The kindness of strangers

In my teens, I spent a fair amount of time hiking a sparsely populated semi-arid island landscape. Agriculture, here, was a peasant economy marginally above subsistence, herds of sheep and goats scattered across sparse hillsides around tiny, isolated villages.

We would pass through these villages, stopping in their cafés for coffee or cola. Sometimes we were welcomed, surrounded by curious villagers eager for news of the outside world beyond the immediate horizon. In those, the distinctions between us (British, French, German, USAmerican) were incomprehensible; we were all, collectively and simply, “English”. In other villages we saw nobody but the café proprietor; young people in dusty khaki walking clothes and boots, carrying rucsacs, bore too much resemblance to soldiers and were best avoided on a general precautionary principle.

In the empty, rocky, soaring spaces between villages, we gradually learned never to ask directions from a local inhabitant.

When, at a fork in the unmapped and barely visible path, we asked a wandering goatherd something like “Which is the way to Melou?”, we always got a long and detailed set of directions richly supplemented by story and gesture. Alas, our genially helpful informant had (as we eventually realised) never heard of Melou, still less did he know how to get there, but didn't like to say so. This was not dishonesty; it was, on the contrary, a cultural reluctance to disappoint, a refusal to deny travellers what they requested. We would, in the early days before we understood this, often follow the instructions we were given. Trekking many kilometres of hard country in the wrong direction, before map and compass eventually convinced us of our error, we would eventually arrive in Melou tired and several hours late.

Curiously, I've now discovered a similar phenomenon in the urban landscape of England's home counties.

Coming out of a Hilton hotel at nine in the morning, I stopped at reception to ask where I could catch a bus into town. (At this point I can hear Julie Heyward, with her low opinion of buses, chortling already.) The reception manager didn't hesitate: he pointed confidently out of the door and said “go out of the hotel gate, sir, and turn left. At the junction turn left again and you'll see the bus stop”.

Outside the hotel gates I turned left; and left again at the junction. I was on a busy six lane dual carriageway, with no sign of a bus stop as far as the eye could see. Undeterred, I started walking.

As I walked, a woman emerged from an underpass, talking on her cellphone. I asked about bus stops. She paused, muttered “Hang on, Mum” into the phone, pointed back into the underpass, and said “Through there and follow the path, it's by the garage”.

On the other side of the underpass the promised path headed in the direction of town, which was encouraging. I walked for about a quarter of an hour, without seeing either a bus stop or a garage, until I met a dog walker coming the other way. To my question he replied, pointing on down the slope in the direction I was walking, “Turn left at the bottom, and just follow the path”.

At the bottom of the slope was a fork in the path. I turned left. Ten minutes walking brought me to a garage, which rekindled hope, but there was no bus stop near by. I went into the garage, where the assistant greeted my enquiry with a blank expression and the puzzled words “Bus stop?” Fair enough; she didn't know, and didn't pretend to. She disappeared briefly and returned with her manager who pointed out of the door and instructed me that I should “cross the road, turn right, keep going, you can't miss it”.

Across the road, having turned right and kept going for some time, I could no longer see the garage behind me and still hadn't found a bus stop ahead. Nor, it occurred to me, had any buses passed me.

Open clearway gradually gave way to houses, goods yards, small industrial premises. About an hour after leaving the hotel, I finally found a bus stop; the timetables inside suggested that every bus which stopped here would take me into town, so I stood and waited. Less than five minutes later, a bus arrived.

The driver gave me a very strange look, when I asked for the town centre, but took my money and issued me with a ticket. The reason for his reaction became clear when, before I'd even had time to sit down, we turned a corner and pulled into a bus station. I had arrived, having walked the whole way and then bought a ticket for the last fifty metres or so.

At the end of the day, I made my way back to the bus station. I discovered the right bus service, boarded it, purchased a ticket as far as the Hilton. Starting Google Maps on my phone, I carefully watched both the landscape outside the bus window and the little dot which showed my position as it crept between town centre and hotel. The route never touched the dual carriageway along which I had been directed by the reception manager; it followed smaller roads through residential estates. It never came within five hundred metres of the garage, nor of the underpass and the path beyond.

When I got off, I discovered that the bus stop was behind the hotel, not out of the gates at all ... starting from the gates, I would have had to turn right, right, and right again (not left and left), away from the junction (not towards and through it).

I stopped at reception and explained all of this to the reception manager. He smiled, spread his hands, shrugged expressively, and said “I don't know, sir; I never catch the bus”

Is anybody there...?

Coincidentally (following close on the heels of Ray Girvan's comment on my "Taking comfort where I find it"), BBC Radio Four's A point of view slot on Friday evening backed him up with A L Kennedy's outlook on unobserved honesty: "Someone to watch over me".

Starting with bourbon biscuits in hotel rooms (yes, I confess, I've been there...) it moves rapidly to social science investigations such as the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments.

Click to either download and listen to the mp3 podcast (about ten minutes) or read the transcript.

Taking comfort where I find it

One of the things which regularly helps to restore my faith in human nature, after it has taken a kicking: the way even the most aggressive and selfish car driver usually pulls over immediately to make way for an ambulance or fire appliance running blues and twos.

---

 Continued, three days later...

Ray Girvan's comment to this post seemed important enough to justify promotion into the body of this post – especially as I've been thinking about it seriously since he left it.

“Well, maybe. My feeling is that the selfish and aggressive are very quick to obey when it comes to overt appearance of authority, such as fire / police / ambulance. That evaporates when no such authority is in sight - and that's the true test of positive human qualities: when you're not being watched.”

I have to say that I agree with most of that – especially the last bit. 

The submission to visible authority factor was, in fact, the reason that I referred to “an ambulance or fire appliance” and left out police vehicles which are indisputably symbols of coercive authority. I'm not convinced that most aggressive/selfish drivers would be cowed by ambulance or fire appliance.

But ... it may well be, I concede, that the selfish and aggressive driver who pulls over may be responding at a gut level. The sound of a siren and the flashing of blue lights in her/his mirror, may well be readi instinctively as potential police signals before conscious identification.

It could well be that how one weighs this depends on one's exact location (at any given moment) on the cynical/credulous spectrum.

Being a fundamentally optimistic (or credulous) soul I cling to memory of an incident on a bus, some years ago. The passengers on the bus ranged from elderly pink rinsed matriarchs through young mothers to two known low level drug dealing thugs who would happily have broken my legs if I'd looked at them the wrong way.

On a fairly narrow estate road, where he could easily have pulled over but passing was impossible otherwise, the driver (an exception to my observation) steadfastly held his position on the road and blocked an braying ambulance for about wo hundred metres. Without exception, the reaction of all the passengers was outrage: the driver was subjected to a barrage of entreaties and abuse aimed at getting  him to pull over and clear the road.

Perhaps, again, though, finer feelings are not the most likely reason for this. Perhaps, rather, each passenger selfishly imagined her/himself, at some future time, in that ambulance. Perhaps that, too, applies to car drivers. When it comes down to it, all I have in support of my original warm glow is the fact that I prefer to be warmed by one interpretation rather than chilled by the other. As a scientist, I have to confess that Ray's view of things has the balance of probabilities more on its side.

Not so swinging after all

Yesterday, my fifteen year old niece asked me about the sixties (the decade, that is; not my age bracket). The sixties are, apparently, now material for history projects ... which is, I suppose, fair enough since they are more temporally distant from her than the second world war was from me when I studied it in history at the same age.

I was somewhat deflated to discover that a rich period full of event, possibility, promise and terror boils down to this: I talked politics, wore flared jeans, had long hair, sang silly songs, and am of an age with the bursar at her school...

Passing for human[ist]

Despite zero belief in, and considerable reservations about, this season's story, I quote from an excellent Maundy Thursday sermon by Simon Taylor:

“...I was speaking with a friend of a friend, a retired priest ... “You need to cultivate the skin of a rhinoceros”, he told me. I think it was possibly the worst piece of advice I was ever given as a parish priest.

[… … …]

All of our ministry is [...] founded in being truly human. To be good ministers, we need to be good human beings. And this is where it gets hard, for so much of what we do as human beings and as ministers, is designed to hide our humanity. We are too good at wearing armour that protects us, but that distorts us at the same time.

[… … …]

The first piece of armour to refuse is that of the thick skin.”

Belief or lack of it has nothing to do with recognising the stark truth of that “so much of what we do as human beings ... is designed to hide our humanity”. Amen.

They knew better

I have all of Luís Bustamante's books. First and foremost, because I love to leaf through the photographs themselves. Also because they are suffused with the gentle humanity which I so much admire in their author. And because they are so different. We are used to photographers having a personal stamping ground which they explore in new ways (or not), often with a trademark style. Luís' work is different; though there is always, in everything he does, a balanced blend of personal conscience and political awareness, content and approach are not subordinated to it. The latest, They knew better, is in a way the most overtly political image set of those so far published, but no less humane. It follows the progress of a group of secondary school pupils through the British anti war demonstrations of 2003-2005, but looks also at what is going on around them. I remember the student protests of the 1960s; this was the first time, since then, that the same passionate mass commitment seemed to resurface. It seems to have gone underground again; I was saddened to hear that The Guardian, supportive of the antiwar movement at the time, declined to review this book. Shot through with both commitment and humour, it's a delightful thing to have, to hold, and to return to over and over again just for the pictures. As with all of Luís' books, you'll find the full content available to browse (I recommend using the full screen option) here: http://www.blurb.com/books/4101573-they-knew-better

From the preface to They knew better: Ten years ago, on 15 February 2003 protests against a neo-conservative war on Iraq drew millions of people across the world, the largest mass protest in history. This was the peak of a series of events that started in 2002. By the end of 2002 and early 2003, large numbers of people mobilised against the West's preparation for war. Demonstrations took place in capital cities and at local level. For the first time in decades, people looked beyond consumer choices and started questioning the morality of their leaders' actions. On one day alone, up to 2 million people went into the streets of London and around 20 million mobilised across the world. The demonstrations took wide sections of the British public into the streets. This is the story of a group of school children [...] who took part in demonstrations against war and neoliberalism over the years. They attended the largest London demos as well as provincial ones, ending up with the Make Poverty History demonstration in Edinburgh in July 2005. While originally concerned with recording the group of youngsters as they went from one event to another, the camera inevitably got drawn to other participants, taking advantage of a unique opportunity to explore the rich demographics which make up British society. The debate still goes on but it's lost much of its relevance. We've moved on as T. Blair insisted we should. The world is a different place now, although not necessarily better. Despite the overwhelming use of force and cutting-edge technology, the war on terror hasn't been won but nobody seems to talk about it any more. A guilty silence surrounds the lies that preceded the attack on Iraq, its catastrophic effect and the flagrant abuses of international law and human rights. The perpetrators are still at large and some of them are treated as celebrities. An air of impunity surrounds those who went against the wishes of so many people. The waste of resources in this and other crazy schemes has pushed the West into a situation in which it just cannot go to war at will. The Western economy has been on the brink of collapse and many people have been disenfranchised. There was a sense of freedom and hope that lingered for a time even in the dark moments of preparation for war and then during the unleashing of the world's most devastating war machine on a country that was already on its knees. It became tangible that the world wasn't divided just between the audacious and the don't cares. For a short time humanity was possessed by an energy which had been lost by generations of conformism.

What is lost and gained

Laid up for more than two weeks with an exasperating virus that's left me with no physical energy and fragmented concentration span, I'm looking through some very old negatives.

I don't know who the kiddy on the left is, but from the context I can be certain that she lived in northern France in the early spring of 1974 ... so must be in her forties now. It's not a memorable photograph, but put that aside for the moment. I probably took it as a subconscious or even conscious background pursuance of the module on “The young individual and society”, for which I would at that time have been preparing my final paper.

Looking at this picture I am struck by the fact that I would, today, be constrained in taking a photograph of a child (particularly a girl child) in a place where I was an itinerant stranger.

Those were, in some ways, more innocent times ... though also times of greater denial.

I was, at the time, considering a career as a child social worker ... a career for which I was probably profoundly unsuited. Looking back, had I embarked on that career I would have discovered that a dark veil hid many childhoods from the sort of sunny light which had imbued my own – and I'm glad that it has been at least partially drawn aside in the decades since, even if comparatively rare “stranger danger” gets unrealistically disproportionate attention compared to the far more prevalent family abuse.

Since then, I have been married to one courageous abuse survivor and have now spent more than twenty years with a partner working in exactly that career path which I didn't take. There have been exposed scandals from Magdalen Laundries and Catholic abuse cases through care home abuse rings to the Jimmy Saville furoré. I would not for one moment ask that the clock be turned back.

And yet ... looking at this photograph I do also, simultaneously, feel sad that I probably wouldn't, today, take it. It's not a particularly good picture in itself; but the fact of its possibility feels important.

A life more vivid

Vivid doesn't post frequently, but when she posts it's always a substantial and worthwhile event.

Ten months after the last one, there is a new Vivid post up now: “More than my job's worth”. It's funny, deep, thought provoking, true, challenging: thoroughly recommended.

Consider a banana...

From Simon Says, the blog of this atheist's favourite theologian:

“Tax havens profoundly affect the way that we live ... They have contributed to a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, both globally and within the richest countries ... ... ... Tax Havens have a huge impact on the developing world.”

...and...

“To see how Tax Havens work, consider a banana.  Every banana in your fruit-bowl has taken two simultaneous paths to be there.  One is the path of the actual banana. ... At the same time the banana takes a more circuitous route, but only on an accountant's piece of paper.”

This is from a review of Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure islands : tax havens and the men who stole the world – a book (aptly described as “exceedingly readable - more like a thriller than a work of economics”) which I, too, thoroughly recommend. I wish I had written as good a review myself; but I didn't, and being pragmatic I'll just refer you straight over to the man who has.

---

• Shaxson, N., Treasure islands : tax havens and the men who stole the world. 2011, London: Bodley Head. 9781847921109 [or] 2012, London: Vintage. 9780099541721

Never a truer word

“(By the way, bulletproof vests won't protect you against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.)”

So says Dr C in his latest post … and how right he is.

It's that time of year, again

Today, as I predictably record every year, is Hiroshima Day.

(Explanation, if required, for new readers here.)

(An additional poetic link, courtesy of Dr C last year.)

(And if you are masochistic enough to read a selection of previous expansions on the theme, click here instead.)

Autres temps, autres blagues

It's always interesting to see different variants on the known, different perspectives on the familiar.

Julie Heyward, in a post yesterday which I have only read today, quoted a joke from Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life by Allan Kaprow:

A man commits a crime and is sentenced to life in prison. When he arrives at the prison gate, he is met by an older inmate who has been assigned to supervise his adjustment to prison routine. After he has checked in and been given a uniform, they proceed to the mess hall for lunch, where the new inmate is introduced to the other prisoners. They begin eating, and after a few minutes he hears someone say “Fourteen!” Everybody laughs. Then he hears “Eleven!” followed by good-natured groans. Then “Ninety-two!” and giggles. Then “Twenty-seven!” Howls and tears. This goes on through the whole meal.

The new man gets more and more confused. So he leans over to his mentor and whispers, “What’s going on?” The older man replies, “We’re telling jokes. But we’ve told them so many times that we know them by heart. So to save time, the jokes have numbers. That way we can tell a lot more jokes.”

The new inmate nods and realizes he’s going to be eating with these men for a long time and might as well learn the ropes. So he says, “Sixteen!” and looks around at everyone. Dead silence. He leans over again and says, “What’s wrong?” The older prisoner says, “Simple. You didn’t tell it right.”

Now ... I recognise that joke ... but in the version I heard in my late teens, and have retold at intervals since, it goes like this

A weary traveller in the Himalaya finds shelter for the night at a remote monastery.

At dinner, as everyone is otherwise eating in silence, a monk further down the long refectory table looks up from his soup and calls “Fourteen!” Everybody laughs. Then the traveller hears “Eleven!” followed by good-natured groans. Then “Ninety-two!” and giggles. Then “Twenty-seven!” Howls and tears. This goes on through the whole meal.

The traveller, puzzled, whispers to the elderly monk sitting on his right, “What’s going on?” and the other replies, “We’re telling jokes. But we’ve told them so many times that we know them by heart. So to save time, the jokes have numbers. That way we can tell a lot more jokes.”

The traveller thinks about this, then asks “Can I tell one?. The elderly monks says “Certainly; we'd like that”.

So, the traveller calls out “Two hundred and seven!!”

There is a moment of dead silence; then waves of hilarity start to roll around the room. Monks choke on their soup and have to be clapped on the back by their neighbours. Others fall out of their chairs and roll on the floor in helpless laughter.

The traveller is amazed. When the table has returned to something resembling normalcy, the noise subsiding to hiccups, snorts of suppressed laughter and occasional spasms of giggling, he turns to the elderly monk on his right again and asks “What was so funny about my joke?”

“Oh” says the monk, wiping tears from his eyes, “nothing, really ... but we hadn't heard it before!”

Same joke; different context; but also different point.

Fascinating.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

[this is a copy of my third post as guest of Vie hebdomadaires]
image source: Radio Times

---

I mentioned in my first Vie Hebdomadaires post on Monday that I learn valuable lessons from occasional differences of opinion with Ray Girvan, amongst our frequent agreement … and so it is this first Olympic Games week. I wouldn’t go so far as Ray does in his 29 July post in my opinion of “sport, and any celebration of it” but I do have concerns.

I don’t have any poor opinions at all of sport in principle. My own personal preference has always been for other physical activities (walking, climbing, cycling, even for a time in my mid teens, cross country running … usually solitary, which probably says more about me than anything else) but I am happy for other people who enjoy more organised or team oriented ones. I can even enjoy watching them, even if others around me find my enjoyment strange.

I can enjoy watching anyone do anything well, and celebrate their doing of it. I can enjoy beauty, and expression whether beautiful or not, wherever I find them. I don’t ever tend to initiate the watching of sport but today, for example, when my partner was watching the athletics, I enjoyed many parts of it in exactly the way that I would enjoy an act of modern dance. When I spend an afternoon with my step son and his family, and a game of soccer is on the television, I enjoy that in the same way that I would enjoy a ballet (he, like almost everyone else know, finds that equivalence hilarious … but it stays with me).

What I can’t manage to do, in either of those examples, is manage to care in the slightest who wins.

There is an old chestnut, frequently quoted at me when I was a spotty, skinny, uncoördinated schoolboy suffering joylessly through a game of Rugby: “it’s not the winning that matters but the taking part”. I could buy that … but, alas, it is almost always spoken in hypocrisy. Sometimes the hypocrisy is a vehicle for comfort and kindness; sometimes not; but I have very rarely heard it said in sincerity. For many players of games (not all; I’ve watched youngsters turn out all season, in all weathers, week in and week out, to play soccer or rugby despite winning not a single match), as in so many areas of life, winning matters very much. For most spectators, it matters even more.

More worrying than the individual desire to win, though, are the outbreaks of mob “chimpiness” (for which word I am again indebted to Ray) which surround sporting events: Quatermass and the Pit style spasms of our biological heritage. At the crudest and most obvious level, it emerges as football terrace violence. More insidiously, but just as definitely, it can be seen in the bean counting which is going on in Britain (and most other countries) at the moment: not honouring the achievements of the participants, but totting up how many medals “we” have won.

It goes way beyond the sports themselves, too. The arts are, by and large, less afflicted by this mass effect – but not once sports have raised the temperature. Despite many detailed reservations and relativist economic concerns, I could enjoyed the Olympic opening ceremony too: as a superbly well designed and executed piece of spectacular theatre put on by a huge cast of committed volunteers. But … so much of the commentary was not around the performance itself but concentrated on whether or not “we” had trumped the equivalent effort four years ago in Beijing.

-Felix

Attend to the soil...

“A healthy artistic climate does not depend solely on the work of a handful of supremely gifted individuals. It demands the cultivation of talent and ability at all levels. It demands that everyday work, run-of-the-mill work, esoteric and unpopular work should be given a chance; not so much in the hope that genius may one day spring from it, but because, for those who make the arts their life and work, even modest accomplishment is an end in itself and a value worth encouraging.”

Always true, always worth quoting ... and I'm using it in the intro to a short course, so thought I'd air it again here.

And it doesn't just apply to the arts, either ... science, sport, business: everything depends upon the environment within which it grows.

---

• Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister of Australia 1973-4 (requoted from Germain Greer's The Obstacle Race. 1979, London: Secker & Warburg. 043618799X.)

Musing on copywrongs

Copyright is a slippery thing, at times. So is freedom of expression, but let's stick with copyright for the moment.

Look at the picture on the left. It was taken late this afternoon by my ex student Anthony. I sent an SMS message to just over thirty people in the same region, asking for a photograph which met certain criteria and expecting to wait a week or so for results, but struck lucky with Anthony within half an hour. Anyway; take a look at it.

I asked a friend in the legal profession for three off the cuff opinions.

First: does it breach the copyright of the person owning the van in the foreground? Answer: no, because that van and its livery are only part of a larger image, taken at and from a public place where the photographer (that's Anthony) had a right to stand without let or hindrance, and furthermore does not seek to represent the livery as Anthony's own work.

Second: does it breach the copyright of the Podkayne of Mars book jacket which I reproduced almost three years ago? Answer: no, because wet dream fantasy illustrations of women in ludicrous costumes which barely conceal their breasts are so common that it would be impossible to argue that the Podkayne illustration was the original. But it's possible (though by no means certain, since my intent in doing so is to "make fair comment" on a larger issue) that I have contravened the copyright of that book cover by reproducing it in this blog.

Third: does it breach the copyright of Sony Pictures in the Charlie's Angels poster with which the JSB blog compared it in a post last month? Answer: quite possibly yes, since it clearly intends to duplicate that image as closely as possible without acknowledging its influence.

So; we have here a van which may be in breach of copyright and a photograph of that van which is not. Which is interesting, since I see that the owner of the van has attempted to bluff JSB with a clumsily veiled threat of suit for copyright breach over a similar photograph in that 2nd march post.

Here on the left, for reference, is JSB's photograph to which the van owner is objecting. Note that JSB considerately obscured details of the owner. now that the owner has identified himself, you can also see the same image with those details en clair by clicking this link (I wouldn't want to breach Mr Addicott's copyright by posting the image itself, so I have linked to his own online display).

Now for freedom of expression. There is an ever increasing sub-legal pressure on photographers to desist from taking photographs in public places. That is an infringement of freedom which, in my opinion, matters a great deal and affect all of us, not just photographers.

Mr Addicott has, of course, a perfect right to defend his use of a sexist image. He has a perfect right to reply to JSB's commentary upon it. He has a right to feel aggrieved (though not to demand agreement or sympathy from those who disagree with him). What he does not have the right to do is seek, through intimidating waffle, the suppression of other people's right to photograph his van on the streets – not to suppress their free expression of opinions on the imagery on that van.

Bullying is never attractive, and should always be resisted if possible.

If Mr Addicott objects to my use of Anthony's photograph in this post, I hope that he will either discuss his grievance openly and reasonably (you catch more wasps with honey than with vinegar, Mr Addicott) or tell me the exact grounds upon which his implication of copyright breach is based. In the latter case, I will take his complaint to my lawyer friend for proper, paid advice.

From the land of the free

From the legislature of the US state of Utah:

AGRICULTURAL OPERATION INTERFERENCE 2012 GENERAL SESSION STATE OF UTAH [... ... ...] This bill establishes the crime of agricultural operation interference ... ... ... [and] provides that a person is guilty of agricultural operation interference if the person, without the consent of the owner of the operation, records an image of, or sound from, an agricultural operation while on the property where the agricultural operation is located; and establishes penalties. [... ... ...]

---

• Bill HB187. http://le.utah.gov/~2012/bills/hbillint/hb0187.pdf

Cars, cows and carbon sinks

An externality, to an economist, is^[1] "a side-effect or consequence ... which affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved". Externalities take all sorts of forms, and can be positive or negative, but over the past half century industrial pollution of the environment has become the primary exemplar.

More recently still, the focus has narrowed down to carbon based compounds whose costs are paid in a number of ways. The crudest direct health effects are usually localised, and become a matter for local legislation or lack of it; the atmospheric greenhouse effect is a global issue with no respect for human jurisdictional boundaries.

Attempts to deal with pollution almost always come down to mechanisms designed to convert an externality into a direct cost paid by the polluter, and carbon is no exception. A number of schemes exist to license carbon emission, with a market in which those who emit least sell permissions to those who emit most, thus exerting a direct proportional cost pressure on producers.

Whether this method is effective, and if so to what degree, is a subject of considerable political argument; but it remains the principle approach. Its use depends on quantification of emissions, which is neither simple nor straightforward. In practice, output is usually simplified from the full gamut of emitted substances (not all of them carbon based) to a single carbon dioxide equivalence figure, the product of mass and a radiative forcing factor which varies from substance to substance. But that still leaves an impractically large data acquisition and monitoring task.

The essence of statistical data analysis, always and everywhere, is generalisation from sample to population with a quantified level of confidence. Sometimes, as with extraterrestrial exploration in the last issue, this is because only tiny amounts of data can be captured and the maximum information must be squeezed from it. In the case of planetary emission levels the opposite is true: the available data volume is huge, and only a small fraction of it can be manageably handled. [more]

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1. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press.

Red, white ... and sung blue

Ray Girvan, in a comment to my "Remembrance Day" post on Friday, made several good points with which I agreed, whilst arriving at slightly different behavioural results.

I am, in principle, a pacifist. It's a principle which i believe must always and everywhere be continuously striven for. At the same time, in world where war remains a regrettable reality, I acknowledge that we must decide how to act in the immediate present. I rarely support (indeed, usually vociferously oppose) foreign wars, but back in April I reluctantly supported NATO military operations in the face of threatened genocide in Libya. Three and a bit years ago, I described military forces as being like bacteria: simultaneously both essential to life and the source of many of its problems. Nevertheless, I do not waver from the view that pacifism is the ideal towards which we should always try to steer.

This year, for the first time in a quarter century or so of wearing a white poppy, I encountered aggression because of it. I have always had people disagree with me, sometimes criticise me, but always in a civilised manner – which is fine, and almost always valuable besides. Four days ago, I encountered the first person to tell be that I am "a fucking faggot" and threaten to stuff the white poppy down my throat. While this wasn't a pleasant encounter, I regard the uniqueness of its occurrence as a generally positive aspect of the society within which I live.

There is another side, though ... what my friend Maureen (a one time European Union administrator) yesterday called “poppy fundamentalism”. I like her term better than “poppy fascism” which, in my opinion, devalues language. Whatever we call it, however, the phenomenon is the same: treatment of a (red) poppy on one's lapel as a shibboleth. Either you wear it or you are somehow suspect.

I agree with the British Legion's expressed viewpoint, three years back, that it doesn't have a problem "whether you wear a red one or a white one, both or none at all".

Joan Smith, writing in her Independent on Sunday column today, sums up my view of this: “The dead we honour won our freedom to disagree”.

More acid drops

It seems to be a drug fuelled (textually, that is; not literally unless you count caffeine) week at the Growlery.

The day before yesterday, I wrote in passing of Aldous Huxley's experiments with perception alteration through use of mescaline and other substances. Today, entirely without connection to my last two posts, of which she was unaware, my friend Agnieszka has (in an entirely separate cultural research context) just sent me an email full of information on similar experiments by the artist and philosopher Witkacy. Using everything from coffee to peyote (the principle psychoactive compound in which is mescaline), Witkacy documented his explorations partly in visual art marked with coded notation.

Sword into ploughshares

I'm receiving a number of responses to Thursday's "Sic gloria transit Qaddafi" post. Most of them, as with my "shades of grey" post back in April, have been disagreeing with me in both directions ... and often by the same people, all of whose opinions I deeply respect and to a greater or lesser extent share.

Geoff Powell, for example, writes:

“Once again we rejoice over our equally barbaric behaviour.
Once again we have created mayhem for money.
Now, if the patterns of the past are followed, all the stupid greedy people will fight over the spoils. Aided by us of course - our "private" army in Iraq.
I feel deeply ashamed and aplogise to those we shred.
It does sicken me the way our "leaders" - squeaky shiny clean school boys - are but puppets of the money makers and brain wash the "plebs" who will bleat away in front of the "telly" soaps and shite and will bleat to the drum of stupidity. No wonder I feel somewhat alone in this madness.”

I agree with much of that. The trouble is, there are other considerations.

I'll start by looking back to last April. Can I, hand on heart, having seen the death and destruction which has occurred in the intervening six months, say that it would have been better to let Qaddafi and his regime inflict even greater genocidal carnage on his civilian population, not only during that time but on into the future? Answer: no, can't.

I don't doubt that the motives for intervention were (to put it generously) mixed. But that doesn't alter the fact that if the intervention hadn't happened, the ongoing toll across a range from torture to loss of life would have been even greater ... and continuing still. Neither Britain's David Cameron nor France's Nicolas Sarkozi are figures to whom I can give my political support; but in a situation where there were no right choices, and every possible course of action would be murky and dishonourable, I am forced to confess that I think they made the choice which was least despicable.

What choices they make next is a different matter, for which they must be held to separate account.

This was not analogous to Iraq, which I condemn without reservation. In Libya, popular uprising had already started. It was, perhaps, more analogous to Kosovo: an intervention to protect a population from massacre which I also supported on principle, though the means (air strikes against urban infrastructures in Belgrade rather than against the forces conducting the massacres) I could not.

I am sickened by what has happened since April; but I would be even more sickened if we had turned our backs and let even worse occur.

On, now, to the present, and the manner of Qaddafi's death, on which Geoff says:

“From Robert Fisk in "The Independent" –

" It's an ill wind, etc. Today my thoughts are not with the Gaddafi family but with Bassam and Saniya al-Ghossain, whose daughter Raafat was killed in Libya on 15 April 1986.

She was the victim of President Reagan's insane air raids on Tripoli – in revenge for the killing of an American serviceman in Berlin, by a bomb planted by one of Gaddafi's lunatics. I was present at her funeral in Libya and have got to know her parents very well over the years since then. They are among my best friends in Beirut. I had lunch with them yesterday. And do you know what Saniya said about Gaddafi's violent demise? "I am against these things. I am against all murder and killing."

I feel the same way; the mentally ill ( have I ever met a sane person in my life older than a few days/weeks ? ) should be cared for not brutally treated”

In principle, again, I absolutely agree. I cannot, sitting here in a comfortable first world liberal democracy armchair, condone what seems to have happened.

But ... in practice ... nor can I put my hand on my heart and say that, if I were a Libyan citizen rebel, pumped up by adrenalin, brutalised by combat, astonished to still be alive after a firefight, perhaps the sole survivor of a family killed or worse by Qaddafi's regime, I might not in the heat of the moment have behaved just as badly.

It would have been better if Qaddafi had been arrested, and at least brought to trial if not placed in a place of care for the mentally ill. But, at the same time, it was nobody but he and his supporters who created the situation which led to his end on Thursday. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”, as Jermiah 23 has it ... or, switching to Matthew 26, “all who take the sword will perish by the sword”. I'm not given to biblical quotations, normally, but those two do describe reality. Alas, they don't stop at description of murderous dictators; they describe what follows the downfall of those murderous dictators, too. Libya has now to turn away from the sword, and sow peace, if it is to move on into a better world than Qaddafi's. The madness which Qaddafi created, and which killed him on a road in Sirte,has to end with his death if Libya is not to become another Zimbabwe. What has happened up to now is, in my opinion though not in Geoff's, down to Qaddafi; what happens next, for good or for ill, is down to those (in Libya and outside it) who have deposed him.