Robert Sharp

On Tuesday I was at the demonstration for Simon Singh outside the Royal Courts of Justice.  He is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, and the latest court appearance was an appeal over meaning.

Here’s a slideshow of my photos from outside the court, all with a Creative Commons Licence:

Inside the court, the judges apparently became quite exhasperated with some of the arguments put forward during the hearing. Padraig Reidy from Index on Censorship reported first-hand:

Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge said he was “troubled” by the “artificiality” of the case. “The opportunities to put this right have not been taken,” Lord Judge said.

He continued: “At the end of this someone will pay an enormous amount of money, whether it be from Dr Singh’s funds or the funds of BCA subscribers.”

He went on to criticise the BCA’s reluctance to publish evidence to back up claims that chiropractic treatments could treat childhood asthma and other ailments.

“I’m just baffled. If there is reliable evidence, why hasn’t someone published it?”
…
Rogers conceded that had Singh written that there was “no reliable evidence”, the defamation suit might never have happened.

But Lord Justice Sedley suggested “isn’t the first question as to whether something is evidence that it is reliable?”

My del.icio.us links: 5th February to 19th February

• Ehud Barak breaks the apartheid barrier – If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic… If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.
• “May The Judgement Not Be Too Heavy Upon Us” – Long post on Daily Dish on Torture and the Catholic Church. A good round-up of the evidence and moral arguments against. No apologies for constant linking to the same person on this issue – Sullivan is the clearing house for information on this issue.
• Escher in Lego – Awsome Escher optical illusions in Lego.
• URL Encoding – I’ve been finding this code converter very useful. It gives you the safe URL code for common characters.
• The Abolition Of Torture – This Andrew Sullivan essay was behind a paywall for a while. It is from 2005 but still one of the best discussions of the ethics at the heart of the issue.
• Brains of vegetative patients show life – latimes.com – Checking the patient’s responses for accuracy and comparing them to the yes-no brain responses of a group of healthy volunteers, researchers discerned that Subject No. 23 was not only still “in there,” but capable of purposeful thought and communication.

(Generated by Postalicious)

A while back, I noted that everyone, everywhere, thinks that their culture is under attack:

The Islamic States fear the coming of Western Imperialism, while the Christian West complains that their time-honoured traditions are being undermined by an unjustified favouritism to alien minorities.

My theory was that this was an observational fallacy.  We are acutely aware of the depth of our own culture, and also changes and threats to it.  Conversely, we fail to percieve nuance and change in other cultures.

I was reminded of this mentality just now, when I read a True/Slant article on percieved bias in Israel/Palestine coverage.  Pro-Israeli and Pro-Arab groups were shown a news report and asked to comment on its bias:

The point is that these groups watched the same news and came to opposite conclusions as to which way it was biased. And each side thought it was biased against their side.

(via The Daily Dish).

I see that the assassins of the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh used fake British passports while plotting the deed.  The Daily Mail has an interview with one of the people who had his identity cloned.

A British man in Israel with the same name as an alleged member of a hit squad that assassinated a top Hamas militant in Dubai said his identity had been stolen.

Melvyn Adam Mildiner said he was ‘angry, upset and scared’ over what he called a misidentification.

During the recent debate about MI5 complicity in torture, I noted with dismay how many people used the phrase ‘terror suspects’ quite comfortably when discussing people they might put on a waterboard.  This incident in Dubai is a timely reminder that ‘terror suspects’ covers day-tripping British tourists.  Anyone who endorses torture due to a hypothetical ticking bomb scenario must also endorse the torture of innocent British holiday makers.  That a British tourist might be mistaken for a terrorist is also a hypothetical – but one that is just as probable, if not more probable, than the ticking bomb thought-experiments.

Endorsing the water-boarding of innocent tourist is the only consistent position for those who would justify the torture of other ’suspects’ such as Binyam Mohammed.  It is this internal consistency, taken to its logical conclusion, which highlights the ultimate absurdity of the pro-torture posturing.

I’m sick of people equating ’sleep deprivation’ in the torture/interrogation sense, with the lack of sleep that many people suffer as as a result of their job. The two are incomparable.

My speech at Goldsmiths was part of a wider campaign to make life easier for visiting artists and academics.  The Manifesto Club, who produced the report ‘UK Arts and Culture – Cancelled, by Order of the Home Office‘ have today published a sequel: ‘Fortress Academy‘. This new report looks specifically at the impact of the points-based visa system on universities and their students.

Students were rejected by the UKBA for a variety of trivial reasons, including having written ‘Malaysian’ instead of ‘Malaysia’ under country, or for the colour of the background used in their photograph.

The view from the panel

Last Monday night I spoke on behalf of English PEN alongside Tony Benn at a meeting a Goldsmiths College Student Union, on the problem of the UK’s new points-based visa system.  The system has caused hundreds of writers and artists to be refused entry to the UK, even for short-term visits such as a one-off gig or book launch.  Academics and university support staff are particularly concerned with how the system affects relationships with their students:  The system places new monitoring requirements on professors to log attendance at individual lectures and inform the UK Border Agency of any ’suspicious behaviour’.

It was clear that, at Goldsmiths at least, neither staff nor students support the new measures.  The general mood is that staff should boycott any extra tasks that the UKBA demands they perform.  Many were frustrated that such a boycott is not already in operation.  However, co-ordinating such action – which really amounts to a simple work-to-rule action, because there is nothing about surveillance of students in any staff contract – nevertheless requires organisation and a sense of momentum.

From the floor, we heard the story of a student who has been harassed and harried at every turn in her bid to stay and study at the college.  She has spend over £2,600 in legal costs and ‘fees’ for processing various immigration applications.  The university cannot give her much help, since they do not want to “act as solicitors”, and she even had to represent herself and an immigration tribunal.  The ‘helpline’ she has been given to assist with her problems costs £1.20 per minute to call… and she is frequently put on hold whenver she calls.

Belle Ribeiro, the NUS Black Students officer, said that in general, international students do not get enough support when they come to study in the UK, despite contributing a huge amount in fees.  The new rules that insist that foreign student carry an ID card will mean that BME students are likely to be disproportionately hassled to identify and justify themselves.  And when ID card fraud inevitably occurs, it will be the overseas students who suffer.

My own speech was a jeremiad (hat-tip James Fallows for that word) on how this country was sending itself into a horrible cultural decline.  The approximate text, corrected for grammar and general semantic sense, is reproduced below.   You can check it against an recording.  The Rt. Hon. Tony Benn was also on the panel:  I’ve put an MP3 of his remarks online too. Read the rest of this entry »

(This post contains vague spoilers, which should not damage your enjoyment of the stories in question)

Would I restore my mind from back-up?

I’ve been reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow’s first novel.  It is a science-fiction thought experiment on what might happen if we all had immortality, and scarcity of resources had been abolished.  Money is redundant, because one can simply utilise public replication machines to generate whatever food or tools you need.  Instead, people earn credibility points (Doctorow calls it ‘Whuffie’) for all the good things that they do – The protagonist, Julius, earns this by maintaining the rides at Disneyland.  Through these tweaks to reality, Doctorow gets to meditate on human purpose and ennui in a time of plenty.

The central, fantastical technology available to the characters, is the ablity to upload and back-up to hard-drive your mind and all your memories.  Should some accident or murder befall you (as of course it does to Julius) you can get a-hold of a clone body, and overlay your complete consciousness onto the tabula rasa.  Doctorow has played with this sort of technology before, in the delightful I, Rowboat (yes, a knowing pun on Asimov’s I, Robot) and another story involving an absconded mother (the name of which escapes me just now).  Apparently, such technology a staple of science fiction:  Back-ups and clones are certainly used in the Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day and I am sure they are found in Philip K. Dick and elsewhere in the canon.

For those who wish to live forever, brain-backups and reboots are exciting idea, but the immortality on offer would be false.  In both The 6th Day and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, its clear that in taking a snap-shot of your brain, you are not preserving your consciousness (or your soul) but simply making a copy of it.  As both Adam Gibson (the Schwarzenegger character) and bad-guy Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) discover in The 6^th Day, it is possible to make a clone of yourself before you die!  When your original ‘version’ dies, the fact that there is a replica of you living on somewhere is of no comfort as your own light fades.  When you finally expire, you know your soul cannot fly away and awake in the new clone, because the clone is already wandering around making memories of his own (see also ‘Second Chances’, a Star Trek: TNG episode with two Commander Rikers).

Stepping into the Star Trek transporters or Fly-style teleporter carries the same philosophical risk.  I simply wouldn’t have the guts to step into such a machine – Not because I worry that my psychology or physiology might be altered due to a malfunction, but because even if the thing works perfectly, the guy stepping in is not the guy stepping out.

One of the few places in fiction where the idea that the soul does not persist through back-ups and cloning is in The Prestige.  Its a film I’ve previously slated for seeming to violate the rules of mystery-telling, but on reflection I think it is internally consistent (the opening shot of the film fortells the final revelation).  Both the Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale characters discover, in their own very different ways, that you cannot achieve immortality through the creation of a clone or a twin, regardless of how that might appear to the rest of the world.  In the end, both characters rightly weep at the demise of their clones, but Jackman’s character is the more tortured because he has caused the death of his ‘original’ self, merely by choosing to step into the crackpot machine in the first place.    This is a sadness that seems to be missing from the characters in Cory Doctorow’s stories.

However, realisation that backup-and-restore is not bona fide immortality would not discourage me from plugging in my brain and making a copy.  This is because we naturally value the things we have created, and we want to see them persist.  I would like to pass on bits of my DNA through children and grandchildren.  I would like people to read the thoughts I have written down, even after I become an ex-person.  A human consciousness restored from my uploaded back-up would be indisputably my creation, a more detailed product of my life and times than anything I might write or carve, or anyone I might sire.  Far better that they, in particular, get to witness the heat-death of the universe (Doctorow, with a nod to Douglas Adams) or the “more glorious dawn” of a Galaxy-rise than some other, generic homo sapien.

'The Same River Twice, part V' by ruSSel hiGGs. Creative Commons License.

After the architectural triumph of St. Pancras, Kings Cross station was in need of an overhaul. The new hallways down into the underground are wide and ergonomic, with few right angles in sight.

A clever new feature on the main concourse is the addition of coloured queue tiles on the floor, leading towards the trains. They are like little yellow-brick-roads for the mass transit system, nudging people into an orderly line, without the need for the proto-fascist barriers that we see at most cinemas, airports and theme parks.

Kings Cross. Photo by yrstrly.

The problem of extra-judicial killings of journalists in Mexico is one of the major threats to free expression around the world.  News of fresh violence seems to drop into my PEN inbox with increasing frequency.  In November, I mentioned the case of Bladimir Antuna García, who was “killed for writing too much.”

In The Independent, Terence Blacker warns that complacency in rich countries can help sustain this violence:

Only some of this nastiness can be explained by the poisonous air of the blogosphere. There is now a genuine confusion in the minds of many between the tawdry journalistic froth of our own decadent celebrity society and the courageous investigative reporting happening in countries such as Mexico.

It is vain and self-deluding to believe that the killing of writers in other parts of the world has nothing to do with our own lives and attitudes. As Cacho herself has said, “a corrupt political system is only sustained by a corrupt and complicit culture“.