Apathy Sketchpad

Almost exactly a month ago (yeah, yeah), the Centre for Policy Studies published “In Bad Faith”, rallying against… well, let’s let the author, Christina Odone, explain…

The witch hunt is on. A Government obsessed with phoney egalitarianism and control freakery is aligning itself with the strident secularist lobby to threaten the future of faith schools in Britain.

I shall defer responding to this to the rather brilliantly ranty article published by Andrew Copson in the Guardian:

Few apart from than Odone can have noticed this dangerous development. Under Labour governments since 1997 more new state-funded faith schools have opened than under any other government, and there is no sign that this increase is being stemmed or about to be. Certainly no evidence for such a change of direction is presented in today’s pamphlet, a mish-mash of anecdote, selective factoids and non-sequiturs (”The schools are not divisive. Not one of the 72 British citizens convicted under the Terrorism Act of 2000 attended a faith school.”).

So what’s the problem?

[Faith schools] are out with Gordon Brown.

The Prime Minister may acknowledge that his faith is important to him. But so is his standing with the Labour party – all the more so given his record-low popularity with the voters. Gordon Brown knows that for the ‘Old Labour’ rump of the party, equally committed to secularism and comprehensive education, faith schools are anathema. Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ were ready to ignore this constituency, but Gordon Brown cannot afford to.

It occurs to me that what people voted for in the last election was not faith schools, not Blair, nor Brown, but it was Labour. If Labour are largely against faith schools then surely Odone is accusing Brown of nothing more than keeping the promise Blair reneged on?

Here is her example of a faith school that’s good:

In contrast to the graffiti that covers the neighbouring buildings, and the litter on the streets and pavements, the Sir John Cass complex is impressively tidy and clean. Youngsters (the school is co-ed) in navy blue uniforms walk briskly but quietly in the corridors, greeting teachers with ‘Hello Sir’ or ‘Hello Miss’. When they spot the head, Haydn Evans, they fall silent to attention. It is easy to understand their awe: when one boy arrives with his tie askew, Evans, eyebrow raised, picks him up on it: ‘Where’s your uniform?’

He sounds like a dick who rules by fear to me. I mean, I’d hate to generalise just from that, but it’s hardly convincing me that faith schools are worth the rampant discrimination and segregation required to sustain them. In any case, this is a Church of England school with 60% Muslim students (just like most faith schools, I’m unwilling to bet), and yet they persist in the pointless and rather silly charade of having a little prayer that most of the students don’t believe in. If this school, with students from a broad mix of (parents’) faiths, is the best example in favour of faith schools you can find, surely that’s an argument against them? At least it’s an argument against the aribtrary suspension of discrimination laws for their special case?

After this she bangs on for a while about the good results faith schools get in league tables. Now I don’t know a lot about schools, but I do know a bit about science. I know that you can’t just say they’re good because “they account for a third of all primary schools but make up almost two-thirds of the top 209 primaries”. That could mean anything. It could mean that selection works. It could mean they’re largely in areas where people get good results. You have to compare them with a matched control group, not just every other school. That’s a meaningless comparison.

In any case, to be frank I’d not be at all surprised if faith schools gave good exam results. I just think that those good exam results will be on the CVs of fucked up children. That, to me, isn’t progress. I for one would rather my children, should I ever have any, grew up to be well-balanced people with poor grades than unlikeable conservative nerds. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it’s the children of ultra-religious people who need secular education most, and saying “if you don’t like it, pick another school” is like saying “let’s legalise murder, and if you don’t like it, don’t kill anyone”: it very much misses the point. Faith schools are a Catch-22: the people who want them are the people it is most important shouldn’t get them.

She also makes an appeal to populatity, saying

Among Christian parents, faith schools are so popular that they are allegedly pushing their children into late baptisms to secure places at these schools. Meanwhile, parents who were turned away from over-subscribed faith schools refuse to accept the alternative: about 70,000 appeals are launched each year.

But this is also misleading: the public in general are against faith schools. Parents want their kids to go to good schools. They don’t care what religion that school is.

In chapter two, Odone makes a poor attempt to address the idea that selection may be responsible for the better results:

Critics maintain that faith schools use the admissions procedure to usher in a better-off intake. As evidence, they point to the schools’ under-representation of children on Free School Meals (FSM)…

But the National Audit Office warns that FSM do not necessarily serve as the best proxy for poor income. Its reservations were corroborated by research carried out last year for the Centre for the Economics of Education.

Fair enough perhaps, but let’s not forget you’re happy to use league tables against a hopelessly unmatched control as a proxy for efficacy. Besides, she’s in favour of selection:

To the Government, as Ed Balls’s attack revealed, a request for a marriage certificate as part of an application form is an ignominious attempt to flush out single mothers. To the Orthodox Jewish school, it is the only way to verify that both parents are born Jews.

Yes, but here in Britain we don’t stand for that kind of shit. Born Jews? That’s not “maintaining the religious ethos of the school”, that’s racism. I’d think Jews, of all people, would know better than that. She lists other, similar examples, which yes, do ensure that the school’s religious makeup is controlled, but plainly also act as proxies for performance selection.

Chapter four (chapter three saying nothing of any consequence) again opens with what Odone wrongly considers a lovely story about what she hopefully-wrongly perceives to be one of the better faith schools. Since the schools featured are her choice from the minority of ones that responded, from the minority of ones she contacted, I dismissed it out of hand. After that she starts explaining the idea that Muslim students or their parents might be offended by many aspects of what she quite wrongly describes as our “secular” state school system. These include “gym where their modesty is affronted” — believe me, at secondary school I would have liked little more than a decent affront to modesty in gym class and it really doesn’t happen — and “the school trip to a farm where they might come into contact with a pig” — which did happen. It was a Gloucester Old Spot. It wasn’t scary or offensive in the least. Of course, I’m not a Muslim, but screw them; if they want to complain about the prospect of their child maybe meeting a pig then they should have a better reason than “oh, we just don’t like pigs”. But Odone says that “feeling misunderstood or rejected by their peers at school, and frustrated in their ambitions beyond it, these youngsters are likely to be receptive to radical messages.” People will blow up trains because they met a pig? Are you serious?

Next is her observation, if you can call it that, that “not one of the 77 convicted on terrorism charges since the Terrorism Act 2000 attended a Muslim school”. What the Guardian article didn’t tell me was the comedy gem hiding after the semicolon: “one, Ader Ahmed, was home-schooled.” So basically he went to a really small faith school? I’m against home-schooling too. That plays right into my existing prejudice. (I realise the pamphlet isn’t aimed just at me, but then, I tend to think that people who share one opinion with me probably share other related ones too.)

Next, she starts implying that the alternative to proper Muslim schooling is little girls being packaged off to Pakistan to marry close relatives:

“The Drugs sex and rock and roll scene is not an option for Muslim girls,” Humeira Khan points out, “or if it is, it sparks huge conflict. So suddenly marrying them early or sending them home [to Pakistan or Bangladesh] becomes a huge pressure.”

Trust me, it’s not an option for anyone at school. Did you never even watch The Inbetweeners? Unless you’ve been sitting up all night watching Skins, which frankly raises even more worrying questions, there’s no reason to be afraid of what happens in the average British school. I’d be far more concerned about the effects of a Muslim education on a young girl. If that results in some people sending their children to more illiberal countries, I think we have to accept that as a consequence of being ahead of the rest of the world. Lead by example. You know or “liberate” Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The fifth chapter (by which point I was skipping the “example” schools entirely) points out that far from “educational ghettos where Christian children learn about Creationism and Muslim children about jihad, while Jewish children are taught they alone are Chosen People” (an accusation I would never make — they’re not educational! Ho ho!), “faith schools in the state system must follow the National Curriculum, including Citizenship education.” Well that’s swell and all, but — and again I don’t know a lot about schools so this may be totally wrong — surely a school which actually is pluralistic, multicultural and inclusive is going to be more effective than a school which is monoreligious, monocultural and exclusive, with a lesson (eating up an hour a week of expensive teaching time) in place to teach students tolerance as if it’s something that can be examined? Odone points out that “all maintained schools are under an ‘obligation’ to promote community cohesion,” but that doesn’t mean they actually do it. The government could mandate that all bank clerks must fly to work on jetpacks, it wouldn’t make it so.

Chapter six, ‘Smears’, mentions creationism. Odone claims that creationism in Britain is basically a myth:

Creationism, then, is not a wild fire sweeping the country’s schools; it is not taught in science classes in place of, or as an alternative to, evolution. Instead, Creationism is taught, in a handful of schools, as part of their study of the Bible in RE. Those Christian students who subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible will believe that God made the world, and man, in seven days; but thanks to the National Curriculum they will also know that science has proved otherwise. In this way their Christianity has to accommodate their learning.

Channel 4 say otherwise. And so does the scary Jewish headmaster in their film.

After that there is a summary saying “as we have seen, the charges against faith schools can be
dismissed one by one” which as I think we have seen, she didn’t actually do with any kind of success.

And that’s why she’s awarded this month’s Crackpot title.

One thing I’m growing to like more and more about the internet is how easy stuff like Blogger or WordPress make it to start a website for any old pointless reason, and there’s very little to stop that website expanding to silly proportions. This means that there are a growing number of websites dedicated to documenting rather specific things, and with a whole world to send in submissions, there are lots of examples of them all. Here are a few I know well:

Language

• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks: signs, shops, and the odd cake wreck or passive-aggressive note, with “scare quotes” or just plain “wrong quotes”.
• Engrish: badly translated English-language signs and products from Japan.
• Literally, A Web Log: tracking misuse of the word ‘literally’.
• Red Pen, Inc.: Mocking bad punctuation and grammar on the internet. See also barrelfishhunting.wordpress.com.
• That’s Punny!: Puns. Mostly bad ones, but that’s like saying “basketball players; mostly tall ones”.
• Apostrophe Abuse: A home for misplaced apostrophes.
• Apostrophe Catastrophe: More of the same. Including a delightfully ironic “student’s for McCain” pen.

Signage

• Signs that Fascinate and Intruige: a Facebook group with thousands of photos of dumb signs. Has a strict rule about it having to be something the submitter found, so no internet virals. Still a scary number of things.
• Say What?: A blog along similarly signatory lines. Pretty good hit rate in a field where that’s unusual.
• Crummy Church Signs: I always approve of mocking churches.
• Hairdressers With Funny Names: Technically a Flickr group but I’m including it anyway.
• A page with daft park bench plaques.
• Oddly Specific signs

Notage

• Passive-Aggressive Notes: notes and signs, and emails, left by housemates, co-workers, employees, and so on. There’s some shocking stuff in there.
• Postcards From Yo Mamma: emails and web-chats sent by mothers to their grown-up children.
• Stall Wall Poetry: A compendium of toilet graffiti.
• Oversharers: Too much information mostly from Twitter.
• Angry People In Local Newspapers: you will get used to the idea that these blogs are named somewhat directly.

Stupiditage

• Not Always Right: collecting stories of daft and unreasonable requests made by customers to put-upon retail staff.
• spEak You’re bRanes: a collection of dumb comments written by idiots, mostly from the BBC’s singularly awful Have Your Say section, where right-wing morons make bad suggestions, jokes that don’t work, and unreasonable demands. That’s probably why it’s at ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com.
• Readers’ Letters: a similar site aimed at primarily-offline media such as newspapers and magazines. Annoyingly LiveJournal-based, but I think we have to forgive that if only because [nja]’s current userpic looks so delightfully like Elvis Costello cover-art.
• Take A Weird Break: hilarious dross from bad magazines
• This Is Photobomb: photos that bad people have ruined.
• Texts From Last Night: drunken SMS messages.
• Facebook Animations: flicking back and forth between consecutive photos on Facebook.
• Overheard In The Office: well obviously this is things overheard in offices.
• Local Jacko: local newspaper reports of Michael Jackson’s death, which suddenly has become a Cambridge-specific event (or wherever).
• Lamebook: ensuring that not just your friends see the dumb shit you do on Facebook.
• Yahoo Answers: dumb entries on the other site called Yahoo Answers.
• Bad Questions For Yahoo Answers: because the site is too moronic for just one blog.

Failage

• Cake Wrecks: a blog showing photos of bad cakes. Professional ones only: no mocking your family. It started when the author got this cake back from the rather dim bakers.
• The FAIL Blog: photos of stupid things, ruined by the application of large block letters saying “FAIL”, all of which were added in Paint Shop Pro. You can tell because Photoshop does letter corners correctly.
• Photoshop Disasters: pictures from newspapers, websites, magazines and the like, which have obviously been edited by morons. There are a few on here that I disagree with, though — at least one where they’ve highlighted a wrist and said “look at the unnatural way that wrist is bent, did they think we wouldn’t notice”, and I can bend that way.
• It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It!: badly chosen photos from house adverts. And here’s a similar one in Probably German.
• Bad Parking: I’m sure you can figure this one out…
• Self Published Books: …which it is obvious why nobody else published. Unlike…
• Awful Library Books: …which inexplicably were.
• Unfortunate Names: This is pretty self-explanatory. Which is kind of ironic.
• Picture Is Unrelated: Like the FAIL Blog, only better.
• LOLTATZ: dreadful tattoos.
• There, I Fixed It: attempts at DIY, with the emphasis on ‘attempts’.
• Don’t Judge My Hair: because I am in a position to criticise.
• If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It Cold?: Political cartoons that are all pretty much the same moronic point.

Miscellanage

• Kemp Folds: unbelievably, this is pictures of Ross Kemp folded so that he looks silly.
• Kemp My Pen: as if Kemp Folds was somehow not enough, now you can see people who’ve attached photos of Ross Kemp to their pens.
• Selleck Waterfall Sandwich: this gets self-explanatory pretty fast.
• Things Younger Than John McCain: a blog which lists things which we all take for granted but that are younger than Republican presidential pipedream and probable next host of Countdown, John McCain.
• Patently Silly: rarely updates any more, but lists a lot of strange patents issued in America.
• Sexy People: Old photos. (It seemed harsh to class it as Failage.)
• Insanewiches: Crazy sandwiches.
• Sleep Talking Man: A woman types up the nonsense her husband talks in his sleep.
• Mad Calculator: The random ‘numbers’ produced by a dying calculator.
• Glum Councillors: Local councillors point at bad things and look sad.
• But Sir…: Me and Ben mock dumb petitions. See also, We The Undersigned.
• Lunch Bag Art: A guy who paints on paper bags for his kids and shows the internet the results.
• Awkward Family Photos: Fairly self-explanitory.
• Dateline: Silver Age: Newspaper headlines from comics.
• Paint My Album: Album covers in MS Paint.
• Awkward Boners: er… yeah.
• Things That Look Like Cock ‘n’ Balls: See above.
• Don’t Even Reply: In which a man sends timewasting letters to people who post classified ads. Good fun, but inexplicably has no RSS feed.
• No First Date: Much the same thing on a dating site.
• This Peanut Looks Like A Duck: Pictures of non-duck objects which accidentally resemble ducks. A bit.

Slightly Rubbish Ones

• Graph Jam: a not-as-good version of this Facebook group which has also gone downhill.
• Sexy A-Levels: photos of pretty teenagers from newspapers on A-level results day.
• Apostophe Abuse In Everyday Life: complete with nerdy URL, insofar as any other type of URL exists. Also does other kinds of grammar. Hit and miss, mind.
• Man Babies: Photos of fathers and sons with the heads swapped round. Why? Who knows.
• You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice: Blatant rip-offs on the internet. A kind of mob-rule copyright law.
• STFU, Marrieds: mocking married couples on Facebook.
• One Post Wonder: Blogs with only a single post. Like, one would hope, Man Babies.
• Regretsy: bad things sold on Etsy.

Those are all the ones I know. Anyone know any others?

A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to this Channel Four report. It’s a five minute video, so here it is:

There are some scary quotes in there, but the stats are worse. From their own survey, 80% of 50 Muslim, Jewish and ‘accelerated Christian education’ schools taught Creationism as fact and ignore evolution. Of those, five were state-funded schools. That’s 74% of 19 Jewish schools, 100% of 21 Evangelical schools and 50% of 10 Islamic schools. None of these schools is breaking a law*, although of course Paul Kelley would have been had he been reckless enough to educate in a secular way. The law, as has been mentioned, is an ass.

Personally, I think the best argument for teaching evolution in schools is that it’s the only way I know that you can make biology into a passably interesting subject. I for one always found it crushingly dull — because it was mostly a list of information presented in a “here’s what happens; don’t ask why, just learn it” kind of a way. Throw in evolution and you can explain why these things happen. You can talk about DNA and all the weird ways genes try to get copied. You can tie biology in to all kinds of other subjects much more effectively. I’m sure you can teach vast tracts of biology without mentioning genes or evolution, but I defy you to make it interesting.

That aside, the best reason I know of not to teach Creationism is simply that it’s patently false. Of course, Creationists won’t accept that, so a better argument is that there is no evidence to support it (because it’s so false). The only argument in favour is the whole stupid “parents’ rights” thing. And I do accept that parents have a right to educate their children in whatever way they want — but I think they should be made to look up the word “educate” before they start paying someone to preach at them, because filling impressionable young minds with damaging lies to promote an ideology is nothing more or less than exploitation — and it’s not even for personal gain: we’re talking about exploitation for the sake of an abstract concept. And I think it’s utterly abhorrent that the government would fund this.

I blame the parents for this. They should be outraged if their kids are being taught such bullshit, and they should get something done. The government are also in the wrong, of course, but you can hardly expect the government to act if the people don’t care. (You know, because the government only ever does what the people want.) People listen to parents. God knows why.

I’m not against the ides of schools being different and parents having choice. I’m not against the idea that some of those differences might be based on a religion — a school aimed at Muslims that makes sure the textbooks don’t have illustrations in articles about Mohammed, or a school aimed at Jews that only serves kosher food, that’s fine. And hopefully the genuine followers of those religions would be able to get places in those schools, because since all schools would be required to teach the same curriculum non-religious parents presumably would just pick the nearest school, or the one the kid’s friends were going to. The moment you let them teach different things then the idea of “choice” becomes an illusion: when you’re presented with one good school and one bad school, you don’t have a choice. Everyone with a brain will try to get into the good school and then you’re back to pot luck (or selection, if it’s a faith school). It’s just the same as the ridiculous claim made by the Department of Health the other day, that “operation success rates help patients choose treatment”. Their theory is that by publishing statistics on survival rates at different hospitals, they give patients a choice. No, you don’t. You just make life difficult for everyone, and worry people who can’t get into the best one. The stats should be public, certainly, but not for that reason. I think that all schools and hospitals should be good enough that you don’t care which one you use, and I think that if they’re not then you should fix it rather than shifting the onus onto patients and parents to find an acceptable one.

More to the point, if it’s legal to teach Creationism, that must mean there is no requirement for schools to teach facts that are true.

But of course, I don’t get a say. Because I don’t live in Normanton. If I did, I’d be allowed to vote against Ed Balls’ continuing reign of lunacy over the Department of Children, Schools, Families and Kittens, or whatever they’re calling Education now. (Honestly, the system of government we have here is utterly mad if you look into it for any length of time.)

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* According to the video, anyway. My understanding is that the teaching of evolution is compulsory in publicly funded schools, but I don’t know where I can find an authoritative source of information.

The other day I made fun of John McCain for referring to Czechoslovakia, a country which hasn’t existed for 15 years. After that, I read a comments thread with similar accusations about Barack Obama, and I thought “I should check these out — I’d hate to be mocking one candidate while the other does worse things”. I like to think of myself as an equal opportunities sarky bastard. (In that spirit, allow me to roundly mock commenter Reid for saying “Hussein will not be elected President” and leaving it at that, as if the very fact that Obama’s middle name is Saddam Hussein’s last name makes any difference to anything at all.)

They didn’t seem to think the Czechoslovakia thing was important, and you can make a good case for that, but their reasons are ridiculous:

“This is basic elementary school geography. I don’t care what excuses you make for them. It also illustrates their level of awareness of the world.”

Can you draw an accurate map of Africa?
How about if I draw the lines, can you put in the names?

Nobody can do that. How is that even remotely like not knowing what countries are called while discussing their politics?

Kinda depends on which week you left elementary school.

What? For the record, Obama studied law at Harvard, and McCain was 5th from bottom of his class of almost 900.

I’ll tell you, as a truck driver, the average person person can tell you the name of the next town.

One of my favorite stories–I was lost, trying to find a consignee–instructions from the dispatcher were bad, nothing matched up with the map. Called the consignee and talked to several people who, given the intersection of major (for the area) highways where I was sitting could not tell me how to get from where I was to where they were.

I finally found the place by circling town (it was just a little bitty place) in decreasing-radius circles until I spotted a likely candidate in the dark.

I have literally no idea why this story is here. Possibly it’s a failed attempt to reference the Kentucky thing (see below) but probably he started thinking about something else and just kept typing.

The Czech Republic is very important to lots of people, and given that they ought to quit changing names every few years. They have been through, what, four since I left grammar school?
Larry Sheldon | 07.18.08 – 2:03 am | #

The Czech Republic has been the Czech Republic since its inception in 1993, and while the full name of Czechoslovakia changed many times before then, “Czechoslovakia” was never wrong for long, assuming that Sheldon left grammar school some time after 1918. They stopped being Czechoslovakia when the country broke in two — what the hell where they supposed to do? Both be Czechoslovakia?

Still, here goes nothing, a full round-up of all the gaffes they accused Obama of making, and a few other things they said about him. Are they worse than McCain’s total ignorance of how to work a computer? Are they worse than his apparent failure to read and understand the Constitution? Let’s have a look.

Fifty Seven States

One of their favourite Obama ‘gaffes’ is his supposed assertion that there are 57 states. The first problem I have with this is that it clearly demonstrates Republicans can’t count, because what Obama actually said was this:

I’ve now been to 57 states, [with] one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to, even though I really wanted to go, but my staff would not justify it.

That makes sixty states, you feeble-minded buffoons. Of course, that would make it harder to draw absurd parallels with the 57 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, except that it wouldn’t because there are only 57 states in that if you exclude the three ‘observer’ states. (I wonder if it’s ever the same people who promoted the Jeremiah Wright clips who think Obama is a Muslim.)

But the biggest problem is that what Obama actually said was this:

I’ve now been to fifty… seven states? I think one left to go. One left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to…

Pretty clearly, Obama said “fifty” instead of “forty”, because he was thinking about the number of states that there are. That’s the kind of mistake people make all the time. And afterwards he acknowledged his error, rather than repeating it as McCain did with Czechoslovakia.

No dice on the 57 states thing, I’m afraid. I’m not a hypocrite yet. I just missed a clip of a mildly amusing error.

Which States Border Illinois

Again, Obama’s knowledge of US geography is called into question. One (presumably conservative) ‘news’ website reports this as “Media Snoozes While Obama’s ‘Altered States’ Gaffes Continue”. If this is as serious an error as they’re implying then the media is clearly complicit in some kind of propaganda campaign. We can’t have a President who doesn’t know the local geography of the state that elected him to the Senate, can we? So what’s the deal?

Well, Obama said this:

Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known [in Kentucky], coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.

And the not-so investigative journalists at News Busters cleverly dug out their atlas and noticed that Kentucky shares a border with Illinois. Therefore, they conclude, Illinois is zero miles from Kentucky and Obama is a fool. We need a map.

(All maps taken from Wikipedia)

Note that I had to Google search to find this — Sheldon simply assumed that we all knew about this.

They’re right, too. Illinois is closer to Kentucky than Arkansas, which by what is clearly a really significant amount. Here, for those interested, is the same map with the population densities shown. (By which I mean I looked at the population maps on Wikipedia and pasted them on top of the state map, ignoring the projection differences as hard as I could. I made this in a couple of minutes in Paint.NET, so it’s not very good.)

You can clearly see that the entire population of Illinois lives almost as far from Kentucky as they possibly can. In fact, probably further from Kentucky’s borders than the population of Arkansas live. That’s not really fair, though, as the population of Kentucky are over to the west of the state, away from Arkansas, so the population centre of Illinois is still nearer to that of Kentucky than that of Arkansas is, but I think this shows that simply going by closest borders isn’t a good plan.

Really, taken in context, Obama’s statement was about politics. I don’t know much about state-level politics, beyond the fact that everyone in Texas is insane and Louisiana is apparently doomed, and California is governed by a robot from the future, but I was able, thanks again to Wikipedia, to find out what larger ‘regions’ the states are usually divided into (Guess how long this map took me):

So is seems likely to me that Arkansas is probably much closer, politically, to Kentucky than Illinois is. Of course, Obama’s statement is still mildly silly — you obviously shouldn’t refer to distances between states when your state is zero miles away — but I can’t bring myself to consider this a “gaffe”. And nor, apparently, can anyone else much, because the media didn’t bother reporting it. “Snoozed”, if you won’t.

I’m still not a hypocrite. I am, however, heartened that the US media would ignore inconsequential things instead of sensationalising them (you know, this one time).

Obama is a Marxist

This is something a couple of Republicans have said, and I can’t even be bothered deconstructing it. Learning Marxism for the sake of a blogpost would be going far above and beyond and I’m not doing it. The actual odds that this is anything other than another Republican who can’t tell Marxism from Liberalism from Communism from Socialism are so vanishingly small that the possibility isn’t worth considering.

Hell, one commenter said McCain was a Marxist, although he called himself “a “bleedingheart” libertarian”, which is like calling yourself a tree-hugging capitalist.

Obama can’t tell ’surrender’ from ‘re-deployment’

This accusation doesn’t make any sense without context and no context was given. I genuinely don’t know what point is being made here. I had a look on Google and that didn’t seem to help. I presume it’s a reference to Iraq, and I know Obama wants to slowly take troops out of there, and I think he’d send a few more to Afghanistan, which I think would be called “re-deployment”. I imagine the commenter here decided that that constitutes “surrender” and phrased his accusation in a way designed to make himself look as foolish as possible: you can’t conflate two concepts then accuse people of not being able to distinguish them. It’s so absurd as to be almost brilliant.

I’m still not a hypocrite.

Obama is a communist (implicit)

See above.

The Bomb that Fell on Pearl Harbor

Yeah, that was pretty dumb. I’ll give you that one. And even though it was the same Larry Sheldon who said it as said all that other rubbish, I’ll even refrain from cancelling it out against his nonsense. In fairness, Obama did say it only once rather than repeatedly, and the significance of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the timing and lack of warning rather than the actual weapons used, but still, Obama messed up pretty good there.

On the other hand, this was an isolated incident, whereas what I did was to combine three McCain issues — his age, his repeated references to countries that don’t exist and his inability to work a computer — and wrap them up into one coherent package of 1992-ness. This is just pointing and laughing at a mistake. I think I’m okay with myself here.

Obama Went To Harvard

Yes. Yes, he did. Isn’t that good?

Lastly, I feel for the sake of completeness, I should lay out what I consider the better case for Saying “Czechoslovakia” Doesn’t Matter, since I defended Obama just now and if I’m being fair I should do it properly. First of all, he could be discussing the Czech Republic and Slovakia. If this is the case he should say “the former Czechoslovakia” as we do with Yugoslavia, but that’s still just a speech thing rather than a shocking ignorance thing. Secondly, he may just be in the habit of saying “Czechoslovakia” — that happens — but if that was true I’d expect him to reliably pronounce it correctly. To be honest, though, I don’t think any of that case matters, because it only dents one of the three things I flagged up as indicators that McCain may be living in 1992. In context, I think it looks pretty bad for him, and even if it doesn’t matter, he and his staff should be able to spot things that make him look dumb and change them. The fact that they can’t or don’t is at least as worrying as the mistake itself.

Obviously I don’t think that an election should be decided or fought on a Who Said The Dumbest Thing competition. But if this is the best collection of “gaffes” they have then I’m happy to keep poking fun at McCain, safe in the knowledge that I’m not indulging in too much selective reporting.

Yay. I was right.

Always remember to wrap on a t-shirt, splat on some suncream, and wear a hat.

1. The metre is rubbish. Two words are at the start of the phrase, and one is at the end. It doesn’t scan at all, because…
2. Hat is a noun. The other words are verbs, and…
3. ‘Splat’ is the wrong verb. Still, at least ’splat’ rhymes. After all…
4. ‘Wrap’ doesn’t rhyme with ’splat’ or ‘hat’. Essentially, the connection between these words is that they all have an ‘a’ in them. If it was “wrap, slap, cap”, that would rhyme and include a verb that more accurately portrays the application of suncream. But it isn’t. And even then…
5. ‘Wrap’ shouldn’t be in there at all. I don’t know who came up with this campaign, but I must assume it was someone who has never seen someone put on a t-shirt. You don’t wrap them. You can, if they’re massive t-shirts, but you won’t end up through any of the right holes. I’m not really sure what could be done about this, because “cover, smother, beaver” isn’t catchy or clear. Of course, they could always abandon the whole idea of using three similar-sounding words and do something that works.

There shouldn’t be five errors in what is essentially a three word campaign.

The big question about John McCain is: is he too old and out of touch to be President?

Well, he can’t use the Internet.

And he still thinks Czechoslovakia is a country.

(Nice analogy, by the way. Not in the least patronising.)

And that it’s pronounced “Czechlosovakia”.

So yes, he is. Czechoslovakia broke up on the first day of 1993, when McCain was 56 and therefore had no excuse for not being able to learn new things. The Internet was just getting widespread around the same time. Clearly, whatever year it is inside John McCain’s head, it’s no later than 1992.

Only the GOP, a political party so insane that GOP stands for “Grand Old Party”, could possibly think this idiot could make a passable world leader.

A while ago, Scottish authorities decided to do something about their drinking problem. Er, Scotland’s drinking problem that is, not the authorities’.

The main points in summary. Ministers want to increase the offsales age from 18 to 21, to set a minimum price for drink based on alcohol content, to end discount offers, to introduce alcohol-only checkouts at big shops, to levy a social responsibility fee on some retailers and to boost spending to address alcohol problems.

Now, ending discount offers I think might help. When you’re selling soft drinks with vodka in them cheaper than regular soft drinks, three bottles at a time, you’re basically selling drunkenness, not refreshment. That’s targeted at the problem. That’s a sensible policy. A minimum price per unit of alcohol sounds not unreasonable too — it’s a small change from the existing alcohol duty.

I can’t work out what use a “social responsibility fee” will be. According to the proposals (pdf link),

We propose that a fee should be applied to some alcohol retailers to help offset the costs of dealing with the adverse consequences of alcohol and invite views on our proposals. We do not intend that this would apply to small businesses where the sale of alcohol is incidental to the main purpose of the business and the amount of alcohol sold may be small.

The aim being that “the costs associated with the wider impacts of a commercial activity should be borne by those who benefit from it”. Well, okay, but we already have alcohol duty — if you want to tax people based on how much alcohol they sell, raise the duty on it. That won’t work and this won’t either. If the cost is high enough to affect business then the drunken vandals will just go elsewhere, maybe to a small business where the sale of alcohol is incidental to the main purpose of the business and the amount of alcohol sold may be small. Or to a pub, which isn’t covered by the proposals.

But mostly, I think it’s insane to try raising the age from 18 to 21. The minimum ages for various activities in this country are messed up enough already without moving them any further apart. So their theory is that you can have sex with your girlfriend at 16, marry her at 18, but you can’t have a glass of wine with her in front of the TV until you’re 21? That is fucking mental, and that’s before you start considering the civil liberties implications of banning about 200,000 people from off-licenses just because you can’t control vandalism. I find it impossible to believe that even 5% of those people are problematic, which would leave 190,000 people, all old enough to vote, essentially being discriminated against by the government, based on their age. Really, who thought that would be smart? Certainly none of these people did.

They tried these ideas in one town, and they say it’s helped, reducing various measures of crime by around half. But they’ve tested a whole raft of ideas all at once as a package, for a short time. We’ve no idea if it would work in other places, for longer times or which of the ideas helped. And it doesn’t address the civil liberties issues.

Here’s a few quick things too big for Google Reader; too small for their own blog posts. (Not really sure why they’re too small; I’ve done two-line posts before now, but it’s my blog and I’ll do what I like.)

Fist, this fantastically silly story from the Telegraph:

Satanist father and Christian mother fight for Sunday morning custody rights

Kristie Meyer has cited the religious beliefs of her former husband, Jamie, as the main reason why an Indiana judge should restrict his visitation rights. … However, legal experts have warned that the American Constitution prevents judges from showing a religious preference. …Mr Meyer may now be asked to prove that Satanism, which he says is about celebrating man’s desires rather than worshipping the devil, is a real faith.

Sounds to me like an eminently sensible faith, compared at least to Christianity.

Meanwhile, legal observers say his former wife may have to show that Satanism – which is recognised as a religion by the US Internal Revenue Service – is harmful to their daughters’ upbringing. Mrs Meyer has argued that her ex-husband’s public expression of satanic beliefs has embarrassed their children.

Can you really legislate on the basis that parents mustn’t embarrass their children?

Pat Roberts, her lawyer, has asked the judge to order Mr Meyer to drop off the children at his ex-wife’s church so they can attend with her during his visitation time. “Frankly, (it) can be emotionally damaging or confusing to children when they’re faced with these two different forms of worship,” Mr Roberts told the Chicago Tribune.

Yes, if you go around exposing children to alternative viewpoints, the indoctrination might not work. Honestly, I can’t see any other way of reading this.

… “Allowing them to go to church for a couple of hours on a Sunday morning is… not unreasonable.”

I think it is, but probably for a different reason. I hope that reason prevails in this case, and honestly I think it will.

Also, in case you missed it, here’s a comic I drew at Ghost Hamster.

Now, below the fold, some replies I sent to 419-scammers which the scammers did not respond to.

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Name something you associate with the Trojans. Go on. Word association: what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear the word “Trojan”? I’m guessing you said “horse”.

The classic Trojan Horse maneuver is as follows: a large, woody object believed to be safe is allowed to penetrate, but then it bursts open and lots of smaller entities come out and cause havoc. Agreed?

So who the hell thought “Trojan” would be a good name for a brand of condom?