manufacturing doubt

Books: Titus Groan

2012-02-11T21:38:00.001Z

I find it hard to believe that I last read Titus Groan when I was thirteen or fourteen. I always meant to re-read it, but never did. (My parents' copy of Titus Groan went missing, which didn't help.) So while I'd say it's a favourite and important book to me, it was half my life ago that I read it.

Titus Groan is still not quite like anything else I've read. Strangely, it reminds me slightly of JG Ballard, though I can't say why. The exaggerated, slightly hallucinatory quality, perhaps.

When I first read the book I found it very hard to read. The prose of Titus Groan is like its setting: ornate, sometimes tortuous, often obscure. This time round, I found it much easier going, though there was still the odd word I didn't know ("hanger"). I also found it exceptionally strange and unrelentingly dark.

The biggest changes in my experience of the book were in the humour and the characters. I think the first time I was so submerged by the darkness that I didn't appreciate the humour. This time I realised how genuinely funny some of the characters and absurdities are. On a number of occasions I was chuckling out loud.

In a similar way I appreciated the characters better. Some are clearly evil or vile, both enabled and constrained, by their situation. Others are unusual, certainly, but pushed to extremes to cope with their situation. The Countess' withdrawal from human contact as a way to withdraw herself mentally from the drudgery of ritual and those whose company she is forced to keep. The twins' nature encouraged into spite and ignorance. Flay, taciturn and hard, but loyal and even dear to those who know him.

Most of all though, the doctor and Fuschia. Despite aloof, affected appearances, the doctor is a thoughtful, compassionate man. As he himself thinks, the others have responsibility towards ritual, but he has responsibilities towards them and their wellbeing. Of all, Fuschia is most tragically trapped. The doctor's intellect at least provides an escape of sorts. Fuschia feels the oppression of Gormenghast, but has only childish escapes, no-one to teach her or provide an example to follow, and no-one to offer or receive the tenderness that would relieve her (save, in all counts, the little Prunesquallor can offer). All this leaving her horribly vulnerable to Steerpike's manipulation. The book leaves you with a sense of foreboding for these two. If the Gormenghast is bad, the realisation of Steerpike's ambitions would be worse.

The adult characters all the characters either suffer a withering of the spirit, or restrain and canalise it, into brutality, birds and cats, an obsession with being a lady. It's this prospect that faces Fuschia. And it's this that is made physical in the Bright Carvers and their sudden decline from vibrant youth to premature age.

Of Steerpike himself, I am not sure how much there is to see beyond the fact he is a psychopath.
Steerpike is not alone in feeling nothing for other people. His success rests on the fact that he cares nothing for the system. For all the other characters, good and bad, Gormenghast is a part of them, just as they are part of it. Steerpike is constantly referred to as an outsider, even though there is no hint of anything odd in his origins (just a kitchen boy). Rather, he is an outsider because people subconsciously realise he cares nothing for Gormenghast.

The only other character to want (in a vague way) to throw down the system like this is Fuschia, and it's what makes her seem so vulnerable to Steerpike. On the other hand, he is unable to recognise the casual cruelty that repulses her and counteracts his efforts to charm.

There is an ambiguity in the book here, that only the most heartless character is able to challenge a heartless system. Does respect for others mean respect for the system, either for itself or for their sakes? Are all revolutionaries cruel, or even psychopathic? Or is Steerpike simply the only person with all the right characteristics - intelligence, art, luck, motivation?

One thing that made me prevaricate about reading the book a little was the feeling that it was a cold, dark winter book. That's not really true though. Titus Groan crosses many seasons and weathers. The only common feature of the weather is that it conspires to oppress the characters; it is always overwhelming either in its violence, like the titanic downpour during Swelter and Flay's confrontation, or in its relentlessness. Even more than the harsh, sparsely described landscape, the weather provides an expressionistic accompaniment to, or rendering of, the events.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about re-reading Titus Groan is that I found that literally all the events I remember from the trilogy come from the first book. Flay and Swelter, Flay's cat-throwing banishment, the burning of the library, the death of Sepulchrave. I am wondering what on earth goes on in the second book that I have forgotten, and whether it will be familiar to me when I read it.

One thing that hasn't changed is that I still can't describe the book in a satisfying way, in a way that really gets across how it feels.

Books: What's Left?

2012-02-10T17:42:00.002Z

What's Left is Nick Cohen's polemic against the state of the left. I was a bit apprehensive coming to it. I'd consider myself on the left, even if I'm uninvolved. So criticisms of it are personal. On the other hand, because I am uninvolved, it is easy for me to pick and choose, ignoring bad things and people, rather than having to commit to actions and groups.

The jacket of the book doesn't help. On the front is a picture of a man wearing a suit, with a keffiyah covering his face, holding a peace symbol placard in one hand and tossing a grenade idly in the other. (The original hardback cover is better.) On the back are supportive quotes from Philip Hensher in the Spectator, Peter Oborne in the Observer, James Delingpole in the Mail on Sunday and Martin Amis in the Sunday Times. Not a set of commentators to inspire confidence.

Cohen's argument for how and why the left lost its way ranges from consumerist politics to Virginia Woolf, but it's mostly about the left's response to tyrants, and more specifically to Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was a monstrous tyrant; we all know this (or should do). Just how bad he was might have passed people by - I certainly didn't have a clear idea. Cohen reminds people of this without dwelling on it. The first case in Cohen's thesis is Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi who in the 1980s wrote a devastating account of the brutality of the Iraqi regime. He was a hero to the left when Western governments were ignoring Saddam's crimes. Then the First Gulf War came and Makiya argued that the coalition should push on to Baghdad and overthrow the regime. The left disowned him. Saddam carried on murdering the people of Iraq.

Cohen asks:

Even if the United States invaded Iraq just to get its hands on the country's oil, the result would still be better than Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi regime was a totalitarian fascist regime. Why didn't the left support its overthrow?

His answer is that the left has forgotten that there are worse things than liberal democracy. I would add, though Cohen doesn't, that there are worse things than war. The left has lost the ability to criticize the bad its own governments do while supporting the good. It is heading towards a manichean worldview where anything the West does is bad and anyone who opposes it can't be all bad. As a result, the left is starting to support the far right (dictators and Islamists), both passively and actively.

How did this come about? The history of warfare and the left, according to Cohen, goes something like this. It started in the 1930s, with opposition to fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The left had some issues about war with Germany, but came good in the end. Then things were peaceful for 45 years, until the first Gulf War. Umm.

Instead of dwelling on events like, say, Vietnam, Cohen turns one of the left's criticisms on itself. It's a left-wing trope that for Western governments there are deserving and undeserving victims. Cohen suggests the same applies for the left. When Hussein was being supported by the West, Iraqis were deserving victims; after the First Gulf War they became undeserving victims. Pre-eminent among the deserving victims are Palestinians, oppressed by US-ally Israel.

When asked why he spends most of his time attacking the US and its allies, Chomsky has a simple answer: because as a citizen of the US he has more responsibility for its behaviour than for that of any other country. It's not that he doesn't care about the people of North Korea. I doubt he has a good word to say about the North Korean government, but he's not responsible for it, and he has very little control over it. As Chomsky points out, it didn't take a war to get the Indonesian military to withdraw from East Timor after 25 years and tens of thousands of deaths. It just took pressure from Indonesia's allies, like the US and Australia. Pressure like not actively supporting the murderous Indonesian military, for example.

There are even bigger problems with Cohen's argument. These are the very broad label of “fascist” and the tricky question of what is the left.

Cohen argues that the great virtue of the left used to be recognising and fighting fascism. For Cohen, the Iraqi regime, Al-Qaeda, Zimbabwe and presumably other organisations and regimes are “fascist”. Just like in the 30s, this justifies all means necessary, up to and including war. We have to fight Saddam Hussein and we have to fight Al-Qaeda, because they're fascists. I actually think the emotional reaction this is intended to create is ok, if lazy.

The less obvious challenge is this: in the 1930s, were people really arguing for military intervention in Spain, Italy or Germany? There's a difference between a civil war, defending one state against another and intervening militarily within a state. Italy and Germany had the will and the means to attack other countries. Saddam Hussein never attacked another country except when he thought it was ok with the US (thought wrongly, in the case of Kuwait).

The Iraqi regime certainly had a horrible ideology, as Al-Qaeda does. But they are different ideologies. In fact, they were conflicting ideologies. Al-Qaeda's goal of an Islamic Caliphate had no place for Baathist Iraq. By classing both as fascism, Cohen implies that the invasion of Iraq was also a battle against Al-Qaeda, a conflation that would make Blair and Bush propagandists proud. It's hardly a radical view that the invasion of Iraq helped Al-Qaeda. We've the authority of MI5 to support that view.

You could certainly argue the case that a stable, democratic Iraq will help fight Al-Qaeda. Cohen doesn't bother to do that. When he talks about “fighting” Al-Qaeda, it's actually not really clear what he means. In fact, he's very hazy on Al-Qaeda and “Islamism”. Is the military regime in Egypt justified to keep the Islamic Brotherhood in check? Should we be fighting various low-intensity but (inevitably) nasty wars in various countries in the world? These difficult questions aren't addressed.

The easiest criticism of the book is that the examples don't really represent “the left”. Here are two examples. Cohen lays into relativism, but I don't think I've ever actually met or read anyone who believes in it. He also highlights the SWP's role in the Stop the War protests. His criticisms of the party and George “I salute your indefatiguability” Galloway seem correct. Yet Cohen himself says that most people involved in protesting the war didn't care about the SWP. He doesn't go on to say that if opponents of the war were inspired by politicians, it was more moderate or respectable ones like Robin Cook and Clare Short. The SWP won a seat in parliament in 2004, before losing it again in 2009 , when they received 33,251 votes, an eighth of the votes the Green Party got.

Which is not to say Cohen doesn't get anything right. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime was probably the only good reason given for the invasion of Iraq. It's quite possible the anti-war movement ignored this. I still think the war was wrong, but I also think the left does not have a clear idea of how to deal with dictators. War is not supported except in exceptional cases, with strong international support. "Engagement" is sometimes supported, sometimes not. Sanctions are usually supported, but rarely effective. It is entirely possible that different approaches are required for different cases, but I don't think I've ever seen a clear discussion of this.

To an extent the left has internalised the system of states and international institutions. This system makes a big a distinction between fighting to liberate Kuwaitis from the Iraqi Baath party and fighting to liberate Iraqis from the Iraqi Baath party. (Though it is certainly not the only distinction.) It should be hard for the left to attack the mendacity of states one minute and look to the UN to legitimise things the next. It's not wrong to go against “international opinion” if you're right.

Look for grand visions in the left and you'll probably be disappointed. Of course, this is because grand visions have disappointed. The left's lack of a cohesive vision is in part a tactic. Whether it is a good one is open for debate.

Blaming Cohen for using straw men and misrepresenting the left is so easy I started wondering “what does Cohen think of as 'the left'?” What is it he's lamenting the loss of? I went back to the definitions in the introduction. “The left” is defined with a conscious fuzziness - “you know it when you see it” - but notably it does specify that it is aligned with the trade unions. Trade unions crop up from time to time in the book, in a positive light. On the whole, though, they're not discussed. If they're not the elephant in the room, they are at least lurking just outside.

I think what Cohen is really lamenting is the loss of a left which:

is radical but still able to work within the system
has a cohesive organisation and political programme, but is not authoritarian
is committed
is linked to the working class, or at least the trade unions.

With those conditions in mind, it's easier to be sympathetic, but it doesn't make the book any better. You'll find little insight into the fall-out from the 60s & 70s counterculture, the decline of trade unions and class politics; the weight falls decisively on Iraq, Cohen's own moment of revelation. Perhaps he should have written a more personal book about his relationship with the left first, and then attempted this book.

Books: Kuhn vs Popper

2012-02-08T23:11:00.000Z

Continuing my attempt to write something about every book I read. Even though this book's fairly short, this post goes on a bit as I try to get to grips with the most important parts.

The dramatic subtitle of Kuhn vs Popper by Steve Fuller is: The struggle for the soul of science. I don't know much about Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper. What I was expecting from this book was a brief and accessible introduction to debates about the scientific method, using the tension between the two as a hook. What it actually turns out to be is a bit of a hatchet job on Thomas Kuhn. For example, one chapter explains why Heidegger cannot escape some responsibility for Nazism. The next asks "Is Kuhn the American Heidegger?" Leaving you thinking, "did Fuller just call Kuhn a Nazi?" Probably the book is best read by someone with a basic grounding in the subject already, something I don't have, but it was still clear enough to be worth reading.

Roughly speaking, Popper and Kuhn's approaches are as follows. For Popper, to decide between rival theories, scientists must set a test. Each theory makes a claim, and whichever is falsified fails the test should be discarded, regardless of its longevity or authority. (If your claim is unfalsifiable, it's not scientific.) Popper's vision is one of constant challenge for scientific theories, and regular failure, but scientists themselves have to be protected from the consequences of being wrong.

For Kuhn, scientists work within "paradigms". "Normal science" is an incremental advance. It increases the power of a paradigm but also brings up problems. When the collection of problems gets too great, a successful new paradigm emerges and a scientific revolution occurs. Most famous scientists engaged in "revolutionary science" rather than (boring) "normal science".

A paradigm is a sort of worldview. Here we run into some problems. Kuhn has been criticised for not having a clear definition of "paradigm" and using the term in different ways. What is probably the key feature of paradigms is that they are "incommensurable". "Incommensurability" is an even more problematic term. Incommensurable theories are radically different, like newtonian vs relativistic vs quantum physics. They are very different ways of looking at and describing the world. You will not understand newtonian physics if you assume that all particles are also waves, with indeterminate position and momentum.

What I think is the key to incommensurability is that it is impossible to clearly judge between two theories (at least, initially). There is such a gap between them that it is impossible to translate a claim made by one theory into terms that can be used to verify the other. In addition, while the new theory solves problems of the old, according to Kuhn, some information is always lost. Naturally, there will be also be things the new theory can explain, but has not yet explained. Faced with this situation, there can be no conventionally "scientific" contest between the two theories. I think Kuhn would go as far as saying that even in retrospect it is impossible to scientifically judge between paradigms. They can only be understood and validated in their own terms, which by definition(?) invalidate other paradigms. Instead there is a fracture in the scientific community, which is not entirely healed until supporters of the losing theory 'die off'. (Einstein never really reconciled himself to quantum mechanics.)

Whether this is really true is open for debate. Late last year, Errol Morris wrote a series of blog posts titled "The Ashtray Argument" in which he attacks the concept of incommensurability. In an interview, Kuhn claimed that incommensurability was "easy" - he got it from mathematics and used it as a metaphor. In maths, incommensurability refers to the fact that irrational numbers cannot be expressed as rational numbers of fractions. Pi as a fraction would be infinitely long. Supposedly, the guy who revealed the existence of irrational numbers was killed by the Pythagoreans for threatening their mystical worldview. They could not make the conceptual change from a world of rational numbers to one where some fundamental numbers were irrational. However as Morris points out: 1) this almost certainly never happened; 2) irrational numbers arguably supported the Pythagorean view; and most importantly 3) it wasn't the case that the Pythagoreans couldn't understand or judge the validity of incommensurability. Kuhn's founding metaphor appears to undermine his own theory.

Anyway, to round this off, when a new paradigm takes over, scientists rewrite history and make it look like science was always heading their way, in its inevitable march towards truth.

There is certainly a valid attack on the 'whig' interpretation of scientific history here - the view that science is always advancing and improving, in a fairly straight line. However it has a number of negative effects. One is to break science into a multiplicity of specialised paradigms. These are insulated from criticism from outside, both of their correctness and their value. In fact, Fuller argues, it served the Cold War military-industrial complex. It persuaded scientists to work on incremental improvements within the constraints of a paradigm ("normal science") rather than to think freely. It protected scientists from criticism of their political and military role - and from thinking about it for themselves.

Popper was initially linked with the Frankfurt School and critical theory. However while he kept a lot in common with them, he also disagreed on some major points. In particular, his political programme was more provisional, experimental and (arguably) democratic, compared with the Frankfurt School who launched something like a(n unsuccessful) propaganda war against capitalism. Popper was much more engaged with politics and his critics than Kuhn, and it may be that his reputation suffered as a result. In contrast, Kuhn wrote no significant books other than The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and answered criticisms only very erratically. This ties in with Morris' picture of Kuhn as someone who forbade him from attending rival lectures and threw an ashtray at him when he challenged incommensurability. (Though Morris' story has been challenged, most notably by Thomas Kuhn's daughter.)

All this might seem a largely irrelevant argument, while science continues successfully on its way. In fact, one of the chapters is titled 'Why philosophers get no respect from scientists'. It's not easy to summarise - I'm not sure it's entirely clear - but part of the reason is that science tends to relegate failed thinkers to "philosophy" while adopting successful ones as "scientists" (eg. Newton vs Descartes). Most scientists working within their specialised niche see no value in thinking more broadly. If they do conduct such "philosophical" speculation it tends to be after they have had their great scientific successes and have entered a "fallow" period.

The Kuhnian position actually relegates philosophers to "underlabourers" working at fringe problems to support scientists. It is quite explicitly uncritical. In fact, it calls for both a non-judgemental history from the perspective of the subjects, and a heroic history aimed at inspiring contemporary scientists. By contrast, a Popperian history of science builds normative assumptions into its story, highlighting how science has deviated from them.

The importance of this is twofold. First, in judging what is good and bad science epistemologically. For example, Popper and his followers had issues with evolutionary science and its ability to claim any change as making an organism "fitter". Evolutionary biology is probably in a better state today, but it has spawned the very dubious field of evolutionary psychology. The movement of physics away from experimentation and observation and into ever more abstract mathematics is another case where scientists methods need to be questioned. I wonder whether this relegation of philosophy has actually encouraged the growth of pseudo-science and non-science. It makes people (both specialists and not) unfamiliar with criticising methodologies. It also looks like science it is itself shielded from criticism, making it appear one among a range of belief systems which cannot be criticised or compared.

Secondly, the philosophy of science is required to make ethical judgements. Some would pretend that science is simply an amoral search for knowledge, but this is clearly not true. Think for example about a virologist choosing whether to research a cure for HIV or to research new biological weapons. In the 20th century scientists were involved in some great ethical questions, most notably the development of nuclear weapons. The fact that the ethics of this project were and are still not clear does not mean scientists can evade responsibility. It might appear that much contemporary science is far removed from ethical questions, but the example of German scientists is instructive - in 1914 they swung behind Germany, including shifting focus from physics to "the epistemologically inferior" chemistry. (The great exception was, of course, Einstein.)

One thing about this book is that I came out feeling I had a much better understanding of Kuhn's philosophy than Popper's. It did leave me wanting to find out more about Popper, but his own works seem quite daunting. I'll have to look out for an introduction.

"How can a mere philosopher devise criteria distinguishing between good and bad science, knowing it is an inutterable mystic secret of the Royal Society?" - Imre Lakatos (1973)

Books: Excession

2012-02-05T12:04:00.002Z

Some lighter reading now. The other two Culture novels I've read left me with the impression that (spoiler alert) the Culture always wins. The Culture is a tremendously advanced, post-scarcity, civilisation; the most powerful in the galaxy. Excession poses the question: what happens when it encounters something that seems more powerful than it is? That it doesn't understand. For which it has no frame of reference. That might challenge it.

Tied into that is the story of the Affront, a species that enjoys cruelty and refuses to reform, and the tales of the human characters. Even more than the other books I've read, the events in this story are driven by AIs. The humans (and drones) are manipulated, commonly with care and compassion, but with little control over wider issues.

I suppose if there's a common theme running through the book it is - when should we interfere? If we think other people, societies and civilisations are doing themselves or other harm, should we intervene? The Culture is an AI-managed utopia; should we feel disconcerted by this? Or is it the crowning achievement of a civilisation to create something better than they are?

Anyway, that aside, the book is a good read. Like the ships they live on, Banks cares about his characters, and somehow he saves a number of funny bits for the end of the book.

Books what I have read: The Palestine-Israeli Conflict

2012-02-05T12:03:00.002Z

I thought I'd try writing something about each book I read. Mainly for myself, as sometimes I think I read through things too quickly, without enough reflection. (How should you balance out reading extensively and intensively?) Making myself sit down and write something about a book, even if it's just an aspect of the book, will help make me think properly about it. But if I'm writing this stuff I might as well post it up and hopefully see what other people think.

I'll do the first few books in a splurge.

The Palestine-Israeli Conflict by Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami. This book is intended as a primer on the history of the conflict, with half written by an Israeli and half by a Palestinian academic, followed by a little engagement between them.

It is as depressing as you might expect. Zionism (which was both religious and secular) was an understandable reaction to the position of Jews in the 19th and early 20th century. Then the holocaust gave horrible evidence for its arguments. At the same time, it's easy to see the idea of transplanting one group of people into the lands of another as a colonial approach; the people living in Palestine are simply there to be moved around.

It is interesting to see the internal struggles over the nature of the state of Israel laid out. There is a lot of argument over its religious and social character, arguments you can vividly see continuing today when settlers attack troops and billboards featuring women are vandalised.

What's perhaps most disheartening of all is the leadership. Israeli leaders negotiate in bad faith (Ehud Barak accelerating settlement building) or refuse to compromise. Arab leaders frighten Israel (and their own people) without actually improving the position of Palestinians. Most of all, though, the Palestinian leadership has failed at almost every turn. True, they may have been in a difficult position, but it's rare to see such a long struggle with so little good to show for it.

Quick Film Reviews #5

2011-07-12T22:05:00.002+01:00

After discussing Wired's choice of the top 25 sci-fi films pre and post-star wars at work, James lent me three of his favourites. Well ok, two of his favourites and Buckaroo Banzai. I've watched two so far.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension
Buckaroo Banzai is a brilliant neurosurgeon/physicist/rock musician, who has been involved in developing an "overthruster" that allows travel to and through the eighth dimension (as long as you're driving a car really really fast). Unfortunately some bad aliens from the eighth dimension want this device so they can return home and be evil there. While they try to steal the overthruster another set of aliens is hovering in orbit threatening to start a nuclear war if Banzai doesn't stop the evil aliens. Also, there's a woman who appears to be the twin of Banzai's former wife. She's just there as a love interest; we find nothing more out about the two. This is just one of many things in the film that makes no sense. This film makes no sense at all. What makes it all the more puzzling is that on paper it sounds like a trashy low-budget flick, but in fact the direction is competent, the production values are high, and the cast is decent (Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Jeff Golblum (in fluffy cowboy pants)). It's not really so bad it's good, it just makes no sense. The design of the aliens' spacecraft is pretty cool though.

Silent Running
This is a classic 70s environmental fable, but I'd never seen it before. The earth's only remaining plant and animal life is drifting in freighters, manned by uninterested crew. When the order comes in to destroy them and return to commercial service, only one rejects it, ending up drifting with his forest, alone save for three diminutive robots. I'm not sure about some of the science in the film, but as an evocation of loneliness and a parable, it works very well. I also like the 70s NASA era technology in the film, all girders on the outside, blue screens and chunky keyboards on the inside.

The Edukators
Radical activists break into rich people's houses, rearrange the furniture and leave notes saying "your days of plenty are numbered". It's a little predictable, a little sentimental at times and the politics isn't very deep, but it's still a worthwhile watch. On a technical note, it's very much a post-dogmé film of cheap but high quality hand-held and mobile cameras, which lends the film a nice rough, personal feel.

Quick Film Reviews #4

2011-07-11T21:21:00.002+01:00

Fargo
Seems a long time since I watched Fargo; I guess it's about a month and a half. Most people have probably seen it, which is good because I don't have much to say about it, although it is a wonderfully formed film. The contrast between the bleak, violent and very blackly comic world of the kidnap plot and the warm and mundane life of the police and residents of Brainerd.

La Jetée
Known mainly as the inspiration for Twelve Monkeys, this 30-40 minute "photo-novel" is a remarkable film. It's told mostly with a narrator and black and white stills, though some are shaky or are cycled quickly to give an impression of movement. It's economical but very effective.

Sans Soleil
Sharing a disc with La Jetée, and by the same director, Sans Soleil is a kind of rambling film essay/letter collection. It's primarily focussed on Japan, with a little less on an African country (I don't remember which) and a little on Iceland. Some of the stuff in there is fascinating, but on the whole I didn't find the footage incredibly engaging or the text particularly illuminating. Perhaps it might become clearer with another viewing, but really, I couldn't be bothered.

Stalker
I was rather excited about seeing Stalker, and a little disappointed. It's philosophical science fiction from Andrei Tarkovsky, with the emphasis on the philosophy. An impact from space has created a mysterious and dangerous "zone". At the centre of the zone is a room that is said to grant wishes. The zone is sealed off by police, but guides known as stalkers guide small number of people past the barbed wire and through the zone. On first viewing it was very opaque, on second, the religious analogies were a lot more obvious. Despite some interesting content and a few wonderfully shot and soundtracked scenes, I still think it's a bit too inaccessible and doesn't quite have the atmosphere I was looking forward to.
update: although I wasn't so impressed by it at the time, Stalker is a film that has stayed with me. It must have got under my skin more than I thought.

Do The Right Thing
A long way from Stalker, full of shouting, city and black people. Do The Right Thing is a well made ensemble piece from Spike Lee, looking at (kind of unsurprisingly) the tensions in a black neighbourhood. The most remarkable thing about it is that the main character, who I gauged at somewhere between 15 and 20 years old, was played by 30 year-old Spike Lee. After seeing the credits I had to check there wasn't by coincidence another Spike Lee who happened to star in a Spike Lee film.

Discrimination, pt3/3 - Philosophers

2011-07-11T21:20:00.001+01:00

I posted the other week about legal protection from religious discrimination. Atheists may be asking "how is it that the law protects people for the faith in an invisible sky lord, or a magical elephant headed helper, but not the beliefs grounded on evidence or reason?" Well good news everyone. The law also covers "philosophical belief" or even "lack of belief" (handy for agnostics).

Of course, this begs the question, what counts as a "philosophical belief"? One test is that beliefs are of "sufficient cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance and are worthy of respect in a democratic society." Another is that the beliefs have an impact on the actions and behaviour of the individual. (This is also a useful test of whether they are genuinely held - if someone doesn't act on their beliefs they're probably not serious about them.)

There are two notable cases here.

The first concerns Tim Nicholson, the former Head of Sustainability at Grainger, a major building & property company. He had frequent clashes with other managers and the firm's CEO, who it appears did not share his beliefs in sustainability. After he was made redundant, Nicholson took the company to Employment Tribunal, claiming unfair dismissal and discrimination on the grounds of religious or belief.

In the course of proceedings,

John Bowers QC, representing Grainger, had argued that adherence to climate change theory was "a scientific view rather than a philosophical one", because "philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof."

Fortunately the judge disagreed. As Nicholson's QC said, "the end result would be that the more evidence there is to support your views, the less likely it would be for you to enjoy protection against discrimination".

In another case, Joe Hashman was dismissed from his job as a gardener after his employers found out he had been an active hunt saboteur and animal rights activist. In court he was queried as to his beliefs. Why, for example, he found it acceptable to kill caterpillars or (by accident) worms - he drew a distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates. Interestingly, the other side's lawyers also suggested his beliefs endorsed violence and thus were not worthy of respect. However the judge found that Hashman's beliefs did qualify for protection. The case is now proceeding to an employment tribunal to determine whether those beliefs actually were the reason for the dismissal.

It's good to know that the law doesn't simply protect beliefs based on superstition and tradition. I wonder, though, how easy it will be to apply. Although people within religions believe loads of different things, they do tend to have some central authorities proscribing beliefs and behaviour. Secular philosophies tend to lack these - indeed they often encourage thinking for yourself and heterogeneity. Are people going to be categorised if they depart from mainstream veganism, or if they apply utilitarianism inconsistently? The law seems to penalise individualistic beliefs. But then again, the point of the law is to protect groups who have historically suffered persecution or disadvantage, so maybe that is not a problem.

Incidentally, another side-effect of this is the same principle as preventing gay clubs from excluding straight customers. It would be just as illegal for, say, a vegan restaurant to refuse to employ an omnivorous person as it would a regular restaurant to employ a vegan. (In fact, the vegan restaurant would be in a trickier position, as it'd generally be harder for a vegan to work in a regular restaurant.)

Discrimination, pt2/3 - Gays

2011-06-05T10:51:00.001+01:00

As well as employment, discrimination legislation applies to the provision of goods and services.

Back in March this year, Michael Black and John Morgan had booked a room to stay the night in a Bed & Breakfast in Berkshire. Unfortunately, when they arrived, they discovered that because of their religious beliefs, the owners only allowed married couples to share double rooms. Mr Black and Mr Morgan's civil partnership was not good enough, and they were turned away. They took the B&B owners to court for discrimination on the grounds of their sexual orientation, and won their case.

Here we have a conflict between two different rights: the right to practice religious beliefs and the right not to be discriminated against on the grounds of sexuality. In this case, the law imposes duties on the provider of the service, and not on the users. It may seem hard on the B&B owners, who wanted to do what they thought was morally right, but imagine if they had been refusing rooms to other people - no (guide) dogs, no blacks, no irish. Would they be sympathetic then? In law, at least, gay people have the same protection from discrimination as races, religions, etc.. Would the B&B owners be more sympathetic if they were Muslims, or Jewish?

What makes this case a little more complex is this: the B&B owners were not directly saying "no gays." They were saying "no unmarried couples can share a double room." However since same-sex couples cannot marry, this has a discriminatory effect. What the judge ruled was that marriage and civil-partnership were equivalent. Meaning that it may be legal to refuse to take people who were not married or in a civil partnership, but not to refuse people who are in a civil partnership, but to accept people who are married. And also not legal to refuse to take people who are married, but to accept people who are in a civil partnership.

Incidentally, you might wonder "why is it always christians in these cases?" There may be some more interesting reasons behind this, but a simple and obvious one is: because over 70% of the UK population call themselves christians, while only 5.4% are believe in other religions.

Quick Film Reviews #3

2011-06-03T23:55:00.000+01:00

Grave of the Fireflies
I spent the first half hour or so of this Studio Ghibli film right on the brink of crying, but I think that may have been more me than the film. The film's about a boy and his baby sister's during the final stages of World War 2 in Japan, amidst firebombing and rationing. I'm going to give away a bit of the plot, but I don't think it's too serious. Ultimately the film was nice enough, but didn't do all that much for me. I also can't shake the interpretation that for all the niceness of trying to find their own way, and not leave her alone, the main character basically kills his sister. It's no Panda Go Panda.

Chungking Express
Chungking Express is not quite the same meticulous, precision crafted film you might know Wong Kar Wei for, but it has the same laden, dreamy style and love of telling stories. The cinematography might not be as sumptuous, but it is still carefully composed and laden with colour. The film has some odd features as well. In particular, it presents two stories, one of which is significantly shorter. The transition between the two takes a little getting used to before you realise they do have entirely different characters. One feature I particularly liked was that the main characters give some narration, thoughts and wisdom, but I never felt these were meant to be taken too seriously. Especially when these pieces of philosophy are issued after eating several dozen tins of pineapple chunks. Stylistically the film's a wonderful evocation of a 24-hour, neon-tinted, multi-lingual city, a setting that fits the its celebration of throwaway chances and romantic possibilities.

Brazil
Probably Terry Gilliam's masterpiece, Brazil always gets compared to 1984, and I'm not going to break the habit. In fact, Brazil is a more plausible vision of the future. Instead of a faceless, ruthlessly efficient system, Brazil's totalitarianism is a somewhat careless bureaucracy. Its staff are not faceless automatons but real people, who might be nice or nasty, but who are bound by their roles and the rules that go with them. You won't get shot for challenging the system, you'll just get bounced around between agencies filling in forms until you lose the will. Ultimately I suppose it is about how people fight and escape from this system with imagination and fantasy. (Although what it does share with 1984 is the use of a woman as a liberating fantasy.) Along with that you have all the visual imagination and wit you'd expect from a Terry Gilliam film, from the architecture that brings to mind early sci-fi, futurism (and its associate fascism), to the immensely long peaks on the engineers' caps. Plus it features Michael Palin as a chummy torturer and Robert de Niro as a renegade heating engineer, who zip-lines out of every scene.

Discrimination, pt1/3 - Christians

2011-06-03T23:52:00.002+01:00

Thought experiment: how would you feel if the government decided your beliefs weren't a proper philosophy? Or if a judge told you something wasn't part of your religion?

Generally I find law fairly boring, but there are exceptions. One exception is discrimination based on belief. This area throws up a whole load of interesting cases and interesting issues, as both religious and non-religious people try to assert their rights. In particular, it brings out conflicts between different rights, and the question of what counts as a legally relevant religion or belief. It's also an area where it seems to me that the courts have made sensible decisions, but where eventually they are going to be forced into farcical or impossible positions.

This is mainly about employment law, because that's what I'm most familiar with. Under the Equality Act, employers are not allowed to discriminate against employees (or those applying for jobs) based on a range of “protected characteristics.” These characteristics are: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex and sexual orientation.

This doesn't mean you have to hire people who are unable or unwilling to do the job. Say you're running a greasy-spoon serving mainly bacon and pork sausages to overweight lorry drivers and mouthy builders. You're hiring a new chef. You are absolutely not allowed to reject an applicant because they're Jewish. However you are allowed to reject someone because they refuse to handle pork. The basic principle is – you can do something if you have a good business reason to justify it.

On to some actual cases.

One of the first to get widespread attention was the case of a British Airways stewardess, Nadia Eweida, who wanted to openly wear a crucifix. This breached a BA policy preventing staff from wearing jewellery unless if could be hidden from view.

Ms Eweida was suspended in 2006 (not solely because of the crucifix). She took BA to an employment tribunal claiming £20,000 in back pay and compensation on the grounds that the company had unlawfully discriminated against Christians. Two facts looked bad for BA. The first was that they allowed Sikhs to wear traditional iron bangles and Muslims to wear headscarves. The second was that BA changed their policy in 2007, and Ms Eweida returned to work. If it had to defend the policy as necessary, it would have trouble.

Despite this, the Employment Tribunal rejected Ms Eweida's claim, as did the Employment Appeals Tribunal and finally the Court of Appeal. The Court backed up the ET's view that “it was not a requirement of the Christian faith that a cross be worn and Mrs Eweida’s decision to wear it was a personal one.” There was no discrimination against “Christians” as a group.

A similar case came up this Easter. A council employee wanted to display a palm cross in his van, going against the council's ban on the display of personal effects. In this case, the council revised its policy and the dispute was resolved. That was probably a wise move. To start with, it avoids going to court over a minor issue. Moreover, the fact that something is legal does not make it a good idea – employers should exercise their discretion when faced by employees with firmly held values and beliefs.

The important point here is that the court has made a decision on what “Christianity” requires and what is the individual's interpretation or belief. It leaves open the question of how many people constitute a “group” or a “religion” - how large does my sect have to be before it is protected by the law? That said, perhaps I am applying a basic fallacy of jurisprudence – that because it is hard to draw a clear line, a line cannot be drawn. In fact, it is a key role of jurisprudence to draw those lines, like the line between being a child and being an adult, even where there is clearly a continuum.

Quick Film Reviews #2

2010-09-11T19:03:00.003+01:00

Ghost World
I'm going to avoid the obvious comparison for this film because it makes me feel like I'm doing it a disservice. I suppose it's a cult film of a sort, but even so Ghost World seems to be much overlooked, even by those who like a bit of late teenage direction/existential-angst. It's ambitions may not be extraordinary, but the film is a wonderfully sharp and well formed piece. It's very well acted, funny and compassionate, but I always thought the ending was also very depressing. Didn't find that quite so much this time, but there's still something to my previous opinion.
The only small thing that does get to me is that the film displays hollywood's inability to cast physically unattractive actresses. Not that there is anything in the story that implies Enid should be, but I'd still like to see how it would play out if she was not so nice to look at.

Little Miss Sunshine
I've seen Little Miss Sunshine twice before from never quite all the way from the beginning. I've also not seen it with Amy laughing her head of at bits of the film. I've never seen someone laugh so much at a horn before. Makes an excellent film even better.
Slight qualm on reflection: is the mother in the film anything more than the conventional harassed but determined and loving mother character?

Aguirre, Wrath of God
On an entirely different note, Werner Herzog's film is a bit like Apocalypse Now if it was set in South America, with Conquistadors rather than Americans and dubbed into German. Klaus Kinski as the self-destructive Aguirre sways about unnervingly, looking at people as if he's sizing up the best place to stab them. I can see its considerable merits - minimalist storytelling, a lush and unrelenting backdrop, a psychotic sense of inevitability, so-on. It reminded me of a shakespeare play at times, even though it's far from wordy; something about the pace of events, the arrangement of characters and the tragic narrative format.
Despite all that, for some reason the film didn't quite click with me. Maybe the "civilised people go mad in jungle" is a little passé, or maybe you just need to be in the right frame of mind. Also I was a little distracted by the how the guy playing the priest looked and acted just like Julian Barrat.

Quick Film Reviews #1

2010-09-05T16:26:00.001+01:00

Cross-posting some old posts, because I feel like it.

Duck Soup
It's probably lost a little over time, but Groucho's wit is sharp, and even the clowning raises some laughs. Entertaining enough to watch in its own right, but ideal if you want to know what the Marx brothers were all about.

Weekend
I raved a bit about this film before. If you want a film that doesn't necessarily make much sense or have any real plot, but batters you with ideas and with hatred for the bourgeois, this is for you. Even if you don't think that's what you want, you should watch it anyway.

The France of Godard's week end is a place where people are united only in despising one another, in a countryside covered in wrecked and burnt-out cars. Middle class are callous, shrill, greedy, murderous, working class are static, ambling, dull, materialistic. Godard's only sympathy seems to lie with revolutionary theory. If the cannibalistic, hippy "Seine-Oise Liberation Front" are an example of it in practice, then of the liberating effects of violence (chez Fanon) are not what was hoped for.
Weekend is a looking glass reflecting colonial violence back into the heart of France, as its characters reference torturing in Algeria or fighting in Ethiopia.

Princess Monononoke
The story goes that the US distributors bought Princess Mononononoke thinking they were getting a nice twee film from "the Japanese Disney", then didn't know what to do with it. It is certainly the most adult of the Studio Ghibli films I've seen - none of the others have a man getting his arms shot off in the first fifteen minutes. I've seen it a few times now, and what struck me last time was just how complex it is. The basic plot isn't particularly difficult to follow, but the number of factions, none of whom have clear-cut morals or motivations, is impressive by any standards. There is magic, but there are no magic solutions in this world, just people learning and struggling to get along.

OldBoy
It was good, but I I was a little underwhelmed. A bit melodramatic (in a negative way), I guessed a couple of the twists (and I'm very bad at guessing twists) and an ending which, while not quite deus ex machina is at least somewhat unsatisfying. The most memorable scene may be the protracted fight along the length of a corridor. It's not a masterwork of martial arts choreography nor a study in painful and bloody realism, but in the confined space it has a wonderful linear progression that's very aesthetically pleasing.

Death on the High Seas

2010-06-01T18:52:00.004+01:00

As the refrain goes, it's not clear exactly what went on when Israeli commandos boarded convoy of aid ships, starting a confrontation in which 10 people were killed (though none of the commandos). Probably the Israeli military knows what happened, provided their troops aren't incompetent or covering up. It might take a wikileaks-style full-length video to give everyone else the chance to make up their minds. I think what I've written here is appropriate to most of the likely events, but it could be invalidated by an extreme truth, from either 'side' of the debate.

Whatever their motivations and whether or not they were foolhardy, I can't help admiring the bravery of those who resisted the boarding action. You're transporting a cargo of aid to Gaza, making a political statement against the blockade. You know the Israeli military is out to stop you. You're going to challenge just how far they will go to stop you. As long as you're in international waters the legalities are, to say the least, disputed.

When they board you in the middle of the night, you know they're going to, at the least, hijack your ship and detain you. If you want to stop them it comes down to a matter of force. And as any freighter captain sailing off the horn of Africa will tell you, the best way to repel boarders is as soon as possible. Catapults and whatever weapons you can improvise versus machine guns. These people must have known what to expect in a fight; expected the Israeli commandos to respond with deadly force.
They weren't attacking civilians and they weren't blowing up soldiers from afar. They were fighting face-to-face with soldiers trying to board their ship in international waters. Unprepared soldiers, perhaps, but still fully-armed soldiers.

I think the fundamental Israel's 'bungling' is making this basic miscalculation - they expected people to back down when faced with superior force and deadly violence. Instead they found people unafraid to fight back against the odds.

I can't shake the feeling it's like a strangely inverted Cuban Missile Crisis, with a catastrophic loss of moral and political standing instead of a nuclear war as the consequence of intercepting the ships.

Strike!

2010-05-17T22:02:00.002+01:00

It's a common complaint of employers that firing or laying people off, even when there is a very good reason for it, is far too difficult and bureaucratic a process.
What I never appreciated was that this works in the other direction, too. The High Court has granted the third injunction in six months to prevent BA workers striking. Now it could be the case that Unite are incompetent. That's possible, even though you'd think that if there's one thing a union should make sure it's good at doing, it's calling a strike.

I suspect that this will come as no surprise to anyone politically aware during the Thatcher-era, that the rules for calling a strike are as challenging as any that employers face.

a diversified party system = a diversified media

2010-05-12T22:39:00.004+01:00

I'm not a serious media-watcher, but it's hard to miss large sections of the media blowing their shit, first about the Nazi LibDems and now about the LibDem-Conservative coalition.

We expect this from the ever-angry Mail, suddenly finding some new important things to hate. However in general it upsets the media ecosystem. In the UK we have some newspapers that reliably back a particular party - the Torygraph and the Mirror, for example. This election has already shifted that system, when the Guardian belatedly came out in support of the Liberal Democrats rather than Labour. Then there are the Murdoch papers that throw their impressive weight behind one party.

Coalition government make these simple media positions hard to sustain. Not only that, but I would propose that a more diverse party system, such as the one we may well be edging towards, means a more diversified media. Each significant party means a target market of supporters looking for news and comment. Is a media conglomerate like Murdoch's flexible enough to support a number of different parties? At the very least, this seems to diffuse its influence. It may force a genuinely more diverse editorial line.

On top of that this kind of change would open opportunities for new media. British newspapers are financially and professionally troubled enough as it is.

So, if and when electoral reform approaches, expect a media campaign against it as vicious as any we've seen. Coalition government and a diversified party system is not in the interest of big media corporations.

Whatever happened to our liberal dream?

2010-05-09T12:48:00.000+01:00

So, after all the talk of a path-breaking election, a new dawn for the liberal democrats, independents and small parties, what we get is the opposite. Despite a seat gained by the Green Party, independents and small parties have gone from three to two seats. Nationalist parties have remained much the same.
And the result looks like a terrible disappointment for the Liberal Democrats, losing five seats - almost 10% of their total. Their share of the vote went up by a meagre 1%, meaning they were more than usually screwed by the electoral system. But a significant jump in LibDem votes would have made a good jumping off point for reform.

To round off the disappointment, the combined total of Labour and LibDem MPs is 11 short of a majority. Even with Plaid Cymru and SNP votes, a coalition would still be two short.

So the LibDems are left trying to come to an agreement with the Conservatives, and not from a position of strength. A failure to agree a workable coalition would itself be a big setback for LibDem dreams of proportional representation, which almost always requires coalition governments. David Cameron needs to offer enough for the Liberal Democrat Party to vote in favour and to stop the party from sabotaging the coalition at some point in the future, and forcing a new election (not that this would necessarily be bad for the Tories). (Apparently LibDem agreement to a coalition would require 75% of the votes of MPs and 75% of the Federal Executive, or 2/3 of Voting Representatives.)

We'll find out soon enough what Cameron has offered, so there's not much point speculating. While the Conservative Party and the LibDems can certainly find common ground, it's unlikely that the Conservative Party would accept any major electoral reform though. (In the short-run it almost certainly means a solid Labour-LibDem majority.) Of course, the LibDems have been messed around on electoral reform before, after their electoral pacts with Labour. Labour haven't even managed to properly reform the House of Lords.

A House of Lords mainly elected by PR (or some alternative voting system) might be acceptable to the Conservatives, but could be a poison pill for the Liberal Democrats, stalling any further reform. Having both an upper and lower chamber selected in the same fashion is not a very good idea, so to get a reformed Commons would mean making another change to the Lords.

An all-party commission on electoral reform, along with a binding agreement to follow its recommendations, may be the best the Lib Dems can hope for. That commission may be hard-pressed to report before the next election (on the basis that the next election could be quite soon).

Failing that, what concessions could Cameron make to entice the Liberal Democrats without offering any significant electoral reform? That could be interesting to see; the Liberal Democrats getting their way on lots of other issues, but not on electoral reform.

Bible Stories Part 1: Genesis

2010-04-16T23:52:00.000+01:00

Sensibly, the Council of Nicea decided to put the most famous book in the Bible at the front. If they had started off with something like Joel, people could well have been put off.

The Biblical creation myth may be unusual in being quite straightforward. There are no ravens dropping rocks into the ocean, gods spitting out their semen or wars with the titans. There's just God, who makes stuff, in a particular order, is happy with it, then has a rest. Of course, God has made the first of many misjudgements with regards to his favourite creatures. It's never clear whether God is struggling to understand humanity or whether he's wilfully ignoring how his creations really think.

The story of the fall is obviously much debated, but the story of Cain and Abel is itself rather mysterious. It's not clear why God rejects Cain's offering, prompting him to murder his brother. My guess was that it is a myth related to struggles between arable farmers and herders, something that the wikipedia article confirms may be the case. Certainly there is a continued emphasis on livestock herding/farming over arable, and on animals over crops in sacrifice. Cain and Abel is just the first of a number of little stories that seem half-formed. They leave you wondering whether there's context we're missing, there are/were alternate versions, it would have made sense to people at the time, or whether the story or event was always a fragment.

Genesis itself is a series of tales that seem remarkably amoral. They're a bit like the tales of Ancient Greeks (the ones without mythical beasts), but without the flair. You get a few principles - don't murder your brother, don't sleep with other people's wives, be generous to guests and most of all, look after your family (but your daughters are less important than guests), and most of all, do what God says - but on the whole that's not what it's about.

The concluding story of Joseph is definitely the most complete and conventionally structured narrative. Joseph is also a rare sympathetic character in the first few books of the Bible. It's no wonder the story got translated into the most divine of art-forms, the musical. An interesting little tidbit from the story of Joseph is that he didn't just dole out food during the famine, he made Egyptians pay for it, so that by the end of the seven years the people of Egypt had sold all their lands and possessions, and were left as slaves to the Pharaoh.

In Genesis you start to see some of the characteristics of God that are less commonly remarked upon. We all know he's a mighty god, a jealous god, but he's also a very forgetful god. Despite insisting on all manner of signs of the covenant between himself and the descendants of Abraham, he still needs to be regularly reminded of what he promised. I get the feeling that had he not made the rainbow as a reminder of his promise never to destroy life on earth again, he really would forget. I suppose at least in this case he knows his problems, like the person who leaves post-it notes everywhere. He also has a bit of an obsession with foreskins.

Quick Book Reviews #1

2010-04-13T00:07:00.002+01:00

Posting some old stuff here to get a bit of momentum

The Economic Naturalist: Why economics explains almost everything by Robert H Frank
Robert Frank has found the most economical way to write a book, which is to copy a load of his students' essays. The Economic Naturalist is a great introduction to the basic principles of economics, from the basic proposition that a person does something if the perceived benefits outweigh the costs to tragedies of the commons to marketplace signals. From experience, Frank's argument that economics is taught badly - with too few practical applications and too little attention to the basics - is true. If you want an easy to read, and easy to dip in and out of, economics primer, this is a good choice.
Having studied some economics, I was familiar with large parts of the book, but it gave me a better grounding and some portions - particularly the section on discount pricing - were interesting and largely new to me.

On the downside, it's also a good illustration of some problems with basic economics. The answer to the question "can economics explain everything?" appears to be yes, as long as you expand "economics" to include just anything else you think is relevant. At least one of the answers in the book doesn't actually invoke any economics, while others beg the question. Sometimes it seems like the economics is explaining the easy bit.
Quite a few of the answers given in the book are also very dubious, and almost all are unsupported by any empirical research or evaluation of alternative explanations. Saying that economics is an excellent way of quickly generating plausible hypotheses about things is less catchy but a lot more plausible than that it explains everything. How accurate these hypotheses are is open to question.

Collapse: why societies choose to succeed or fail by Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is a biologist-cum-anthropologist-cum-scientifically-minded-historian/archaeologist and Collapse is his attempt to demonstrate that environmental factors can and do cause societies to collapse, and to learn some lessons from this. Diamond's a good, and persuasive author, but still I wasn't massively struck by this book. Maybe I'm not a good audience for it, as I don't take much persuading. Even so, Diamond's scientific instincts to pile on the evidence, from every kind of nologist could try the patience. There's a similar issue with Guns, Germs and Steel, where the last third largely goes over evidence when you've already been convinced by the first two thirds.

Collapse is interesting in some ways. For example, Diamond doesn't come down on the side of either top-down or bottom-up solutions. They both have their places. What's particularly important is that people can't escape the results of their actions. He is positive about the potential for corporations, with appropriate pressure, to be environmentally responsible. Also, did you know Vikings were afflicted by goat-scorn? Or, more seriously, that despite being starved (literally) for agricultural and hunting resources, Greenland Norse didn't eat fish.

One quote I was particularly taken by is about how the Japanese, who had big problems with deforestation, solved their problems with the resources at hand. That is an important lesson, that you can't rely on the development or invention of new resources. It brings up the role of technology, which Diamond is very skeptical of. After increasing our environmental impact for centuries (millenia even), what are the chances technological developments will suddenly start reducing it? At the very least, we need to have a strong degree of skepticism about the impacts of more environmentally safe technologies, particularly when they involve large-scale implementation costs. At the same time, technological change is one of the strongest forces in our society. Can we not treat it as a resource, which can be directed in different ways, albeit to somewhat uncertain outcomes?

Diamond emphasises that little is inevitable, and societies choose their path. He is "cautiously optimistic" about our prospects for dealing with environmental problems, but I can't help feeling that you can't write a successful book if you're not. In particular, it's not clear to what degree key decision-makers can isolate themselves from negative changes - if nothing else, because many of those changes happen slowly. We also suffer from a serious problem of "creeping normalcy", which makes it hard to deal with gradual and stochastic (variable, climate-style) changes. Fortunately, right at the back there's a picture of Jared Diamond looking incredibly friendly and curmudgeonly, to comfort you if you're feeling a bit depressed by it all.

Watchmen, story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Seeing that the film is out, I thought "it's about time I read the graphic novel", although I couldn't read it in public because then everyone would think I wasn't cool. I won't add much to everything else that's been written about this comic, but it certainly is an acute and extraordinary piece of work. I'm not sure about the odd thing - I'm not sure the climax fits perfectly and there's a parallel comic story that's I don't entirely get. Some characters are more interesting than others, but that's inevitable when some of them are so interesting.

Amazon has the first few pages to read here.

If you've any interest in super heroes, popular culture, mutually assured destruction, morality, society, people, or just about anything else, then you should probably read Watchmen.

Postscript: I was talking to Mark the other week about the difference between the ending of the Watchmen film and comic. On the one hand, the ending of the film is significantly less mental. But on the other, it does significantly change the connotations of the ending. Which is more appropriate I couldn't say.

rags to rags, riches to riches

2010-04-11T16:34:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but haven't got round to it until now.

Last month The Guardian reported the finding of an OECD study that the UK has the worst social mobility of the dozen OECD countries for which data was available.

In economics, the basic measure of social mobility is how much someone's income is determined by the income of their parents, after controlling for certain variables. That's certainly not a perfect measure - for example it misses changes in income within people's lives - but it's hard enough to measure as it is. The OECD report also looks at the education, and its relationships with income.

This graph shows how much the income of parents determines the income of their children. The higher the score, the less social mobility there is. In crude terms, the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor. Most people wouldn't need persuading this is a bad thing. The UK is alongside Italy and the US in the difficulty poor children face getting richer, and the ease with which rich children stay rich. (Technically speaking, because of the limited accuracy of the measurements, we probably can't assert any real distinction between them.)

There are a few things I'd like to know more about. First is the influence of intra-generational inequality. The report does talk about this, and I think finds that inequality reduces mobility, but I didn't read it closely enough to understand exactly how, or how they accounted for this. Second, what is the effect of immigration? Migrant status is factored in in some way, but there's no discussion of how it might affect the findings. It may be of note that countries like the US and France have relatively high levels of immigration, Austria and Norway low. Thirdly, how does the size and heterogeneity of the US affect its figures? Eg. do people in poor states stay where they are, rather than making the (comparatively) distant move to a richer state to earn more money?

Those provisos aside, what struck me about this report was the same as other international studies of social mobility I've seen. It's a conventional view that the US is a land where anyone can make it big, that it is full of rags to riches (and riches to rags) stories, and more socially fluid than Europe. The actual evidence suggests otherwise. If you're born into a poor family in the US you're more than twice as likely to stay poor than someone in Denmark, or Canada. If you're born into a rich family, you're more likely to stay rich.

I'd like to have some useful insights for the UK, but unfortunately I don't. The report finds certain educational policies, plus redistributive and income support policies to strongly enhance mobility. If you're interested, have a skim of it yourself.

Freakonomics

2008-06-13T21:29:00.003+01:00

I was a bit disappointed by this book, but that may not be its fault.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Investigates the Hidden Side of Everything makes the following proposition:
Economics presents a very powerful set of tools, particularly the study of incentives and statistical analysis. (Though other disciplines might also like to lay a claim on many of these tools.) The trouble is that they've been put to use on very dull issues.

Steven Levitt (economist) and Stephen Dubner (journalist) try to rectify this by turning these tools on to questions such as why drug dealers live with their mothers and what difference good parenting makes. The book is a collection of studies of assorted subjects, rather than an attempt to formally argue the initial proposition or anything else.

Now part of the reason I didn't like the book all that much is probably because I'm already familiar with this kind of approach, mostly from reading the Freakonomics blog. So it hardly has the shock and perspective changing value it might otherwise have.

That aside, the book is rather hit and miss. It's written in a journalistic style, which is fine really, but grated with me a bit. The chapters are very hit and miss. In particular the last chapter on names is horribly boring. The most interesting is almost certainly the chapter on drugs gangs. Coincidentally, this is also a chapter that relies heavily on the research of someone else... It's based on the work of Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist who basically spent a long time hanging out with and kind of writing the biography of a drugs gang. That produced some fascinating results, but it's a method quite different to Dubner & Levitt's.

The economics data they take from Venkatesh comes from the gang's carefully recorded account books. What these reveal is that in the four tier structure that the gang was part of those at the top earned a lot - $500,000 a year for the top tier, $100,000 for the gang leaders, both tax free (naturally) - but those at the bottom earned only $7 an hour - less than minimum wage. The top level did have a 1 in 4 chance of being in prison at any particular point, but the lowest level people had a 7% chance of being killed each year. Levitt & Dubner conclude the gang members are living the same dream as millions of americans hoping for a career in Hollywood or the NFL - working a crappy job in the hopes of striking it big. But they fail to address why they have chosen this particular career (waitressing while hoping for acting work isn't great, but it has a much lower mortality rate) or even whether these odds make any sense in the first place. Without more sociological data the conclusion is seriously lacking.

Not that Levitt & Dubner's approach isn't a decent one - there are good examples of what statistical analysis can discover, unintended consequences (particularly teachers getting the incentive to cheat on behalf of their students). If there are two lessons you can take from the book, they are probably: 1) incentives are very powerful motivators; 2) always consider how people will 'cheat' to get them. You can see those issues very clearly in criticisms of government policy here - how they've crudely tried to incentivise public sector workers, but not how creatively they'll 'cheat' to get the rewards. There are some lessons about devising incentive schemes tucked away in Freakonomics, I'm sure, but they're not spelled out much.
Another lesson is: 3) learn how to do (multivariate) regression analysis.

I've got the revised and expanded edition of the book, which includes Stephen Dubner's original piece on Levitt for the New York Times (which I didn't read), and a selection of posts from their blog. I don't really know about their value. They bulk out the book (which is under 200 pages, quite large spaced) without adding much, and nothing that's not freely available on the web.

My advice is: don't bother with the book, but read the blog. You'll soon pick up the key points, and you can happily skip over all the bits that don't interest you or aren't quite so good.

True Cost

2008-05-26T14:12:00.002+01:00

I was walking home the other day looking at posters pasted up on the fence around a building site. "I've no objection to flyposting in places like this..." I thought, "...as long as the people who do it pay the costs of clearing it up..."

Then I caught myself. Just how exactly do you go about doing that?

It's a commonplace view in economics these days, the doctrine of making people and organisations pay externalities, 'shadow prices' or 'true cost', or whatever you prefer to call them. The logic's basically like this. The market system works fine, except that people can get away without paying for a range of things. Including some very important things, like pollution. So what's needed is to bring those costs into the transaction - make companies pay £10 for every ton of carbon they emit, or £100,000 for every endangered animal they kill, and so-on. That pushes production and consumption away from bad things, and allows you to compare different bad things - it's worth killing one endangered animal if it saves 10,000 tons of carbon emissions.
Maybe it's not fully come into the world of politics, or everyday use - probably because those two are more practical - but it's fundamental in a lot of economics, and to quite a bit of political (especially environmental) activism.

Can you really put a price on everything like that, and make people pay it, though? It's a massive project, even supporters must agree.
The question's certainly not novel - it's pretty obvious, but other day it struck me just what this whole idea is really like; it's one of those great, and always slightly loopy, projects to bring everything under one philosophical system. In particular the enlightenment project to rationalise the world. In its way it's a much more encompassing system than traditional economics - that's happy to forget about all the extra bits and pieces and either to leave them to other fields or insist they're ignored.

Burma & post-colonial anti-colonialism

2008-05-17T13:06:00.001+01:00

It's one of the features of being a former colonial power that not only do we tend to think we're responsible for most of the problems in the world but also that we have the responsibility and power to fix them.

The most interesting thing I've heard about Burma in the last few weeks - and granted I haven't been paying close attention - was a snippet from the peer Lord Desai. He explained how China and India are battling for influence in Burma and access to its economic resources. Rather than lose out to the pragmatic Chinese, India has put its generally liberal foreign policy on hold and worked with the Burmese regime.

We can say and do what we like, but in the face of India and China there's not really much we can do to influence Burma.

Why did I not know about this?

2008-05-13T22:36:00.000+01:00

From this post on Gin, Television and Social Surplus.

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

not just illegal, but unacceptable.

2008-05-08T17:54:00.006+01:00

The Liberal Conspiracy blog calls it "evidence-free" policy making. It is certainly a classic example of how drugs policy is made.

In 2004, Cannabis was downgraded from a Class B to a Class C drug, meaning penalties for possession and supply were reduced (though the maximum sentence for supply remained the same) and giving a signal to police to spend less resources on combating the drug. In the years since then, there has been a steady decline in the rate of cannabis use (eg. from 10.8% to 8.2% of people admitting to having used it in the last year). This is consistent with the well-established trend that making drugs illegal tends to increase their use.

Set against this decrease in use was an increase in the strength of cannabis sold and new evidence that cannabis increases the likelihood of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. This, and a media campaign which included not just the usual right-wing tirades, but the Independent dramatically reversing its formerly liberal position.

The government commissioned the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs to produce a report, as it is required to do whenever it wants to change the law. Among the ACMD's conclusions were:

Although there is a consistent (though weak) association, from longitudinal studies, between cannabis use and the development of psychotic illness, this is not reflected in the available evidence on the incidence of psychotic conditions. The most likely (but not the only) explanation is that cannabis – in the population as a whole – plays only a modest role in the development of these conditions. The possibility that the greater use of cannabis preparations with a higher THC content might increase the harmfulness of cannabis to mental health cannot be denied; but the behaviour of cannabis users, in the face of stronger products – as well as the magnitude of a causal association with psychotic illnesses – is uncertain.

Evidence about the social harms associated with cannabis is clearer. Despite public anxieties, there is little real evidence that cannabis is a significant cause of acquisitive crime or of anti-social behaviour. There is, though, cause for concern about the growth of cannabis farms and the emergence of wider organised crime, including people trafficking, that is associated with them.

Decisions about advising on classification must, ultimately, be based on the Council’s collective judgment about the relative harmfulness of substances within, and between, classes. On balance, taking into account the totality of the relevant issues and very mindful of the actual and potential harms, the majority of the Council advises that cannabis and the cannabinols remain in Class C. Although the majority of members recognise the harms caused by the use of cannabis to individuals and society, they do not consider these to be as serious as those of drugs in Class B.

Just to add to this, the police stated reclassification would not change their strategy of "confiscate and warn", freeing up police time for what they consider more serious matters.

Faced with this evidence, the government did not sway from its course, and also decided to throw in some extra new penalties. Carefully cherrypicking from the ACMD's evidence, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith stated "young people may binge on skunk in the same way as alcohol, trying to achieve the maximum effect". Presumably she was oblivious to the implications of comparing the use of cannabis to that of a perfectly legal drug.

According to Gordon Brown, the government needs "to send out a signal that cannabis use was not just illegal but also unacceptable". This may seem like an odd thing to say. Is being unacceptable now a step up from illegal?
On further thought though, this makes sense. After all David Cameron had to specifically state that he knows it's important to obey the law (even though he didn't). Well done David, having mastered the finer points of our legal system you are truly fit to be in charge of it. So if there's the chance that Cameron might be confused about this crucial point, is it any wonder Gordon Brown thinks cannabis users need it making clear to them?

Expect to see a rise in the use of cannabis in the next few years.

(All unreferenced info from the ACMD report into cannabis.)

‘why the fuck are we all so miserable in the first place?’

2008-05-06T18:46:00.003+01:00

Lon takes issue with my question "can money buy you happiness?"
The first thing to say to this is that there's no objective measure of happiness anywhere around here. Nothing to say "members of this group are happy", "the people in this country are unhappy". All we can say is that these people are happy than these people or less happy than they used to be. (Incidentally, there are at least two statistical effects tending to push the data here away from the extremes and towards the middle - see comment on the last post.)

As I only hold knowledge about animal behaviour, I have been taught that to keep animals happy, in order for them to breed in captivity and not suffer from depression, species have to be kept as close to their evolved way of life as possible, especially primates.

I've always wondered just how happy animals really are, especially when you take into account their periods of disease, hunger, death of relatives and friends and so-on. Sadly there is no survey data where they trained dogs to bark a number of times to indicate how happy they were.
This sounds like the sort of thing an evolutionary psychologist would say, though. I'd like to see a fight between an evolutionary psychologist and an economist.

Mark takes up the theme:

Though it's not empirical, quantifiable data (something that would be very difficult to glean in this area), I have seen many documentaries & read a lot of articles of traveling reporters & Humanist scientists who have spent time with remote tribes who insist such people, whilst living a subsistence lifestyle, are the happiest people they have ever met. These people spend their lives working for the direct benefit of a small group of people, hunting, gathering, building, growing.

That's a familiar viewpoint, though as with animals I wonder how accurately it reflects the burdens of disease and early death (particularly in childbirth) in these communities.

Naturally, these societies are not reflected in the Gallup, or any other, polls. This does suggest, however, that rural populations might be happier than urban ones - having a somewhere more traditional lifestyle. That's not something that's obviously borne out in the data, though one interesting theory you could propose is that the reason Easterlin found a paradox and this data is because poor countries have urbanised a great deal since the 1970s. Still, I don't think it's an argument that would stand up to scrutiny.

The point is, what should we be aiming for to make people happier? (If we accept that as a reasonable goal.) Some positive points about increasing incomes there is good evidence of a strong relationship between increasing income and happiness and that it's something people, governments, society and suchlike are experienced thinking about. One of the downsides is that that doesn't necessarily mean they're good at doing it.

In other words, it's not a foregone conclusion that effort put into increasing GDP will be more successful than the same amount of effort put into increasing happiness another way. Trying to increase GDP is certainly not the same thing as succeeding... Though that applies to other changes as well. The US experience is salutary. Here's a case where a country has increased its GDP, with the assistance of government policies strongly aimed at this, at the expense of other goals. This success on GDP hasn't made people any happier.

So what should we be doing to make people happier? To start with, none of this is prescriptive at an individual lesson. It's not saying the way to make yourself happy is to go out and try and raise your income. In terms of broader social and political aims, should economic growth (with appropriate environmental caveats) be our primary aim? Or would we be better off using other means?

The question of whether we might benefit from trying tomould our societies more closely to homo sapiens' 'natural state' and/or incorporate more features from tribal societies is one that I'm going to have to leave open.

Interesting as Wolfers and Stevenson's research is, it still leaves these questions wide open for debate. And even the specific argument about happiness is bound to keep running away.

Yes, but are you really happy?

2008-05-05T16:37:00.004+01:00

Now there's at least one obvious problem with this approach to happiness. To quote my psychologist cohort Chelle, "[t]he main problem with self report is that people are big fat liars." A more thorough survey would look at physiological and other objective measures. But of course, happiness and other emotional state are subjective experiences, so self-reporting is not an unreasonable measure. It should also be noted that 1) the Wolfers-Stevenson paper is titled "...Subjective Well-Being..." and 2) any criticisms of self-reporting apply just as much to the classic Easterlin study.

What about the main questions, which ask variations on 'how do you rate your life?' or 'how happy are you with your life?' Maybe we're placing too much weight on that one form of question?
Well one of the interesting things here is that the Gallup surveys include a whole range of other questions related to happiness, from "did you experience sadness yesterday?" to "did you have tasty food yesterday?" The relationship in most cases is pretty weak, but in every case increased income improved people's lives (or so they said). (See here.)

Have a look at depression, for example. I know I would have said that rates of depression are higher in rich countries; there's all this angst about unfulfilling consumerist lifestyles, suburban anomie, lack of social support and so-on. It turns out, though, that if you ask people "have you experienced feelings of depression" that's not what you find.

Lon asks another sensible question, "If money can buy happiness, shouldn't that mean the majority of the world would have committed suicide by now?"

To start with, I haven't found any international rates for depression, but there is data for suicides (see here). On the whole it seems more people kill themselves in rich countries (though China and India are major mid-liers and stats for Africa are almost non-existent). Suicide is a pretty puzzling phenomenon and I don't think it's one that relates to other factors in a clear way. Depression, and other mental illnesses, it's harder to say, but depression is a global burden - I think the WHO rates it something like #4 in its list of problem-causing diseases. We're much more aware of it in the rich world partly because we have resources for diagnosis. And, to give the professionals some credit, that may also be why we report lower rates.

That aside, if you trace the best fit line back, it hits 0 on the x-axis with a happiness score not far below Togo(?) and Benin. That's roughly how happy cavepeople might have been... It doesn't seem horrifyingly unhappy.

Happiness is...

2008-05-03T16:30:00.006+01:00

positively related to the log of Gross Domestic Product per head.

It's a fundamental notion in economics that expanding output of goods and services - that is, GDP - makes people happier. That is a view that has always been challenged by some individuals and philosophies, but it has always been dominant in economics and in politics, both capitalist and socialist.
In 1974, however, Richard Easterlin studied the empirical evidence from surveys that asked people how happy they were. Easterlin found the following paradox:

1) within countries rich people are happier than poor people.
2) rich countries are not happier than poor countries.
3) countries do not get happier as they get richer.

This is a finding that remains controversial to this day. One of the theories that can be drawn from it is that richer people are happier because they compare themselves to less well off people. Naturally, we compare ourselves more to people in the same country as us, which is why it is income differences within countries that have an effect. The idea that steadily increasing wealth isn't automatically making us happier - indeed it may be making us more unhappy - has become widespread, if not quite mainstream. Examples range from the Kingdom of Bhutan's commitment to "Gross National Happiness" to the concept of Affluenza, developed by psychologist Oliver James, to even the Tory party suggesting it would aim more for happiness than growth. It's certainly a commonplace notion among people I know that rates of depression are higher in rich countries, or at least the UK and US (and possible Japan and Scandinavia), than poor ones.

Recently, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have examined more up-to-date evidence on happiness. The approach they use is similar to Easterlin, relying on surveys which basically ask people to rate how happy they are. The results and discussion can be found in a series of posts on the freakonomics blog here and in a proper academic article. They're one of the most interesting things I've read this year.

Wolfers and Stevenson's conclusion is that in fact higher GDP does increase happiness, both within and between countries. Their view is that Easterlin simply didn't have the data available to make any firm conclusions. Since 1974 we have access to much more information, most notable the epic Gallup World Poll.

Plot things on a graph and you get this:

That is clearly a strong correlation between GDP and 'life satisfaction', even without looking at the proper stats (giving an extremely high correlation of 0.82).

One thing that is worth noting before moving on is that the scale for GDP is logarithmic. In other words, an extra $100 increases the happiness of someone on $500 per year more than it does someone on $5000 a year. That's common sense, and something that's accepted by economics, but it's still something that doesn't get emphasised enough.

What the logarithmic scale does show clearly is that a proportional increase in GDP has the same proportionate effect in happiness regardless of how rich you are. It doesn't matter if you are on $500 or $5000, if your income doubles, your happiness will increase by the same proportion (about a third of a unit). If this weren't the case, the best fit line would not be straight.
There is no 'saturation effect' beyond which extra wealth doesn't make people any happier. Or at least, if there is, we haven't reached it yet.

Just to be thorough, Wolfers & Stevenson show that not only are rich countries happier than poor ones, but within countries rich people are happier than poor people (here) but on the whole countries get happier as they get richer (a href="http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/the-economics-of-happiness-part-5-will-raising-the-incomes-of-all-raise-the-happiness-of-all/" target="_new">here). The former relationship is universal, but the latter has more problems. It holds for most European countries (but not Belgium), seems to hold (with some caveats) for Japan, but does not apply to the US. On the whole, people in the US have got marginally less happy in the last 30 years. The authors suggest that this may be due to the distribution of income - the rich have got richer, pushing up average incomes, while increasing happiness little (due to the diminishing returns mentioned above). There's more analysis of the US in the full paper, though not of poor grumpy Belgium.
This time-series data also suggests that all this is not simply the result of people comparing their income to others.

Has conventional economics been right all along on this topic? Do we romanticise poverty and the lifestyles of the poor? Figures on suicide (see next post) do suggest rich countries have particular problems, and the US is a salutary lesson not to forget diminishing returns and let the already wealthy take the most benefits. On the whole though, the empirical data suggests they are significantly happier.

(Cliffhanger ending: Or does it..........?)

Takeover

2008-04-28T22:16:00.002+01:00

I'm going to try not to make this a linkspamming blog, but some things are too good not to link to.
If you've ever wondered how corporate takeovers work, specifically, how the Microsoft/Yahoo takeover is going, Marc Andreessen has talked to a couple of expert corporate attorneys. Don't switch off at the mention of attorneys (I guess I probably lost some people on "corporate takeovers"), because to my surprise it's actually a very clear and readable account.

So go and have a read of it, and you'll soon be able to spout off like a hard-nosed business journalist.

Prologue

2008-04-28T21:00:00.004+01:00

I finally got myself a proper blog. Proper as in not OMG EMO! livejournalling, not as in hosting/designing/etc.ing.
Not sure about the colour scheme, but I'll work on that.

For those that don't know me, this will be a mish-mash of thoughts on topics like politics, economics, society, computers, the interwebs, books, films and whatever else takes my fancy. I'll do my best to keep it straightforward and not overcomplicate things.

I'm going to port a few bits of stuff from LJ to get things started off, and try to put together a comprehensive post on happiness, then we'll see how it goes. I hope that this doesn't go completely unread, and I can get some interesting comments on things. Oh, and feedback about what was interesting, or what I should be thinking/writing about is always appreciated, both from people I know and people I don't. Not that I promise to act on it, but I'll try...

That's about it, I think. Add to your bookmarks and RSS & ATOM readers!

tech wars pt.1: google

2008-04-27T11:57:00.006+01:00

I wonder how long it'll be before Google loses its shine. Already, executives are trying to distance themselves from its "don't be evil" motto, while some people are suggesting the pace of innovation at google is slowing - most notoriously google's online storage service, which has apparently been in development for years now, or google maps' loss of the technical lead to MS live maps (though the search function on the latter is awful). (Edit: and it looks like I picked the wrong time to start up with blogger.) Rumour has it that google's not attracting so many of the top smart people any more. Though I'd still be happy to work there.

What really concerns me though, as a good financial services sector worker, is data security. Despite losing the lead in some areas, google is still at the forefront of hosting/storing/aggregating people's data. Gmail, for example, famously has such a large storage capacity you don't need to delete anything. So most people (I imagine) don't. Which means there's a huge archive of stuff about them saved somewhere in the world (probably backed up in two locations). Wherever it is, it's not on their computer. Add to this the fact that someone's google log-in works for multiple products so you hack one you have access to all the others. That, of course, is the weakness of centralisation.
We see serious security breaches all the time, so how long before google suffers a big bust in and someone steals a load of data, or a load of accounts? Or it just loses it somewhere. Google's CAPTCHA technology (those things that ask you to type some letters from an image to prove you're not a bot) has been cracked, so they're not invulnerable tech gods.

I'm not trying to write an OMG DISASTER IS CUMIN! post here, just throwing this out for consideration.

Two things probably work in google's favour though. The first is that while they're not perfect, they are comparatively good. I'm not aware of any major breaches at Microsoft, and they run windows. If you're looking to do some crime, you go for the easy targets, not the hard ones. And there are plenty of easier targets around. Second, the volume and type of data stored by google makes it less appealing for criminals. If someone, say pulled a dump of a load of gmail accounts and posted it'd be a privacy disaster. Worse than that 20GB file of myspace pictures on bittorrent. However, myspace is filled with idiots. I mean, uh, there's limited monetary value in doing that. You could do a search in it all for bank account details, account names and passwords and stuff like that. It'd be a very inefficient way of doing things though, when you could just hack into TJ/K Max and grab a load of credit card numbers directly.

Incidentally, internet security gets more exciting the more you watch Ghost in the Shell. Particularly stuff like this, this, or those Chinese cyber attacks on US and UK government computers. Or the attacks on Latvia (or one of the other little baltic states) by Russia that turned out to be just one unhappy Latvian guy. Now all we need are the cyberbrains.