Nooooo!

Another email from the libel reform campaign:

Dear Friends,

We’re grabbing this chance while we have a quiet 10 minutes to give
you a bit of advance notice of the biggest, most important, and
hopefully the funniest, event in the libel campaign so far this year.

Later on today we are going to publicly announce ‘The Big Libel
Gig’ when some of the biggest names in UK comedy, science and human
rights will be sharing a stage to tell us that England’s libel laws
are unjust, against the public interest and need to be reformed.
‘The Big Libel Gig’ is at the Palace Theatre in London’s West
End at 7.30 pm on Sunday 14th March 2010.

There will be a very eclectic line-up of famous names including Dara
Ó Briain, Robin Ince, Tim Minchin, Shappi Khorsandi, Marcus
Brigstocke, Ed Byrne, Professor Brian Cox and Professor Richard
Wiseman.

The Big Libel Gig will also include a chance to hear from Drs Ben
Goldacre, Simon Singh and Peter Wilmshurst, who have all felt the full
force of England’s libel laws. They’ll talk frankly about how the
libel laws have affected them personally.

This is a one-off benefit event to raise money for the libel reform
campaign being run by the Coalition for Libel Reform, established by
the charities Index on Censorship, English PEN and Sense About
Science. If you can’t make the gig, other ways to support the
campaign include donating through the dedicated JustGiving page
http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQHUQgKDlAYBQZJBAAKVVw%3D
or email donate@libelreform.org for more information.

Tickets are now on sale from
www.seetickets.com/see/event.asp?e|artist=the+big+libel+gig&filler1=see&filler2=BLG

, at the theatre’s Box Office in person and by telephone on 0844
4124657. This has not yet been announced publicly, so beat the rush,
buy the best seats in the house and support libel reform.

We look forward to seeing you at the campaign’s most important,
funny, thought-provoking and staggering event of the year so far.

Best

Mike & Síle

The Libel Reform Coalition

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQHUQgKDlYYBQZJBAAKVVw%3D

The Libel Reform Campaign is a coalition of English PEN, Index on
Censorship and Sense About Science.

So far, 197 MPs have signed our Parliamentary Early Day Motion
calling for libel reform and the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has
formed a working party that the Libel Reform Coalition is represented
on.

Marcus Brigstocke?

Quote of the Day

From Eric Raymond, in a post titled Who bears the cost of moral vanity:

I was born and educated into the class that produces “gentry liberals”, but I’ve come to loathe them. This is why. It’s always someone else who pays the cost of their posturing. Very often, it’s the people they claim to be helping: the black teenager who ends up in a drug posse because because minimum-wage laws would force the small businessmen in his ‘hood to take a loss if they hired him for a legal job; the coal miner who gets pneumoconiosis because nuclear-plant construction was strangled in environmental red tape; the woman found in an alley strangled with her own pantyhose, because the handgun she could have shot that rapist with was denied her by force of law.

They’re so very, very convinced of their moral superiority, they are. The pious anti-torture crusaders, the “economic-justice” cod-Marxists, the no-growth environmentalists, the gun banners, and all their kin in the tribe of wealthy white left-liberals. Armored by their certitudes and their sheepskins and their class privileges, they sail serenely above the deadly consequences of their meddling. Not for them any need to worry about second-order effects or process costs or who actually pays the cost for their delusions, oh, no. They are the anointed, and lofty intentions are their sovereign excuse however much damage they do.

Truly, I hate them all. Perhaps I hate them more intensely because I so narrowly escaped being one of them. But it’s really the invincible stupidity and myopia that gets me, and the way their “compassion” stinks of narcissism. If I could have just one wish, it would be this: let their folly come back on their own heads.

Physician, heal thyself

Mick Hartley is, as usual, spot on in his criticism of a recent Peter Singer piece. But what strikes me is that Singer, a Professor of Philosophy, has committed a simple logical error when he asks:

Why do people give generously to earthquake victims, but not to prevent the much larger number of deaths caused by poverty?

Singer is begging the question. He is assuming that giving money to disaster relief is functionally similar to giving money to alleviate poverty when this is in fact a case he has to argue.

A simple, well known, logical error. How strange, from someone in his profession.

Self defence

A characteristic snark from Blood and Treasure:

Incidentally, I believe this is in line with current Tory policy on reasonable self defence.

"This" being a BBC report:

A Russian farmer has been convicted of planting landmines around his field to ward off trespassers.

Bovine partisanship aside, for of course Tories are no more likely to approve of this than Labour voters (which is to say some of each might but not many), what would be a reasonable legal position when it comes to the situation a householder might face when waking at night, alone, in an isolated farmhouse, and hearing sounds from downstairs?

I don't see why the householder, as a result of someone else deciding to break into their house, should be expected to accept any form of risk to their personal safety. There's no reason why they should have to get into a fight that is in any way fair. That is, a fight the burglar has an even chance of winning. The only sort of force that is reasonable in these circumstances is overwhelming force, force that keeps the householder as safe as they were asleep in bed before anyone broke in.

The only test that should apply is whether or not they were still at risk when applying the force. So if a burglar is running at them, screaming, the householder should be able to shoot them without suffering any repercussions. If a burglar is running away from the householder, screaming, then to shoot and kill would be murder, to shoot and wound would be assault.

This approach would have been of little help to Tony Martin, who shot and killed a burglar who was running away.

Simon Singh's weird idea

An email arrives from the libel reform campaign:

Dear Friends,

I’ve had an idea – an unusual idea, but I think it might just
work.

As you know, England’s chilling libel laws need to be reformed. One
way to help achieve this is for 100,000 people to sign the petition
for libel reform before the political parties write their manifestos
for the election. We have 17,000 signatures, but we really need
100,000, and we need your help to get there.

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFWggKBFYYDEgEDAEBXg%3D%3D

My idea

My idea is simple: if everyone who has already signed up persuades
just one more person each week to sign the petition then we will reach
our goal within a month!

One person per week is all we need, but please spread the word as
much as you can. In fact, if you persuade 10 people to sign up then
email me (simon@simonsingh.net
) and I promise to thank you by printing your name in my next book
… which I will start writing as soon as I have put my own libel case
behind me. I cannot say when this will be, but it is a very real
promise. My only caveat is that I will limit this to the first
thousand people who recruit ten supporters.

When persuading your friends remember to tell them:

(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights
Committee.

(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to
discuss matters of genuine public interest (and public health!).

(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the
powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas
corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws
are so hostile to responsible journalism. (In fact, it is exactly
because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome
signatories to the petition from around the world.)

(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate
those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England
is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically
runs to over £1 million.

(e) Three separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and two medical
researchers raising concerns about three medical treatments. We face
losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar
concerns? If these health matters are not reported, then the public is
put at risk.

My experience has been sobering. I’ve had to spend £100,000 to
defend my writing and have put my life on hold for almost two years.
However, the prospect of reforming our libel laws keeps me cheerful.

Thanks so much for your support. We’ve only got one shot at this
– so I hope you can persuade 1 (or maybe 10) friends, family and
colleagues to sign.

Massive thanks,

Simon

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFWggKBFYYDEgEDAEBXg%3D%3D

The Libel Reform Campaign is a coalition of English PEN, Index on
Censorship and Sense About Science.

So far, 188 MPs have signed our Parliamentary Early Day Motion
calling for libel reform and the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has
formed a working party that the Libel Reform Coalition is represented
on.

Please also considering donating to keep our campaign going:
http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFWggKBFcYDEgEDAEBXg%3D%3D

Irony alert

Sunny Hundal:

People reading political blogs generally seem to hate nuanced positions, but I’m going to try anyway. For that it’s likely I’ll get slammed by both sides but that’s fine. I need to get this out of my system.

And later in the same piece:

Nick Cohen is also having a go – the very same who on record as supporting the torture of detainees in certain circumstances, and has wrongly criticised feminists themselves in the past. With friends like these…

If you follow those links, you'll not see Nick Cohen supporting the torture of detainees, nor being wrong about feminists (all of them, Sunny?). But you will see him making arguments that are, well... nuanced. Too nuanced for Sunny, unfortunately.

Surface stations

I just left this comment at John Graham-Cumming's blog. The Neo-Nazi revisionist bit refers to his use of the term "denier", which is always contemptible. The bit I've bolded is the important point:

Noise and uncertainty simply exist, for scientists and laity alike (comparing Freeman Dyson to a Neo-Nazi revisionist is unworthy of you). Pretending certainty that does not exist is not scientific, though it is the province of the fanatic.

People you call sceptics - a term of approval in a sane world - are not trading in obfuscation, but rather in terms of broad, sweeping issues. Without proxies, we can't reconstruct the historical record. Without a good measured temperature record, we can't calibrate proxies. We do not have a good directly-measured temperature record. This is not some niggly detail.

UPDATE: It looks as though jgc does not want to publish this comment. It's not on his site yet, though a later comment from someone else has appeared. Going out to bat for climate milleniarism does unfortunate things to people.

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Via

Cooperation

One of the areas of dissonance between right and left is the meaning of the word "cooperation". For the right, it means something voluntary but also, and this is not a contradiction, involuntary. People harvesting rubber in Malaysia are doing so voluntarily, making a living. They are cooperating, involuntarily, with those who use the rubber to sheath electrical cables in another country.

It also means something awe-inspiring, something Newton put most succinctly when he said he had stood on the shoulders of giants. Here's Bill Whittle, writing about near-disaster flying a light aircraft, and touching on both these aspects of cooperation:

How many people were there with me that day? Not just the obvious two – Dana and Craig, who’s support kept my monkey brain in the back of my head to return to throw pooh another day. How many guys were watching me on radar, keeping me separated from far, far better men and women who do this in their sleep up there? How many people did it take to make the instruments, to mine the silica for the glass, to tap the rubber for the wires? Who laid the asphalt on the runways, who built the filaments in the approach strobes, and who attached the ceramic tips to my spark plugs? And how many millions of other unseen connections had to be made to allow me to do, routinely, and on a middle-class salary, what billions of dead men and women would have given a lifetime to taste – just once. In those few minutes I just told you of, I stood on the shoulders of millions of my brothers and sisters, not the least of which were two sons of a preacher from Dayton, Ohio – now long dead but with me in sprit every day. I was atop a pyramid of dedication, hard work, ingenuity and progress, following rules written in the blood of the stupid and the brave and the unlucky.

I had tossed myself a mile into the air and landed safe in this Web of Trust.

Global warming debates

Monbiot and Plimer interviewed. An evasive Plimer simply refuses to answer a basic question. Not at all impressive:



In Australia later today, Tim Lambert and Christopher Monckton will be debating the same subject.

Physics GCSE question

Patrick posts the following on his blog:

Patrick's comment on this is exasperated rather than detailed - he has to teach this stuff. But what strikes me is that all four statements are true of all four appliances. That they all produce heat is obvious. Sound is a form of kinetic energy and they all produce sound (even the toaster and lamp). Because they all produce heat, they all produce light, even if it is just infra red in some cases. In addition, the radio has an oscillator inside it, producing radio frequencies (for tuning) - it's the oscillators in TV sets that the old TV detector vans listened out for - and radio is a form of light. Or heat. And vice versa.

I don't think anything I've just said relies on a knowledge of physics beyond GCSE level. The demarcation of heat and light and radio waves as separate types of energy is out of date by more than a century.

I know this is the first question, and is intended to put the child at ease, but it should be possible to do that and still stay within the realm of contemporary knowledge.

Make mine a double

Strong coffee might increase the risk of heart disease.

Within an hour of a single espresso, blood flow had reduced by an average of 22 per cent.
But when the volunteers drank a decaffeinated espresso, there was little or no change.

And:

... previous studies have also highlighted coffees potential harmful effects, others point to many benefits.
Recent research showed one coffee a day could nearly halve the risk of dangerous cancers affecting the mouth and gullet, while other evidence suggest three a day can slash the risk of Alzheimers disease.

Brain function remains high, cancer risk reduced, sudden death after active life. What's not to like?

We are not Spartacus

My excuse is that I haven't been blogging much. Normally, I do chip in when there's a "We are all Spartacus" call on behalf of a blogger, and so do many people from left and right. Normally.

For some reason, the only places I've seen the case of the Reverend Stephen Sizer mentioned have been left of centre blogs. So, in case you haven't heard about it yet:

At 10am on Sunday 29th November 2009, I received a visit from two policemen regarding my activities in running the Seismic Shock blog. (Does exposing a vicar’s associations with extremists make me a criminal?, I wondered initially). A sergeant from the Horsforth Police related to me that he had received complaints via Surrey Police from Rev Sizer and from Dr Anthony McRoy – a lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology – who both objected to being associated with terrorists and Holocaust deniers.

Sizer then used the incident to try to intimidate another blogger:

Dear Vee,

You must take a little more care who you brand as anti-semitic otherwise you too will be receiving a caution from the police as the young former student of Leeds did recently. One more reference to me and you will be reported.

Blessings
Stephen

But here's what I find the most chilling part of the account:

The sergeant made clear that this was merely an informal chat, in which I agreed to delete my original blog (http://seismicshock.blogspot.com) but maintain my current one (http://seismicshock.wordpress.com). The policeman related to me that his police force had been in contact with the ICT department my previous place of study, and had looked through my files, and that the head of ICT at my university would like to remind me that I should not be using university property in order to associate individuals with terrorists and Holocaust deniers (I am sure other people use university property to make political comments, but nevermind).

An informal chat? What does that mean?

Are we to take it that if a complaint of defamation is made to them, police officers will contact a person's employer, visit that person, reach an agreement that they will delete a blog in its entirety, that they will do all this informally?

This is "informal" as in "the police have no jurisdiction"; defamation is a civil matter in which the police have no role, at least at the stage where nothing more has happened than a complaint from the aggrieved party.

Yet they still act to censor and intimidate a writer. This, entirely extra-judicial, harassment is a far greater worry than our current, infamous, libel laws. At least they involve court appearances and take place within the rule of law.

Solidarity

I didn't know this:

... after 9/11, people came together to hold a candle light vigil on Mohseni Square in Tehran in solidarity with the American people. They came unfortunately under attack by the regime’s thugs for doing this.

From the Iran Q&A thread at HP.

Evil oil companies spreading disinformation

Some fifteen years ago I saw a VHS video about Global Warming, produced by an environmental group in the USA. At the time, I was completely persuaded by the arguments for AGW, so I found the tape persuasive. One of the things it focussed on was a video presentation funded by evil oil barons, in which computer simulations showed how an increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would encourage plant growth. We looked at each other in disbelief, revolted by this "our friend Mr CO₂" propaganda.

It seems the oil barons were right.

The view from Iran

This is a fascinating post at Harry's Place. Q&A with a pro-democracy Iranian in Iran. If you go there now, you can ask your own questions.

Who said this?

We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately

Guess


Via

Governments and public goods

In an aside, Norm writes:

Incidentally here, I am intrigued by the reactions to this of some Republican politicians - to the effect that Obama's decision is 'a crippling blow', or even 'the death march', for human space exploration. I thought government provision wasn't all that central to human accomplishment, according to some philosophies.

Extreme positions exist on both sides of this debate - that governments should do almost nothing, or not exist (anarchism and extreme Libertarianism); that everything or almost everything should be done by governments. The second position is more common than the first (and few politicians of any hue argue that they themselves should not exist) but let's leave both aside and look at the main area of the bell curve of ideas.

Here, the debate is over the appropriate limits on government activity. Public goods like law and order and defence are generally recognised as being appropriate roles for governments. The constitutional right, classical liberals and moderate Libertarians tend to assert that the state should also enforce property rights and the law of contract, without which no free market can exist*.

So what of space exploration? For Republicans, or any other advocates of limited government, to support the notion that this should be financed and managed by government, and to do so without hypocrisy, they need to be arguing that space exploration is a public good.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn't matter whether that's an argument that could or should prevail. I just want to point out that there is no necessary inconsistency or hypocrisy in the position of a small-government Republican who wants the government to fund space exploration.

Small-government Republicans are not no-government Republicans.


*A free market is simply an arena for exchange in which all parties can act in what they perceive to be their own best interests, without coercion or deceit.

There is such a thing as a free lunch.

Thanks to R for the pic.

A shared dream

Coherent exposition of the anarchist position, from The Guardian:

"We organise horizontally, there's no leaders amongst us. A misconception about anarchism is that there's no leaders. I think it's more about everyone taking a lead in doing certain stuff. This is a shared dream of many people."