The fact that the Labour Party tried to swiftly silence Walter Wolfgang when he heckled Jack Straw doesn’t surprise me. But even a hardened cynic like me couldn’t imagine that an 82-year-old man would be physically dragged out of his seat and later detained under the Terrorism Act when he tried to re-enter. Tony Blair, in an equivocating, weaselly apology, stated:

“The conference is stewarded by these volunteers, and they are people who try to do a very good job. This time they were a little bit over-zealous so I fully apologise to him, and I’m sorry about it.”

Sorry, terribly unfortunate, but y’know, it’s the staff - they were a bit OTT, got carried away. Not the fault of anyone on high. Oh no. Why do I suspect the same excuse will be trotted out once these guys report on what actually happened to this guy?

Apparently, according to a survey published today, religious societies are worse off than non-religious ones. From the article:

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

It’s already appeared in plenty of blogs and linklogs, with many comments, some along the lines of “hmm, this is interesting”, but many willingly take the causation line as gospel.

However, this falls into the exact same trap of bad science that pro-scientists all too frequently bemoan. For starters, it’s neatly smoothing over the difference between correlation and causation. It’s not entirely implausible that the causation is in fact the other way round - social problems and the suffering they cause will mean more people resort to religion, both for spiritual reasons and for the social bonds it forms - a hypothesis which is ignored. Secondly, once you actually read the article in question and look at the data, you’ll see many of the graphs produced are highly scattered and correlation is quite weak - no statistical tests of correlation are provided (in fact, the author explicitly avoids them). In many cases they are a close-knit jumble of points, and the only point which clearly matches the hypothesis is the United States. This perhaps suggests that religion is not the most relevant variable to consider here, and instead America’s problems are unique and specific to that country.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not especially pro-religion - I’m an atheist, and believe very strongly in a secular state that does not promote or favour any religion at all. But I do find it disturbing that in the attempt to rescue science and rationality from the jaws of fundamentalism, supposedly pro-science people are willing to throw out rationality and jump on to any old rubbish that is published.

After reading through Tony Blair’s conference speech (which deserves a thorough fisking if ever there was one), just waht is his obsession with change? Everything must be continually reformed, reshaped, or else the juggernaut of globalisation will run over us all. He possessed a near-obsessive fatalism, in which we’re not allowed to debate or try to steer the course of progress. Nothing is allowed to get in the way, we must all acquiesce. Technologically, this means ID cards are a natural accepted consequence; economically, it means economic “liberalisation” and a steady opening of every facet of life to market forces; socially, this means junking whatever rights and freedoms necessary to win an unwinnable war on terror. Blair scorns obsession with ideology, and urges freedom from doctrine, without realising that a mile-wide ideological streak runs right through him.

Anyway, I haven’t time to go through all the distortions and rhetorical flim-flammery, but by far the worst was this:

We are trying to fight 21st-century crime - ASB [anti-social behaviour], drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime - with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

Now, I don’t know know my Dickens too well, but given that Dickens created characters such as the Artful Dodger’s marauding gang of child thieves, the opium addict John Jasper, the drunkard Bill Sikes and the master arch-criminal Fagin, it perhaps suggests that these crimes are not as uniquely “21st century” as Blair likes to make out…

Spent the weekend away in Edinburgh; too many things to talk about, but here’s a few quick points:

• With his “Gerin Oil” article, Richard Dawkins is sounding more and more like the batty, obsessive uncle your family would rather not talk about. His unsophisticated and tiresome ‘critique’ only strengthens the impression that scientists as grumpy, over-rational, unspiritual and dull, something which is nowhere near the truth. I suspect that’s why the press like printing his stuff so much, he fits the stereotype so easily.
• Hell is (happening to) other people over at Chicken Yoghurt is a quality rant, one that I myself have been wanting to make. It really is worth reading.
• Maybe it’s just me, but Flickr’s quality of service has been quite atrocious recently - rejecting photo uploads for no reason, “not finding” photos or sets that have just been added, refusing to rotate or rename them, etc. This is not what I paid for.
• Howl’s Moving Castle was an enjoyable film, but nowhere near as good as Spirited Away, and suffers a little from resorting to deus ex machina. But it raised some interesting (but not very well-developed) thoughts on wizardry and its supercession by modernity. Oh, and there’s a good interview with Hayao Miyazaki in the Guardian.
• The news that Blair is falling into Bush’s line on global warming is utterly disspiriting, but at least it will give future generations of Britons a single figure to blame for the whole sorry mess. But I’m not surprised at anything he says or does now, it makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to vote Labour again…

Real blog posts to follow later. For someone with absolutely nothing to do, I find that I am astonishingly busy.

It’s recently been my pleasure to read Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners: The History of Immigration to Britain. I originally bought it to while away a long train journey a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been continually going back and re-reading chapters I’d already covered; not because it was too difficult to grasp, but because there was just a simple pleasure in reading it and going over the rich history that he had written.

As well as being well-written (and packed full of amusing anecdotes and trivia), Winder has managed to organise his material incredibly well; generally, each chapter tells the story of a particular minority group and their arrival in Britain, but he does it without forcing artificial divides, and manages to include groups that I had never really considered before - it’s not just about the Empire Windrush, but covers Britain’s history from pre-Roman times up until today: medieval Jews, freed slaves in the 18th century, German dissidents in the 19th, Polish servicemen after the War - they all have their stories told. The final chapters, on the asylum seeker hoodoo whipped up by the media and turned into a temporary national psychosis, are an excellent and dispassionate account of the recent stupidity and misinformation (Chapter three of Nick Cohen’s Pretty Straight Guys is another good reference, incidentally).

Out of the book come a couple key themes. The first is that immigrants are not scroungers (as the right paint them), but neither are they meek and helpless (as some patronising parts of the left paint them). Rather, they are strong, willing and capable individuals themselves - to migrate to a new land, often overcoming barriers in one’s homeland and leave behind the place of your birth is an act of bravery, not cowardice. The other is that despite the current anti-immigrant mood, and past blots on our record such as Moseley and the National Front, Britain has generally been a receptive and hospitable home (”tolerant”, with its implication that immigrants are a nuisance that have to be put up with, is not an ideal word) to newcomers (especially when compared with many other parts of the world), and that should be something to be proud of.

The book flags a little at the end - a chapter discussing what national identity means is a little muddled and doesn’t draw enough on the preceding 400-odd pages of historical account. There are too many ideas in it, and it could have been spun off into a separate book entirely, to be honest. But that’s a minor quibble, overall the book is a superb and informative read, and thoroughly recommended.

From this week’s Popbitch - and no, it’s not about Kate and her friend Charlie…

Californian sea otter Morgan was abandoned as a pup, and taken into care by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sea Otter programmes, which attempts to rehabilitate parentless otters. But like so many products of the care system, it all went wrong.

When he was released back into the wild, Morgan became a serial killer paedophile… of baby seals. Morgan used to shag the seal pups and when he was done with them, hold them under water to drown them. He raped and killed about 20 seals off the Californian coast, at one time even attracting a copycat Son-Of-Morgan rapist wild otter.

After a year, naturalists finally managed to recapture Morgan. They considered castrating him but then decided that would leave him a non-contributing member of otter society, taking up valuable space in otter habitat. So they kept him in captivity, where he will only be allowed to have sex with female sea-otters. No doubt Morgan finds this rather dull.

There’s a Home Office policy somewhere in that. Though other fans of the animal kingdom may stay well clear - I doubt those extolling the virtues of penguins will be rushing to co-opt otters any time soon.

Update: Funnily enough, Jamie at Blood & Treasure has blogged the exact same thing before I did - a coincidence and nothing more, I assure you…

I haven’t written about Iraq for a long time, but perhaps I should, in light of a few recent things - Jamie K pointing out that Iraq is now effectively at civil war, while the incident with the British soldiers (captured after dressing up as Arabs, Carry On-style, then busted out in the manner of The A-Team) has brought into sharp relief the militias’ inflitration of the local authorities, while the role of the occupying forces is that of spy and adversary, not as a friend.

Before the war broke out, away from the phoney claims that Iraq possessed workable WMDs, or that it was a backer of organised international terrorism, and avoiding the sinister overtones of neo-imperialism that the “beacon of democracy” and “domino effect” lines, the simple moral case that the Iraqi people had suffered enough under Saddam, and they should be free of him as soon as possible, was the most compelling argument for. Out of all the pro-war people I have talked with, those that believed in the simple moral case of bringing tyrants to justice were the most reasonable and least evasive.

My own potted thesis of how this movement came about follows; it’ll probably get mauled but what the hell, I’m no professional and I’ve never claimed to be. In the 1990s many former Communist Eastern European countries had quickly flourished as democratic nations; South Africa similarly moved to lose the shackles of apartheid. Liberation was in vogue. The movement from totalitarianism to democracy was possible in a matter of a few years.

At the same time, we were given a stark warning of what happens when we let tyranny get away unchecked - the bitter ethnic wars in Croatia and then Bosnia; and on a much larger scale, the horrors of Rwanda. Central to many of these was the shameful inaction of the UN; it became clear that if intervention was needed, then multilateral action would be insufficient. The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc had removed one enemy to freedom, but it was clear that there still many others.

The first Gulf War had shown the might of NATO (i.e. American) military power. Technology and modern tactics turned warfare into a precision, low-personnel activity. Total war was out, “smart bombing” was in. War was no longer the bloody, slow, awful horror that we in Europe had dealt with 60 years ago, but a swift and precise act of surgery.

Emboldened by the success in Eastern Europe, horrified at what happened in the Balkans, and in awe of American military might, the proponents of liberal interventionist argument managed to construct a compelling case. It had a clear and unobjectionable motive (freedom for the Iraqi people), the means to achieve it were certain to succeed (given the predominance of the American military) and the eventual result promised to be a bright future.

Of course, it could perhaps be seen that not every liberation story has been a success; Russia’s vast oil fortunes made it the target of rapacious “businessmen” who have made themselves billionaires. The ethnic and religous divides and extreme poverty of central Asia have led to civil wars and a return to brutal dicatorship. American post-Cold War military power was not always invincible (as shown in Somalia) - and of course, administering and reforming a country is very different from attacking it, and the current American government showed little interest in it.

When, two and a half years ago, Colonel Tim Collins gave that speech of “liberation, not oppression“, I thought wow, the liberal interventionist movement has got some high-up followers! and there was a brief buzz of optimism that maybe the war I opposed would be brief and beneficial, and I would be proven wrong. But I was wrong - and to make things much worse, even Collins himself now doubts his own words.

With it clear to everyone now that Iraq is slipping into something far worse than what even Saddam and sanctions did to it. Occupying troops are largely powerless in a lawless Iraq underminded by ethnic and religious tension (remember when everyone said that Syria was next on the list? Not now). Thousands of people have died. And there is no end in sight. Some of the pro-war types have shifted targets - when not stalking George Galloway, they’ve moved away from targeting a secular Ba’athist fascist state to the more nebulous and complex “Islamofascism” (a portmanteau I have reservations about using, as I don’t see Islamic extremism as the same as fascism, in both its roots and its aims - but that’s another blog post for another time). But I’m still curious; do they still believe that democracy can be quickly delivered through military intervention? Was it that convinced them it was possible in Iraq? I could surmise it down to simple naïvety, or narrow-mindedness (or maybe they were all just lying to me), but that wouldn’t be totally fair.

The reason why I ask is not to triumphalise (which would be crass given the 25,000+ casualties of this war), but rather to try and think of a way out of this mess. Not least because of Iraq’s own troubles, but for the sake of everyone else’s too. The Iraq war was a mistake. If those of us who want to see liberty and democracy flourish across the globe want to see it in our lifetimes, then we have to learn from that mistake. We have to realise the folly in automatically believing in the efficacy of military action, and should realise that liberty, though absolutely desirable, is not always achievable so quickly and smoothly.

Right, flame away.

There is a disturbing advert on television for some brand of painkiller (I won’t mention the brand, although I will mention the generic unbranded versions are a quarter the cost and every bit as good, a fact that makes me doubt the rationality of the average consumer), which markets itself as “For people who just want to get on with it” (or similar). The woman in the advert lives a “demanding” lifestyle “juggling” various tasks in life. Should she at any stage start to feel a bit dicky, the solution lies not with bedrest and some hot lemon, but knocking back her painkiller of choice and “getting on with it” i.e. her demanding and Very Important life.

At first, it brings a smirk to the face, the “get on with it” slogan undermined by recollections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but on a more serious level, it made me think “Why should we get on with it?”. Don’t worry, I’m not heading down a “Importance of being Idle” line here, but I do think that if you are ill, chugging down the painkillers and ploughing on regardless may not be the best option. More importantly, it should not be portrayed as a lifestyle choice to aspire to - this advert is beyond the “your job’s hanging by a thread, so get back to work motherfucker!”* kind we’re used to seeing every winter, where only if your boss is a tyrant and demands you come in to work rather than rest and recover normally. Now we all should be knocking back the ibuprofen and drug ourselves ever onward to exhaustion, no matter what, because otherwise our lives would instantly crumble to dust around us.

Somehow, in the great scheme of things, people have confused hard work with dumb work; rather than hard work being a matter of intelligence, diligence, creativity or skill, it’s all about the hours. No matter what the problem is, you must be seen in the office, even if it’s just to do another fucking PowerPoint presentation that everyone will have forgotten within five minutes - it doesn’t matter; what does matter is that your wheezing, sweating carcass showed up at your desk put in the hours. The result - as well as working the longest hours in Europe (which, of course, leads to a greater risk of injury), we also have lower productivity than many other industrial nations, including the French, who are apparently encumbered with all that socialist crap like the 35-hour working week. Of course, this is not really surprising, as anyone familiar with the law of diminishing returns should know. Nevertheless, we all seem to be happy to keep going on, slowly killing ourselves (as the ongoing rise in work-related stress seems to suggest) by working as many hours as we can, and the drug companies are cheering us along every step of the way.

* © Charlie Brooker - TVGoHome, alas, has died, so I can’t find the original inspiration.