The Right Hand Knoweth not what the Extreme-Right Hand Doeth

So, then.  Donald Trump looks set to appoint a noted climate-change sceptic denier to be head of the Environmental Protection Agency when he assumes office in January.

Joy.

On Facebook, Robert Reich gives a quick précis of Scott Pruitt's credentials.  They... um... they aren't convincing:

1. As attorney general of Oklahoma Pruitt is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Pruitt to send to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, criticizing Obama's environmental rules. The close ties have paid off for Pruitt politically: Harold G. Hamm, the chief executive of Continental Energy, an Oklahoma oil and gas company, was a co-chairman of Mr. Pruitt’s 2013 re-election campaign.
2. Pruitt shares Trump’s view that Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, is a “war on coal.”
3. Pruitt has been a key architect of the legal battle against Obama’s climate change rules -- spearheading a 28-state lawsuit against them. A decision is pending in a federal court and is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court.
4. Pruitt shares Trump’s view that the established science of human-caused global warming is a hoax. “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” Pruitt wrote in National Review earlier this year.
5. Pruitt also shares Trump’s view that the Paris accord, committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, should be canceled.
6. Pruitt is well positioned to help Trump dismantle the E.P.A. altogether. Like Trump, Pruitt doesn't believe the federal government has a role in setting environmental policy.

What could possibly go wrong?

Now, I'm going to leave it to other people in other posts to take Pruitt's and Trump's positions apart forensically.  Rather, I'm going to nod towards this story, from the BBC website:

Weeping Songs

It's not about Arthur.  Keep telling yourself that.  Nick Cave has said himself that only one song on Skeleton Tree was written after the death of his son (although they were all recorded in its wake), and he's not said what that one song is.  So the album isn't about Arthur.  Well, most of it isn't.  Well, it wasn't intended to be when it was written.  So let's put Arthur to one side.  We shouldn't make it about him anyway.  That'd get in the way of writing an honest review.  I mean: what if the album's rubbish?  What kind of heartless bastard would you have to be to slate it in that case?  Who'd slag off Kindertotenleider?

So let's treat Skeleton Tree as just another stage in the evolution of Nick Cave (and sometimes the Bad Seeds).  There was the old-time Old Testamential Nick Cave of, say, "Tupelo"; there was the gleeful Grand Guignol of "Stagger Lee"; the sleaze of Dig, Lazarus, Dig! and the Grinderman side-project (which might as well be a Bad Seeds spin off); the introspection of White Lunar (another Seeds spin-off in all but name) and Push the Sky Away.  This is just another layer accreted.  Front Row on Radio 4 talked about this album as a sequel to Sky, and it does feel something like that - more of a development than a sequel, but something in the same vein.  But there's a difference; a big difference.

Before now, at his darkest, Nick Cave offered a way out.  Either there was a knowing wink to the camera: think of the videos to "The Weeping Song", or "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow", or there was a blast of noise that pulled you through to the other side, as in this live version of "Jubilee Street".  And in Skeleton Tree?

Free Labour and Quiet Doubts

(Originally posted on 1.viii.16 at the other place.)

Those of us on the academic side of things will almost certainly recognise the situation: you're sitting in your school's Teaching & Learning committee, or a staff/student committee meeting, or something like that, and you hear the complaint from students that they should get more contact time.  Academics should spend more time teaching rather than simply doing their own research.  After all, they're paying however-many thousand pounds for their education.

And you'll've heard the standard rebuttals - and maybe even trotted them out yourself: that course fees cover not just teaching costs, but libraries, labs, buildings and so on; that university learning isn't about hours in a classroom; that teaching and research are intertwined; that students benefit from being taught by the people who're writing the papers they're reading.  But I wonder if these standard responses miss something important.

Back in April, I was getting companionably smashed with some of my final-year students, and we were talking about what they were going to do when they'd graduated, and about possible careers.   One or two were interested in academia, and so a part of the conversation concerned what life's like from my side of the fence.  Predictably, pay was one thing that interested them.  I mentioned that I'd made about £80 in total from the books I've written, spread over 10 years.
"And what do you get paid for a paper?"
I held back my bitter laughter, and explained how much you get paid for papers, and how much you get for peer-reviewing, and all the rest of it.  The students had had no idea that this stuff was expected of us, but not remunerated.  Why would they?  Indeed, isn't it insane that we're not paid?

I think that one gets an insight here into students' complaints about academics' priorities being wrong.   If they think that we get paid for publishing papers, then of course they're going to think that we have an incentive to resist extra contact hours - and everything we tell them about extra contact hours being at best academically unnecessary, and likely as not counterproductive, will sound like so much bad faith.  After all, of course we'd tell them that a course only needs 30 hours of lectures rather than 60 if we could be earning extra money with those spare 30 hours.

What prompts all this is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   It's from 2012, but it's started popping up in my social media timelines this morning, and Carl posted it on Fear and Loathing in Bioethics last night.  It makes a proposal:

I Got a Letter!

About six weeks ago, just after the EU referendum, I wrote to Jean-Claude Juncker and others to ask whether there'd be any way I could retain my European citizenship in the event that the UK actually does leave the Union.  (Whether or not it ever will leave is another question entirely; everyone who knows anything seems to be saying that even if it weren't a disaster waiting to happen, it'd be implausibly and pointlessly complicated, and the government does seem to be dragging its feet - wisely.  I leave that to one side.)

The version of the letter that I posted here has been far and away the most-read thing I've ever written in any format anywhere, and when I put the link on social media, it was one of the most liked and shared things I've ever posted as well.

Annnnnnnyway... I GOT A RESPONSE!*  OK, the chance that it was penned by Juncker himself rather than a PA writing in his name is vanishingly small - but, still.  It's still more than I got from anyone else.

So what does it say?  Does it admit that I raised an good legal, moral, and political point?  Does it promise to ensure that I, and people like me, might be able to claim dual UK/ EU citizenship?  Oh, boy: this could be really something!

Thank you for sharing your views with me following the result of the United Kingdom's Referendum. 

I am sad about the choice of the British people.  The European Commission worked hard to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union. 

European leaders offered the United Kingdom a fair deal that reflected their hope that the United Kingdom remained part of the European Union. 

This is an unprecedented situation but the European Union will stand strong and uphold its core values of promoting peace and the well-being of its peoples. 

I truly hope that the United Kingdom will be a close partner of the European Union in the future. 

I wish you well. 

Jean-Claude Juncker
European Commission
200, rue de la Loi,
1049 Bruxelles

Oh.



*For clarity, I should add that I got the response almost a fortnight ago; I'm just too disorganised to have written about it before now.  Ooops.

Hate Thy Neighbour

Over at the other place, I've written a couple of times over the years in response to posts on the Christian Medical Fellowship's blog.  (Now I look, it's more than a couple.)  I have a strange fascination with it, you see.  But the fact that the other blog is associated with an august academic body means that I have to restrain myself.  I don't think I have to do that here.

First, though, why do I have it on my RSS to begin with?  Well, there's something about the combination of utter bewilderment by the world, the staggering poverty of the reasoning, the ability to misunderstand things that're really quite straightforward, and a compulsion to crowbar a Biblical verse into every second paragraph that I find compelling.  But the fundamentalism does sometimes grate; some of the attitudes there are - to use a word that the contributors there almost certainly think relates to actual historical fact - antediluvian.  And they stop the posts being quite as funny as they might be.

Peter Saunders' latest is a grotesque example of all that's wrong with the CMF.  "We live in times when the very foundations of our civilisation are being destroyed," he begins.

[T]he NHS with its burgeoning needs and shrinking budgets, mounting national debt, political and economic uncertainty following ‘Brexit’, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, creeping atheism and secular humanism.

See the problem here?  The utter lack of perspective?  Even if you think that these things are bad - on which, more anon - I'd wager that the very foundations of our civilisation are not being destroyed.  At most, they're changing.  Saunders has form when it comes to secularism, though.  It's one of the things he simply doesn't understand.  He's used the phrase "secular fundamentalism" as though it actually exists, for example (in a piece that offers a defence of the pointless genital mutilation of male children, to boot).  He thinks that Britain is "slid[ing] into secularism".  He doesn't seem to notice (a) that secularism is perfectly compatible with Christianity - and arguably draws some of its intellectual strength from the Christian idea that one should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's: a doctrine that is quite possibly an early call for a separation between religion and politics; (b) that, as such, a commitment to secularism is precisely the thing that guarantees his right to publish this gibberish irrespective of prevailing religious views; and (c) he is in no way representative of what most Christians think anyway.  (Maybe he's a bit takfiri when the mood takes him.)

But then again, I've thought for a while that there's the whiff of the theocrat about Peter.  I thought I'd written something to that effect elsewhere, though I can't seem to find it right now.

Love the EU, Hate the Idiots

On Saturday, in a programme about Ted Heath, Radio 4 broadcast a clip from the Today programme the morning we entered the then EEC.  I got quite emotional about it.  I'm still heartbroken by the prospect that we'll probably leave the EU.

As such, I'm interested in any plausible political or legal moves that might be taken to ensure that we don't.  It's probably a forlorn hope, but it's something.  David Allan Green is keeping an eye on some of the legal aspects.  What's just cropped up in my twitter feed is not one of those moves.

Someone called Marcus J Ball* has set up a crowdfunder, the aim of which is to "[p]rosecute dishonest Brexit politicians and bring integrity back to British politics".  He's trying to raise at least £100k.  No, really.  Inevitably, there's  a video.  Look:

Now, I'm not a lawyer; and what law I do know revolves around the medical sphere.  Beyond that... well, it's the sort of legal awareness that one picks up from sitting in rooms with proper lawyers for a decade or so.  I'm sure that osmosis is a totally legitimate pedagogical technique - but, still, I thought it might be fun to have a look.

What does the webpage say, then?  Brace yourselves: it's... not good.

Please Don't Take my Sunshine Away

I could maunder on for hours about Brexit - ugh: horrible word! - and what a disaster it is; but it'd achieve nothing.  (Actually, I might post something later.  Brace yourselves.)

Of course, achieving nothing is the lot of just about everyone, if we're being completely honest.  But, all the same, I've taken it into my head to write to some important people in the hope - the vanishingly small hope - that we won't lose everything good from the debacle of the referendum.  Please do feel free to copy and use this as a template for your own letters if you think it's any good.  I've embedded the email addresses of recipients behind their names.  For UK Ministers, I've used their ministerial email address, rather than their Parliamentary one.  The exception to this is for David Cameron, who doesn't seem to have a ministerial email address that I can find; I've had to use his Parliamentary one.  But I'm planning to send paper copies to the MPs in addition to the email anyway.

Obviously, I'm going to use my real name when I send it.  I'm not thick.  You should do the same.  You're not thick either.

*     *     *     *     *

Mr Juncker –

Thursday’s referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union has already had severe repercussions around the world.  At the time I write this, it is unclear when (or indeed whether) the UK will invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and thereby begin the formal process of leaving the EU: the referendum is not legally binding, after all; but whatever happens in the coming months and years, it is clear that there will be huge changes in the political landscape of the continent.

However, it is also true that very nearly half of the electorate voted to stay within the EU; and a good portion of that half is positively enthusiastic about continued UK membership of the EU.  To them – to us – the outcome, and the prospect of leaving the Union, is nothing short of a disaster.

One of the reasons for this is economic.  Yet, though the economic consequences of “Brexit” are likely to be severe, they may also be transient in the medium-to-long term, and it is the job of politicians and central bankers to manage them.  But there are other reasons for Europhile gloom: notably, UK membership of the EU represents an outward-looking, cosmopolitan, and optimistic attitude.  This is not something that can be managed politically.

I am currently a citizen of the United Kingdom, but also a citizen of the European Union.  This European citizenship means a great deal to me and to millions like me precisely because of the symbolic status of the EU.  The prospect of losing that European citizenship feels like being disinherited.

With this in mind, I would like to ask whether, in the course of whatever negotiations occur in the next few years, some way could be found for those UK citizens who wish to keep European citizenship to do so, perhaps as dual citizens.  Is there any chance at all that we might be able to retain a European passport, and the rights that we currently have across all member states?

It is worth noting in passing that citizenship of the EU was established under Article 8 of the Maastricht Treaty, according to which:

1. Citizenship of the Union is hereby established.
Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union.
2. Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights conferred by this Treaty and shall be subject to the duties imposed thereby.

Thus everyone who is a citizen of a member state of the EU is also a citizen of the EU; and anyone who is a citizen of a state that accedes to the Union becomes a citizen of the EU as a matter of course.  This is confirmed by Article 9 of the Lisbon Treaty, which also makes it clear that

[e]very national of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship.

Citizenship of a member state, on this basis, would appear to be a sufficient rather than a necessary condition of holding EU citizenship.  Under Article 50 (3) of the Lisbon Treaty,

[t]he Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

Clearly, there is no provision for people who are born in, or become citizens of, ex-member states of the European Union to be granted EU citizenship, any more than there is or should be for citizens of states that are not and have never been members.  However, neither is there any provision by which citizenship, once granted, may be withdrawn from EU citizens once conferred.  This is a very different matter, and I would suggest that summarily removing citizenship from tens of millions of people may not set the most happy precedent.

It is my deepest hope that the UK’s departure from the EU can still be avoided somehow, and that if it cannot, the door to rejoining the club will not be closed to us forever.  (On this, I cling to Article 50 (5) of the Lisbon Treaty, as do many others.)  In the meantime, a great many UK citizens do think of themselves as European, and are horrified at the prospect of having that taken from us for even a comparatively short period.  If there is any way that we can maintain a European citizenship that we have come to regard as our birthright, it would surely be embraced.

Sincerely

Enzyme

cc The Rt Hon David Cameron MP, Prime Minister;

The Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Secretary of State for the Home Department;

The Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs;

The Rt Hon David Lidington MP, Minister of State for Europe;

Frans Timmermans, First Vice President of the European Commission;

Federica Mogherini, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy;

Marianne Thyssen, Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills, and Labour Mobility;

Johannes Hahn, Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy;
Dimitris Avramopoulos, Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship

Do Not Adjust Your Sets

Here's something mildly diverting... although - at risk of sounding like I'm trying to get my excuses in early - whether it makes any real sense might depend on the characteristics of the screen on which you're reading it.

I'm currently in Edinburgh for the IAB, but took the opportunity to pootle off this morning to the SNGMA, where they've a Bridget Riley exhibition.  (It's small, but very good.  Well worth a visit, I'd say, though perhaps not if you've got a hangover.)  One of the paintings on show is this one:

It's called Rattle, and it's a touch over a metre and a half high, by almost four metres long.  It's a series of stripes, each of which is constituted by alternating sequences of diagonals in red bordered with green (which look a bit orange), and red bordered with blue (which look a bit pink).

But here's the thing: the intensity of the colour seems to depend on the direction of the diagonals.  To my eye, the bends sinisters (top right to bottom left, as we look at it) seem to have a much deeper and more vibrant hue than the bends dexters.  I wondered if it was just my eyes, but I asked a couple of other people who were there, and they agreed.  It's just occurred to me that maybe they were just being polite, but I'll take them at their word.

The picture I've just used is one I downloaded; here's a detail from the painting that I photographed myself.  The effect is lost a little in translation from reality to camera to blog, but I think it's just about visible in the two "pink" stripes; the lower one, to my eye, seems to be more intense than the upper one.  Oddly, the bends dexters in the "orange" rows now look to be the more intense to me here, which was not the case when I looked at the painting directly a couple of hours ago.  That in itself is possibly worth noting.

I wondered if the effect would be preserved in black-and-white; and I think it is.

Look at the top three rows in the reproduction on the right here; the top one, the third, and the fifth one down are pink-looing in real life, and the one between them is orange-looking.  But the top row and the third do look to be different even here - darker in the bend sinister than in the bend dexter.  Rows 4 and 5 look to be more similar to each other than rows 3 and 5.  Had I not seen the colour version, I think I'd be inclined to guess that 4 and 5 were the same colour in real life, and 3 different from both.

Or maybe I'm just trying to persuade myself now.  It's a bit hard to tell.

So that's mildly interesting.

The Narcissism of it All

In the end, it's the narcissism of it all.

There's something oddly fascinating about the Brexit campaign.  I think it's factually wrong about a lot of stuff, bullshitting on a good deal more, and out-and-out mendacious on some.  A case in point is the £350m-a-week claim; it might have been forgivable to state that at one stage, but once it's been so thoroughly rebutted, to keep making it implies either a desire to deceive (which at least implies that the truth is important qua something to be avoided), or an utter contempt for truth.  I have to admit that there's a degree of bullshit to the remain campaign as well (not as much, I don't think, but some), and likely as not a few errors too - though I'm not aware of any outright lies.  That economy with the truth is, regrettably, to be expected.  It doesn't explain, though, why I find Brexiteers to be by turns risible and infuriating.

And then it struck me - that there's a theme that unites the Brexit arguments; and that theme is a quite staggering narcissism.

Brexiteers' strongest card is, I think, the immigration one.  Lots of people are very worried about immigration; whether or not that worry is warranted is neither here nor there.  If people are worried about immigration, and the Brexit camp is willing to say that (a) they're correct to be worried, and (b) leaving the Union will do something to salve those worries, then that's a politically astute strategy.  Employment has something to do with it; benefits have something to do with it.  It's a line of argument that we first heard way back in 2004 with the last expansion of the Union: we'd be opening our doors to floods of Eastern European migrants who would come across here and take all the jobs.  To hear the Brexiteers speak, they're still doing that now.  The difference is that the problem is no longer associated just with the accession states; it's merely potential members of the EU, too - notably Turkey.

There's a Vote Leave poster on the main road from Salford to Manchester that screams TURKEY IS JOINING THE EU.  That's a bare faced lie.  But if you look at page 6 of the Vote Leave brochure, great play is made of the fact that Turkey's population is at the thick end of 80 million.  And there's an arrow heading from there right to the Thames valley.  Subliminal message: they're all going to come here.

That's some quite remarkable argumentative chutzpah; but it's also where the self-absorbtion comes in.  Why would they come here?  What is so special about the UK that the first thing that would cross the mind of the people of an accession state (or accession-possibly-at-some-pont-in-a-generation-or-so state) is to pack their bags and come to the UK?  It makes sense if you think that the UK is the land of milk and honey - finite milk and finite honey, of course: not enough for everyone - and that that's a given.  And yet, of course, the UK is not that land.  The UK is, in the end, just another country.  It's quite a nice country - we're wealthy, and there's no State oppression, and low crime, and little to no political violence; so, yes, things could be a lot worse.  And given the choice, I think I'd rather live here than in Turkey.

Yet at least some of that has to do with the fact that I've been brought up here.  I understand the culture; my ties are all here; I speak the language; the faff of getting a bank account somewhere else seems like too much to be bothered with.  But Turks probably think the same.  It might be true that the jobs are currently more and better in the UK; and that is a reason to migrate.  But there're lots of reasons not to as well.

Bluntly, the UK is not so attractive that everyone will want to come here by default.  It's strangely masturbatory to think otherwise.

Something similar goes for the economic arguments.  One of the lines for remaining is that the EU represents a huge free-trade area; free trade is good for the economy and so - when well-regulated - good for the people.  Brexiteers insist that they would negotiate free trade after leaving (which raises the question of why we'd leave to begin with, if one of the priorities afterwards would be to negotiate to secure what we'd just lost; but still...).  And they think that such a deal would be easy to negotiate, on the basis that the UK imports more from the EU than it exports to it.  That, in the mind of a Brexiteer, implies that the EU needs the UK, and would therefore be wary of putting up any trade barriers.

There's an obvious non sequitur there - the fact that they send more here doesn't mean that they depend on us in any way.  But there was a spokesman on the radio the other day whose claim was that the Germans would be loath to disrupt free trade, because of all the German cars we buy - I don't have a link, sadly, but there's someone reported as saying something very similar here.  In other words, if the UK leaves the Union, the UK will be able to dictate terms, and the rest of the Union will have no choice but to accept them.  Just how up yourself do you have to be to think that?  How much of a narcissist?

To think - as seems to be the case - that when we buy BMWs we're doing Germany a favour, and we might rescind this favour if those naughty Europeans don't play by the rules we want: to think that requires... and here, I begin to struggle for words.

It's more than a little bit repellent, if we're being perfectly frank.  But it's also insane - and it's deeply worrying for what might happen if we leave the Union.  If exit is run by the kind of twerp who thinks along those lines, then the post-exit UK is doomed for a generation.  It would struggle outside the EU even with wise leadership - but I'll admit that it might just about be OK with immense good luck and a following wind.  But if that kind of delusional thinking is indicative of what's to come...  God, it doesn't bear thinking about.  I'm increasingly worried - no, scared, that the UK is about to leave the EU.  And it's about to do so under the leadership of liars and fantasists.

And we're supposed to leave because BRITAIN, and we'll be OK afterwards because BRITAIN, and we're the greatest nation in the world because BRITAIN, and that's why everyone wants to come here - because even if we are the greatest nation in the world, we're not quite so great enough to handle non-Brits coming here and building our walls.  Still, BRITAIN, eh?  Fucking BRITAIN.

I don't pretend that any of this is a devastating insight.  I'm probably well behind the curve.  But I think it's interesting, and worth pointing out nonetheless.

Shit, I'm scared.

An Addendum on the Strike

Having written at length about why I'm not persuaded that a strike is a good idea when it comes to university pay disputes, I've just learned that Goldsmiths, and maybe a couple of other places, are diverting the money that would have been paid to striking staff to the student hardship fund.

Now that's the sort of thing that might win me over.  Staff would still lose out in the short term - that's part of the nature of a strike - but students would get some kind of benefit that'd begin to offset any inconvenience; and employers wouldn't be rewarded for making staff angry.  (Not all inconvenienced students would benefit, but some would; and a benefit to the student body in abstracto doesn't mean that every student in concreto would have to feel it.  That's probably all that matters.)

If I hear from my employer that there's a comparable scheme at our place, then I think I'd be persuaded.  I'd still probably work, but that's because I've got nothing better to do with my time; but I'd be much more likely to register as being on strike.

To Strike or Not To Strike?

Officially, the UCU is on strike today; the headline is that the dispute comes down to being about pay.  According to the UCU website, the real value of academic salaries has fallen 14.5% since 2009; the latest pay offer is 1.1%.  I'm not sure how the 14.5% figure is calculated, but I'll take the Union at its word.  (I don't doubt that Universities UK would dispute the figure; but even if it's mistaken, there's no reason to suppose that the UCU is speaking in bad faith.)

To be honest, when it comes to pay levels, I'm personally not all that fussed.  Larger pay rises are nicer than small ones, but academics at my level are not poorly paid by any stretch of the imagination.  But it's not about what I get personally.  What's much more worrying is the dual trend of the demands placed on us in return for that pay, and the casualisation of HE.  Everyone I know works evenings and weekends; I've had five days' annual leave in the past two years, and I worked during that; I'm not taking any holiday this year.  The idea that one might take a couple of days away from the keyboard to read and get to grips with a new book, or longer to get up to speed with a new but important topic or sub-field on work time is risible, even though doing so would obviously contribute to teaching and research.  There's no time or incentive to step back and look at how courses work and how the might be done differently.  If you're casual, you can flit between sessional gigs for years - and increasing numbers are casual.  Pay at my end of the scale may not be bad in absolute terms; but if you're starting out, it can be awful.  It isn't always; but it can be.

In many ways, the UK system is beginning to look like the US system, with all the grotesqueness that that entails... except that here (with a very few exceptions), we don't have the Prince-Bishop professoriate.  Senior academics are in pretty much the same boat as a newly-appointed junior lecturer.

We do have our Prince-Bishops, though: Vice-Chancellors' pay has gone up by quite a bit more than academics' - in one case, by about 25%.  (Falmouth has a university.  Who knew?)  The Wolverhampton VC's pay went up by 19.6%, apparently as a reward for exceptional leadership - whatever that may mean - and reflecting the "size, complexity and performance of [the] university" - as though academic staff have nothing to do with that performance.  On that basis, the hypocrisy of the 1.1% offer is stunning.

Repeating a Success is Still Repetition

Review: Nerissimo
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld (Specula)
.....
"Hope."

That single word constitutes the first refrain of "DBX 2", the second track on Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld's second full album, Nerissimo.  The second time we hear the refrain, it's changed.  "Hope," it now goes, "Should be/ A controlled substance".

One shouldn't read anything much into the lyrics to pop songs.  All the same, it sounds like it's asking for trouble for people who'd been waiting expectantly for this followup to 2013's Still Smiling.  They - oh, all right: we - would have had no small amount of hope invested in the project; Still Smiling is a great album, and between that and this, Bargeld had overseen a brilliant return to form for Einstürzende Neubauten, in the form of Lament.  So there was every reason to be hopeful.  Yet, one can be too hopeful; as the lyric suggests, there might be times when hope ought to be kept in check.  Hope might be the kind of thing upon which we oughtn't to get too dependent.

After all, getting the Lament project together, and then touring it alongside a sarcastically-titled "Greatest Hits" set could easily have meant simply that there wasn't really time to get the new album to succeed as well as it might.  Faced with that kind of pressure of work, it's equally possible that a person would fall back on tried-and-tested formulae rather than doing anything all that new; and any innovations attempted, by the same token, may not have the fullest realisation.  On reflection, it's this more downbeat assessment that is the more appropriate when evaluating Nerissimo.

The basic problem is that, although there are elements that build on the last album - there's a use of steel guitars gives the album an almost country-rock undertone ("Animelle" having hints of REM's "Airportman", for example) - the bulk of the record is rather derivative.  Much of it relies on extensive recycling of material heard on Still Smiling: "The Beast" clearly fits the same mould as "Buntmetalldiebe";  "DBX 2" is a close cousin of "What If?".

Bargeld has been happily ripping off his own back catalogue for almost as long as he's had one to rip off.  Hence we shouldn't really be surprised to find that it's not only the last Teardo and Bargeld collaboration that is pillaged/ revisited (delete as appropriate), but Bargeld's contributions to the other bands with which he's been associated.  The lyrics to the titular opening track hark back to "Sabrina", the opening track of Neubauten's Silence is Sexy; "Ich Bin Dabei" has - alongside another hint of "What If?" - a clear echo of the Bad Seeds' "Stranger than Kindness".  He's even gone so far as to include what is pretty much the same song on two albums in the past: "The Garden" is more or less the same track that appeared three years earlier as "Salamandrina".  The pattern, of course, is itself copied from musicians through the ages: there's any number of composers from the classical tradition who quote themselves (and others) freely.  Yet it's one thing to be expected to churn out yet another Mass or cantata for an Esterhazy on a weekly basis - I'm guessing here, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a significant portion of what we take to be the musical canon either started out as hack-work, or informed hack-work shortly after its composition - but it's quite another to approach album-making in that way; the context is very different.  Not the least of the differences is that the album is released on Teardo's own Specula label, so there should have been no pressure on that front.  Hence it is perhaps pushing things a little to include two versions of the title track - once in English, and once in Italian - to top and tail what is anyway only a nine-track album.  It's one thing to want to return to a theme or idea to work it out as fully as possible; but I'm not sure that there's really that much of a new angle being taken here.  For what it's worth, the Italian version is preferable, but that's because I don't speak Italian; Italophones may prefer the English.

In passing, there's the odd moment when Bargeld's voice seems to be feeling the strain - "The Empty Boat" really could have done with another take.

Lest this sound like an attack on the album, it's really not meant to be.  Is the album any good?  Yes: it certainly is - with the possible exception of "Ulgae", which... um... well, you know that Simpsons Tree-House of Horror episode in which creates a whole civilisation in a petri-dish?  Yeah.  Let's leave it at that.  But if you ignore that, and the double inclusion of the title track, you're left with a long EP as much as a short album.  A good one, for sure, but - well, is it enough, and good enough?

The nagging suspicion is that if Nerissimo is a good album, that's because Still Smiling is a very good album, and Teardo and Bargeld have taken some of its component parts, spray-painted them, and released them again.  Control your hope.

The Slow Death of Printed Newspapers, and why it's a Problem.

There was a piece in The Guardian the other day about switching from print to digital newspapers... and then back again.  It's rather Proustian and elegaic in its tone: Stephen Curry writes that, having bought a paper copy of his newspaper,

I sat at the kitchen table with the paper spread out and immersed myself.  The pleasures are simple and deep and have yet to be reproduced on any screen that I have used.  Browsing is easier and feels more natural than with a… browser.  Despite the ease of search that computerised versions offer, you have more command of the content as the eye ranges across a double-page spread, skimming the headlines and noting those stories that you will return to read in full.  And you know where you are with a paper newpaper.  By which I mean you know where you are in the story and how far you have to go.  I was relieved to escape the seemingly endless scolling that disorients digital reading. 

There was also pleasure in the physicality of the interaction.  I had not lost the skill of whipping the wide bundle of sheets to initiate a fold, or the knack of pulling out creases and shaping the page to frame the article selected for attention.  And those muscle memories brought to mind other recollections – an instant reconnection with a childhood in Ballymena that bears the imprint of newsprint.  My father, a dentist in the town, picked up the Irish Times and the Guardian on his walk to work, to peruse in his lunch break and bring home at the end of the day.  In the evening the Belfast Telegraph would thud onto the mat at the front door.

Told you it was elegaic, didn't I?

I think he misses something, though, which occurred to me as I was reading his article (online, natch).  What you don't get with digital newspapers is serendipity.  It's easy to search for things that you want to read; but that means that you're less likely to read things that you didn't want to read but were glad you read - things, I susppose, that you didn't know you wanted to read.

You don't have as much control with the dead-tree press.  That's a good thing.  The alternative is that one is much more likely only ever to read things that confirm one's view, or that are "relevant" to one's life; one stays in one's own information bubble.  (This, incidentally, also provides a defence of the library and the bookshop, both for leisure and academic purposes: giving students the URL of a paper will take them directly to it, and so reduce the chance that they'll look at the table of contents of different editions of a journal and read something out of sheer interest; providing a scanned chapter from a book, or typing a search into Amazon, saves everyone from reading the book that's on the shelf next to it - and so condemns them to not reading it by the same token.)

So when Curry says that, with the newsprint version of a paper, "you have more command of the content as the eye ranges," I think he's wrong - and I think that it's good that he's wrong.  (Or, even if he's correct, I reject the value he imputes to that control.)  In leafing through an actual paper, you eye can be caught by an interesting headline, or picture; you take in half a sentence and follow it up, and sometimes you learn something about the world that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.  It's not impossible to browse an electronic version - but it's harder.  And in having to work for it, you lose the serendipity that is the whole point.

One of the things that I miss with the decline of the Indy, which I only ever bought on a Saturday, was reading the book reviews over a slow breakfast on a Sunday.  I've added any number of titles to my wishlist on the basis of that that I would never before have considered, or even encountered, otherwise.  And you can put a hot plate of oatcakes on a newspaper without having to worry about the damage that might be done to it by molten cheese, too.

What goes for book reviews goes, pari passu, for the parts of a newspaper that are probably quite a lot more important than books.  Of course, exposure to things that one would not otherwise have read is imperfect even with an actual newspaper, since the editor does preselect them for you - in choosing the Indy over, say, The Times or the Express, I narrowed my focus a little - but, still.

I am not the first person to worry that internet searches may only tell us what we want to hear.  But it'd not occurred to me that the printed press might be at least part of the solution to that problem.  An imperfect one, to be sure, since one chooses one's newspaper according to one's tastes; but a part of it.

If the printed press is in decline, we shouldn't mourn it (just) for Curry's essentially sentimental reasons.  We should be concerned in other ways, too.

I Don't Understand Poetry

This post is meant as a bit of an encomium of Ian McMillan, Bard of Barnsley and potential Patron Saint of Speech Radio - though, on re-reading, I'm a bit worried that it won't sound like it.

The other morning, he posted this on twitter:

I love this poem by Norman Nicholson

The poem in question is called "Five Minutes".  Here it is:

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

I've always had a problem with poetry.  I simply don't get it; and this poem is a good example of why.  I don't understand why it can't be rendered as a paragraph, for one thing:

'I'm having five minutes,' he said, fitting the shelter of the cobble wall over his shoulders like a cape.  His head was wrapped in a cap as green as the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind whined in the ashes like a saw, and thorn and briar shook their red badges of hip and haw; the fields were white with smoke of blowing lime; rusty iron brackets of sorel stood in grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.  "Just five minutes," he said; and the next day I heard that he was dead, having five minutes to the end of time.

It'd be - for my money - a slightly over-baked paragraph; writing as such throws into relief what is over-done about it ("red badges of hip and haw"?  Hmmm), but for the life of me I can't see what's missing.  Indeed, it seems to be that the piece is more successful when rendered as prose, because the line breaks are distracting.  Why are they where they are?  (I can't tell that there's a rhythmic need; and the rhyme structure is too tenuous. A-B-A-C-D-E-F-E-G-H-I-F-A-G, if I've counted correctly.  Oooh: wait: 14 lines.  So does that make it a sonnet?  And why does that matter?)  In the prose version, you don't have to worry about that; but you do have the freedom to stress what you will - to pick out the rhythms and rhymes as they present themselves, without the prompt.

Anyway: I replied to McMillan, because... well, because Twitter makes you think that that's OK.  "I have never understood poetry," I wrote.  "Why couldn't this be (overbaked) prose?  Who/ what should I read to see what I'm missing?  I believe I *am* missing something, but what?  I feel like a blind man in a gallery".

Am I Still Charlie?

One of the things that makes it hard to defend Charlie Hebdo is Charlie Hebdo's habit of publishing stuff that's hard to defend.  In particular, I'm thinking of the editorial published on the 3rd: "How Did We End Up Here?".  In this article, it seems that the magazine is placing the blame for Islamist violence not only on Muslims (which is trivially true, inasmuch as that non-Muslims are unlikely to take up the Islamist cause), but on all Muslims (which is trivially false, and feeds into a rather unpleasant right-wing narrative).

Having said that, we do need to be clear about what, exactly, Charlie is supposed to have done, and why, and what our response should be.  The Independent's piece on criticism of the editorial gave much more attention to the critics than to the editorial itself.  (Admittedly, this later article did make the case for the other side.)  And I'm fully signed up to the principle of charity when it comes to assessing people's arguments; even if they screw up the argument, the thing for which they're arguing may still be worthwhile.  So we ought to take the best possible interpretation of a given article, and dismiss it only to the extent that a charitable reading is not possible.  For some things, the dismissal will come fairly quickly; for others, it'll take longer; and for some it'll be late, if it comes at all.

Photo: Exeter Express and Echo

Based on the application of that principle, I don't think that the Charlie editorial is quite as bad as it might appear at first.  It certainly does have the whiff of the train-wreck about it  in certain respects; but upon examination, my sense is that things could probably be worse; it seems analogous to the weekend's bump between trains in Plymouth.  There were no serious injuries caused when the trains bashed into each other - but it's clear all the same that someone can't have been paying attention, and the damage is going to need more than a bit of paint to put right.  As for Great Western, so for Charlie.

(At least, I think so.  Look: writing about this stuff is always going to be difficult, so I make no claim that what follows is anything more than thinking aloud.  But since this is a blog rather than an academic analysis, and I'm writing under my pen-name rather than ex cathedra, I reserve the right to throw stuff out there pretty much as it occurs to me.  So, suitably disclaimered, here we go.)

The first thing we should note is that Charlie is, and always has been, fiercely irreligious, and fiercely anti-clerical.  The image on the right is the cover it published on the first anniversary of the murders in its own office.  It's god who's fingered as a the guilty party here.  Religion is not going to get an easy time in its pages - and it is no harder or softer on Islam than on any other religion.  The figure in the image could be Allah, or Yahweh, or anyone: the name and the particular mythology don't matter one bit.  So the background for any article is a presumption that religion, or at least the encroachment of religion into the public realm, is something to be resisted.  With that noted, how should we read the editorial?

The trivial answer is that, at the very least, we should read it.  And some of it is, I think, misjudged.  But it's worth quoting at length, all the same.  (I'm tempted to C&P the whole thing, except that I think that this is already going to be quite a long post, and there's really no need; you can follow the link above if you're really bothered.)  And it starts off well - if vaguely - enough:

Why India? Why Brits?

Cross-posted from the other blog.

Julie Bindel had a piece in The Guardian the other day about India's surrogate mothers.  It makes for pretty grim reading.  Even if the surrogates are paid, and are paid more than they might otherwise have earned, there's still a range of problems that the piece makes clear.

For one thing, the background of the surrogates is an important factor.  Bindel writes that

[s]urrogates are paid about £4,500 to rent their wombs at this particular clinic, a huge amount in a country where, in 2012, average monthly earnings stood at $215.

It's tempting, at first glance, to look at the opportunity to be a surrogate as a good thing in this context: these women are earning, by comparative standards, good money.  But, of course, you have to keep in mind that the standard is comparative.  If your choice is between doing something you wouldn't otherwise do and penury, doing the thing you wouldn't otherwise do looks like the better option.  But "better option" doesn't imply "good option".  So there's more to be said there; more questions to be asked.  Choosing x over y because y is more awful doesn't mean that x isn't.  It might be a good thing; but it might not be.  There might be economic - structural - coercion.  Choosing to become a surrogate might be a symptom of there being no better alternative.

A related question is this: are the women really making a free choice in offering their reproductive labour even assuming that the terms are economically just?  Possibly not:

I have heard several stories of women being forced or coerced into surrogacy by husbands or even pimps, and ask Mehta if she is aware of this happening.  “Without the husbands’ [of the surrogates] consent we don’t do surrogacy."

Note (a) the non-denial, and (b) the tacit acceptance that it's the husband's decision anyway.  That's not good.

(In a wholly different context, I've recently been reading David Luban's Lawyers and Justice, and - in a discussion about lawyers cross-examining complainants in rape cases, he makes this point:

([H]ere we have two people who are confronted by powerful institutions from which protection is needed.  The defendant is confronted by the state [that is: in any criminal trial, the defendant does need protection from the power of the state - IB], but the victim is confronted by the millennia-long cultural tradition of patriarchy, which makes the cliché that the victim is on trial true.  From the point of view of classical liberalism, according to which the significant enemy is the state, this cannot matter. But from the point of view of the progressive correction of classical liberalism, any powerful social institution is a threat, including diffuse yet tangible institutions such as patriarchy. (p 151)

(The sentiment would seem to apply here.  A view of human agency that sees liberty as being mainly or only about avoiding state interference is likely to miss all kinds of much more subtle, insidious pressures that are liberty-limiting.  Economic factors are such pressures.  The idea of the wife as property is another.)

I do wonder if readers of this blog might help out with answering one more question, though. One of the startling claims is that

[a]pproximately 12,000 foreigners come to India each year to hire surrogates, many of them from the UK.

I don't know how many "many" is, but let's take as read that it's more than none.  It's a statistic that raises a question for Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels:

Why India? Why not hire surrogates at home?
Because India has a lot of poor people, that’s why. Because the price is a fifth of what it would be at home. Because it’s a perfect setup for rich pale people to exploit very poor brown women.

I don't think that that's quite got it.  As I commented on Ophelia's piece, this wouldn’t easily explain the UK factor.  As the article makes clear, commercial surrogacy is illegal here; surrogates are allowed only to recoup reasonable expenses.  Surrogacyuk.org suggests £7000 – £15000 as a guide for the “price” (I know I shouldn't use that word, but you know what I mean) in the UK; but if Indian surrogates are paid £4500, and the clinic is still making up to £18000 on the transaction (assuming I’ve not misread the article), the Indian market is likely to be more expensive for commissioners, even without the cost of travelling to India to begin with.

So why do Brits use Indian surrogates?

Here's a hypothesis.  In the UK, surrogacy arrangements aren’t enforceable, the woman who gives birth is automatically recognised as the mother, and a Parental Order is required for the commissioning mother/ couple to be legally recognised as having parental status.  I don’t know what the legal niceties are in India, but my guess is that that side of things is probably a bit easier to deal with.  After all, if the procedure there is as free-wheeling as Bindel suggests, keeping track of exactly who gave birth to whom and with whose eggs isn’t going to be foolproof.

Is that it?  Is there any other reason why people from the UK might commission an Indian surrogate mother?

Autism, Mental Illness, Euthanasia and the WaPo

(Cross-posted from the other blog.)

There was a piece in the Washington Post the other day with a striking headline: Where the Prescription for Autism can be Death.

Normally, if we're saying that the prescription for x is y, we mean to say that y is being suggested as a treatment for x. Painkillers are the prescription for a bad back, a steroid cream the prescription for eczema, and so on. Even if you find that phrasing a bit clunky, "prescription" implies the recommendation of a medical expert. On that basis, the implication here is that somewhere in the world, doctors are seeing patients, diagnosing autism, and saying, "I wonder if the best thing would be to kill you". That would be Quite a Big Deal.

The place in question is Holland. But a quick look at the article shows - surprise, surprise - nothing of what's hinted at in the headline. Here's the opening few sentences, edited slightly for formatting:

In early childhood, the Dutch psychiatric patient known as 2014-77 suffered neglect and abuse. When he was about 10, doctors diagnosed him with autism. For approximately two decades thereafter, he was in and out of treatment and made repeated suicide attempts. He suffered terribly, doctors later observed, from his inability to form relationships: “He responded to matters in a spontaneous and intense, sometimes even extreme, way. This led to problems.”
A few years ago, 2014-77 asked a psychiatrist to end his life. In the Netherlands, doctors may perform euthanasia — not only for terminal physical illness but also upon the “voluntary and well-considered” request of those suffering “unbearably” from incurable mental conditions.
The doctor declined, citing his belief that the case was treatable, as well as his own moral qualms. But he did transmit the request to colleagues, as Dutch norms require. They treated 2014-77 for one more year, determined his case was, indeed, hopeless and, in due course, administered a fatal dose of drugs. Thus did a man in his 30s whose only diagnosis was autism become one of 110 people to be euthanized for mental disorders in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2014.

So, then, it's a story about a man, who happened to be autistic, and who asked a psychiatrist for euthanasia. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, that request was granted. There is no reason to believe that this was a case of death being prescribed for autism. It's just that he happened to be autistic and to want to die, and a prescription for assistance was provided. Phrasing is important.
Dutch law on assisted dying is famously liberal; in considering the permissibility of euthanasia for psychiatric as well as somatic illnesses, it is in the minority of the minority of jurisdictions that consider the permissibility of any euthanasia. I have addressed the question of psychological suffering in relation to euthanasia elsewhere, and shan't rehearse the details here; suffice it to say, I don't see any reason in particular to think that mental illness and physical illness should be treated all that differently in principle:

Mature Content?

This is a slightly longer version of a post I've just published on the other blog.

There's an aisle at the supermarket that has a sign above it that reads "ADULT CEREALS".  Every time I see it, I snigger inwardly at the thought of sexually explicit cornflakes. (Pornflakes.  You're welcome.) It's not big, and it's not clever: I know that. But all these years living in south Manchester have taught me to grab whatever slivers of humour one can from life. Anyway... A friend's FB feed this morning pointed me in the direction of this: a page on Boredpanda showing some of the best entries to the 2016 Birth Photography competition. (Yeah: I know. I had no idea, either.)

I guess that birth photography is a bit of niche field.  The picture that one "Best in Category: Labour" - which you can see here - is, for my money, a brilliant image.  Some of the compositions are astonishingly good - but then, come to think of it, childbirth isn't exactly a surprise, so I suppose that if you're going to invite someone to photograph it, they're going to have plenty of time to make sure that the lighting is right.

A second thought that the pictures raise is this: no matter how much people bang on about the miracle of birth... well, nope.  Look at the labour picture again. I can't begin to express how glad I am that that's never going to happen to me; and I'm even more convinced than I was that I wouldn't want to play any part in inflicting that on another person.  (I think that there's all kinds of reasons why I have a duty not to reproduce, from overpopulation to the fact that I don't think it'd be desirable for a migrainous thicko like me to beget another generation of migrainous thickos; but not abetting that kind of agony in another human being is also on the list.  Fortunately, since it's unlikely that anyone would want a migrainous thicko to play any part in siring her child in the first place, this is not a problem I'm likely ever to encounter in practice.)

But my overriding response is something in the realm of astonishment that some of the pictures are blanked out as having "mature content".

I mean... really?

Looking at the Stats

I've been really remiss at posting since the beginning of the year, here and on the other blog.

But I've just looked at the stats, and it appears that I've been getting one hit a day here consistently.  Whoever you are... Awwwww.  Bless your soul.

On Voting with a Heavy Heart

Well, I'm going to vote to stay in, obviously.

I don't vote often; I have a rather tortured relationship with democracy because whether or not I approve of a person or policy has very little to do with the qualities of that person or policy, and I think that it'd be better overall if people like me just shut the hell up and left the task of running stuff to those with an education and expertise.  I voted in the last general election simply to add to the weight of votes against UKIP, rather than out of any positive choice.  All the same, I shall put my scepticism about plebiscites and elections to one side in June, and I shall vote for the UK to stay in the EU.  But I shall do so with a heavy heart.  Why so?  Because the terms on which the referendum is to be held are so dispiriting.

The syntactically-clunky wording of the referendum will be

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

This was at the behest of the Electoral Commission; the European Union Referendum Act (2015) has  a couple of formulations of the ballot.  Technically, neither wording has anything much to do with what David Cameron has just negotiated; but for him to ditch that negotiation would be such an act of brass neck that it's fair to say that the bindingness of the referendum will be tied to the agreement reached on the 19th: should anyone try to depart from that agreement, there'd be significant pressure to overturn the referendum result.  (I predict that that'll be UKIP's strategy whatever happens: insist that the deal is not being enforced properly by those dastardly Europeans, therefore they're acting in bad faith, therefore leave.  The result will make no difference at all to the likes of Farage.)  To all intents and purposes it's a referendum on an agreement that noone will read, and that the Leave side would reject no matter what it said unless it said "leave now".  But the agreement is central; and this is the problem.

Saving Money is Easy.

Here's a bit of silliness that's just popped up on my FB feed: something called the 365 Day Penny Challenge.

Want to know the easiest way to save £667.95 in a year?
Then I’ve got the thing for you…
The 365 Day Penny Challenge.
All you need is:

• A jar 
• Pennies 
• Will Power

Day 1 (usually 1st January) put 1p in the jar, the next day (Day 2) put 2p in and so on and so forth. 

At the end of the 365 you will have save[d] £667.95! 

You're not doubling what you save; day 3 would involve putting in 3p, day 100 £1, and so on.

All groovy... except I doubt that it's sustainable.  A person could quite easily have, say, £3 in their pocket to put into the jar on day 300.  But that they'd have almost £3 on day 299, AND £3 on day 300, AND £3.01 on day 301, and so on looks to me to be more of a stretch.  (That'd amount to over £21 in loose change over the course of a week.)

If you do have that amount of loose change every day, I suspect it's because you're going to the bank and taking out £5 every day, some of which you spend on odds and sods.  But you're still taking out £5.  Banking the change - which is in effect what you're doing by putting the change in a jar - is not making a saving.  It's just a matter of not spending the change.

Genius.

People are sharing this and calling it a good idea.

Besides: who pays for everything with cash anyway?  The whole premise of this rests on the idea that you're going to be forced to take money out from the bank every day in fixed denominations greater than you would want to spend (unless you're withdrawing money just so that you can put it in your jar, which is ridiculous).  But Tesco and pubs all take plastic now.  Hell, even my milkman takes a direct debit.

In other words, the idea isn't just capitalising on people withdrawing cash in fixed denominations greater than they would want to spend; it requires it, in the face of there being much more efficient and secure ways to buy stuff.  The only people for whom this could conceivably work are in the cash-in-hand economy.  For people who aren't my window-cleaner or builder... it's a bit dim.

New for 2016: Shaming 7-Year-Olds

Salon is running a story about a video that has apparently gone viral.  (I only know about it because of the Salon piece; maybe its virality is self-fulfilling.  Maybe I've just not been paying enough attention to YouTube.  But I digress.)

The video is only a minute or so long, and it shows two little girls receiving the gift of a doll.  I'm not good at guessing people's ages, but I'd guess that they're somewhere around 7 or 8 years old.  The doll happens to be black; the girls are white.  One girl looks as though she's disappointed with the gift, but trying to be diplomatic about it; the other bursts into tears.

"Their reaction shows how much a doll can tell us about race", says the byline.  The article concludes that, "[t]hough obviously not an official social experiment, their reaction is a comment on just how early in life racial bias forms".

Well, it might.

Rhodes to Palmyra

There are many things that look to be superficially alike, but that careful examination shows to be very different.  Sharks and dolphins are both grey-ish aquatic predators with a prominent dorsal fin.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone unfamiliar with them to suppose that they are closely related: a child, or - less plausibly - a marine biologist visiting from another planet might make that mistake.  But closer inspection would reveal significant differences; and one would hope that the child or alien biologist would move away from thinking them the same sort of thing.  One would hope that a tolerably well-informed adult would have stopped making that kind of mistake a long time before, and would not get a newspaper column asserting that dolphins and sharks are very similar indeed.

This serves as a sort of preamble to a rumination on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago: that Oriel, Oxford, was considering removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes after coming under pressure from student protestors.  These protests echo similar protests in South Africa.

The rationale for getting shot of the guy is straightforward enough: that he was racist, imperialist, and not the sort of person whom modern academia should be honouring if it's ever going to stand a chance of becoming the post-racist, post-imperial community to which it aspires.  I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view - particularly in respect of the South African protests; after all, the colonial and post-colonial history of that country has been particularly bitter for the majority of the population.  Having a monument to him at Oriel strikes me as being slightly morally different, though I can't put my finger on why - so maybe it isn't that different after all.

On the other hand, there are counterarguments.  Rhodes was a man of his time; it is naive to pretend that we can, or should, whitewash history; if we want to understand where we are and to control where we're going, it pays to remember whence we came; and, anyway, Rhodes' personal legacy has enabled students from all around the world, of all races, to study at Oxford.  His reputation may be tarnished, but it is not without burnished bits as well.

The point is that the arguments about whether Rhodes must fall are complex, and worth hearing from both sides.

Not everyone seems to think this.