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.

You Ain't No True Scotsman, Bruv!

Maybe I've missed it, or blocked it out, but we seem to have been spared the regular pieties in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks - the ones trotted out by all mainstream politicians about how the true Islam is tolerant and peaceful, and terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  That line doesn't seem to have had much of an airing.

For this, I am grateful.

Let's be honest: it's not true that jihadi or Islamist* terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  It plainly does have something to do with it.  This in no way means that Islam is, or has to be, a violent religion; and I do believe that most Muslims are horrified by what's being done in the name of their religion.  There's a #notinmyname hashtag that testifies to this.  I don't think that people using it are liars, and I think also that the overwhelming majority of Muslims who haven't used it are likely to be in agreement with it.  But, howsoever tenuously, it is something to do with Islam.

In just the same way, witch-burnings have something to do with Christianity.  The Westboro Baptist Church has something to do with Christianity.  Neither is not the whole of Christianity, by any means.  Not even most, or a significant part of it.  But it is there.

It does noone any good in the long term to pretend otherwise, and denying this seems to be a version of the No-True-Scotsman fallacy:

N claims to be a Muslim
N commits some crime in the name of Islam
N turns out not to have been a true Muslim after all.

So when a witness shouted at the attacker in Leytonstone that "You ain't no Muslim, bruv", and it became a slogan for showing opposition to religiously-informed violence: well, it's an admirable sentiment, but... behaving violently in the name of a religion doesn't disqualify one from membership thereof.  A bad Muslim is still a Muslim, and its disingenuous to insist that Islam can be separated from reprehensible acts as a matter of principle in something like the way that being a Scot can be separated from taking sugar on your porridge in principle.

Actually, it's more than that.  It's empty dogmatism to insist that Islam as a matter of principle must be beyond criticism, and therefore anything that is liable to criticism must have nothing to do with Islam.

But I don't want this to be a post about Islam; my concern is more general, and it has to do with the rhetoric of being a "true" adherent to whatever the creed under consideration is.  Let's talk about it in terms of Pastafarianism, just to be as neutral as possible.

What is it to be a "true" Pastafarian?