Hicks and wiseguys

Posted on November 15, 2007 by acb

Ophelia Benson and others are having fun with a survey in Christianity Today asking what are “the most compelling arguments for Christianity”. The choices are

  1. The exquisiteness of the physical world (6%)
  2. The reliability of the Scriptures (21%)
  3. The life and character of Jesus (44%)
  4. Christianity’s positive influence on culture and individuals (5%)
  5. The experiences of individuals (10%)
  6. Something else (13%)

and of course the Pharyngular atheists point out that none of these are arguments for the truth of Christianity. But of course they’re not. Even most Evangelical Christians (79% if we can trust this survey) are smarter than to suppose they are arguments for the truth of Christianity. They are arguments for calling yourself a Christian, for trying to act as you believe a Christian should and all the other things entailed by actually being a Christian, rather than supposing that “Christianity” — whatever that may be — is “literally true” — whatever that might mean. They are all versions of the argument given me by a wicked priest, who said that at an early age “Jesus got me by the bollocks”. That’s not an argument for the truth of his beliefs. It’s a justification for his actions, and one which is both sufficient and entirely comprehensible. Am Anfang ist der Tat. For all but a tiny minority of philosophically trained intellectuals, theology is just decoration — primroses round the power station — an attempt to rationalise the principles they try to act on. So the Pharungular strategy of pissing on the primroses, or even digging up the flower beds, isn’t going to affect the actual generating mechanisms at all.

You’d have thought that people who pride themselves on being smart as much as the pharyngular atheists do might be worried by the discovery that nearly 80% of even American Evangelicals know something they don’t. And they might, if they were prepared to notice that this was true. But they are so convinced that all Christians must be ignorant bigoted yahoos that they never will.

Posted in God | 15 Comments

There had to be a youtube post sometime

Posted on November 12, 2007 by acb

And here you are. It has no soundtrack and no colour. Courtesy of TNH, it is newsreel footage from the last twenty minutes of life in the trenches at the Somme, before the men go over the top, which they do right at the end. One man slips climbing out and lies motionless on the front of the trench as the others scramble on around him. I was just wondering why he did that when I noticed two more of the walking men drop with the same irrelevant speed as they approach the wire. Then the film cuts out.

The other thing one remembers is the face of the young man nearest the camera in the slow shots of the men waiting in the trenches for the order to go over. He knows his last few minutes will be watched soon in cinemas where everyone is warm, safe, and, strangest of all, alive.

Posted in War | 1 Comment

Mailer and Waugh

Posted on November 12, 2007 by acb

A note in the Telegraph’s obituary of Norman Mailer leads me to ponder the distinction between egomaniacs and shits. They might seem indistinguishable, but the comparison with Evelyn Waugh shows they are not. Mailer, it’s obvious from his biographies, was a dreadful egomaniac: often abominably selfish, violent, petty and aggressive. But he was not mean-spirited. He really wanted other people to be happy, providing this did not interfere in the least with any of his other desires.

Waugh, though he was much more restrained in his behaviour, as in his prose, seems to have been a very pure shit in that he had no benevolent impulses towards anyone for the last thirty or so years of his life. Witness the awe-inspiringly dyspeptic account from his diaries (quoted in the Telegraph obit) of a party thrown in Somerset by one of Mailer’s mothers in law:

“very lavish… Two bands, one of niggers & one of buggers, a cabaret, an oyster bar in the harness room, stables flood lit, much to the discomfort of the horses. One bit an American pornographer who tried to give him vodka.”

The American pornographer was of course Mailer. In general, the tone of the whole Telegraph obit is remarkably ungenerous. It is impossible to discern from it why anyone might want to read Mailer, and that, it seems to me is something that you really ought to explain if you are gong to give the whole of the obit page over to a writer.

Posted in Literature | 1 Comment

how journalism works

Posted on November 12, 2007 by acb

One of the odder things I do is to write a column on religion in the media for the Church Times and one of the odder difficulties with that is I feel I ought to try not to say too many cruel things about Ruth Gledhill. So I will vent here instead.

This week she is rushing to catch up with someone else’s scoop, a position that always brings out journalistic vices. After all, our livelihoods as well as our self-esteems depend on being better and more quickly informed than the competition, and last week her competition, in the shape of Jonathan Petre of the Daily Telegraph, got a genuine and important story about whole dioceses from the Episcopal Church of the USA attempting to transfer their allegiance to another province of the Anglican Communion so as not to catch gay cooties imperil their orthodoxy.

At this point the innocent reader will be asking what is a province? What is the Anglican Communion? Well the AC is about 50m1 Christians all around the world in churches descended from the Church of England. Large countries are provinces in themselves; England actually has two; smaller countries where there are a sprinkling of Anglican congregations get bundled up into larger provinces. The sparsest of all, is the so-called “Province of the Southern Cone”, which covers the whole southern half of South America, five countries in which there are a total of 32,000 Anglicans. It is the head of this operation who has announced that he will accept any North American dioceses who would like to join him. So naturally, the Gledhill version of the story starts:

One of the largest provinces in the Anglican Church is offering itself as a safe haven for traditionalist US dioceses that wish to secede in the argument about the acceptance of gay clergy, including bishops.
The province of the Southern Cone, which includes Argentina, Peru and Chile and is headed by the expatriate British Bishop Greg Venables, has voted to extend its jurisdiction to cover the whole of the US.

Why not claim that the bishop with the longest name is the most important, while you’re about it? But it’s the next paragraph which is completely beyond parody:

The decision marks the formal start of a realignment of the Anglican Communion in the row over gays and could help to stave off a schism.

But “realignment” is schism. That’s what “realignment” means when Anglicans use the word now. You can no more stave off a schism with realignment than you stave off a war by mounting an invasion. If the bishop of Pittsburgh anounces that he is no longer part of The Episcopal Church (in America) but still claims to be the Anglican bishop in Pittsburgh, then the Episcopal Church is going to depose him and elect another bishop of Pittsburgh in his place. The lawyers will feast on all this for years, and in the meantime there will be two people believing themselves to be the Anglican bishop of Pittsburgh (there may well be others, but we will imagine them safely medicated and locked away). That is the definition of schism. You couldn’t possibly have a clearer case of it than two bishops laying claim to one cathedral. What Ruth has written here makes no possible sense. It’s not even untrue. It’s just totally incoherent. It’s what happens when you have to follow up someone else’s story and you have nothing whatever to add to it.

One part of me rather admires the crazed dervish skills with which Ruth gives the impression that her story is newer and bigger than the one which appeared in the Telegraph four days ago; but another part wonders whether it is entirely fair on the readers. Oh well, anyone still reading the Times knows what they get these days.

1 I know people say there are 80m. If you believe that, you must also believe there are 25m Anglicans in England — rather more than 25 times as many as go to church on any Sunday. The Nigerian church claims 18m members, and you are free to believe their figures, too.

Posted in God, Journalism | 17 Comments

A thought on lenses

Posted on November 12, 2007 by acb

It is hard sometimes to justify the purchase of lenses to people who are not interested in photography. You can buy a perfectly decent camera for a lot less than I just paid for a 77mm f1.9 Pentax portrait lens. But there will often be a better camera next year. At the present rate of progress you can expect a significantly better camera for the same price every eighteen months or so. I could for example buy a Pentax K10 today for what I paid for my ist1D last summer, and the new camera would have more megapixels (big whoop) but also an anti-shake mechanism, better controls, and a widget for preventing dust from settling on the sensor. For less money I could get the anti-shake and the dust reduction for in a K110 or whatever they are calling it, and still have the lovely light body.

On the other hand, the lens I just bought is a design ten years old. There won’t be anything better on the market in ten years’ time at any price and I doubt it will have got cheaper then either. Almost all my other SLR lenses are second hand and still great. So if you absolutely positively have to spend invest money in camera equipment, lenses are the way to go. And this is a glorious lens for low light portraits. See my mother:

77mm portraits 003

Posted in Pictures | 3 Comments

A very quick further note on censorship

Posted on November 9, 2007 by acb

I have been discussing with the imperfectly Voltairean Mrs T. in comments the sort of grounds on which modern states actually censor, rather than those which they pretend to themselves they apply. In particular, I want to argue that notions of obscenity have reappeared, but now they are applied to politics, rather than to matters of sex.

Germane here is the case of Samina Malik, a Muslim shop assistant who is going to go to jail partly for writing poems about jihad in the privacy of her own hard disk. This has been quite widely reported in the British press this morning, but the most interesting comment came right at the end of the Guardian’s report:

Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan police counter-terrorism command, said: “Malik held violent extremist views which she shared with other like-minded people over the internet. Merely possessing this material is a serious criminal offence.”

This really is thought crime. I am not sure from the context whether my first reading was accurate — that he was referring to her rather disgusting poem1 about beheading, rather than the instruction manuals also found in her room. These included — according to the Times — The Mujaheddin Poisoner’s Handbook, Encyclopaedia Jihad, How to Win in Hand-to-Hand Combat, and How to Make Bombs. But the point is that there isn’t any imminent danger to the public from reading this stuff. On the contrary, as I was suggesting earlier, the way that this stuff works is slowly, and the more dangerously because it is private.

I’m not happy about either possible stance here: the one that says we should freely allow this kind of material, even at the risk, almost the statistical certainty, that some of the people who read it will be depraved and corrupted; and the opposing one which says that the government has a perfect right to snoop around on our hard disks.

1 so in a just world he will spend time in jail too, if the state is going to move into literary criticism.

Posted in Net stories, War | 8 Comments

Doctors and murderers; now added hate

Posted on November 8, 2007 by acb

I’m always surprised, when I think of it, that so few doctors turn out to be mass murderers. It’s hard to think of any profession which offers better arguments for nihilism, except, perhaps, religious journalism. In any case, the Shipmans, at least the detected Shipmans, remain rarities. But it is true that the profession best represented in the Nazi party was the medical one, and now it turns out that a Swedish neonazi is training to become a doctor in Stockholm despite his conviction for murdering a leftist in 1999.

It turns out that there is no check on the criminal records of anyone who becomes a doctor in Sweden. So this man (name not printed by the Swedish press, in accordance with their usual practice) was sentenced to eleven years in the early part of 2000 for the cold-blooded murder of a man who had shopped a union functionary as also an active member of a neo-nazi party. He was let out on parole in February this year, and then accepted by the Karolinska for training.So he is obviously not a stupid sociopath. He did not mention his conviction on his application. Now he has been denounced (anonymously) to the hospital, I suppose he will be thrown off the course. Then he will go looking for whoever denounced him …

The minister responsible has announced that convicted murderers and sex criminals will not in future be accepted for training as doctors, even when they have otherwise paid off their debts to society.

Meanwhile, another homophobic preacher has been freed by the Swedish Supreme Court after serving a month in prison for comments on his discussion board, for which he was held responsible, even though he had not made them, since he didn’t take them down. The two which have been quoted in reports of the case are that “The sooner a queer meets his executioner, the fewer sins he will have had time to commit, and so the better for his prospects in eternity” and “Men who can’t resist the temptation to have sex with other men should be hanged from poles in the public square.”

The obvious arguments about free speech, Voltaire, but I’ll be buggered if I let anyone stop you from saying it, etc are not worth rehearsing. But one line in the judgement seemed to me remarkable. The Judges who freed Liljeström held that it was a mitigating circumstance that these remarks were made in a semi-private discussion. They weren’t an immediate public incitement to violence in the way that they might have been had they been made in the context of — say — a Gay Pride parade and counterdemonstration. But if the argument is that certain forms of speech are objectionable because they tend to deprave and corrupt — and it is certainly one of the views one can hold about “hate speech” that it should be, properly speaking, obscene — then it is much more likely to do its corrupting work in secret. If the people being denounced were not gays, in a Christian site, but Jews or infidels, on a Muslim board, then we would regard the semi-secrecy, and the tendency of participants to egg each other on, as making it more likely that someone would act on these incitements, rather than less. It turns out that the limitation of free speech, even on consequentialist grounds, is tricky, or at least impossible to combine with a belief that you’re not really limiting it at all.

I did want to discover what was the sermon which had led to Åke Green, another pentecostalist preacher, being jailed, but when I went to look it up on Dagens Nyheter’s site, it turns out that they took the text down after being reported themselves for inciting hatred — by the Swedish Young Liberals.

Posted in Sweden | 3 Comments

Friday quickies

Posted on November 2, 2007 by acb
  • A truly excellent foreign affairs blog by the FT columnist Gideon Rachman.
    Who could not love someone who writes
    This is vintage Steyn – jeering, complacent and utterly stupid. ?
  • An elk has been rescued from a swimming pool after police called in aid a fork lift truck in southern Sweden. (Are there too many elk here?) Unfortunately, I can’t find the photograph in my history file.
  • The police in Kronoberg, quite near there, have been cleared of malpractice when they decapitated unwanted kittens.
  • James Flynn, the man with the effect, on IQ in the LA Times, says, in effect that IQ scores have gone up because they measure the ways of thinking common in urban civilisation, rather than anything more generally useful. Hence it is not very informative to look at them for real improvements in cognitive skill. I should have spotted this at the time of the Watson row.

If you look at the PSAT, which is given to juniors in high school, the scores are stable and are not going up with IQ. The PSAT has lagged IQ because it tests reading and general arithmetic.
Q: Wouldn’t we be better off if children were better at reading and math?
Yes, we would. But you have to teach for that. You have to hire people who can actually teach math. It’s not a cheap fix. You have to make it a national priority. The invention of computer games has made thinking spatially and reasoning logically an automatic social priority. We have never made pouring money into schools to make sure kids were better educated a national priority.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Torn between two browsers

Posted on November 2, 2007 by acb

Feeling like a fool: I really wish there were something that was as fast as Opera, and as popular as Firefox. At the moment I am using different browsers on different computers, and this also is confusing, since I miss, when using Firefox, Opera’s wonderful one-key shortcuts and the ability to move the “Back” button onto the tab bar, which saves, over a year, several miles of mouse track. [UPDATE: this is because I am too thick to read the help file clearly, as a commentator is too polite to point out.]
Then, when I am using Opera, I keep pushing the mouse up to a tab and waiting for it to take focus without clicking, And waiting.

What threw these things into perspective was a note in the relentlessly boosterish Opera blog that according to Netcraft, Opera usage had risen by 34% this year !!!! until the progam now has one per cent of the installed base. So I don’t suppose that the interoperability thing is going to get better any time soon. Designers won’t test in Opera; the makers of add-ons and intelligent dustbins won’t fix their software to work with it. Soon we’ll be unable even to sneer at Safari users.

What makes this doubly frustrating is that Opera had all the good ideas ages before everyone else. Even its mail program, had it been properly developed, would have stayed two years ahead of Gmail and ten years ahead of the rest of the competition. But it looks as if all the effort that might have gone there has gone into the mobile phone browser instead, which is, I admit enormously slick, but pretty pointless so long as you have to enter text from a mobile keypad.

On the other hand, if I were Japanese, I would be planning to write a novel on the keyboard of my phone.

Posted in nördig | 3 Comments

Research tool wanted

Posted on October 29, 2007 by acb

What do people here use to store all the clippings they make from the web? It needs to be quick, unobtrusive, so that I can just press a hotkey in the browser, and to allow tagging and later sorting by date; also to be easy to synchonise between two Windows computers. I’m not going to get a Mac laptop just for this. So far, the following have failed me:

  • Opera’s notes facility is quick and unobtrusive. But it doesn’t allow tagging, doesn’t easily let me sort date ranges, and won’t synchronise between computers.
  • The scrapbook extension for Firefox is comprehensive and may allow tagging, if I misuse the comments field. But it won’t synchronise between computers.
  • Ecco is old, and growing buggy. I know that other people can get the shooter working properly. I can’t, is all I can say. It would be perfect if it did work, because then I could slice, dice, and classify everything I put into it and integrate this with other information. I’ve just wasted an hour proving that there is a bug in its date folder handling.
  • OneNote? Won’t tag very flexibly, and won’t interact with non IE browsers has a powertoy to work with Firefox. May or may not synchonise; I can’t remember.
  • EverNote: I found the UI irritating and the web clipper wouldn’t work with Opera. I might have another look though; I’ve paid for it. It does synch without fuss.
  • Zotero looks great, but won’t synch at all: they suggest putting a special firefox installation on a usb drive, and carrying that between computers. Seems sensible for students but I need a solution that works at the breakfast table, when I am half asleep.

First rough conclusions: none of these will work properly with Opera, which I went back to using a few months ago, for two reasons: I adore the single key ‘z’ shortcut for going back; and I was hoping that improved IMAP would deliver me from bloody odious Thunderbird. Still, it looks as if I will have to return to Firefox.

What else? I know there was some bibliographic-ish program that I lusted after which was a competitor to EndNote. Can’t immediately remember the name, though. Ah. Biblioscape. Wants you to use its own web browser. No thanks, I already have three.

I don’t want an online solution because then it’s not around when I am offline. But I can see I might be driven to one.

Posted in nördig | 15 Comments