Chimanmanda Adichie’s Single Story

Posted on 1 September 2010 by Robert

An interesting TED talk by the novellist Chimamanda Adichie on the power of stories, and how a multitude of stories are required in order to fully understand other people.

Key quote is thirteen minutes into the speech:

I have always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person, without engaging with all the stories of that place and that person.  The consequence of the Single Story is this: It robs people of dignity.  It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.  It emphasises how we are different, rather than how we are similar.

That’s my kind of multiculturalism.

Posted in Africa, Books, Multiculturalism | Leave a comment

Lost Moon Technology

Posted on 31 August 2010 by Robert

The website TopTenz.net lists 10 Lost Technologies such as Damascus Steel and the Antikythera Mechanism (via Kottke). Incredibly, the technology used to bake the Apollo programme lacks any meaningful record of its construction:

The Apollo and Gemini programs aren’t truly lost. There are still one or two Saturn V rockets lying around, and there are plenty of parts from the spacecraft capsules still available. But just because modern scientists have the parts doesn’t mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did. In fact, very few schematics or records from the original programs are still around. This lack of record keeping is a byproduct of the frenetic pace at which the American space program progressed. Because NASA was in a space race with the USSR, the planning, design, and building process of the Apollo and Gemini programs was always rushed. Not only that, but in most cases private contractors were brought in to work on every individual part of the spacecraft. Once the programs ended, these engineers—along with all their records—moved on. None of this would be a problem, but now that NASA is planning a return trip to the moon, a lot of the information about how the engineers of the 1960s made the voyages work is invaluable. Amazingly, the records remain so disorganized and incomplete that NASA has resorted to reverse engineering existing spacecraft parts that they have lying around in junkyards as a way of understanding just how the Gemini and Apollo programs managed to work so well.

I find this offensive. Lore has it that the Apollo programmeran off less computing power than your average mobile phone, and I repeat my generous offer to donate my iPhone – completely gratis, I might add – to any future moonshot.  Coupled with a Trident submarine turned on its end, I always assumed that this would catalyse our return to extra-terrestrial bodies.  And so its crushing to hear that most of the work would have to be done again from scratch.  What were you thinking, NASA?

Meanwhile, NASA joins the Flickr Commons, providing historical andiconic photography from the NASA space programmes.  The image below is the Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned oribtal flight, in 1962.

Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned orbital space flight. Astronaut John Glenn aboard, the Mercury-Atlas rocket is launched from Pad 14.


Posted in Science, Space Travel | Leave a comment

On Benefit Fraud

Posted on 13 August 2010 by Robert

Now then.  Dave Osler has an interesting post about benefit fraud over at Liberal Conspiracy.  Apparently, only 1% of benefits paid by the state are wrongly claimed.  That still amounts to a billion pounds, but is obviously less than the billions spent on bank bailouts.

Crucially, it is also much less than the amount of benefits people are legally entitled to, but never actually claim (approximately £10.5 billion, points out woodscolt in the comments).  Double crucially, it is a fraction of the money lost to tax evasion (£30 billion).  Yet in our political discourse, it is benefit cheats who are blamed for the horrible amounts of money the government wastes.  Could this be because diddling benefits is a poor person’s game, while tax evasion is a middle- and upper-class pursuit?

During the election campaign, I recall more than one political debate I had with friends and passers-by, on this problem.  Like immigration, the issue is incredibly muddled.  People often equate benefit-fraud with the separate issue of the state giving people too much in benefits. A story about a woman who steals £60,000 from the state in a benefit fraud is equated with the story of a man who claims housing benefit of £2.1m a year to live in Kensington are seenn as somehow part of the same problem.  However, they are problems of a completely different order – The first is a case of someone breaking the law, who should be (indeed, was) caught and punished.  The second is someone acting perfectly legally and in their own interests, within the system operated by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.  We solve the first case by investigating criminality.  We solve the second problem by forcing the borough into building more and better social housing (if indeed you consider humanely housing a group of refugees to be a ‘problem’).  Housing policy, and the level of benefits paid to those not in work, seems to me to be an ideological argument, where Labour and the Tories have very different views.  Meanwhile, everyone agrees that benefit fraud is wrong and must be stopped.  Public discussion on benefit fraud doesn’t always make this clear… and the Left loses the argument as a result.

Posted in Debate, Economy, Politics | 1 Comment

Linklog for 6th August to 12th August

Posted on 12 August 2010 by Robert

My del.icio.us links: 6th August to 12th August

(Generated by Postalicious)

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Quoted on Libel Tourism

Posted on 12 August 2010 by Robert

Eagle-eyed commuters will have spotted a quote from yrstruly in the Metro this morning, on the all important topic of Libel Tourism.  Barack Obama has just signed into law some measures that will protect Americans from British libel judgements.  The protection will kick-in if the libel judgement is at odds with the First Ammendment.

Yesterday, campaigners said Mr Obama’s move was a clear indication that our libel laws were way behind the times in protecting freedom of expression.  Robert Sharp, of charity English PEN, said: ‘It’s a national disgrace and just shows how skewed and unbalanced our laws are.’

Read the whole article.  My longer rant about libel tourism may be found on Comment is Free.

Posted in Elsewhere, Human Rights, USA | Leave a comment

Defending the Cordoba Mosque

Posted on 10 August 2010 by Robert

Over in New York, an argument is blazing over the Cordoba Initiative, an Islamic cultural and community centre planned for downtown New York.  Shrill critics have labelled it the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and called for the project to be cancelled, due to it offending the sensibilities of the families of 9/11 victims.  However, a calmer look at the proposed centre reveals although it is in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre site, its hardly on top of it.  Other mosques exist in the downtown area, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the project, has been praised for his interfaith work.

This controversy has clearly been manufactured by those who seek to polarise American political debate.  It is depressing and astonishing that the arguments against the centre have gained any traction at all.  One might expect this in Europe, with its muddled and inconsistent relationship with secular ideals.  Or in theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran, with their blanket intolerance of other faiths.  But for a country which explicitly enshrines human rights such as free expression and freedom of religion in its constitution, it is bizarre that the debate has advanced so far.  Most ironic is that the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation set-up specifically to combat religious prejudice and anti-semitism, has led the calls for the plans to be scrapped.  Their statement prioritises public outrage and ‘offence’ over freedom of expression, assembly, and religion – A dubious position indeed.

Thankfully, the principles of tolerance appear to be waxing.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently gave a fantastic speech where he reaffirmed the principles upon which the United States was founded.  As a Jewish New Yorker, his words have a certain ‘rhetorical authority’ (as David Foster Wallace would call it).  Let’s hope this argument becomes another ‘teaching moment’, a step away from the global war that Osama Bin Laden sought to provoke when he planned the September 11 attacks.

“The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

Update

Daily Dish has some great commentary.

Posted in Human Rights, Multiculturalism, Religion, USA | 12 Comments

Known Unknowns

Posted on 9 August 2010 by Robert

At the Plain Blog About Politics, Jonathan Bernstein reminds us that, despite the oceans of political coverage that seems to saturate the media, many people do not take an active interest in politics outside of election time.

If you asked [my Father] to name a NASCAR driver he’d probably look at you as if you were nuts…but if you named some of them, he’d probably recognize the names. The idea is that lots and lots of people have about that level of knowledge about most of what happens in politics. It’s just background noise. We, the people who write and read political blogs, and watch debates, and pay attention to politics even in the off season –we’re the minority.

Bernstein is writing about US politics, discussing former Governors and presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, two people who I bet few in Britain would recognise.  Nevertheless, Bernstein’s cautionary tale is pertinent in the UK too – At election time, I remember being amazed that the Leaders’ debates could increase Nick Clegg’s popularity ratings so substantially.  How had so many people not heard of him, or see him perform?  In my world, he was on TV all the time!

Here’s Caitlin Moran on Twitter:

I’ve made a decision – I’m not going to find out who Justin Bieber is. He’s going to be the first “modern thing” I’m going to ignore.

This has stuck with me, because it was via this message that I discovered that a person called Justin Beiber existed.  Whenever I have mentioned this to other people, they have, without exception, replied: “Who’s Justin Beiber?” which reassures me somewhat.  If I am being culturally ignorant, then at least a lot of other people I know are too.  There is a Facebook group called I bet I can find 1 million people who hate Justin Bieber.  Perhaps I should start one called I bet I can find 1 million people who have never heard of Justin Bieber?

That Bieber is, in many circles, a hugely famous global phenomenon – worthy of single-serving sites, mash-ups and parodies – matters little to me.  The most cursory research quickly reveals that I am not his target market.  In such cases, admitting ignorance becomes something of a badge of sophistication.  However, in other cases, the sudden exposure of my own ignorance leaves me more concerned.  It is more embarrassing for me to admit that I had barely any knowledge of Alan Watkins’ career, or the output of Tony Judt, until people I follow began tweeting and blogging their RIPs.  As a fully paid up agent for the liberal left conspiracy, Watkins and Judt were guys I really, really should have known about before they died.  Instead, both names were part of the ambient noise around me (like Bernstein Snr and the NASCAR drivers).  I’m grateful that at least the news of their passing found its way into my ‘streams’, and I can now set about reading Postwar.

Of course, knowing that there are influential people out there who you have not heard of is not very helpful, because of course, you don’t know who they are!  This can be remedied by reading an entirely new or random blog, or just by picking up a weekly magazine that you might otherwise avoid.  What might me more interesting, however, is considering who or what currently exists on the penumbra of your consciousness?

The answer that springs to mind is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, which I first became aware of when I began to see young teensm on trains reading improbably thick paperbacks.  Meyer’s series managed to become a global success story while I remained oblivious.  Again, this is easily explained by the fact that I am not the target market.  However, now that movies are being made and advertised on the public transport system, I would say that the saga, with its emo-vampire chic, is part of most people’s peripheral vision now.  It is no longer ‘background noise’ as Bernstein has it, but rather, a collective cultural happening that infiltrates our awareness via a kind of osmosis.

I would say that there are a whole class of public figures – people like Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Huw Edwards, and John Terry – who enter our thoughts this way.  We know about them, and their notoriety before we even consider consuming their cultural oevres ourselves.  Certain politicians fall into this category too.  I would expect even the most uninterested and sullen of the lumpenproletariat to know who David Cameron was, and possibly George Osborne and Nick Clegg too.  However, if they aren’t clear who David Willets or Danny Alexander are… well, I think that’s forgivable.

Posted in Art and Cultures, Diary, Politics | 2 Comments

When PC Myth Becomes Government Talking Point

Posted on 3 August 2010 by Robert

Five Chinese Crackers spots a stinker from Baroness Warsi:

“Well I think there’s a difference between multiculturalism per se, and state multiculturalism, where the state intervenes and says, ‘You will do this, you will do that.’” For example, she offers, “When the state says ‘We’ll have winterfest instead of Christmas, so everyone feels included.’ That’s wrong.”

Eh? Did I miss something? When – and you don’t have to be exact now, a year will do – did the state say we’ll have Winterfest instead of Christmas? (Except for the time when Cromwell’s government banned Christmas, smartypants).

The Guardian article by Decca Aitkenhead is here. Now is the perfect time to link to Oliver Burkeman’s fantastic debunking of the Winterval myth:

Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. “We get this every year,” a press officer sighs, eventually. “It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it’s bollocks, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

According to an official statement from the council, Winterval – which ran in 1997 and 1998, and never since – was a promotional campaign to drive business into Birmingham’s newly regenerated town centre. It began in early November and finished in January.

Clicking back from the Five Chinese Crackers post, I find that the Exclarotive blog has been logging similar myths.  Anton Vowl spotted another example of the Conservatives propagating the nonsense, this time over health and safety legislation.  Ann Widdecombe cited several examples of PC gone mad during our debate on the issue last year.  I wonder how many had any substance?

One might think that debunking articles, such as those mentioned above, might serve to sink the highly dangerous armada of lies that sails through our society, leaving a hatred of immigrants in its wake.  Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be so.  In the Boston Globe, John Keohane reports on a University of Michigan study that shows that the introduction of new facts may actually cause people to double-down on their strongly held misconceptions.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

This is why we need to discuss much of our politics in terms of narrative.  It sounds pretentious, but the fact is that a single article giving some facts will rarely reverse a political consensus.

Update

Here’s my namesake in the Independent with a similarly fine debunking.

Posted in Political Correctness | Leave a comment

Linklog for 18th June to 2nd August

Posted on 2 August 2010 by Robert

My del.icio.us links: 18th June to 2nd August

  • The Complete Unbelievability of World War II – "So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable."
  • Death on Facebook – Coming from a generation that grew up with Facebook and lived in a world in which relationships weren’t official until they were on the social networking site, in a strange way finding out about a friend dying in war via Facebook made it more real
  • Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge – Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret
  • Waterboarding and the Media – Comprehensive study showing how waterboarding has been redefined by US media. It used to be called 'torture'… now, not so much. This is Orwellianism in action, no hyperbole.
  • Let's say you're the first human ever to make alien contact –
  • 2010 gadgets redesigned for 1977 –
  • Can England be more than a 90 minute nation? – Sunder Katwala's long and rewarding essay on Englishness and Britishness, the best of the World Cup reflections I have read this tournament.

(Generated by Postalicious)

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Tropes

Posted on 31 July 2010 by Robert

The latest YouTube craze is to take a common film or TV cliché or plot device and splice them together.  Its a diverting way to highlight the many recurring scenes that we see in our media, the audio-visual grammar of our entertainment.

A couple my favourites are Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions and Let’s Enhance, below.

Via that video, I came across the massive time-sink that is tvtropes.org. I think a wiki-style project to create a YouTube video for every TVtrope listed would result in a fantastic media- and film-studies resource. A good use of our cognitive surplus, I reckon.

Update

Tom Cruise, running.

Posted in Film, Internet Philosophy | Leave a comment