Christopher White

Why do we live like this?

The Santorum Menace

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.

If you haven’t got anything of value to say…

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.

Uncut

Get your child’s ears pierced and you’d probably attract a certain degree of scorn. Tattoo that child, and you’d likely bring the attention of social services.

But if you permanently surgically alter your little boy’s sex organs, then, at least in some communities, that’s considered perfectly normal.

This article from the other day tells the sorry tale of a man who caved in to his wife’s demands to have their son circumcised because she personally finds foreskins unappealing.

(She doesn’t seem nearly as concerned by the fact that her – uncut – husband appears to lack any testicles.)

Her own aesthetic view is, or ought to be, irrelevant. A woman who views her offspring as a troll doll on which it’s fine to chop and change the parts until they’re more to her liking is entirely unfit to be a parent. She is a custodian of the human being that she created: not his owner.

Compare: some US states have passed laws requiring women seeking abortions to undergo a “transvaginal ultrasound”, a name that doesn’t make immediately clear the real nature of the procedure: the insertion of an object into a woman’s vagina, irrespective of her consent, for no good medical reason – in fact, for no reason at all other than that the Republican Party thinks it’s a neat idea. Critics have correctly equated it to state-sponsored rape.

The difference between the two? There is none.

No parent, or cleric, has any right whatsoever to make permanent, medically unnecessary alterations to another person’s body without his consent. To do so is not simply cultural practice that’s up for debate: it’s an assault.

Negotiating the Falklands

It’s time we negotiated with Argentina over the Falklands, and I’d like to suggest a form that this negotiation should take.

We should tell Ms Kirchner that if she gives Argentina back to the Mapuche, Kolla, Toba, Guaraní, Wichi, et al, then the UK will happily hand the Falklands over.

To the penguins.

Grubby hands off

If the computer on which you’re reading this blog is less than a few years old, it will almost certainly come with parental controls pre-installed.

They take at most a couple of minutes to set up, and do a pretty good job of blocking out things that parents might not want young eyes to see. The one on my laptop definitely refuses access to all my favourite bongo sites.

Owners of older machines can install a content filter themselves without too much trouble: a quick search on a certain popular web tool for “block pornography” (with the quotes) returns more than 55,000 results, including comparisons of different pieces of filtering software and instructions on how to use them.

Apparently that isn’t enough. Claire Perry, the MP for Devizes, wants internet service providers to take more responsibility to “keep children safe”.

Similarly, the last time Perry brought this up, campaigning to make internet pornography available only on an “opt-in” basis, the Times columnist Janice Turner claimed on Twitter that: “Porn streams into my home. I didn’t choose that. Vulnerable kids watch it unsupervised, it’s fucking up heads of generation.”

It’s unclear whether Turner and all the others clamouring for greater efforts to block pornography are unable to install a content filter or simply unwilling to. But allowing pornography to stream into their homes is precisely the choice they all made when they decided to get a computer, and an internet connection, and yet opted not to exercise any control over how they’re used.

When people elect to have children, this is part of the undertaking that they signed up to. It’s their job to protect their child’s wellbeing, physical and psychological, until they reach maturity. This means, then, that if protecting their psychological wellbeing requires that they not be exposed to pornography, then steps should be taken to stop them from being exposed to it.

So, parents: install, and set up, a content filter. Don’t know how? Learn. Can’t learn? Get a friend to do it for you. Can’t get a friend to do it for you? Then go without a computer.

Just don’t expect the government to do your job for you, and ruin everybody else’s fun in the process. It’d be sort of like buying a car and not bothering to fit any seatbelts in the back, and then demanding that the speed limits be reduced to about three miles an hour to avoid any accidents.

This total abdication of responsibility, lazily expecting the state to step in when parents can’t or won’t do the task that they implicitly agreed to when choosing to bring another life into the world, is ultimately far more corrupting than any amount of pornography is.

No sacrifice at all

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.

The NHS owes me an hour and a half

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.

No-brainer?

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.

Opinions and arseholes

“Ignore celebrities,” Michael Bywater writes in his 2006 book Big Babies, “except when they are doing what they are celebrated for doing: acting, playing football, singing et cetera. Skill does not confer moral, political or intellectual discrimination.”

(Bywater exempts writers from this on the grounds that they necessarily know everything. I can speak in any case for his perceptiveness, as he once suggested I need to get laid more often.)

It’s pretty good advice. If one were to invent an order of precedence then, in declining order of just much attention one should pay, I imagine that data and facts themselves would top a list that would then run through gradations of expertise, ultimately ending on someone who happens to be capable of making a credible and coherent argument. (Ahem.)

The beliefs, opinions and prejudices of celebrities, simply by virtue of their being celebrities, are of no greater value than those of the average man in the pub. But still we get ostensibly serious newspapers reporting the view held by a famous child actor of the third most popular political party as though this is somehow of any import or consequence.

And we have Sean Penn making a fool of himself in an article that should probably never have been commissioned in the first place, because his “personal belief in the necessity for diplomacy to resolve a deeply held Argentinian conviction of ancestry and sovereignty” is a complete irrelevance.

We’re lucky enough that Penn’s comments will probably have no real impact: at worst, they’re a bit embarrassing. But just a few days earlier, there was this: the drummer from Foo Fighters backing some whackjob set of HIV-denialists who claim, among other things, that antiretroviral medication and not the virus itself is the cause of Aids.

Clearly there is no obvious single route cause of this. The widespread systemic failure to properly teach children about how we know the things we know is probably a factor, as is rest of the current anti-science backlash in the US. But so is the past 25 or so years of treating celebrities as though their opinions should genuinely matter, and using them to promote every trendy cause going. Sow a wind of opinions, reap a whirlwind of arseholes.

 

Carey’s wedding-crashing

This morning there was a gay couple canoodling on my tube. This evening there were lesbians doing likewise.

Brilliant if you ask me.

Personal freedom is very much a case of ‘use it or lose it’, and equally, my being just as interested in other people’s liberty as in my own, I welcome being occasionally reminded that it’s still there — that the worst that’s likely to happen to such couples is a tut from a Tory rather the crack of a whip. Or worse.

It seemed apt that both of these public displays of affection should come on the day that Lord Carey is all over the news due to his campaign against the government’s plans to legalise same-sex marriage, claiming they don’t have the “right” to do so.

Wrong way round, Bishop: they have no right not to. If a gay couple wants to enter into this kind of arrangement, and a competent authority — religious or secular — is happy to provide for it, as some churches in fact are, then the state has no legitimate business preventing them from doing so. Gay marriage is commonly miscategorised as a matter of equality: in fact it’s one of freedom from government interference in private affairs. If gays want to get married, there are no valid grounds for preventing them.

Carey’s rather incoherent defence of the status quo presents gay marriage as some sort of existential threat to civilisation (and includes a zinger about schoolteachers being forced to tell pupils about the redefinition of the institution against many parents wishes — a bit rich given the compulsory acts of Christian worship forced upon children in an environment ostensibly dedicated to education). He protests, perhaps too much, that his view is not borne of a dislike of gays. It’s hard to believe given the church’s continuing hang-ups about non-marital sex in general. And frankly I’m disinclined to pay attention to lectures on sexual ethics from a group taking their primary cues from an iron-age book in which there are 613 separate commandments and not a single one against rape.

The church and the state can both stay well out of people’s bedrooms — and steer well clear of their weddings.