In a Comment is Free article today, Arthur Scargill (who of course has no vested interests) has issued a challenge to George Monbiot:
I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel - coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 [sic] for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.
Okay, let’s try that. He can stand in “a room full of CO2” for two minutes, and then, when the paramedics have resuscitated him and explained that you can’t breathe carbon dioxide, we can discuss what “a room full of radiation” might be.
Presumably he has in all his years seen at least one dimmer switch. He might like to explain at what point the room becomes “full” of light. Because you could easily endure a small amount of radiation for two minutes with no ill effects. You do exactly that every two minutes of your life. In the same way, you can endure a small amount of carbon dioxide.
So first we need to work out exactly how much of each thing each room will need to be “full”. Then we need to decide if Scargill will be allowed to supplement his CO2 with any oxygen — bearing in mind that if there’s room for oxygen, it can’t really be “full” of CO2 now, can it?
We should also decide what kind of radiation to use. We could use alpha, beta, gamma, or anything we like from the EM spectrum including long-wave radio, heat or visible light.
After we’ve done that, and Scargill and Monbiot have spent the required minutes in their respective rooms — personally I vote to up Scargill’s sentence to five minutes as it’s by no means unheard of for people to simply hold their breath for two and that’s cheating — we can discuss what the hell any of that was supposed to prove because CO2 is dangerous because a sodding greenhouse gas, not because it’s poisonous.
Scargill’s challenge is like the NRA saying guns are safe and proving it by standing in a room full of bullets for two minutes and failing to die. Or a company showing their new Arsenic Sandwich is safe by sitting in a room with it for two minutes. Or Dan challenging the claim that cigarette smoke is more toxic than car exhaust fumes by challenging me to inhale thousands of times more of the latter than he willof the former.
Another interesting bit of his article is this:
…we live on an island with more than 1,000 years of coal reserves from which we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment.
I was going to mock him for this too, but I’ve looked into it, and it turns out he’s right. Modern coal-fired power stations are really quite clever. You don’t actually need to burn the coal. Instead, a kitten gently caresses the coal, and the coal starts to give off heat. This is used to drive a turbine and create electricity. Meanwhile magical pixies suck any CO2 the kitten may have exhaled into magic pixie bottles, which then vanish in a puff of pure joy. It’s true.
This brand of puritanical secularism is little more than inverted religion. It substitutes reason for god, science for theology, relentless progress for original sin and human fall. Its followers see secularism not as mere separation of religion and politics, or as state neutrality vis a vis matters of faith and belief. To them, it is a set of dogmas to be embraced willingly or imposed coercively by the force of the state.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of the “militant secularism” I know, but I shall ignore that. I think the major problem stems from a disagreement about what the new headscarf reforms in Turkey mean: Grayling says that “Turkish Islamists are encouraging more women to hide that automatic trigger of unbridled male lust, the tresses on the female head”, whereas Ghannoushi says “those genuinely committed to civil liberties and individual freedoms would applaud the relaxing of an oppressive law that denies women their basic right to decide their dress”. Personally, I’m not going to comment on who is right — pretty clearly the ideal is that women should be allowed to wear whatever they like, but there’s every chance that without the headscarf ban 95% of wearers would be wearing them against their will, and in that situation I think a ban can be justified easily.
Grayling’s thesis was really much more wide-reaching than that:
If the Brian-sandalistas cannot succeed by direct assault, they will do it by constant nibbling and encroachments: prayers in American publicly-funded schools, headscarves in Turkish publicly-funded universities, a little bit of anti-evolutionary biology there, a little alcohol ban there – and if that doesn’t work, they try more robust means. So it goes: creep creep, whisper, soothe, murmur a prayer with the kids in assembly, ecumenicalise, interfaith-schmooze, infiltrate, subvert, complain, campaign, scream, threaten, explode.
And that’s the point. It’s all well and good Ghannoushi saying
This crude interventionism practised in the name of secularism in Turkey and France, and religion in Iran and Saudi Arabia can only be described as despotic. Individuals’ minds and bodies are not part of the state’s jurisdiction. The state is only the manager of citizens’ public affairs, not a judge of their consciences, appearances, habits, and preferences.
but in a society like Turkey, with a 99% Islamic population, if you have completely open democracy then there’s a very real possibility that people are going to vote for an alcohol ban, the death penalty for apostasy, a ban on dogs as pets, legalisation of forced marriage, and yes, a mandate to women about what they can wear on their heads, because what unites the people is their irrational conviction that a load of nonsense in a rather silly book, as well as a lot of other nonsense that even Mohammed never thought of, handed down by word of mouth, is How You Absolutely Should Live. And before you know what’s happening, you’re living under Sharia law in an Islamic state in all but name. And then they’ll vote to change the name. Because that’s what Islam is:
“Islam is not like Christianity. It doesn’t just aim to be practised in the realm of belief but also to regulate and rule the state,” — Omer Faruk Eminagaoglu, “chairman of the association of judges and prosecutors (Yarsav) and deputy to Turkey’s chief prosecutor”
The aim of a secular democracy then, cannot be to do what the people want, but to do what the general underlying values of the people dictate — just as in this country I don’t want the Chancellor of the Exchequer to do what the people think he should do; I want him to do what the people would think he should do if we were smarter and in possession of all the information and a good working knowledge of economics. Otherwise there’s no point in having anyone remotely qualified doing the job. You end up with lowest-common-denominator politics and the country’s de facto run by the editor of the Sun. (Frankly “tabloidism” can be treated as a religion for all practical purposes.)
The problem is, though, that if you have a large majority of one religion, it stands to reason that any candidate for government office would do well to make a big deal of subscribing to that faith. If they say things like “my religion guides my values and my values guide my politics” then he’ll do well in an election because he’s playing to something that’s seen as very important by the majority of the electorate — lowest-common-denominator again — but he’s just promised to act totally unsecularly. (That’s a word. Don’t say it isn’t.) And you end up living in a theocracy, no matter how secular the values enshrined in your law may be. You only have to look to America to see how strong this effect is. That Ghannoushi refers to this as “the neutral soft secularism of the United States” baffles me.
But what can you do? You can’t simply not tell the electorate what religion the candidates are; that would never even nearly work, and in any case it wouldn’t stop a candidate championing the teachings of their religion explicitly. You can’t demand that only atheists stand for office (or only atheists vote); again it’s unenforceable (unless perhaps you make the ballot out of ham) and it’s not exactly liberal. You can’t expect religious people, either government or voters, to set their faiths aside when making decisions, because it’s too big a part of who they are.
The problem isn’t secularism; the problem is that the religion exists in the first place. You can’t justly govern lunatics without recourse to the sane, and in a population 99% Islamic, you really have no baseline level of sanity to refer back to. Don’t get me wrong, in a pluralistic, multi-cultural society like Britain religion is mostly harmless and I think any attempt to stamp it out would fail and end up doing far more harm than good. The issue, though, is that if one of the many religions present in a society is somehow ‘fitter’ than the others, it will prosper. It’s easy to imagine a large majority of Muslims or Evangelical Christians establishing itself in such a society, feeding off the good-will towards faith that the other religions have fostered.
I believe that the only solution to this problem is to make sure that children are not indoctrinated with dogma. By all means they can be taught the various customs and traditions of their parents’ religion. But threats of eternal damnation or literal Earthly punishment, for breaking stupid and arbitrary rules are not okay. Of course we can’t legislate how parents raise children. (I have no particular ethical problem with that — it just wouldn’t work.) But we can grant them all the fundamental human right to an objective, neutral and secular education. With that in place, there’s not much parents can do to stop their children becoming tolerant and balanced members of society.
Religious parents will object to this, of course. Some non-religious ones will as well. They will say that they have a fundamental human right to raise their child any way they like. I say no. I say they don’t have the right to fuck up a child’s mind any more than they have the right to fuck up the child’s body. You can very easily totally ruin someone’s life before it’s even begun if you teach them to live in an imaginary version of the real world. They grow up and experience agonising dilemmas caused by a conflict between what they want and care about and some made-up rule implanted by their parents when they were small. I’ve seen it happen. But I think that children’s rights must always trump parents’ rights because they are in every way more vulnerable (although since parents can vote and children can’t this isn’t perhaps a view shared by everyone in government). So give them a decent secular education and I think they will, in the vast majority of cases, grow up to be balanced, liberal, tolerant people — even if they do still pay mostly-harmless lip-service to their faith. They’ll be a people who can be justly governed by democracy without religion taking over. Is that “crude interventionism”? Maybe. But I think it’s a good goal and a practical and fair means by which to achieve it.
See, Odone? I’ll see your choice of “faith schools or terrorism”, and I’ll raise you a choice of “secular education or Sharia law”. They’re both false dilemmas, of course, but I’d rather live in a secular democracy that gets bombed periodically than the peace that comes with the brutality of Sharia.
…to ask [them] to investigate fully the plight of increasing numbers of people who have become electro-sensitive (ES) or electro-hypersensitive (EHS) in the UK due to electricity or the new pulsed microwave radiation technologies such as TETRA, mobile phones and masts, WiFi, radar, cordless phones and a host of “wireless” gadgets.
ES and EHS are made-up conditions. They’re technophobic knee-jerk idiocy kept alive by people like Alasdair Philips so that they can sell you utterly useless shit. At first it was “wifi is dangerous, phone masts are cancer factories, and so on” but when it became too obvious even for them that the population at large was bathed in radiation and still basically limping on okay they decided to say it was just some people and give it a name. The prefix “hyper” was added to the condition to make it seem like they were just more suceptible to microwave radiation, rather than having a whole new way of getting disease. That makes it seem more plausible.
They also want:
1. Demand independent research into this “FUNCTIONAL IMPAIRMENT CAUSED BY ENVIRONMENTAL TRIGGERS” - which does have a distinguishing feature from other illnesses/conditions with similar symptoms i.e. the ES/EHS CAN AND DO recover if they are isolated from the cause(s) of the sensitivity.
The research has been done. The condition does not exist[1-3]. (The third abstract there includes the phrase “Sham-Math” and is therefore excellent.) I’ve never seen a petition before which so repeatedly strives to establish some objective statement of (supposed) fact. It’s as if they think people don’t believe EHS is a real condition.
2. Demand monitoring by personnel trained or researching in this field who are aware of the effects of pulsed microwave radiation/electricity.
You’re demanding monitoring done specifically by people who know the monitoring is pointless.
“Pulsed” microwave radiation is just regular microwave radiation that turns on and off quickly. That doesn’t make it somehow more dangerous any more than turning a light on and off a lot makes it dangerous (assuming you don’t have epillepsy, anyway). I assume they go after pulsed radiation because that’s what’s used for modern things like mobiles and wifi, whereas regular, continuous modulated radiation must be safe because the wireless was around when they were little and nothing was dangeous then because they didn’t have the Daily Mail then.
3 Ensure that the Human Rights of the ES/EHS are observed fully and recognise electro-sensitivity as a disability in the UK, as in Canada and Sweden.
Maybe we should officially recognise stupid as a disability while we’re at it.
4 Provide safe zones so that the ES/EHS have places to recover/live in OR replace pulsed microwave radiation with a safer technology.
A safer technology? Like what? I hope you’re not advocating yoghurt-pots-and-string, because that string, stretched tight across streets, is a real hazard to cyclists, especially when it’s dark.
Just… no. Go and do something else.
Part of me hopes they get a lot of names on this, so I can see the government response. You can only say “your concerns are imaginary and we fully intend to ignore them” so diplomatically.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
On Saturday I got back from the Netherlands. They’re very nice.
Bit of a nightmare getting there: I was picked out at random by the metal detector and frisked, then I was the 25th person through the gate so I was questioned by the government survey woman. Then KLM lost my bag with all my spare clothes, although to be fair they did give me a little bag with an XXL t-shirt, a toothbrush, some other toiletries (including no soap or shower gel) and some detergent. To me, that was just mean. Then the train was rerouted, so a 2-and-a-half hour journey became a three hour journey. My one set of fitting clothes was becoming less and less suited for prolonged use. My bag arrived at 10pm the following day, with a voucher for €25 off any flight of €100 or more — which frankly is the second shittest attempt at compensation anyone’s ever given me (first place going to N at the National Express). Anyhow.
Actually, bit of a nightmare getting back, too. The plane was delayed for two hours because there wasn’t a pilot and apparently KLM don’t have anyone on standby. We couldn’t wait in the bar or get anything to eat or drink, of course, because Schipol’s security checks are after those things and they couldn’t be bothered checking us again. Then literally all the trains from Manchester Airport were cancelled for no stated reason, and the monitor that said where the bus went was broken. But at least I had my bag. Anyhow.
The Netherlands are of interest just now. While I was there I learned that I’d got there about a week before they caught up with other European countries and implemented a smoking ban, one year to the day after we did. This ban relates specifically to tobacco. It has to, because technically marijuana is as illegal there as it is here, and you can’t really ban something without first legalising it. It’s allowed in ‘coffee shops’, as there’s a long-standing policy of not enforcing the laws against it (if you follow the rules), because, well, because enforcing it is very expensive and clearly doesn’t work. (Personally, I’m not sure what exactly the aim of drug laws are in the first place: be it to reduce crime, or cut off funding to the suppliers — who are mostly pretty unpleasant, but then so are Nestlé and chocolate is legal — or to stop people taking it. But since the bikes I saw in Holland were left unlocked, and the locked ones I see in Manchester have no wheels, seats or chains, I’m pretty sure none of those things has happened.)
So given this very mature, liberal and pragmatic attitude, you’d think the Dutch authorities would say, perhaps, that tobacco is okay when mixed with marijuana in a licensed coffee shop. Okay, so perhaps people would go there just to smoke it, but is that a major problem? That’s exactly what happens anyway; the only difference would be they’d be smoking something legal.
No.
The Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, which is responsible for enforcing the ban, said it had trained around 200 inspectors. “They can tell the difference between a mix or a pure joint from its smell and appearance,” said a spokesman.
