Apathy Sketchpad

I feel now like I may have been a bit harsh on the Church of England. Obviously I don’t think it should remain Established a moment longer, and naturally my ideal world wouldn’t include it, but…

Well, first of all, it’s at least trying to be progressive. They ordain women, much to the chagrin of Anne Widdecombe, a woman so conservative she even objects to equal rights for women, and gay people (although they do ask them not to actually have sex, although in fairness that’s as much the government’s fault for failing to legalise gay marriage as such). If there really has to be an Established church (which there clearly doesn’t) then I’d rather it be them than most of the others.

And what happens?

A breakaway sect of Anglicanism (a phrase I never imagined I’d have to type — cake or death, anyone?) forms, designed to keep those dirty gays out. And people (like the aforementioned Tory notjob) desert the Church for the safety of Catholicism, where of course there is no danger at all of anything remotely resembling liberalism, progressivism, or any form of acknowledgement that it’s not the middle ages or that making stuff up is different from research. These people usually justify their actions by saying things like “you can’t just ignore the parts of the bible you don’t like”, while wearing cotton-polyester blend. So either you’re being selective, and therefore will need to either stop being a sexist homophobic bigot or find a better reason, or else you’ve got to accept the whole bible, including all the really fucked-up stuff with rape and murder and slavery and so on and so forth. Honestly I’d be happier if they just came right out and said “I think homosexuality is wrong and I won’t be a member of any church that supports it”. They’d be flat out wrong, but at least they’d be honest. When did palatable become better than honest?

If all this is right, then to say the C of E is doomed because it’s losing people is like saying that a cancer surgery patient is doomed because they’re losing cells. If enough of the fools abandon the ship then the Church may even end up being a force for good.

Of course, I’ll still want it disestablished.

(There are some really fucking weird versions of Cake Or Death on Youtube…)

This is one of those times when something I was meaning to write anyway suddenly becomes topical. I choose to ascribe this to coincidence, but if you are insane you may like to instead surmise that I am a computer simulation created by another version of myself.

I was probably a couple of days away from getting round to blogging about just how intensely I dislike Ann Widdecombe, when this lands in my Google Reader inbox:

Ann Widdecombe has enjoyed a controversial political career

Ann Widdecombe set to stand down

Former shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe has confirmed she will end her 20-year political career at the next general election.
Miss Widdecombe, 60, announced she would not be standing for re-election in the Kent constituency of Maidstone and the Weald…

…whatever exactly a Weald might be. It’s illustrated with what appears to be the BBC’s stock photo of Widdecombe, which looks like it was captured when she tried to canvass the House Of Horrors, and which appears on almost every BBC News webpage that so much as mentions her.

Well, good riddance to her, I say. I don’t like her. I don’t like her voice, I don’t like her hair, and I don’t like her politics. In many ways the last one is the most important. Rather than attempting to structure this in any particular way, I am instead going to type things as I think of them and therefore jump around the topic like some otherwise-crazed anti-Widdecombe pinball.

First, she signed this Early Day Motion in support of spending tax money on homeopathy, a ludicrous treatment that doesn’t work. Ann Widdecombe is in favour of spending tax money on pseudoscientific ‘complimentary medicines’ that have no clinical effect whatsoever. And it shows us that she’s not afraid to speak out on an issue just because she doesn’t understand it.

That, or she thinks herself to fully understand all topics, a theory bolstered by the general smugness that pervades everything she does and the fact that she seems quite happy to dole out advice on all kinds of things, no matter how far they are from her own area of expertise, whatever that may turn out to be. In Anne Widdecombe To The Rescue, she doled out all kinds of improperly thought out quick-fix advice. Her advice is always much the same, and stems mostly from her apparent conviction that anything deviating from ‘normal’ family life is Bad and deciding all further issues on the School Dinner Lady mechanic, that is, by assuming the first version of events she hears is the truth and anything that deviates from it must be wrong. And she believes in the Ultimatum as a good way to solve all problems. Her attitude is aggressive and uptight and she advocates it as the solution to everything. Here’s an example from her rather offensive Guardian column, where she advises people about relationships despite being famous for not having any:

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right?
Name and address withheld

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Very mature. Surely she should be able to do better than that: she was rude and confrontational and she made no attempt to answer the question. That, and she displayed a pathetically backward approach to relationships which suggests to me that her knowledge of the world around her is nothing approaching what I would demand for the job of running any part of it. And she didn’t even consider the possibility that it was the father of the letter writer’s children that caused the breakup of their relationship. The letter writer might be an innocent victim who, even by Widdecombe’s quaintly 1950s moral code has done nothing at all wrong, and she is simply attacking her for her circumstances. Joe Joseph can do better than that.

Her rather abrasive attitude is basically all she does throughout the whole article. The next letter is from a man who expects his vegetarian wife to cook meat for him, and her advice is to “shove a steak under the grill and mix it with whatever gunge she is turning out”. Then a mildly reasonable reply to a writer who doesn’t like their newly discovered sister, spoilt by the phrase “get a life”. Then, this:

I have been going out with my boyfriend for five months and it is driving me mad that he still shares a house with his ex-girlfriend along with other friends from university. He says he has no feelings for her any more - even though they broke up just four months before he started going out with me - and that they are never alone in the house together because of the other lodgers. I don’t care - I just want him out of that house and away from her. He earns enough to rent a place on his own, and I think he should be able to see that it is unreasonable still to be living with an ex when he has a new girlfriend who is bothered by the situation. Should I insist, or dump him? I don’t think I can learn to live with it.
Name and address withheld

Never alone in the house together? What do the other students do, set up a chaperone rota? Give him an ultimatum and don’t be wet enough to give it twice. But before you do that, ask yourself the most important question of all. You don’t really trust him, do you? If you believed him, you wouldn’t be in this tizz. Trust is the most essential element in any relationship and yours doesn’t have it, so no matter where he lives it is doomed. Take charge and make a fresh start now.

That is unremittingly awful advice. An ultimatum is the worst thing you could do. If you can’t discuss something like an adult then what chance do you have? Aside from anything else, unreasonable is not an attractive look on most people, and attractiveness is important when you’re demanding that someone move house for you at short notice. And notice is important: another vital detail Widdecombe fails to pick up on in this letter is the timing. The article came out in March. Five months before March is October, and four months before that is June. Add a little time between letter and publication, and that’s the time when this guy broke up with his ex. Student housing contracts always begin and end at the end of June, and are therefore usually signed before then. It would seem probable to me that they signed to live together before the break-up and, unlike the letter writer and Widdecombe, decided to just be adult about the whole thing and cohabit without any drama. He’s now, in all likelihood, contractually obliged to pay the rent until next July and therefore probably won’t want to splash out on a second rent payment just to satisfy his jealous and untrusting girlfriend. I wouldn’t.

And to round it all off, her advice is that the relationship isn’t working so she should end it. Possibly this explains why she is so perennially single. I don’t know how she expects the writer of the first letter to “[marry and stay with] the father of [her] kids” if her advice is to break up the moment you hit a difficulty.

More recently, she made a programme called Anne Widdecombe Versus Prostitution, in which she made a token effort to stamp out prostitution (which is ironic given that when she’s supposed to be helping run the country she’s happy to lend her face to basically anything, not just populist pseudo-political drivel, but Celebrity Fit Club and even advertising pasta or supporting Doctor Who villains — she’s kind of like Neil and Christine Hamilton, except that they can hold a relationship together). I didn’t watch this show. I only found out about it because Charlie Brooker didn’t enjoy it either. I did see a clip on Screenwipe of it, though, and it went much like this:

“You used a prostitute.”
“Yes.”
“But you used a prostitute!”
“Yes.”
“A street prostitute.”
“…Yes.”

I don’t think the idea that other people might think prostitution is basically okay had occurred to her, which is strange considering that she was talking to prostitutes and their customers.

As if all that wasn’t enough, look what she calls her website! “The Widdy Web”? What the hell is that? And she writes for The Daily Express — a rag whose primary business model is little more than exploiting dead blondes for profit. (Actually, that may explain it.)

And all that, and I honestly can’t think of any good she’s ever done. I checked her entry in Wikipedia and it seems she’s held two positions of major national power and the only thing Wikipedia lists that she did in that time was to visit every prison in the country — which is exactly what I expect of her: all perfectly good PR but nothing of any substance or evident use. Probably she spoke with the inmates and said “well, you shouldn’t have broken the law in the first place, then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess”.

Maybe I’m missing something. If any of you can tell me any small good that Widdecombe has ever done for the world then please do, but as of right now, everything I know about the woman, even after research, leads me to dislike her.

What, I ask of you, is she for, and why do people in these constituencies continue to elect these inane celebrities when they could be electing representatives?

A thread on the Bad Science forums has just directed me to this page, a parliamentary early day motion in favour of homeopathic hospitals, along with a list of the MPs who are stupid and/or ignorant enough to have signed it. Here’s the text of the motion:

That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets.

Almost every word of that is wrong. Homeopathic hospitals cost money and don’t work; that is a negative contribution. “Complementary treatments” is a misleading term and does not refer to homeopathy alone and so the number attached to it is irrelevant and misleading. Complementary medicine cannot offer “clinically-effective” (which should not be hyphenated) solutions to any health problems (except possibly for psychosomatic ones). Threats to these hospitals’ futures is not a cause for concern, the government should not support them, and they are not “national assets”. That’s pretty bad for a single sentence.

It also links to this page which tells you who your local MP is and how to contact them, so that if yours is on the list (mine isn’t) you can let them know that the NHS should probably not be spending millions of pounds of your money on hospitals whose stated goal is to prescribe a nice cool glass of water for every known illness.

I shall add this motion to my long list of reasons not to like Ann Widdecombe. The only other name on there I know anything much about it Lembit Opik, and frankly I expect more from him. If he wants me to believe his asteroid science he could start by showing he understands that water cannot cure allergies. If someone who understands science tells me there’s a danger then I’ll worry. If someone who thinks homeopathy is clinically effective tells me there’s a danger then I’ll laugh.