I've said it before and I'll say it again

Phil Nugent knows how to write about films.

Here is his favourite Easter film, Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:

Also, here is the Monty Python sketch that the article references:

Best Guitar Solo Ever

If you disagree then consider this a challenge: link to a better one in the comments!

Sentence of the Year

"If one spends too much time knocking down and polemicizing against weak arguments, sooner or later all opposing arguments start looking weak."

Here is the full version of Tyler Cowen's biting rebuttal to Paul Krugman's needless nastiness.

For background here is another post where Cowen explains why he is generally disappointed with Krugman, who he thinks is spurning his chance to be a truly great public intellectual by not being charitable to opposing positions. Krugman responds here, arguing that being polemical increases his power in the grand intellectual battle he sees himself as fighting. Here is what someone articulate from the Marginal Revolution comments makes of the situation:

Yes, he definitely targets weak arguments, but that’s because he’s conducting a war, not a debate. Krugman believes (or at least he’s said so on many occasions) that his opponents — Republicans and “right-wing” (his term) economists — are either themselves malicious or dupes of malicious people, who (consciously or not) are pursuing goals that will result in massive negative results, on the order of trillions of dollars of loss, hardship and death. He believes he needs to win this battle on the stage of national opinion (and for better or worse, he is on it), or these terrible things will happen. 

Picayune details like whether or not specific little arguments are right or wrong are irrelevant, and that’s why he reacts so rudely to you — as an average person might to the argument that “at least the trains ran on time.” He thinks that if he grants any ground to you or any other “right-wing” footsoldiers, he may lose the war, and then the truly evil (again, his words) will use that as ammunition to enact policies that will harm billions of people. I imagine that’s why he rarely repeats all the free trade stuff that he wrote in the 90′s — that position has been overrun by the enemy. He no doubt continues to believe those words then to be true, but talking about them today doesn’t serve the greater purpose. 

I don’t want to armchair psychologize or demonize Krugman, because I feel everyone tends to think like that: when you’re opposing something that is truly wrong, no one goes out of their way to analyze their arguments, or take care to ensure they’re addressing only the strongest points of the apologists. I feel like he’s taken a form of Pascal’s wager: when the risk is so great, can he afford to let any doubts fester? 

It is cool to see such a widely-read economics debate take a turn towards philosophy. The question of whether people do better by picturing their intellectual interactions as group play or as wars is quite a deep one I think, but not so deep that it isn't totally obvious who is right in this case!

Songtime

Mavis Staples: True Religion

The Lovelites: Get It Off My Conscience

"Watch out! Watch out!"

I found the second song by watching this incredible documentary about the Wigan Casino, where in the 1970s/80s young northern people congregated to dance through the night to obscure soul music. It has interviews with a reveller, a record-seller, the proprietor and an old couple who tell you about the price of cigarettes in the 1910s. Watch it!

The BBC does not take complaints seriously, part 851

I read an article mischaracterising GPs' views about the government's healthcare bill and wrote the following complaint to the BBC:

The BBC news website today ran a prominent story featuring claims by some lobbyists that many GPs support the government's NHS bill. 

The results of a recent survey according to which 90% GPs would support the RCGP in calling for the NHS bill to be withdrawn can be found here http://www.rcgp.org.uk/news/press_releases_and_statements/health_bill_survey_results.aspx

This shows unambiguously that the quoted lobbyists' views are highly unrepresentative of those of GPs as a whole.

Since it does not mention this important information, the BBC story gives the impression that GPs support the NHS bill, when in fact the opposite is true.

Please change the story so as to mention the survey results.

Today this response came back (quoted in full except some irrelevant links):

Many thanks for your message, and interest in the site. The story does reference the fact that the Royal College of GPs is opposed to the government reforms. 

Our extensive coverage of the reforms over many months has given a lot of prominence to the opposition of many of the leading professional groups (see examples below). 

In this instance we felt it was newsworthy that a group of doctors had come out in favour of the reforms, partly because this is not an organised voice from which we have heard much. 

We strive for balance in our news coverage at all times, and while it may be true to say that the majority of doctors have deep concerns about the reforms, this is not a universal view.

What I wrote back:

Thank you for your prompt reply, which I find deeply unsatisfactory.

(i) As far as I or cntrl-f can see, neither the phrase "Royal College of GPs" nor any other information about GPs' overall opinions appears in the article in question. Your claim that "The story does reference the fact that the Royal College of GPs is opposed to the government reforms" is therefore incorrect. I am astonished that you have made such an incompetent error.

(ii) Whether or not your coverage has "given a lot of prominence to the opposition of the leading professional groups" is irrelevant to my complaint, which was that your article gives a misleading impression of GPs' opinions.

(iii) Your account makes your standards of newsworthiness seem bizarre and arbitrary. Needless to say there are many other unrepresentative groups whose organised voices rarely feature on the front page of your website.

(iv) I do not understand what you mean by 'balance' in this context. I struggle to think of an interpretation of the word that would override the duty, which your article strikingly neglects, to give the public an accurate impression of the distribution of GPs' views about healthcare reform.

I repeat, please update your article to make it less misleading, using the information I have provided.

Not even exaggerating about the astonishment: is there not some kind of procedure to ensure that complaint responses are not false?

Reminder: top of the pops was sometimes good

No time for posts too busy bedroom-dancing:

She is such a cool person it's insane

how to protest awesomely

A masterclass by a marching band in Wisconsin.

At 1:05 they stop in front of the union-busting governor, whip out some incredible choreography and play this song:

Meanwhile the commentators discuss how many degrees the next turn in the road has: 105, apparently.

Found on NewAPPS, an excellent philosophy blog that also has good music on it.

Racism part 1

Dianne Abbott said "white people love playing divide and rule". The question is, does that show that she is a racist?

I think one reason why arguments about this question are on the whole fruitless is that different people mean different things when they talk about "racism" and "racists", so in this post and some more coming soon I am going to try to make sense of the situation. First here are what I consider the two main definitions:

Racism1: A state of affairs where members of some races are systematically disadvantaged compared to members of other races 

Racism2: The claim that there are true race-based generalisations  

 

Racist1: Someone who promotes Racism1 

Racist2: Someone who believes in Racism2 

These definitions fit the Dianne Abbott situation pretty well. There is ample evidence, all things considered, that Dianne Abbott is not a Racist1: for one thing, she has spent most of her professional life trying to reduce the systematic disadvantage that black people face in Britain. On the other hand, her tweet suggests strongly that she is a Racist2.

This isn't yet satisfactory: there are several questions that still need to be answered. Specifically:

(i) Is it bad to be a Racist2?

(ii) If the answer is "sometimes" (clue: I think it is), then when? 

(iii) Is there a connection between the two kinds of racism? If so, what is it? 

I want to think about these a bit and then write some more. In the meantime, is this a good rational reconstruction so far? Are there forms of racism that these definitions don't capture or do they label things as racism incorrectly? Also any good articles on this subject would be appreciated.

 

 

Publicising Medical Information Humourously

First here is Vinnie Jones keeping us up to date about what is the best song to think about while administering CPR.

Second, here is a poem from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which is really good and was compiled by Philip Larkin. And yes I'm blogging about what I read on the toilet again). Key quatrain: "So do not wait for aches and pains/ To have a surgeon mend your drains/ If he says “cancer” you’re a dunce/ Unless you have it out at once". The writer, J.B.S. Haldane, was a fairly awesome biologist/statistician/Marxist and you should definitely check out his wikipedia page.

Cancer’s a Funny Thing

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked. 

Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
They pumped in BaS04.
Till I could really stand no more,
And, when sufficient had been pressed in,
They photographed my large intestine,
In order to decide the issue
They next scraped out some bits of tissue.
(Before they did so, some good pal
Had knocked me out with pentothal,
Whose action is extremely quick,
And does not leave me feeling sick.)
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer,
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
One set is in my perineurn
Where I can feel, but can’t yet see ‘em.
Another made me like a kipper
Or female prey of Jack the Ripper,
Through this incision, I don’t doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.
I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table. 

So do not wait for aches and pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
If he says “cancer” you’re a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait it’s sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.
My final word, before I’m done,
Is “Cancer can be rather fun”.
Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan
The NHS is quite like heaven
Provided one confronts the tumour
With a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one’s cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit


*In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.

new cat power video

Featuring renowned boxer Manny Pacquiao hitting a ball rhythmically and with focus. It's fairly mesmerising. Thank you, twentyfourbit.com!



The song is called 'king rides by': here is the original version from 1996. Sad words!

Good Golly!

Why Little Richard became a born-again christian:

In early October 1957, on the fifth date of a two-week tour of Australia, Penniman was flying from Melbourne to appear in front of 40,000 fans in concert in Sydney. Shocked by the red hot appearance of the engines against the night sky, he envisioned angels holding up the plane. Then, while he performed at the stadium, he was shaken by the sight of a ball of fire that he watched streak across the sky overhead. He took what was actually the launching of Sputnik 1, the first human-made object to orbit the earth, as another sign to quit show business and follow God. The following day he departed Sydney on a ferry and threw his $8,000 ring in the water to show his band members that he was serious about quitting. The plane that he was originally scheduled to fly back home on ended up crashing in the Pacific Ocean, which he took as confirmation that he was doing what God wanted him to do.^[58]

Fairly understandable!

The Werewolf

By Angela Carter, which I read while having a poo the other day and quite liked:

It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. 

Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives. 

To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that. 

Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St John's Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch--some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours' do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! _follows her about all the time_, they strip the crone, search for her marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death. 

Winter and cold weather. 

Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I've baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter.The good child does as her mother bids--five miles' trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to use it. 

The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast. 

It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer's child would have died of fright at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father's knife and slashed off its right forepaw. 

The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf's paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother's house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured. 

She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf's paw fell to the floor. 

But it was no longer a wolf's paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother's hand.  

She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her father's hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already. 

The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and come rushing in. They knew the wart on the hand at once for a witch's nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead. 

Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered.

Christmas Reading

This is a good time I think to recommend Rortybomb, my favourite American politics blog.

It is a superhumanly comprehensive yet accessible account of a collection of complicated but important issues - credit card charges, home foreclosures, mass incarceration, bankruptcy laws, unemployment - that dominate ordinary peoples' lives in the USA but are quite hard to get a handle on conceptually.

The author, cartoonised above, is former 'financial engineer' turned left-wing blogger/activist thingy Mike Konczal.

His blog goes right down to the details of festering foreclosed swimming pools causing disease outbreaks in Fern County California, and right up to the big historical picture of a country that suffers from an inherited Victorian/feudal prejudice against debtors, with plenty of in-between interestingness as well.

Konczal has the good habit of picturing economics, and academic theorising generally, as a useful explanatory tool rather than a deep underlying truth, which makes the blog pleasingly intellectually cosmopolitan and also less confrontationally evangelical, despite its decidedly radical political stance, than say Paul Krugman, Kevin Drum etc.

Perhaps connectedly, Rortybomb also does really well at playing the ideological Turing test game (perfected by Tyler Cowen here), where you try as convincingly as you can to defend the position of someone you disagree with. This long post about the roots of conservative radicalism  is by a guest but is typical. Here is an understanding the other side post by the main man. Here is another one asking why non-financial firms aren't pushing for bank reforms.

Why the blog is called "Rortybomb" is a mystery to me. It sounds kind of computery.

Finally, here is yet another excellent post featuring the line "there is no foreclosure Batman"(no comma).

Enjoy!

Here am I, Daniel Dennett, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes!

Thanks be to Sarah Costrell, here is something that is both mental and philosophicalarious:

facebook is funner with folk music

If you like The Coral on facebook they send you really cool eclectic music videos such as this one:

Here are more Jonathan Wilson songs.

Hate: in my opinion it is bad

It strikes me that well-meaning people with committed heterodox political views who invest a lot of their energy and personal identity in politics tend to indulge quite a lot in words like 'despicable', 'pathetic', 'vile sewer rat' 'Maggie Maggie Maggie, die die die' etc. See this blog for plenty of examples. These are words that people use when they want to encourage hate. I don't think this is a good idea.

First a qualification. While I generally tend to think that puzzle-solving is a much better metaphor for world-improvement than fighting/struggling/resisting etc, there are doubtless a lot of hate-worthy people out there, and hate-fostering can certainly be a useful tool in some circumstances. Still, I think it should probably be done less for the following reasons:

1) It often has the wrong effect. Personal attacks generally bring everyone down, causing witnesses to lower their opinion of both the bully and the bullied party. I think there is research into US political adverts that backs this point up and will link to it if find it. Worse, hated people often become afraid of the people who hate them. This is bad on two levels: broadly, groups of frightened people often develop strong group identity, making their members less likely to change sides; narrowly, people are way more likely to be violent when they are afraid. Sometimes you want to be disliked and for people you disagree with to bond and become violent, but more often I think you don't.

2) It can be misleading. There is a part of most people that wants to solve problems by asking themselves the question 'where are the bastards and how can I hurt them?' even when asking other questions is a better idea. Maybe it is because of zero-sum game situations featuring quite a lot in our evolutionary history or something. If you spend your whole day talking about what bastards some other people are and how it's time to fucking declare war man, even if this is a good idea in terms of its effects on other people, it is likely to encourage your inner warrior and bias your thinking, making you worse at world-improvement.

3) Non-activism reasons. There are reasons to do things other than world-improvement considerations, and I think these overwhelmingly favour a presumption against hate-fostering. It is really ugly, arbitrarily limits the range of people you can interact with, causes depression and paranoia, reduces your and others' ability to think independently and most importantly is wildly inaccurate, in the sense that genuine hate-worthiness is rare and really hard to gauge. Things which make people inaccurate, non-autonomous, unhappy, isolated and ugly are best avoided.

good to have her back

From now on every political speech you see/hear will be disappointing in a whole new bunch of ways:

No drums, no "is-there-so-much-Hate-for-the-ones-we-Love?", no choreography, no Terry Wogan introduction, no frizzy-haired well-moustached balalaikists, no archery...

Downhill from now on, basically

May I have your intention please

I want to find an article that deals with the following argument:

1. The criminal law depends on folk psychology because it attaches importance to 'BDI' words like 'belief', 'desire' and 'intention'.
2. Specifically, the law says that guilty verdicts can only be given when it can be proved to a high standard that a particular intention was present in someone's mind at a particular time.
3. If we all agree to be naturalists, then we may as well accept that peoples' behaviour supervenes on the physical state of their bodies: the state of a man's mind is a fact about his digestive system blablabla 
4. Even better, folk psychology and BDI words are generally ok, because theories that use BDI words are generally good ones. People who like tomatos and believe that they are in the fridge and intend to eat them often do so and vice versa blablabla
5. Despite points 3 and 4, it is still unclear enough how to tell whether a statement of the form "Mrs R had intention S at time T" is true or not that one might say that it has never been established to a "beyond reasonable doubt" kind of standard.
6. Therefore every guilty verdict ever was wrong.

So far all the articles I can find either offer reasons why 3 and 4 are true or spend loads of time going on about neuroscience experiments that do not address the question of what the truth conditions are for single-case intention ascriptions but instead introduce new irrelevant red herrings to do with consciousness.

Philosophers/lawyers/neuroscientists/internet-users: your help is requested!

The man who wrote 'The Men Who Stare At Goats'

Thanks to Olly Wiseman's sound advice, here are a lot of documentary-like radio programmes created by Jon Ronson, whose reality-based book about the US military's investment in paranormal warriors was made into an awesome film a few years ago.

He is one of those people whose life seems to be quite like how a lot of people including me would like their life to be quite like. If you haven't seen the film version of the book, then do as it is fantastic. If you have, then you will probably want to tuck into these bad boys.

Sample quotes:

"There could only have been two possible explanations: either the maze did exist, or it didn't exist". 

"...but he had unearthed something valuable in the Loch, something just as valuable as a Plesiosaurus." 

"As a child, Danny Robbins wanted to be a detective like Sam Spade, but instead he became a humourist on the radio, which is noble and exhilarating in its own way, but then again it isn't."

Also here is Jon Ronson's website, wherefrom all these links are.

Series 1 

Jon Ronson On Amateur Sleuths 
Jon Ronson On How to Be Invisible 
Jon Ronson On Positive Thinking 
Jon Ronson On Going West 
Jon Ronson On the Comfort of Strangers 
Jon Ronson On Magical Moments 

Series 2 

Jon Ronson On Living in the past 
Jon Ronson On Irrational thought 
Jon Ronson On Lying 
Jon Ronson On Friendship 
Jon Ronson On Waiting 
Jon Ronson On Building Bridges 

Series 3 

Jon Ronson On The Worst internet date 
Jon Ronson On Waking from a Dream 
Jon Ronson On Uncontrolable responses 
Jon Ronson on Crushed egos 
Jon Ronson on Glastonbury Festival part 1 
Jon Ronson on Glastonbury Festival part 2 

Series 4 

Jon Ronson on Receiving bad news 
Jon Ronson On Being fancy 
Jon Ronson on The wrong kind of madness 
Jon Ronson On How to stop time 
Jon Ronson on Doing anything for love 

Series 5 

Jon Ronson on The Fear of Flying 
Jon Ronson on When Small talk goes wrong 
Jon Ronson on Living in a movie 
Jon Ronson on Being alone 
Jon Ronson on Ambition 

Series 6 

Jon Ronson on Voices in your Head 
Jon Ronson on Spying 
Jon Ronson on The fine line between good and bad 
Jon Ronson on Witch hunts 
Jon Ronson on Aiming low 

Wee, doobydoodoo, doobydoo doobydoobydoodoo

A funkier than normal version. This interview is also very good indeed.

UPDATE: it sounds quite like papa was a rollin stone