Panchromatica

Someone is wrong on the internet!

I think one of the great things about blogging is the way in which it allows extended conversations with people you would never otherwise meet. Without blogging I would never have ‘met’ people in the US, France, Japan, Brazil and even here in the UK. Of course these conversations can go wrong, for a variety of reasons. For that reason I try to avoid getting into interblog spats, or get too bothered when an innocuous comment suddenly blows up into a flame war. However two things in particular are likely to derail me and make my responses less than optimum. The first is when I am criticised, not for what I say, but for what I am, while the second is being patronised. It isn’t surprising therefore that in this case, things went wrong.

I have to say that I still think the post written about below is an egregious crock of nonsense, perpetrated I suspect by an academic who should know better, made even worse by some of the lunatic comments. Add to this the fact that my final comment was disemvowelled, (including rather amusingly I thought, a quote from the site's own guidelines); that the nominal topic is one of my life long loves Science Fiction (and Doctor Who in particular) and I am persuaded to make an exception, however pointless it might prove in the long run. Now read on…

Beware - if you haven't seen this episode yet (Midnight) there are spoilers.

Of all the people writing for TV at the moment, I would not have expected Russell T Davies to be on the receiving end of claims of racism and anti-lesbian bias. However it seems I was wrong. A post on Feminist SF by the pseudonymous Yonmei, dealing with the latest episode of Doctor Who makes just such a claim. Initially I was pleased to find the site (via Liberal Conspiracy.) Together feminism and SF can offer a mirror up to society in ways that mainstream fiction often cannot do. However I was sadly disappointed (although I have kept the site in my RSS feed for the moment).

In essence Yonmei argues that the episode is both racist and anti-lesbian, based on claims that:

·        because the person possessed by the alien identifies herself to the Doctor as lesbian in an early scene, this means she is singled out because she is lesbian. 

·        the three black people in the episode are in subservient positions and two of the three die.

·        the fact that no one knew the name of the cabin steward who had saved them all is simply because she was black and therefore ‘unimportant’.

Yonmei and some of the commenters on the post argue that the points they make are not just indicative of media bias in general, but represent a deliberate and systematic bias by the writer, Russell T Davis. In practice though, these ‘criticisms’ are based on inaccurate descriptions of the plot.

·        In the case of the lesbian character (played by Lesley Sharp) her sexuality is totally unconnected to her role in the story, but simply part of the ‘fleshing out’ that all writers do.

·        In the case of the black characters, two of the three are actually in charge of the vessel in which everyone is travelling (hardly servants), one dies heroically saving everyone else while the other dies alongside his white crewmate.

·        The discussion in which the Doctor reflects on the fact no one knew the name of the steward is on board the vessel, while waiting for rescue - in other words before anyone could have found out anything. Russell Davies also made it clear in an interview in the supporting ‘Confidential’ programme that this was in part a commentary on the other characters and their attitude to someone they initially saw as a mere functionary. He was also looking to explore the behaviour of people who did not in general behave well under pressure.

My first comment was to the suggestion of racism, pointing out the importance of Martha Jones (played by Freema Ageyman) and to the issue of the anonymity of the cabin steward, making the point above. I suggested that you needed more than one example to support a claim of systematic bias. I didn’t get very far.

Yonmei dismissed this out of hand, accusing RTD of 'institutional racism'. (Quite how an individual can be guilty of institutional anything escapes me.) Yonmei and another  commenter Ide Cyan (who posts on the blog in her own right and is a self described "man-hating separatist") also referred to a previous story in which Martha's mother and sister were enslaved by the Master and forced to wait on him in maid's outfits. It didn’t seem to matter to them that this was part of a story line in which billions of people were also enslaved and billions more killed. No, what is important is that two black characters are made to wear particular costumes by a megolamaniac monster. Ide Cyan also describes Martha as suffering from the "Mammy stereotype" This is so far from reality that my first response was laughter. After all, this is the character who walked the world alone at the end of Series 3, a world devastated by The Master, and whose actions literally saved the entire planet! That is apparently not enough however; it doesn’t count because she was doing it to save a man. Well, yes, but also her family and several billion other people...

Ide Cyan also described Martha’s character as being treated as a second best character to a departed white girl. A huge part of series three is of course driven by the simple fact that the Doctor is in mourning. (If you have read Philip Pullman’s Subtle Knife trilogy you will see strong resonances with the separation of the Doctor and Rose).Far from being a 'Mammy stereotype', Martha is a strong, intelligent, independent black woman. After all – you don’t spend a year walking the world the Master created without being pretty damn special.

Ide Cyan responded to this by describing the story line as being an aggrandising mirror for white straight males (this is about a series produced by a gay man remember!)

I tried to probe the other issue – the supposed negative take on lesbianism. I argued that the matter of fact acceptance of a character’s sexuality was actually a positive; that it meant the writer looked beyond the reified status of the character as a lesbian to her position as a human being.  Again I didn’t get very far. Essentially both Ide Cyan and Yonmei appear to believe that placing any lesbian or black character in jeopardy before a straight white male is evidence of bias.

The response from Yonmei included these gems:

“At a guess you yourself are a straight white male”

“I suspect that leap of imagination is beyond you right now. But maybe it’ll sink in. Given a few years. Until then you may be right not to join in discussions where people with more experience than you are talking about things that you don’t comprehend.“

It became clear to me at this point that concepts like plot, dramatic effect, story arcs, scheduling, even the simple fact that the story had to be told within about 40 minutes meant nothing to these people. Everything has to be made subservient to gender and racial politics – an attitude every bit as sexist and racist as those they attack. My ‘incomprehension’ is down to my gender and sexuality and any attempts to put my case are dismissed as me being ‘angry’ because I can’t ‘force them to agree with me’.

My responses to this were the start of the disemvowelling. I suppose with hindsight I might have been politer – but I could have been a damn site ruder too! For what it is worth, I have copied most of the remainder of the exchange below - with vowels restored.

ian on June 17, 2008 6:32 am

1. I have never seen such a patronising heap of garbage - even on the internet as your last comment.
2. You know sweet fa about me - about my history, my background.
3. I don’t think in your case it is a failure of imagination - just the opposite. A lesbian character is placed in a TV plot but the story has nothing to do with her sexuality. What happens to her has nothing to do with her sexuality. That is a positive - it means her sexuality is treated as normal. You however construct a vast conspiracy around one small line. You want every lesbian character to be given privileged representation in the plot.
4. As it happens I am straight - but I am also disabled. If I see a character in a wheelchair who is also a villain, or who comes to a sticky end I don’t think this is stereotyping the disabled. I think that there is at least one writer who manages to see past the stereotype and recognise that disabled people live in a world where things happen to them.
5. I hope for the next generation’s sake you are not an academic foisting this garbage on young minds, but I have a sinking feeling you are…

·  ian on June 17, 2008 6:36 am

Oh - and as for experience - I saw the very first episode of Doctor Who with William Hartnell and I have followed it ever since. I have been reading science fiction (and every other literary form) for 50 years and politically active for almost as long. I think it you need to grow up and - in the words of your own web site - remember that “Communication techniques include understanding the flow of an argument, what’s going on with it, and making sure the discussion continues effectively.” You have singularly failed.

Now I really am going.

·  Yonmei on June 17, 2008 10:16 am

ian: You know sweet fa about me - about my history, my background.

And yet, somehow, I deduced - correctly, I might add! - from your incomprehending comments that you are indeed straight, white, and male.

For the rest: well, I think you are now just angrily repeating yourself, unable to understand why you can’t just force me to agree with you.

Now I really am going.

At last.

 

So people – I need some help here. Is this exchange really an indicator of racism and sexism on my part? Or are these people really so extreme and blinkered as they seem? Remember at least one describes themselves not just as a man hater, but as a separatist.  For my part I find the idea of female separatism almost literally alien.  

One point does seem to come through. I see nothing wrong with subjecting TV, film and other modern media forms to the same intellectual scrutiny as the written word has received historically. Similarly, the often tortured, relationships between men and women in society need to be closely examined. From what I have seen though, the whole field of media studies - with a few honourable exceptions - seems inane, simplistic and anti-intellectual. Platitudes are presented as major discoveries, nonsense as scholarship. If this exchange is typical, does this apply to academic studies of gender and sexual politics too? Please tell me I’m wrong.

A strategy for moving towards minimal government

Visit any libertarian web site and you will see lots about what is wrong and a great deal of rhetoric about abolishing welfare and the like, but virtually nothing on the practical question of how to move from a society dominated and to a large degree controlled by the state to one where individual choice is paramount.

If a transition to a much less intrusive state is to happen, we need to consider how that will be achieved – unless of course you are either a revolutionary or a pessimist. In the first case you will think that only revolution can achieve the sort of radical change needed, in the second you will think that only revolution can achieve the sort of radical change needed!

I don’t really think I am a libertarian, although I have had a long standing interest in anarchism and mutualism so I must make it plain that what follows is not meant to be a programme for a libertarian party. In any case, there are probably as many flavours of libertarian as there are ultra-left Trotskyist sects and they are likely to exhibit as much fellow feeling. A libertarian party is almost inevitably doomed to failure for that reason alone. In practice all the main UK political parties have intellectual traditions that could be built on to provide some sort of libertarian or minimal government platform. Nor do I intend to consider the many other ways in which the state intrudes into our daily lives – health and safety legislation, employment law and the like.

These thoughts have been triggered by reading Tim Harford’s book, the Undercover Economist, which describes how China made its transition from a full-blown communist state in the late 1980s to its present position as a major market economy. China’s growth has been in stark contrast to events in the former Soviet Union, where what appears to be emerging after the sort of short sharp shock advocated by the likes of the IMF is a vicious oligarchy of the sort described by Jack London in ‘The Iron Heel’.

Unlike the Soviet Union, China did not abandon the state planning process overnight. Instead it froze the plan. Any production achieved over plan levels remained with the enterprise for sale as they wished. It appears that this simple device was the key factor behind the huge economic advances of the Chinese economy since the early 1990s.

So, how might this help us in the UK to make the transition to a minimal state (setting aside for the moment any discussion of quite what ‘minimal’ means in this context)?

My suggestion is simple. On a given date, Government tax revenue would be frozen – in cash terms without any messing around making ‘allowances for inflation’. We have after all seen what governments can do with such measures when it suits them. At the same time, every private individual or corporate body would also have his or her tax payments frozen – again in cash terms. Tax includes everything paid to government – National Insurance etc for individuals, Corporation Tax etc for business. At this stage I am unsure about Capital Transfer Taxes, Inheritance tax etc – I would like to see them abolished, but I am not sure at what stage in the process.

Should personal or corporate income fall, the tax payable would also fall, paid at the aggregate rate established when the tax collectable was frozen.

Taken alone, this would not be enough to have a significant impact on reducing government spending or increasing personal disposable income. However freezing of tax revenue collected would only be the first stage in the process. Even so, some people would be able to increase their incomes and all of that increase would be tax free and available to spend as they wished. Similarly there would be a strong incentive for business to increase turnover and profits since all increases generated would be free of tax, so allowing them to increase dividends payable and spreading the benefits of their growth further into the economy.

Anyone setting up a new business would immediately be free of tax. This would include businesses created by demergers and spin offs from existing companies. This would have two benefits. Obviously the incentive to start up new businesses would be huge, but by including demergers and independent spin offs, the balance would swing away from the sort of dominance exercised by firms like Tesco in favour of smaller, looser structures such as federations, franchises and cooperatives.

Over a period of 5-10 years, individual personal allowances would increase, so putting further income out of the reach of the taxman. The effect would be to place increasing pressure on government spending in parallel with an increase in personal disposable income and a massive increase in the growth of new businesses aiming to get a share of that money through the provision of goods and services. The objective is to simultaneously increase personal untaxed disposable income to the point where all normal services are affordable by most people, while pressurising service providers to move towards a market oriented approach by reduction and eventual withdrawal of all state funds.

Inevitably some ‘public’ services would need to be cut back or abandoned. The only way in which they could survive would be by attracting people willing to pay directly for the services they provide out of their increased disposable income. Schools and other institutions like them would increasingly have to take a much more market oriented approach if they want to continue to exist.

At some point all these institutions, whether schools or leisure centres would need to become independent of the state. Using schools as the example this would mean that they would be handed over to the staff at a point when staff felt confident that they could generate enough income to keep the school in being. At handover all central funding would cease, although this could perhaps be phased over say three years. At some point however all these bodies would need to either close or be independent, so creating an incentive for early independence in order to get a ‘long run’ up to that final point.

Continued provision would need to be made for those in receipt of some state benefits, for example the chronically sick and disabled. One option might be to set up local or regional charitable foundations funded by a ‘dowry’ from government but afterwards on their own. These could take on the role of providing the ‘safety net’ for those in chronic need. There is no reason why these charities should not compete also – after all the sick and disabled have as much right to a good standard of service as everyone else. Existing charities could perhaps also make a business case for ‘dowry’ funding.

If such a programme as this is to get public support, some guaranteed level of protection for people who are chronically sick or disabled (for example with MS or disabled following accident) would be essential. Initially this might be by requiring ‘dowry’ funded bodies to provide a minimum level of provision.

Another political hot point would be health care. Here GPs could move, like schools, from total state funding through the provision of paid services to complete independence of the state. Major hospitals would probably deal with doctors rather than the public at large, hiring facilities and providing services for consultants and other health care professionals. Smaller cottage hospitals of the sort common in more rural areas could move to a funding model similar to GPs, but could also no doubt hire out facilities and provide local services like X-ray to GPs and others.

Again the essential principle is one of first freezing then squeezing state funding in parallel with increasing the ability of people to pay for their services by reduction in tax levels, starting with the lowest paid. As the state is increasingly under financial pressure, it will need to respond by developing new paying services or moving existing services out of the public sector onto the market in order to survive.

These are really only sketches of a possible process. I don’t intend to set this process out in full detail. That would take a book, not a blog post.

Funny stories

When I make a joke, it doesn't harm anyone; you can take it or leave it. But when Congress makes a joke, it's a law.

Will Rogers (attrib)

...and in the same vein:-

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

Quote of the day

All forms of government have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the given conditions.

Martin Buber

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

Gustav Landauer

both quoted by Colin Ward

You can have my kidney, when you pry it from my cold dead hand (and other stories to frighten the children)

The announcement from Gordon Brown, that he supports the principle of 'Deemed Consent' to organ donation has brought out the predictable set of responses, ranging from the demented (New Labour New Cannibalism), through the only slightly less barking (although the discussion remains surprisingly thoughtful in the main) to the surprisingly unthinking.

Starting with the mad we have this amazing outburst:

When the law allows organs to be harvested from the bodies of the dead without the explicit prior consent of the dead, or the explicit consent of the next of kin, the State becomes effectively a cannibal.

and:

...presumed consent really is only the beginning. Let this through, and it is only a matter of time before blood donation becomes compulsory. After cannibalism, after all, vampirism is very little.

The trouble with this absurd hyperbole is that no one will listen when you make a serious point and there is a serious point to be made, even from this rather crazy perspective. Do you really trust NHS bureaucrats to get it right? After all one of the reasons for the decline in donors is the Alder Hey and associated scandals, the roots of which go back to 1948.

As Chris Dillow points out, one reason for making the change is the assumption that many people will fail to do so through simple inertia. It is not proposed on the grounds of being more rational but simple expediency.

...the way in which choices are presented to us can affect what we choose - a fact which is awkward for conventional conceptions of rationality.

This outburst from Sean Gabb is totally irrational. It is playing directly and explicitly to the 'yuk' factor and is as nonsensical as the tabloid garbage on which it is modeled.

Moving on to the slightly barking, we have an argument based in part on property rights but also  implicitly on the concept that any action is permissible so long as it causes no harm to others.

...the State's plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive.

The second aspect is easier to dismiss.

1. Are you harmed by the State removing your organs after death in order to transplant them into another person? Of course not - you are bloody well dead.
2. Is anyone else harmed by this action? It could be argued that relatives suffer distress but I don't see much sympathy for that from Perry de Havilland and the other denizens of Samizdata if offense or distress is claimed as a reason for legal prohibition of an action.
3. Harm might exist in circumstances where a free trade in bodies or body organs is allowed, since these proposals effectively nationalise your corpse (not for the first time of course).
4. Harm is caused of course but indirectly. If your organs are incinerated or composted rather than being used to keep someone alive, then they will die. There is a strong case that by your inaction you have caused death or at least severe suffering.

Despite 3, I don't think an argument against opt-out based on harm to others can be made.

The issue of ownership is harder to deal with. We accept the disposition of property after death, although of course unless you are an anarchist or minarchist, the state will often set limits on that, for example through taxation. We do not generally accept that people can be owned even by mutual consent, (although there are some who argue otherwise). Can the body therefore be owned after death and on what terms?

It seems to me that this is easier to deal with from the atheist perspective. To an atheist, the body after death is just a collection of bones and tissue and has no intrinsic worth. Even atheists however recognise that to their friends and value their body does have meaning, if nothing else as a symbol of the person they were. This is of itself an important aspect in deciding on the disposition of one's body after death. In the extreme case of leaving one's body to medical research, you have to make specific provision. You apparently cannot simply write it into your will. Even here of course the 'yuk factor' comes into play, both for the owner of the body when making provision and of course for relatives.

For those of a religious bent, there will be other considerations. They are not considerations I accept, or even really understand, but it is your body and your beliefs and neither the state nor anyone else should be able to override those beliefs, even though it appears that the proposals will allow for opt-out.

On that basis, the proposals boil down to the state dictating how you should dispose of your body after death. The third posting I have picked out (cross posted from here) ignores this aspect almost entirely (although it is picked up in the comments) in favour of a rant about the right. It largely ignores the impact of death on the family and those around them - an attitude to a degree retracted in the comments. It simply assumes that there is no acceptable objection to the proposals.

Libby Purves puts it a little more rationally in The Times:

In any legal change, it must be acknowledged and accepted that some of our compatriots have powerfully superstitious beliefs about bodily parts: we are not historically far from the age of relics, and some of the Alder Hey parents held repeated funerals for recovered microscope slides. You may not think that way, I certainly don't; but nobody has the right to gainsay those who do. Not in the “public interest”, not using state authority. Your body is your own.

She also deals with the issue of implied consent:

My main caveat is that with presumed consent the opt-out should be staringly visible. It should be offered in a way nobody could fail to notice, and cost no time, stamps, visits or call centres. Perhaps a tickbox at 16 when you get your national insurance card; then every year a renewable consent box, maybe on your tax form (though given the Revenue & Customs' inability to handle data responsibly, perhaps not). But the opt-out must be unavoidable, universal, not in the small print.

There is no doubt but that people die every week because of the lack of a suitable donor and almost always that lack arises because the person who could have helped didn't get round to it and because no one had the nerve to ask the bereaved. Opinion polls actually show a high level of support for organ transplantation, much higher than for xenotransplants, held out by many as the ultimate solution.

The problem as ever is complex. There is no point in behaving as if there is one answer and ranting about the stupid behaviour of those who don't agree with you. At its centre are multiple moral and philosophical questions to do with our sense of who and what we are and about our place in the universe. Of course it would be nice to have a neat simple solution - but it isn't going to happen. We will have to carry on muddling through, making decisions that please no one.

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

Terry Pratchett Hogfather

Its deja vu all over again...

From Freedom, Vol. 1, No. 1.

To understand the Governmental application of laissez-faire learn the two following rules of thumb.

1. When the proprietors molest the proletariat, laissez-faire.

2. When the proletariat resist the proprietors, interfere to help, the proprietors.

There are no exceptions to these rules.

Serenity and Libertarianism

For some bizarre reason, the film Serenity (and its TV series precursor - which I haven't seen yet) have been claimed as 'libertarian'.  For those who haven't seen it, the film is centred on  the exploits of the crew of a space ship led by a veteran of an interplanetary civil war (on the losing side).

The film opens with a bank robbery, in a scene recalling 'The Wild Bunch', although as one commenter claims here, because the money comes from taxation it has already been stolen so that doesn't count! By that logic I could hang around waiting for someone to be mugged, knock the mugger over the head and legitimately walk off with the proceeds.

I think the problem is that the people making these claims are not really familiar with Science Fiction as a literary form. They seem to think it began when they discovered it. Looking back though to the early days you will find nothing new in Serenity, not as science fiction, not as a film nor in its ideas. It isn't a bad film, just not especially original on any count.

The big bad government - the 'Alliance' - is a supposed coming together of the US and China. Joss Whedon, in the extras to the Serenity DVD sees this as positive, but you wouldn't know that from the discussion in Blogistan. It isn't an original concept by any means but ironically probably the best known version of it comes from Jerry Pournelle, an arch neocon, although in his case we have the 'Co-Dominion', an uneasy alliance between the US and the USSR. Nor would you know that the driver for humanity leaving earth was overcrowding and pollution - neither of them I suppose particularly high priorities for your average right libertarian.

The film itself is equally derivative - it contains elements of Star Wars, Alien and many others as well as drawing heavily on Whedon's own work. The character of River Tam is clearly another version of Buffy, while the Reavers recall both the myriad demons and monsters from Buffy, (especially in the climactic battle between River and the Reavers) as well as innumerable zombie films.

So is it indeed libertarian?

The short answer I suppose is no. The longer answer is 'only if you think libertarians have a monopoly on liberty' (which to be fair is what many do indeed think!) In practice it is a pirate movie - if Serenity is libertarian then so is 'Pirates of the Caribbean'.

 

Read and weep for Britain...

Link: The Home Office is a bunch of ********

They don't let you work, they don't give you money either, they don't let you leave immediately either. So the longer they take, the more they make me look like an illegal overstaying immigrant. Which is exactly what they want. Everything they are doing to me now will affect any future I have of entering any country, anywhere.

So, if they had wanted to be decent, they could have said "right we want you to leave the country, if you do so in two months we won't hold anything against you". Instead, they out of the blue turned me into a criminal.

How did we elect such an authoritarian bunch of bastards? And don't think Cameron's lot would be any better. The tories are just itching to join in with the same sort of nasty populism that Blair and now Brown have indulged in for years. The real worry is that it is working - there are enough people out there who think this is the right way to treat visitors to this country.

The trouble is there is no one else around - UKIP are only united in their paranoia about the EU and if they got near power would fall apart, the local LD politicians I know are bloody useless. Heinlein's precept "if in doubt, vote against" doesn't work, when the whole bloody shower are all as bent and corrupt (either morally or financially) as the  next one.

For the first time in a long time I despair...

Restraint of Trade?

From Ebay

In February, we reduced the visibility of UK items on eBay.com, as they had reached a level where they were significantly impeding domestic trade on eBay.com. We are aware that a small percentage of sellers, who relied in whole or in part on US buyers, were significantly affected by this reduced visibility.

Since then, we have been planning how best to display some UK items on eBay.com and some US items on eBay.co.uk so that cross-border trade can thrive without impeding domestic trade on either site.

It seems to me that there are several ways to read this. One is that US sellers are worried about competition - especially with the slipping $ to £ and $ to € rate of exchange. References to 'impeding domestic trade' tend to reinforce that interpretation.

On the other hand I've noticed - for example on Etsy - that many US sellers seem frightened of selling internationally. Having looked at the US Postal Service Web site I can see why. Sending anything out of the US seems to be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Some US sellers however seem almost to be unaware that there are people outside the US borders who actually buy things. This shows up a great deal in forum discussions of all sorts. I remember being accused of being 'Unamerican' back in the days when I had an AOL e-mail address for example, the person concerned clearly having no idea that AOL was an international company. I suppose, given the huge size of the USA, this isn't entirely surprising, since making any international journey takes much greater effort than travelling within Europe.

EDIT: It occurs to me that it is always possible for the buyer to exclude non-local sellers so I suspect my less charitable conclusion has some merit.

 

Same circus, different clowns

For more see here.