I'm not an American, but I still think that the Stop Online Piracy Act should be killed. With fire. Then resurrected to be killed again, to emphasise it's a really bad idea.
Watch the below video, or get involved at AmericanCensorship.org
If you want a handy guide, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Rhys Morgan hit the headlines a few weeks ago due to his work in publicising Stanislaw Burzynski's fradulent alternative medicine practices. I hold him in some high regard as, at his age, I wasn't too heavily involved in skepticism (although a friend of mine was, and was partially the reason why I later became active in the atheist movement).
Also in the news was a dispute between University College London and their atheist society, after an image from the webcomic Jesus and Mo was used to promote one of their facebook event. Obviously, this caused Muslims on campus to complain about the offensiveness of the image. It's nothing new; Leeds Atheist Society was forced to cancel a showing and debate of the controversial film Fitna back in 2009 for the same reason.
The skeptic and atheist community is no stranger to threats to their freedom of speech: Simon Singh got sued by the British Chiropractic Association after he called their claims that chiropractic could help ill children "bogus". In 2005, the Christian Party protested BBC screenings of Jerry Springer: The Opera, people from Jyllands-Posten to South Park Studios have been censored and attacked for daring to show images of Muhammad. This extends to actual legislation: critics of Scientology and other religions have been arrested for using "insulting" language as defined in the Public Order Act 1986, which is why Peter Tatchell (one of my favourite people) and the British Humanist Association would like that provision stripped.
This is where the two are linked: UCL's student union asked the society to take it down, and refused on the grounds that it was an infringement of freedom of speech: of course, there is an Islamic prohibition on images of Muhammad, but it doesn't and shouldn't apply to non-Muslims. It's like banning people from saying "God dammit": taking the Lord's name in vain, is of course, a massive sin. They publicised this dispute and got support from Richard Dawkins and all three major secular societies in the UK (the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society, and the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies).
They also got solidarity from Morgan, who used the image as his profile picture for a week or so. He describes the intolerant behaviour he experienced on his blog, to the point that he was denounced as no better than Hitler and people threatened to burn his house down and assault him.
I was unaware of Rhys's actions until I woke up this morning and found he had tweeted that he had been called into a meeting with his head of year at his sixth form college, about the Jesus and Mo cartoon. He reports being harassed at school and being ostracized for posting the cartoon. He was later called in again to be told that they were considering expelling him if he didn't take the cartoon down.
Let that sink in for a second.
You see, in the British school system, you only really get suspended for one incident of violence if you don't get put in the hospital, like, for example, getting into a punching fight. But if you post one cartoon that some people take offence at, you run the risk of getting expelled. Yes, his school promised to take care of the threats too, but it's fucking ridiculous. Consider these two quotes from Rhys's twitter feed.
So yeah, apparently, is something is offensive to one person, a perfectly acceptable response is to beat the poster/creator up.
Basically what they're aug is I've caused so much offended I don't have the right to freedom of speech anymore.
If we abridge free speech because it might offend someone, then it becomes meaningless. We wouldn't be able to criticise Islam or Christianity over verses of their holy books. We wouldn't be able to bust the claims of alternative medicine peddlers. We wouldn't have a healthy democracy, basically. Freedom of speech is (near) absolute, and it's absolutely unconscionable to start to abridge it.
Forgive me for the title; I've been on a Stieg Larsson bender over the past week or so, which you can blame on the Fincher/Craig/Mara movie. The English movie led me to the books and the Swedish movies. As of today, I've finished Hornet's Nest (the novel). It's relevant, I promise. My first post delved into the ideas of "subjectivity" on the wiki, and my second about the community. In retrospect, those two barely scratch the surface; this'll be a bumper post touching on some stuff which, themselves, may get a blog post unrelated to TV Tropes.
The best place to start would be indeed the page for Larsson's Millennium trilogy. A quick explanation: the trilogy is a (somewhat) feminist series and Larsson does not skirt around the fact that misogyny is completely wrong. The first book, in Swedish, is literally translated as Men Who Hate Women. It could be joked that he's the anti-troper. About a third of the way through the first book, the series' female lead, Lisbeth Salander, is brutally raped by her legal guardian, Nils Bjurman, after she asked him for money for food. That it was a (admittedly botched) plan at entrapment is irrelevant to the fact that the rape still takes place. Luckily, I've not found anyone on the website say that the character "deserved" it because she was prepared to give Bjurman a blowjob for that evidence (q.v. the Law and Order: UK episode "Alesha")
But placement is everything. The following two quotes link to the trope "Moral Event Horizon": defined as "the first evil deed to prove a particular character to be irredeemably evil". One is on the main page, the other on the YMMV page, which is designed for subjective tropes:
Bjurman — who is Lisbeth's legal guardian and caretaker — crosses this line when he forces her to perform oral sex in exchange for the money she needs to replace her computer. And then longjumps even farther over it when he violently sodomizes, rapes and tortures her.
Lisbeth's treatment of Bjurman is so harsh that it borders on Moral Event Horizon. But it was so precise and ingenious that it could qualify as a Crowning Moment of Awesome: rather than killing the man, Lisbeth opted to make Bjurman suffer the exact same abuse he put her through, up to every little detail, including the rape and the blackmail, just to make him realize how it felt.
The revenge, for what it's worth, is Lisbeth confronting him with recorded evidence of the rape and threatening to go public if he even so much as sneezes the wrong way, culminating in him tattooing "I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist" on his abdomen.
So, have you guessed which one is on which page? Because you're wrong. The rape is on the YMMV page; her revenge is on the main page.
Yep.
See, there's a trope for characters like Bjurman: rapists, child abusers, the genocidal, the utterly evil: it's called "Complete Monster". By rights, there should be stuff so heinous that it's just objectively morally wrong, no matter how many people defend it: Sam Harris makes this point in his book The Moral Landscape (which I'm reading right now). Another user raised this exact point a year ago, and this was Fast Eddie's response:
Complete Monster is thoroughly subjective.
And Fast Eddie has the gall to call Crazy Goggs a "gaping asshole"? Crazy Goggs never defended rapists. There's worse stuff too, on the YMMV page for the Millennium trilogy: for example, an equivalence is drawn between Bjurman's brutal rape of Lisbeth, and Lisbeth having consensual sex with a sixteen-year-old in the Carribean. Luckily, that last one was picked up on.
But the TV Tropes community seems to have this fixation on rape; at the moment, the SA thread's subtitle is "Why the fuck do they have such a fixation on rape?" For example, a week after Torchwood: Miracle Day finished, the TV Tropes page had, for the previous two months, said that Oswald Danes, a child molester who's last words to say he was going to join his victim in hell so he could chase her forever, was a "debatable case" of Complete Monster.
I now defer you to these quotes about rape initially found by the wonderful people in the Something Awful thread, who have a much higher tolerance for staring into the abyss than me.
Okay, you know what, I'm fucking done here. I am not going to sit around and look for examples of the complete festering pit of shit the TV Tropes forums are. These are just a handful of quotes of dozens the SA thread as found. And I've covered this plenty of times: the community on the forums leaves a lot to be desired to become "normal", given that racists, misogynists, and homophobes can talk free from criticism.
This is the thing about free speech: it either exists, or it doesn't. The forums claim to have this non-judgemental attitude similar to Wikipedia's "don't be a dick" guideline, but it's not free speech at all. Free speech includes the right of someone to say to a rape supporter "no, you're a fucking piece of shit". But the only recourse against these horrible people is the broken moderator system, and it's well known that most of the staff are power-hungry bastards. I'm for free speech — why do you think I have Article 19 on the sidebar? — but I absolutely detest this mockery of the concept.
In December, the SA thread became aware of a forums user who was well-spoken but was critical of these elements: Annebeche. As far as I can tell, the first mention in the SA topic was her calling a racist a terrible person. Even one of her signatures was an act of civil disobedience. In effect, she was a Goon lost in the mires of TV Tropes, and she received admiration for it. On December 19th, this drama came to a head when two users, Yeah Bro and Disaster Grind, came to the forums and strongly criticised both the wiki and the forums: Yeah Bro focused on the site's attempt to over-categorise square-shaped fiction into round-shaped tropes; Disaster Grind focused on the forums community's obsession with rape and gore.
Fast Eddie, presumably driven paranoid by the SA thread's focus on his site, didn't like that, and immediately dismissed and banned the two users for being Goon infiltrators who are just hear to complain. Anne took Eddie to task… and got banned too. This was a massive deal, and tropers that either the banned three or SA criticised or made fun of jumped to their defence. Eventually, an appeal to the moderation was launched in a thread. So far as I can see, the administrative staff just hid behind the "troll/SA interloper" defence and refuse to enact changes. Anne, for her part, stumped up the $10 and is now one of the roster of frequent posters in the SA thread. And all the while, Fast Eddie remains wilfully ignorant to the problems of his site, and thinks so highly of himself he feels he can demand a Stanford researcher remove mention of SA in a project of his.
Over these past three posts, we've established that Fast Eddie is an incompetent power-mad freak, who would rather protect rape apologists and set literary criticism back than actually listen to critics; I mean, Jesus, even a broken clock is right twice a day. There's just one thing that could save him: his coding skills. Or lack thereof. He's running a heavily customised version of pmwiki, yet can't use CSS background properties or if/else switches properly: things I knew how to do when I was fourteen. The forums are so buggy that Eddie's avatar was once hacked. The parser is so horrible that a user tried to play with it to see what tricks he could pull… and was immediately accused of being a goon. I wish I was joking. He tried to fix this, horribly, making more coding mistakes than I would. And they were live, as he clearly didn't think of using a shadow copy of a site to beat test things. Poetically, I noticed this on the page for the Millennium trilogy.
Escaped entities? What's that? Oh, hello, mysterious "hello"!
And, for the record, I'm aware of SA's problems, especially GBS/FYAD. But, better the devil that bans pedophiles, right?
But, that's it. I'm fucking done with this trilogy of posts staring into the abyss. I know that I'm a lot more… terse… in this posts, but there's little point in the dry commentary with people like this. The first part of the trilogy is my most popular blog post, and it's actually, to my surprise, on the first page of results for TV Tropes. I'm going to heed and agree with the SA thread's instructions: there's no fixing TV Tropes, so just let it die or shrivel into irrelevancy.
So, the Occupy movement. Let's get something straight, first: I like the idea of Occupy, what it was like in its infancy around the world: a grassroots movement to expose corporate malfeasance and the like. A left-wing version of the Tea Party, but without birther idiots. But I don't like Occupy as it is today. There's a reason for that. People have stopped caring, so a lot of sympathisers, like myself, stopped being involved. It left the movement with only the dedicated people. And it's not dedicated anarchists or dedicated socialists or dedicated liberals, it's the dedicated anti-establishment.
Let's use an example: the Zeitgeist movement are very dedicated to Occupy. On the surface, the Zeitgeist movement looks like your standard anti-establishment group: "we don't like the current financial system, we want something like out of Star Trek" is a rough version of their belief system. It's a nice way of thinking.Or, if you want to be malicious, "Transhumanist Time Cube". But there is a very fine line between hating the current system because it benefits "the 1%" or hating the current system because it benefits the Jews.
There is obviously anti-establishment vibe running through Occupy, but I would argue that it's not proper theoretical anti-establishmentism. Liberals, socialists, and anarchists both practice a form of this: liberals and anarchists hate police statism, socialists and anarchists hate the capitalist establishment. But the anti-establishment at Occupy are like the anti-establishment of the Greens: they're new to the idea, having not given much thought to it before (they voted Labour or Lib Dem previously, for example, because they're not the other two parties), so they don't/can't differentiate between the good type of anti-establishmentism and the bad type of anti-establishmentism.
The bad type invariably leads to conspiracy theory, for example, the supposed "pharmaceutical conspiracy", which doesn't exist as a method to suppressing the efficiacy of homeopathy or other alternative medicine (in case you're wondering, alternative medicine has either been not being proved to work or being proved not to work). But there isn't a pharmaceutical conspiracy, except for the "conspiracy" to make profit. As a skeptic, I have to be skeptical of the conspiracy theory as well as the establishment; if in doubt, one must always assume a profit motive. Because profit does make the world go round.
So a person new to it might be drawn into believing stuff such as chemtrails, FEMA death camps, and an international banking cartel that controls the world… all hallmarks of ultra-right-wing conspiracy theory. You think you don't believe me? Imagine Alex Jones, the loveable angry conspiracy nut, saying that. It does make sense. And it's not a straw man to say this: spend five minutes at an Occupy site, and you'll hear someone say "Bilderberg" or "Rothschild".
Which leads us to our main problem: these conspiracy theories are just redressed anti-semitism. Jon Ronson's book Them: Adventures with Extremists highlights this perfectly: conspiracy theory is masked in language: instead of saying "we don't like negroes", the Ku Klux Klan of today say "we love the white race". And the same is of conspiracy theory: Rothschild is a Jewish name. Banking is a Jewish profession. Law is a Jewish profession. And so on. With the exception of David Icke — who really believes that the international élite are twelve foot reptilians — it's all a way of trying to keep the Jews down in a post-Holocaust society. The changing of language isn't new, either; Lee Atwater, former Reagan aide, said that you start out in 1954 saying "nigger, nigger" and by 1968, you start talking about states rights, when it's the same thing.
(A previous version of this post asserted that "Bilderberg" is a Jewish name. It's not; the group takes its name from the hotel it first met at. However, and as Ronson points out, Bilderberg is still used as a codeword for "Jew".)
On the same line of thought, it's depressing how V for Vendetta has transformed, like Occupy, from (in the comic's case) a pro-anarchist screed to an arm of the conspiracy theory movement. Alan Moore likes the idea of greater consciousness of anti-establishment thought: in fact, he wholly endorses his comic being appropriated by groups such as Anonymous, but he would throw a fit if he saw it being used the way it is:
Yes, there is a conspiracy, indeed there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up… the main thing that I learned about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in the conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control, the world is rudderless.
And, to show I'm not bullshitting, here are excerpts from the Occupy Leeds group: I am aware that they are the same people, but they are the most vocal. The ground operation, however, is slightly less batshit insane:
A lot has changed since my first TV Tropes blog post, which I notice is consistently the most popular post on my blog (to my dismay, actually). I was criticised by someone defending Troper Tales as "someone on or in serious need of serious medication". I'm not kidding. Feels good mang.
Troper Tales was a part of the site where editors could post where tropes applied to their life. Sounds good, doesn't it? But it eventually devolved into socially awkward people and their power fantasies, and in general creepy shit. An infamous page that I tried and failed to get deleted was the page for "rape as comedy". Let that sink in for a moment: there was a page in which tropers could post where they sexually assaulted people for fun. In effect, it was a page where tropers could post "I squeezed my friend's boobs, aren't I funny?". It was still wrong.
Enter CrazyGoggs and Something Awful.
Back in December 2010, the YouTube user CrazyGoggs started a series called This Troper, in which excerpts from TV Tropes, mostly Troper Tales, were read in amusing voices. It's an easy concept and it works well as comedy. At the moment, it's at about 105 episodes, with the author half-facetiously claiming that new episodes are coming out slower because it's too emotionally draining. At the same time, the Something Awful forum had a thread which would do the same: Goons would post different excerpts and make disparaging, or even depressed comments about said excerpts. Myself included. The point was to highlight that, really, TV Tropes has a shitty community.
Troper Tales was eventually taken off the site a few months ago because of this. It was more of a "saving face" gesture, as the community there still has noticeable flaws:
In which being anti-lolicon makes you complicit in "thoughtcrime".
This user in particular has been banned, but the current Something Awful thread continues to bring up goldmines. Now, I'm aware that every online community has its outcasts and people the others don't want to be associated with. But the problem is that the administration doesn't warn them that they're outside societal norms.
In fact, they embrace them. In a thread about racist elements on the forums (and we're talking white supremacist-level racism here), a moderator made this comment in official capacity:
Reporting a post you find questionable won';t get you smacked for "dogpiling" Dogpiling happens within the thread, when a number of posters all start turning their posts from what someone said/believes to how bad (s)he is for saying/believing it.
This is a thread about someone who quoted Stormfront in a discussion. The moderator's line is that you should report infarctions instead of telling someone that they're an arsehole. It's a perversion of the principle of free speech, the misconception that free speech means freedom from criticism (hint: it doesn't). As a Goon said, "They have a rule for ganging up on the racist. But not for being the racist." This comes from the fact the only community rule is "don't be a dick", which is an ages-old Wikipedia rule used when it was free-culture geek project. Even Wikipedia doesn't really use it as a rule any more.
Even Fast Eddie just Doesn't Get It. Which is obvious from reading anything about how TV Tropes works. This is a person who violated the cardinal rule of his own wiki, that there is no such thing as notability, because he didn't want to "advertise for that gaping asshole". Yep, you heard that right. A man in his 50s can't take people making fun of his site so he bans mention of it. Which really doesn't work. Even the deletion was opposed on TV Tropes. The pages for Something Awful and Encyclopedia Dramatica were locked for similar retalitatory purposes. Users were banned for questioning this policy. Referrals from Something Awful were blocked. And then…
Fast Eddie locked the page for "Let's Play" and deleted a link to Something Awful. This is a form of video game commentary that Something Awful undeniably pioneered. And why? Fuck knows. Even the lone sane moderator, Bobby G, halfway admitted that it was for retalitatory reasons. Let that just sink in for a second: the owner of a well known site (well known enough to have its own Wikipedia article) is violating the core concepts of a wiki because he wants to stick it to some people who are laughing at his own incompetence more than anything. It's sad, if you think about it, as what could've been a good concept way back in the day has, despite warning after warning, careening head-first into being the laughing stock of the internet.
It was inevitable, really. With one of the biggest restructurings of the NHS of the past few decades working its way through Parliament, two MPs, Nadine Dorries and Frank Fields, have put forward an amendment to abortion law that, on its face, doesn't look bad: women seeking a termination would, under the amendment, have to seek "independent counselling" before going through with the procedure. This, of course, is very dangerous to abortion rights in the UK, as anyone who has thought about this for more than ten seconds would realise.
The Right, over the past twenty years, have realised that a legislative ban on abortion would be incredibly unpopular;indeed, according to YouGov, the current amendment is opposed 40%-24%, and only 29% of the population believe that abortion access is too lenient, as opposed to 51% who believe it's just right or too strict. The catalyst for this was probably the very famous Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which affirmed a woman's right to abortion. And with the Right in America made to look impotent on this regard, the Right in Europe was similarly emasculated. But with conservative politics becoming all the rage these days, the Right have finally found their foothold into reducing access to abortion.
Dorries' first piece of ammunition is the supposed link between abortion and mental health. This makes abortion restrictions a matter of protective policy, as the argument goes. But like the link to breast cancer, this too has been debunked as cherrypicking data to fit political viewpoints: a practice which, as Bad Science readers will know, is widespread on both sides of the aisle.
Contrary to popular belief, US contraceptives provider Planned Parenthood only spends 3% of its money on terminations.
So then Dorries makes overtures about abortion as an industry. Of course, this is complete bollocks. As a publicly-owned service, the NHS is not in any need to abort babies to make a profit. This is more obviously a tactic borrowed from the U.S. Before the ink on Roe v. Wade was dry, the Right immediately acted to try and restrict abortion without banning it. This was at the forefront of healthcare debate in America last year: no taxpayer money used to fund abortions. Leaving aside the fact that taxpayer money may be used to fund activities that others may find morally repugnant (the War in Iraq and support of Israel being two major ones), it's not even a moral stand. The rich can easily skip over the border to Canada, or, in our case, the continent, to pay for abortions out-of-pocket, the poor are left even poorer by either paying a premium for abortion (because no federally-assisted insurance package can cover abortion) or by raising a child for eighteen to twenty-one years.
Never was this more apparent when funding to Planned Parenthood, a non-profit reproductive health provider, was under threat because they spend money on abortion: an entire three percent. This is the most overt example of making the poor poorer; as abortion services are restricted, so are STI screens, contraceptives, cancer screens, and other womens' health services (which, between them, accounts for 95% of PP's services). Clinics are under threat. The eminent American liberal blog Daily Kos even went as far to call it a "war on women". It may not be that far from the truth; with the religious tinge that American conservative politics has, it wouldn't be exaggerating to say a large amount of the movement believes that if a woman gets pregnant, then it's her own fault, even if she was raped. Including one recent vice-presidential candidate. You know which one.
It's very important to note what is meant by independent counselling. While Dorries claims that religious organisations would not be allowed to intervene, it's almost certain that most of the independent counsellors would be anti-abortion. Why would an anti-abortion group seek, or be granted, NHS funding? And likewise, charities such as Marie Stopes are only not "independent" because the NHS has recognised their aid in reproductive health. The tactic of "opening your mind" is well-known to those preaching views counter to the mainstream. Conspiracy theorists most often use the tactic, but the most infamous user of the term is Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly, who claims that you are close-minded if you use basic physical laws to verify that gravity is an inversely proportional to the square of the distance. As Aristotle said, the mark of a true open mind is one that can entertain an idea without holding it.
Even so, it wouldn't be too long until conservative politicians started crafting "informed consent" restrictions. It's a particularly odious form of anti-abortion rhetoric that is very similar to (and overlaps with) the health concerns as mentioned above, with a twist of claiming that the consent gives more choice to a woman. By insistently using the term baby instead of the more correct fetus, by requiring ultrasounds of the fetus before termination, all this implies that abortion is an act of murder. It also seeks to hide the fact that a fetus necessarily must live in gestation, consuming the mother's resources, for at least twenty to thirty weeks before it can be born. I wouldn't go as far as to use the term parasite, but the implication is the same: these acts seek to deligitimise a woman's right to her own body.
And finally, and this is more of a footnote than anything, politics should not be in a position to disregard scientific evidence and science in general. But, sadly, it's hard to find a decent politican who believes in evidence-based policy, as it's not politically expedient. Over time, evidence on climate change, evolution, abortion, drugs, security, and civil liberties has been actively thrown away in favour of the "gut feeling"; a prospective presidential candidate, Jon Huntsman, lost support within the Republican Party because he agreed on scientific consensus on climate change and evolution. Alan Johnson, former Home Secretary, famously sacked David Nutt because he dared to speak the scientific line rather than the policy line. And for anyone who's flown in the past ten years, airport security lags behind actual terrorist tactics to the point it's not even funny; when was the last time someone put a bomb in his shoe, airside or not?
This story has a happy ending. After realising that her plans were unpopular, Dorries has decided to blame Nick Clegg. Unlike a lot of things over the past seventeen months, this may have some truth; Evan Harris, one of the Lib Dems' best MPs (before he sadly lost his seat last May), asked Nick Clegg to discuss the amendment with Cameron. Coupled with a supposed Lords rebellion to a Health Bill with the amendment, the hope of the it passing is close to zero. But this too betrays a salient fact: not even Conservative MPs are happy with reducing abortion access more than necessary. More Tories voted against a bill to reduce the abortion limit to sixteen weeks than for it, a move which would've still allowed over 90% of abortions possible now to go ahead. And even for the limit of 22 weeks, on the cusp of scientific consensus on a suitable limit, 80% of Labour MPs and 60% of Lib Dem MPs voted No. Even on a free vote, Dorries won't win. But we must keep vigilant, because if more American conservatism makes its way eastwards, it could be disasterous for the vast majority of us.
Unless you've been living under a rock the past week, there have been riots around England in the past few days. Maybe it's just me, but I've felt myself drifting towards the left in the past few months; while I was, I admit, a little skeptical of public sector worker marches over the winter and spring, I'm rather sympathetic towards the original set of rioters in Tottenham and several other areas. There are obvious parallels to the eighties; a Conservative government, economic troubles, racial tensions, public sector strikes, even a royal wedding. The only thing that needs to happen now, comedians have opined, is for Liverpool to win the league. Sadly, though, it appears that people seem unwilling to learn the lessons from the eighties.
Riots, after all, are caused by a catalyst. People do not riot because they want a new 42" TV, whatever the tabloids say. Yes, there are oppurtunists buying baseball bats and balaclavas, looking for a fight or a looting oppurtunity, as the EDL did in Eltham today, but there is always a catalyst. The 1981 riots were caused by racial tensions, as were the 2001 riots. The 1992 L.A. riot was caused by police brutality against Rodney King, and the perpetrators being acquitted of said brutality. The 2008 Greek riots were caused by the country's mounting debt. Even the riots after all the anti-cuts protest were caused by anti-state sentiment. And these riots were caused by the death of Mark Duggan during a standoff with the police, in which there is evidence that Duggan didn't even fire his gun, let alone first.
The sus laws were repealed in 1981, but its effects linger still. An inquiry into the Metropolitan police in 2003 after the murder of Stephen Lawrence found a large degree of institutional racism still in the force. And if it wasn't for its age, its patronage, the Met would be deemed unfit for purpose, after the way it dealt with the News of the World phone-hackings, its actions during anti-cuts and anti-tutition fees protests over the past year, Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes… and, with the exception of Lawrence, this all happened in the past six years. Reforming the Met is a key priority to ease racial tensions between communities and the police.
There is another major reason for these riots, however. If you look at the places where rioting started, an obvious pattern emerges: Tottenham, Enfield, Brixton, Wood Green, Islington, Streatham, Croydon, and, outisde London, Chapeltown, Handsworth, and Toxteth. These areas have a large minority population and a large degree of relative poverty; systemic poverty over the past thirty or forty years. Indeed, Brixton, Chapeltown, Handsworth, and Toxteth are all famous for major riots in the past. This pattern appears as a prelude to riots in cities: first it's in the poor districts, and then town centres, and then, leafy boroughs. It's telling that the leafy boroughs of Bromley, Kingston, and Bexley have been relatively violence free. The Guardian, for its faults, have picked up this, and produced a pretty map that shows this correlation.
All three parties have lessons to learn on poverty, and most notably Labour and the Lib Dems. While the Tories will probably never change, as there's no votes in it for them, the other two parties need to change. Deprived areas are often Labour-voting areas, and they've been Labour for a long time. A cynic might say that they don't do anything about poverty because they'll lose a voting base. But Labour, at their heart, are sympathetic to those trodden under, the working class and the underclass. It's their reason for existence, and the party need to return to their roots and work in communties. But change must also come to the Liberal Democrats. For stable governance and a bit of power, we've allowed the Conservatives to enact policies that hurt the poor. The cuts may be defensible, but we have to remember that cuts to these poor councils have an effect on its residents. Luckily, Conference seems to be aware of this, and will debate drug reform and ESA assessment reform, two areas where we are concerned about the effects on the poor.
But even so, the reaction of the party, both in Parliament and the grassroots, has been nothing short of despicable. It's not liberal at all to advocate that convicted rioters lose their council homes. And while it's politically prudent to duck the tricky issue of the causes to attack "professional looters" or "professional anarchists", it's not liberal either, and is kowtowing to the press: one thing we were recently proud of avoiding. There have even been calls from 33% of the population for the use of live ammunition, and calls from more for the reintroduction of the Riot Act 1715 and other heavy-handed measures, even from the Lib Dem grassroots. But you cannot, and do not, solve poverty with more poverty, or respond to anger at police brutality with more police brutality.
And finally, there's an air of hypocrisy in the air. People who have glorified rioting in Arab Nations or Greece have blanched when it came to London. They're scrambling to blame looters, to make everyone in Tottenham and Hackey people just after a 42" TV. Yes, there are a lot of opportunists, but we must not ignore the genuinely downtrodden in these times. Everyone, including opportunistic looters, the angry dispossessed, the angrier tabloid readers, and the politicians looking down and tutting needs to stop the escalation, otherwise the latter two will try to eradicate the former two, and this mustn't happen at all, and we mustn't let it happen.
Some amusing news from the ermine chamber this week: 76% of peers, including 54% Lib Dem peers, would see reform of the House of Lords unconstitutional. The first thing is that the number of Lib Dem objectors, including Lord Steel, is depressingly too high: Lords reform has been Liberal and Liberal Democratic party policy since before proportional representation was added. The second thing is that this is complete bollocks.
My friend over at Legal Fiction has posted, from a legal standpoint, why this is not the case: most importantly, the use of the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 to override the Lords with the Hunting with Dogs Act (2004) was seen as constitutional by the Law Lords. That, and Parliament has the right to pass nearly anything it wishes (with the exception of laws that violate treaty agreements). But there is a societal aspect too.
The peers should remember why the Parliament Act was passed in the first place. A little history lesson is needed here. In 1909, the Asquith-led Liberal government tried to pass "the People's Budget" — a kind of early New Deal for the British — but were met with a recalcitrant Lords. Asquith went the polls, was returned, and tried to pass a precursor to the Parliament Act. They refused, so he went to the polls again and campaigned with Lords reform as the primary issue. Finally, after the Lords threatened refusal once again, Asquith and the King threatened to pack the chamber with Liberal peers. And so the Parliament Act passed, containing this in the preamble:
And whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation;
Plus ca change, I'm sure you'll all agree. Since 1911, there has been an assumption that the Commons, being elected, represent the Will of the People and are allowed to pass any legislation promised in their election manifesto. This is known as the Salisbury convention, and was formulated after the Attlee government of the late 1940s were opposed by a Conservative majority; a Conservative peer felt that Labour had an explicit mandate of nationalisation and thus it would be improper for the Lords to block these bills. Still, Attlee saw it necessary to amend the 1911 Act to make it easier for the Commons to pass its legislation.
Now, this is all important: it has been law that the Lords will be elected for the past hundred years, but Governments have been historically lukewarm on the idea. Constitutional change isn't seen as really pressing. There has been gradual reform of the chamber since, including Life Peerages and the removal of the Law Lords, a few manifesto promises on abolition, cross-party consensus on reform, and, most importantly, the Blair reforms making the chamber majority-appointed. However, appointment is not a "popular basis", and it does stink of the "jobs for the boys" culture (look at Norman Tebbit or Peter Mandelson, two men who would never be elected to the Commons these days).
And resisting reform would instigate a fight that the Lords will not win. For a hundred years, the Commons has been Supreme. Always. And the best path to constitutional reform is a perversion of democracy. Whereas a "wrong-winner" result would spur on proportional representation, the Lords blocking reform would be seen as the government ignoring the Will of the Public, especially seeing as reform was in the manifesto of every MP returned to the Commons. This is not an exaggeration: even the Irish and Nationalist parties agree Lords reform is vitally needed. If it got to even considering using the Parliament Act, it means that the Lords will have perverted democracy, and the Unelected Lords would be finished as an institution. Given the lack of serious opposition among even Conservative MPs, it seems that it would be an easy thing to campaign on. The Lords seriously need to consider whether to pull the trigger or have someone else do it for them, because it will happen now. To block it would be to sign its own death warrant.
I'm going to admit, and lose a lot of "man points" by saying this, but I watch Grey's Anatomy. It's a show that I've watched for a couple of years, after a friend showed me the first season. This was, of course, at a time when Scrubs was finishing and I needed a second show in the "medical show" roster (the first being House). However, I admit, that the writing on the show is lacklustre at best. For one thing, I don't think the actors for the original set of interns, with the exception of Justin Chambers (Alex Karev), could act very well. Secondly, especially this season, the plots have become somewhat nonsensical, including a musical episode that was a result of a character rear-ending a truck, and an almost carbon copy of the "let's ruin a drug trial by switching the placebo!" subplot House did a few years ago.
But one of the most glaring problems with the show is that it tries to copy the formula of "Soft Rock of Despair + Death = Tearjerker" that Scrubs used to historically devastating effect. For example, in the 2004 episode "My Screw Up", Joshua Radin's "Winter" is used to score Dr. Cox's acceptance of his brother-in-law's death.
And the reason why this works is that the writing staff are better: one of the key plots of Scrubs is evolving character dynamic between J.D. (Zach Braff) and Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley). And McGinley's acting carries the scene; he doesn't say a word, but he lets his facial expressions carry his character's despair. The music is just an added touch. And contrast with the 2006 Grey's Anatomy episode (and second season finale) "Losing My Religion" (complete final act):
There's a contrast even in the scene; the first half has no music and is genuinely poignant, even though Katherine Heigl's character, Izzie, is generally unlikeable (and was so especially during the Denny Duquette subplot). But as soon as Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" plays, the scene loses said poignancy. Why? First, Izzie becomes a blubbering wreck as soon as the music plays. It's a cheap and easy way to make a character look upset, but it doesn't carry the same weight as acting with just expressions. And secondly, the episode brings in the soap drama plot question of "who will Meredith choose?" right at the end, which just kills any sadness at all.
And it betrays the show's quality to do this, when only ten episodes previously, the "bomb scare" episode was genuinely tense. But alas, this trend of using soft rock as a cue for "sadness ahead" was endemic in Grey's Anatomy, whereas Scrubs' use was much more nuanced and better for it. Any time there was an emotional scene, the soft rock would play.
Until Thursday's episode. There was a subplot that was much more emotional and much better in every metric than any recent attempt in the show: apart from the soap opera was a story about a passenger plane going down in the Puget Sound. First, the doctors have to cope with the realisation that there are no survivors, and then the passengers' relatives have to cope. The mid-episode twist of this subplot is that there was a solitary survivor, and seeing the guest cast's acting, as their character's distress as they lie about their sons being alive to give the survivor's mother hope… and all without the soft rock.
The point is, the writers know they don't need the music, as the music is only an added effect. But it had been used in the show as a lazy cop-out. The watershed point was most likely the terrible musical episode this season (which prompted many comments about the show jumping the shark, including from me), as if there was one lesson to be learnt from it: music cannot replace dialogue. The key lesson is that if you can't make it work in dialogue (or lack thereof), then rewrite the dialogue, don't slap in music and hope for the best.
