"Denial" and Disinterest

Having taken myself off to see Denial the other night, I've been thinking about its portrayal of law - specifically, how it's done in the English courtroom.

The film that tells the story of Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt.  His complaint was, basically, that she shouldn't have called him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian, and that in doing so she was a big meanie, and booooo!  And, of course, as everyone knows, he lost.  This is why I can call him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian here with impunity.  (Well, under the terms of the 2013 Defamation Act, I probably could anyway: the requirement for serious harm would mean that a blog with a readership as low as this would slip through the net.  But the point stands.  English law was satisfied that David Irving is a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian.)

One of the plot points - can one talk about a plot when one is aiming to represent reality?  I suppose you can: you can't distill a dispute that lasted years into a couple of hours without (a) deciding that there's a story worth telling there, (b) where the main parts of that story are to be found, and (c) weaving them into a plot - Anyway: one of the plot points concerns the way that English libel laws worked at the time.  These laws famously made it very hard to defend a libel action; the burden of proof would be on Lipstadt to show that she was correct, rather than on Irving to show her incorrect.  In a reversal of the normal order of legal proceedings, she'd have to prove her innocence; in effect, she'd have to show that the Holocaust happened.  Rachel Weisz' Lipstadt is clearly flummoxed by all this; and the film is plainly sympathetic to her confusion.  The English defamation laws were a mess.  (Whether they still are is for another post.)  Lipstadt is also baffled by the distinction between solicitors and barristers, meaning that it's a surprise to her that the lawyer she'd hired to take her case, and who'd be doing the donkey-work to put it together, would not be the lawyer who presented it in court.

I mean, you can see why someone not brought up on the system would think it weird.

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.