Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: Asthma and the smoking ban: Find the decline
One of my favourite bloggers, staunch freedom advocate Chris Snowdon, has written a superb debunking of a daft, highly disingenuous and badly broken study claiming that childhood asthma rates dropped after the introduction of the smoking ban.
'I suggest to you, dear reader, that most people who read about the "sharp fall in the number of children admitted to hospital with severe asthma" would have assumed that the number of children admitted to hospital with severe asthma fell sharply in an actual year, not in a hypothetical year which exists in the imagination of a man who Dick Puddlecote has described, with some justification, as "the foremost anti-smoking crank on the planet". But then maybe I'm very old fashioned.'
Ye-ouch. Superb analysis, Mr Snowdon.
Sunday 27 January 2013
Monday 21 January 2013
Evolutionary Psychology as Pseudoscience - the 'waist-hip' ratio
'Humans simply do not mate randomly.'
So says New Zealand anthropologist Barnaby Dixson in a Daily Mail (Mail Online) article released a couple of years ago [1]. Taken at face value, as an inane expression of the bleeding obvious, I can't help but agree - what I can't agree with is everything else he claims, arising as it does from some extraordinarily boneheaded thinking.
This is another study of how the waist to hip ratio (whr) - found by dividing the circumference of the waist with that of the hip - supposedly is a reliable indicator of 'female attractiveness'. The pet project of evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh, this idea resurfaces every now and then in the form of 'research', perhaps due to a temporary coincidence of a surplus of time and funding with a deficit of intelligent thinking amongst the scientific community [2].
I can immediately think of a couple of perfectly good reasons why looking like a stick on the one hand, or like a whale on the other, is unlikely to be perceived as attractive - reasons that have nothing to do with a putative hardwired instinctive appreciation of biological fitness. The first physical profile might result from an extreme case of narcissism, the latter from an extreme case of lack of self-control - both of which are traits of personality or behaviour that are not exactly appealing in their own right. Convinced? Not if you're an evolutionary psychologist.
Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that EPs don't even notice the possibilily of explaining subtle human social behaviour by using subtle human social science, as the loud rumblings of their biologically deterministic juggernaut drown out every one else's suggestions and arguments, crushing all painstakingly observed social understanding down to the reductionistic nothingness of genetic imperative.
Let's put this idea to bed now, shall we?...
...About 10 years ago, I started taking my own whr measurement. This hasn't changed over the passage of time. And, what do you know, I am in fact the proud possessor of the golden ratio myself - just under 0.7!
Now, don't all jump on me at once ;-)
But then you're not, are you?
See, over the last decade, I've been walking to work pretty much every single morning (I do recommend this for helping to maintain your whr at the required level for optimum fertility and attractiveness as mandated by the experts!) passing, as I do, a wide variety of males, species Homo sapiens. Especially during the summer months, my whr must surely have been explicitly visible.
However, on arriving at work and looking behind me, one morning after another I have noticed that hordes of ardent male suitors, stretching back in a trail from whence I have come, have conspicuously failed to materialize.
How odd. I definitely remember walking past on a typical day, oh, more than two dozen male conspecifics on my way to work. Where are they all?
Perhaps I've been doing it wrong. Perhaps I need to leer provocatively at males in passing and advertise my superior biosignal to genetic fitness by glaring pointedly at my hips, trying to tap into that ancient phenomenon of hard-wired gaze following we supposedly inherited from the ancestors we shared with other higher primates. Or perhaps I should wink vigorously at the various males I encounter on my walks and bump into them with my hips to attract their attention to my index for optimal fecundity.
However, something (which EPs would probably call my 'naive folk psychological skills' and I would call my 'bloody common sense') tells me that whilst I might provoke some attention, it would be unlikely to be informed by the kind of motivation anticipated by Singh.
Not, perhaps, attention that would indicate an immediate desire to engage in a mating episode.
I do invite interested evolutionary psychologists to try these research techniques out though (in the field as it is, where everyone knows it really counts). After all, they are the experts. As long as it is accepted that the extension of this invitation does not mean I am responsible in any way for spurious events that occur concurrently with testing in the experimental environment (black eyes, broken teeth, police arrests, sections under the Mental Health Act, etc).
--
How can it be that Singh, in his 2010 study, was wrong [3]? The experiment was carried out on no less than 14 human males. Under scientific lab conditions, using very expensive shiny equipment, very possibly by people wearing white coats and almost certainly credited with scientific qualifications.
Here's an idea.
Could it possibly be that Singh might have missed something out?
Could it be that, perhaps, when human males choose a mate, they do not do so acting according to the diktat of their orbital frontal cortex operating under carefully-controlled lab conditions under the observation of an fMRI scanner when being shown a collection of photographs of surgically-altered naked human females?
Could it be that in real life, a specific human male's interest in a specific human female is not activated on being rounded up with a group of conspecifics and shooed into a lab where he is exposed to digitally-altered photographs of female midriffs?
Could it even be that in the real human world of attraction, a whole variety of complex factors are in interplay, with (whisper it) shared personality attributes, interests, a similar world view, humour, intelligence and so on all playing their part alongside rather undefinable attributes of physical attractiveness?
Seriously. I am having difficulty figuring out how evolutionary psychologists can get away with themselves.
Three possibilities present;
1. They and everyone they know really do actually behave like biologically-driven muppet Martians. They approach their intended female with a calculating expression, graph paper and a tape measure, and their idea of a first date is a trip to the nearest fMRI scanner so that they and their prospective mate can discover whether they do indeed feel attraction towards each other - by poring over a brightly-coloured scan of their anterior cingulate cortex - before they can get down to business;
2. They all need to get out even more than I do;
3. They live in some strange parallel, topsy-turvy universe where the measure of a good scientist is made according to their ability to manufacture theories completely at odds with what is under their noses and pretend as hard as they possibly can that the absence of any correlation between their subsequent 'findings' and real life is not at all relevant.
Let me put this problem another way. Imagine you are posing the question 'Why is that dog wagging its tail?' to a biologist, a chemist and a physicist respectively, with the expectation that they will be recruiting the expertise of their professional discipline to inform their response. You will likely get three qualitatively different attempts - but these would be descriptions of what is going on when a dog wags its tail.
In order to get a proper answer to your question, you must really look at the pseudosocial environment in which the dog is located -
_'the dog is wagging its tail because... its owner has returned/it is about to go out for a walk/it is about to be fed...'_
And that's just with dogs - human behaviour is many orders of magnitude more complicated, especially as it has the extra game-changing dimension of an explicit self-awareness. It operates in a real social environment, so we need the social sciences (informed by the context of individual choice) and the humanities - philosophy, social anthropology, psychology (of the non-biologically deterministic variety), political science etc - to enlighten us here. Meaningful understanding of behaviour always requires a social interpretation.
Genetics, endocrinology, neurology and so on aren't the right tools for the job. They can only give us, at best, an intriguing glimpse into a tiny part of the processes of human thought and behaviour - what is biologically involved and perhaps necessary but far removed from sufficient to provide an explanation. Most importantly, the biological part of the process is the least illuminating of our actual, distinctively unique, humanity.
So the expectation that the 'hard' sciences can inform us about human behaviour turns out to make a silly category error. If you don't realize this, you apparently become an evolutionary psychologist.
---
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1306012/Beauty-summed-To-tell-womans-really-attractive-figures.html
[2] For some sources, see the references at the end of the Wikipedia article on whr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio
[3] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009042#s
So says New Zealand anthropologist Barnaby Dixson in a Daily Mail (Mail Online) article released a couple of years ago [1]. Taken at face value, as an inane expression of the bleeding obvious, I can't help but agree - what I can't agree with is everything else he claims, arising as it does from some extraordinarily boneheaded thinking.
This is another study of how the waist to hip ratio (whr) - found by dividing the circumference of the waist with that of the hip - supposedly is a reliable indicator of 'female attractiveness'. The pet project of evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh, this idea resurfaces every now and then in the form of 'research', perhaps due to a temporary coincidence of a surplus of time and funding with a deficit of intelligent thinking amongst the scientific community [2].
I can immediately think of a couple of perfectly good reasons why looking like a stick on the one hand, or like a whale on the other, is unlikely to be perceived as attractive - reasons that have nothing to do with a putative hardwired instinctive appreciation of biological fitness. The first physical profile might result from an extreme case of narcissism, the latter from an extreme case of lack of self-control - both of which are traits of personality or behaviour that are not exactly appealing in their own right. Convinced? Not if you're an evolutionary psychologist.
Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that EPs don't even notice the possibilily of explaining subtle human social behaviour by using subtle human social science, as the loud rumblings of their biologically deterministic juggernaut drown out every one else's suggestions and arguments, crushing all painstakingly observed social understanding down to the reductionistic nothingness of genetic imperative.
Let's put this idea to bed now, shall we?...
...About 10 years ago, I started taking my own whr measurement. This hasn't changed over the passage of time. And, what do you know, I am in fact the proud possessor of the golden ratio myself - just under 0.7!
Now, don't all jump on me at once ;-)
But then you're not, are you?
See, over the last decade, I've been walking to work pretty much every single morning (I do recommend this for helping to maintain your whr at the required level for optimum fertility and attractiveness as mandated by the experts!) passing, as I do, a wide variety of males, species Homo sapiens. Especially during the summer months, my whr must surely have been explicitly visible.
However, on arriving at work and looking behind me, one morning after another I have noticed that hordes of ardent male suitors, stretching back in a trail from whence I have come, have conspicuously failed to materialize.
How odd. I definitely remember walking past on a typical day, oh, more than two dozen male conspecifics on my way to work. Where are they all?
Perhaps I've been doing it wrong. Perhaps I need to leer provocatively at males in passing and advertise my superior biosignal to genetic fitness by glaring pointedly at my hips, trying to tap into that ancient phenomenon of hard-wired gaze following we supposedly inherited from the ancestors we shared with other higher primates. Or perhaps I should wink vigorously at the various males I encounter on my walks and bump into them with my hips to attract their attention to my index for optimal fecundity.
However, something (which EPs would probably call my 'naive folk psychological skills' and I would call my 'bloody common sense') tells me that whilst I might provoke some attention, it would be unlikely to be informed by the kind of motivation anticipated by Singh.
Not, perhaps, attention that would indicate an immediate desire to engage in a mating episode.
I do invite interested evolutionary psychologists to try these research techniques out though (in the field as it is, where everyone knows it really counts). After all, they are the experts. As long as it is accepted that the extension of this invitation does not mean I am responsible in any way for spurious events that occur concurrently with testing in the experimental environment (black eyes, broken teeth, police arrests, sections under the Mental Health Act, etc).
--
How can it be that Singh, in his 2010 study, was wrong [3]? The experiment was carried out on no less than 14 human males. Under scientific lab conditions, using very expensive shiny equipment, very possibly by people wearing white coats and almost certainly credited with scientific qualifications.
Here's an idea.
Could it possibly be that Singh might have missed something out?
Could it be that, perhaps, when human males choose a mate, they do not do so acting according to the diktat of their orbital frontal cortex operating under carefully-controlled lab conditions under the observation of an fMRI scanner when being shown a collection of photographs of surgically-altered naked human females?
Could it be that in real life, a specific human male's interest in a specific human female is not activated on being rounded up with a group of conspecifics and shooed into a lab where he is exposed to digitally-altered photographs of female midriffs?
Could it even be that in the real human world of attraction, a whole variety of complex factors are in interplay, with (whisper it) shared personality attributes, interests, a similar world view, humour, intelligence and so on all playing their part alongside rather undefinable attributes of physical attractiveness?
Seriously. I am having difficulty figuring out how evolutionary psychologists can get away with themselves.
Three possibilities present;
1. They and everyone they know really do actually behave like biologically-driven muppet Martians. They approach their intended female with a calculating expression, graph paper and a tape measure, and their idea of a first date is a trip to the nearest fMRI scanner so that they and their prospective mate can discover whether they do indeed feel attraction towards each other - by poring over a brightly-coloured scan of their anterior cingulate cortex - before they can get down to business;
2. They all need to get out even more than I do;
3. They live in some strange parallel, topsy-turvy universe where the measure of a good scientist is made according to their ability to manufacture theories completely at odds with what is under their noses and pretend as hard as they possibly can that the absence of any correlation between their subsequent 'findings' and real life is not at all relevant.
Let me put this problem another way. Imagine you are posing the question 'Why is that dog wagging its tail?' to a biologist, a chemist and a physicist respectively, with the expectation that they will be recruiting the expertise of their professional discipline to inform their response. You will likely get three qualitatively different attempts - but these would be descriptions of what is going on when a dog wags its tail.
In order to get a proper answer to your question, you must really look at the pseudosocial environment in which the dog is located -
_'the dog is wagging its tail because... its owner has returned/it is about to go out for a walk/it is about to be fed...'_
And that's just with dogs - human behaviour is many orders of magnitude more complicated, especially as it has the extra game-changing dimension of an explicit self-awareness. It operates in a real social environment, so we need the social sciences (informed by the context of individual choice) and the humanities - philosophy, social anthropology, psychology (of the non-biologically deterministic variety), political science etc - to enlighten us here. Meaningful understanding of behaviour always requires a social interpretation.
Genetics, endocrinology, neurology and so on aren't the right tools for the job. They can only give us, at best, an intriguing glimpse into a tiny part of the processes of human thought and behaviour - what is biologically involved and perhaps necessary but far removed from sufficient to provide an explanation. Most importantly, the biological part of the process is the least illuminating of our actual, distinctively unique, humanity.
So the expectation that the 'hard' sciences can inform us about human behaviour turns out to make a silly category error. If you don't realize this, you apparently become an evolutionary psychologist.
---
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1306012/Beauty-summed-To-tell-womans-really-attractive-figures.html
[2] For some sources, see the references at the end of the Wikipedia article on whr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio
[3] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009042#s
Saturday 12 January 2013
The Leveson Inquiry. Leveson's legacy and the future for the British press - Frontline Club, London - Hosted on the 3rd of December
The Leveson Inquiry - a nasty top-down authoritarian assault on a Free Press in the U.K., that would never happen in the U.S., where citizens have the enviable protection of the First Amendment.
My running analysis/commentary on the Frontline Club's Leveson debate.
Featuring Torin Douglas (as Chair), Martin Moore, Rich Peppiatt, Mick Hume and Kirsty Hughes.
---
@0:03:57 - MM speaks. He goes over some of the points from the Leveson Report.
@0:12:24 - I would challenge the whole idea that polls are an accurate and useful barometer of public support.
In the past, public feeling was expressed through campaigns by the *public*, this was how a democratically-held view would be developed and articulated.
These days we are expected to stay at home and fill in polls designed or commissioned by pressure/campaign groups. There are a number of problems with claiming that this latter approach reflects true public feeling, not least a) question wording tends to be influenced by the pollsters' own agenda even when the polls are 'independently' carried out, and will cherry-pick the sort of opinion that they call for b) percentages are all very well, but what is the *gross* popularity of the poll, i.e. its total participants? There are about 65 million people in the U.K.
---
@0:14:12 - MH speaks.
@0:16:43 - MH: the paradox of 'independent self-regulation'. Why has no-one else noticed this?
---
@0:24:00 - RP speaks.
@0:24:14 - 'Why are liberals and the Left lining up to endorse Leveson?' RP asks.
I'll give you a simple answer - because they've given up on democracy being defined by the demos.
---
@0:24:30 - RP argues that the nature of democracy has fundamentally changed and these days it is run by corporate powers - including the corporate press - rather than the forces of Government - 'Rupert Murdoch is more powerful in many ways than David Cameron, you could argue'. Therefore the press should be regulated.
Either by laws written by the state, or by an oxymoronic 'independent self-regulator', which is, as MH says, to be summoned out of the ether and to be mysteriously and magically immune to the mistakes, biasses and prejudices that affect hacks and all their readers (that is, the common man).
Well, Murdoch's press may provide an annoying, blaring backdrop of press narcissism and endless obsession with trivia to our everyday lives, but last time I looked it was not powered by the full forces of statecraft with the ability to change and enforce the law.
No matter who owns the press or how loud its voice is, establishing a regulator over it either explicitly (if underpinned by statute) or implicitly (as a clique of unaccountable elites appointed by them) hands the public voice, eyes and ears over to the isolated forces of the state, which can only result in the undermining of the essential foundation for a healthy democracy - the autonomy of ordinary people.
---
@0:26:08 - If there is anything that transparently captures the whole powerful undertow of elitist snobbery pervading this entire discussion, it is RP's 'cooking' analogy.
He argues that, when at home, he can cook up whatever he likes, but everyone would agree that if he was to sell his cooking to the general public some sort of regulation would be necessary.
The contemptuous message is obvious: the press can't feed all those dumb masses out there just *anything*, who knows what might happen to us. 'Common sense' dictates that we must have regulation.
This argument is reiterated in various guises during the discussion (by, amongst others, Mandy Cormack @0:51:20).
---
@0:26:30 - RP flatly states it: 'We don't have a free press'.
I one hundred percent agree. But why don't we have a free press? Because of insane mediaeval libel laws, perhaps? Because we are about to get a new press regulator?
Nope. Apparently the reason we don't have a free press is because Rich Peppiatt doesn't get paid to sit down, rant about whatever he likes and then have the results published verbatim by his editor.
Those of us that know the difference between, on the one hand, having a blanket consensus forced on us from outside by an elitist and powerful regulator and, on the other, privately establishing a consensus within our own publication might advise Rich, if he would like to make his voice heard, to work his way up to a more senior position.
We might call this sort of 'press censorship' 'old-fashioned editing'. Indeed, given the sort of stuff coming out of Rich's mouth in the course of this debate, in his case I would call it 'pretty *essential* editing'.
---
@0:27:20 - KH speaks, outlining Index on Censorship's position.
@0:42:10 - MH raises Private Eye editor Ian Hislop's stance that the press should be accountable firstly to the criminal court and secondly to the public, its readers, and that should be that.
Also Hislop apparently suggested that some News of the World readers should be invited to the Leveson proceedings to give their reasons for reading the News of the World in their millions all that time. Lord Justice Leveson declined to entertain this idea, which kind of sums up his attitude to the public at large.
---
@0:46:35 - MM points out that criminal acts committed by the press often are unknown to the victim, may never come to light and, if they do so, either cannot or will not be pursued by the police due to a lack of evidence or financial/time costs.
Civil law cases, i.e. libel and privacy cases, have to go to the High Court which is well beyond the means of most people.
However it is difficult to see how establishing a regulatory body or watchdog would help with this. If journalists can hide criminal activities from their peers/the public/the police, they are hardly likely to reveal them to a regulator.
On the other hand, a diverse press - which we desperately need - might be able to hold *itself* to account by investigating its rivals and their claims. Any regulator is going to achieve the *opposite* of a diverse press, though, by chilling the scope of investigative journalism and scaring journalists away from risk-taking.
---
@0:50:08 - KH points out that the Defamation Reform Bill is intended to act as a vehicle for enabling compensation for press harassment and libel, and that it is therefore unnecessary to have a *press regulatory body* doing a job best suited to the police.
While I would agree with the point that it is a bizarre idea to have a body regulating the press be responsible for public redress, I find myself deeply uneasy with a lot of the contents of the Defamation Bill and think it is not the champion of individual freedom that Index on Censorship seems to hold it up as.
---
@0:50:54 - the discussion opens to the floor...
@0:55:45 - RP reckons that politicians don't come up with radical ideas because they are running scared of the press!
I think politicians don't *have* any radical ideas and the press is just filling the resulting vacuum with its vacuous monologue.
@0:56:36 - RP: 'The problem we have with our newspapers is that they don't declare "we're coming from this perspective - this isn't the whole story, this is the part of the story that suits our argument"...people...think they're getting news, the facts...[this] perverts our social debate and I think that's a broader issue than criminality at a specific moment in time. I think as a society we have a real issue with that, and I think that that is something that Leveson will hopefully address.'
Digest: people are too dim to spot the truth among the lies and know the difference between 'facts' (which are identical with news) and opinion, us dumb folks are getting confused and need Leveson to come along to separate truth from fiction and tell us how to think.
@0:58:54 - Audience member points out that the PCC is an elite institution set up by the press that has the effect of shutting ordinary people out. His solution is to, um, create another elite institution set up by Leveson that will have the effect of shutting ordinary people out.
---
@1:00:56 - 'John'. Hmmm. 'John' is a problem, for a start being just plebs we're not allowed to know his full name. Let's call him 'Sir John' (SJ), there are enough Lords and Sirs buzzing around all of Leveson's movements, and he certainly acts like one.
After missing the whole point about the First Amendment he continues:
'I think a lot of people in the United States would love to have a broadcast regulated environment that would stop Fox News from destroying Public Discourse.'
A lot of people like himself, that is, who would love to have Public Discourse trammelled within the respectable confines of BBC-alike mantras approved by the likes of SJ.
Perish the thought that Public Discourse should be made off with by Fox News and descend among the herds of snorting and cavorting sheeple who might boot the poops of dissent and irreverence all over Sir John's shiny shoes as he picks his way across the uneven fields of democratic debate on his way to his next appointment as Director or CEO or Chairman of whatever.
---
@1:01:05 - MH quips: they'd want something as boring as the BBC instead?
Ouch.
God bless the BBC, says Sir John, who apparently works for Al Jazeera and loves Ofcom's stranglehold over investigative journalism (surprise surprise).
MH quips: like Newsnight?
Ouch again.
SJ reckons that's a cheat. Or cheap.
(actually I don't think it *was* cheap, both in terms of the besieged BBC's reputation loss and in terms of the alleged 185k payable by them to a wronged and furious Lord McAlpine, but there you go...)
SJ retorts that perhaps we should be talking about MH and ITN. MH calls his bluff. SJ immediately changes the subject and accuses both MH and KH of displaying a cavalier disregard for 'minorities and third parties' bullied by the press who are seeking redress from 'independent' regulators like Ofcom.
I'm more concerned with SJ's cavalier disregard for the majority of society and his willingness to advocate the use of 'minorities and third parties' as human shields behind which the freedom of the press can apparently be attacked with impunity.
This top-down technique for establishing 'social justice' (and the related one of blackmailing people into agreeing that their freedom must be given up in exchange for 'empowering' those less well-off than themselves) is now so absolutely ingrained into mainstream political thinking on societal change, that every time I hear a plea on behalf of 'vulnerable/minority groups' I hope that someone finds where that stink is coming from and shuts it off as quickly as possible, before more precious civil freedoms disappear down the toilet.
What SJ and all the other m'lords and m'ladies don't get is that it is a perfectly consistent position to both have sympathy for victims and *at the same time* robustly resist any attempt to use them to set an agenda.
---
@1:02:58 - MM thinks that the rights of the individual are forgotten in comparison to the rights of the free press. He gives examples of the wrongly accused - 'What are they to do?'
Putting aside the fact that the free press is made up of individuals with rights, people are often wrongly accused of all sorts of things. That's part of life. And the whole Trial by Media thing doesn't help. But that's part of life, too. The tyranny of 'popular opinion' always *has been* part of life.
How is a Regulatory Body supposed to make these things disappear? Short of chilling publicly-visible reporting and the subsequent debate out of existance, which is just as likely to result in miscarriages of justice, just behind closed doors.
In a democracy the only legitimate approach to creating a freer, fairer, improved platform for debate can be from the bottom up, not from the top down. It is, of course, true that doing things that way is a lot more difficult than calling in an elite of the great and the good to do it for you. But it is also, of course, true that it *always has been* difficult - at least no-one gets hanged for it these days.
---
@1:07:09 - MH is the only one that gets it: 'Freedom of expression is an *indivisible right*!'
@1:08:16 - MM: 'Leveson specifically says, no regulator should be able to stop anyone from publishing anything.'
So the golden question. *Why do we NEED one?*
---
@1:08:32 - MM gets J.S. Mill's harm principle catastrophically wrong. Mill was a passionate advocate of *self determination*. Determination. By *selves*, not by Leveson, a Regulatory Body, MM or anyone else. This absolutely fundamental freedom principle is conspicuously and disdainfully ignored throughout this entire 1.5 hour discussion.
The harm principle caveat is 'so long as it causes no *physical* harm to others', with the *physical* qualifier being necessary in the modern therapeutic age because of the aggressive expansion of the idea of harm into the sphere of the psychological, an idea that Mill would not have found recognisable, because once people have to be protected from 'psychological harm' you can wave the project of self-determination goodbye.
And if anyone doesn't get the difference between mental and physical harm, I volunteer to come and whap them around the head with my copy of 'On Liberty' until they do.
---
@1:09:25 - Member of the audience reckons as laws are reactive, we want a regulator to create an environment where injustices do not happen in the first place.
Problem is of course they still will, but with a gagged press you will never know.
@1:10:30 - The same audience member lets slip a very revealing comment. He reckons in order to appoint regulators to decide what is in the Public Interest, we should set up a sort of 'senate clearance' system where a senate is appointed to pass these regulators. This process would not need to be subject to votes by the public, because of course, none of us would be interested in it (!!)
---
@1:13:10 - KH points out, rather belatedly, that not shutting down press coverage on crimes has led to their solution, so the media can play an important role here.
---
@1:13:58 - Howler from RP (they just keep coming), who (possibly due to a moment of airheaded introspection) wasn't paying enough attention to have noticed Sir John's dig at MH (@1:01:25).
'I would love', he says, 'to see Mick or you, Kirsty, at the centre of a media firestorm and the victim of this and see if you would sit here and be quite as blase about the right of the individual.'
Well. Let's say (for the sake of argument) that you happened to be the editor of a small, one of a kind publication with a handful of staff and a microscopic budget, and that you happened to get sucked into just such a media firestorm, and that a huge and powerful entity (say ITN) happened to decide to bankrupt you and liquidate your publication.
Clearly, in such a situation it is a given that you would turn tail on a principled defence of free speech and run whimpering to the fold of the Leveson sycophants?
Clearly, it's a given that *Rich* would, anyway...
---
@1:16:40 - MM thinks Leveson was a good idea for embarrassing media moguls into compliance/behaving. He thinks having 'this thing' where people have to explain what they are doing is a 'healthy, democratic thing'.
I think people explaining what they are doing is a 'healthy, democratic thing' when it's done in the open court of public opinion. Not when it's done in the closed inquisition of Lord Justice Leveson.
---
@1:17:21 - An investigative reporter joins MH to make an insightful, clear-headed total minority of two:
'If you take as your initial premise that democracy won't exist if you don't have healthy investigative journalism, which is a view I subscribe to, what do we know about investigative journalism? We know that at the moment it is on its knees, good public interest investigative journalism, because there is not enough resources. Right. So there is an irreconcilable paradox here because, on the back of the appalling behaviour of the News of the World and other organizations there is this huge backlash occurring, that is heading towards legislation. What will that do? That will crack down on and legalize the whole process of investigative journalism.'
He makes the point that difficult judgement calls have to be made which sometimes break the law in order to break an important story. If you have to continually argue every point with a lawyer, this will kill off investigative journalism because no-one will bother.
Quite right. Even though some investigative attack dogs may have the repulsive habit of occasionally chewing on a plebian leg or two, I would rather, on balance, they be left to run free out there.
---
@1:18:55 - Reiteration of the argument made by SJ earlier. I.e., we have to protect Children And The Vulnerable by regulation.
Speaker then follows this argument through to its logical conclusion:
'The local news blog, if it writes something that might actually be true, but rather an invasion of my privacy, may hurt me more because it is local, because all my friends read it: why, still, the question remains, why are we regulating 10 particular newspapers, and not everybody else?'
So there we have it. Where this line of thinking ultimately leads to: because free expression is, indeed, an indivisible right. If the '10 particular newspapers' don't get it, *nor does anyone else*. Everyone must therefore be regulated and censored.
---
@1:24:36 - RP argues that most people who buy the tabloids wouldn't do so (would 'rather not') if they knew what went into making the stories.
Like all incurable snobs, he is magically and singularly immune to the brainwashing influence of the megalomaniac corporate zeitgeist out there. This gives him superhuman powers of perception and the authority to decide what the rest of us get to see, read, hear, think and say.
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@1:25:42 - MH closes with an argument about the first principle of a free press.
If you don't want to listen to all the discussion just listen to these last few minutes, as he makes the only points that *really need* making by anyone throughout the whole debate here.
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END
Monday 7 January 2013
Guitar by Stradivarius - the "Sabionari" - played by Krishna Sol Jimenez
Krishna Sol Jimenez performs Robert de Visee's Suite in G Major on an instrument by Antonio Stradivari, arguably the most famous musical instrument maker of all time.
Known primarily for his peerless violins, violas and violoncelli, Stradivari also made other stringed instruments, including some guitars. There are only 5 known extant guitars by Stradivari, of which the Sabionari is the only playable example, restored to its current condition by French expert restorers Sinier de Ridder [1].
It is best to give this performance a listen through more than once, in order to get accustomed to the transparent delicacy of the Baroque guitar's timbre, which is quite different to that of a modern Classical guitar. The Prelude, which opens the performance, perhaps sounds the most alien of the movements to the modern unprepared ear, with its freer form and modal clashes.
Once you are used to the tone, the graceful, plaintive Sarabande, the Chaconne (about half-way through) and the Menuet (last up) are brought to glowing life with this wonderful instrument.
Jimenez' superb performance reflects an authentic approach - not just by playing without nails. Note the contact with the soundboard by the little finger of the right hand (a practice that was to extend into the 19th century), the use of the index finger and thumb to encompass the strings, the use of strumming and the florid left-hand ornamentation especially on extended notes.
While treatises from any previous historical era on technique are sparse (in practice most early performers would likely just have developed their own style), Jimenez' right hand position and approach is consistent with hints we have about general performance practice of the time.
For a start, we have the design of the instrument itself; the guitar at this point was a five-course instrument (with 5 pairs of strings) rather than having the modern arrangement of six single strings. Double strings give the guitar a particular resonance when strumming, but the absence of a sixth course limits the polyphonic possibilities a little.
The guitar at this time was also longer scale (the scale length of Baroque instruments like this was often shortened later to keep pace with changes in repertoire and technique - more polyphony implies further left-hand spans across the fingerboard, made more difficult on a longer-scale instrument). This particular example has a 74cm neck, suggesting a focus on continuo playing and strummed repertoire; although fine solo playing, as Jimenez demonstrates, is certainly also possible, the design of the instrument and its contemporary repertoire lends to performance a more conservative technique for both hands here (note how Jimenez' left hand movement does not stray above the fifth position).
Also, there is the repertoire: works of a more ambitious and sophisticated style tended to be reserved for the guitar's shorter-scaled cousin the lute, which went on to accumulate more and more courses over the end of the Renaissance into the Baroque period to allow for more dense and elaborate polyphonic textures.
However, in addition to the continuo and (generally strummed) dance music written for the Baroque guitar, there remains a legacy of charming and cunningly constructed solo works of art music, especially those by Francesco Corbetta - a notable Baroque virtuoso and guitar composer - and from de Visee, of course, who may well have been a pupil of Corbetta's.
And then we have the contemporary equivalent of photographs.
A painting by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, painted a few years before the Sabionari was made, indicates the right hand position very precisely. [2]
Jean-Antoine Watteau was another artist famous for favouring as a subject musicians with their instruments and a number made of guitarists survive. [3]
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[1] For provenance and further details, see the Sabionari website http://www.sabionari.com .
[2] http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/guitar_player.html
[3] http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/w/watteau/antoine/1/index.html - see 'The Italian Comedy', 'La Perspective (View through the Trees in the Park of Pierre Crozat)', 'Gilles and his Family' and ''La gamme d'amour' (The Love Song)' for examples of indications of styles strummed and plucked.
Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil
Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil.
What I took away from this was the desperate necessity for free thought and the clash of open debate: Eichmann was a product of his time, of an elite who had utterly crushed dissent and had adopted a terrifying uniformity of vision. The political critics of the Nazis had lost the argument - the vacuum that left was ultimately filled by the Holocaust.
'It was not that Eichmann could not hear the call of conscience, but that his conscience spoke with the voice of respectable society; and this is the voice that seduces men to evil.' (emphasis mine)
Long live the voice of disrespectable society.
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