Martin In The Margins: Festival surrenders to boycott blackmail

Yet again we see the hypocrites shutting down free speech whilst proclaiming themselves its champions. Ken Loach, who has blackmailed a credulous Edinburgh Film Festival, will always defend free speech unless it is the speech of those he opposes.

Martin In The Margins: Festival surrenders to boycott blackmail

Jewel of Medina and Censorship

I think the Index on Censorship website is a good thing. Censorship, whether open or covert, prevents us from making informed judgements and, in doings so, subverts the democratic process. There are, of course, other means of managing and distorting public opinion but the website provides a small bastion against the encroaching darkness.

However, Sherry Kones, the author of the book Jewel of Medina, who protests there, may not provide the most outrageous case against censorship because there is the other relevant issue that her book is, by all accounts, really bad. Jonathan Moeller's blog offers quite a thoughtful condemnation of the craven publishers in the face of self-appointed Islamists, albeit the author's daughter took exception to his description of the book as trashy. However, even the couple of lines he quotes from it are sufficient to persuade the reader that the book really is trashy, which may have contributed to a lack of any rush to publish it. Nonetheless, she does seem to have got publishers and the more noise she makes the more sales she achieves. Amazon UK and USA both show it ranking just below 50,000th in their sales rankings, which is not bad for a boddice-ripper

Is Chiropractic Bogus?

So the British Chiropractic Association has sued the science writer Simon Singh for a Guardian piece in which he wrote

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

Sadly "According to a report by Jack of Kent, the presiding judge in the English High Court, Sir David Eady, decided last Thursday that Singh's passage was a statement of fact. But more surprisingly, the judge decided that

The word "bogus" meant deliberate and targeted dishonesty. So it did not mean that chiropractic for the six named children's ailments (including asthma) was simply wrong, or that it was contrary to established medical practice or research, or even that it completely lacked evidence.

"Bogus" meant a lot more. The judge held that by the mere use of the word "bogus" Simon Singh was stating that, as a matter of fact, the BCA were being consciously dishonest in promoting chiropractic for those children's ailments."

Read the whole of the article on the language blog. It is worth it.

You do wonder about some elements of the British Legal System. Dr Singh has been hit therefore, with a massive legal bill for the use of a word in a context that most English speakers would not believe to have the meaning ascribed by the judge. I think that the word bogus can be taken to mean complete rubbish without implying conscious deceit. And anyway, it is outrageous that he can be successfully sued when the substance of his article is true!



There seems to be no evidence to support

Speaker Martin

John Stonborough was PR consultant to the unlovely Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin. He writes in his blog explaining how he warned of the likely embarrassment resulting from publication of the Speaker's expenses. Whilst it has the taste of personal revenge eaten cold, his account also bears the ring of truth.

Apart from his monstrous self regard and record of inept judgements, the man now finds that people he has slurred, hurt and blackened over the years are now taking their revenge. Only an idiot and a truly nasty person builds such an edifice of enemies.

Go Speaker Martin, go.

In our Time: a national treasure

I wonder whether, anywhere in the world, there exists such a civilised and important radio programme as "In Our Time" on BBC radio 4. In a 45 minute broadcast, also available on the web through BBC iplayer, each week it picks an important intellectual topic from history, science, art, philosophy, literature and gathers three or four academic experts to discuss and expound the subject, guided and kept on track by its 'host' Melvyn Bragg. Occasionally the discussion fails to convey a clear understanding of the key points of a subject to the listeners, perhaps because the subject is too complex for the medium or because the host does not quite understand it himself and so the potential wisdom and knowledge is not controlled and channelled but evaporates in all directions. But these times are rare.

Recent subjects have ranged from "The Measurement Problem in Physics", through "The library of Alexandria" to "The Brothers Grimm". It is a jewel that, on its own, justifies the entire BBC licence fee.

My Rant on Education

I saw Chris Woodhead's piece in the Sunday Times and it got me going again. By and large he writes well and his arguments are convincing. This time he was reporting on data relating to students getting the grades to get to Oxford and Cambridge. The data shows a disproportionate share of top grades being won by those from independent schools. If, as a nation, we want to give all children of all classes equal opportunities then we clearly have to decide between two choices; make public sector education better so that the children from comprehensives get better results or else make access easier, which is code for making A levels easier, and bully universities to select on the basis of (low) family income.

There is a problem with the latter choice, which is that we are in global competition with other nations and the battlefield is that of skills. If our national skill set is not up to snuff then we will fall back economically too: jobs and industries will migrate. If the better universities are forced to take less well educated students then their standards and outcomes will inevitably drop and we will fall back in the race. In any case, social engineering of this sort seems doomed to fail since even in comprehensives the children of the middle classes will still fare better. Their parents will pay for extra tuition, take them to concerts, buy books and computers, will give them experiences that broaden understanding and will encourage them in intellectual activities. Recently published research shows that disadvantaged children have already suffered significantly by the age of three simply on account of differences in parenting - talking to and playing with babies.

So please let us abandon the class war and focus on improving the public sector schools whilst maintaining educational standards. There is good evidence that it can be done. Tough school heads who impose discipline, exclude troublemakers and dismiss poor teachers do achieve much better results. Yes this still leaves us with the problem of what to do with those difficult children but we would have had that problem anyway.

Darwin and Creationism

In the beginning God created...chemistry. I don't know about you but I find the extraordinary complexity of life that results from God's chemical processes truly awe inspiring, reminiscent in a way of entering a great cathedral or seeing a great work of art and wondering at the builders and originators of such beauty. Let us think for a moment about the extraordinary end product. When DNA was discovered and explained it seemed as if humanity had a relatively simple key to the processes of life yet with time we have found the story just gets more and more complicated. We have found that our genes are not simple codes for particular results, we have found that each gene can produce several proteins - an average of nearly six not one, that the same gene can perform different functions in different tissues at different times. We have found that the expression of each gene is itself controlled by complex processes, including methylation, from within the genome. We have found that whilst Darwin was mostly right that Lamarck was not completely wrong and that characteristics developed during a single life may, surprisingly, be passed on to our children.

Consider the curious case of human size. At times in history when people have had poor diets for several generations the population becomes smaller in stature. When diet improves, the average size does not spring back immediately but does so over several generations. I have a photograph of my grandfather, great grandfather and his father: each son taller than his father. In turn, my father was taller than his father, I was taller than my father and my son is taller than me. You can understand why this process makes evolutionary sense, reducing the risk of the improved food supply being temporary and ensuring babies in each generation are not too big for their mothers to give birth to. It seems, superficially, to go against our understanding of Darwin's ideas but complex processes of gene expression overlay the genetic code and control how it is manifested.

At every turn the complexity of life and its chemical processes expands. And all this is a natural process that follows from the chemistry of carbon, nitrogen and the other elements: when bundled together in certain circumstances they naturally start reacting and forming chains of molecules that join and break apart - stir, add water and heat gently for several billion years and you get us and everything around us. Amazing.

PS. There was a TV programme on Darwin recently that talked about Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika in Africa and how each had a huge variety of fish in different ecological niches that have evolved from the same single species over many millions of years. And what was wonderful was that very similar fish had evolved in each niche - as if evolution had run the same experiment twice and come up with much the same result. Amazing.