Apathy Sketchpad

I know it’s only February and I know there’s an election to look forward to, but if there’s a more completely absurd news story this year than the Gordon Brown bullying debacle then I’ll be very, very impressed.

The original story was pretty weird. The idea that the country was effectively run by a short-tempered, foul-mouthed Scot is, while not implausible, at least a bit derivative. It was pretty uninteresting when it was just allegations in a book, but then Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline told ITN that they’d had several calls from Downing Street staff and rather than everyone saying “that’s shocking, thankyou for raising this important point,” which is presumably what she was expecting, everyone said “hang on, isn’t that a massive breach of confidentiality?” and then every single one of the charity’s patrons resigned. That two of those patrons were members of the Conservative party (one Ann Widdecombe, one a London councillor) and the website carries an endorsement from David Cameron doesn’t make the whole thing look any better. Pratt responded to this by promising to dig through thousands more confidential emails so she’d have “proof” (as if that was the problem). Now there are concerns that the whole charity was never anything more than a front for an anti-bullying consultancy firm. They’ve spent almost nothing and are behind filing their paperwork.

That alone would be plenty of stupid for one story, but then an Asian news channel helpfully animated the whole story in GTA-style. That, I would say, is the second layer of absurdity in the story.

The last story they animated is an enraged Gordon Brown hurling a tangerine into a laminator. This never happened. It was in fact a story invented by Robert Popper, author of The Timewaster Letters, which he phoned in to the ever-credulous LBC radio station, and was somehow uncritically reported by both The Sun and The Telegraph.

I can only presume that The Sun, in their zeal to make Brown look just as bad as possible, will literally publish any old fucking nonsense sent into them. If someone told them that Gordon Brown heated his house by burning stolen babies I’m confident it would be front page news the next day. The Telegraph just print whatever everyone else print because why check something if the competition can do it for you? Essentially the press in this country is nothing more than an institutionalised grapevine.

Of course, this rather took the heat off the National Bullying Helpline, so it was good to see them back in the news today, when one of the other ex-patrons accused Pratt of bullying her.

TV presenter Sarah Cawood…, a former patron of the National Bullying Helpline, says Christine Pratt left her in tears after accusing her of failing the charity. ”She was really pushy and I felt bullied.”

If the worst Labour’s critics have to throw at them is obviously made-up stories and allegations from corrupt charities then (a) maybe we might be spared a Conservative government after all, and (b) they haven’t been paying close enough attention.

I await with baited breath next week’s developments in this story. For my money, I predict that David Cameron will ask Gordon Brown about the tangerine story in PMQ, Christine Pratt will peel off a rubber mask and turn out to be David Cameron (or, more probably given his complexion, vice versa) and someone at The Sun will read this blog and run with the stolen-babies story. I’m available for quotes.

The Church of England have launched a rather silly new website called sayoneforme.com. The site mostly consists of a big friendly green box into which you type a prayer. Then you click the button underneath, which I swear is marked ‘Amen’. A cynic might (and did) suggest that for all the difference it would make this might simply delete the text and say God’s read it, but instead the prayer is emailed to a selection of bishops who will pass it on to God for you if you’re too lazy to pray manually or if perhaps you don’t know how.

There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

To discover how honest homeopaths are, here is a passage from the Society of Homeopaths’ website, edited for accuracy:

Homeopathy simply explained: What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is an effective system of healing which assists the natural tendency of the body to heal itself. It recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of disharmony within the whole person and that it is the patient who needs treatment not the disease.

In 1796, a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann, discovered a different approach to the cure of the sick which he called homeopathy (from the Greek words meaning ’similar suffering’). Like Hippocrates two thousand years earlier, he realised there were two ways of treating ill health: the way of opposites, most commonly used by conventional medicine and the way of similars.

Hahnemann discovered that diluting and succussing (shaking) remedies, which homeopaths call potentisation, not only produced fewer side effects but also produced better results. Homeopathic remedies are drawn from the natural world and prescribed on the principle of treating “like with like” or the way of similars.

How does it work?

Scientists cannot yet explain the precise mechanism of action for homeopathy but there is published evidence of its efficacy. It is believed that homeopathic remedies work by stimulating the body’s own healing abilities and that this stimulus assists your own system to clear itself of any expressions of imbalance. For more details on research evidence, please see the Society’s website at www.homeopathy-soh.org.

That’s not too bad. I’ve crossed out very little by homeopathic dilution standards.

A theme I’ve heard a lot about from alternative medicine types is “choice”. Homeopaths in particular are extremely keen that everyone be given a choice between ‘conventional’ and homeopathic medicine. Choice is, of course, a good thing. People should have a choice wherever possible. But the way alternative medicine practitioners use the word is disingenuous at best.

I’m going to skip over the argument for choice within the NHS, as I think that’s more to do with entitlement issues and the persecution complex fringe groups always adopt when their absurd privileges are taken away — hence every ‘attack on Christianity’ news report you’ve ever read or the endless ‘put the football on the BBC’ petitions on the 10 Downing Street website. The problem with ‘choice’ as an argument for providing alternative remedies is that their practitioners are intent on taking away any choice you may have.

A particularly gutsy Deal Or No Deal contestant may find themselves offered the swap with only the 1p and £250,000 boxes in play. Their dilemma, essentially, is between the prize in box 4 and the prize in box 17. One of them is life-changing money, the other won’t cover their bus fare if they live down the road. If they call it wrong, we wouldn’t incredulously ask them why anyone would want 1p instead of £250,000. They were never given a meaningful choice.

Both extremes of the ‘choice’ argument can agree on one thing: homeopathy and evidence-based medicine do not both work. One of them cures diseases, and the other is a waste of time and money. A patient given a choice between homeopathy and real medicine is in the same position as the Deal Or No Deal contestant above: they want the medicine that will cure their disease, but they don’t know which box it’s in. The patient has no meaningful choice until they’re told which medicine works (at which point they still have no meaningful choice since one option just seems silly).

An uninformed choice is no choice at all, so the people pushing for consumer choice are the skeptics who work to disseminate evidence of efficacy or lack thereof, to expose quacks and to debunk media scare stories. They are giving people the information which enables them to make a choice. Homeopaths are effectively arguing that we are ‘anti-choice’ because we want to give people information that will make the choice so easy it will cease to exist. I think they are anti-choice because they deprive people of information that makes the choice meaningful — and often give out misinformation that makes the answer to their dilemma both obvious and wrong. When they die of a treatable condition, will the homeopath stand up in court and say ‘this is what he chose’?

Nobody is arguing that consumers should have a choice between conventional business deals and Nigerian princes who e-mail them opportunities.

I was reading a blogpost today by Labour MP Tom Harris, who I am inclined to like purely because I confuse him with Labour MP Tom Watson. In it, Harris decries the Liberal Democrats’ proposals for electoral reform.

Electoral reform looks to be coming, and it’s long past time. The current First Past The Post system magnifies majorities — any party winning 51% of the vote in every constituency will have 100% of the Parliamentary seats. (A cynic would think that this is why incumbent governments have been so far unwilling to change it.) In the last election, for example, the Liberal Democrats got 22% of the popular vote, but 18% of MPs, whereas Labour got 35% of the vote and 41% of MPs. A common proposed solution is Proportional Representation (PR), which is what happened at the European Parliament election: each constituency has multiple seats, which are doled out to best match the proportion of votes for each party. This would obviously benefit the Lib Dems and penalise Labour.

The Lib Dems are apparently proposing a Single Transferable Vote system, a form of PR where you also get to nominate a second choice. Harris says they’ve drawn up some ideas for how to divide up these new mega-constituencies that are designed to favour their own MPs as far as possible:

They want electoral reform, not for their own good – oh, no! – but for the good of the nation. … So, rather than leave the drawing of the new boundaries to a politically-neutral body such as the Boundary Commission, the LibDems have helpfully done it themselves. … Simply gerrymandering LibDem-held constituencies using the excuse that their MPs tend to represent rural areas simply isn’t honest. Not that we expect honesty from the Liberals, of course (a prize to the first commenter or Tweeter who claims that by attacking the Liberals I’m betraying my fear of the threat they pose).

Which is all well and good. Possibly they have cynically chosen this variant of PR and this map to maximise the benefit to their party, although the epic smackdown in the comments suggests otherwise. For some reason, I’m inclined to irrationally disregard his opinion because he uses the word ‘gerrymandering’ I have no earthly idea why. But, let’s have a look at Labour’s proposal.

Labour are suggesting Alternative Vote (AV). Here, someone disillusioned with Labour but rightly disgusted by the Conservatives might vote Lib Dem, but nominate Labour as ’second choice’. In most constituencies that would count as a Labour vote. This is obviously better than a system where left-wing voters are split between two parties and a right-wing minority can seize power, but given how much of Labour’s decline in support has been defection to the Liberal Democrats, it doesn’t look entirely selfless either.

Meanwhile the Conservatives, who despite their own best efforts are still favourites to win the election, don’t seem keen on reform at all, although this could be a part of their cunning electoral strategy of not doing or saying anything at all unless pressed, and then repeatedly U-turning until nobody knows what their position is.

A Heresy Corner commenter for some reason calling him or herself Wasp Box suggested The Report of the Independent Commission on the Voting System as a source of good, unbiased information, and the proposal in there is called Alternative Vote Top Up, which I think is AV with a pool of ‘top-up’ MPs attached to no constituency who would be selected to make sure the overall party numbers were about right. This report was commissioned by Labour, with the Lib Dems’ support, and neither of them are now following its recommendation. So maybe the Liberal Democrats have chosen the system that will benefit them the most, but even granting Harris that, the Lib Dem proposals are a lot better than those of his party, whose own report describes them as “unacceptable”.

I’d say all three major parties are pushing systems that would work out well for them. Quelle surprise. But to me, that just makes Harris’ condescending and sarcastic tone grate that much harder, especially since he’s attacking the one party whose self-interest is nearest to the public interest.

This Saturday, a lot of people are going to publicly overdose on homeopathic medicine, to prove that the pills are totally inert. This is part of the ‘10:23′ campaign. Personally, I love homeopathy. Its practices read like a scathing satire of alternative medicine. Literally every part of it is wrong. Just as you think it’s done being silly, you read the next bit and if anything it gets more absurd. Allow me to explain.

The way homeopathy works — I say ‘works’. The way homeopathy is thought to work — I say ‘thought’. The way homeopathy is believed to work is by a principle called ‘like cures like’. So you cure a disease using something that causes the same symptoms (even though they tell you that homeopathy treats diseases, not symptoms unlike, they say, something which they call ‘allopathy’ and which everyone else calls ‘medicine’). So, for example, say you have fractured limbs. As any player of Theme Hospital will tell you, Fractured Limbs is caused by falling from high places onto concrete, so you might get some concrete, put it in a glass of water and call it medicine. That’s a rather facetious example, but you can genuinely buy homeopathic remedies made with dolphin song or the light of Venus. The light of Venus? What disease does that cause? I think if you’re exposed to significant amounts of Venus-light then the terrible heat and the atmosphere of sulphuric acid will be what does for you. Homeopaths work out what diseases to flog these esoteric tinctures for by giving them to healthy people and writing down what it does to them. In case nothing happens, they omit such extravagances as a control group or any statistical tests, so they get the same guaranteed results as the N = 1 science of Braniac. They call these experiments ‘provings’, which is a bit like me writing ‘working’ on my timesheet when I was actually doodling: it is what I would like people to believe I was doing.

Anyway. You take your medicine, which you’ve carefully selected to be the worst possible thing you could give the patient, and dilute it. This, homeopaths conveniently assert, reduces its harmful effects while amplifying its presumed healing properties. You take a drop of the water with your medicine in, and put it in 10ml of fresh water, which is assumed to be about a 1:100 dilution, which they call “1C”. Then you shake it, or hit it with a book. (That obviously achieves nothing, so it can be fun to leave it out, thereby making homeopaths say amusingly daft things like ‘well of course it’s going to sound silly if you don’t mention the succussion’, which is the word they invented for hitting things with books.) Then you repeat the dilution, and succussion, so you have a 1:10,000 dilution, which they call “2C” and then again so you have a 1:1,000,000, or “3C” dilution. They call it a ‘potency’ instead of a ‘dilution’ because that sounds more like it might work, but chemists may recognise this as the technique used to remove all trace of a chemical from titration pipettes (except they’re delicate so you don’t hit them with books). Homeopathic remedies are routinely sold at a potency of “100C”, which means…

The problem with a 100C dilution is that it’s beyond analogy or satire. A 60C dilution would have to literally fill the entire universe before it had even a remotely realistic chance of containing a single molecule. When homeopathy was first imagined, we didn’t know about Avogadro’s Number, but now we know that beyond 12C there are generally no molecules left of the original medicine. It’s just a glass of water. So modern homeopaths have invented a thing called the ‘memory of water’. Some of them write long pieces of gibberish about quantum theory which read like a shooting script for one of the sillier episodes of Star Trek Voyager, but mostly they pin their meagre hopes on some kind of unspecified crystalline microstructures which they say form around molecules in water, and which heal your body somehow and don’t get damaged by being repeatedly hit with a book. Of course nobody has ever shown the memory of water effect in a laboratory or that homeopathic remedies have any therapeutic effect, but they write a lot more entertaining but merit-free quantum bullshit to explain that away. This empty water can optionally be soaked into a sugar pill if liquid medicine isn’t your thing, so my advice would be not to give hyperactive children homeopathic sleeping pills.

The problem with the ‘memory of water’ hypothesis (aside from the fact that it isn’t true) is that beyond a 24C dilution there is none of the 12C solution left either, so water would not only have to remember what it contained, but communicate this information to some future water. A 100C dilution would have had to do this at least four times. This aqueous Chinese-whispers obviously has no active ingredient, and homeopaths therefore believe that the real power of homeopathy is that it activates the body’s own healing powers, which sounds very natural and healthy but raises two rather important questions, the first of which is ‘why doesn’t the body just use those powers in the first place?’, and the second of which is ‘what environment did mankind evolve in where this was the best system?’. Developing an immune system that needs kick-starting by some water which used to have poison in it seems to me like an evolutionary mis-step.

No, the immune system evolved to try its level best to fix anything that might go wrong in the body, but it’s a bit of an ad-hoc job and doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it fails, and sometimes epically backfires and kills its owner. Modern medicine works by giving a group of intelligent people a deep understanding and knowledge of anatomy, asking them to interfere with the natural progression of a disease, and banking on their expertise to make a better fist of it than the body’s in-built system, which by the way is the same system that reckons if you don’t wash your face enough you need a load of spots that hurt to clean. It’s a slightly messy process, obviously, because there’s a finite number of options available, so we do massive amounts of research to discover every effect that every chemical and surgical procedure we can think of has on the body. Doctors look through that research to find one which will do what they need it to, and anything else it happens to do is called a ’side effect’ and the patient has to put up with them or take their chances with the disease.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, insist their medicine has no side effects. Much like the Daily Mail, they see the world as divided into ‘healing’ and ‘disease-causing’ things, and like the Daily Mail put everything on both lists. It’s just a pathetic piece of magical thinking which belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works. It’s not divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things; things are right or wrong for a particular purpose. It’s this kind of thinking that leads to people putting deisel in a petrol engine, assuming they haven’t ruined it already by using 100C unleaded.

Homeopathic medicines in Boots, labelled with poncey Latin names to appear more credible. Hence the alternative spelling ‘homœopathy’.
photo credit: Gwyn Richards

And obviously people are perfectly free to think this way and to spend many a happy afternoon pointlessly diluting glasses of water and hitting them with books. Probably the ritual will make them feel better. But if people rely on this voodoo nonsense instead of real medicine, they die. And when they promote it over real medicine, they kill. Boots the Chemist have admitted in Parliament that there is no evidence that homeopathic medicines work, but they sell them anyway, alongside the real medicine, because “[their] customers think they work”. Campaigns like 10:23 are important to minimise the harm these things do.

Homeopaths will tell you that 10:23 does nothing to disprove homeopathy. The stunt is for loads of people to each chug an entire box of pills all at once to demonstrate that nothing happens. Such homeopathic overdose stunts have been done before, and homeopaths have got their excuse down pat by now: they say that any non-zero number of pills, if swallowed all at once, is the same as one pill. (I agree, apart from the ‘non-zero’ part.) They can say this, and indeed anything they like, because once you’ve effectively invoked magic, all bets are off. But the point isn’t to convince homeopaths — they’re far too invested to quit now — but to show everyone else how silly it is. If you have a bit of a cold and someone suggests you try homeopathy, and you do and you get better because it was only a cold, that can be quite convincing. But if we can goad the homeopathic community into publicly saying something as patently absurd as “one hundred pills is the same dose as one pill” then that’s a valuable victory. Anyone who’s seen that will think twice before entrusting their health to a homeopath. It also raises questions about why the packaging of these pills says to take a dose of two. That’s the business plan of a dodgy plumber.

That’s the point: we don’t need to disprove homeopathy. Aside from the fact that it is the homeopaths’ responsibility to prove their theory, all you need to do to homeopathy is hand it enough rope. A public awareness campaign is exactly the last thing homeopaths need.

Games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto come in for a lot of stick, from simpletons who assume we’ll be violent in real life after playing them, and from moralistic fools who think we shouldn’t be playing them anyway because it’s ‘wrong’ to press a button that makes a machine draw a picture of how it imagines a man killing a prostitute would look.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?

Five years ago, I subscribed to Amazon.co.uk’s e-mail newsletter because I thought it might be useful. It was. I thought it might alert me to offers I’d be interested in. It did. It has since become less useful. To illustrate why it is less useful now, and because I like them, here is a graph:

You may notice that December 2009 is not included on this graph. So far this month, I’ve had 9 e-mails, excluding ones related to orders. That’s equivalent to almost exactly 20 for the month as a whole, but I thought it likely they’d subside around Christmas, so it seemed fairest not to include it. Even without this datum, there’s a pretty clear trend: Amazon have stopped emailing me none-to-two times a month and taken to emailing me nine-to-twelve times a month. In the last week, Amazon have sent me six promotional e-mails. Their average for December is one every 36 hours or so. This graph reminds me of the terrifying one from An Inconvenient Truth. If it carries on at this rate then before too long it’ll catch up with the now glacially slow increase in my GMail storage quota.

Amazon have been spectacularly unhelpful in this regard. I e-mailed them about it and they said:

Dear Customer

Thank you for writing to Amazon.co.uk with your enquiry.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused in this regard.

I understand from your email that you are receiving more promotional emails everyday.

Please understand that these are automated and system generated emails. Unfortunately we do not provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer.

We do have an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

If you would us to remove your email from the mailing list, please confirm using the link below:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/email

As an Amazon.co.uk customer or subscriber, you can receive e-mail updates about important functionality changes to the website, new Amazon.co.uk services, and special offers we believe would be beneficial to you.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.co.uk.

Did we answer your question?

Well, no, it didn’t (and your link didn’t work).

I want my old, useful e-mail alerts back. I don’t want to run and hide from broken things; I want to work with their operators to improve them. I don’t want to start my own online shop. I’d be terrible at that. I just want one that works how I want it to so that I can buy things from it, and I’m happy to give a little of my time to help existing ones do that. I think if everyone did that we’d have a lovely little world where everything worked. But it needs the companies to co-operate with us, so I get cross if, when I give a company useful information for free, I’m fobbed off with a response like the one above. Worse still, there’s no real ‘reply’ option, merely a ‘tell us how we could have improved our response’ option, which is a needlessly roundabout and confusing question which I wouldn’t know how to begin answering.

So I’m replying here:

Dear Amazon,

No, you did not answer my question. (And technically I didn’t ask one.)

Allow me to reiterate: recently your e-mail alert system has taken to sending me a promotional e-mail every 36 hours or so. That volume of e-mail is neither useful nor solicited. You are abusing the contact details I provided you with to run a spamming campaign.

It sounds from your e-mail like your automated newsletter system has, for reasons best known to itself, elected to send me absurd amounts of increasingly useless e-mails. Let us be clear: this is a fault in your system and one which is costing you money. Fix it. Install a provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer. I am happy to help you do this. A good start would be to stop sending people ‘deals of the week in electronics’ because they buy one memory stick a decade from you. Stop hectoring me to take out a trial of Amazon Prime. I don’t want Amazon Prime, because contrary to what your newsletter-droid apparently believes, I don’t use Amazon nearly enough to make it worthwhile. Don’t try to sell me shoes. I am never going to buy shoes from you; I have enough trouble finding ones that fit in real shops where I can try them on. Off the top of my head, perhaps you could weight each offer by how good it is and its relevance to my purchase history, and give me a slider for what ‘value’ threshold I’m willing to accept, or else give me a slider for how many e-mails I’m prepared to read every month and you can adjust the value threshold for me based on that. Maybe you could offer a weekly or monthly ‘digest’ email with anything this system filters out (obviously excluding offers which have by then expired).

It is in our mutual interest for me to when you have a relevant offer on. The system you use to alert me to this is massively broken. I thought you might be interested in this information but apparently you are not.

Suit yourselves,

Andrew