Apathy Sketchpad

I sent this to Newsjack. They didn’t use it. Given the reception Newsjack got I’m not sure how annoyed I really ought to feel about that. That’s not to say it was all bad by any means, but if it’s worse than the worst thing in Newsjack then I really shouldn’t show it to anyone ever. In any case, it’s sufficiently topical that I presume if I sit on it any longer it will cease to be any use to anyone, so here it is:

So the Practice Election is over. I thought it was the European Parliament election, and the local council elections. That’s what I thought it was. But apparently I was wrong and it was just a practice-run for the general election that David Cameron is so keen on. I assume this because I’m being told to vote Conservative “if [I'm] sick of Gordon Brown’s hopeless Govenment”.

The Conservative position at the moment seems to be ‘Vote For Us; We’re Not Labour’. They’ve got a checklist on their leaflet of policies that they support and Labour oppose — which is fine, but they’re bound to differ on some points or they’d be the same party, so unless they explain why these policies are good ideas, they’re saying little more than ‘We Support Our Own Policies’. And they’re all just generically right-wing policies. Everything on the list is in the form ‘voting against EU [blank]‘. I get how they’re not Labour, but they do seem to be UKIP.

Third on the list is “Voting to keep the UK’s opt-out from the EU Working Time Directive, allowing people to choose how much overtime they work”. As I understand it, the idea of the Directive is to make sure nobody is forced them to work nominally-voluntary overtime, say by paying them so little that they basically have no choice. I don’t know if I support that, but if I oppose it it’s not because (from the leaflet):

More than three million people in the UK, many working in the health service, have opted out of the Euro-regulations because they rely on overtime to boost their pay to make ends meet.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood this, but it seems to me that if you need to work overtime in order to make ends meet, then you’re being exploited. If you have a full-time job and can’t support yourself on your basic salary, you’re not being paid enough. Unless they all have irresponsibly vast progenies, this isn’t an argument against the Working Time Directive, it’s an argument for a massive increase in the minimum wage and a Working Time Directive. These are surely exactly the people this regulation is designed to protect? Once it’s illegal for them to do the overtime, presumably their employers will be forced to increase their wages, because they’re not going to turn up if the pay isn’t enough to live on. They’ll look for something else and claim benefits in the meantime. Surely that’s exactly the point?

But mostly what makes me cross about the Conservatives lately is their ‘handling’ of the MPs’ Expenses scandal. David Cameron, realising that ‘MPs’ becomes ‘the Government’ in people’s heads, then ‘Gordon Brown’ and then ‘Labour’, keeps standing up in Parliament shouting about how Gordon Brown has ‘lost control’ and ‘isn’t it time to call an election and let the public say how they feel’, all without mentioning that almost all the really bad expenses stories were Tory MPs. Brown can’t control the opposition MPs, therefore there should be an election, at which everyone will vote Conservative because they’re ahead in the polls principally because they swindled their expenses.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much like Labour either. But I think the extent of their present unpopularity is unfair — it’s caused more by bad timing, Gordon Brown’s inability to control his own facial muscles and the cross-party-at-worst expenses scandal than anything they’ve particularly done wrong — and the Conservatives aren’t better. The Conservatives think anti-science nonsense-fountain Nadine Dorries is a viable MP. Ann Widdecombe, an insane, shouty, far-right lunatic who supported The Master for Prime Minister, is their health secretary. They are, if anything, worse than Labour at almost everything that Labour are unpopular for, but they’ve cunningly exploited it as a selling point anyway because they’re The Opposition, and it’s an easier narrative if you can Vote For Change than if there are inconvenient details like, say, the Liberal Democrats to worry about.

And people fall for it. The council election results are in. The Guardian put them on a map, and it just looks like a map of Britain painted blue. There’s one Lib Dem council, a few with No Overall Control, and the rest are Tory (and a few in a nice sky blue that wasn’t on the key so I don’t know what it means).

There are even fears that the BNP might get a seat on the EU Parliament. That’s almost criminal — they’re not remotely interested in contributing to the running of the EU; they just want cash. A seat on the Parliament comes with £5 million of funding, which they could use to push their racist agenda. You can’t let a racist fringe party have that kind of public money just because you’re upset at MPs. And again, they’re not a protest vote because they’re worse than either Labour or the Conservatives. Okay, so some Labour and Tory MPs fiddled their expenses, but BNP members (they escaped the scandal by cunningly not having any MPs) have made explosives, attacked people, robbed houses, stolen cars and assaulted the police.

And it’s hard to say before the results come out, but apparently there’s a chance they’ll manage it. If they do, I shall blame the Telegraph newspaper. There’s no point blaming the people who voted BNP or the BNP themselves; they’re all idiots or racists or both, and you can’t expect any better of those people. But the Telegraph ought to know better.

The reason I blame the Telegraph is that they were the ones to break the expenses story. And they could have done so properly: reporting the genuinely scandalous examples as such, while praising or quietly ignoring MPs whose expenses claims were perfectly reasonable. Instead, they tried to read a scandal into even the most innocent behaviour, and paint all MPs as equally corrupt. Possibly they did this because targeting the worst offenders is difficult for a historically pro-Tory paper, but it did wonders for the BNP, who immediately started shouting nonsense like ‘punish the pigs’ as if petty revenge was a good reason to vote fascist. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, who are less corrupt and less terrifyingly illiberal than any of the above parties, haven’t been doing as well as one might expect, and I put this down to the Telegraph trying to paint them as corrupt for no good reason and the ‘two-party’ false dilemma whereby people unhappy with life under a Labour government automatically side with the Tories without bothering to look up either party’s policies.

Basically, people need to take a good long look at their reasons for voting. ‘Punishing’ the government is not a reason. A demand for vague, unspecified ‘change’ is not a reason. ‘We always vote Labour in our family’ is not a reason. A reason is something like ‘I strongly agree with his policies on Europe and the environment’.

Because it turns out this stuff might be important some day.

I don’t know if this will be of use to anyone, but nonetheless. When I get email, Google Talk alerts me. If I click the alert, I just get the message in Chrome, not the full GMail interface. This doesn’t have a button, for example, to apply a label to the message, so I wrote a bookmarklet that takes me to the equivalent page in the full interface. It’s here if you want it:

GMail

To install, drag it to your bookmarks bar. To save you having two bookmarklets, if you are viewing any other page, it will open GMail.

I’ve just read about a thing called the Dice-O-Matic. The gist is that the operator of GamesByEmail.com requires a lot of random numbers between one and six inclusive to feed his collection of online dice-games. And inevitably, people have complained that the numbers he’s used are insufficiently random.

And maybe they were, once. Originally, GamesByEmail used the pseudo-random number generator built into whatever the games are written in. Once ‘seeded’ with a starting number, such an algorithm will spit out a string of numbers which will have all the same properties as random numbers, except that if you know the seed, they’re totally reproducible (although still essentially unpredictable, much like the digits of π*). They’re generally seeded from a high-resolution timer, so this should never be a problem. They also repeat if you run it for long enough, so you should re-seed periodically. In theory, this should be fine, but you have to be very careful not to accidentally bias the selection.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to tell if your numbers are random enough or not. For example, some episodes of the dreary logical fallacy roadshow that is Deal Or No Deal used an Excel spreadsheet to randomise the assignment of 22 sums of money to 22 boxes — for which there are probably more sequences than there are grains of sand in the world — and the seeding was bad enough that only twelve of them arose in over forty shows. You can experience this for yourself: whether by accident or design, the Concentration mini-game in Super Mario Brothers III only ever shows players eight out of a possible 58 billion permutations of cards. The producers of Deal or No Deal switched over to drawing lots by hand.

  
xkcd’s ‘Random’ comic, which illustrates the difference between actual randomness and unpredictability, which is far more useful.

So (I infer) GamesByEmail switched to using random.org for their random numbers. Random.org link to their own story of a quiz show failing to randomise, this time costing them $100,000 in prize money (not that it brought anyone any happiness), and solve the problem of generating random numbers by means of four cheap radio antennae in Dublin, tuned into nothing in particular. The waveform of the white noise between radio stations is recorded, and the least significant bit (the last digit in binary; 0 for even numbers and 1 for odd) is recorded. Then, the stream of numbers are chunked into pairs, so 01001101 would become 01 00 11 01. 00 and 11 would be discarded as insufficiently random, and the first digits of the remaining pairs would be kept, so 01001101 gives two zeros. They throw away about 97% of the radio data, keeping only the most unpredictable bits possible. Your TV does a similar thing in reverse, when it blocks out random data and replaces it with a blue screen, while foolishly allowing Deal Or No Deal through unimpeded. It’s as near to pure randomness as you’ll get without invoking quantum theory (which states that some events in the universe are totally random, and indeed you can buy modules for your computer to generate random numbers in this way).

Of course, people still complain about the numbers from random.org. Of course they do. Random numbers, by their very nature, don’t look random. People believe in winning streaks, lucky socks, and prayer for exactly this reason. If I recall correctly, ball 44 was well known for a time in the National Lottery because it came up more than the others in the first few weeks, even though actually there were several sets of balls in use. Partly this is because humans have evolved to be shit-hot at spotting patterns, because in the wild that can stop us being killed. Natural selection favours the caveman who won’t eat the same berries that Ug, Thag and Og ate right before they died. In fact, generally people will eschew the berries after just one person dies. That’s a good plan for surviving in the wild, but it does make us spot patterns where none exist. Try it. Have random.org roll 16 virtual dice for you. I did it, and the sequence started 1155. That doesn’t look random. It had a 123 in it too. And there was only one 4. People tend to think numbers are random if they’re uniform: if I shuffled the numbers 1–6 into a random order (say, 341625), people would rather believe that was the result of six dice rolls than 115561, the first six that random.org gave me — but really the odds of getting one of every number are less than 2%.

If you encourage people to spot patterns, they can be relied upon to do so, regardless of whether the patterns exist. B F Skinner demonstrated this in pigeons in 1947. Pigeons were put in cages and fed periodically, “with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behaviour”. At least six out of eight of them became totally convinced that they could cause food to be delivered by repeating some arbitrary motion such as turning anticlockwise. This has been replicated with humans, perhaps most famously by Derren Brown in Trick Or Treat, proving that Channel Four cater for both ends of the intellectual spectrum. Five guests were put in a room full of toys and instructed to accumulate 100 points to win a prize. In fact the points counter was controlled by two fish swimming around at random in another room (i.e., a poisson distribution). At the end of the game, four of the five guests were totally convinced they’d figured out a sure-fire way to score points. The other guest was Doctor Who. This may or may not be significant.

Random.org solved this problem by running constant statistical tests on their numbers. The numbers are expected to pass these tests most of the time — but not too often, or else that would be suspicious. GamesByEmail.com felt they needed something a bit more accessible to the kind of person who plays dice-games on the internet, so they built the brilliantly terrifying “Dice-O-Matic Mark II”. It is, in their words, “a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day”. It is literally a massive machine full of dice, which scoops them up, flashes them past a camera which notes down what numbers they show, and then flings them onto a ramp, whence they bounce back into the “pure seething violence” of the hopper full of dice ready to go round again. It runs about 90 minutes a day, and you can tell when it’s running from two rooms away. (It also uses some image processing which I found interesting because that’s what I do. If you want to read about it, visit GamesByEmail’s page.)

Ironically, I suppose, it’s technically less random than the random.org numbers were, but it’s a great PR move. After all, nobody can say it’s not a realistic simulation of dice: it is dice. But it neatly demonstrates the problem faced by people like lottery organisers: their job is to provide people with something people are practically designed not to be able to see. This may be why GamesByEmail add:

There is no doubt that I will still receive complaints about the rolls, but now I can honestly say I have done all that I can possibly do: the rolls you get are exactly as random as those you would get throwing by hand. As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice.

What with being away, I’ve only just this minute seen the BNP Party Political Broadcast.

At least, I thought I had. Now I’m fairly convinced what I saw was a brilliant satire. I tend to ignore the BNP, so I wouldn’t know Nick Griffin from Peter Serafinowicz in a fatsuit. I’m given to understand that the BNP are trying to claim popularity on the back of the MPs’ expenses scandal, presumably on the grounds that MPs are unpopular and they’re the only party who don’t have any. If this video is real, they’re actually going more for a kind of pity-vote. It’s so adorable. Here, have a look:

My favourite part is the woman who stands in front of bemused-looking houses presenting a bizarre kind of plumbing forecast. I love that she stumbles repeatedly on the word ‘hip’, and yet nobody thought to try anything as reckless as a second take. But my favourite part of this, my favourite part, is when it cuts from there to another, nearly identical scene, with about half a nanosecond’s pause between the sentences. It looks like a Mitchell and Webb sketch that would start with ‘hello and welcome to Coverage Of People Asking For Security Lighting And Getting It. We’re here with this elderly couple who want a downstairs shower and we’ll be catching up with them when it’s been installed which is now’.

I also liked the bit where Nick Griffin brilliantly promises ‘no Big Brother spychips, inyerbins’, as if that had ever been a major concern. You can’t just make up policies and then promise not to enact them. ‘No spy chips in your bins, no compulsory gay sex for children, and we won’t nail a railway sleeper to your dog.’ Thanks. I think I’m going to go vote for the man from the Nationwide adverts.

And just when you think it might actually be real, it cuts to hopeless graphic of the website, with a voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in a toilet cubicle. And then the phone number appears behind the on-screen graphic! That’s the final brilliant touch that lifts this video out of Slightly Naff and into the realm of Satirical Genius.

And the whole way through the video, everyone is trying very hard to squeeze everything in. There are almost no pauses between sentences, even where you really need one. And yet, most of the time they’ve used is wasted on fluffing lines and the huge pause at the end while clipart shuffles ponderously around the screen.

It can’t be real — nobody would sign off on it as anything other than parody.

You probably already know this, but the science writer Simon Singh is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for referring to chiropractic treatments of some conditions as ‘bogus’. You probably know that British libel law perversely assumes guilt until innocence is proven. (Sign this petition to change that.) You probably know that Judge Eady ruled in a preliminary hearing that ‘bogus’ means ‘deliberately fraudulent’, even though this is not what Singh meant, and that unless he can get this changed on appeal he has little hope of winning the case. This is, of course, roughly the same as if someone sued you for calling them a bitch and the judge ruled that you had to pay £100,000 if you couldn’t prove the plaintiff was of the genus canis.

I assume that you know all this because you are reading a blog, and at that a blog which frequently mentions science and political issues. You are exactly the kind of person I would expect to know exactly this kind of thing. Let’s take a step back and see what you’d know if you got your news from newspapers and TV.

The Guardian, whose paper carried the in-no-way-offending comment in the first place, have published precisely one follow-up that I have found:

Singh said he would like to fight it, because he is unhappy about the interpretation put on his words. “But there is a bigger issue about the state of our libel laws and how easy it is to be a science journalist or any journalist,” he said.

They elected not to mention what that wider issue is or that the interpretation put on Singh’s words was totally unreasonable, although they did mention that they bankrolled his legal defence (as they did for Ben Goldacre when Matthias Rath sued him) – frankly if newspapers do stop being able to make money then the Guardian should consider applying for charitable status. They do more good than many groups that have it.

The Times has published, as far as I can find, exactly one sentence on the subject, which was totally uncritical of the case and which they used to make Singh sound like a bad person and to put words in his mouth:

On Thursday the [Edinburgh Skeptics] society is addressed by Dr Simon Singh, the author who is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for his dismissals of the efficacy of chiropractise.

The Telegraph have not mentioned it, nor have the Independent. BBC.co.uk has nothing on it, as does channel4.com. Bizarrely, Sky News can’t sort search results by date so I have no idea whether they’ve deigned to mention it. (The above searches were performed with the sites’ own search functions, so they’ve only themselves to blame if I’ve missed anything.)

That’s a bit crap, considering this is a story about newspapers. The Telegraph, having exhausted all the abuses of the Parliamentary expenses (which a Guardian journalist did all the legwork for), have set about listing everything else MPs have claimed for and trying to insinuate a scandal around each one where generally none exists, and yet don’t apparently have room for even one article about a genuine scandal that is representative of a massive and unwarranted threat of litigation that hangs over them every time they publish any kind of comment piece.

I’ve said before that I get my news from blogs, Twitter, friends and the Internet. I said at the time that newspapers were still a vital primary source, but they’re just not. We know about this from Nature, NewScientist, nerds on Twitter, blogs and so forth, not from newspapers — despite it being about them. The same was true of the planned law to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act — despite their willingness to cash in on the fruits of that victory.

We don’t need the newspapers any more. Clearly we can do this on our own.

Theos, the self-appointed ‘public theology think-tank’, whatever precisely a ‘think-tank’ actually is, have done another survey. Their last one, you may recall, reached such eminently plausible conclusions as ‘38% of Jews believe in the virgin birth of Christ’ and ‘36% of people of no religion celebrate Christmas as a religious festival’. This one says that 39% of Britons (including 50% of Londoners) believe in ghosts. The margins of error aren’t quoted, but you can work them out and they’re about 39%±2% and 50%±5%. It also says that 22% (±2%) of Britons believe in astrology.

Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

This is a long rambling post dissecting the arguments of one Tom Vizzini with regards to swine flu. It may or may not be of interest to you, but I had to get this out of my head so that I can sleep, and to that end I’ve put it here. Read it if you want.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: ■ Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.