Lost Worlds

De mortuis nil nisi bobortwo

The jailbird Wilfred Death (claims it's "De'ath" but I used to know a woman called Mrs Onions who declared in middle life that her name was actual O'Nyeons and nobody believed that either) writes in the Daily Express to traduce Alan Coren. Calumniating one's superiors -- in wit, intellect and achievement -- the moment they're dead; that I can perhaps understand. But to write for the Express? Hard to believe that even Death would sink so low.

If That's How "We" Are Then Include Me Out

In this week's London Review of Books, the culture critic John Lanchester writes about, and around, global warming. He declares:

Electric light and power, and television, and computers, and fridges, not to menton cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust; we don't know how they work but we're happy to benefit from them.

Who is "we"? I am neither a professional scientist nor an engineer but I understand perfectly well how these things work. All of them. I suppose Mr Lanchester means, by "we", people of a liberal humanities background who overwhelmingly occupy the media and most of politics; people who not infrequently pronounce upon a science or technology of which they know little and understand less, while proudly waving their ignorance as a badge of their refined sensibilities and social standing. In a world which is run more and more through technology, the sort of chap who says "Oh, I barely know how to turn the damn thing on, let alone how it works" seems less like the elevated being he imagines himself to be, and more like an idiot, in both the modern and the ancient Athenian senses of the word.

I suspect Mr Lanchester knows perfectly well how his stuff works and is just pretending he doesn't, in order not to seem common or blokeish.

But that approach leads him to make remarks like: "there is one school of thought, and a few nutters".

Tell that to Copernicus or any other scientists ("nutters") involved in serious paradigm shift. The truth about science is that, first, there's only a model, which it's everyone's duty to throw rocks at to see if it falls over, and, second, science being emphatically not a democracy, it's perfectly possible for one person to be right and everyone else wrong.

To us caring, egalitarian relativists, that may seem tough. But it's a tough world, and may do for us yet.

Technorati Tags: culture, global warming, infantilization, journalism, media

What A Twat

So I wrote "flout" when I meant "flaunt" (see below). Must be my Scottish blood coming to the surface. Wheee! (There goes the moral high ground.)

On Ethnocentricity and Marketing

I am English. I don't know people called Aurora Ponce or Kaden Gonzalez. I don't know people called Caleb or Jordan or Ryan or Trey. There is nobody in even my widest social circle called Bryson, Valencia, Cristiano, Harley or Rogelio, Ferreira Mauricio, or Elliott, or Wyatt Cobb; nobody called Noel Suarez, nobody called Ladonna Ballard, no Misty, no Nelson, no Carter and no Quinn.

Nor will there ever be. We don't have people called those things here. This is England. Even people called Fergus MacBuggery get up our nose (particularly when they flout their Scottishness as though it is some sort of personal achievement; and I speak as one with a Scottish grandmother.)

So why do spammers think that I will be fooled by these names? Hundreds of Chip Lombardos and Emilianio Lowells flood into my spambox, and all that is happening is that when, one day, I meet someone with a Hispanic first name and English surname -- or vice-versa -- the rage pent up in me after thousands of spammings will erupt. "Michael," they will say to me, "may I introduce Stanley Estevez (or Jaime Cogshaw, or Enrique Q Coleman, or whatever)?" and that will be that. WHOP.

It's wrong. I know it. But my defence will be: Spam Made Me A Racist.

(Full disclosure: the Scottish grandmother was called Euphemia May Vallance, and if that's not a name just made to be attached to V1@gr@ S*P*A*M, then I don't know what is.)

That's What They Think We Are Like

On a sachet of Nescafé Latte Skinny Less Than Half The Fat:

• Empty a sachet into a mug
• Fill the mug with 200ml of hot but not boiling water, stirring all the time. Add sugar or sweetener if required.

Is that how stupid they think we are?

No. They think we're stupider. Because the instructions continue:

• Enjoy your deliciously frothy latte!

Ah. Thank god they told me. I had been wondering what to do with the damnable stuff.

Technorati Tags: infantilization, advertising

Eat Shit; 110,000,000,000 Flies Can't Be Wrong

The oldest trick in the Dud Logic Toolbook is confusing correlation and causality. The climate is changing: check. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are rising: check. Mankind dumps a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: check. Ice core studies show high carbon dioxide levels in previous periods of rapid climate change: check. Therefore mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for climate change: hold on a moment.

There is nothing in that dodgy multi-part non-syllogism to justify drawing that conclusion. So to concentrate our resources on reducing our CO2 emissions may be barking up the wrong tree or, just possibly, barking up no tree at all. A good idea to do something rather than to do nothing? Yes. Better still to consider the worst-case scenario (as they say)? Yes again.

What we should be doing, therefore, is planning for damage limitation, because if climate change is nothing, or little, to do with us, and everything, or mostly, to do with nature, then all hell is going to break loose and we had better be prepared. Save the Earth? No. The Earth will be fine. It has shrugged off bigger species than us in the past. Wehat we mean is: Save Our Own Skins. And reducing CO2 may, of course, help; but let's not persuade ourselves that it's a cure or even a cause.

Writing in The Times today, Mary Ann Sieghart addresses herself to this question but floats elegantly around the point. She accuses the complacent of "denial", but announces in a rather de haut en bas tone:

You see, there comes a point at which you have to admit that 95 per cent of the world's scientists can't be wrong.

This betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is that it's almost shocking to find it the pages of a great national newspaper.

It's not just that science is emphatically not a democratic process. More crucially, it's that most of what Thomas Kuhn called "paradigm shift" has occurred, at least initially, against the received opinion of far more than 95 per cent of scientists. And, most crucially, that's how paradigm shift science has to occur, because the prevailing paradigm ("malaria is caused by bad air") is, by definition, what the great majority of scientists believe.

The Ibsenesque notion of the solitary scientist battling against mass prejudice is Romantic and unrepresentative of most scientific progress. But neither evolution by natural selection, nor the "deep time" against which it took place; neither Newtonian nor Einsteinian mechanics; neither heliocentricity nor electromagnetism nor the wave/particle duality of light: none of these represented the prevailing paradigm — or, to put it another way, all were cases where 95 per cent of scientists were most emphatically wrong.

This is, of course, because reality is often ambiguous. Copernican heliocentricity was opposed by natural philosophers who said "Well, it certainly looks as though the sun goes around the Earth," to which the best reply was "So what would it look like if the opposite were true?"

But the difference between scientists and politicians is that politics is the art of the possible, whereas science is the understanding of the actual. Which is why scientists, once persuaded, are happy to say "We were wrong".

Richard Dawkins tells of the "elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford" who firmly and persistently maintained that the Golgi Apparatus -- a part of cellular micro-anatomy -- was an artefact. "One Monday, the [visiting lecturer] was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said -- with passion -- 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.'" [1]

Can we imagine any politician, anywhere, ever, saying such a thing?

---
1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London, Bantam 2006, 283-4)

Technorati Tags: global warming, media, science, society

The Day TV Died

Performative TV. It does what it says on the tin.

Make $$$ With Your Pen

Macworld reports that:

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote in a widely quoted report that “we believe the iPhone is likely to be largely cannibalistic to iPod sales, rather than entirely incremental to Apple, limiting upside.”

How did Toni Sacconaghi learn to write like that? And why? I think what it means is: "People won't buy a new iPhone as well as a new iPod. They'll buy an iPhone instead. So Apple won't make as much money as they think they will."

The odd thing is, it's really hard to write that badly. To write that badly, you have to learn to think that badly, too: pompous, dehumanised and convoluted. Who is it meant to persuade? Who is it meant to impress? Who, at the cheque-signing end of the money-chain, is genuinely impressed by it? And why? Or are they all bullshitting each other with an inept and teeth-stripping rhetorical schema which none of them believe in really?

And that's why I'd have failed in business. I don't mind, as an astute businessman friend once said, that "most of business consists of sitting in expensive restaurants over expensive breakfasts while people tell you lies". Lies are fine. It's the language they're couched in which I can't take.

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

A little under two thousand years ago some narratives claim (as people like George W Bush and Tony Blair believe, and want us to believe too) that the sanhedrin gedola or "Great Council" in Jerusalem tried, on the charge of sedition, Yoz Asaf, a.k.a. Issa bar Yussuf, a.k.a. Jesus the Messiah a.k.a. The Christ.

Yoz Asaf was found guilty and sentenced to death. But Mosaic law forbade observant Jews from killing. So the 71 men of the Assembly -- twenty-four Sadducees, twenty-two Pharisees, twenty-two clerks and the High Priest -- handed him over to the occupying army for execution.

The result was Christianity.

Now the traffic is heading in the other direction. In effect, the self-intoxicated pietist Bush and his moist-eyed sanctimonious friend Blair, handed Saddam Hussein over to the similarly obliging puppet government of Nouri Maliki which, in an act of marvellous symmetry, hanged Saddam at dawn on the day of the Eid of the Hajj -- in intention, if not in theology, an equivalent of Christmas.

But they went one better. They released videos of the noose going around Saddam's neck. The BBC chose to publish stills from this obscene footage on their website (which is compulsorily funded by a tax on television-ownership, non-payment of which is punishable by imprisonment).

(You might expect a link here. No.)

Obscene, because it demeans us as much as Saddam demeaned his own people.

Obscene, because the pictures of a man seconds from his own death surely appeal to a repugnant, quasi-erotic voyeurism in us all.

Obscene, because it depicts the raping, in public, of the assertion that a civilized nation does not inflict the death penalty.

Obscene, because it is a visual relic beyond price for those who would establish Saddam as a martyr (can we even imagine how Christians would fetishize a video of the crucifixion?).

Above all, because, in the fluid test of British law, obscene because it has a tendency to deprave and corrupt the viewer.

Bush and Blair, for all their pietism, are seemingly depraved and corrupt beyond redemption. Bush lied about Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attacks on Manhattan; Blair... do we need to say more than that Blair is having a lovely holiday in the Miami Beach fuck-pad of a Bee Gee?

You know, Bee Gee? As in "Stayin' Alive"?

Say Thank You, But To Whom?

Even atheists like a bit of a blessing on a solemn occasion. And those dreadful non-sectarian woolly humanist pseudoliturgical spasms are too ghastly for words. We want a bit of continuity, a bit of justification-through-history, and what better than this one:

Salue parens omnia rerum natura

That's how that old naturalist and Stoic Pliny the Elder ended his monumental Naturalis Historia (1st Century AD). Translation: "Hail mother of all things: Nature" and while we're fouling it up -- motherfuckers -- a nod of acknowledgment over the Christmas turkey wouldn't be out of place, just to remind us that we were all got here by the same inexorable logic, and could be got out again just as quickly...