Christopher White

May 2012 Barack Obama finally declares his support for gay marriage

November 2012 Despite fears that his support for gay marriage would affect his re-election bid, Obama comfortably wins a second term

2014 With the end of his presidency in sight, without another election to worry about, Obama legalises gay marriage throughout the US. The backlash bolsters the American right.

2015 A challenge to the Supreme Court, claiming that laws regarding marriage are the province of the states and not the federal government, fails.

2016 The backlash over gay marriage sees the return to electoral credibility of Rick Santorum. He easily defeats congressman John Garamendi in the presidential contest.

2017 Santorum’s attempt to repeal laws enabling gay marriage fails to get through congress

2018 Santorum has everyone registered as having had a gay marriage rounded up by the US Army and detained in Guantánamo Bay without charge or due process, using provisions for the indefinite military detention of US citizens signed into law by… Barack Obama.

The Telegraph’s head of technology says that “Twitter grief” deserves respect.

It depends on how that grief is expressed. I suppose it comes down, like most writing, to a variant of the principle of “show, don’t tell”.

Mentioning, or linking to, a particularly moving or noteworthy piece of work is one thing. It illustrates how and why the dead person touched or influenced the virtual mourner’s life.

I’ve done this myself, sharing Christopher Hitchens’s old Vanity Fair report on North Korea a couple of days after both he and Kim Jong-il died. It seemed apt. (And then I had a quiet glass of Johnnie Walker and went home and lost myself in his anthology for a few hours.)

In the funeral analogy that Shane Richmond draws, it stands in for a eulogy.

But simply writing “RIP [dead person]” is nothing but a reflex, and at that one effectively devoid of content. It adds zero of any value except to display the tweeter’s own emotional incontinence.

In the funeral analogy, it stands in for the wails and tears of the congregation. As expressive communication goes it barely registers above a baby informing you that it’s hungry in the only way it knows how.

Such comments are at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy of valuable content, which I would suggest should probably look something like this:

1. New and wholly original facts
2. Pre-existing facts unknown to the likely audience
3. Original, well-founded opinion
4. Pre-existing facts already known to the likely audience
5. Unoriginal but well-founded opinion
6. Baseless opinion and prejudice
7. Unqualified expressions of like/dislike, and emotional outpourings.

Probably a few of those in the middle can be swapped around and differentiated, perhaps by letter, by the importance of the topics on which facts are unearthed and opinions voiced. But the top and bottom are going to stay exactly the same.

This blog and my tweets probably wallow around at about number five. The other blog and paid-for work have very occasionally climbed the ladder as far as two and three.

(The fourth-year project on my astrophysics degree was number one but would have been a lower-letter subcategory: I did technically add to the sum of human knowledge, but it was about dust…)

“RIP [dead person]” is invariably the seventh, and – particularly for a country whose upper lips were once stiffer than if they’d been botoxed – they’re incredibly frequent. They are, in fairness, just one aspect of a new endemic compulsion to vomit up the details of every aspect of our lives for public consumption.

Personally I wouldn’t heckle the mourners. But I will filter them out.

At Easter, when we are at least ostensibly invited to remember the sacrifice made for us by Jesus, it’s worth asking one pertinent question: what sacrifice?

As Bertrand Russell put it, dying for us is not too much to ask of someone who is immortal.

If we were to accept the tale as literally true, then, yes, he was subjected to severe mistreatment for a few days. But he knew, absolutely and for certain, that his suffering would save the souls of the entire human race, and that his bodily death was not the end. The afterlife was not, for him, an undiscovered country, and there could have been no doubt of something after death, let alone dread of it.

There are greater sacrifices than this throughout recorded history. Every morning I walk past a war memorial, headed, like most of them, with a biblical quotation: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.”

And most of the young men killed in service to their country really were fighting for their friends: for the surrogate family alongside whom they lived, worked, and then died in their thousands. Their ultimate aim was a freedom, or a national preservation, of which they could have no foreknowledge of success, and nor could they be sure, when they breathed their last, face-down in the sand of some godforsaken strip of land that they probably couldn’t even pick out on a map, that they would soon be sucking in sweet air floating on a cloud (or whatever the hell heaven is supposed to be these days).

They gave all that they had, never knowing whether it would even do any good but simply hoping that it would. Jesus, the stories tell us, got a little bit tortured knowing that it would permit everyone who was ever born to live forever in paradise. Many throughout the ages have given far more for far less. The supposed sacrifice on which Christianity is founded is not special in the slightest, and it’s insulting to all of those who risk their lives defending others to give it an undue prominence.

One day last week I had to leave the office earlier for a doctor’s appointment.

Normally I wouldn’t bother, and will leave relatively trivial things to (hopefully) clear up on their own, or wait until I happen to be off work anyway.

This time I lost 90 minutes of my working day, which I’ll have to make up. And this is entirely because I’m forced to be registered with a GP in the borough in which I live rather than being able to see one close to where I work.

I can’t help but wonder how many minor ailments are left untreated, and how much productivity is lost, just because of an ideological fetish for central planning.

Money expert Paul Lewis (off the telly) on Twitter earlier:

“Please somebody explain why 52% tax is a disincentive? Earn £1000 keep £480. Choose not to earn £1000 get £0. Do the work. It’s a nobrainer!”

Well, because at the 40% rate one would get £600. (And at the 20%, £800.) And if one values one’s labour at £600 (net), then one is inevitably going to be less inclined to sell it for £480. So some proportion of work that would have been done will not be.