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