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Listening to the rather wonderful Fry’s English Delight reminded me of a post on the rather wonderful F Word Blog. A dimwit MEP by the name of Roger Helmer doesn’t believe that homophobia exists. Mr Helmer, whose blog has the strapline ‘Straight Talking’, says

In psychiatry, a phobia is defined as an irrational fear. I have yet to meet anyone who has an irrational fear of homosexuals, or of homosexuality. So to the extent that the word has any meaning at all, it describes something which simply does not exist.

This is the kind of English up with which I will not put. Firstly, the word phobia is used outside of the psychiatric context. A rabid dog is sometimes described as hydrophobic because of its fear of water – different to that described in the DSM – and a symptom of meningitis is often described as photophobia. Unless Mr Helmer is insisting that every tin can he buys is entirely Sn, he can sod right off.

Beyond that, the meanings of words change. Paedophilia comes from the Greek ????, child, and ?????, which best translates as ‘brotherly love’ (as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love). It was originally coined to differentiate from pederasty which definitely meant sexual love. I could use Helmer’s logic to say that we don’t need to worry about paedophiles, but those damned paederotes. It would be as pointless as Helmer saying that he is not a homophobe but a antibivirist – words change their meaning.

xD.

The LSE SU is embarking on a fairly radical programme whereby it will share some staff with SUARTS, the SU for the University of the Arts, London. Details of the proposals can be found on the LSE SU website and a brief comment from me is at the end of this post.

LSE SU General Secretary Aled Dilwyn Fisher, who also contested the North-East constituency for the Green Party at last year’s GLA elections, kindly agreed to be interviewed. My questions are in bold.
Continue reading “Interview with Aled Dilwyn Fisher: the future of LSE Students’ Union” →

The excellent Nosemonkey has a look.

xD.

Donald Rumsfeld attracted unfair opprobrium over his ‘known unknowns’ speech – which is not to say that much of the opprobrium he attracted elsewhere was unjustified.

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.

Emphases added by me.

It strikes me that there is a fourth category – unknown knowns*. I am increasingly aware that people in one part of an organisation can know something – and not just know it, but have a developed view on it and how it affects other things – but that other parts of the organisation, particularly towards the top, don’t know that another part of the organisation knows.

xD.

* – That is not Zizek’s definition:

the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values

These are ‘rejected knowns’ and I’m taking the semantic route out as I would say that people still know about these things, even if they ignore them

I never thought I’d say that. Her execrable blog has been taken down.

However, I think the Telegraph were wrong to file papers against Acidity, Dorries’ web hosts, rather than her, and to do it late on a Friday evening. I am concerned about almost any instance of restricting an MP’s freedom of speech, no matter how much I disagree with them, even if they can use Parliamentary privilege. While I think that the Telegraph were acting in the public interest, primarily albeit not exclusively, I feel that Dorries’ remarks, however wrong, were fair comment.

And now, with bad grace, holding a red rose behind my back and typing this with my gloved right hand, I’m going to link to Phil ‘Dizzy’ Hendren, who makes some good points here. There is some independent confirmation courtesy of the Guardian.

A few other remarks. Firstly, did the Telegraph not expect a Streisand effect, or do they really think Dorries and her blog carry that much influence, or did they not think at all? Secondly, I think there should be some libel laws; I just think that, at the moment, they are written, interpreted and enforced so widely that I find it difficult to tell which enforcements are fair and which not.

If you want further comment of mine on Nadine Dorries’ antics, follow this link.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

– Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarising Voltaire’s attitude towards Helvétius.

xD.

From the Facebook group:

Simon Singh, the highly respected science writer (Fermat’s Last Theorem, etc), is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. Chiropractic is an alternative/complementary therapy which purports to treat various ailments by manipulation of the spine.) The BCA are promoting Chiropractic as treatment for children with (potentially serious) ailments such as asthma and frequent ear infections. Simon Singh criticised this in a Guardian “comment” piece. In particular, he criticised the BCA for doing this without appropriate clinical evidence.

He is now being sued for libel.

The BCA want damages and an injunction against him saying such things in future. Fundamentally this is about free speech and the use of evidence. An informed and responsible science writer should be able to write about genuine concerns on an important public health issue (the correct treatment for children) without the threat and expense of High Court libel claims. Even if he was wrong, it would surely be enough for the BCA to simply show their supporting evidence. But they are suing him instead.

In the words of Frank Frizelle: “Let’s hear your evidence, not your legal muscle.”

I found out about this at a recent meeting of Skeptics in the Pub and there is good background from the excellent Jack of Kent blog, covering the BCA’s claim, Simon Singh’s defence and a very useful guide to English libel law. The original piece from the BCA is here, courtesy of the Internet Archive and Singh’s response that has precipitated all this is here. A good summary of things is over at the Quack-o-meter. A not so good summary follows below courtesy of, er, me.

The BCA’s claim specifically refers to Singh’s statement that there is “not a jot of evidence”for the eficacy of chiropractic interventions for colic; sleeping problems; feeding problems; frequent ear infections; asthma; and prolonged crying, mentioned in that original doc from the BCA. The upshot is that the case could revolve (as I understand it) around one of two things; whether an organisation like the BCA has a reputation in this case to be protected (which has all sorts of positive implications for free speech) and an actual look at the evidence for the said eficacy. In other words, the BCA may just have put chiropractic on trial.

Ho, ho, ho.

The preliminary hearing starts tomorrow, 7th May, at 1000 at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand.

xD.

Via Tiberius Gracchus, I read a despondent post from Ashok Karra; do read both the original and the reply.

Ashok’s lament is based on Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation:

“that our unparalleled access to knowledge is coeval with a culture of decadence which allows the construction of entire worlds around our purely adolescent selves”

Our time is not uniquely stupid, or, if it is, we have no way of showing it to be so. In this, I largely agree with Tiberius. However, Ashok’s post picks up on something of a theme I’ve seen of late in books like Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and how to Stop it. Essentially, it argues that the combination of easy access to information through the internet and, crucially, easy means of putting information on the internet¹ means that our culture is degraded because our population does not think critically. This affects everything – politics, music, literature, the arts, everything. I think that those authors and Ashok are missing the point.

Let us take one of the supposed high-points in the intellectual life of our species; classical Athens. Aristotle believed that part of the human condition was to be a zoon politikon. This is often rendered as ‘political animal’ but such a translation loses some of the meaning of ‘political’; it means ‘of the polis, or Greek city-state. The good life was achieved by living in, and taking an active part in, the city-state as this fulfilled man’s (and it is man’s – women had very little status in ancient Greece) various needs and potentials. That option isn’t open to us now; even engagement in the municipality isn’t the same because national identification has primacy for most people. Since that high point, we have gone downhill, according to Ashok and others’ argument, and thought less and thought less critically.

Unfortunately, that’s a load of rubbish.

It’s often nice to think that the Athenian agora was full of people wandering around, alternately philosophising and politicising. I rather think it more likely that it was a mixture of something that student politicians in the UK would recognise – scandal, rumour and faction – and people just trying to get on with their lives.

Socrates was in the habit of accosting people in the agora in Athens to discuss whatever was on his mind; not necessarily philosophers, but whoever was going about their business there. In response to a pronouncement from the oracle at Delphi that he, Socrates, was indeed the wisest in Greece, Socrates decided that his wisdom came in recognising that he didn’t know much and was prepared to analyse things critically and honestly. His compatriots gave unthinking, uncritical answers – dumb answers – to his questions, asserting knowledge when what they had was prejudice (in the sense of having pre-judged based on existing personal and societal biases and received wisdom).

We might take another moment of great conflict and change – the foment around the time of the North American War of Independence. At the same time as Tom Paine was proseltysing his radical messages, one retort ran

So you, great Common Sense, did surely come
From out the crack in grisly Pluto’s bum

(Tom Paine – A Political Life by John Keane)

As Mark Steel commented – what is that, magical realism?.

I will not deny for a moment that there were some interesting, eye-catching developments from those periods – and those are just two in history – I will deny that those periods were awash with it. Yes, perhaps more people were aware of great debates. I wonder how many read much more into them that they did into the arguments between two feudal lords in other times and places.

If I may borrow, via Ed Murrow, a phrase from Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves

Trivia, rumour and gossip are as much a part of the human condition now as they ever have been; it is part of our social nature. I am prepared to accept that our liberal-capitalist-democratic order is fragile and requires a more active and informed citizenry to survive, which in turn requires a long, hard look at the nature of politics, education and the media in the west, but that doesn’t mean the material we have to work with is qualitatively worse or that it has been made so by the internet.

xD.

1 – This is an interesting effect, deserving of study. It is principally the ease by which it can be done. Once upon a time, you either had to code directly in HTML (and CSS and the rest) or use a WYSIWIG editor like MS FrontPage. You still had to sort out how to upload your files and storage space was frequently limited. The Web 2.0 phenomenon is not so much about social media as faster internet speeds, cheap storage and user-friendly interfaces (hard and soft) so that you don’t have to know anything about computers beyond standard office skills to have a blog, edit Wikipedia or post something to YouTube.

I caught the last few seconds of Newsnight Review to see a picture of Humphrey Lyttleton and my heart sank. It turned out that he died this evening at seven o’ clock. Humph and ISIHAC hold a special attraction for me.

I first discovered Humphrey Lyttelton where I would probably hear him most often; in my father’s car. He was chairing I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, one of the silliest and funniest radio programmes ever to be broadcast. It turned an obscure station on the Northern line – Mornington Crescent – into a monument to the character of the English, made familiar figures out of the lovely Samantha and the rippling Sven and, on more than one occasion, caused Dad to pull onto the hard shoulder because the risk of him causing an accident because he and I were laughing at Humph on the radio.

When I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue was commissioned, radio comedy was in a sorry state. Consisting almost entirely of panel games, it was bland and it was formulaic. The show was to be an unscripted version of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again; if jazz was the antidote to scripted music, who better to lead the antidote to panel games than a famous jazz trumpter – ‘Humph’.

I suspect that for many people, Humphrey Lyttelton was first and foremost the chair of ISIHAC. He was, of course, a fantastic musicia; indeed, he was described by Louis Armstrong as ‘that cat in England who swings his ass off’. His dedication to music, I think, is without question. In September 1943, he landed at Salerno with a pistol in one hand and his trumpet in the other. I won’t say any more than that it is well worth listening to any one of his records. Incidentally, his own record label was Calligraph, named after one of his passions, calligraphy. He was the president of the Society for Italic Handwriting and was at one point a cartoonist of some note.

Humph was sent to a steel mill in Port Talbot as a young man to see if he had the makings of a captain of industry. The outcome was rather the opposite, as he became a lifelong socialist, albeit, as he described himself, ‘a romantic socialist.

Lyttelton was, despite his protestations to the contrary, modern to the last. His website, humphreylyttleton.com, carries a message that ends with Humph in introspective mode.

“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication.”

I think it is fair to say that Lyttelton was silly – gloriously, wonderfully silly – throughout his life.

Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, cartoonist, calligrapher, columnist, jazz trumpeter and host of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Born Eton, 23 May 1921, died London, 25 April 2008.

xD.

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