
rights and land which went with it, were a reward
for faithful service. If you don’t reward your
followers well, particularly after a civil war,
then they'll transfer their allegiance to someone
who will. And they did. And so we had Charles II,
a sort of anti-Cromwell who released us from the
Taliban-like piety of the Roundheads and restored
the position of the former aristocracy...(continue)
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| The
Law of Conservation 18 July 2023 |
The recently departed Czech writer,
Milan Kundera, criticised “judging instantly,
ceaselessly and everyone; of judging before, and
in the absence of, understanding”
The law of conservation of energy is
fundamental to science. It was however formulated
in the days before Einstein started redefining
physics. As a result of his thinking we now have
his formula E=mc2 which says that, actually, we
can convert energy into mass and vice versa. They
are two sides of the same coin. Hence the heat we
receive from the conversion of matter in the sun.
It seems, however, that conservation and conversion do not stop there. A few years ago, a writer called Samuel Goldman proposed what he called “the law of the conservation of religion.” He said: “in any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed.” An interesting thought. One which implies not only a constancy but, I would suggest, also an interchangeability between the outwardly religious and the apparently secular. It aligns with my own observation that so many people in so many fields adopt the sort of thinking which is typical of traditional religions. High-profile events such as international and even minor town football matches have very similar effects to religious gatherings: fans can feel that their life has meaning through social involvement. An essential part of this is seeing one's team as worthy of support - despite everything - a support that for many fans borders on worship. And, the clubs, instead of Peter's pence, ask for payment from those supporters for the shirts, changed with regularity, and other sacred memorabilia, to keep the money flowing in. Of course, ritual is fundamental in both sport and religion. In the days when religion ruled supreme, it was not unusual for people to go to mass very frequently. Now, many people's lives are taken over by a belief that they have to go to the gym or go running before going to work. Others put in 10,000 steps each day in order to attain - well, no-one's quite sure - the scientists tell us that simply doing housework gives enough of a workout to keep us in working order. But they believe that it's what they should do. It's their sacred ritual....(continue) |
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| Gender
dysphoria 15 July 2023 |
On 6th July this year, a case I hadn’t
previously heard about was decided. It was a claim
by a registered charity called ‘Mermaids’. It had
applied to the court for an order that a rival
charity, the LGB Alliance (note the lack of ‘T’),
should have its charitable registration removed.
The fight was because LGB Alliance opposes the
‘trans ideology’ of Mermaids.
To me this is the equivalent of the C
of E asking for the charitable status of all
Sikh temples to be removed because they’re not
Churches. So then, not good. And a demerit for
Jolyon Maugham and the ‘Good Law Project’ for
deciding to take on the case for Mermaids.
It is of course true that LGBA has its HQ at 55 Tufton Street, the address for so many organisations of a rather extreme right-wing persuasion. So we can see whom they align with and who might be supporting them financially. On the other hand, the founders of the LGB Alliance are two lesbians and so they’re entitled to oppose views which, they consider, are contrary to their interests. The two judges determining the case said that, although the point did not need to be decided by them, they could not actually agree between themselves whether LGB Alliance was entitled to its registration as a charity. For LGBA simply to attack other charities, such as Mermaids and Stonewall, looked more like the activity of a political organisation than a charity. The judges however went on to decide the case simply on the basis that Mermaids did not have the required legal standing to challenge the Charity Commission’s original decision. And so the registration stood...(continue) |
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| Positive
discrimination 9 July 2023 |
We’re back to the
law, I’m afraid. In this instance the decision by
the American Supreme Court two weeks ago. It’s all
about positive discrimination, something which,
although superficially attractive, I find inherently
difficult to justify. Usually it is an excuse for
not having addressed the living conditions that
produce the disadvantages for which positive
discrimination is a so-called solution - a cheaper
but much less effective solution. In the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment provided that no State should “deny to any person...the equal protection of the laws.” It guaranteed: “the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.” Despite this, the Court – along with the country as a whole – failed to live up to the Clause’s commitment. For almost a century after the Civil War, state-mandated segregation was the norm in many parts of the Nation. The Supreme Court played its own role in that history, allowing the shameful ‘separate but equal’ regime that would spread through much of America. Some decisions had emphasized that it required States to provide black students educational opportunities equal to - even if formally separate from - those enjoyed by white students. Finally, however, in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court overturned the separate but equal regime. The right to a public education, it said, “must be made available to all on equal terms.” In the years that followed, Brown’s “fundamental principle” reached other areas of life - for example, state and local laws requiring segregation in bussing; racial segregation in the enjoyment of public beaches and bathhouses; and anti-miscegenation laws....(continue) |
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| The
emergence of civilisations 3 July 2023 |
History tells us
that civilisations and empires ultimately disappear.
Like the Egyptian civilisation, they may last for
thousands of years or, like the extensive Mongol
Empire, be gone in less than 200 years. The ebb and
flow of power and influence even just in Europe and
around the Mediterranean in our recorded history
would take a very long time to recount. But what is more puzzling is what happened in the days before the empires of which we have written records. Our recorded history is actually a very small part of our existence as hominids. For almost all of our 300,000 years of human existence, our species has been roaming the planet, living in small groups, hunting and gathering, moving to new areas when the climate was favourable, retreating when it turned nasty. It has though only left indirect evidence of what was happening. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors used fire to cook and warm themselves. They made tools, shelters, clothing and jewellery. Then, about 10,000 years ago, everything began to change. In a few places, people started growing crops. They spent more time in the same spot. People in places as disparate as Mesopotamia, northern China and South America all turned to farming within a few millennia of each other. They built villages, towns and cities. Various unsung geniuses invented writing, money, the wheel and gunpowder. Within just a few thousand years – the blink of an eye in evolutionary time – cities, empires and factories mushroomed all over the world. Archaeologists and anthropologists have sought to explain why this rapid and extraordinary transformation occurred. For almost our time as humans – including during the tumult of glaciations – we had been hunters and gatherers. So why did our ancestors abandon a lifestyle that had worked so well for so long?...(continue) |
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| Evolution:
still controversial after all of these years 25 June 2023 |
In the 19th century, after the emergence
of the theory of evolution, it was not surprising
that it was controversial. It called for a totally
different world view. The so-called 'Oxford
Evolution Debate' of 1860 took place at the Oxford
University Museum, seven months after the
publication of 'The Origin of Species'. It
happened as part of the British Association's
week-long annual meeting and was attended
by numerous prominent British scientists and
philosophers, including Thomas Huxley and, as the
main opposition to this new idea, Bishop Samuel
Wilberforce, a well-known preacher and orator.
The debate is best remembered today for
a lively exchange in which Wilberforce is said to
have asked Huxley whether his 'descent from an ape
was from his grandfather's side or his
grandmother's'. Huxley is said to have replied
that he would not be ashamed to have an ape as an
ancestor, but that he would be ashamed to be
connected to a man who used his great gifts to
obscure the truth.
Someone else present said that Wilberforce's real question was "whether, in the immensely shaky state of the law of development, as established by Darwin, anyone can be so enamoured of this so-called law, or hypothesis, as to rejoice that his great-grandfather was an ape or a gorilla?" Since Darwin's theory had not proposed any mechanism for the change of species over time, it was obviously legitimate to express doubts about the whole idea. However, Abbot Mendel had already clearly shown that there had to be a complex genetic mechanism for defining the characteristics of plants, even if the actual explanation, the double helix, would only be known a hundred years after the Origin of Species. In the West, except for creationists and indigenous groups in New Zealand, we have the impression that evolution is generally accepted as the explanation for the geological record...(continue) |
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| Morality
- the ups and downs 12 June 2023 |
The social fabric
appears to be unravelling: civility seems like an
old-fashioned habit, honesty like an optional
exercise and trust like the relic of another time.
One famous social commentator has claimed that “the
process of our moral decline” began with the
“sinking of the foundations of morality” and
proceeded to “the final collapse of the whole
edifice”, which brought us “finally to the dark
dawning of our modern day, in which we can neither
bear our immoralities nor face the remedies needed
to cure them”. All very apt not only to the Roman historian Livy, who wrote those words 2000 years ago, but also seemingly apt as a description of our society now. We have endless scams and hate-speech on the internet; in the political world we have a former American president charged with felonies under US espionage legislation, Johnson not willing to face up to the finding of the privileges committee that he lied through his teeth (and other orifices) to Parliament about partygate and now, for good measure, the former First Minister of Scotland arrested in connection with ‘accounting irregularities’. In response, Trump and mini-Trump trumpet their innocence of the trumped-up charges against them. Everything is a conspiracy to do them down, whether by the establishment, judges or the shape-shifting Blob. But are things actually worse now and going rapidly downhill? As illustrated by Livy’s remarks, there is always a tendency when looking back to give our own past a rose-coloured hue. But there is now a study, carried out by researchers at the Universities of Columbia and Harvard, published last month in Nature, which suggests that this is not really the case...(continue) |
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| National
Conservatism 17 May 2023 |
In the far off days of Jeremy Corbyn
(remember him?) we had a huge group of devoted,
environmentally-aware supporters of Corbynism
called ‘Momentum’. They obviously thought that if
they all cycled fast enough, their momentum would
carry them over the finishing line ahead of
everyone-else. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Instead we had a Johnson super-majority (followed
by his downfall for lying) and Jeremy himself now
in the naughty corner as he struggles to
understand the concept of antisemitism.
Of course the European Research Group
was at the forefront of making sure that Brexit
was brought over a rather different finishing line
– the one labelled ‘Hard-Brexit’. And they
succeeded, only to see themselves as a group
gradually waning in political influence when the
rest of us carried on asking them to explain how
we would benefit from it all. And answer came
there none.
But not to worry, when one group wanes,
another waxes. And so at the beginning of this
week we had the National Conservative conference.
No, me neither. But it has been portrayed in a
tweet by Mr Gove, one of its participants, as a
‘center’ right movement. That slip in the spelling
could be because the conference was promoted and
partly funded by an American religious (very)
right-wing organisation.
It seems that National Conservatism is, as the name implies, a nationalist variant of conservatism that concentrates on upholding national and cultural identity. National conservatives combine nationalism with conservative stances promoting traditional cultural values, family values, and, importantly, opposition to immigration. To see it as a precursor to Brexit is not difficult, and to see it as an attempt to justify the appalling mess created by Brexit is very easy. The promotional film for the conference tells us that “Conservatives around the world look to Britain as an inspiration” over images of Elizabeth II and a military parade. But then the mood darkens...(continue) |
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| Artificial Intelligence - folie de
grandeur? 9 May 2023 |
It
may not be obvious that there is a direct link
between the greenhouse effect and artificial
intelligence. Last week, however, in ‘Le Monde’
there was a lengthy analysis of the
exponentially increasing amount of power being
used to run the world’s computers. This
has been talked about in the past in connection
with crypto mining. Recently it was estimated that
such mining used the same amount of energy as
Norway.
But the article makes clear that crypto mining is only a subset of total computer power demand, with its effect on the production of greenhouse gases. The promise has always been that the use of computers would diminish the energy used overall: it would provide efficiencies which would more than outweigh the power used by the computers themselves. Le Monde’s reporters point to research showing this to be untrue. And so, as part of our attempts to limit global warming, we need to consider just as carefully how we use our computers as what sort of transport we should use. Artificial intelligence is, by its nature, a very big user of computer power. Indeed it’s only now that we’re in a position to run computer systems big enough (and power-hungry enough) to do the vast number of computations required for AI. Which means, in turn, that if we want to progress down that route, then we shall have to be very sure that we are not thereby causing ourselves even greater problems. A webinar organised by Warwick
University last week asked the question “AI – who
will win the race?” It did not though take us very
far towards an answer. I’m not sure that we were
even told by the speakers where, in their opinion,
the race was taking place or who the competitors
were. And there was certainly no mention of global
warming.
Inevitably, however, ChatGPT came up despite the reluctance of one of the talking heads to do so. Actually, I can see why there was such reluctance. As we have all become aware, it’s a Large Language Model (LLM). It takes the string of words it's provided with as the prompt and then from its immense database decides, on a statistical basis, which word would normally come next and then which word should follow that and so on. As a number of computer scientists have said, it is designed to produce text which is 'plausible' rather than accurate. And I’m not personally convinced that ChatGPT is even what I would think of as AI...(continue) |
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| Neurodiversity – the new
social identifier 28 April 2023 |
There seems to be
a wish to pathologise everyday experiences that are
simply part of what it means to be human. People
will often claim to be depressed when they are
simply suffering from the occasional low moods that
are part and parcel of navigating the vicissitudes
of life; or claiming to have OCD simply because of a
preference for tidiness or a penchant for
organisation. When I was about 7 years old, I cried
because we were going away on holiday. I was upset
because I had fairly recently started to learn to
play the piano and, on holiday, I would no longer be
able to play my absolute favourite tune: “Matchbox”.
Was that an example of OCD or simply part of being a
kid? Having built sand-castles on the beach, I think
that I got over my forced absence from music fairly
easily. It did not leave me traumatized. Many commonplace experiences are, however, labelled as traumatic. Adverse or upsetting experiences, however, are not necessarily synonymous with trauma. We have specific psychiatric criteria that distinguish such events from ordinary human experiences. But, although we have official criteria for autism, there is also the vaguely related social media version. Few, if any, psychologists would say that a preference for natural lighting, doodling in class or even identifying as LGBTQ is a sign of ADHD or autism. And yet, online, there are diagnoses of such things using “symptoms” unrelated to clinical diagnostic criteria...(continue) |
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| Cultural
appropriation 31 March 2023 |
Cultural appropriation apparently first
became a ‘thing’ in connection with white
 people starting to play blues and
jazz. There was some resentment amongst the black
community, where the music styles originated, that
their music was being copied. But the idea of
cultural appropriation has now spread much more
widely. Indeed, its latest and very strange
appearance came last week. Abba were the epitome of 1970s cool.
Agnetha was the blond and Frida had dark curly
hair. The latest iteration of the money-making
group is the ‘Abba Voyage’ show, featuring
holograms performing the band’s greatest hits. But
it has been reported in the last few days that
fans attending the show and wanting to dress as
their heroines have been banned from wearing wigs
in honour of brunette Frida, although wearing a
blond wig is permitted.
The promoters have e-mailed ticket-holders to say: ‘Many of our guests will want to get in the spirit of the show by dressing up for their visit. [But] please do not wear so-called “Afro” wigs. ‘These wigs are culturally insensitive and not appropriate to be worn as fancy dress. If any guests are wearing this style of wig they will be respectfully asked to remove them as a condition of entry to the arena.’ The ban on wigs had been buried in the ‘Frequently asked questions’ section of the show’s website since it opened at the former Olympics site in East London in May 2022, but has only now come to light. Are the fans though actually intending to appropriate the culture of Afro-Caribbean people or make fun of them? I doubt it. I think it far more likely that when people dress up, they are doing it as a homage to the band and to the 1970s era. But cultural appropriation is now
available in numerous flavours...(continue)
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| Saving the world one vegan sausage at a time 14 March 2023 |
The
main argument for veganism used to be its claimed
moral aspect. We should not be causing harm to
animals: for a convinced vegan this was an end in
itself. In these days of global warming, however,
there is much talk of the contribution which the
reduction or elimination of the consumption of
meat could make to our chances of survival. Making
food more sustainable was a major focus of the
Cop27 climate talks, recently concluded in Egypt.
We are told that the global production of food is
responsible for a third
of all planet-heating gases emitted by human
activity. The use of animals for meat causes
twice the pollution of producing plant-based
foods.
The
use of farming machinery, spraying of fertilizer
and transportation of products, causes 17.3bn
metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year,
according to the research. This enormous release
of gases that fuel the climate crisis is more than
double the entire
emissions of the US and represents 35% of
all global emissions, according to Atul Jain, a
climate scientist at the University of Illinois
and co-author of a paper published
in Nature Food. “This study shows the entire
cycle of the food production system, and
policymakers may want to use the results to think
about how to control greenhouse gas emissions.”
The
raising and culling of animals for food is far
worse for the climate than growing and processing
fruits and vegetables for people to eat, the
research found. This confirmed previous findings
on the outsized impact that meat production,
particularly beef, has on the environment.
So
then no more Sunday Roast, although the Yorkshire
puddings can remain on the plate...(continue)
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| 13th November, 1849 – a very
public execution 10 March 2023 |
According
to work carried out by researchers at King’s
College published this week, Great Britain (i.e.
excluding Northern Ireland) is one of the most
liberal societies in the world. We have seen
monumental shifts in attitudes towards
homosexuality, abortion, divorce, euthanasia and
casual sex, according to their survey. Where we
are not so liberal is in connection with the death
penalty: 21 per cent thought it was justifiable —
a higher proportion than Morocco, Russia, Spain
and the Philippines — while 42 per cent said it
was not. There is however a significant party
political difference. Only 16% of Labour voters
believe the death penalty is justifiable, while
the figure among Conservative voters is 32%, with
another 35% believing it is potentially (?)
justifiable.
Which perhaps explains the recent appointment of Lee Anderson as vice-chairman of the Conservative party, Mr Anderson says that, after an execution, there is no question of repeat offending. I’m not sure if he thinks that a posthumous pardon provides a tangible benefit to someone executed after a wrongful conviction, but then balanced thinking does not come easily to members of this government. What follows is, I hope, a look into a past not to be repeated. Letters to the editor of the Times of London (from the Times archive) From Mr Charles Dickens Sir, I
was a witness of the execution at Horsemonger Lane
this morning...(continue)
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| Religion and
politics 24 February 2023 |
Did I
ever mention that I might easily have been born
somewhere in South America? When my parents were
engaged, my father wanted to become a missionary
there. I think he had Bolivia in mind for some
reason. They both started to go to classes to
learn Spanish, but then the second world war came
along and so that all fell by the wayside.
They
both of course remained committed Christians
during their lifetimes and we quite often provided
accommodation for visiting missionaries who were
home on furlough. It was a little unusual that the
version of Christianity to which my parents
subscribed didn’t have any wish to take or
exercise political power. Their attempts to
influence people were confined to trying to
persuade them to become Christians. They believed
in voting: it was a civic duty, but they were not
involved in political parties because St Paul said
that the followers of Christ were 'pilgrims in a
foreign land'.
This is
in contrast to many later versions of Christianity
which become integrated into the state. They all
saw themselves as, at the very least, having a
role in guiding the state authority: they insisted
that their brand of morality be reflected in the
laws of the land.
And the further back we go, the greater the power exercised, whether by Popes, Archbishops or, in countries with other religions, their equivalents. A lot of this was based on these religious representatives being the emissary of their god and so, potentially, wielding supernatural power, something now difficult to imagine, particularly in the case of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, a former oil industry executive. But, after a period in the second half of the 20th century when people had increasingly accepted the division between state and religion, the religious are now again seeking power...(continue) |
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| EU law:
the leftovers 22 February 2023 |
While
we were members of the EU, we were subject to EU
law. In the course of the almost 50 years of EU
membership, many laws had taken on a distinctly
European tinge. Some of these European laws were
incorporated into our law as primary legislation
(Acts of Parliament) or secondary legislation
("Statutory Instruments"), but many European
directives had direct effect and thus were not
incorporated into our legal system in the
traditional way.
Regardless of how European law became part of
British law, many saw it as undemocratically
imposed. This, despite our membership of all the
European bodies, such as the Council of Ministers
and our seats in the European Parliament. Those
same people regard the continuance of that body of
law to be an affront to our Britishness and they
want to put British laws in its place – without
delay.
On leaving the EU, much of that law would have become automatically unenforceable and so, as a holding measure, an Act was passed confirming the status quo: we would continue to be subject to the same laws as when we were in the EU until Parliament decided otherwise. It is that which is now subject to an attempt by the Brexiteers to purify our law, casting off the last vestiges of foreignness so that we can revert to singing ‘Rule Britannia’ with gusto. A bill has been passed by the Commons which would have just this effect. Fortunately, it is now being considered by the Lords. The Lords are revolting. I’m pleased to say. My latest email to my friend and Brexiteer, Craig, is as follows: Dear Mr Tracey...(continue) |
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| Liberty 15 February 2023 |
My
adventure started because I was on a train to
London. This was back in June 2009. As usual when
I travelled any distance, I bought a copy of
Private Eye at the station to accompany me on my
way. The magazine happened to have an advert for a
conference in London arranged by the human rights
group, Liberty, to celebrate its 75th anniversary.
The addresses by the main speakers were to be
web-cast to various other locations, including
Aston University, Birmingham. There would then be
local discussions.
The intention of the event was to promote the idea that we needed to oppose further intrusion of the state into our lives by the introduction of identity cards and hang on to our human rights generally. What it would take, I did not know, but imagined that, at least, there would be demonstrations ahead. Now you may not think me one to flout the law for any reason, but you would be wrong. In the early 70s I studied for my solicitors final examinations at Aston. I went there on my moped every day at a stately 20 miles per hour wearing my crash helmet. The results of our examinations were due to be posted to us, but at midnight on the night before the fateful envelopes were due to arrive, the results could be read in the first edition of the Birmingham Post. Which explains why I was waiting outside the Birmingham Post and Mail building in the city centre at midnight (with my crash helmet in hand) in order to buy the newspaper - and absolutely over the moon to find that I had passed. So delighted was I that on my way along the deserted main road from Birmingham back to Smethwick, I deliberately steered my moped to the right hand side of a keep left bollard - just to celebrate my success. It isn’t just Rock stars who walk on the wild side! And so it was that, many years later, on the Saturday morning following my outing to London, I went once more to Aston University, this time for the conference. I was, I have to admit, in a state of some excitement at the thought of getting involved in protest...(continue) |
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| Patterns of thought:
conspiracy theory and politics 6 February 2023 |
In 2017, thousands of people in Memphis joined
the Women’s Marches taking place across the world.
Among the placards bearing slogans such as ‘Our
bodies, our minds, our power’ one seemed  distinctly out of place. ‘Birds
aren’t real’ was carried by an American psychology
student, Peter McIndoe, so creating an elaborate
conspiracy theory. He claimed that between 1959 and 2001 the US government had, using a virus, committed ‘the merciless genocide’ of more than 12 billion birds, replacing them with robot spy birds. The prank now has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter (and see https://birdsarentreal.com) and a merchandising arm selling T-shirts with the slogans ‘If it flies it spies’ and ‘They are always watching’. Granted the deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the idea behind it is to ‘fight lunacy with lunacy’. Professor Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist specialising in misinformation and conspiracy theories, says ‘Birds aren’t real plays into all the important conspiracy narratives – people’s anxieties about surveillance, privacy, government intervention. And I love some of the details – why do birds sit on power lines? Because they have to recharge’. He considers though that it was a mistake to claim that all birds are drones. The smarter theory would be that only some birds are drones; then you could have a whole subset of conspiracies about what type of bird, how they act, are the sounds real? And you could record their calls – do they sound like a bird or a machine? Then it could get real traction...(continue) |
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| Colonisation 30 January 2023 |
In ‘The
Life of Brian’, in order to galvanise his group
into throwing off the yoke of their oppressors,
Reg, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea,
asks them ‘What have the Romans ever done for
us?”. And to this rhetorical question he receives
the slightly surprising answer “Sanitation?”,
followed by others suggesting medicine, education,
wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh
water system and public health. “All right, he
says, but apart from all that, what have the
Romans ever done for us?” Which quite neatly sums
up the present difficulty we seem to be having
with our assessment of colonisation and empire.
One of Britain’s leading publishers has been accused of cancelling a book on colonialism which concluded that the British Empire was not all bad. Rather than publish his book, ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’, Bloomsbury, publisher of the Harry Potter series, chose to pay off Professor Nigel Biggar, then Regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford. This was despite having described it as a work of “major importance” when it was delivered to them. According to journalists working for the Times, emails exchanged between Biggar and Bloomsbury show how the publisher went from enthusiastic to unwilling to publish in three months. This was under pressure from junior staff. The book argues that despite grave mistakes and moments of gross injustice, the British Empire learnt from its errors and was increasingly propelled by humanitarian and liberal ideals, most notably through the abolition and suppression of slavery. It also examines the work of a number of historians who Biggar claims “overstate” the sins of British colonialism, concluding that they are sustained by contempt for the West. Obviously his is a very unfashionable view. Not at all woke. And it
was not only the British who engaged in
colonisation. It can be seen in the history of
every continent and part of the world...(continue)
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| Originality and
Uncertainty 11 January 2023 |
I’ve just
come across the site - https://dalledemo.com/
- in which you can enter a description (in words) of
what you would like depicted and it will produce a
picture for you. I entered the instruction: ‘an oil
painting of a white mouse reading a book - in the
style of Picasso’. It generated 4 images, the best
of which is: Not
bad as a piece of cubist art, I thought. I tried various other combinations of subjects and styles. The other picture shown here is its version of a Monet-style haystack. It has the  right sort of colour
pallet, although it’s a bit less impressionist and
more realist than the master’s works. Both however
are obviously a lot better than either I or most
other people could paint. Which of his many haystack paintings it’s based on I have no idea, but the software is designed to to use the data it finds on the web. And I imagine that every one of his works is there somewhere. As far as I know, though, Picasso didn’t actually paint a picture of a mouse reading a book and so the mouse image shows a striking capacity to handle data in a way that looks like creativity, but is in fact the ability to create a pastiche. We do not see originality. What really made the news in AI recently, however, was ChatGBT. Commentators told us that school and university coursework was dead, because the software could do it all for us. I shan’t trouble you with the essay which I asked ChatGBT to write for me on the subject of freedom of speech. I awarded it 5 out of 10. It would make a rather dull encyclopaedia entry, providing nothing more than anodyne comments on the difficulties inherent in the concept. But clearly AI is making progress - of a sort...(continue) |
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| Cool tech and
influencers 31 December 2022 |
I suppose that I first came across the idea of a
guru - an early form of influencer - when the
Beatles got  together with Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi. It was a combination of flower power,
transcendental meditation, yoga and chanting –
mainly ‘Om’, although other chants are available. What we probably weren’t then aware of was that, in his early years, Steve Jobs was himself, with a shaven head, also seeking enlightenment. He went to India in search of a guru. He was looking for a sort of counter-culture, something different to the American way of life. The idea of a counter-culture can also be seen later on in his creation of computers very different to the rather dull Microsoft-based computers which dominated the market. The Apple computer had style, and was marketed not as a mere computer, but a desirable object in itself. Any reasonable analysis will show that the computer itself was not exceptional, except in terms of the exceptionally high price demanded for it. Samsung phones quickly caught up with Apple phones in terms of functionality and also style. The latest Samsung folding version of their phone has gone beyond what is available from Apple and there are many other contenders out there at half the price. But the Apple brand has been and is still presented as something apart. It is portrayed as having a spiritual quality, incarnated in its founding Guru, the very cool Steve Jobs, he of the black roll-neck jumper version of priestly garb: all, with access to software which will only work on its unique operating system, designed to keep Apple users ‘faithful’ to its products. Apple is not alone in its success, however...(continue) |
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| Freedoms, religion and secularism 9 December 2022 |
The current Reith lectures
are being given by four different lecturers.
Between them they deal with freedom of worship,
freedom of speech, freedom from fear and freedom
from want.
I was particularly interested to listen to the lecture on ‘freedom of worship’  given by the former
Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. His main
thesis seemed to be that, not only should one be
free to hold a religious belief but, through a
somewhat extended definition of worship, be able
to act out ones religious beliefs in daily life.
Simply being able to hold beliefs was not enough.
One had to be able to live life in accordance with
those beliefs. And at first sight, particularly when it comes to an Anglican way of faith in the UK, which is notoriously centre of the road, there is unlikely to be much difficulty. As we have seen, however, in the context of various cases before the courts, there is an attempt by other more extreme wings of Christianity to impose upon the rest of us a concept of life, whether at the earliest moment when, they say, embryos should have full human rights, or at the end when any suggestion of control of the time or manner of ones death should be utterly rejected. Other religions are even more prescriptive. So then, it is clear that the Archbishop’s right to freedom of worship impinges on others' rights. What though sets a right of freedom of worship on a pedestal? How is it intrinsically different to the right for anyone-else - for example me, as a secularist - to ‘live out my beliefs’, to act out the values I hold to?...(continue) |
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| To Infinity and Beyond! 4 December 2022 |
 On October 23, 2020, one day after
the final presidential debate before the election
and seven months into the Covid pandemic the
Republicans tweeted a summary of its campaign
platform. The first tweet said:President Trump is fighting for YOU! Here are some of his priorities for a 2nd term: *Establish Permanent Manned Presence on the Moon. *Send the 1st Manned Mission to Mars” After these promises came others about “Infrastructure” and “WiFi,” and then a commitment to “Develop a Vaccine by The End Of 2020”. So they clearly thought that the electorate was more interested in space than anything-else. And although President Biden disagreed with his predecessor on most policies, space was not one of them. A month after taking office, Biden even affirmed his enthusiastic support for Trump’s ‘United States Space Force’ - “Earth is only half the battle. Today, space is essential, not only to our way of life, it’s absolutely critical to the modern way of war. The United States Space Force is being built from the brightest minds across the space operations of the Air Force...and the private sector. It’s time for another giant leap.”. Biden also announced his intention to proceed with the Trump-Pence vision for NASA. So then first, the USA is going back to the Moon where they’re building a lunar outpost. This will then serve as a launching pad to the Red Planet. It’s all called project Artemis...(continue) |
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| Eugenics
– good or bad? 30 November 2022 |
Whenever
you see a title asking if something is good or
bad, you know that the answer is “It all
depends...” And so it will be in this essay.
So
what is it that we’re talking about? Broadly
speaking, eugenics is a means of improving the
genetic quality of the human population. Even
before they knew that genes existed, selective
breeding amongst animals and plants had already
been practised to produce better or more abundant
food. And so it
is not surprising that in around 400 BC Plato
suggested, seriously or not, that the principles
of selective breeding could also be applied to
humans. After all, why would you not want to have
better human beings? You might come closer to
having his ideal, the Philosopher King.
He was not the first to think in those terms. The Pharaohs had already engaged in selective breeding, confining themselves to breeding with their (very) close relatives. Presumably, as demigods, they wouldn’t want to mix with the common people. Of course, it didn’t work awfully well: ‘inbreeding’ describes the neurological and psychological disorders and skeletal malformations which result. And something similar happened amongst the royalty of Europe much later on with similar consequences. Darwin’s idea of natural selection as the basis for evolution, however, gave added impetus to thinking about the possibilities of eugenics as a practical way forward for improving the human lot. Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, was at the forefront of this movement. After he read ‘On The Origin of Species’, he became convinced that humanity could be improved through selective breeding...(continue) |
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| Being an adult 19 November 2022 |
President
Biden, now aged 80, when discussing the likelihood
of standing in the next presidential election in
2024, said that he didn’t feel any different than
when he was aged 50. We’ll see what his wife Jill
has to say about his campaigning for another four
years in office. As we often say though, when in
self-delusion mode, ‘age is just a number’.
Actually, for much of our lives, age is indeed
just a number: from one year to another, nothing
much seems to change. The only reason we become
aware of the passing of time is when we receive
birthday cards reminding us (often rudely) of
another milestone passed.
But as
we pass from being children, to adolescents, to
adults, the theory is that we become more, well,
‘adult’, more mature. But how do we define this
stage of our lives? As someone who has had a
career and is now retired, someone who has
miscellaneous white goods, a car, a house (and a
wife), I suppose that inevitably I attract the
label ‘adult’ - even if I don’t think that these
criteria are the last word.
You could also argue that being an adult is about how we deal with our emotions. As young infants, we scream or lash out to express our displeasure. We have no other way to communicate. As we become older, society demands that we develop more sophisticated means of dealing with our feelings. It seems that a recognisable “emotional intelligence” starts to appears around age 4 and develops at (very) different rates in different people. There is though no scientific consensus on when your emotional intelligence stops developing, if it ever does. And unfortunately some never seem really to develop it. Criminals tend to be in that category and so, in that sense, have never truly become adults. There are of course programmes in prisons which can have an important effect on their psychological development: would that there was the investment frrom the government to make these more available. And so we come to politicians. ...(continue) |
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| Persuasion, the law, democracy and the
power of markets 8 November 2022 |
Hyde Park Corner has the reputation of being a
place where people with loud voices go to stand on
soap-boxes in order to express their very
firmly-held opinions. Why ‘being on your soap-box’
is the accepted expression, I have no idea. Boxes
for other dry goods were no doubt available.
Traditionally, you could say what you liked as long
as it was not treasonous, defamatory or, these days,
inciting hatred of various protected groups. Of
course, you had to be prepared for people to shout
back at you and probably to be very rude. Although
definite in their views, the Hyde Park fraternity
(they were mainly men) did not take extreme measures
to force their listeners to do as they said. So then, the ‘Just Stop Oil’ group (and its affiliates) is a bit of an outlier in the ranks of people trying to persuade others to change their ways. They carry out their protests in the way that they do because, they say, ”they have no other option”. But of course they do. Unlike the Suffragettes who were disenfranchised, they could enter the democratic process and become elected to local councils or to Parliament. They say they’ve tried that route, without success. And so, in their minds, the fact that they did not receive enough support from the people, the electorate, means that, instead, they are entitled to impose their views on us. It all sounds rather self-contradictory and dictatorial...(continue) |
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| Artificial
intelligence I November 2022 |
An engineer at Google recently attracted
international attention by claiming that the
company’s chatbot development system had shown signs
of sentience by its seemingly thoughtful and
self-reflexive answer to being questioned as to what
it was afraid of. It was, it confessed, afraid of
being turned off - it was afraid of its own death. This, of course, comes against a background of progress in computer science which involves vastly more powerful computers with phenomenal amounts of memory. With its parallel processing chips and algorithms, Deep Blue is now able consistently to defeat grand-masters of chess. AlphaGo can beat even the most experienced players of Go and super-computers can outplay the best players of the most difficult American quiz game of all, Jeopardy. It also reflects a vision of computers based on HAL from the space odyssey 2001, a smooth-talking computer with both intelligence and character (even if it wanted to destroy mankind) and the myriad other versions of imagined computer life in dramatic guises which are the cornerstone (with elves and goblins) in the proliferation of on-line games. But at the core of all this there is Alan Turing’s ground-breaking, highly influential paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950). In it, Turing argued that if a hidden machine’s ‘answers’ to questions persuaded a human observer that it was a human being, then it must be regarded as genuinely thinking. If it expressed its ‘thoughts’, if it responded to questions just like a human, it must be the equivalent of a human...(continue) |
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| That Fiscal Event A letter to my MP 28 September 2022 |
A letter to my MP, Craig Tracey,
following the disastrous 'Fiscal Event' announced by
the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng: 28 September 2022 Dear Mr Tracey I note that you have not always
voted with your own government – notable recent
examples in the latter stages of the Covid pandemic
were your opposition to putting in place various
measures designed to protect Care Home residents
from visitors carrying the virus or people going to
concerts or indeed the continuation of proxy voting
in the Commons to avoid its continued spread. And of
course, as a long time Brexiteer, there was your
opposition to any attempt to delay the UK’s leaving
the EU, with the corollary that, as far as I can
see, you did support the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Which has obviously proved to be a major success.
As the MP for my town of Coleshill, I would be interested to hear from you whether or not you support the government’s new economic policies as set out in the Chancellor’s ‘fiscal event’. Now I appreciate that Mr Kwarteng’s supply-side reforms are, as he explained, the ‘new economics’ and so to be welcomed in place of the old hide-bound, Treasury orthodoxy. This, even though, so far, they do not seem to have gone down awfully well with the markets. Obviously as the main proponent of the new economics, Professor Patrick Minford is a sage to be listened to. In arriving at his conclusions, however, I do wonder if he has taken into account the fact that most people in the world of investment do not seem to agree with him and what that failure to take on board his ideas means in, what we might loosely describe as, the ‘real world’. |
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| How can we explain
Liz Truss? 28 September 2022 |
How did this happen? Why did the newly elected
Conservative leader announce fiscal measures which
showed that it was not the party to be trusted with
the nation’s finances more than Labour, (hitherto
one of the party’s most valuable electoral assets)
and at the same time confirmed Labour’s charge: that
“the Tories” care most about the rich. This was effortlessly achieved by a mini-budget abolishing the top rate of tax during a “cost of living crisis”, the abolition of limits on bankers’ bonuses and an indication from No 10 that it would break the pledge to raise benefits to the poorest people in line with inflation. In her student days, Truss was an active member of the Liberal Democrats. Three weeks ago Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader, tweeted: “Farron to agent Truss: you might need to tone it down a bit now, it all looks a little too obvious, some people are beginning to suspect ...” He followed up: “Obviously we have contingency plans to extricate her and move her to a safe house for debriefing if needed.” But it is not the Lib Dems who have benefited from Truss’s actions. The opinion polls show instead a massive swing to Labour. Perhaps Truss is instead actually an agent for ... Labour. Indeed, Truss’s peculiar speech patterns sound as if she is mindlessly repeating what is being dictated to her by Labour Party HQ through a concealed earpiece..(continue) |
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| Monarchy and Power 21 September 2022 |
Power
comes in many guises, in many ways. In 1520, we
had the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ as just such
a demonstration. Our Henry VIII and King Francis 1
of France each tried to outdo each other in the
lavishness of their contribution to the
celebrations designed ostensibly to promote
friendship between the two nations.
The
celebrations, the idea of Cardinal Thomas
Wolsey, Henry’s main advisor, lasted for
 eighteen days and
took place in a valley very close to Calais,
then in the control of the English. Religious
ceremonies, jousting, wrestling, archery and, of
course, feasting took place in opulent tents and
banqueting marquees. The construction of a
‘portable palace’ for Henry VIII and his retinue
was vital. It required almost 6,000 men to erect
such an impressive structure. Made from timber
and covered in a canvas material painted to look
like real stone, from a distance you could
easily believe that it was real palace. There
were even fountains placed at the entrance,
providing drinks for the king’s guests. Such expense was lavished on the event, with the tents and outfits of its participants adorned with vast quantities of cloth of gold, a combination of gold and silk, that the meeting was referred to as the Field of Cloth of Gold. The event was of course extremely demanding for those who had to arrange the beautiful settings and lavish catering for the estimated 10,000 royal guests. Such a grand spectacle had a very important message to convey; the special bond between the two nations which had previously been antagonistic and competitive. it was a very expensive display of wealth by both kings and each tried to outdo the other in their ostentation. Unsurprisingly, the English side were sure that they were victorious in this unspoken competition. But both were aware that the display demonstrated the power of each of them and it produced at least a stand-off in hostilities … for about a year. I was reminded of all this by the queen’s funeral...(continue) |
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| Decolonisation,
racism and being woke 18 August 2022 |
By chance, the other day I
heard an explanation on the radio by the
author Olúfẹ́mi  Táíwò of his views in
his recently published book “Against
Decolonisation”. Nigerian by birth and education, he
himself is now a professor of philosophy at Cornell
University. His work is an attempt to explain why
the current vogue for decolonisation is both
intellectually vacuous and, at the same
time, damaging for the African continent. Independence was sought and largely achieved in the various countries in Africa in the twentieth century. Decolonisation theory, a phenomenon of the twenty-first century, however, takes things one step further. It presumes that even after independence there are aspects of the colonisers' influence which remain and that, whatever they may be, they should be extirpated. Decolonisation takes aim at the supposed universality of “western knowledge” and its role as an instrument in the “colonial matrix of power,” and so requires removal from African thinking. The decolonisation struggle against ‘western hegemony’ necessitates a rejection of the occidental world-view and its lingering influence among the colonised in favour of “indigenous knowledge systems.” But, according to the writer, decolonisation is simply a mindless slogan used by many liberal activists, activists who are mainly found, ironically, in the former colonising countries in the West. Decolonisation is part of the ‘Woke’ agenda. And, consistently with woke group-think, no consideration is given as to whether the remaining influences introduced by the colonisers are actually good or bad. There is an unshakeable, doctrinaire presumption that they are bad and so should be replaced with something ‘authentically’ African. This, even though ’authentically African’ is as without substance as ‘authentically European’...(continue) |
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| The sad case
of Archie Battersby 12 August 2022 |
Where do we start? With a child hanging
himself from a bannister rail, for reasons not yet
known? Or do we start with the legal circus,
organised by the Christian Legal Centre and
fronted mainly by two eminent barristers, which
succeeded in prolonging his physical existence
even when he was brain dead, but didn’t actually
bring him back to life?
Maybe we should start instead with his
mother’s request for an inquiry into how St
Bartholomew’s hospital handled matters so badly.
So very badly in fact that the Courts kept
agreeing with what the hospital was doing or at
least wanting to do – to bring to an end what had
become a completely pointless medical
intervention. I think though that we should start
by looking at the motivations of those involved.
Let’s loo  k at the
characters in the drama. I think it was on the
web-site of ‘Royalty’ that I saw a reference to
the engagement of Edward Devereux and Princess
Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis. Confirmation of
their relationship was in the commentary
accompanying a photograph of the happy couple on
the web-site of the German tabloid ‘Abendzeitung’.
The more famous of the pair, the Princess, was
identified, but the unidentified mystery  man had simply
referred to himself as her ‘boyfriend’.
Fortunately though, on the website of Harcourt
Chambers there was a photo of Edward Devereux, the
QC acting for Archie’s mother and father. The
shirts and ties are different colours, but
otherwise...(continue) |
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| Germs, memes and extremes |
Plagues were a part of life (and death)
in times past and they were no respecter of class.
People in all stations of life died as a result.
And, in turn, those deaths will have changed
history in very many ways, both good and bad. It
is impossible to see how things would have been in
the absence of those changes, but it can still be
illuminating to look back at what happened in
previous times.
One of the
earliest examples of the effect of a pandemic was,
possibly, that of Akhenaten in the ancient Egypt
of the 14th century BC. He had previously been
called Amenhotep IV and lived with his court in
Thebes. Relatively early in his reign, however, he
decided to change his name, build a new capital
city in a place called Amarna and move there with
his court, except for the priests, whom he tried
to get rid of. Why? Because he had also changed
the state religion from polytheism to monotheism
and obviously he would need new (although fewer)
priests for the new religion.
Now, many are the speculations as to why all this happened, including the fact that the priestly caste was getting above itself. That may, however, only be half of the story. Since the coming of Covid, the suggestion that it may have been a reaction to a plague, a pandemic, has gained more traction in the archaeological world. After all, when no-one had the first idea what caused diseases and therefore how they spread, it may have been thought that a new start somewhere-else with a new god for protection might be just what was required. The old gods were obviously not up to the job and, although the idea of localised gods is a strange idea for us, Thebes was where they lived. So then, leaving Thebes and their ineffective protection could well have made perfect sense...(continue) |
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| Politics 18 July 2022 |
On Friday, the BBC Proms began. BBC2
relayed to us Verdi’s operatic oratorio, his
Requiem. Four soloists, two massive choirs and a
huge orchestra told us about the ‘Day of Wrath’
from which we needed to be delivered:
That day will dissolve the world in glowing ashes, as David and the Sibyl prophesied. How great will be the terror, when the Judge comes to give strict justice.... A written book will be brought forth, which contains everything for which the world will be judged. Therefore when the Judge takes His seat, whatever is hidden will be revealed: nothing shall go unpunished. At the same
time, on Channel 4, we had the Conservative
leadership hustings, with four out of the five
people trying to explain why, having served as
ministers in the government of an inveterate liar
for so long, they were nonetheless themselves
trustworthy. Was this juxtaposition just a
coincidence? Art shines a searchlight on life,
both private and public. So far God has not struck
him down, but let us at least hope that the reign
of Boris the tousle-haired, loose-trousered and
fork-tongued is coming to an end. Although his
time in office only lasted for 3 years, it feels
like an eternity...(continue)
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| Constitutional
confusion 30 June 2022 |
The European Court of Human Rights
regards the Human Rights Convention as being a
‘living instrument’. It has to be interpreted in
the light of contemporary circumstances, otherwise
it becomes mired in the thinking of 70 years ago.
It would be limited in the assistance which could
be provided to resolve problems which, although
analogous to those specifically mentioned in the
Convention, were unanticipated when the Convention
was created.
Until last week's decision, when the
USA Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the Court
regarded the US constitution in much the same way.
But no more. Right wing, religiously inclined
judges have decided that a literal view has to be
taken towards its interpretation: it was after all
adopted in the 18th century when following a
religion was a way of life. To illustrate the
difficulty inherent in all of this, we should
perhaps start with the 14th amendment to USA
constitution adopted in 1868. The relevant part
says:
1. … No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.The majority opinion in Roe v Wade found that the underlined wording meant that a law of privacy existed and that this was sufficient to confer a constitutional right to abortion, at least until the foetus was viable. I’m a lawyer and even I don’t really understand how we go from a requirement for ‘due process’, a concept relating to ensuring that the law is properly applied in every case, to privacy and then onwards to a constitutional right to abortion. I suspect that the reality was that in the early 1970’s, 50 years ago, the Court felt that the time had come for the country’s laws to align themselves with majority opinion created during the swinging sixties, rather than continuing with principles enshrined more than 200 years previously...(continue) |
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| Inequality 15 June 2022 |
In France at the
moment we have the legislative elections. President
Macron has already been returned to power, but the
question now is will he command a majority in their
legislature as well and so be able to make the
changes to the law he considers are necessary? Well,
not if Monsieur Mélanchon has anything to do with
it. He is someone, rather to the left of Jeremy Corbyn, whose candidates came a very close second in the first round of the current elections. I say ‘his candidates’, but in fact candidates from a coalition of left wing parties. Although he has not himself stood as a candidate, he is hoping that, with success in the second round he can force himself upon Monsieur Macron as his Prime Minister. Monsieur Macron’s response translates something along the lines of ‘over my dead body’! Monsieur Mélanchon is, after all, in favour Frexit and of withdrawing from NATO. So then quite the revolutionary. He is also in favour of more equality. He wishes to raise pensions, freeze prices of ‘essential goods’, have wage increases in the public sector and introduce a 100% inheritance tax on that part of any estate exceeding a value 12 million euros. In other words, he is not a great believer in capitalism and the inequalities it produces...(continue) |
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| Homogeneity
and difference - a reflection 8 June 2022 |
In Coleshill we
have several cafes. There is the ‘Cafe on the
Hill’, which is actually on our very flat High
Street, rather than on the hill leading up to it.
It’s a bit of a strange place, with two fairly
small rooms, one looking out of the main plate
glass window at the front and the other, at the
rear with no window. It’s popular and the people
running it always seem to be coming up with new
ideas for making money. During the Jubilee
celebrations, they provided picnics for people
taking part in the events on the Croft, the area
of public land lying between the Church and the
cemetery, where the band played, speeches were
delivered and the audience wrapped up warm under
umbrellas. Elsewhere, actually on the hill, there is the former Army & Navy store, now converted into a cafe and, further towards us, a cafe which does pizzas, cakes and all sorts of other comestibles which is called ‘Jaffa’s’. This seems to attract the mothers with the children (I assume their own) they have picked up from school. But also on the High Street is ‘Costa Coffee’. This is like any other Costa Coffee you have ever seen and provides the same products that you can get in any other Costa from London or Edinburgh, Cardiff or Hull. It has no character. It must though make money, otherwise it would have been closed long ago....(continue) |
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| Inconsistency
and moral decision-making 15 May 2022 |
I was looking the other day at an
article concerning the inconsistency, the
hypocrisy involved in decisions to allow refugees
from Ukraine to enter various countries, including
the UK, but not allow them to enter if they came
from other countries. It seems that our psychology makes the inconsistency inherent in hypocrisy uncomfortable for us. We suffer from cognitive dissonance. We have, however, at the same time developed mechanisms to enable us to reduce or even overcome that discomfort. One such is compartmentalisation or dissociation - an ability to put things which are in fact very similar into different boxes so that we don’t really see them as in conflict with each other. The other way of combatting the discomfort caused by hypocrisy is cognitive distortion - an ability simply to exaggerate differences. The author had brought together a series of explanations of why, according to various politicians, we should favour Ukrainians as opposed to say Syrians or other persecuted groups around the world in deciding whom to welcome. Many commentators tried to justify the distinction between Ukrainians and others seeking refugee status on the ground that the Ukrainians are a lot more ‘like us’. Rather disturbingly they have spoken of the Ukrainians as having blue eyes and blond hair. ...(continue) |
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| Superstition in a (suppposedly) rational
age 9 May 2022 |
The
writer G.K. Chesterton is quoted as having said:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not
believe in nothing, they become capable of believing
in anything.” In fact, he did not say this. Rather,
his hero, the detective Father Brown, in “The Oracle
of the Dog”, said to another character: “It’s the
first effect of not believing in God that you lose
your common sense and can’t see things as they are.”
A commentator on the book then paraphrased it by
saying: “The first effect of not believing in God is
to believe in anything”. Of course, Father Brown would have been referring to the Christian version of God, but I’m sure that people with other gods would think the same, although about their god or gods. So then, all a bit nonsensical: in fact like most aphorisms - it sounds good, but is devoid of real meaning. It is though possible to come not to believe in god by at least three routes. There are those who will reject god as a result of some tragedy. Others, having thought about it in some depth may decide that it simply makes no sense. And there are some who were brought up in circumstances where god didn’t really feature in day to day life and so was an irrelevance. In that instance, there being little need for critical thought on the topic, they may I suppose be more open to other beliefs i.e those which, to a good Catholic, would be ‘anything’. In times past many people looked at prayer to their god as a way of trying to protect themselves or their family members from some danger. Their prayers therefore mattered to them very much. However, with the decline of organised religion it seems that many people now experience an increasing feeling of powerlessness in terms of making meaningful change in their lives...(continue) |
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| Group-think 2 May 2022 |
The
Regressive Society - communitarianism and the attack
on the individual by Thierry Aimar I should have realised from the outset, as the author is an economist and a believer in a particularly liberal school of economic thought (that of the Austrian School), that the book I’d bought in France, in a little book-shop where we’d stopped for a coffee, might be a bit light on evidence and heavy on assertion. It wasn’t though until I got to the end of the book and looked up the author’s details that I realised all this. My explanation to myself for feeling perplexed as I was reading it was that, as I was not reading it in my native language, I must have missed something important in his argument. I hadn’t. I even thought that, perhaps in the last few pages, he was about to reveal a clinching set of facts. He wasn’t. His main economic argument was unsupported. So then what are we talking about and why have I bothered to write about it – apart obviously from feeling a bit smug that I did in fact read such a book in French? Well, I do agree with much of what he says about the changes to the human condition brought about by technology, although his prose style is actually more of a dad-rant about the younger generation. This is an extract which gives a good impression of his message:...(continue) |
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| False perceptions and their political consequences 26 April 2022 |
It is clear
from the Presidential elections here in France
that electors are not necessarily the most
rational of people.
From what
I’ve heard in interviews with the man/woman in
the street, the vote for Marine Le Pen was to a
considerable extent a vote against Macron by
those who feel disadvantaged. They see him as
the president of the rich. Evidence? Well he was
a top student of the top college churning out
énarques, went to work for Rothschild's
afterwards and, as President, had the temerity
to abolish wealth tax, reduce the tax burden on
high earners and say that work, and not
benefits, was the way forward for the ‘working
man’. Ouch.
So then, he was not seen as a president for the people by very many, leaving Le Pen to promise all the sorts of impossible things the disaffected voters wanted to hear. But it seems that misperceptions can also arise because the left wants to make the world a better place. In this case they arise not by inciting prejudice as Marine Le Pen promised with her policy of making foreign residents second class citizens, as Trump did with his wall or as Home Secretary, Pretti Stuppid, is doing with her decision to send ‘illegal’ immigrants to Rwanda. Instead, to rid the world of prejudice against minority groups, it seems that the left is promoting their visibility in the media vastly beyond what their numbers would justify...(continue) |
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| War
crimes and genocide 10 April 2022 |
Russia is now suspended
from the Human Rights Council. Of the 175 members of
the United Nations, at any one time 47 members of them
are appointed to the Council. They represent various
areas of the world. Ironically, the two countries
until last week representing Asia and the Pacific
States were Russia and Ukraine. By a two thirds
majority the General Assembly can suspend the rights
and privileges of any Council member that it decides
has persistently committed gross and systematic
violations of human rights during its term of
membership. And so the United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia from the Council on Thursday. There were 93 votes in favour, 24 votes against and 58 abstentions. Amongst those voting against were, of course, Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Vietnam. Those abstaining included India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia. Of course this means very little in practical terms. It seems unlikely that Russia will feel so shamed by its suspension that it will withdraw from Ukraine, offering reparations for the destruction they have brought about. On the other hand this is only the second time that such a resolution has been passed, the other country sanctioned in this way being Libya, when Colonel Gaddafi was in charge. And look what happened to him. We can but hope that a precedent has been set!...(continue) |
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| Hypocrisy
and life 31 March 2022 |
The ancient Greek word
‘hupokritēs’ is the origin of our word ‘hypocrisy’.
It meant to feign or play a part. But apparently the
actual words mean ‘speaking from underneath’. Greek
actors wore masks to represent the part they were
playing and so what they said came from ‘underneath’
their mask. And so, I suppose, Covid has made
hypocrites of us all.
But of course words evolve and what was a simple description of how acting was done in ancient times has now taken on a pejorative meaning. To be labelled as a hypocrite is not a good thing. It means that you are pretending to be someone you’re not in order to gain advantage in some way. Perhaps though we shouldn’t be
too hard on ourselves. Life requires a certain
degree of hypocrisy just for us to get by. I, for
instance, although wearing the mask of lawyerly
wisdom and confidence, am really only the diffident
kid I always used to be. But to get on in life, you
sometimes have to adopt a character which is not
yours naturally. And, by adopting it, after a while
it starts to fit a little bit and then a little bit
more. I suppose that, for many, their innate
character is suited to the life they wish to lead,
but for the rest of us, there is always something of
a tension between how we think of ourselves and what
we portray to the outside world, whether from behind
a mask or not.
Hypocrisy can even be
well-intentioned towards the person deceived...(continue)
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| Cancellation – the upgrade 13 March 2022 |
In the playground at
school in the distant past, there was the ultimate
sanction: if you’d got up too many people’s noses, you
were sent to that far-off land called Coventry. No-one
would speak to you or play with you. You were
ostracised. Quite where the expression came from is
now impossible to say, but there is no lack of
suggestions as to its origin. They tend to relate to
the time of the Civil War. Coventry was loyal to the
Parliamentarians. One protestant minister who lived in
Kidderminster, a town very supportive of Catholicism,
and so to the Royalist cause, found himself having to
leave. In his journal: “Driven from Kidderminster”,
the English theologian Richard Baxter (1615-91) found
refuge at Coventry for two years from the end of 1642.
He explained in Reliquiae
Baxterianae (published in 1696) that he was not
the only one to do so: Thus when I was at Coventry the religious part of my neighbours at Kidderminster that would fain have lived quietly at home, were forced (the chiefest of them) to be gone. And to Coventry they came; and some of them that had any estates of their own, lived there on their own charge; and the rest were fain to take up arms and be garrison soldiers, to get them bread.Today’s more modern version of being sent to Coventry - and not just used in the playground - is cancellation - a refusal to engage in any sort of discussion with people of the decried opinion. On the internet, in a less than intellectual atmosphere, there can be a storm of protest against someone who does not conform with current thinking. They are forced off social media...(continue) |
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| Democracy
today 26 February 2022 |
It’s depressing that, as we are trying
to find ways to shore up the democratic government
in Ukraine, the latest Democracy Index, published
on 10 February by the Economist Intelligence Unit,
continues to show a gradual decrease in the extent
of democracy in the world. At 5.28 for 2021 (5.37
in 2020) it is the lowest since the index was
first produced in 2006. The index is based on 60
indicators in 5 categories with a possible score
in each of 0 to 10. The five categories are:
The average of all of these indicators becomes a country’s score. The countries are then divided into: 1. Full Democracies with an overall score greater than 8; 2. Flawed Democracies with a score between 6 and 8; 3. Hybrid, 4 to 6; and 4. Authoritarian with less than 4. The annual survey finds that more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule, while only 6.4% enjoy a full democracy...(continue) |
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| Freedom
of Speech 9 February 2022 |
This week, I saw a post
on my MP’s Facebook page from WOKE 88 FM - Ice Wall
Radio, a public group with just over 5000 members. On
its own page under the heading ‘About’, we read: “Exposing the flawed theories of government controlled science and it's promotion of the Earth as a spinning globe that goes against the word of God.”And, sure enough, there are links and numerous videos of people explaining why we ‘dome-heads’ have got it wrong and why there is no evidence at all to support the idea that the earth is spherical. I’m still not sure what they think they’re seeing when they look up into the night sky, or why they can’t cope with apostrophes. I should probably have investigated further, but didn’t have my tin foil hat with me. I gather, however, that once a post from someone-else is on your Facebook page, you can’t actually remove it, so I shan’t attribute the mentality of that particular branch of the Flat Earth Society to our MP – although it is very tempting to do so granted his continued support for Boris. But at least their views are unlikely to cause any harm to anyone-else, unlike the anti-vax people and many others who appear online. The comedian Jimmy Carr is under the spotlight because of a comment he made about the holocaust in his stand-up show which is now available on Netflix...(continue) |
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| Original thinking 31 January 2022 |
Original thinking is
much admired. The Fields medal is awarded to those who
have moved mathematics forward in ways which the rest
of us will never understand. We have Nobel prizes for
things as diverse as physics and peace, economics and
literature. There are many other awards available,
immortalising the names of their philanthropic
benefactors, which reward those who have done things
differently, who have excelled in their field. Those
awarding the prizes are looking for that spark of
genius which enables us as humans to move in a
different direction. Now, obviously, I’m not going to criticise the idea of new directions. They are needed from time to time. Neither will I criticise the progress of science, even though it is often two-edged. The invention of dynamite was not something by which Alfred Nobel wished to be remembered. But I would like to propose that unoriginal thinking also has and should have a major place in our lives and that the magic supposedly underlying original thinking is a little exaggerated. Comparisons are actually very useful to us and, fortunately, most events in our lives are not entirely new....(continue) |
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| Juries 12 January 2022 |
Edward Colston was an
English merchant, philanthropist and Tory Member of
Parliament who  was involved in the
Atlantic slave trade. Born in 1636, Colston followed
his father in the family business becoming a sea
merchant. By 1672, he had his own business in London
trading in cloth, wine, sugar and slaves. A
significant proportion of Colston's wealth came
directly or indirectly from the slave trade. In 1680,
he became an official of the Royal African Company,
which at that time held the monopoly in Britain on
slave trading. On his death in 1721, he bequeathed his
wealth to charities and his legacy can still be seen
in the names of Bristol's streets, memorials and
schools and other buildings, including the main
concert hall, the Colston Hall. This was all long
before slavery was abolished. But our colonial and slave-trading past is high on the agenda and so Colston’s statue, erected 125 years ago, had become a target. A lot of publicity was generated when it was pulled down using ropes and rolled ignominiously to the harbour, there to be thrown into the waters. It has since been recovered and is now in Bristol Museum, one of the few public buildings not bearing the Colston name. But the controversy surrounding this particular episode in the life of Bristol has continued. The “Colston 4”, those who pulled the statue down, were charged with criminal damage and tried, not at the magistrates’ court, but (at their request) at the Crown Court which meant that it was a trial by jury. And the jury found them not guilty...(continue) |
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| A stroll
through the real and the imaginary 1 January 2022 |
It seems that we are at a turning point.
Facebook or, as now renamed, ‘meta’, is insisting
in its hype that the ‘metaverse’, its version of
virtual reality, is as real as, well, real
reality.
In light of this, the philosopher David Chalmers, he who gave us the rather exaggerated concept of the ‘hard problem’ of self-consciousness, is to give subscribers to the New Scientist the benefit of his wisdom in a talk in February. He too will say that Metaverse-style virtual worlds are genuine and meaningful realities. Computer generation does not necessarily mean that they are fake or fictional. We can live a meaningful life through our VR headsets. He asserts that virtual reality will no
doubt bring wonderful things and awful things and,
in so doing, it will offer the full range of the
human condition. Well, he’s right in his last
statement, bearing in mind what’s already
available by way of games software.
I’m not though sure that he is right as to the reality of virtual reality. Most of us would accept as a working definition that what we can touch and feel and see and taste and smell is real to us. So then, in that sense, a well-executed VR would indeed be indistinguishable from our actual reality. But is that what we really mean by the word ‘real’? If I am aware that someone has programmed a computer to induce sensations in me, do I think of those sensations as representing real objects or experiences? If I can literally switch off reality, I’m not sure that it’s very real! For me, reality, even in its ever changing forms, ought to have an inherent permanence and not be capable of being switched on and off on a whim...(continue) |
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| A Christmas
reflection or Cognitive Dissonance 15 December 2021 |
I have been struck over the Christmas
period by the beautiful descriptions of God
contained in the carols and oratorios sung.
He (for ‘he’ it is) is great, loving, all-knowing
and able to do for us everything we
need. Of course, his care for us hardly seems to
tie in with the reality of our lives, but we
nonetheless continue with our idolisation of God.
Indeed, hymns of praise were sung in one of the Baptist churches in Kentucky on Sunday, this following the absolute devastation and many deaths caused by the biggest hurricane ever recorded in that area. How they managed to reconcile his omnipotence and love with the random path of the hurricane, and so the random choice of victims, I cannot begin to imagine. They must surely feel the dissonance entailed. Believers have though somehow defined God in such a way that he is a paradigm of all that they could ever want - the perfect benign dictator - and having so defined him, it seems unfeeling to try to remove him from his position: it would destroy their dreams...(continue) |
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| Privacy and
Meghan Sparkle 7 November 2021 |
Until the judgement last week by the
Court of Appeal, I had rather lost track of the
case brought by Meghan against Associated
Newspapers, the publishers of the Daily Mail. It
all related to a letter which she had written to
her father asking him, in effect, to stop cashing
in on her new-found fame and fortune. With the
father’s encouragement, the letter was duly
published, almost in full, by the Daily Mail -
presumably accompanied by a payment to the
impecunious father. The normal royal response of
doing nothing was abandoned by the rather more
litigation-minded American Duchess. She sued under
two headings.
Secondly, and more controversially, she claimed a right to expect that her letter would be treated as a private matter. It was sent to her father privately and it was he who revealed its contents. In the UK we are in an odd position. Unlike most of Europe and Canada and, I think some states in America, we didn’t have a law entitling people to privacy unless there was a contract in place which imposed confidentiality – usually only the case in connection with business arrangements. We did though start to accept the concept of privacy when the European Court of Human Rights extended the scope of the “right to privacy” under Article 8 of the Convention...(continue) |
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| Asylum 30 November 2021 |
After more than three weeks of tough
legal wrangling, delegates on 28 July 1951 adopted
the ‘Convention relating to the Status of
Refugees’, the ‘Geneva Convention’. It allowed
people displaced during the second world war and
its aftermath to apply for asylum in the countries
where they had ended up. Although World War II had
long since ended, very many refugees still
wandered aimlessly across the European continent
or squatted in makeshift camps. This was a more
far-reaching convention that those previously
adopted in response to the 1st world war and to
the purges carried out by the USSR. But in its
original form it only applied to people who had
been displaced in the period up to 1951, and the
right to make a claim for asylum was to last only
for 3 years after the convention came into force.
The size of the problem was then
estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Things have unfortunately continued to develop. In
1951, the world’s population stood at 2.5 billion.
It is now almost 8 billion. According to the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2018
more than 70 million people worldwide were living
in countries other than their own, having been
forcibly displaced because of persecution,
conflict, violence, or human rights violations. So
then the problem has vastly increased and the
reality is that the principles behind the Geneva
Convention have been overwhelmed. What was
initially a reluctantly agreed, but limited,
requirement to accept people from other countries
into your society is now on a wholly different
scale....(continue)
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| Suitability
for the job 21 November 2021 |
 This is a somewhat
delicate subject for a man to deal with, so I
shall tread carefully. But it has to be reported
that a complaint has been made to an employment
tribunal in France of discrimination and so breach
of employment law. It has been made against the
organisers of the ‘Miss France’ beauty pageant.
The complaint is that they have selected
contestants based on their appearance and marital
status. Who knew? According to
reports in the French press, three Miss France
contestants who failed to make the grade have
joined a leading feminist group in starting this
action. Osez-le-Féminisme (Dare to be
Feminist) said it had filed a complaint with an
employment tribunal on behalf of the former
contestants. They said that they had done this
because they had not been able to succeed in
getting Miss France banned in any other way -
presumably because there was no general public
support for their argument.
The plaintiffs allege that the organisers are breaching French employment law by forcing aspiring beauty queens to be more than 1.70 metres tall, single, and "representative of beauty”...(continue) |
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| The Owen
Paterson affair 14 November 2021 |
Following the Commons vote on 3 November
and their screeching U turn the following day, I
sent an email to my MP, Craig Tracey. The Tories
had been whipped to vote in favour of a motion
that had the effect of postponing consideration of
the Report of the Committee on Standards regarding
the (now) former MP Owen Paterson, he of the
consultancy fees paid to him by Randox and Lynns
Country Foods, or should that be the ‘egregious
breaches of the rules against paid lobbying’?
It also meant the setting up of a committee parallel to the Standards Committee, one with a Tory majority, designed to create a new system for investigation of MPs’ conduct, including that of Owen Paterson. So then a blatant attempt to move the goalposts in order to protect one of their mates. All opposition parties refused to cooperate with this underhand attempt to game the system: Dear Mr Tracey Re: The Standards Committee vote last night And so Boris, the Conservatives’ answer to the Grand Old Duke of York, led you up the hill and is now running back down as fast as his legs will carry him, having seen the reaction on the front page of the Daily Mail, not to mention the leaders in the Guardian and the Times. You really should be aware of the danger of being party fodder. You get abandoned by your own leader when it suits him. Paul Buckingham I received a
reply, no doubt created by Conservative Central
Office, also dated 4 November, but not received
until 13 November. This is the relevant part:
As I am
sure you are aware, the MP that has been linked to
this motion, Owen Patterson, has now resigned as
an MP after 24 years in the role...(continue)"… Yesterday's vote was not based on any one case heard by the Standards Commissioner, but in relation to a culmination of failings in the system that have been reported over a period of time. In any matter such as this, it is important that a fair hearing is given so that there can be confidence that the decision reached and the punishment handed out are correct. |
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| Collective
Narcissism 9 November 2021 |
We think of narcissism as a solitary
activity. Narcissus didn’t apparently invite
anyone-else to gaze with him at his own
reflection. But there are different types of
narcissism. They do not all revolve around
admiration of our own physical beauty.
Fortunately, for those of us not obviously endowed
with beauty of form, there are alternative ways of
admiring ourselves. And others can get involved
too.
In 2005, the psychologist Agnieszka
Golec de Zavala was trying to understand what
leads people to commit acts of terrorist violence.
She began to notice amongst extremist groups what
other psychologists, Theodor Adorno and
Erich Fromm, had previously described as “group
narcissism”: “a belief that the (exaggerated)
greatness of one’s group is not sufficiently
recognized by others.”. This means that the thirst
for recognition is never satisfied. She helped to
develop the Collective Narcissism
Scale to measure the severity of
group-narcissistic beliefs, including statements
such as “My group deserves special treatment” and
“I insist upon my group getting the respect that
is due to it” with which respondents rate their
agreement.
At first, she thought it was just a
fringe phenomenon, but has since realized that
it’s widespread. It can happen in any kind of
group, whether religious, political, gender-based,
racial, ethnic or in sports teams or clubs of
any sort...(continue)
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| Long-termism 2 November 2021 |
Although in
favour of long-term planning for the benefit of my
own health and welfare, it has its dangers when
associated with an assumed, overarching purpose in
all human life. Of course I could simply adopt a
purpose of my own choosing if I felt that there was
something sufficiently attractive about it for me,
but I could not then justify imposing it on every
other member of my species. It seems, however, that there is now a philosophical movement that seeks to do just that. It supports the idea of the long-term view and, along with it, the importance of human life in the universe. This long-termism is not though simply ‘caring about the long term’ or ‘valuing the well-being of future generations’. It goes well beyond this. A small group of theorists, mostly based in Oxford, has been working out the details of a new moral world view. It is one which emphasises our importance to the universe over an unimaginably long period of time - measured in billions of years. This idea of the importance of the long-term view and, along with it, the importance of human life in the universe, they call ‘long-termism’. At its core is an analogy between individual persons and humanity as a whole. The premature death of an Einstein would be a personal tragedy. It would however be a much greater tragedy looked at on a global scale - his death would rob the world of an intellectual superstar destined to make extraordinary contributions to human knowledge. But long-termists would apply these claims to humanity itself, as if humanity were an individual with its very own ‘potential’ to fulfil over the course of ‘its lifetime’. So then, a catastrophe that reduces the human population to zero would be tragic not only because of the individual suffering it would inflict. They would argue that the real tragedy would be astronomically worse: our extinction would permanently destroy what could be a human future lasting billions of years. It would irreversibly destroy the ‘vast and glorious’ long-term potential of humanity, an opportunity to spread to the rest of the Universe the intelligent life which has developed here on Earth...(continue) |
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| Democracy
under attack? 12 October 2021 |
Although in favour of democracy in general terms, clearly it has its problems. The main problem is that it depends upon the information available to voters and their ability to understand and process it. They, after all, ultimately determine which government policies are adopted, whether actively or through lack of interest in the entire process. Governments tend not to adopt unpopular policies for reasons of self-preservation. That also means that governments tend to look to the short term – what will get them elected the next time the people go to the polls – rather than what would actually be good for the country in the longer term. In that sense, they are behaving like most people do in their daily lives. They tend to look to the short and not the long term. Keynes famously said: ‘in the long run, we are all dead’...(continue) | |||
| Extreme academe |
Lots of radio stations play music. Most
of it is pop music, but there are quite a few
which play classical music and so are a bit more
to my taste. Some specialise in a particular
composer, such as 'Vivaldi FM' or 'Bach FM' which
do what they say on the tin. Most though play a
mixture of classical music, albeit mainly those
with the more memorable tunes.
There is a
Swiss station which plays classical music with,
between tracks, just a simple statement of what is
being played and who the artists are. Others, like
Classic FM, try to engage with the listener and so
use biographical detail about the composer or
artists in order to make it more interesting.
Musicology provides that biographical detail, and
stations such as Radio 3 and France Musique take
it even further with the often very detailed
information given to the listeners and the
in-depth discussion of performances and
compositions.
For all this information, obviously we need musicologists, although perhaps not to the extent that musicologists would want us to believe. Most of us would actually be quite happy with a relatively superficial knowledge of the subject. But then that’s true of many aspects of academic life. One of our leading musicologists is Professor J. P. E. Harper-Scott of Royal Holloway, London University. He has though now resigned his post. This is because he no longer sees academic freedom as normal in universities...(continue) |
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| Living longer 13 September 2021 |
It’s been said
that young people dream of being rich, and rich
people dream of being young. It is perhaps not
surprising then that the latest news from Jeff Bezos
is that he is putting squillions of dollars into a
company trying to develop editing of the human
genome. He expects that it will enable us to
achieve immortality. It is not though to provide
immortality just for embryos yet to be formed. It is
anticipated that a living person’s entire body will
be able to be reprogrammed. I suppose that it’s
marginally less obvious as an example of middle-aged
angst than launching a phallic symbol into space. The money is going to Altos Labs, a young start-up trying to reverse ageing by reprogramming human cells. The technology has been shown to rejuvenate cells in a lab, and it is thought that it might eventually help revitalize entire bodies. The Company was formed after a series of short-term grants had been awarded to longevity researchers by Yuri Milner, another middle-aged billionaire. When it became evident that a dedicated, well-funded start-up could pursue research more efficiently, Altos was born, in the spring of 2021. And the company hasn't stopped growing since, poaching a who's who of the world's top longevity scientists...(continue) |
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| Sentience 15 August 2021 |
Now, I’m sure that there are many
sentient beings on this planet, although I do
sometimes wonder about the human kind, particularly
football supporters. Our beloved leader’s new wife,
though, has decided that, as a matter of priority,
in the middle of all the other problems we are
trying to resolve, we should have an Act of
Parliament which recognises that all vertebrates are
sentient. The Animal Rights (Sentience) Bill when
passed will do just that.
She’s apparently not though
concerned with invertebrates. Perhaps they’re not
cuddly enough. Neither octopuses nor lobsters would
make good pets as far as I’m concerned, but then
most people don’t find rats or mice particularly
attractive as companions either. So it’s all a
little bit odd as an approach to what I assume is an
attempt to increase our concern for the welfare of
other species. The background to it appears to be
our old friend Brexit...(continue)
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| Falsification
- right or wrong? 2 August 2021 |
The process of science, according to
Professor Sir Karl Popper, was the creation of a
hypothesis followed by an attempt to falsify it:
you needed to set up an experiment to try to prove
your hypothesis wrong. If the hypothesis
was
disproved, you had to reject it. Simple.
Popper came to this conclusion at a time when the general view was that the scientific method was all about verification. Whilst verification intuitively sounds like the best way to go, it really isn’t. As Popper saw with Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalysis, Marxism and astrology, a wish to provide verification generally meant that people looked only for evidence to support their view of things, rather than looking for inconsistencies. Now you might think that verification and falsification are two sides of the same coin, but they’re not. In fact verification, in philosophical terms, was an example of trying to impose standard philosophical methods on science without really understanding the role of science. Verification is fine if you have a logical puzzle: you can check for errors in logical reasoning because it follows pre-defined rules. If there are no flaws, then the proof is accepted. It is verified. Unfortunately, the real world, the world about which science is trying to inform us, doesn’t work like that. It’s very different because we don’t start off knowing what the rules are. We start off from a set of observations of what is going on and then try to infer from our observations the underlying rules which govern what is happening. If logic alone had been sufficient to give us the structure of the atom and otherwise sort out all the problems of science, then the ancient Greeks would have had mobile phones and been talking about the Big Bang, rather than Zeus and his bolts of lightning...(continue) |
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| Freedom of Speech - the Bill 23 July 2021 |
Cancel culture seems, for some time now,
to have been affecting who is invited to speak at
Universities or who will be employed by them. Many
high profile people have been disinvited from
speaking to student groups at our institutes of
higher education. They appear to come not only
from the right wing, but to include many others,
particularly those who have not accepted the
purist 'trans' line that sex is a social
construct.
The government has therefore introduced a Bill (the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill) which would impose on Universities and other institutes of higher education (and their respective student unions) an obligation to support freedom of speech. This would include making sure that accommodation for meetings on the campus is not denied simply by reason of the opinions to be expressed. As it happens,
flipping between channels, I briefly saw the
Educashun Secretary, the Right Honourable Gavin
Williamson, at the dispatch box during its second
reading. At the time though, I think I had
something more pressing to do, like cutting my
finger nails. Obviously I should have paid full
attention to the no doubt penetrating and subtle
analysis of a particularly difficult aspect of our
constitution by a former fireplace salesman and
also the wisdom of the other similarly
well-informed speakers on all sides in the debate.
The difficulty with imposing a right is that it not only has to be defined positively, but also provided with limits. All very difficult without subscribing to the passing fads of society....(continue) |
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| Patriotism
and nationalism 12 July 2021 |
For the last few weeks,
patriotism has been on show. During Wimbledon we had
an unusually good performance by the Brits. Although
we lost Andy Murray early on due to his metal hips,
Dan Evans, a player from Solihull, did very well in
the opening rounds. And then there was 18 year old
Emma Raducanu, born in Toronto of a Chinese mother
and a Romanian father, but living here since
2004. Granted her success in getting through
to the fourth round as a wild card entry, although
previously unknown, she was instantly adopted by
almost all the country as a true Brit. Of course
when she had to withdraw in the next round, Piers
Morgan, that bastion of Britishness, said that she
should “man up!” It’s nice to have such a well
thought-out suggestion from an expert in the field.
And then there was the football.
There have been so many flags on display and so much
excitement, but also dread at the thought of losing,
particularly to Germany by way of penalties: the
curse of the penalty shoot-out. And of course all
was well, with England actually beating Germany
without the need for a penalties. Cue great
celebrations and talk of Gareth Southgate becoming
Sir Gareth if they won the final against Italy. But,
of course, they didn’t. Which means that football is
not “coming home” any time soon (whatever that
means), and that Gareth will remain Gareth. The
Italian ambassador before the match had indeed said
that perhaps football, as his country’s national
sport, had already found itself a new home! But it’s
all a bit of a shame, because here we encounter the
unforgiving nature of many sports, and particularly
football. You have to win. From a field of 24 teams,
even getting what would be the silver medal, if we
were talking about the Olympics, is just not enough.
Of course, the Scots were delighted and, if I am
typical of the Welsh, then they simply don’t care.
But England went into mourning....(continue)
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| Mind the Gap 29 June 2021 |
The phrase "Mind the gap" was coined in
1968. It was an automated announcement to warn
tube passengers of the danger awaiting them. As
London Underground had chosen to use solid state
equipment and as data storage capacity was
expensive, the phrase had to be short. The danger?
Because some platforms on the London Underground
are curved and the rolling stock that uses them
are straight, there is an unsafe gap when a train
stops at a curved platform. Sound engineer Peter
Lodge recorded an actor reading "Mind the gap" and
"Stand clear of the doors please", but the actor
insisted on royalties. Lodge, however, had already
read the phrases to line up the recording
equipment for level and so those were used
instead. 'Mind the gap' has now though become a
part of the tourist scene in London. Tourists,
especially Americans, regard it as being
quintessentially British.
Unfortunately, the idea of a gap is also becoming very British in another sense – it is the gap between how we say that we should act and what we actually do. Hypocrisy has always been with us. People have had affairs, claimed to be acting in the interest of others when lining their own pockets and done many other things which they would have condemned in others. That doesn’t mean, though that we should simply ignore it when it happens now. |
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| Cancellation 21 June 2021 |
It came as something of a shock to read
that the latest person whom we should be
cancelling is the artist formerly known as Georg
Friederich Händel. When you next listen to the
call to devotion of Messiah, or the melodies of
Water Music, you may feel somewhat conflicted
knowing that their composer was involved in the
slave trade. It was not just that he was being
paid for his work by people involved in the slave
trade. He was an actual and successful investor.
Historians have
recently discovered that Handel invested in the
Royal African Company, one of Britain’s two
official slave trading enterprises. The National
Archives at Kew hold a set of the company’s “stock
transfers” for 1720, signed by the composer: these
are purchase and sale orders for actual human
beings, not stock in the sense of stocks and
shares. The
Royal African Company shipped more Africans into
bondage than any other company in the history of
the Atlantic slave trade. At the time he was
writing Water Music, he was making money from
slavery....(continue)
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| The paradox of
environmentalism – do future generations
actually have the right to inherit a sustainable
world? 14 June 2021 |
We live in apocalyptic times. We are
having meetings and signing treaties to try to
encourage world leaders to take global warming
seriously. If we don’t, then greenhouse gas
emissions will continue to climb, putting the
Earth on track for a catastrophic 3ºC rise above
pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
At the same time, we are hacking down trees,
paving over green areas and polluting more and
more of the natural systems upon which we depend.
It is not surprising that species extinction rates
have leaped to levels not seen for millions of
years, with some scientists concluding that the
Earth’s sixth mass extinction is now underway.
Meanwhile, the human population is expected to swell to 9.7 billion by 2050. It is not clear that a world of 3ºC heating and irreversible species loss could support anything like that number. Even if humanity is not a casualty of the mass extinction, we seem certain to face a period of miserable retrenchment if we do not change course radically in the next few years. As a result, we have numerous protest groups who are trying to impress on us how serious it is. They want us, as electors, to use our votes to have governments which will do what is necessary to avoid the inaction which would lead to such a disaster. However, it
proves surprisingly difficult to explain what
exactly would be wrong with bequeathing a burning,
environmentally exhausted world to future
generations. The roots of the problem were
identified more than 30 years ago by the British
philosopher Derek Parfit in his book ‘Reasons and
Persons’. He pointed out that, identity, the
particular person you are, is a precarious thing.
Small differences in circumstances can make very
big differences to who exists. Even minor changes
in your parents’ behaviour, physiology or
environment before your conception would probably
have resulted in someone else’s birth rather than
your own – someone who, alongside billions of
others will, as a result, never exist...(continue)
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| Stoicism
v Epicureanism 9 June 2021 |
The fight between Stoicism and
Epicureanism may seem rather old fashioned or even
quaint but, unexpectedly, it has become quite
relevant again. For the last 18 months we have,
without realising it, lived in a way which can be
seen as being in accordance with the tenets of
Stoicism rather than any other philosophy. Perhaps
not altogether voluntarily, we have reduced our
enjoyment of the pleasures of the world around us.
We have been
very limited in our activities and have only left
our homes to go out for walks in a circumscribed
area. Restaurants have been out of the question,
as have theatres, concerts and night-clubs. Even
meeting friends became possible only in two
dimensions. Admittedly we did not spend nights on
mountains exposing ourselves to night-time
temperatures in order to make ourselves more hardy
or learn how to handle a sword, but in a lot of
respects, our way of life became a Stoic’s dream.
Indeed, we have mostly borne our changed condition quite stoically, and have even shown a stoical desire not to go back to our old way of living too soon in case we bring the plague back to our doors. Which means that our present way of living has that faint allure of self-sacrifice and so self-righteousness. However I hope that we can now put all of that behind us and respond to the allure of Epicureanism instead...(continue) |
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| Big
companies and their
moral influence 2 June 2021 |
Small businesses
are traditionally started by a person or a few
people in partnership. Very often there is a family
connection between those involved. As businesses get
bigger, however, there is a need for people with
skills that family members don’t have and often for
outside money to enable expansion to take place. To
raise the money, you need to be able either to
borrow or to have a structure such that people can
actually invest in the business. The model which has
emerged is that of ‘joint-stock companies’. There
are records of them being formed in Europe as early
as the 13th century. However, beginning in the 16th century, they multiplied significantly when adventurous investors began speculating about fortunes to be made in the New World. Indeed, European exploration of the Americas was largely financed by joint-stock companies. Although governments were eager for new territory they were reluctant to take on the enormous costs and risks associated with these ventures...(continue) |
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| ‘ocracies 24 May 2021 |
We were trying to declutter the house.
In the course of this, I came across a
 notebook containing
notes written by my mother’s father. It contains
numerous pages of information about how the human body works
and what to do in the case of injury, hanging,
strangulation or poisoning. This was all from
his days as a trainer of St John’s Ambulance
volunteers. However, starting at the back of the
notebook he wrote down, on the other sides of
the pages, his thoughts about his Christian
faith, his views on one or two minor religious
controversies and quotes from religious
magazines which he had found helpful or
inspiring. Altogether, there are about 80 pages
of his literate and well expressed thoughts, in
pencil and in pen. They seem to cover the period
from  about 1920 to 1930.
As the eldest child in a large, single-parent
family, he used to have to go fishing for eels
in the local river (the Taff) in order that they
had something to eat. As a consequence, as a
child, he received very little formal education
and so subsequently was largely self-taught. But
clearly reading and writing were very important
for him and, according to my mother, reading and
writing were very much encouraged in the family. As I have mentioned before, my mother
seemed to have inherited her father’s penchant for
writing and, with his encouragement and that of
her school teachers, wrote essays and actually won
prizes for them. Although I learned to read early
on, as a child I received little encouragement to
write actual essays and never met my grandfather.
So then perhaps my own late-flowering efforts at
expressing my thoughts have a genetic basis...(continue)
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| Decision making
and 'Noise' 18 May 2021 |
I’m sure that during my professional
life my decisions always were always of the
highest quality and totally consistent. At least,
that’s what I’d like to think! The reality was, I
imagine, somewhat removed from the ideal. I don’t
think that my judgements on the law were far out,
but being a lawyer is also about running a
business. And it is there that problems can arise
far more easily.
The more people
who are involved in the business, the more there
is room for difference over how it should be run
and for variation in the performance of those
employed. Lawyers do vary in their ability – not
so much in giving the right answer, but in
actually getting the job done or being better at
dealing with clients than others. When it came to
the partners who were ultimately responsible for
the business, we sometimes had significant
differences. Should we expand and if so where?
Should we instead close branch offices and
concentrate on our main office? Which types of
legal work should we try to develop? When we had a
vacancy, whom should we hire? And of course none
of these decisions had easy answers.
The latest book
by Daniel Kahneman with fellow psychologists Cass
Sunstein and Olivier Sibony, is called
‘Noise’. Confession first: I have not read
it. But I have heard two half hour interviews with
Kahneman and read some of the longer reviews, so I
have a reasonable grasp of what they’re saying.
Noise in this context is unwanted variability in
making decisions. Their research shows that the
most banal things cloud even the best expert’s
judgment...(continue)
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| Piety
– religious and secular 11 May 2021 |
It is not by chance that the three different parties in power in England, Scotland and Wales were all winners in the elections last week. They have obviously benefited from a vaccine bounce. The early response to the pandemic cost a lot of lives, but that has been forgotten in the euphoria generated by our emergence from our period of isolation. The scientists who provided us with the guidance and the vaccines to enable us finally to look forward to a more normal life have, of course, been praised. It seems though to be the political leaders, those leading the press conferences telling us what was going on, who have been the big winners. They have been able to look as though they were statesmanlike, even when giving us bad tidings. And of course, now they are able to give us good tidings and so are basking in what is really only reflected glory. (continue) | |||
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A shot across the bows of the French
government by retired generals
At the
initiative of Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, a
retired general in the gendarmerie, twenty
generals, a hundred senior officers and more than
a thousand other military personnel have signed an
appeal for “a return to honour and duty within the
political class.”. One of the generals was also a
leader of the ‘Gilets Jaunes’.
(My translation of their letter published on 21 April 2021) Mr President, Ladies and gentlemen of the government, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Parliament, This is a serious time, France is in
peril, several mortal dangers threaten her. We
who, even after retirement, remain soldiers of
France, cannot, in the present circumstances,
remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful
country.
Our tricolour flags are not just a piece of cloth, they symbolise the tradition, through the ages, of those who, whatever their skin colour or creed, have served France and given their lives for her. On these flags we find in gold letters the words "Honneur et Patrie". Now, our honour today lies in denouncing the disintegration that is affecting our country...(continue) |
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| Secular
fundamentalism 26 April 2021 |
A few years ago,
a woman in the US, Rachel Dolezal, who had been a
senior member of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, resigned when her
claim to be a person of colour turned out to be a
lie. Richard Dawkins tweeted earlier this month: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”I imagine that Dawkins finds incoherence in pressure groups’ statements to be annoying. I sympathise. The American Humanist Association, however, said his statements on transgender rights “demean marginalised groups” and so withdrew the ‘Humanist of the Year’ award they had given to him in 1996. The AHA said that he was no longer “an exemplar of humanist values” because his tweets appeared to question whether people could choose their gender...(continue) |
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| Fake or Fortune and the 'Non-Fungible
Token' 20 April 2021 |
fungible
: of goods or commodities, freely exchangeable for
or replaceable by another of like nature or kind. This essay is written by me. It is an example of my writing style and uses my normal vocabulary in a way common to all my essays. I would hope that you will find that, thanks to spell-check, it contains no spelleing mitsakes and that because of my grammar school education it uses apostrophe’s correctly. But this essay is unique, despite the features it has in common with my other essays. I have not written another using the same words in the same order. How though can you be sure that it is mine? We could look at my somewhat idiosyncratic style, but that is easily imitated. Instead, we could perhaps look at provenance. This is essentially a matter of probability. As no money is involved, it is unlikely (the Bayesian prior probability) that anyone-else would want to pretend to be the writer of my essays. Secondly, it has appeared on my own web-site: it is even more unlikely that someone-else would have bothered to hack my domain in order to carry off the deception. So, I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that it’s a genuine Paul Buckingham. What a relief! ...(continue) |
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| Gossip 13 April 2021 |
Last Autumn, in his weekly address from
a window above St Peter’s Square, the Pope spoke
about gossip. “The devil is the great gossip," he
said. “He is always saying bad things about others
because he is the liar who tries to split the
church.” The Pope added: “Please brothers and
sisters, let's try to not gossip. Gossip is a
plague worse than Covid. Worse.”. Far be it from
me to remind the Pope of his own church’s history,
but I seem to recall that the major splits in the
Catholic Church – which created the orthodox
churches – were not caused by gossip, but by
doctrinal difference. The Anglican split, of
course, came about because a priapic Henry VIII
wanted a son rather than daughters. I wouldn’t
want to cast doubt on the Pope’s medical
credentials either, but I’m not sure I’d entirely
agree with his assessment of the relative gravity
of gossip and Covid. I don’t think gossip has ever
seriously vied with plagues for the highest
numbers of people killed - for the Covid virus so
far around 3 million people world-wide. But then,
for the Catholic Church, perhaps splits are
actually a fate worse than death, since normally
the other faction was excommunicated after a
split, and thus condemned to meet the fires of
hell.
In fact, I’m quite sure that gossip has been a part of our society since the beginning. I imagine that, even in the Stone Age, there was gossip about someone's laziness in the hunting groups or unwillingness to chip away at flint stones and someone else's wandering eye. If so, then it probably has an overall evolutionary benefit. I would guess that there would be a benefit for the community because the fact that there is gossip means that there is pressure on everyone to act in an acceptable way. It actually promotes morality, something of which I would have expected the Pope to approve...(continue) |
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| Truth
- a slippery concept 6 April 2021 |
Mahatma Gandhi said:“Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologise for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.”I came across this quote by chance in a blog headed “In these dark days…speak your truth”. Not, on the face of it, quite the same thing, even if what Gandhi said could also be interpreted as making a belief the same as truth. But it seems that it’s a confusion of thought which has royal approval - from the Queen of American TV, Oprah Winfrey. It was exemplified in her interview with those other minor royals, Harry and Meghan, when Meghan was encouraged to tell her truth about her hellish life as a part of the British royal family. Obviously it’s very easy to make fun of all this Californian posturing, but it shows that we’re not making much progress as a civilisation when truth is a relative concept. Traditionally, Easter is the time to reflect upon the idea of truth. During the questioning of Jesus by Pontius Pilate, Jesus claimed that he had come into the world to testify to the truth. Pilate then famously asked "What is truth?". As a Roman, governing a very fractious and divided colony, I can quite see why he would be somewhat cynical about the quality of the information he was being given, but for us to follow his example and allow such an important word to lose its meaning does seem rather unfortunate. We no longer have the daily twitterings of Trump to remind us how far out of sight truth can sink...(continue) |
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| The Right to Protest 31 March 2021 |
MPs have given a second reading to a Bill intended to increase the ability of the
police to, well, police demonstrations. It includes
greater powers to rein in demonstrations that cause,
amongst other things, “serious annoyance, serious
inconvenience or serious loss of amenity”. It is of
course intended to please the right wing and so give
the Home Secretary a better chance of the highest
office should Boris one day cease to be our glorious
leader. it is also an attempt by the Home Secretary
to play to her image as a hard-liner on crime and
punishment, and probably compensation for the
psychological harm caused to her in her school days
by being named ‘Pretti’. But it is worth noting that the official reasoning for the introduction of these new powers is that existing powers had not proved sufficient to control new ways of demonstrating, as exemplified by Extinction Rebellion. It pioneered forms of protest causing mass inconvenience to the public in ways the police found it difficult to handle under existing legislation...(continue) |
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| Empathy, invention and autism 21 March 2021 |
Last week, there was a report about a female
bonobo living in the jungle in the Democratic
Republic of Congo. She had decided to take a two
year old orphaned bonobo from a different social
group under her wing. According to the Japanese
researchers who have been watching this jungle since
the ‘70s, such an action had never before been seen.
It means that the adoptive mother is looking out for
the infant and having to find food for it and, as
far as I’m aware, bonobo offspring, whether actual
or adopted, don’t support their mothers in old age.
Her action is therefore, on the face of it, to her
disadvantage. It looks like a display of altruism.
We tend think of altruism as particular to the human
species, but if you go on to the web - to the
click-bate sections – you won’t actually find it
difficult to see dogs befriending cats or cats
befriending chickens, so I’m not sure that we do in
fact have a monopoly. When looking at ourselves as a species in contrast to others, we can easily believe that we really are different, when in fact we are on a continuum with them. However, particularly in the case of our much vaunted intelligence, the result of being further along the continuum can mean that we benefit from a step change in what that ability can do for us, as compared to others...(continue) |
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| The Census 15 March 2021 |
We’re all due to provide our personal
details to the Census Office on 21 March. The
National Census is a ten-yearly exercise in
collecting data but, every time, the data
collected are slightly different. We are told that
they are required by the great data controller in
the sky so that the civil service will have the
knowledge needed to govern us better – or
something like that. The first post-Domesday Book
census was carried out in 1801 by ‘enumerators’,
as most people couldn’t read or write. It was also
based in part on Church records of baptisms,
weddings and burials for that year and the
previous 100 years to give comparisons. Some say
the census was to find out how many able-bodied
men there were who could fight in the long-running
Napoleonic wars, while others say that it was to
enable the government to know if there would be
enough food to eat. Whatever the reason, the
Census found that Great Britain then had a
population of 9 million.
The 1841
census, though, was the first census
recognisably similar to the ones we now fill in.
For the first time it recorded people's names,
alongside their age, sex, occupation and
birthplace. Thirty years later, another column in
the census asked whether anyone in the household
was blind, deaf and dumb, imbecile or idiot, or a
lunatic. Subtle. From 1951 until 1991, households
were asked if they had an outside toilet...(continue)
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| Consent 8 March 2021 |
In the New York Times last week there was an
article on consent. The idea of consent, certainly
in sexual relationships, has taken on a much greater
prominence in recent years. Many of the cases, of
course, involve activity after a lot of alcohol. But
the writer of the article, a law lecturer at
Michigan University, is more concerned with whether
we think that consent, in any context, is
invalidated, simply disappears, where we have been
persuaded to do or not do something as a result of a
lie. Obviously there are implications for the law if
we think that consent to actions based on a lie
should automatically be wiped off the record, rather
than simply giving rise to a remedy. This research was conducted amongst samples of people apparently representing society as a whole. It consisted of presenting (fictional) scenarios to the interviewees for them to judge. The examples given in the Yale Law Journal, which is behind the NYT article, are constructed so as to present the story as unambiguously as possible - the person asking for consent is lying and the person asked for that consent would supposedly be absolutely determined not to give consent if he or she knew the truth. Surprisingly to the researcher, most people, in the circumstances portrayed, decided that consent was still consent even though fraud had been deployed to obtain it...(continue) |
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| Vaccines, data and
human rights 2 March 2021 |
When asked about
the Covid vaccination programme, the Queen suggested
that citizens should “think about other people
rather than themselves”. A commentator in the Times
this week went rather further, saying that she felt
frustration at the “vaccine refuseniks who plan to
free-ride their way out of this pandemic on the back
of the jab-taking majority.“. Of course, we now hear
from the European Commission that vaccine passports
will become de rigueur for those wanting to travel
within the EU, and also for those wanting to enter
that zone. Although it has now decided to bow to
what most of the rest of us thought was inevitable,
our own government was at first opposed to the very
idea. It would cause ‘discrimination’ - a very
odd word to employ when for the last year the
government has demanded self-isolation, surely an
extreme form of discrimination, for those who’ve
tested positive for our cheeky little
virus. But it now seems likely that the House of Commons will have to debate the whole question. An online petition opposing vaccine passports has gained 200,000 ‘signatures’. It says that the vaccine passports could be "used to restrict the rights of people who have refused a Covid-19 vaccine". Hmm...(continue) |
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| Purpose in life 21 February 2021 |
Set into one of
the inside walls of a restaurant in the medieval
part of Annecy, there is a very large  aquarium. It divides the
main part of the restaurant from an overspill area.
The last time we were there, the aquarium had
lots of different fish in it, some big and some
small. But it was the little fish which fascinated
me. Sitting where we were, they passed between the
left shoulder of a man at one table and the right
shoulder of a lady sitting at another. It seemed
that every time I looked at the aquarium, the little
fish, perhaps 15 of them, passed in a shoal from one
person's shoulder to the other, instinctively trying
to resemble a big fish and so ward off the dangers
of the seas. If only they realised that the rules of
the ocean are reversed in a restaurant. In a
restaurant, of course, it is more dangerous to be a
big fish, for it is the big fish which we normally
eat and not the minnows. If only I could find some
way to convey this knowledge to them, they could
breathe a collective bubble of relief, get their
deck chairs out and enjoy watching us perform
instead.As a nation we have had to learn quite a few new things as a result of the changed situation brought about by the pandemic...(continue) |
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| Statues – what’s the
point? 10 February 2021 |
William Morris, born in 1834, was a
British textile designer, poet, novelist,
translator and socialist activist. He was a key
person in the British Arts and Crafts Movement.
His legacy can be seen in various National Trust
homes. He is also remembered for his 1880 maxim:
“Have nothing in your house which you do not know
to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. So
then, in my house, I have to try to be useful. As
for the contents of the house, I regret to say
that they are far from uniformly useful, and few
of the things which are not useful manage to be
beautiful. Even during this period of enforced
idleness, we have not succeeded in making more
than a token effort to rid ourselves of the things
which occupy space, but do nothing to earn their
keep. We excuse ourselves by saying that we would
need to make an appointment at the tip and, even
then, would only be permitted to go to dispose of
things if it was an essential journey. Having had
many of these redundant objects for very many
years, it’s difficult to argue that they’ve now
suddenly become a matter of life or death. After
this is over, though, I think that we shall need
to hire a professional declutterer to carry out
regular raids on our junk.
But it is not only in our private space
that we need to heed William Morris’s maxim. It is
also in the public space. It is now proposed
that we should make space for one more statue,
this time of Captain Tom with his walking frame...(continue)
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| Scottish
independence 1 February 2021 |
It seems that the war of words over Scottish independence is heating up. A week ago, the SNP revealed a "roadmap to a referendum" on Scottish independence, setting out how they intend to take forward their plans for another vote. It says a "legal referendum" will be held after the pandemic if there is a pro-independence majority at Holyrood following May's election. In other words, if the SNP win a majority of the seats. There is of course the small matter of their actual ability to hold a ‘legal referendum’, or even what the term means. Let us assume it means a referendum which would give independence to Scotland if there were sufficient ‘yes’ votes. If so, then, most lawyers consider that the Westminster government would have to give its consent under Section 30 of the Scotland Act 1998 before the Scottish government could put the arrangements in place. Obviously, the Conservative and Unionist Party, currently led by Boris, is not very keen to see the break-up of the UK. The clue is in the name. And of course after the last referendum in 2014, everyone agreed that result would be binding for ‘a generation’. A rather indeterminate term, which seems to be only 7 years in Scotland. They age quickly there...(continue) | |||
| Value of life 28 January 2021 |
In my previous essay I wrote about value, mainly in the context of Bitcoin. But, we attribute value not only to currencies, objects or services, but to our very lives. And it is here that there can be quite a lot of argument and very muddled thought. A supposed absolute value of life is used to support a religious view that neither abortion or euthanasia can ever be justified. Despite very significant public protest, Poland's extreme and autocratic government has very sadly decided to implement law bringing the practical possibility of abortion virtually to an end. By contrast, at the end of last year in Argentina, another predominantly Catholic country, mainly because of huge protests on the street, a more enlightened view gained sufficient ground to enable a change in the law. Now, abortion for any reason up to 14 weeks of pregnancy will be permitted, so diminishing the agony and deaths caused by back-street abortionists. It makes Argentina something of an exception in Latin America...(continue) | |||
| Value and
Bitcoin 24 January 2021 |
The value of an
object we buy or the services we consume is
subjective. It is in the eye of the beholder,
although it often reflects the general opinion of
its worth. Ultimately, though, it’s our decision
whether or not to buy something at the price asked.
At a rarefied level, we see this every time there is
an art sale at Christie’s and, at less stratospheric
prices, during every episode of the Antiques Road
Show. Very often, there are valuations which leave
me astonished. But it also applies to things we buy
for everyday consumption, when we choose between
brands. So then, we are a value driven society. We
are encouraged in this by the many price comparison
websites which purport to give us information about
the quality of the items and the relative prices
asked by different vendors. The Welsh tenor “Gio
Compario” has made a fortune out of representing
just such a web-site for insurance. But when we want
to know how much we can get from selling something,
our own valuation of it is not exactly the last
word. We need to know how others see it. And such
estimates of value are not easy. A particular example of the difficulty
valuation presents us is the phenomenon, or
as some would say, the Ponzi scheme, known as
Bitcoin. In early January of this year, it hit the
headlines because it had attained its greatest
value since its creation. Although having no
material presence, a single bitcoin was trading at
just over £30,000 on 8 January...(continue)
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| Changing
morality 18 January 2021 |
The same two books, both with an anti-British tone, have recently been reviewed together in numerous magazines. The review I first saw was by journalist Mihir Bowes for the Irish Times. The one book, by a Professor at Stanford University, tells us that the idea of British exceptionalism as a driver of Brexit, was based on a wholly unjustified view of our empire as a triumph. In fact, from the conversations I have heard, the motivation for Brexit and so the justification for our exceptionalism wasn’t the empire, but an exaggerated view of our courage compared to the nations conquered during the second World War and, as far as the French are concerned, our victories at Agincourt and Waterloo. There is also the failure amongst exceptionalists to recognise that the plucky British spirit of WWII, was forced on us by the malign force known as Hitler. It resulted in privation during the war years and for years afterwards. And it is obvious that the own goal of voluntarily leaving a large trading block has no moral equivalence to declaring war on Hitler. It is a category error to compare the two, although the economic consequences may be similar....(continue) | |||
| Censorship in the age of
Twitter 11 January 2021 |
I see that because Meghan
is the most trolled person in the world, she and
Harry are now reported to have quit social media
(Instagram etc). So how will they achieve their
aim, through Archewell, to “unleash the power of
compassion to drive systemic cultural change” by
non-profit work and “creative activations through
the business verticals of audio and production”? …
No, me neither. But in practical terms it seems
that they have decided not to share with their
devoted public their opinions and photographs of
what they’ve been doing. They have engaged in
self-censorship in order not to attract the sort
of vicious comments and threats that I can well
imagine they receive.
Of course, they could simply have turned off the comments section of their Instagram site. The Queen is on Instagram and has hundreds of thousands of likes, but I can find no means of commenting on what is displayed. There is of course no ‘dislike’ option. But then, not enabling comments on such a site means that it’s less attractive to visitors and so less attractive to the Companies and organisations wanting to make money out of their internet offerings. And then there’s Twitter...(continue) |
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| Trump’s attack on democracy 9 January 2021 |
I was
transfixed by what was going on on Wednesday in
the United States, but did eventually go to bed
and actually had a good night’s sleep. It must
have been the Chianti. I wonder how well the
Donald slept. This was the man who, in concert
with one of his sons and others during the morning
had whipped up a crowd of around 30,000 people to
march on Capitol Hill to ‘Stop the Steal’. So many
slogans, such great slogans. He told them that
they had to be strong as they would get nowhere by
showing weakness. His lawyer, Rudy Giuliani had
called for trial by combat to be re-introduced, so
no incitement to violence there either. Vice President Pence,
although presiding officer at the official
certification of the Electoral College votes, had
already told Trump that there was nothing that he
could do to prevent Joe Biden being declared
President. And so the protestors took them at
their word and stormed the Capitol building
itself. That it happened was shocking, but should
not be surprising. Since before he was elected as
President his mantra has been that in any vote he
will be the winner as he is sooo popular and if he
does not win, then it means that fraud has
deprived him of what is rightfully his.
What
happens now?...(continue)
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Brexit agreement - December 24, 2020 26 December 2020 |
We regain our sovereignty and have a free trade agreement – for just as long as we don’t exercise that sovereignty to diverge from European norms. But as from 1 January 2021, we shall be able to sign up to trade deals with countries around the world and cease to be subject to the decisions of the ECJ and thus have reacquired our sovereignty. We shall have a free trade deal and no tariffs or quotas with the EU. It is the largest free trade deal ever signed by the EU and by us. It is worth £650 billion (2019 figures). That £650 billion is made up of £295 billion by way of exports to the EU and £355 billion by way of imports from the EU. Now £650 billion as a figure is big, but essentially meaningless - only 57% of our exports consist of goods (£168 billion) and so subject to the deal, while the remaining 43% (£126 billion) consist of services, not the subject of ‘free trade’. The export of services from the EU is worth less - £105 billion - and so only 30% of their total, spread around a number of EU countries, such as Germany, France and the Netherlands. This means that 70% of their exports to us consist of goods - £250 billion - and so considerably exceeds the value of goods we export to them. The EU therefore gains more from the free trade deal than we do. And they are less disadvantaged overall by the lack of a deal regarding services. And any disadvantage is in any event spread between 27 different countries, whereas our disadvantage is ours alone. But it goes further. The EU was concerned that we might not continue to comply with their standards for the goods exported to the EU and so be able to undercut their producers. We have therefore reciprocally agreed to maintain at least the same standards (both now and in the future) to ensure there is no trade distortion which might have an adverse economic effect on the other party. If we don’t, then we (or they) suffer the consequences by way of the imposition of tariffs - taxes. But, in maintaining those standards, we will have to continue to comply with EU law. If we don’t, it is quite true that we shall not be subject to sanctions adjudicated upon by the ECJ. Instead, there will be an independent arbitral body to decide our fate but, necessarily, based upon the definition in EU law of those standards. So then, we’ve taken back control!? ...(continue) |
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| Science 7 December 2020 |
The latter part of this year has been a
period of triumph for science. We had a series of
positive results for Covid vaccines, in
development only since March and all done at an
unprecedented speed. We have seen the production
of artificially created chicken tissue, although
at the moment only for supermarkets in Singapore.
We saw the announcement of a programme run by
'Deep Mind' capable of predicting the
three-dimensional structure of a complex protein.
This allows the creation of other molecules
capable of interacting with the protein in a
predictable way. It could therefore allow, for
example, with a speed that has been impossible
until now, the development of drugs or, perhaps,
chemicals to degrade otherwise non-recyclable
plastics. A Japanese mission to an asteroid to
recover some rock (which returned to Australia
last Sunday morning) may shed light on how the
earth came into existence. After 7 years of
observation, the Gaia satellite has created the
first accurate 3D map of the Milky Way. This can
help resolve the question of whether or not dark
mass and energy exist. The Chinese have put a
probe on the moon to collect even more lunar rock
and return to earth with it - although I'm not
sure why. And the latest news is that some Oxford
researchers - from the same Jenner Institute that
produced the vaccine against the Covid virus -
have also produced an effective vaccine against
malaria, a disease that is at least 10 times more
dangerous than Covid.
At the same time we know that there are many who do not have a positive attitude towards science. They have doubts...(continue) |
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| The Rule of Law - Part 2 28 November 2020 |
I have for
some time now been promised a reply to my letter
of 24 September by my MP, the member for
North Warwickshire, Craig Tracey, but, nothing
so far...
In the circumstances, I have now sent the following ever so slightly tongue in cheek e-mail to Mr Tracey's assistant - Thank you for your e-mail of 18 November. I appreciate that you and Mr Tracey will be very busy dealing with the effects of the Covid 19 virus, particularly with North Warwickshire going into Tier 3 as from next Wednesday. In contrast, as a retired person in lock-down, I have plenty of time on my hands. So then, to save you time and effort in dealing with my concerns, I have prepared for Mr Tracey two alternative replies, either of which he could send to me regarding the rejection by this government of the Rule of Law. He could then mark my file as closed, which I’m sure would be a relief. There is precedent for such an approach. You will recall that the Prime Minister adopted just such a solution when deciding which way to swing on Brexit. My suggestions are as follows: Alternative A Dear Mr Buckingham, Thank you for your emails of 24 September and 12 November 2020. The first questions my justification of the Internal Market Bill and its provisions enabling a government minister to ignore our treaty obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement signed by Boris only a year ago. In your later email you point to Dominic Raab's apparent hypocrisy in criticising the Chinese government over its failure to abide by its treaty obligations in respect of Hong Kong. The reply which I had sent to you dated 18 September was, I accept, a rather obvious attempt to obfuscate and confuse. I should perhaps have read the letter more carefully before sending it out but, hey, who am I to say no to a letter produced, as you guessed, at the instance of The Dom - Cummings that is. Of course, Dom and his mates have now left us and instead are doing spectacular deals in cardboard box futures. This means that before the next enforcer comes in to No. 10, I can slip this reply out to you under the political radar....(continue) |
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| Memes and
genes 22 November 2020 |
The
idea of a meme was first put forward by Richard
Dawkins in his 1976 book, ‘The Selfish Gene’. He
explained later how it had come about. The
entire book had of course been about the genetic
code and how natural selection selects for the
most adapted version in the circumstances at
that time. Of course nature doesn’t have any
purpose in this. It’s just that the organisms
endowed with genes more adapted to their
circumstances tend to survive and pass their
genes on to the next generation. But he tells us
that he wanted to explain that the particular
chemical composition of our genes was not the
only possibility in our vast universe. Who knows what may work in other circumstances? Perhaps something based on silicon, for instance, would work. The essence of genetics for him was not the chemicals involved, but that there was something which coded for a particular structure or outcome. Any way that this could be achieved would be the equivalent of our genes. To illustrate it, however, he introduced an abstract example - the idea of the meme...(continue) |
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| Space,
the final frontier 17 November 2020 |
This week, we have seen Space X, an Elon Musk
company, take four space travellers to the
International Space Station. In time past, it would
have been NASA itself which would have developed and
launched the rockets, but now it has decided that
it’s better to ask private enterprise to do the
development work and take the risk. They say
it works out cheaper for NASA than the old approach
to space travel. Obviously at the beginning it was
only governments who were capable of taking on the
immense cost and risk of doing something with no
obvious financial benefit. The main benefit, after
all, was in the time of the Cold War to demonstrate
that the USA was at least the equal of the USSR and
could, ultimately, fly the American flag on the
moon. Even after 60 years of space travel and the
great experience that has gained, it still costs a
great deal of money to send people to circle the
earth in space for months on end, or to send them to
the moon (and bring them back). In an attempt to
justify the immense cost of the space effort, NASA
often points to the spin-offs from the advances in
science which were required to enable man to be put
on the moon and, later, for information to be sent
back by robots from Mars. For some reason the
scientific advance cited always used to be the
development of Teflon! I am not sure, however, that the
need to use less fat when cooking and greater ease
of washing up the saucepans afterwards is
justification for the billions of dollars spent by
NASA....(continue)
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| Extremism –
at both political extremes 10 November 2020 |
Articles
in the Times last Saturday and this Monday took us
to task for being so down on President Trump and
his supporters. The writers, Matthew Parris
and Clare Foges, say that even though they
personally dislike him (of course), someone needed
to stand tall on the world stage and look after
the interests of the USA. They point to the fact
that the only country paying the agreed percentage
of GDP for NATO, other than the USA, was the UK.
And so he was right to demand more from the
countries benefiting from America’s contribution
to their protection. A fair point. At home, though
he whipped up outrage over immigration – that
beautiful wall, still only partly built. He quite
absurdly encouraged his followers to believe that
coal and oil were the fuels of the future and so
pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate
change, so denying the overwhelming weight of
scientific opinion. He criticised the WHO for
having failed to point the finger at China, pulled
out of the organisation - and then let the virus
run rampant in his own country, again completely
ignoring the science and inviting us to drink
bleach instead. He has denigrated all of America’s
institutions, including the fourth estate with his
rallying cry of ‘Fake News’. And he has done his
bit to overturn the rule of law with obviously
partisan appointments to the Supreme Court. He has
lied and lied and lied again. Some have counted
22,000 lies. So then I’m a bit puzzled as to what
we should praise Mr Trump for....(continue)
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| Political
sectarianism 1 November 2020 |
Political polarisation is not a new phenomenon.
It has taken many forms over the centuries and has
sometimes led to violence. It seems though that,
particularly in America, this polarisation has
become far more pronounced over the last 40 or so
years. The study now published offers an
international comparison of the degree of love for
one’s own party and the degree of hatred of the
opposing party. Data from 1975 through to 2017
in nine Western democracies was looked at. Four
nations - America, Canada, New Zealand, and
Switzerland - exhibited increasing sectarianism over
time, with the rate steepest in America. By
contrast, Australia, Britain, Norway, Sweden, and
Germany exhibited decreasing sectarianism over time.
Although positive feelings toward members of
peoples’ own party remained relatively constant over
that period, the degree of hatred felt for other
parties showed a strong increase. By 2017, the
strength of hatred between opposing parties was
stronger in America than in any other nation. But what has really changed is that attitudes have gone from being mostly a dislike of the other party’s policies, to being an active dislike of the people who are members of that party....(continue) |
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| Knowing me, knowing you
... AHA! 20 October 2020 |
It is still quite normal to say that men are from Mars and that women are from Venus. It seems to be common sense to many people. It is also based on various studies done over the years which seemed to show differences in the way things were looked at and thought about as between the sexes. This remains the abiding impression even though a metastudy was carried out some years ago which puts a different perspective on the situation. It turns out that although there are differences, they are very small compared to the variation which already exists within each of the genders. Indeed, rather than men being from Mars and women from Venus, it would be nearer the truth to say that men are from Chipping Norton and women are from Chipping Campden, the difference is so small...(continue) | |||
| Conjectures
and Refutations 14 October 2020 |
Having been reminded of Karl Popper and his influence on others, including George Soros, I decided to take another look at some of his writings which have been sitting in my bookcase for very many years. It’s been a long time since I first read, for instance ‘Objective Knowledge’ and ‘Conjectures & Refutations’, books which for me were quite eye-opening at the time. They showed me another way of looking at the world, one not dependent on religion or indeed received wisdom. However, what I would like to discuss mainly is the approach taken by Karl Popper as regards governance set against a little of the background to the development of his main philosophical ideas. Winston Churchill said that ‘democracy was the worst form of government - apart from all the others’. Popper arrives at a similar conclusion, but shows his workings. In order to see what he is saying, however, we need to go back to the whole idea of ‘conjectures and refutations’, or, more exactly ‘conjectures which can be refuted’...(continue) | |||
| The Open
Society 7 October 2020 |
Apocryphally or not, it is said that an obituary of Alfred Nobel which appeared in a newspaper in 1888 described him as a “Merchant of death”. The obituary had actually appeared in error as Mr Nobel was still very much alive. But he took warning about his reputation from this and founded the Nobel Institute in Stockholm to ensure that his name was not just associated with explosives and death. The Nobel prizes were intended to reward those who, during the preceding year, had “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. The peace prize was to be awarded to someone who had rendered “the greatest service to the cause of international fraternity, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses”. The latest recipient is due to be announced this Friday. I don’t have any inside knowledge as to who the recipient may be, but there has been quite a lot of discussion in advance of this event about past winners. Many are uncontroversial, at least now even if not at the time. Names such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela come to mind. Others remain controversial...(continue) | |||
| WEIRD - Western,
educated, industrialized, rich and democratic 29 September 2020 |
It seems that
there is not only a physical effect to
intermarriage between close relatives. A new
book by Joseph Henrich, a Professor of Human
Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, shines a light
on the more widespread effects of the rules
about who you can marry and who you can’t marry.
When suggesting
a new way of looking at things - and wanting to
sell a book - I suppose that having an acronym can
be quite useful. It tells the reader that there is
something different on the way, something novel
and so worthy of a new ‘word’. This essay will
refer to the rules around who was entitled to
marry whom in the middle ages. But such rules had
their origin long ago, possibly as a result of
seeing the unfortunate result of successive
marriages between close relatives - as the Pharaohs
found out when trying to preserve power within the
family. Consanguineous
marriages placed offspring at risk of nasty
deformities and early deaths....(continue)
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| An exchange
of views with my conservative MP regarding the
government's decision to flout the Rule of Law 24 September 2020 |
My initial e-mail to Craig Tracey MP - 8 September 2020 I note that your colleague Brandon Lewis has now admitted to Parliament that the government’s proposed Brexit legislation will infringe International Law in a "specific and limited way". If a burglar were to say that he had only broken into one house rather than a number of them - so only infringing the Theft Act in a ‘specific and limited way’ - would that justify his conduct? I note that the permanent secretary to the Government Legal Department, Sir Jonathan Jones, has announced his resignation as a consequence of the government’s intention to ignore their legal obligations under international law. There is such a thing as the Rule of Law. It is currently being ignored in many countries around the world to the extreme detriment of the peoples of those countries. I had hoped that the United Kingdom would continue with its tradition of abiding by the Rule of Law in order to preserve our democracy...(continue) |
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| The Rule of
Law 16 September 2020 |
It may seem
strange, but there is no internationally agreed
definition of the Rule
of Law. Of course, there are many countries
which have constitutions and so abiding by these
might seem to be fundamental to abiding by the
rule of law. But not always. For example,
although China has a constitution, we do not
normally think of it as a country which abides by
the Rule of Law. The constitution itself excludes
the exercise of what we would regard as normal
democratic liberties. There is an absence of, for
example, the right to free speech, the right to
protest or the right to put yourself forward as a
candidate at an election without the consent of
the government. This would be seen by most people
as creating a system which was far removed from
the rule of law and so turn it into its
antithesis, a dictatorship...(continue)
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| Blessed are
the... 8 September 2020 |
Bill and Melinda Gates have for many years run a major charitable foundation into which, at the outset, they put $31 billion. Warren Buffet, the ‘Sage of Omaha’ and one of the richest men in the world is a trustee of the Gates Foundation and promised in 2006 to give 85% of his fortune to it. This will ultimately cost the American tax-payer the amount of estate duty which would otherwise have been payable had these vast amounts gone to their heirs. Since that promise, payments by Buffet have been made in annual tranches of $1.5 billion. They are though conditional upon Bill and Melinda Gates continuing to run the foundation. The secret of Mr Buffet’s incredible success as a professional investor is always to make his money work hard - and that requires good ideas and the best management you can get. The same principles apply to running charities. Obviously the Gates represent to Warren Buffet the best that’s available. Which is hard to argue with. And so this mega-foundation will ultimately have double its original worth. Currently it is worth in excess of $40 billion and is able to make grants of over $3 billion per year. This means that on its own it is able to tackle some of the biggest and most intractable problems the world has. As some measure of its importance, it now has the same disposable income as the World Health Organisation....(continue) | |||
| The New Season 3 September 2020 |
As far as the Met Office is concerned, it seems that Autumn has started. It began on 1st September. I can hardly believe it. Time passes. But despite the social distancing required to avoid Covid 19, the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn has been accompanied by quite a lot of events involving quite a lot of people. The children have gone back to school, as witnessed by the line of their parents’ parked cars in our road at school closing time. We can now see and hear large orchestras and choirs at the Proms concerts, even if only because they have the whole of the otherwise empty Royal Albert Hall in which to spread themselves out. There is talk of some theatres reopening, but so far nothing significant has happened. On the other hand, over the week-end live and recorded music (all in the same key) was beamed down to the streets and bemused citizens of Bristol from loudspeakers attached to seven hot-air balloons floating in the relatively becalmed air over the city. It’s true that football matches have restarted, but are watched with only the echoing sound of recorded audience reaction - presumably both applause and boos at the same time from different ends...(continue) | |||
| Reflections
on the coming, politically correct, Spitting
Image 23 August 2020 |
 Because of the
somewhat baffling concept of wokeness, it seems that
things are far from straightforward in the normally
devil may care world of satire. We learnt from the
Times last week that the producers of the new
Spitting Image for ITV are worried about certain
aspects of the programme due to air in the Autumn.
They’ve already produced Spitting Image puppets of
people in the public eye, like Prince Harry and his
dear wife, and the probable next President of the
United States of America, Kanye West. What
they’re stuck on is whom they ought pick to voice
them and who should write the scripts. You may think
the answer is simple - actors and scriptwriters
respectively. But no...(continue) |
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| Morality – the downside | We have often
discussed the concept of morality. Obviously for
someone without a belief in a supernatural authority
but, instead, a 'belief' that natural selection is
the main factor in the creation of our social code,
it is possible to see how morality can work
unexpectedly. To function well in our age, a social
code depends on encouragement from a combination of
law and social pressure. And as we can easily see,
where the law does not work very well and where
social pressure is not benign but actually
malignant, local morality can be a contradiction in
terms - at least for those who look at it from the
outside. The pressure of your group can have very variable consequences. To be accepted, some groups require as part of their social code the commission of what would normally be considered immoral, or even illegal, actions. If I am in a disadvantaged area, I am likely to find that stealing cars or dealing drugs would be considered necessary behaviour if I wanted to be part of a gang. I'm expected to lie to the police for my friends...(continue) |
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| Coleshill
– waves and a Wall of Answered Prayers 5 August 2020 |
Land designated as Green belt in the
local plan cannot be developed. Except of
course when it can.
The planning laws say that it can be developed for outdoor leisure use, “where this preserves the openness of the Green Belt”. This though is just an example of the overriding possibility of approval where there are ‘Very Special Circumstances’ and ‘where the potential harm to the Green Belt is clearly outweighed by other considerations’. So then what does the future hold for us here in Coleshill?  Firstly there
is the idea of a Wave Park in what is roughly
the centre of England. It has just been
approved and will be constructed on a 15-acre
site on the other side of the M42 from
Coleshill. Features will include a 5.4-acre surf
lagoon with artificially generated waves, an
outdoor heated swimming pool (very carbon
friendly), a perimeter track for one wheel
self-balancing electric skateboards and a 1,600
sq metre hub building. The park, to be called
Emerge Surf Birmingham, will also be home to a
surf school, surf shop, café and restaurant, a
multi-purpose fitness studio, a physiotherapy
and massage room and a children’s play area. It
is said that it will be a haven for landlocked
surfers and those keen to try the sport for the
first time. For we residents, it will attract
more traffic, but I suppose that it will prevent
further expansion of urban Birmingham. So then
probably on balance a good thing. I shall have
to iron my wet suit ready for action.
Then there is Coleshill's answer to the Angel of the North - the 'Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer' - yes indeed!...(continue) |
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The carbon neutral essay 14 July 2020 |
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| The Tower of
Babel - its side effects 6 July 2020 |
...Creating
groups of people dispersed throughout the world,
however, who spoke different languages was not,
perhaps, an action that was destined to produce
a very peaceful world. It was a somewhat
short-sighted decision on God's part.
Differences between different groups of people
promote suspicion and therefore hostility. It is
perhaps a minor example but, many years ago, we
were on holiday in Wales, not far from where my
father was born. We went into a small shop.
People were speaking to each other in English,
but after they spotted our presence they changed
languages and continued in Welsh! I was very
offended.
My father spoke Welsh as a little child because it was the normal language in the small town of Llanelli in South West Wales. After a few years the family moved to Cardiff where the national language was almost extinct. It wasn't taught at school. So then after a few years my father became an English speaker and could no longer remember any of his Welsh. They say it's not easy to learn another language when you're older. There are many who believe that they are not capable of it, that they do not have the necessary ear. I suspect, however, that it is not only 'the ear' that they lack, but also the need for it and the willingness to deal with the grammar. The grammar of your own language is not a very popular subject at school. So spending even more time as an adult learning foreign grammar is perhaps not a very attractive prospect. Which means I'm probably a nerd...(continue) |
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| The danger
of slogans 29 June 2020 |
 Slogans are
part of our everyday lives. They enable an
important point to be made in a few words. In
2000, some bookshop owners found an old government
wartime poster asking the citizens to Keep Calm
and Carry On. They framed it and hung it their
shop, but it created such interest that they
started having copes printed. Now we have an
entire industry producing reproductions
of the slogan on mugs, tea towels, deck chairs,
T-shirts and anything else which can be printed
on. There have also been numerous derivatives,
from ‘Keep Calm and Drink Tea’ to ‘Keep Calm and
Marry Ron’. But the lack of words in a slogan can
also lead to a lack of clarity, rather like the
existing government slogan telling us to ‘Keep
Alert’. A slogan is a headline rather than a
fully argued statement. There is always a much
fuller message which the slogan is intended to sum
up. And so its success is judged by how well it
conveys the real message and at the same time how
memorable it is....(continue) |
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| Ecocide
– now to be made a crime, whatever it may be... 23 June 2020 |
In France at the moment there is a major attempt to shift opinion and the law itself in favour of environmentalism. It has come about because President Macron had to try to pacify the 'Gilets Jaunes' protest movement. He wanted to persuade them that he was giving power back to the people. And so for 9 months now, a group of 150 people, randomly chosen by the government, has been discussing during long weekends what their country should do in order to play its part in the struggle against global warming by reducing their CO2 emissions by 40%. 'The Citizens Convention for the Climate' has now come to a decision on lots of measures which they consider are necessary or desirable...(continue) | |||
| Money 16 June 2020 |
I
have in front of me a 50 Euro note. When you
draw money out of a French hole in the wall, you
are almost invariably given one of these.
Using it to buy anything is slightly embarrassing,
as the amount of change you will normally receive
will be significant. I wouldn’t usually
expect to buy anything at a price even close to
that amount with cash. Indeed, if you draw any
money from an English ATM, the biggest note you
will receive is £20. I’m not sure that I’ve
ever handled a £50 note and if I tried to use one
in a shop, I would be looked at with suspicion;
they have a reputation for being fakes and used
only by drug dealers. But what I was trying to do was to see what the 50 Euro note actually says. The information recorded on it is rather sparse. It says ‘50’ and ‘Euro’ and has its serial number. It also has the initials of the European Bank on it in 10 languages and the signature of Mario Draghi beneath the European flag. But nothing else. The £20 note has similar information on it, and with pictures of the Queen and of the artist Joseph Turner. But it also famously goes on to say: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds”...(continue) |
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| Prejudice - good or
bad? 7 June 2020 |
We
are continually told that prejudice is a bad
thing, but research has come to what should be an
unsurprising conclusion: that prejudice can in
fact confer an evolutionary advantage. Why else
would we have it as part of our psychological
make-up? And of course it exists not only in us as
humans, but also in the ‘lower’ orders. The
suggestion is that our benefit from and so
tendency towards prejudice may come from two
things - the constant need to make decisions about
the danger we face from others and the need to
know whether someone can be relied on to help you
when needed. If you feel that you belong to a
group, then it seems that you have a short-cut to
making those decisions, whether as a human, a
chimpanzee or a vampire bat. As members of a
group we have a tendency to favour other members,
for no other reason than that they are members of
our group. So then, if you are prejudiced in favour of people in your own group, you will also feel instinctively that the other members are similarly prejudiced towards you. And largely you will be right. This means in turn that the need to make assessments of reliability or danger will be simplified. Instead you can be reasonably sure that you will be able to trust each other. Trust facilitates co-operation and your group will benefit accordingly. Prejudice can be beneficial....(continue) |
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| Why we
believe what we want to believe: Part II - the
lingering influence of fake news 1 June 2020 |
A few weeks ago I wrote about the conspiracy theorists, those who make causal connections out of correlations. The research suggests that they are motivated to do this by the enhancement in their social standing amongst others in the conspiracy community when they find previously unknown links to ‘support’ a particular conspiracy theory. There are though many others who don’t engage in this sort of behaviour but who, nonetheless, believe things which have been shown to be untrue. Politicians rely on their ability to persuade such people in order to gain power. The brand leader for untruth amongst politicians used to be Hitler or Mussolini, but is, these days, Mr Trump. ‘Fake news” is Donald Trump’s favourite catchphrase. Since the election in 2016, it has appeared in some 180 tweets by the President...(continue) | |||
| Celluloid,
Chinese laundries and racism 26 May 2020 |
When I was in secondary school, I developed an interest in chemistry. My brother and I had a chemistry set that we'd add to whenever we could. And it was pretty easy to do so, because at the time there weren't a lot of restrictive rules about what a shopkeeper could sell to two kids. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the kind of experiments we were interested in. Yes, those that produced an explosion. There were two main suppliers of the necessary chemicals in Smethwick: a garden shop on the Oldbury Road and the pharmacy on the opposite side of the road owned by Mr. Carr BSc, MRPS. For gunpowder you need sulphur and carbon as the fuel, and potassium nitrate to provide oxygen to accelerate combustion and thus, in a confined space, to cause an explosion...(continue) | |||
| Conspiracy
theories - why do people believe in them? 18 May 2020 |
The case of Carlill v the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company (1893) is well known to all law students in the UK and other common law jurisdictions. The Company said that its ‘smoke balls’ would provide protection against what we now know as the Russian flu. The smoke actually consisted of finely ground phenol powder of the type then used in soap as disinfectant. So now we know where Mr Trump got his idea from. The advertisement said that the smoke should be inhaled 3 times per day for two weeks. The smoke balls would last for two or three months and could then be refilled for the princely sum of 5 shillings. So not cheap. Fortunately though it all came with reassurance. If, after you had inhaled the vapours as prescribed, you actually caught the malady, then such was the Company’s confidence in its product that they would pay you £100 (equivalent to about £35,000 now). To reassure potential sniffers further, the Company said in its advertisement that they had deposited £1,000 in a bank to show their faith in their product. Mrs Elizabeth Carlill became ill, despite having inhaled the smoke for at least two weeks, and requested the promised compensation. The Company refused to pay, saying that it was only an advertisement and so not to be taken seriously...(continue) | |||
| Originals or
copies - which are better? 12 May 2020 |
In an article in the Times last week, there was a suggestion by leaders from the museum and art gallery world that reproductions of artistic masterpieces should be put on display while the originals are stored out of sight. It seems that with modern scanning and reproduction techniques, the imitations would only be distinguishable from the originals because they could be colour-corrected to show what they had been like when originally painted. No longer would they have to be displayed in semi-darkness in order to protect them from damaging light. No longer would they need to be behind shatter-proof glass to protect them from attack. So then the proposal would have the benefit of preserving the originals from further deterioration and the risk of theft and, at the same time, enabling the public to view those great works currently considered to be too fragile to be displayed or displayed as we would like to see them – in the light...(continue) | |||
| Change 3 May 2020 |
We were in Annecy and the world had just become a year older. I looked up at the mountains though and saw that nothing had changed since the last time I’d looked at them - in the previous year, the night before. Nothing changed in the millions of years before we started going there either. The sun still rose over the same mountains and set in the same place. They cast the same shadows. The lake remains an ever present feature in the valley lying at their foot. Of course that is not quite true. If we were to go back, say, 100,000 years, we would find the mountains to be very slightly taller and the shadows they cast to be slightly more jagged. But the change, the erosion of the mountains, takes place so slowly, that it is undetectable to the human eye. Other changes take place more obviously - such as the trees growing on the mountain-sides which change colour with the seasons...(continue) | |||
| I
may have many faults, but being wrong isn't one
of them 21 April 2020 |
Some time ago, we went to the dry cleaners in a town called Flers in Normandy. Having handed in the clothes to be cleaned, the lady at the counter naturally asked for our name. Heather gave it to her - Buckingham - and then, as the lady, unsurprisingly, looked uncertain, spelt it out in her best French accent. Everything was fine except that we could see that the first letter was a P and not a B. So we both pointed to it and said, in French, ‘no, the first letter is a B'. ‘Yes', she said, ‘a P'. ‘No', I said, ‘B as in...', and as my mind had gone blank and I couldn't think of anything simple, I said ‘Baignoire' (bath). ‘Yes', she said, ‘P as in Peignoir' (dressing gown). Her younger colleague, perhaps with better hearing, sitting a few metres away was muttering ‘no, its B, not P'. Eventually, by reference to Buckingham Palace and then actually writing the letter down, we managed to convey to her what letter it was. Clearly, though, she did not want to accept that we probably knew better how to spell our name than she did, and so carried on insisting that her spelling of it was in fact correct...(continue) | |||
| Privacy
and getting our lives back 14 April 2020 |
I
was pleased to hear from the Catholic church on
Easter Sunday that we should rely on Science,
inspired by the Holy Spirit, to beat the
coronavirus. It’s just a shame that the Holy
Spirit doesn’t reveal some hard facts on the
nature of the beast we’re trying to overcome.
After all, it is one of God’s creations, so the
Holy Spirit should have inside knowledge, unless
the members of the Trinity are maintaining social
distancing from each other. Such information would
help a lot, just as it would have helped with the
Spanish flue and the black death. However, with or
without the inspiration apparently on offer, we’re
going to have to try to find ways to restart our
lives and our economies as best we can. The
virus is not going to go away any time soon; it is
unlikely to commit suicide. Of course, there is an argument from evolutionary theory that we can expect it to mutate into something less virulent. The most successful, the most enduring parasites, don’t do too much harm to the host, but keep it as a long-term source of nourishment – rather like the tape-worm....(continue) |
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| Human
rights in a time of coronavirus 6 April 2020 |
To say that we live in unusual times is something of an understatement. We are under attack by a very large, mindless, molecule which, despite its ignorance of its own existence, is multiplying at an alarming rate and, in the process, doing considerable damage to us. The damage, however, is not only physical, but also political. Not only have we, at least temporarily, lost our Prime Minister, but he has been replaced by his deputy, the Karate Kid – the rabid right-winger Dominic Raab. Let’s hope that he doesn’t get to make any significant decisions. In fact, BoJ is looking like a safe pair of hands in contrast to the man now in charge. Maybe Matt Hancock and Rishi Sunak as health secretary and chancellor will carry on as before actually running the parts of government which count....(continue) | |||
| Coronavirus
– the financial effects 26 March 2020 |
It
seems that the Americans have now decided to sign
up to the idea of Universal Income, at least for
the time being. As part of the $1.8 trillion
stimulus package, $250 billion has been allocated
to enhanced unemployment benefit. In this country,
we have the government agreeing to pay 80% of
salaries of those not working as a result of
Coronavirus. We’re still waiting to find out
how much the government will pay the self-employed
during the time they cannot work. But we expect
that, in the short-term, the amount of financial
hardship which will result from the virus
close-down will be minimised. No-one should go
hungry and no-one should be thrown out of their
home as a result of inability to pay the mortgage
or the rent. We even have an extra 6 months in
which to take our cars for an MOT. But there have already been significant effects and there will undoubtedly be even more significant effects in the aftermath of all this. An immediate effect was that the stock-markets around the globe dropped precipitously, although following the announcement of the US aid package, the stock-markets have rebounded quite a lot....(continue) |
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| Covid
19 – who’s to blame? A look at some of the wilder ideas now circulating 19 March 2020 |
According to Isis, the reason that
the Covid virus is so widespread in Europe is
because of our immorality. God has
inflicted the virus upon us in order to punish
our wicked behaviour. In fact so much is
this the case, that the leaders of Isis have
told their followers to keep out of Europe and
let off their bombs elsewhere. Which, if
true, is something of a relief for us, if not
the other parts of the world affected.
Of course, since that statement was announced,
a few weeks ago now, the virus has become
prevalent in Iran and various other good
Muslim countries, so I’m not sure what’s
happening there. Maybe the Christian god has
decided to engage in reprisals against Allah
and his followers. It must be really confusing
in Israel for the various gods, bearing in
mind the mixture of Muslims, Jews and
Christians.
Others are not pointing to religion
as being at the root of all this. Many
are claiming that China has a covert bioweapon
establishment in Wuhan where the virus was
being developed in order to wipe out Western
capitalist civilisation. Something apparently
went wrong and the virus was accidentally
released amongst their own people, a mistake
they at first tried to cover up and then
claimed was a natural occurrence having its
origin in a market which sold the meat of wild
animals. Obviously a front for their high tech
laboratory....(continue)
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| Coronavirus -
a little local difficulty 3 March 2020 |
We
seem to have quite a number of difficulties at the
moment. There’s the flooding which has been
greater and more widespread than we’ve seen in the
past. There’s the apparent incompatibility between
the negotiating positions of the UK and the EU.
The dispute between Pretti Patel and her former
chief of staff has been such a major difficulty
that the anticipated arrival of the Prime
Minister’s new baby has been deployed in order to
deflect criticism from the Home Secretary. And of course, there’s the small matter of the coronavirus. This is nearer to home for me, at least, granted that we’ve decided to cancel our fortnight in Sicily as a consequence of its appearance on that Island (now 9 cases in different areas). The owner of ‘Il Giardino di Oliver’ has kindly agreed to let us, as old folk at greater risk of infection, postpone our trip to later in the year, although of course subject to payment of any price difference. That of course presumes that there will be flights available. Which is looking somewhat doubtful. I suppose we could always try to hitch a lift on a cruise liner - there are likely to be quite a lot of spare berths this year - although it might be best to wear a haz-mat suit at all times...(continue) |
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| The thought
police and secular morality 17 February 2020 |
It
seems that of the Labour candidates for the
leadership, the two female candidates have signed
up to a series of 10 declarations regarding the
trans community. The third, Sir Keir Starmer
QC has not, at least not yet. It may be a
relief to know that I don’t intend to look at all
10 declarations. But there is one of the
declarations which is more than somewhat
controversial. It says: ”I will
campaign for reform of the Gender Recognition
Act to introduce a self-declaration process and
for the introduction of legal recognition for
non-binary gender identities. I believe that
trans women are women, that trans men are men,
and that non-binary genders are valid and should
be respected.”.
Another version of this adds: “there is no
material conflict between trans rights and
women’s rights”.
Essentially what they are asking is that the law should accept that a person is of whatever gender they say they are for all purposes and that the belief that this is so should be a protected characteristic, just like, as we saw recently, the ‘philosophical belief’ of veganism. As always, however the assertion that something is so does not necessarily make it so. The word ’oversimplification’ comes to mind....(continue) |
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| Climate
change – the practicalities 12 February 2020 |
Although not
covered by the national press at the time, we
now know from the Sunday Times that students
with tents, banners and placards occupied the
15th-century quad of St John’s College, Oxford
on Wednesday, 29th January. They said they
wouldn’t leave until the college agreed to sell
its shares in those prolific producers of
hydrocarbons, BP and Shell. The College is very
rich. It was reported at the time in two student
newspapers, but not it seems elsewhere.
Dominic Lawson is a columnist for the Sunday Times and a climate change sceptic. He is also a Brexiteer, although his father, Nigel Lawson, a former Conservative Chancellor with similar views to his son, has lived in France for many years. So people I don’t really take very seriously. On this occasion, however, I have some sympathy with the conclusion which Dominic draws from what happened. It seems that on the day of their occupation, the protesters e-mailed Professor Andrew Parker (an eminent research scientist and the principal bursar) to demand a meeting to address their demands. These were that St John’s “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels”. His answer was not what they expected. “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”.....(continue) |
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| Discontent
with democracy 4 February 2020 |
Going shopping for clothes for Heather in France can be an interesting experience. Not only is there the consideration of what would suit her but, from the numerous items of different sizes picked from the rails, there is then the need to narrow down the choice by trying them on. By Heather that is, not me. During these lengthy periods, there is usually a shop assistant standing by waiting for the verdict and, of course, ready to say how good it looks or, if that ploy is unsuccessful, to suggest alternatives. Standing with the assistant outside the changing room in silence during all of this is a little embarrassing, and so I generally try to engage in some sort of conversation. It normally starts with something quite innocuous, but can then take various twists and turns. And so this last week I have ended up discussing Brexit, which the French find completely incomprehensible, the pension reforms being imposed by the French government as compared to our system, the 35 hour week, where to buy the best fruit and vegetables (‘Le Grand Frais’ at Seynod) and which is the best cheese shop in town – confirmed to be the Fromagerie Gay...(continue) | |||
| Decision
making for the long term 20 January 2020 |
We quickly learn that short-term decision making, our day to day decisions, are the most important for us. If we ignore them or get them wrong then they soon come back to bite us. They have an immediate effect on our lives. And so we tend to concentrate on them. There are though many aspects of our lives which we don’t immediately even recognise as decisions in the same sense, even though they are. Many aspects of our lives - dress, speech or tattoos - which we adopt consciously or unconsciously, are used to determine what part of society we belong to. An even less likely piece of behaviour, altruism, is part of this same group. Acting altruistically always used to be thought of as an example of acting out of goodness, a genuine wish to help others with no thought of a return, something of the moment – and so a short term decision. Of course there were always some cads - very much frowned upon by society - who would pretend to be helpful in order to worm their way into someone’s affections. I imagine in fact that most people would still explain altruism in these terms, even though we know from lots of research on us and other animals, and our own common sense, that it is far from true...(continue) | |||
| Anthropomorphism,
imagination and creativity 12 January 2020 |
As human beings, we seem to have a tendency to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects and imaginary beings. Ancient civilizations were well aware of this strange habit of human psychology. Xenophanes invented the word "anthropomorphism" 2,600 years ago. He realized that people worshipped gods that looked like them - the Greeks had white gods, while the Ethiopian gods were darker. From this observation he predicted that if horses and donkeys believed in God, their god would trot on all fours. He may have been right. Some time ago, primatologists documented a type of behaviour among chimpanzees, called 'the rain dance': when a storm begins, sometimes they climb a tree, then they tear out its branches and brandish them while they cry out to the clouds - as if they were facing a male rival. It seems to be a kind of 'chimpomorphism' about the storm. They shake their branches at the alpha male they assume to be throwing flashes from the sky...(continue) | |||
| Philosophical
belief and veganism 5 January 2020 |
The
world has apparently gone mad. Alright it’s
continued with its madness. We now have not only
crazy religions, but crazy non-religious
‘Philosophical Beliefs’, given the benefit of
protected characteristics under the Equality Act
2010 by a Court in the UK. Jordi Casamitjana, a zoologist by training, with a speciality in wasps, is someone who refuses even to travel on buses as they are likely to kill insects. Obviously he travels on buses which go faster than the ones I’ve been on. As we know, a vegan is someone who does not eat or use animal products. People may choose for supposed health purposes simply to follow a vegan, and so exclusively plant-based diet. They would therefore exclude all meat, fish dairy and eggs from their consumption. But self-described ‘ethical vegans’ go further and try to exclude all forms of animal exploitation from their lifestyle...(continue) |
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| 2020
- The next decade 31 December 2019 |
Traditionally,
we mark the end of one decade and the beginning
of another by reflecting on what has happened in
the past and what is likely to change in the
next 10 years. We might even celebrate the
change. Well, quite a lot has happened in the
period since 2010 dawned. The year 2008 had seen
the financial crash brought on by recklessness
in the banks. And so the end of the first decade
of this century was taken up with attempts to
prevent the banks’ foolishness from affecting
the lives of ordinary people. It was not though
something easily achieved and so the aftermath
of the crash continued well into the next
decade.
Indeed, it continued until 2019. We were told that austerity was the key to our survival and that public expenditure had to be cut, and cut quite savagely in some areas. Which, of course, had an effect on the lives of those same ordinary citizens, if not on those of the billionaire bankers who had caused the problems in the first place. And so the decade we have just lived through did not start well. Neither did it end well, bearing in mind the upheaval caused by David Cameron’s decision to hold a Brexit referendum which he, and so we, lost. But what now?...(continue) |
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| Brexit and
the General Election - December 12, 2019 |
My Blog during the run up to the December 12, 2019 general election. | |||
| Trust 25 November 2020 |
The other evening we were watching a
nature programme narrated by the real monarch of
our isles, Sir David Attenborough, the person we
all trust to tell it like it is. As it
happened, it concerned somewhere called
Australia, a land mass cut off from all the
other continents since before the time when the
dinosaurs died out. As a result, the
animals which took over when the dinosaurs
departed this world were rather different to the
animals with which we are familiar on the other
landmasses of our globe. They became even
more different because of the working of
evolution over the last few million years,
mainly as a result of the fact that Australia
has gradually moved from the colder South to
nearer the equator....(continue) |
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| World Trade Organisation 13 November 2019 |
OK, so the
World Trade Organisation may not seem very
relevant to our everyday lives, but stay with
me. We are
told that a no-deal Brexit would be on WTO
terms. Indeed, should Boris win an
actual majority in this election, it will
include many Conservative MPs who would
actually favour a no-deal Brexit, and so on
WTO terms, rather than even contemplate
extending the one-year transition period his
agreement allows for negotiation of a
bi-lateral agreement with the EU.
But unless something seismic happens, then the WTO will cease to be a functioning organisation on 10th December - in just one month's time....(continue) |
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| Making
up perfection 10 November 2019 |
Perfection is something which is never actually achieved in real life. I was put in mind of this a little while ago when we went to a concert at Symphony Hall in Birmingham. It included Saen-Saens' second piano concerto. We have it on disc. In fact we have two different recordings of it. I like them both and have listened to them quite often. So often, that when I heard it played live, I was only too aware of a few wrong notes. It was not that it was cacophonous or played badly. I think that if I had not been so familiar with the recordings of it I wouldn't even have noticed. The point is that the versions on disc are highly edited and not a single wrong note is allowed to remain....(continue) | |||
| Remembrance 6 November 2019 |
On
Sunday, the Anglican church at Coleshill will be
unusually close to capacity or even perhaps
completely full. And of course the reason is that
it is Remembrance Day. There are local and
national remembrance ceremonies at which
dignitaries take part and where we, as a nation,
remember the victims of the last two wars
regardless of our personal involvement or not in
them. In Coleshill, the Town Band will take
part with the usual mix of tunes used for this
occasion and of course all the Town Councillors,
members of the Servicemen’s associations and
generally the great and good of Coleshill will be
in attendance to lay poppy wreaths on the war
memorial outside the Church. Even Heather and I
will be there, with a poppy wreath to lay on
behalf of the Twinning Association. Other countries, with other histories remember their war dead at different times and in different ways. But it is something which virtually every country does. Of course, in some countries, major conflicts relate not so much to wars with other states, but to civil wars of various kinds, whether to try to achieve independence or to try to get rid of a dictator, such as in Spain. In these circumstances, how or whether to celebrate can be quite contentious....(continue) |
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| Eugenics 12 October 2019 |
The BBC4 documentary in October this year on the subject of eugenics was very informative, Eugenics was proposed as a system of improving the ‘quality’ of the human species. Over the millennia, dog, pigeon and plant breeders had taken major steps, by cross-breeding, to select for desirable traits in their subjects. It meant that not only could homing pigeons fly home from greater distances, but that plants could become more productive of the food we need to survive. Dogs, well, it seems that you can never have enough different sorts to appeal to their devoted ‘owners’. When it comes to humans, however, it all becomes a little more difficult....(continue) | |||
| Speciesism 28 August 2019 |
...
We now have ‘Speciesism’ being compared to racism,
sexism and fascism. Speciesism, the
doctrine hated by vegans, was
described in a book called
‘Animal Liberation' (1975) by an
Australian philosopher, Peter Singer. He defined
it as ‘a prejudice or bias in favour of the
interests of members of one's own species and
against those of members of other species.’
People who oppose speciesism say that giving human
beings greater rights than non-human animals is as
arbitrary (and as morally wrong) as giving white
people greater rights than non-white people.
As always, there is a fundamental confusion in the
Olympian pronouncements of the Animal Rights
fraternity even though, or perhaps because, based
on a book written by a philosopher. They assume
that morality can be justified and understood as
part of a carefully constructed rational
framework, instead of its being simply the outcome
of evolutionary pressure which we then, for
psychological reasons, try to justify
rationally....(continue) |
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| Decisions,
decisions 7 October 2019 |
The other day, some research was
published which showed that mice, faced with
choosing between two identical (tasty) rewards,
took longer to start eating than where there was
only one such reward. It took them time to
decide. Who’d have thought it? In fact, we all
know that it's difficult to make decisions of
this sort. To choose between chocolate cake or
lemon meringue pie is not an easy thing for
me. The equality of desire makes the
choice very difficult and time-consuming, even
when the outcome of the choice is not, at least
to an outsider, very important. But if there are
in fact things in life which are more important
than dessert then, surely, we would make choices
about them based on a rational consideration of
the benefits and disadvantages for our
lives? Well maybe not...(continue) |
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| The
precautionary principle, bananas and pigs 21 August 2019 |
...
The fruit and vegetables which we now eat look and
taste very different to those our ancestors ate.
Over the centuries, by hybridisation of the
various varieties, plant breeders have succeeded
in making fruit and vegetables which are far more
resistant to disease, grow much better and,
sometimes, even have a better taste. All
this is by means of genetic manipulation. But this
has been ‘natural’ genetic manipulation, perceived
to be carried out by ‘gardeners’ wearing gardening
gloves, rather than scientists in white coats
using CRISPR gene editing. Of course the end
result is the same, it’s just that the ‘natural’
variant is not subject to checks to see if it
affects our health in the long term, whereas the
genetically modified variants are. Except in
Europe, where they are banned because of the
precautionary principle. So
what is the precautionary principle?...(continue) |
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| The Silly
Season 14 August 2019 |
Every
year, when the MPs go off to the seaside with
their buckets and spades, we seem to enter a
season when nothing much of importance happens, or
at least is reported by the newspapers. Instead,
the sorts of stories which might normally only
make it on to page 15 find a place on the front
page. This year seems to be no
exception. We have had the reported death of
‘Grumpy Cat’, a cat famous on the net for looking,
well, grumpy. The world mourned. There were
the discoveries in New Zealand of 30 million year
old fossils of 4 metre high emus and of penguins
the height of a human. There was then the
declaration by someone who has recently married an
actress that they are going to have at most two
children in order to minimise their impact on the
environment. The proposed changes to the rest of
their somewhat lavish lifestyle and their use of
private jets seem not to have been reported...(continue) |
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| Words
we may not use 29 July 2019 |
The English language tsar, Jacob William Rees-Mogg esquire, has spoken and told us what we may and may not say. We may not use words such as ‘very’, ‘unacceptable’ ‘lot’ (we don’t know which meaning is proscribed – a large quantity, destiny, something put up for auction, a film set etc), ‘ascertain’, ‘disappointment’, ‘speculate’, and ‘equal’. Now for a multi-millionaire Conservative M.P. I can see that the word ‘equal’ may be an unacceptable (oops) socialist concept. I suppose that a lot of his clients would not want to be reminded that to speculate is the essence of the business of which he was CEO, a fund management firm, Somerset Capital Management. He is still a partner in the business. They would not wish to have the disappointment of learning that the firm which he co-founded necessarily follows an investment strategy based on speculation...(continue) | |||
| The
power of positive thinking and a can-do attitude 26 July 2019 |
It
seems that our new PM (the Piffle Minister)
believes that a can-do attitude and positivity
will gain us the prize of a deal with the EU
without the need for an Irish backstop. I’m
sure that he’s right, as he is with so many other
things, such as figures on the sides of buses and
the source of the regulations governing the
sending of kippers through the post. But what I wanted to think about was the power of positive thinking. Every so often in the past century there has been a self-help book which has caught the public imagination and sold in millions...(continue) |
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| An
excess of Human Rights? 18 July 2019 |
On Wednesday this week I happened to hear ‘Thought for the Day’. It is part of the Today programme but, when I hear it come on, I generally find something else to listen to as it is normally too full of platitudes. On this occasion, however, the speaker was not a Bishop, but a Parliamentary lawyer, Daniel Greenberg, and so I decided to give it a go. He said that Article 2 of the 1st Protocol to the ECHR, which makes a right to education a human right, also provides that the State must "respect the right of parents to ensure that the education of children is in conformity with the religious and philosophical conviction of the parents". (continue) | |||
| Honesty,
Wallets and Humanism 10 July 2019 |
A research paper appearing at the
beginning of July this year in the American
Academy of Science magazine, a
magazine called, with creative flair,
‘Science’, reports an international
experiment into our honesty. It
says in the introduction:
...
Psychological models based on self-image
maintenance, however, predict that people
will cheat for profit but only so long as
their behaviour does not require them to
negatively update their self-concept.
However, it is unclear, without evidence,
whether self-image concerns will become more
or less important as the incentives for
dishonesty increase and also what form that
relationship will take.
In other words, even if I will not be caught, does being able to continue to think of myself as an upright citizen, and not a thief, outweigh the benefit of nicking the cash? (continue) |
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| The influence and effects of CO2 25 June 2019 |
The other day we were on our way to a recycling centre which, ironically, is not accessible by public transport. On the motorway we overtook a lorry. On its side it advertised the fact that it was delivering the sort of oil we use in our cars, made, or perhaps I should say refined, by BP. After the problems encountered by the Sackler family in giving away money in sponsorship of the arts, we now have Sir Mark Rylance bringing to an end 30 years of involvement with the Royal Shakespeare Company because of its continued sponsorship by BP. Sir Mark’s involvement with the RSC was in any event rather strange as he considers that the works attributed to Shakespeare were in fact written by another knight, Sir Francis Bacon. But although BP subsidises tickets for the under 25’s, he is concerned that BP in its day job is also one of the main ‘sponsors’ of global warming. He finds this unacceptable...(continue) | |||
| Populism 14 May 2019 |
We have just witnessed an unusual event. The Emperor of Japan has abdicated and his son has taken over the role. The outgoing Emperor and his son are of course descendants of the Japanese Sun God and so are deities in their own rights. Even though Japan is a society which depends on industry and technology for its position as one of the richest nations on earth, evidently they have a regard for the traditions of the past, as their ceremonies, little-changed over the centuries, still invoke the god-like status of their rulers. But the royal family has changed. Emperor Hirohito, in power during the second world war, was a strong supporter of Japanese aggression, encouraging a form of extreme populist nationalism which resulted in an early version of suicide bombers and brutal treatment of prisoners of war. His son Akihito is a pacifist, as is probably his grand-son, the new emperor, Naruhito. The just-abdicated Emperor is very much respected by his people for his efforts in changing the attitude of his country from that of populist hostility to the outside world to that of friendship...(continue) | |||
| The proceeds
of slavery 5 May 2019 |
Cambridge University has announced an inquiry into the way it benefited from the slave trade. It seems that those who have profited from injustice should compensate their victims even unto the seventh generation. After the Second World War, Germany was called upon to restore stolen property to its owners or compensate them for its loss. The identities of the Jewish families wronged, the Nazi wrongdoers and the relationship between original victims and surviving family members, were all the subject of good evidence. The loss claimed for was quantifiable. Compensation made sense. As time passes, however, the connection between the descendants of the wrongdoer and wronged becomes more tenuous. I’m not sure how any individual descendant of a slave could show a justifiable claim to compensation from any particular person or institution at this stage. More recent events, good or ill, occurring well after the abolition of enslavement will have had a major effect on peoples’ lives making them richer or poorer and so will have made any serious attempt to show an individual’s right to compensation for the enslavement to be impossible...(continue) | |||
| Philanthropy 28 March 2019 |
I was fascinated to read a 4 page spread in Hello! about Ariana Rockefeller, the well-known philanthropist and heiress of the immensely rich Rockefeller family. It took a while for the garage to balance my new tyres and I’d finished the Daily Mail provided in the reception area. In the profile she told the reporter how important a work ethic was to her, something which she’d learned from her family, and how much time she spent dealing with her philanthropic organisations. When in New York, she lives not in her own house or apartment, but in a huge suite at the Mark Hotel - “the most boldly lavish hotel in New York City”. She is quoted as saying: “They make my favourite cocktail as soon as I walk into the bar. They save my favourite table in the restaurant for me. They do everything for me. You can’t put a price on that.” The $57,000 a night apparently charged for the penthouse suite by the Mark may be a clue as to how the system functions. Poor little rich girl; nice to be cosseted for love, not money....(continue) | |||
|
27 February 2019 |
I have never thought that what
the world really needed was another Paul
Buckingham. I have always thought that one
was more than enough. I am conscious,
though, that I am in a minority when it comes to
being (or not) family-orientated. Although
families aren’t generally as big as they were,
there is still a desire to produce a Mini-me or
two. From my rather selfish point of view, that
is a good thing as, hopefully, when I am
exceedingly old there will be younger people
around who will be able to look after me – for a
fee of course. Although a family in the UK tends on average to have just under two children, there are of course exceptions. The super-rich seem to have numerous children, rather like the potentates of old. And then of course, at the other end of the income scale, there is the perception that people on benefits have lots of children. This appears to be such a problem that the Universal Credit System will not make any additional payment to parents in respect of a 3rd or subsequent child born from now on...(continue) |
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| Conspiracy
theories
- the business model. 25 February 2019 |
What is really happening in the world? Of course, for enlightenment, we cannot depend on the traditional press and their fake news. Our friend Mr Trump tells us that all the newspapers and media outlets (apart from Fox News) are in the pockets of the super-rich and, obviously, these billionaires have their own agenda. This is even more clear now when, thanks to the internet, we know that the super-rich are a part of the 'deep state', the group of characters that truly control the world - also known as the "Illuminati". There are those who pour scorn on such an idea. Fortunately though, there are others ready to defend the truth about this state within a state...(continue) | |||
| Pseuds Corner 7 February 2019 |
In the
satirical magazine Private Eye there is a column
called ‘Pseuds Corner' which pokes fun at
pretentiousness in the arts and the media. There
have been such gems as Sir Paul McCartney's poem
-
"We (women)
are just as obsessed and infatuated as men. We
love music just as hard. It's just that we don't
exhibit that obsession, that love, through an
alphabetised record collection. You want to know
how I store my records? I put the ones next to
each other that I think would be friends. I
suppose that you could call that
emotional; I call it
womanly." (continue) |
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| How
to spend the Science budget 21 January 2019 |
It seems that
CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just outside
Geneva, is not large enough. When it was
constructed, with its 28 km circumference
tunnel, it was designed to be big enough to find
out whether or not the Higgs boson existed. This
had been predicted to exist, as theory said that
it was the particle needed to give mass to all
the other sub-atomic particles. No, I have no
idea either. Where we once just had protons,
electrons and neutrons, we now have a menagerie
of particles. They came into view when
physicists started to fire the particles they
knew about at each other to see what happened.
The LHC is the latest and most powerful version
of the technology used for the task...(continue)
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| Sovereignty 1 January 2019 |
It seems that
the concept of sovereignty is very much to the
fore amongst Brexiteers. Apparently they are
determined we should regain it. It seems it has
not been available to us since we joined the
EEC/EU. If I’m honest about it though,
it’s not something I'd thought about very much
over the years. Indeed, as a concept, it seems
to me to relate more to the time when we had
kings and queens, colonies and outposts of
empire – a time when we had actual sovereigns
and ruled a large part of the globe. An
exception, Oliver Cromwell, who did for Charles
I and became “The Lord Protector”, was regarded
merely as a dictator, rather than a sovereign
because he was not of kingly lineage. He did in
fact try to create a lineage. The army wanted
him to ensure a succession and so he nominated
as his successor as Lord Protector his eldest
surviving son, Richard Cromwell. Richard,
however, rather unwisely reduced the amount of
money going to the army and so the army decided
it was time to go back to real kings instead. But any
sovereign worthy of the name was, by
definition, a dictator. And as we
can now see, there is no such thing as a
kingly lineage, just children who have
succeeded in taking over from their
parents as the dictator of the moment. The
‘royal line’ has in fact been a succession
of ‘royal lines’ over the millennia....
(continue)
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| A Christmas
Story 23 December 2018 |
... as
told to me by my close friend and fellow
filosofer, Mr Thomas Jeffries: It had been a restless night, but suddenly I awoke with a feeling of premonition. At that moment, the radio came on and the sonorous chimes of Big Ben could be heard, as if portending something of great moment. As they stopped, the Radio 4 newsreader began the midnight news-bulletin with words which shook me to the core. She said “the Government has decided that Mr Thomas Jeffries, the well-known philosopher and a leading citizen of Coleshill, someone generally accepted to be a person of great wisdom, has been given the responsibility of deciding whether or not the concept of Father Christmas should be abolished. He will announce his decision in 24 hours time.”. I was at first utterly at a loss to know what to do, but then, having decided that I should accept the challenge in the national interest, I started to think over the questions which it raised. There is first of all the patriarchal aspect to all of this. The hero of Christmas is a man. Mother Christmas does appear in some versions of the tale, but only as a helper and with nothing like the same status as Father Christmas himself. It has been reported in the Times that Egloshayle Parish Council in Cornwall has attempted to overcome this by advertising the post of Father Christmas on a non-gender specific basis. They have not though stated whether the successful candidate will be called ‘Father’ Christmas or ‘Mother’ Christmas. Obviously a bearded man self-identifying as a woman would be an ideal candidate, but this to me seems unduly restrictive...(continue) |
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| Referendums 19 November 2018 |
It
is
generally accepted that the idea of democracy
originated in the city of Athens. I am not
convinced that this is true, however. There
are, even now, some tribes found in remote forests
that work by consensus - i.e. democratically -
rather than being subject to the diktat of a
leader or a group of "potentates", and there's no
reason to think that this is a modern
phenomenon. But we can, I suppose, accept
that the Athenians were the first occupants of a
city to adopt such a system. There was, however, a
recurring anxiety for the Athenians: were the
people in fact hopeless at making decisions,
incapable of intelligent consideration? Were they
instead all too easily influenced by spurious
arguments and manipulated by unscrupulous
rhetoricians hungry for power? After all, Boris is not a
new phenomenon...(continue) |
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| The Perils of
Perception 27 November 2018 |
... In principle this approach - theory, experiments, modification of the theory and ... repeat - can be used not only in science but also in other spheres of life. The difficulty, however, is that we have preconceived ideas of how the political world works and how it should work. This difficulty exists in the fact that our prejudices have the status of a religion (in the broadest sense) and therefore prevent us from wanting to challenge them or to believe the results of each "experiment", or detailed investigation of what happened in the past, that would indicate something contrary to our prejudices. We say that everyone has the right to believe in what he wants to believe and therefore there is no real motivation, as in science, to correct our mistakes. We admire those who stick to their beliefs or their principles and criticize those who are without principles....(continue) | |||
| Self-driving
cars
and morality 4 November 2018 |
... The New Scientist article gives the example of an autonomous car travelling along a road when its brakes fail. Should it carry straight on and hit a pregnant woman, a doctor and a criminal on a pedestrian crossing, or swerve into a barrier so avoiding the people on the crossing, but instead killing all the occupants of the self-driving car, a family of four? This, the article tells us, is the kind of scenario included in the 'Moral Machine’ experiment, a survey on the internet of millions of people in 233 countries and territories worldwide, the results of which were published on 24th October in the much-respected science journal Nature. Participants were asked to consider different scenarios in which those saved by the car’s decision might be, for example, fat or fit, young or old, pets or criminals or those with important jobs. In total, 40 million decisions in 10 languages were collected. So, an impressive gathering of data. ... (continue) | |||
| Political agitation and violence | ... But the question of civil disobedience continues to be important. The film "Suffragette" encourages its audience in thinking that civil disobedience is justified because it produces a just end. Obviously, now, the vast majority of people accept that women are as intelligent and as capable of making rational decisions as men (which doesn't say much!). Giving them the right to vote, therefore, is seen as a fair and just outcome. But in the past? Before the changes in the 20th century, the vast majority (including most women) would have thought otherwise. Why? Because it was received wisdom. It was only in the light of the obvious evidence of their true abilities that 'received wisdom' was brought into question. And so finally there was a general acceptance that the 'wisdom' of centuries made no sense. But it had been a realisation that came in parallel with the realisation that the right to vote should not be limited just to land-owners either. Therefore there was a general evolution in the thinking of that era. Now it seems to me that for somebody of a contrary opinion, violence is not a convincing argument...(continue) | |||
| Brexit - conservative and
liberal thought 10 October 2018 |
....
But. But it seems to me that there is now a
political situation in which conservatives
from all sides of the political spectrum are
in a position to triumph, and this in a very
costly way. I am talking, of course, about
Brexit and the possibility of a Brexit without
agreement or a Brexit 'Lite' agreement. The
history of the European Union and the United
Kingdom has been very fractious. Political
parties have adopted various policies at
various times. Churchill and the Americans,
after the second war, encouraged the formation
in 1950 of the Coal & Steel Community.
This was of course an attempt to encourage
commerce, but not only to promote economic
growth. It was also intended to decrease the
likelihood of another war. Churchill did not
see the need for us to be part of this group.
We had the 'Commonwealth' to trade with...(continue)
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| Identity
politics and "The end of history" 3 October 2018 |
Francis Fukuyama has written another book, to be published in October this year (2018). In one of his previous books, the much discussed "The End of History and the Last Man", Fukuyama saw the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall as the end of ideological conflict in the world. He said that Western liberal democracy was the final ideological phase of human evolution. Democracy had won. A courageous belief. He warned us in the book, however, that he may have overestimated the ability of liberal democracy to provide peace and personal satisfaction. He says in "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment" that we can now see that this expression of uncertainty was necessary. He has decided that the main difficulty we have is the perception among people that peace and relative prosperity, which normally accompany liberal democracy, are not sufficient. People also want dignity; recognition of their personal difficulties. The absence of this recognition creates resentment. And so we come to the politics of identity so common today. His new book apparently describes the difficulties we have as a result....(continue) | |||
| Artificial
Intelligence 14 September 2018 |
... now, we have emerged from the impasse, because scientists have taken the next step - the neural network. They have simulated our brain’s neural structure in order to allow a computer to learn from first principles how something functions or the essence of a collection of things. From the information furnished, the network is capable of deriving common factors, just as we and our brains do. They can then apply this knowledge to situations which were not included in the original examples. For example, given thousands of photos of lots of different varieties of dogs and cats, all labelled correctly, the network can distinguish dogs from cats in other unlabelled photos with a very high success rate. We have seen though that they can be used for other more useful things. They can identify cancer cells, or identify the changes at cellular level which will result in blindness if not diagnosed very early. Often, it is not obvious how the network has arrived at its conclusion. Thus, these networks give the impression of an actual intelligence, rather than the traditional computer which we know to be incapable of freeing itself from the bounds of its prescriptive software. Although we are only at the beginning of this new approach, we are even now seeing notable results.... (continue) | |||
| The polluter should
pay - quite a lot 21 August 2018 |
There
is an island off the coast of Virginia, USA. It
has the unlikely name of Tangier. Almost
100% of the
inhabitants are descendants of immigrants
who came mainly from Cornwall in the eighteenth
century. They speak a form of English that,
according to some, still reflects its ancient
origins. In the sense that they don't need a
policeman or locks on their doors it is a kind of
utopia - albeit at the price of not having alcohol
for sale on the island! They are religious
fundamentalists. The island is quite small, with an area of only 3.2 square kilometres. There was a population of 727 people in 2010, which has now decreased to only 460, and it's population is getting older, in view of the difficulty young people have in finding a job on the crab fishing boats. But the main difficulty for the island is that it now has a maximum height of one and a half meters above sea level. It has already lost at least half of its surface area to the sea over the years, and the risk of global warming to its existence is obvious. But not to them. They believe that it is not a matter of rising sea levels, but of coastal erosion. They don't accept the science relating to climate change. For this reason they propose a stone wall around what remains of the island. But not too high - they don’t want to disturb their view...(continue) |
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| Evolution, politics
and democracy 22 March 2018 |
Having lived for the vast majority
of our existence as a species under a system
of government which depended on a chief of
some type – a tribal chief, a king or a
dictator – we live now in an era in which
democracy is the most widespread political
system. It seems to have taken over. I am
though concerned about its longevity and how
firmly rooted it is. It is worth noting that the
original UN constitution made no reference
to democracy until the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the end of the cold war. It was
only in 1999 that the UN’s Universal
Declaration of the Rights of Man was
modified to include:
“the right to full
participation and other fundamental
democratic rights and other liberties
inherent in any democratic society.”
The result?
Almost every government now proclaims itself
to be a democracy. This is hypocrisy for many,
but they think that they ought to pretend
because it is the preferred international
model. They can often lie with impunity
because it is difficult to show that a country
is not in fact a democracy....(continue)
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| Privacy - Sir Cliff Richard v BBC |
The High Court has now issued its judgement in the case of Sir Cliff Richard v BBC. Sir Cliff was suing for damages for breach of privacy. He had already received a payment of £400,000 from the South Yorkshire Police who had revealed to the BBC in 2014 that they were going to search his penthouse in a gated development in Berkshire. The BBC turned out in force to cover the search, complete with a helicopter filming overhead. It was on the TV on all channels throughout the day and in the press, both here and abroad, for a long time afterwards....(continue) | |||
| Sport - World Cup
2018 |
On the terrace of the apartment in France where I am writing this, I can hear the horns of the cars being driven into town in advance of the World Cup Final. It’s between France and Croatia this afternoon. We’re almost alone in the building here in Annecy. I imagine that our neighbours are in the bars, the hotels or the piazzas (where big screens have been put up) in order to watch the game with others who share the same passion. At the restaurant where we had lunch today, even while we were having our dessert, the restaurant itself was being prepared around us to receive a hundred or so supporters for the match, with supplies of beer and a huge screen – obviously all that was necessary for a match. Sport is, of course, principally a group activity. Obviously there are the other participants necessary for an activity which is inherently competitive in nature. But there aren’t many participants who would take part without a public, small or large, to cheer for them. In England, there were around 25 million watching the TV during the England - Croatia semi-final, each one at the final whistle in a state of nervous exhaustion...(continue) | |||
| Take the Train - railway time and execution excursions | I’m not really into trains, but a little while ago there was a programme on BBC4 concerning the story of the train and its effect on all our lives. I found it unexpectedly fascinating. When I think of a train, I think of a timetable. It’s difficult to manage a rail system without one. Overtaking is rather difficult because all the trains depend on the same railway tracks. In fact this limitation was at the root of the standardisation of time across the nation. Initially it was known as ‘Railway Time’ a concept introduced by Great Western Railways in 1849. It was the first recorded example of the standardisation of local time and it spread throughout the entire rail system in that year....(continue) | |||
| Definitions
and Transsexuality 23 January 2018 |
It seems that transsexuality is now a particularly delicate subject. There is a determination by a vociferous part of the transsexual community to be seen simply as women, even though they are not, whether genetically or by their experience of life. But these distinctions are not apparently important. We now have various self-proclaimed spokespeople for the movement. They insist that we recognise as women every person who self-identifies as a woman. And this regardless of their genes, their secondary sexual characteristics or even if they have decided to live in any real sense as a woman. Thus after or before a transition and with or without the intention to make a transition. And this self-identification is apparently to be for all purposes. Obviously this is something which produces a series of difficulties....(continue) | |||
| Asymmetric relationships | When parents produce a child there is from the beginning, and for very many years, an asymmetry in their relationship. Normally the parents provide everything which is necessary until the time when the adult can maintain himself. Exactly when this moment will arrive is very variable. In England, although we have a problem relating to affordable housing, there is a tendency amongst the young to fly the nest as soon as they can, something not necessarily replicated in other countries, like France and Italy. The difference can be explained in part, at least, by the law. Here in the UK, responsibility for a child finishes at the age of 18. In other countries, where the law is based on the Napoleonic Code, it is more generous. In 2016, an Italian court decided that a father should continue to be responsible for the maintenance of his son (a ‘child’ of 28) until he had finished his doctorate in, I think, sociology. But it is not totally asymmetric because, in those countries, the children are legally obliged to maintain their parents...(continue) | |||
| Poverty
& inequality - a local TED talk giving the
French perspective |
...And so I chose the video of the talk recorded at the TED conference in the Haute Savoie supporting the idea of universal Income, in the hope that I would at last find something convincing in the argument. The person giving the talk asked us to keep in mind the importance of the number 9 – apparently wealth in France is held as to 90% by the 10% of the people at the top and the remaining 10% of the wealth is in the hands of the other 90% of the population. He continued on the same theme, with 9% unemployment in France and the 9 million who live in poverty. To solve all these problems and several others, he said that the answer was Universal Income. I wasn’t convinced by his arguments as to the solution or of his explanation of the problems.....(continue) | |||
| "I
was here before you" - some thoughts on
patriotism 13 February 2018 |
You hear this in the play area and elsewhere where kids want to stake out their territories. Taken literally, it’s simply a statement of fact, but it brings with it a claim to the right to be there to the exclusion of everyone else. I don’t know why the fact of being there gives a right to exclude others. There’s no obvious logic to it, but it seems to be a common conception. And it’s not confined to kids. The very idea of a queue depends on the same principle and, in view of our reputation for queuing, we can say that we British must be very territorial. On the other hand, we teach our kids to be courteous, to say “No after you, I insist”. So then, to maintain at all costs our position in a queue seems to be a bit inconsistent....(continue) | |||
| Brexit - why
the Germans are unlikely to cut us any slack |
Following the decision to leave the
EU and agreement on the so-called divorce
settlement, the question now is the terms upon
which we will be able to continue to trade
with our former European partners. The
Brexiteers have told us that the EU countries
will be eager to do a deal with us in view of
the fact that we import more from them than
they import from us. This they say applies
especially to Germany which exports so many of
its cars to us.
But since the vote, Germany has
consistently told us that when Britain leaves
the EU access to the single market for trade
will be restricted unless the UK both accepts
the four freedoms which underpin the whole
concept of the Single Market and also makes a
financial contribution to the EU....(continue)
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| Brexit - the divorce
settlement |
... and so with the conclusion of this agreement, we now know quite clearly that: Goods & services a. We're
definitely leaving the Customs Union and the
Single Market and so can adopt any regulatory
framework we like; and
b. Unless the Irish government and the Northern Ireland Assembly agree otherwise. we're going to maintain alignment (i.e. comply) with all the regulations required for membership of the Customs Union and the Single Market. And, of course, there is no Northern Ireland Assembly at the moment to give its agreement. Just MLAs being paid to kick their heels. ...
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| Memes, Dodos & Donald Trump | That
ideas
spread is not a new insight. But it was given new
impetus in 1976 by Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The
Selfish Gene’. In this, he coined the word ‘meme’
which he defined as "an idea, behaviour, or style
that spreads from person to person within a
culture". He saw it as analogous to a gene and so
subject to the same evolutionary pressures as
them. In particular, he said that they were
subject to natural selection based on their
fitness to survive. Now, as we know, fitness to
survive in organisms is not a quality which is
easy to recognise in advance. There are so many
variables that we normally take the easy path and
simply recognise that such fitness must have
existed in those organisms which have in fact
survived. And so it is with memes. Who would have thought that gin would becomes so popular again? Gin was known as “mother’s ruin” in the 18th and 19th centuries, the preferred drink at golf clubs and amongst the upper middle classes in the 20th century and increasingly out of fashion in the 21st century. But since 2010 it has had a resurgence with the production of a swathe of craft gins popular with hipsters. Apparently the effect is a result of the influence of one part Downton Abbey and one part James Bond - shaken not stirred....(continue) |
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| "The past is a different country, they do things differently there” | In his novel “The Go-between”, Leslie P Hartley wrote: “the past is a different country; they do things differently there”. I don’t know anyone who has read his book, but this phrase has become very well known – because it tells us a truth. Our morality has changed very much, not just over the course of millennia or centuries, but even over the last few decades. I’m reminded of this because this year we have seen the homosexual community celebrating the 50th anniversary of the passing of a law to decriminalise the practice of homosexuality in private between consenting adults. But if we look more closely at the effect of this Act of Parliament, we can see in retrospect that 1967 marked only the beginning of a slow change which would take a long time to unfold....(continue) | |||
| Diversity and
Inclusion - a concern |
In the beginning was the Race
Relations Act 1965. It was quite revolutionary
for its time and made unlawful a new category of
behaviour which for millennia had been regarded
as perfectly acceptable - looking after your own
at the expense of the incomer, the foreigner (in
the widest sense). For the first time, the
law banned racial discrimination in public
places. For the first time, also, it made
illegal the encouragement of an emotion - hatred - on the grounds of
“colour, race, or ethnic or national
origins”. Of course, as a moral statement, it
had something of the magician’s ‘smoke and
mirrors’ about it, as controls on immigration
remained. So then we were against
discrimination, but only for those already here
or for the relative few permitted to come here
by our immigration laws. Which meant that
most of the world was in fact kept out of our
newly-benign regime. But although our
new-found morality began and stayed at home, the
Statute was criticised
by some for being little short of the
introduction of ‘thought crime’...(continue)
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| Wealth | Certainly, there are many who argue
that equality is something to be aimed at,
although when you ask people if they really
mean equality
or simply less
inequality, they are likely to choose
the second. Defining how far to take the
lessening of inequality then becomes an
exercise in the measuring of the length of a
piece of string. The concept of
inequality, however, was given fresh impetus
when this year's wealth comparisons were
issued by Oxfam. They told us that the 8
richest people in the world (all men) have
wealth equal in value to the bottom 50% of the
world’s population. Last year it took the top
64 wealthiest people to achieve this rather
strange form of equality. So then the
world is in this sense becoming less
equal. It’s a striking comparison. But
..(continue). |
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| The regulation of information |
I imagine that we are all in favour of freedom. This is something our ancestors fought for and that we keep in mind when deciding who to vote for. But, at the same time, over the centuries, we have agreed to many laws that limit what we can do. There are of course our many criminal laws, but there is also the law of defamation - this penalizes us if we falsely accuse someone-else of doing something naughty. But until quite recently, there was no privacy law in this country. That has changed in our computer age with its ability to spread information around in ways unheard of before: privacy is no longer just a problem for a few individuals, but for millions of people...(continue) | |||
| A somewhat forlorn wish for 2017 | St Paul defined faith or belief, rather poetically, as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. Belief is a strange thing. It is an acceptance that something is true even though there is a lack of evidence to support it. Beliefs though are a normal part of our lives. We mostly have faith in our nearest and dearest that they will act in our best interests. We believe that the food we buy will be fit to eat if we consume it before the use-by date. We (most of us) accept that going on a plane is highly likely to get us to our destination in safety, even if the same cannot be said about our luggage. Mainly we base our beliefs on past experience. Indeed, living our lives would be so much harder and time-consuming if we did not rely on our past experience. We would have, somehow, to check everything out from scratch to see if it was safe or advisable. Our reliance on past dealings in fact brings with it a continuity in our actions and thinking. And the world-wide business model depends upon it...(continue) | |||
| How to handle a Brexit | So
now we have a decision of the High Court saying
that the government cannot use the Royal
Prerogative to trigger Article 50. The howls of outrage from the Brexiteers have had to be heard to be believed - how could the Courts possibly justify interfering in the democratic process? Michael Fabricant said in the Commons on the day of the announcement that the decision was 'deplorable'. Did he think that our judges were acting politically or was he saying that his knowledge of the law was so superior to that of our judges that he could be contemptuous of their reasoning? Or was he perhaps alleging that they had been got at in some way? I think we should be told...(continue) |
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| How (not) to become Prime minister | Obviously there are many attributes necessary for becoming the head of a country like the UK. Having self-confidence is a fundamental quality but this needs to be allied with intelligence and the knowledge appropriate to the post. But according to Andrea Leadsom, it is also necessary to be a mother or, perhaps, a father. She complained loudly that the article in the Times was not a true reflection of the interview with the journalist Rachael Sylvester. Fortunately it was recorded and this showed that there was no inaccuracy. Without doubt, Mrs Leadsom’s decision to withdraw from the contest had a number of reasons behind it. Not the least of these was the lack of support amongst the other MPs and the resulting risk of a situation similar to the problem now suffered by the Labour Party – a leader with the support of the members, but with the support of only 20% of her colleagues in parliament. The exaggeration in her CV also played a part, but I am persuaded that the fallout from the interview with the Times played the principle role in her decision...(continue) | |||
| The (dis)United
Kingdom 23 June 2016 |
We were never
unconditional friends of the European Union, but
now our country has decided to engage in
collective self-harm. The majority has decided
to quit the EU with no idea of the consequences.
Having taken the view that Europe has nothing to
offer us and that all the experts and all the
organisations with the knowledge necessary to
inform us of the consequences were liars, they
have voted for an isolationist future. Our Prime
Minister has decided to resign and we will
probably have Boris Johnson as his successor,
someone very popular with his fan base, just
like Donald Trump, and just as much a deceitful
opportunist as Donald Trump...(continue)
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| The end of illness – thank you Facebook! | It seems that as a result of a donation of $3 billion from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Ms. Chan, we can anticipate the end of disease. To be precise, they say that their goal is "to treat, prevent or manage" all the diseases to which we are subject by the end of the century. They are promising to spend $3 billion - over the next ten years. But last year they said they had decided to bequeath 99% of their fortune (estimated at $55 billion) not to their children, but to charitable purposes able to benefit humanity in general. I suppose therefore that this promise must be taken into account in their grand vision. But since they are not exactly old, we have to hope that they will have a fairly short life expectancy - for the greater good, of course...(continue) | |||
| Anger and the post-truth era | Anger is a strange emotion. It is a reaction to what we perceive as a wrong done to us or to someone for whom we care. Anger wants to inflict some sort of payback, revenge. That this is not always possible or even desirable is something which we have to learn as children and probably then again as adults. Some people are more inclined to feel or show anger than others. Some make a virtue of its control. Others are proud of their unwillingness to control it. Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, argues that anger makes little sense. She says:...(continue) | |||
| Self-driving cars, accidents and the trolley problem | The trolley problem, a thought experiment, is famous for making us face up to difficult choices. What is proposed is that a heavy trolley is coming along a railway track, at speed, in the direction of a set of points. You can decide to leave things as they are and so just let the trolley carry on, in which case it will kill 6 people who are, by chance, tied to the line. Alternatively, you can switch the points so that the trolley goes down a side line instead. This choice would mean that there would be only one person killed, someone who had the misfortune to be tied to that other line. Most people say that they would send the trolley hurtling down the side line. ...(continue) | |||
| Insults, real or imaginary | We live in a world where racism is a real problem for many people, but I'm not convinced that the attempts to combat it by their self-proclaimed champions always make a lot of sense. For example, it seems that, for an English person to put on a sombrero in a university bar to accompany drinking a tequila is a gross insult to the Mexican nation. It diminishes them. It is an example of micro-aggression which is now unacceptable in civilised society – or at least in a sub-group of that society – the academic community. There are other people, however, who consider that taking the Mickey out of a nation or an individual is not always an act of racism....(continue) | |||
| Populism | Why is it that every so often we have the triumph of a Corbyn or a Tsipras, a Marine Le Pen or a Nigel? What is that they offer which mainstream politicians fail to provide? First of all, we should note the obvious fact that the new pretenders are not all of the same political persuasion. The first two are of course on the far left and the other two are far to the right in standard political language. But whether left or right they each have something which resonates with their audiences. But I would suggest however that it is not the political programme which they propound which wins them their popularity. Obviously their words enshrine their political thoughts, such as they are, but It seems to me that these are a secondary factor. The more important one is the nature of the people to whom they are talking. It seems to me that they all think in the same way. They wish to live in a fairy-tale world....(continue) | |||
| Charlie Hebdo | In the English newspapers, there was a near unanimity of opinion after the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and then the supermarket, Hyper Cacher. Obviously all the journalists thought that there was a need to support the principle of freedom of expression, the right to offend included, and horror at the attack on the Jews in the supermarket simply because they were Jews. But. But there are many questions raised which don't have an easy answer...(continue) | |||
| A Slippery Slope? |
July 2014 ...But what we see in opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill is the deployment of an argument which I have never understood – "we're on a slippery slope" or “one thing inevitably leads to another”. They predict a free for all, with death upon demand...(continue) |
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| Politics & principles and getting elected |
June 2014
This week, we have seen a prime minister acting out of principle, apparently. He has opposed the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as the President of the Commission of the European Union. This was not just for immediate political gain within his party, but because he says that Mr Juncker will take Europe in the wrong direction. He has been a part of the European clique of federalists who have wanted to diminish the identity and importance of individual nations and transfer that power to the centre – to Brussels. It seems that David Cameron sees Mr Juncker as wanting to be a powerful supra-national President, rather than a civil servant helping to serve the individual nations by ensuring that Brussels has the minimum of power needed to enable the EU to act as a successful trading bloc...(continue) |
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| The Nasty Party- Mark 2 |
...it seems that now we have another candidate for the title "the Nasty Party": my favourite cartoon party – UKIP. The MEP Godfrey Bloom said the other day: "How we can possibly be giving £1bn a month, when we're in this sort of debt, to Bongo Bongo Land is completely beyond me. To buy Ray-Ban sunglasses, apartments in Paris, Ferraris and all the rest of it that goes with most of the foreign aid. F18s for Pakistan. We need a new squadron of F18s. Who's got the squadrons? Pakistan, where we send the money.". All the journalists criticised him for his use of the pejorative term 'Bongo Bongo Land', to describe the third world. But opinion was divided on the question of continuing to give foreign aid when we ourselves need to borrow so much to continue to survive as a country...(continue) |
| A Petition |
I was waiting for Heather who was looking for a new handbag in a shop in Annecy. I decided not to be involved. Opposite the shop there was a big catholic church. It's an old church which has been renovated recently at our expense – i.e. the rate payers of Annecy. And so I decided to go in and have a quick look at the inside. As usual in French churches it was a bit dark, but in the shadows I saw a leaflet entitled “One of Us”. It continued:
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| Inertia
- conservative and liberal thought |
Newton's
laws of motion tell us that a body will continue
to travel with the same velocity unless acted on
by another force. That force may accelerate it or
slow it down. But the tendency to carry on in a
straight line is, of course, its inertia. Inertia
is not though confined to the realm of physics.
Economics, too, has its own brand of inertia -
goodwill. Goodwill has been defined as the
likelihood that a customer will return to do
business with you again and again. It is, or ought
to be, a very valuable part of any company’s
balance sheet. But like so many aspects of
economics, we are not here looking at some
abstract mathematical notion. We are looking at
the way that we as human beings act. ... (continue) |
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