For those amused by the discomfiture of the clergy, there has been undoubtedly an entertainment in watching the officials of St. Paul's Cathedral tying themselves into more knots than you would find in a Franciscan's cincture. Unfortunately all jokes eventually wear thin (a fact of which Jonathan Ross should have been apprised in about 1993) and it's becoming more difficult to see the funny side. Not least on account of a report today that Dr. Richard Chartres (surely that isn't his real name?) is advancing the argument that the protestors camp should be evicted on the grounds that it might be infiltrated by violent activists.
Chartres, described by The Times as "the third most senior cleric in the Church of England" apparently voiced the following concerns: "we do not know what is going to happen. The camp could be taken over by people who are very different from the ones who are in charge at the moment."
Well, much as it pains Sordel to slip into the vernacular, duh. I don't know who will be running Dixons next week: it could be taken over by people who are very different from the ones who are in charge at the moment. Just in case, maybe it should be closed down.
The counterargument to this is obvious: Dixons is operated by a bunch of professional retail experts (bolstered, it should be admitted, by a load of spotty teenagers who always seem keen to chat in a back room rather than show their acne-ridden faces on the shop floor) whereas the Occupy London protestors are a bunch of naive and erstwhile-tree-hugging hippies ripe for exploitation by would-be criminals. Violent infiltrators usually gain entrance to Dixons through the front windows via the energetic application of waste-bins, not by applying for jobs and working their way up. In this (and perhaps nothing else) Dixons would seem to have a robustness and resilience totally absent from a protestors' campsite.
Yet while Dixons does not seem to warrant the mistrust that Dr. Chartres lavishes on Occupy London, I can think of at least one institution that does.
The Church of England.
Isn't the Anglican clergy full of precisely the same variety of wide-eyed idealist who is currently camping out in front of St. Paul's Cathedral? Aren't they all the same feckless bunch of warts on the behind of society who have demonstrated by their lifestyle choice their complete incapacity to make a conventional contribution to society, yet who make a profession of asserting their high moral standards? Aren't they a proven target of criminals (in this case, child molesters) who would like nothing better than to infiltrate their organization and use it for other purposes?
When we start evicting people on the basis of what might happen in the future, it is my modest proposal that we don't stop at the doors of St. Paul's but proceed directly into the body of the cathedral.
In the meantime, perhaps Dr. Chartres consult a book with which he is supposedly familiar and take "no thought of tomorrow, for tomorrow shall take thought of the things for itself". Or he could, you know, pray.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
50/50 Hindsight
Sordel is feeling somewhat soiled today, having been forced to visit the Daily Mirror website so that you, Dear Reader, do not need to.
The poor old Mirror (broadly speaking a distorting mirror, given that the people therein reflected are always wickeder, more repulsive or otherwise just more than they would be in real life) is up in arms because of the injustice of a largely random competition having a largely random result.
Nathan Hageman (separated from the hangman by one small letter) is evidently a "thug" and a "brute", as well as being £1 million pounds the richer as a consequence of a roulette spin on the new Ant & Dec vehicle, Red or Black?. Contrary to all reasonable expectation, the roulette ball seems to have paid no attention whatsoever when bouncing around the wheel to the fact that Hageman was sentenced to five years for beating up his ex-girlfriend.
In this, as usual, God has had his little joke at the expense of those who care. Some might say it was affliction enough on His part to have permitted Red or Black? be green-lighted in the first place, but now He compounds the misery by allowing the sun to shine on the unjust man while the rest of us get the thorough drenching that only ITV on a Saturday night can bestow.
Simon Cowell is reportedly livid that someone of such low moral character should get rich from reality television which (apart from setting up an obvious but quite unwarranted joke) merely suggests that Cowell did not understand the rules of the competition that he himself had scratched on the back of a beer-mat.
Before we castigate the creator (and the Creator) too energetically, however, it is worth noting that there evidently was another and more immediate failure: on the part of the show's producers when they were "vetting" contestants. Evidently, Hageman admitted to having a criminal conviction for ABH and aggravated burglary, but claimed that the victim was a man and not his ex-girlfriend.
It reveals the mentality of the producers to a nicety, then, that their consciences (which would have been untroubled by a violent criminal winning the prize had his victim been a man) pinch somewhat when the victim is revealed to be a woman.
Sordel, meanwhile, is willing to admit to having watched roughly five minutes of Red & Black? last Saturday and would like several series of The X Factor to be taken into consideration. I consider myself to be the principal victim and can assure you that no women were harmed.
Can I haz my million still?
The poor old Mirror (broadly speaking a distorting mirror, given that the people therein reflected are always wickeder, more repulsive or otherwise just more than they would be in real life) is up in arms because of the injustice of a largely random competition having a largely random result.
Nathan Hageman (separated from the hangman by one small letter) is evidently a "thug" and a "brute", as well as being £1 million pounds the richer as a consequence of a roulette spin on the new Ant & Dec vehicle, Red or Black?. Contrary to all reasonable expectation, the roulette ball seems to have paid no attention whatsoever when bouncing around the wheel to the fact that Hageman was sentenced to five years for beating up his ex-girlfriend.
In this, as usual, God has had his little joke at the expense of those who care. Some might say it was affliction enough on His part to have permitted Red or Black? be green-lighted in the first place, but now He compounds the misery by allowing the sun to shine on the unjust man while the rest of us get the thorough drenching that only ITV on a Saturday night can bestow.
Simon Cowell is reportedly livid that someone of such low moral character should get rich from reality television which (apart from setting up an obvious but quite unwarranted joke) merely suggests that Cowell did not understand the rules of the competition that he himself had scratched on the back of a beer-mat.
Before we castigate the creator (and the Creator) too energetically, however, it is worth noting that there evidently was another and more immediate failure: on the part of the show's producers when they were "vetting" contestants. Evidently, Hageman admitted to having a criminal conviction for ABH and aggravated burglary, but claimed that the victim was a man and not his ex-girlfriend.
It reveals the mentality of the producers to a nicety, then, that their consciences (which would have been untroubled by a violent criminal winning the prize had his victim been a man) pinch somewhat when the victim is revealed to be a woman.
Sordel, meanwhile, is willing to admit to having watched roughly five minutes of Red & Black? last Saturday and would like several series of The X Factor to be taken into consideration. I consider myself to be the principal victim and can assure you that no women were harmed.
Can I haz my million still?
Friday, August 12, 2011
Looters to the Court of St. James
Doubtless you shared Sordel's shock. An ambassador was among those recently rioting in London! Some Ruritanian minor nobility, one might presume, tired of cowering behind the windows of his embassy in silk sash and monocle while the people of England marched for civil rights and HDMI cables.
But, hang on.
It was an Olympics ambassador.
One of the things that the media are very good at is inventing grandiloquently entitled professions when it suits them. Robert Sebbage, murdered while on holiday in Greece, was evidently an England mascot which, with all deference to his better qualities, seemed to be a stretch of terminology.
A 17-year-old who turned herself into the police for looting Richer Sounds, "had been learning ballet since the age of seven and fears that she will now lose her place at dance school". Sordel tends to think the age of seven as a rather late start for ballet, but she is described by The Times as a ballerina which, on the evidence of the article, is both unlikely and something of an insult to proper ballerinas, who are typically the principal dancers in ballet companies.
Our "Olympic ambassador" is Chelsea Ives, an athlete whose competition results are readily available online. Her main disciplines would appear to involve running, throwing things and jumping (skills for which she may have found a practical use) but being a reasonably promising sportswoman and one of eight thousand doing voluntary work to promote the Olympics does not make her an Olympic "ambassador", except in the fevered brains of news editors and the British Olympic committee: neither of whom are strangers to overstatement.
Gushing lists of these glorious occupations were trotted out in newspapers, wall posts and tweets. Graphic designers evidently bathe in champagne and have white truffles for loofahs. Social workers have uniforms of spun gold with diamond inlay. Semi-professional footballers (ah, how it must have hurt the news editors to add that semi-) use bankers for their footstools and millionaires for their spitoons.
The problem with this "title inflation" is that the impression has been given that - far from those suffering from social deprivation - the rioters were all members of the urban nobility, living it large, them with their degrees and flashy careers.
One problem with rioting? It leads to a lot of heat, and not so much light.
But, hang on.
It was an Olympics ambassador.
One of the things that the media are very good at is inventing grandiloquently entitled professions when it suits them. Robert Sebbage, murdered while on holiday in Greece, was evidently an England mascot which, with all deference to his better qualities, seemed to be a stretch of terminology.
A 17-year-old who turned herself into the police for looting Richer Sounds, "had been learning ballet since the age of seven and fears that she will now lose her place at dance school". Sordel tends to think the age of seven as a rather late start for ballet, but she is described by The Times as a ballerina which, on the evidence of the article, is both unlikely and something of an insult to proper ballerinas, who are typically the principal dancers in ballet companies.
Our "Olympic ambassador" is Chelsea Ives, an athlete whose competition results are readily available online. Her main disciplines would appear to involve running, throwing things and jumping (skills for which she may have found a practical use) but being a reasonably promising sportswoman and one of eight thousand doing voluntary work to promote the Olympics does not make her an Olympic "ambassador", except in the fevered brains of news editors and the British Olympic committee: neither of whom are strangers to overstatement.
Gushing lists of these glorious occupations were trotted out in newspapers, wall posts and tweets. Graphic designers evidently bathe in champagne and have white truffles for loofahs. Social workers have uniforms of spun gold with diamond inlay. Semi-professional footballers (ah, how it must have hurt the news editors to add that semi-) use bankers for their footstools and millionaires for their spitoons.
The problem with this "title inflation" is that the impression has been given that - far from those suffering from social deprivation - the rioters were all members of the urban nobility, living it large, them with their degrees and flashy careers.
One problem with rioting? It leads to a lot of heat, and not so much light.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Hours Crawl By
The essence of "water cooler television" used to be that a programme was so memorable that everyone at work would be talking about it the next day. These days it's a branding thing: watch this thing tonight or tomorrow you might have nothing to talk about.
Case in point: The Hour, the BBC's one-size-fits-all drama. It's part history, part social history, part breathless romance, part spy story, part detective story. The general idea seems to be to mix up all the genres so thoroughly that the audience won't even know which way is up, and it seems to be working, since Sordel is still resentfully watching it several weeks beyond its logical expiration date.
Until the most recent episode, none of the actors in The Hour seemed quite to have hit upon the perfect acting strategy for the drama. Romola Garai (only happy when a strand of hair is falling fetchingly over one eye) is one half blushing schoolgirl and one half strident feminist. Ben Whishaw (playing a journalist who would evidently be brilliant if the writers were able to supply evidence in the form of slick dialogue) is half pouting public school intellectual and half working class hero. A line of motley runs up the centre of each of them.
The most creditable work in the main cast is being done by Dominic West, who has relied thus far on a sweetly avuncular smile and arched eyebrow to suggest that he is keeping his best acting chops in reserve for some other programme, any other programme. Channelling Roger Moore is a skill that every great actor should have in his toolbag.
The latest episode, however, opened up the field to an actress who had the thing to a nicety. Jessica Hynes (previously known as Jessica Stevenson and best known for her roles in Spaced and The Royle Family) might be said to have played the entire thing for laughs, deploying a range of cod-period tics that have never hitherto been rolled into the same character.
There is such a thing as "mannered acting", but this crossed into some territory beyond High Camp, not even pausing to draw breath at the staging post of "a right Royal piss-take".
As water-cooler television goes, The Hour is deplorably tepid, but one senses that once it is done and dusted it will be the comic actors who add it to their c.v.s with the greatest pride, and the principals who claim to have been "resting" in 2011.
Case in point: The Hour, the BBC's one-size-fits-all drama. It's part history, part social history, part breathless romance, part spy story, part detective story. The general idea seems to be to mix up all the genres so thoroughly that the audience won't even know which way is up, and it seems to be working, since Sordel is still resentfully watching it several weeks beyond its logical expiration date.
Until the most recent episode, none of the actors in The Hour seemed quite to have hit upon the perfect acting strategy for the drama. Romola Garai (only happy when a strand of hair is falling fetchingly over one eye) is one half blushing schoolgirl and one half strident feminist. Ben Whishaw (playing a journalist who would evidently be brilliant if the writers were able to supply evidence in the form of slick dialogue) is half pouting public school intellectual and half working class hero. A line of motley runs up the centre of each of them.
The most creditable work in the main cast is being done by Dominic West, who has relied thus far on a sweetly avuncular smile and arched eyebrow to suggest that he is keeping his best acting chops in reserve for some other programme, any other programme. Channelling Roger Moore is a skill that every great actor should have in his toolbag.
The latest episode, however, opened up the field to an actress who had the thing to a nicety. Jessica Hynes (previously known as Jessica Stevenson and best known for her roles in Spaced and The Royle Family) might be said to have played the entire thing for laughs, deploying a range of cod-period tics that have never hitherto been rolled into the same character.
There is such a thing as "mannered acting", but this crossed into some territory beyond High Camp, not even pausing to draw breath at the staging post of "a right Royal piss-take".
As water-cooler television goes, The Hour is deplorably tepid, but one senses that once it is done and dusted it will be the comic actors who add it to their c.v.s with the greatest pride, and the principals who claim to have been "resting" in 2011.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
A Fate Worse Than Death
Sordel recently argued that - far from taking society to some new moral nadir - restoring capital punishment is like a leafy suburb somewhere on the line between The City of God and our current societal Sodom. Naturally this is far from an argument on behalf of the restoration of capital punishment (just because bad things happen, no need to add to them!) but let us turn out attention for a moment to how bad capital punishment really is as a legal resort.
How would it be if you could experience the fear and discomfort of death and not die?
Good punishment? Bad?
Waterboarding was routinely used by the U.S. as an interrogation technique. For the person being interrogated in this way, the experience is said to be similar to being drowned. Some claim it's torture, but it was contended by the Bush administration that it is not. Either way, we're not killing the person, so why worry, right?
Waterboarding does not infringe the natural right to life, and it can be used both as retribution against the convict and as a deterrent. Since it is not a capital punishment, it is proportionate for all sorts of crime. It's cheap, causes no permanent (physical) damage ... what's not to like?
No wonder that U.S. interrogators apparently felt that it was okay to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.
(No wonder there is such understandable anxiety in America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might cheat justice and elude the death penalty.)
Of course, that's just the United States, and it can be argued that the use of waterboarding was primarily preventative rather than punitive. Interrogation may have saved many more lives than it ruined and - unless you actually believe in natural rights - the end (on a purely Utilitarian calculation) often does justify the means.
My philosophical concern is not whether waterboarding itself is justifiable, but rather this: is there no number of waterboardings that equal, from the standpoint of retributive punishment, one actual execution?
Because, if other punishments (including those inflicted without due legal process) can exceed in cruelty capital punishment, then why are we drawing this artificial moral line?
Why do we strain out a gnat and swallow a camel?
How would it be if you could experience the fear and discomfort of death and not die?
Good punishment? Bad?
Waterboarding was routinely used by the U.S. as an interrogation technique. For the person being interrogated in this way, the experience is said to be similar to being drowned. Some claim it's torture, but it was contended by the Bush administration that it is not. Either way, we're not killing the person, so why worry, right?
Waterboarding does not infringe the natural right to life, and it can be used both as retribution against the convict and as a deterrent. Since it is not a capital punishment, it is proportionate for all sorts of crime. It's cheap, causes no permanent (physical) damage ... what's not to like?
No wonder that U.S. interrogators apparently felt that it was okay to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.
(No wonder there is such understandable anxiety in America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might cheat justice and elude the death penalty.)
Of course, that's just the United States, and it can be argued that the use of waterboarding was primarily preventative rather than punitive. Interrogation may have saved many more lives than it ruined and - unless you actually believe in natural rights - the end (on a purely Utilitarian calculation) often does justify the means.
My philosophical concern is not whether waterboarding itself is justifiable, but rather this: is there no number of waterboardings that equal, from the standpoint of retributive punishment, one actual execution?
Because, if other punishments (including those inflicted without due legal process) can exceed in cruelty capital punishment, then why are we drawing this artificial moral line?
Why do we strain out a gnat and swallow a camel?
Monday, August 8, 2011
Hang 'Em (Even in Conservation Areas)
Good news everybody! You have a fundamental human right to a satellite dish. When it comes to human rights, the BSkyB is not the limit, but it is certainly the icing on the cake.
To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?
Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.
The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?
If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)
How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?
If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?
Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.
We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.
So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?
To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?
Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.
The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?
If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)
How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?
If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?
Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.
We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.
So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Out For The Count
Like the Periodical Cicada, Marcus de Sautoy is observed only occasionally on British television and presumably at prime intervals. When last seen, in 2009, Sordel's favourite boffin was frolicking on a beach with everyman-for-hire Alan Davies, but now he is out on his own, trying to solve The Code, which is his post-Langdonian nomenclature for boring old mathematics.
"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.
Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.
From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."
The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)
The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.
But of course there was.
Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.
"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.
Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.
From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."
The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)
The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.
But of course there was.
Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.
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