deploy the 10" shaming wand

I'm glad that the shocking business with abortion legislation in Texas has popped up on Ben Goldacre's radar, because his entirely proper outrage about it illustrates the ridiculousness of his statements in the belief survey I linked to a while back. You cannot rationally simultaneously hold to the positions that:

• the Texas law is an abomination amounting to state-sponsored punishment of women by making them undergo pointless violation and extended anguish and trauma as revenge for wanting to exercise choice and autonomy over their own reproductive health, and moreover an abomination dreamt up principally by fundamentalist Christians
• I'm not really bothered about the question of whether God exists, it's all a bit boring really

Well, if the fundamentalist Christians are right and you really are going to BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY for choosing to have an abortion, then it's actually rational and compassionate for them to be enacting legislation that makes getting an abortion more difficult, isn't it? So the question is actually pretty important, isn't it?

I don't want this to be about Dr. Ben, though, as in general he is a source of good sense and rationality. That Texas sonogram bill is one of the most sulphurously evil things I've ever seen, though. And again, it's perhaps hard to understand just how evil while sitting here in the UK with our state-funded medical care and our multiple hospitals within easy reach of most people - if your only nearby hospital is a Catholic-run one that won't perform terminations at all, even to save the life of the mother (for fear of getting excommunicated), even if the fetus is already dead, and you then have to travel (assuming that you have the resources to do so, and can get time off work) potentially tens or hundreds of miles to a hospital that will perform the procedure, the last thing you need is to be told that some men somewhere have decided that you, as a weak and feeble-minded woman, clearly won't have realised how human reproduction works or the consequences of what you're about to do, and so you need to be painfully probed, then have an unwanted ultrasound scan shoved in your face and (just in case you close your eyes or something) described to you in detail, and then be forced to wait another 24 hours before having the procedure carried out.

Again, just to recalibrate our ethics-ometer here, the purpose of all this is to:

• shame and humiliate women for exercising choice over their own sex lives, and not just being passive semen receptacles;
• deter people who would otherwise seek abortions from doing so, with the consequence that they either have the child (which the enactors of the bill will instantly stop caring about as soon as it's outside the womb) as God intended or undergo some kind of botched amateur procedure which will take her pansy pinko pro-choice heathen ass out of the gene pool anyway. It's a win-win situation;
• remind people that women may own the wombs, but they and those wombs are owned by men, and suggestions otherwise make baby Jesus cry;
• throw a smokescreen over all this by claiming it's about "providing information" while simultaneously enacting further legislation that will indemnify doctors from getting sued should they withhold information from women that might otherwise have inclined them to get an abortion.
  

Here's a montage of a week's worth of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon strips on exactly this subject. To see the one here in readable form (as Blogger only wants to display it really small for some reason) right-click and select "Open in New Tab". To see them in their original form on the website, start here.


To be honest I find Doonesbury a bit incomprehensible a lot of the time as you need to live with it for a while to get to know who the characters are, but this is exactly what political cartooning should be: courageous, savage and satirical. Predictably, despite Doonesbury's status as an American institution (and one whose liberal instincts are hardly a secret) a disappointingly large proportion of newspaper editors who would normally carry the strip failed to display a similar degree of courage (or indeed respect for their readers) and evidently felt it might be better to have a week off and just put up some old Garfield cartoons instead or something.

they mervynned me

Two further quickies: firstly let's give a posthumous Welshman of the Day award to Mervyn Davies, the former Wales and British Lions number 8 and Grand Slam-winning captain in 1976, who has died aged 65. I don't think I ever saw him play "live", as my earliest rugby-watching recollections that I can attach a specific date to are from Wales' next (and last until 2005) Grand Slam year, 1978, by which time Davies had been forced into early retirement by a brain haemorrhage.

Secondly, I caught most of Frost On Interviews on BBC4 the other day, and I was struck firstly by how interesting it all was, despite being at times a bit of a mutually congratulatory circle jerk between Frosty, Parky, the Melvster and others, but secondly by how odd it was to hear Sir David Frost refer to Anthony Eden by pronouncing the "th" in "Anthony" as a "th" and not as a "t", i.e. as in "anthology" rather than "antidote". This sounds odd when someone with a still nominally English accent (though Frost's tortured vowelisations are pretty uncategorisable these days) does it, as it's a specifically American thing. I have no idea why this pronunciation became the standard one in the US while the "t" one is the standard one in the UK. I suppose the many decades Frost has spent in the USA have had an influence (on him, that is, rather than pronunciation habits in general). The Americans still drop the "h" when abbreviating the name, though: the only person Wikipedia has a page for who goes by the first name "Thony" is this obscure French footballer.

they melvynned me

Here's something at once grindingly disappointing and compellingly bizarre: Melvyn Bragg having a pop at "militant atheism" (translation: atheists who talk about it anywhere other than really quietly, in the dark, in a cupboard) and, inevitably, Richard Dawkins in particular. It's very hard to pull out a point from his disjointed ramblings but it seems to be the usual one regarding "respect", i.e. that there are certain fact claims about the universe that are deemed arbitrarily to be off-limits to investigation or criticism or, heaven forbid, ridicule.

While it is fascinating to see the effects of the cultural brainwashing that makes people enthuse about old religious texts, traditions and beliefs without ever thinking to engage with the basic question "yes, but is any of it true?", one would have hoped that Melvyn might have been one of those who had shaken themselves free of it. I do have just a suspicion that, like AC Grayling, Melv is occasionally guilty of being distracted by the leonine magnificence of his own hair. Also: watch it, Melv, you're starting to sound a bit shrill and strident there.

This particular bout of bile was filmed as part of Sky TV's The Book Show, and Melv does bang on incomprehensibly about the King James Bible a couple of minutes in, so I wonder whether this was prompted by his having written a book about the cultural and literary influence of the KJV a few months back.

This is all a great pity, because I am a devoted fan of Bragg's Radio 4 show In Our Time which is a fascinating programme about proper heavyweight intellectual matters which I often hear the first 15 minutes or so of on a Thursday morning and then have to go and catch up with later on iPlayer.

we exist; fear us

A bit more on atheist shrillness, or at least accusations thereof, if you've got a couple of minutes. Someone had the bright idea, after all the shocked pearl-clutching and swooning over atheist billboards in the past, of speculating about what sort of wording would be anodyne enough not to cause conniptions among the devout. Well, inspired by this challenge, someone has undertaken a real-life test of it by attempting to get the banner below stuck on the side of a bus in Pennsylvania. Brace yourselves:


About as inoffensive as it's possible to get, I'm sure you'll agree, since all it's doing is announcing, as if it were some sort of revelation, that atheists exist, and can be found on that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the internet. Amusingly, though, or appallingly, depending on your mood, the transport authority rejected it on the grounds of its being "controversial".

So when the cretins at Spiked have another of their bizarre periodic eruptions of bile towards atheism and ask questions like this:

Are atheists really a beleaguered minority in the US? Is it really a great taboo today to profess that you do not believe in God?

- then the simple answers are respectively: yes they are, and yes, clearly it is. Not in the coffee shop in Hampstead that you filed your piece from, perhaps, but certainly in Pennsylvania.

Contrast that salutary demonstration of what gets classed as "shrillness" and "stridency" - i.e. anything that's not staying indoors and pretending they don't exist - when perpetrated by atheists with the sort of poisonous bigotry that gets a free pass when it's perpetrated by members of the major religions. Not just a free pass, moreover, but a forum in a supposedly respectable newspaper for you to trot out the view that same-sex marriage is as bad as slavery.

And it's no use Richard Cole getting all groovy vicar on us and saying hey, that's not the kind of religion I do, guys, and if Jesus were around today he would in a very real sense be hanging out with the gays and probably even going to their weddings - it is the wishy-washy "inclusive" C of E bullshit trotted out by the likes of Richard Cole that excuses and enables the vicious intolerance of people like Cardinal O'Brien who purport to believe in the same magic book and magic friend. And in any case, the Cardinal's right and Cole is wrong: the Bible does prohibit being gay. So if you are a gay Christian, then you have some thinking to do: essentially, one of them will have to go. You could live a life of miserable repression and conflict while still being able to hang out at the jam stall with the vicar at the church fête, but on balance I'd suggest ditching the belief in the exact factual accuracy of a book that starts with a story about an enchanted garden, an angry giant and a talking snake, for fuck's sake.

I must just link, as a parting shot, to this article in the New Statesman by Bryan Appleyard, as I think it must be the stupidest thing I've ever read on the subject of religion and atheism, and bear in mind at this point that I've read a few Spiked articles and some stuff over at the Guardian's Comment Is Free section. Almost every single paragraph contains either a reference to atheists being "militant", "fundamentalist" or a "cult", or some gratuitous Dawkins-bashing (by Alain de Botton, among others), or a massive flaming straw man completely misrepresenting what atheists believe - odd, really, seeing as how it's about as simple a philosophical position as it's possible to take. Here's a good bit:

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

Whoa, hang on: "Darwinism", which I take to mean acceptance of the entirely uncontroversial Theory of Evolution, is in some way to do with God and religion, and not about finches and earthworms and the like at all. How does that work then?

Actually I must reproduce the de Botton bit about Dawkins, just because it's so priceless. Check this out:

He has taken a very strange position. He's unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.

It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him.

Blimey. Well, at least no-one accused atheists of being Nazis. That sort of thing is best left to the Pope.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

As with the Michael Gove one I'll offer you two today and you can take your pick: who does gargantuan Welsh centre (and try-scorer against Italy today) Jamie Roberts most resemble?

Is it actor, ex-fiancé of Julia Roberts and schoolboy shower-based bumrape enthusiast Jason Patric?


Or is it venerable Dandy strongman and cow-pie enthusiast Desperate Dan?


You decide.

live and let Viv

There's been much fond reminiscence in the media this week on the occasion of the great Sir Vivian Richards' 60th birthday, so it seems only fair to throw my own misty-eyed nostalgic maunderings into the pot as well.

I'm slightly too young to remember the legendary West Indies' tour of England in 1976, as I was only six at the time and in any case we were living in South Korea where you could get things like Sesame Street via the American forces' network, but not the Test match coverage, sadly. Anyway, this was the series where Tony Greig made his spectacularly ill-judged remarks about making the West Indies "grovel" prior to the series and was rewarded by Richards carting England around mercilessly for 232 at Trent Bridge, 135 at Old Trafford and 291 at the Oval, and West Indies winning the series 3-0.

So my first memory of seeing Richards bat "live" was for Somerset in the 1981 Benson & Hedges Cup final, where he made an unbeaten 132, the last 50 or so in partnership with his old mate Ian Botham, as Somerset cantered to victory. This was the golden age of foreign imports playing in the English county game, with Richards and Joel Garner for Somerset, Gordon Greenidge and Malcolm Marshall for Hampshire, Alvin Kallicharran for Warwickshire, Glenn Turner and Imran Khan for Worcestershire, Zaheer Abbas and Mike Procter for Gloucestershire and Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee for Nottinghamshire, plus no doubt many more that I've forgotten about.

The first time I saw him bat in a Test match was in 1984 at Edgbaston, where he carried on from his record-breaking feats in the preceding one-day series by making 117, mostly in partnership with Larry Gomes. I had to resort to listening on the radio to his fastest-ever Test century (a record which still stands, despite Adam Gilchrist's best efforts), also against England at Antigua in 1986. His form declined a bit in the late 1980s, but it's typical of the man that when he had to make some runs, in his last ever Test series, also in England in 1991, he made 376 at an average of 53 (and 60 in his last-ever innings at the Oval) to keep his overall Test average above 50.

Statistics schmatistics, though, and you can keep your Pontings and Laras and Tendulkars, with their superior Test aggregates and averages - great though they all are, Viv is still the most exciting batsman I've ever seen play. There may have been lower-order sloggers who hit the ball harder and further (though not many), but none of them made Test double-centuries or averaged 50. And none of them were as ineffably and effortlessly cool, either.

snap snap grin grin nudge nudge moist moist say no more

In these times of financial hardship and uncertainty, the ever-present threat of nuclear armageddon and the bizarre antics of our own increasingly unhinged government, it's important to retain both a sense of perspective and a sense of humour, however puerile. It's in that spirit of childlike hope and optimism and schoolboy sniggering that I offer you this heading to a sub-section of a chapter in an instructional manual I consulted for some advice earlier today. I wonder if you can guess what sort of book it was?


Well, obviously it was this coookery book in which I sought some advice regarding roasting times for chickens. Why, what did you think it was? Eh? Eh?

d) nun of the above

Good job I was only about 15 minutes late getting to work yesterday morning, as Start The Week with Andrew Marr on Radio 4 was shaping up to be possibly the most annoying programme ever broadcast. The title "Faith and Doubt" set the alarm bells ringing even before the guests were announced - "doubt" being a code-word usually used to make the religious sound reasonable and open to new evidence, prepared to adjust their belief system if required, that sort of thing, as well as maybe just a little bit tortured and interesting. It differs from "scepticism" in that it's clearly understood that the doubt will be resolved by a re-affirmation of faith, or at least an undertaking to try harder at it, rather than the abandonment of it.

If that hadn't been enough of a red flag, the name of the first guest, Karen Armstrong, would have given the game away. Armstrong is the former Roman Catholic nun who, after her decision to give up the nunning game (hardest game in the world, the old nunning game), has gone on to forge a lucrative career as a writer of articles and books on religion. These aren't especially in keeping with her Roman Catholic upbringing, though, being more in the wishy-washy hand-waving vein familiar to anyone who's ever stumbled across Terry Eagleton's writings.

Clearly they couldn't risk having an actual rationalist on the show being a spoilsport and not playing by the rules (though I was hoping to be proved wrong and find they'd saved the fourth chair for AC Grayling) - instead they wheeled out a couple of writers of broadly sympathetic views and Richard Holloway, a former bishop whose career seems to have followed a similar trajectory to Armstrong's, i.e. from orthodoxy to a sort of vague hand-waving hello clouds hello sky metaphorical mystical transcendence bullshit.

Just to sidetrack for a minute, I had the idea in my head that the early-90s Kristin Scott Thomas ITV series Body And Soul was a loose adaptation of Armstrong's book Through The Narrow Gate, dealing as it does with a young woman's transition from being a nun to, well, not being a nun any more, with just a little bit of low-key soft-core partial nudity (stockings and the like) to draw the punters in (this is presumably why it stuck in my mind). Anyhoo, it turns out that the two are completely unrelated apart from the coincidental plot similarities - the TV series being based on a novel by Marcelle Bernstein.

Back to the main topic: what you need to pull this sort of thing off successfully is a set of tactics very similar to the accommodationists - a lofty disdain for the "extremists" at both ends of the spectrum (flying commercial jetliners into buildings and writing harsh and sarcastic articles on the internet being broadly equivalent in terms of unacceptable rudeness, apparently), a steadfast refusal ever to define clearly what any of the terms you bandy around (like, for instance, "God") actually mean, and a sort of chuckly patronising dismissal of those who attempt to challenge or tie you down on what you mean and what you actually believe.

Again, this is religion as metaphor without the moral courage or clarity of thought to come out and say OK, but the supernatural water/wine loaves/fishes stuff is all bollocks, though. You have to master the Janus-like ability to say to the mass of 99% of religious people - who totally believe Jesus was a real live white guy with nice hair and lovely white teeth and a beard who just happened to live in the Middle East - yes, we're defending your core beliefs against those nasty shrill scientists who really just want to herd your grannies into the gas chambers, and simultaneously to engage in "respectable", "intellectual" debate on Radio 4 where you do a lot of "could it not be said" and "might we say" and "in a sense" without ever making any testable claim about any aspect of reality. Throw in a bit of conflation of religion (carefully left undefined) and morality and some guff about charity and the kiddies, plus the obligatory Dawkins-bashing, and you're done.

Dawkins-bashing is a pastime where interest never flags completely, but fluctuates in proportion to how much he's been in the news lately. Just at the moment he's been popping up in various places - I caught a bit of Nicky Campbell's The Big Questions (better title: Big Questions To Which The Answer Is No) the other day, but I expect there were others - to publicise the poll on religious belief that his foundation commissioned from Ipsos-MORI recently, and which has some interesting, though hardly very surprising, things to say about the reality of religious belief and observance in the UK, the gist of it being that most people are bovinely unreflective about the whole thing and just rock up to church every Sunday out of habit and social convention, or possibly for the cakes, rather than out of any sort of evangelical fervour, or because they're quite lidderally bonkers about Jesus or anything like that.

Anyway, this fairly uncontroversial stuff has provoked an astonishing upspewing of vitriol from the conservative press - most absurdly the episode a week or so ago where a journalist rang Dawkins up to have a pop at him for one of his ancestors having owned some slaves. To be fair even some of the commenters at the Daily Mail felt this was crossing the line into ridiculousness, which tells you something.

Possibly as part of the same publicity round Dawkins popped up in a debate with the cuddly old Archbishop of Canterbury this week about the whole God thing. I must confess I find Rowan Williams quite fascinating, and it's not just the mesmerising eyebrows, it's the fact that he's a clearly highly intelligent man who believes some patently ridiculous stuff. The interior of his brain must resemble some sort of partially-cleared minefield, with all sorts of barbed wire and giant red signs with skull & crossbones logos on them to mark places where trains of thought must not trespass, lest they unleash an explosion of cognitive dissonance.

As you might expect the debate was all quite donnish and mutually respectful, so in the absence of any "shrillness" to complain about the Mail were left with having to jump on Dawkins' referring to himself at one point as an "agnostic" and claim it as some big AHA! moment. As I said before I think "agnostic" is a term to be avoided, partly because it grants a sort of respect to these particular ridiculous claims that we don't grant to similar ones about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and partly because it's meaningless, since we're technically agnostic about virtually everything that isn't just true by definition ("all bachelors are unmarried" and the like). Anyone who doesn't get this is respectfully requested to wash down their portion of Flying Spaghetti Monster with a nice cuppa from Russell's Teapot, or alternatively to consider whether the Archbish might admit to a 0.1% (or 0.01% or 0.00001%, whatever) smidgen of doubt about the whole God thing. I suspect he would, so you have to ask the question: does that make him an agnostic? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, innit.

pob's your uncle

Here's a contribution to the ongoing debate over which 1980s celebrity the current Education Secretary Michael Gove most resembles: Pob or Rick Moranis. Rick Moranis got my vote, but it appears that the people at lovable scatological Geordie publication Viz have other ideas. Have a look:

golden showers with fanny intervals

Good to see the BBC keeping up their recently instigated tradition of dropping the c-bomb on live TV and radio at inopportune moments (not that there are many opportune ones). The latest one involves weather forecaster Alex Deakin dropping it into a weather forecast. He was trying to say "bucket-loads of sunshine", but - well, see for yourself.

the last book I read

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Redrick "Red" Schuhart is a stalker. What that means is that he makes a living scavenging various mysterious alien artefacts from The Zone, one of half-a-dozen sites on Earth where alien visitors arrived briefly some years before, before buggering off again as quickly as they came.

These Zones are cordoned off from public access, partly for the public's own safety, since there are physical objects there that can maim or kill, as well as more nebulous things like weird local concentrations of gravity that can crush vehicles (and, needless to say, people) like a grape. The exclusion of Joe Public is also partly prompted by less altruistic motives, inevitably, as some of the alien artefacts, while potentially dangerous if mishandled, have wide-ranging applications for energy, public health, and the like and The Man wants to ensure he gets his cut.

With anything like this there's going to be a thriving black market as well, of course, as long as people are prepared to pay enough to make it worthwhile for other people to risk their lives by breaking into the Zones. Which is where Red comes in. He's an old hand at navigating round the weird death-dealing phenomena to get to the good stuff, and being able to get it out of the Zone and move it on to the right people. Red takes the occasional occupational hazards in his stride - a two-year jail sentence, his old co-stalker and mentor Buzzard Burbridge falling into a pool of alien goop and having his legs dissolved below the knee, another co-stalker snagging some alien spider-web stuff and subsequently dying, that sort of thing.

One of the problems with being a stalker, apart from the constant danger of getting arrested or shot or stumbling into a gravitational anomaly and getting turned inside-out, is the long-term effects of spending a lot of time in the Zone - there's no measurable radiation being emitted, but something happens to stalkers, and those that don't find themselves rendered incapable of having children altogether produce offspring that are a bit, well, odd. Red's daughter Monkey is a case in point, being so named because, well, she looks a bit like a monkey.

It's in a desperate attempt to generate a lump sum to get some (almost certainly futile) treatment for Monkey that Red takes on One Last Job - finding the Holy Grail of stalkerdom, the Golden Ball, which supposedly has the power to grant wishes. Only old Buzzard has seen this before, and he's passed on two vital pieces of information to Red: not only where it is, but also the importance, on this trip more than ever before, of taking a co-stalker with you - you see, one of you will have to die before the other can get to the Ball.

Needless to say Red decides not to share this piece of information with his co-stalker - in a piece of cruel irony, Buzzard's son Arthur - and once the inevitable unpleasantness has been got out of the way, Red is free to approach the ball, by this stage in a state of almost religious ecstasy.

And then what? Well, we never find out, so you'll have to make up your own mind. Judging by what's gone before, a sudden burst of cleansing joy and happiness whereby everything is OK and no-one has to suffer ever again is probably unlikely, though. I think a useful comparison is to view this book as being a sort of polar opposite of the Iain M Banks books within the science fiction genre (with my usual caveats about whether that categorisation is even sensible or useful) - the Bankses are all about the glorious possibilities of technology to make worlds better places to live, laugh, hang-glide and have weird freaky sex, with the denizens of the Culture representing a sort of perfected version of humanity, while Roadside Picnic is about some unknown aliens dropping into Earth on their way somewhere else (possibly a hang-gliding and freaky sex party, who knows) and just randomly dumping a load of garbage with no particular purpose in mind, probably not noticing the human race even existing, and with no intention of ever coming back. It's very much like, as the book's title suggests, a bunch of people having an impromptu picnic by the side of the road and leaving behind a load of orange peel, biscuit wrappers and plastic forks without any thought to the effect on the local wildlife. A profoundly gloomy view, you might say, but that sort of grinding mundane reality whereby contact is fleeting, baffling and unaccompanied by any sort of context, let alone an instruction manual, seems a much more likely way for any First Contact scenario to play out.

The other way in which this differs from the Bankses is that they are in the main quite big chunky books, while this is a slim 145 pages. There's enough ideas here to fill a much bigger book, though, if you were less inclined to terseness and leaving the reader to work things out for himself. I thought it was excellent in a grimy and gloomy and weird and haunting (and typically Russian, one might argue) sort of way.

Roadside Picnic is most famous for being the source material on which Andrei Tarkovsky's celebrated 1979 film Stalker is based (here's a 5-minute version). Pretty loosely based, by the sound of it, even though the Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay. I therefore consider this further confirmation of my earlier theory about short novels being easy to adapt into films. Tarkovsky's most famous film Solaris was also an adaptation of a science fiction novel, this time by Polish author Stanisław Lem. I haven't seen either of the Tarkovsky films, though I have seen the 2002 Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney version of Solaris, which I thought was pretty good in a glum sort of way. I expect the Tarkovsky version is even glummer, though.