Indistinguishable from magic

This entry is going to contain a lot of stuff that’s been swirling around in my mind for several weeks, and I’m not sure it all quite fits together, but I want to put some thoughts out there.

The first trigger was that I tangentially got involved in one of those discussions about whether science is better than religion. I normally don’t bother with that argument because it’s boring and frequently stupid, and also because I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison. Science is not only no good, but completely irrelevant, for organizing a regular rota of visitors to check up on an old lady with Alzheimer’s who is estranged from her daughter. Religion is not only no good, but completely irrelevant, for understanding how prions in the old lady’s brain aggregated to cause her to lose her memory and functionality. (I have no intention of asserting that atheists never visit lonely senile people, just that they don’t use science to do so, because they are not idiots.)

But anyway, I joined in with this discussion because Paul is intelligent and interesting, and there was an issue of terminology I was curious about. The discussion led to Paul asserting (relevantly):

I think it is fair to say that the established results of the physical and biological sciences are less likely to be overturned than those of the social sciences. Evolution is a fact, current theories of anthropology will be outdated in a few decades.

Woah! That really, really brought me up short. I mean, it’s trivially not true, but even if it were it wouldn’t be a good thing! The whole point of why science is “better” than religion as a way of understanding how the world works is that scientific theories and models get changed when someone finds new data that contradicts the old view. This is a really good example of the way that selling science as an alternative to religion does a massive disservice to science (I care surprisingly little about vocal atheists misrepresenting religion): it leads to people, intelligent people I respect, trying to treat science as a source of eternal verities. I also absolutely disagree that physical science is inherently better than social science; it just isn’t, but trying to cram science into the niche where religion or Humanism or other philosophical systems belong can really easily lead to that sort of misguided hierarchy between branches of science.

The thing is, “believing in” science in this way doesn’t just offend me as a scientist; it kills people. Let me talk about a lecture I attended recently. The talk was given by the DUETs people, who are working to put conventional, evidence-based medicine on an even more scientific basis. But they are not doing this by claiming that good science should still be true decades and centuries after findings are reported. Quite the opposite! They are claiming that good science, and good evidence-based medicine, should be flexible in how it responds to new evidence, and established views should be constantly challenged. This isn’t just to make people feel better intellectually, it’s a really critical aspect of patient safety.

Example 1: for many decades in the second half of the 20^th century, medical wisdom was that babies should be encouraged to sleep on their fronts. This advice was pretty universal, and even made it to Dr Spock’s famous book about childcare. It was based on the best evidence available at the time, but by the 70s there was an increasing body of evidence that sleeping prone is a significant risk factor for cot death. However, this evidence took a very long time (decades) to percolate into mainstream medical advice, because doctors and even the medical research community were reluctant to challenge the established scientific fact. They were especially reluctant to rely on data from soft sciences and observation of large human populations, in order to overturn data based on the “more reliable” physical experiments that led to the earlier bad advice. Dr Spock was wrong, not because he was a bad scientist (neither morally bad nor incompetent), but because cot death wasn’t really on the radar at the time he was writing. The data he relied on measured physical parameters of how well individual babies did, and was very likely correct that prone sleeping reproducibly improved those parameters in the short term. It was still wrong, and following Spock just because he had the authority accorded to a successful scientist still led to preventable deaths.

Example 2: some decades ago, there was some robust, reproducible, statistically valid scientific research showing that giving caffeine to premature babies helped to reduce the frequency of a condition called apnoea where the infant briefly ceases breathing. However, this research was often not applied clinically because there wasn’t any real evidence to show that reducing apnoea occurrence was particularly important. Nobody was being a bad scientist, nobody was following superstition or religious beliefs at the expense of evidence, there wasn’t even a big problem with doctors being unaware of the state of the art of research. It’s a perfectly medically valid decision that you don’t want to give a powerful drug with unknown long-term effects to premature babies who are extremely vulnerable anyway. It’s a perfectly valid ethical decision that you don’t want to do double blind randomized controlled trials on premature babies, with the very real possibility of harming them. Again, it took population studies and extrapolations from soft science observations to demonstrate that the frequency of apnoea is correlated with long-term risk of cerebral palsy and reduced life-expectancy. That’s a lot of avoidable disability and death because only one sort of clinical trial counts as properly scientific.

Example 3: some decades ago, there was some robust, statistically valid, properly designed and controlled research showing that steroids can be helpful in patients with severe brain injury. So doctors very sensibly started treating brain-injured patients with steroids. And scientists very sensibly did what scientists do, and repeated and extended the original experiments over the course of the intervening decades. They didn’t just assume that the original research must be “true” because it was “scientific”. They didn’t prefer to work on more glamorous, more prestigious new stuff at the expense of low-status confirmatory work. The effect size and statistical significance tended to decline with subsequent studies. This doesn’t mean that the original research was wrong, or that the original scientists were biased, incompetent or lying, it’s just an artefact of the way that scientific culture works. If you’re going to publish something novel, you have to have a pretty watertight case, with strong statistical significance and a relatively big effect, and that’s as it should be. But if you’re just confirming something that is already known, then rather less dramatic and conclusive results are acceptable because they support the established fact. And of course, we all know but can easily forget that 1 experiment in 100 will show that something is true at the 99% significance level purely by chance and sampling error!

After many decades, a consensus started to emerge that the effect of steroids in brain injured patients was small and not terribly reproducible. Not false, just marginal. Meanwhile, treating people with high doses of powerful steroids has known side-effects. The medical community started to suspect that the definite, quite serious harm caused by steroids was greater than the small, poorly reproducible benefits. But there wasn’t enough evidence to stop treating brain injured patients with drugs that might save at least some people’s lives, until there was a huge, expensive publicly funded trial involving 10,000 brain injury patients across the EU which definitively proved that steroids do more long-term harm than good in this situation. So, ok, you might well say that this is a happy ending, this is medical research and evidence-based medicine working exactly as they should. But you have to take into account that even an optimal scenario means several decades of people receiving treatments which are actually harmful on balance, and which undoubtedly caused unnecessary deaths and suffering during this time period.

What are the implications for “rationalist” rhetoric? I think the most important is that scientific research, and particularly opinions couched in scientific-sounding language which include numbers, technical jargon and statistics, should be treated with at least a comparable level of skepticism to “woo” and alternative medicine. Lay people can’t expect to directly evaluate every individual piece of research they read about; indeed scientists can’t do that either, because most of it is outside their field and they have to spend at least some of their time studying new questions rather than confirming, validating and challenging old conclusions. But just accepting something as fact because it’s “scientific” is not the way to deal with this!

Just accepting the authority of someone because they have scientific qualifications leads to things like believing Wakefield about MMR because he did experiments and used statistics and medical terms. It leads to believing a popular book based on extremely dubious research because the authors have some academic credentials. And because neuroscience is a “real” science, they have more authority to talk about anthropology and sexual psychology than, you know, actual anthropologists and sexuality researchers because human sciences don’t count. It leads to giving racist propaganda the benefit of the doubt, because it uses statistics and hard sciencey jargon. Yes, it is a basic principle of science that one should accept unpalatable results if they are supported by data from well-designed and well-executed experiments. But all those people who piously recite this principle in response to badly-designed, biased and thoroughly debunked “experiments” “proving” that white people are inherently superior to other ethnic groups are strangely unwilling to give the same benefit of the doubt to the vast body of good research indicating that, you know, racism actually harms people. True, you can’t weigh and measure those harms, you can’t do double-blind experiments, but that doesn’t mean that social science is just a matter of what’s politically fashionable just now.

And that brings me on to my second point: if you believe that science is the best way of looking at the world, you should also accept that social science is the best way of studying human societies! That’s especially the case if you (or the journalists you rely on for your information) can’t tell the difference between actual physical / natural science and people using vaguely sciencey technobabble, but even good physics is relatively unhelpful for looking at social and cultural phenomena.

And yes, that goes for medicine too; there is lots of really vital medical information that just isn’t going to be found by doing randomized controlled trials and measuring the physical outcomes and applying statistics. Partly because a lot of randomized controlled trials that would be informative are also unethical. And partly because the information that can be measured physically isn’t always the most important; “how fast do babies put on weight?” can be measured easily, but a more important research question is “how likely are babies to die for no discernible reason?”

Drug trials are (relatively) easy to carry out in the time-honoured “hard” science way; you give the drug to half the patients and a placebo to the other half, and you measure objective parameters about how well the two groups do. I’m in no way arguing against doing this kind of experiment – hell, I spend most of my working life doing that myself – but it doesn’t mean that drugs are the best possible treatment for all possible conditions! For example most patients with joint pain would prefer physiotherapy and exercise rather than strong painkillers (and by the way, the reason I know this is because social scientists did serious research into the issue, not because some arrogant biologist assumed that his credentials totally qualified him to throw together an internet survey.) There is some evidence that the former has more benefits and fewer side-effects for a greater proportion of patients than the latter. But it’s rather harder to do a double-blind trial of physiotherapy, and you can’t use pure bioscience to answer questions like “how well do patients on this regime integrate into their communities and lead normal lives?” which may be as important as “what is the level of pain-related chemicals in the bloodstream of patients taking this drug versus a placebo?”

And thirdly, I suppose, don’t put too much faith in the scientific process. In the best possible circumstances it is slow and inefficient and people get harmed while science is sorting out the answer to difficult questions. When we’re talking about medicine, individual variation within the population is inevitable, and however good the evidence is for a particular treatment, that best treatment will do nothing for or actively harm a proportion of patients. And to be honest, the best possible circumstances don’t always apply; it’s hopelessly naive to believe that all science is pure and unbiased and free of the influence of culture and political and financial considerations! Criticize superstition and woo and political bias, of course, but don’t couch your criticisms in terms of assuming that the scientific mainstream is always right. That’s bad rhetoric and it’s atrociously bad science.

Last refuge of a scoundrel

It’s a bank holiday which looks set to break with tradition and provide some actual sun. It’s unpatriotic to talk about any serious topic on a day like this, but then again the US army inconsiderately chose a day when there’s not supposed to be any news to accomplish its decade-old goal of killing Osama Bin Laden.

My religious and personal views forbid me to rejoice in another person’s death. I suppose I am mildly pleased about Bin Laden because killing him slightly reduces the political inevitability of endless war. It may even slightly decrease the number of civilians who have to die because they had the misfortune to be born in Muslim-majority countries with more or less tenuous links to Al Qaida. It certainly won’t bring back the hundreds of thousands already killed, or even the three thousand Americans killed in the terrorist attack which formed the excuse for the last ten years of violence. Oops, it’s unpatriotic to have any qualms about the number of human lives considered acceptable “collateral damage” in the almighty quest to take revenge on Bin Laden.

Perhaps I should talk about the royal wedding instead. I suppose I’m mildly pleased that HRH has found a woman to marry who seems pleasant enough. A woman of his own choice, who has known him well for ten years, so perhaps we won’t see repeats of the mistakes his father’s generation made. Good for them. It’s unpatriotic to express doubts about the cost of such a huge, ostentatious wedding, though. And apparently it’s illegal to get together with a group of people and express unpatriotic opinions in public. Pre-emptive arrests of protesters who “might” breach the peace. Who am I to spoil the nation’s bank holiday fun by expressing negative thoughts about that?

So I’m not feeling the expected warm fuzzy thoughts about this weekend’s national knees-up and military success. In fact, my main reaction is to cement my intention to vote Yes to AV on Thursday. Not because I’m terribly proud of my cleverness in being able to follow sophisticated mathematical arguments about why AV is better than FPTP. Rather, because I want to cast a vote, however symbolic, for a party which is not willing to throw this country into the USA’s wars. I want to vote against our wealth being pawned, against the loss of lives of young people who don’t have any better alternatives than to join the army, and particularly against the destruction of several countries and the barely regretted deaths of more than half a million of their civilians, just so George W Bush can prove that he’s as much of a man as his daddy and Barack Obama can prove he’s as much of a man as the white guy. It’s unpatriotic of me to value foreign leaders’ machismo lower than the life of a child, but I want to vote my unpatriotism.

I want to cast a vote, however symbolic, for a party which will stand up against using this endless war as an excuse for appalling violations of civil liberties. Against arresting people for gathering together to express politically inconvenient opinions, against heavy-handed, violent and occasionally lethal policing methods, against imprisonment without trial and ministerial intervention in trials when they eventually do occur, against serious government intrusions on privacy, against cooperating with regimes which torture political prisoners and prisoners of war. It’s unpatriotic of me to want to safeguard political and personal freedom even when we are slightly more threatened by brown-skinned terrorists than white-skinned terrorists, but I want to vote my unpatriotism.

And I want to be able to vote without having to worry about helping to hand my city over to the racist BNP and their allies who are equally racist but too cowardly to admit their connections with a known racist party. The mainstream political parties are all too willing to throw my city to the wolves. It’s poor, it’s a historically safe Labour seat, it’s too far away from London and too unimportant to business issues for anyone to care. But it’s my door those wolves are slavering at, and AV will give me a slightly pointier stick to keep them from devouring me and mine. That’s what’s on my mind this sunny bank holiday Monday that happens to be, in the Jewish calendar, the day set aside for remembering the Holocaust.

Anyway. Enjoy the rest of the bank holiday. I am stuck inside with a pile of marking, but that’s a very minor rant compared to the one I ended up composing.

Doesn’t matter if you’re green with purple stripes

I’ve started reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I’m about 200 pages in and so far nothing much has happened, though it’s a fairly pleasant sort of nothing. But there’s something about it which I’d characterize as self-indulgent, and it’s reminding me of the tenor of some long-running internet discussions about social justice related stuff.

The common thread I’ve noticed among some people who identify with geek subcultures is that they think of themselves as totally free of prejudice, and also they experienced social exclusion as kids / teenagers (often to quite a severe extent), and therefore understand what it’s like to part of an oppressed minority. Both these assumptions are partly true, but taking them as absolutely axiomatic in all circumstances leads to a lot of frustration.

Being free of prejudice seems to be partly to do with identifying as being very (or even completely) rational and objective. There’s no rational reason why women should be inferior to men, people with darker skin should be inferior to people with lighter skin and so on, so your typical geek rejects these irrational prejudices. There’s an ideal, and one that I have a lot of time for, of being meritocratic, and judging people only on their intelligence rather than superficial aspects of their appearance.

The problem is that things like culture aren’t seen as objective facts, and indeed discrimination itself is assumed not to exist because it isn’t rational. This means that geeks can be entirely accepting of people who differ in superficial characteristics in theory, but in practice, if the superficial characteristics have tangible practical consequences, this kind of geek gets into a panic because that makes it not superficial any more, whereas the theory has already dismissed the differences as superficial. For example, if it turns out that women are a rather less likely than men to find rape jokes funny, or object to being constantly subjected to images of hypersexualized “babes”, then there must be something wrong with the women. No rational person (who, like me, was unaffected by them) would object to these things, and women are just like me, therefore they must be totally irrational in objecting!

The other problem with this attitude is that intelligence itself is a mixture of two things. One is in fact a superficial characteristic just like skin colour or height or whatever; intelligent people aren’t inherently morally superior to people of low intelligence. The second is that there are behaviours that are often confused with intelligence, but are more reflections of social class than anything else. Things like being educated and knowledgeable, especially about areas that are considered prestigious (knowing a lot about sport or fashion isn’t prestigious, knowing a lot about history or physics is). Things like being skilled in logical argument / rhetoric (at least as much a matter of training as innate intelligence). This is particularly noticeable when the topic is of purely intellectual interest to some people in the debate, but of personal, emotional impact to others; it’s easy in this situation for geeks to assume that the second group are less rational or even less intelligent.

Of course, the holy grail of geekdom, being competent with computers and the internet, is only accessible to people who have enough money to afford computers and broadband subscriptions, and enough leisure time (or sufficiently indulgent bosses) to be able to spend many hours a week online. Now, it’s true that these things are fairly, though not universally, accessible now, but people who have only been able to spend lots of time with computers and the internet for a few years rate as less intelligent, and therefore less worthy, than geeks who have been part of that culture for decades, and that’s going back to a time when you had to have a lot of advantages in life to be online regularly.

The result of these assumptions about intelligence is that geeks often find themselves most comfortable surrounded by people from very similar backgrounds. It’s still admirable, but not all that difficult, to respect diversity when it’s largely variation between middle to upper-middle class, anglophone, educated, straight, white, not too severely disabled males. Of course there are geeks who don’t completely fit that picture, and it’s definitely a good thing that these people are welcome in geek circles, but the point is that most of them are people who can pretty easily act as if they did fit the standard geek profile. I very much count myself in that category; although I’m Jewish, the ways I’m Jewish mean that my lifestyle differs very little from that of a secular post-Christian, and I’ve experienced very little serious antisemitism, and my appearance doesn’t really mark me as non-white. Although I’m bi, my presentation is such that I’m assumed to be straight and conventionally gendered. Indeed, although I’m female, many of my interests, my upbringing and my personality are those typically considered masculine. In fact I have so much in common with straight WASP male geeks that I am planning to marry one of their number!

The trouble is that people aren’t always willing or even able to pretend that the things that make them different from the standard don’t exist. This causes a surprising amount of friction. I think it’s partly because any mention of difference can be read as accusing geeks of being prejudiced, which they’re just axiomatically not. Another issue is that people may well not want to spend time, either online or in person, with people who treat them badly. The decision to avoid someone who makes you feel physically / sexually unsafe, or who constantly hurts you with racist micro-aggressions, is confused with shunning or ostracizing, and ostracizing is evil. Geeks who understand far too well how painful it is to be excluded from a social group, but don’t have any direct personal experience of how painful it is to be subjected to misogyny, racism etc, may well end up creating an environment that is far more welcoming to bullies than their victims, even if they themselves are genuinely not sexist or racist or otherwise prejudiced. Part of it is putting too high a value on being “objective”; there’s no merit, and much harm, in trying to have a neutral, balanced debate about whether certain groups of people are really human.

The other side of it is the belief that being bullied as a kid means you understand systematic oppression. It’s almost always a mistake to compare one kind of prejudice and exclusion with another; the impulse to build on your own experiences to generate empathy is admirable, but it can easily be taken too far. Beyond that, though, there is a difference in kind, not just in degree, between bullied because you like D&D better than football, and being subjected to racism. One of the things that’s bugging me about Anathem is that there is a group of people, the Ita, who are portrayed as being somewhere between Jews in pre-modern society, and highly excluded nerds. And some characters who are clearly supposed to be analogous to autistic / Asperger’s spectrum people in this world. Between that and the whole setting where a certain style of rationalism and logical argument is literally elevated to the status of a religion, I’m feeling a little impatient with the book.

When I started thinking about this sense of irritation, I was reminded of a whole bunch of things which are annoying in similar ways: the absolutely painful, awful conversations that happen when Making Light tries to discuss racism or religion (even though in fact it’s a pretty diverse community in terms of the declared identities of regular commenters). The stupid argument between the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong crowd and some of the LJ social justice people about how racism and sexism are totally unimportant because they’re not cognitive biases or logical fallacies. Some of the discussions around Among Others (not the book itself, just some of the smugness of its readers who seem to be using it to justify their sense of superiority over the mundanes). A lot of tiresome reductionist arguments about how there’s no such thing as sexism because women on average have very slightly different brain structures from men, and obviously socially constructed gender is irrelevant because it’s not “objective” like physical measurements of the brain are. Some of the annoying bits of New Atheism.

I think what I’m saying is that sometimes admirable working principles can lead to negative practical consequences. I hope that if I write this down it will help me to appreciate all the positive things about geek culture, without falling into the trap of feeling superior to non-geeks or thinking I am knowledgeable about stuff I’m really ignorant of! Or perhaps I’ll just annoy everybody, I’m not sure.

Political education

I’ve been following the protests over the tuition fees issue, but not really participating. I’m not a protesting on the streets sort of person, and my institution seems to be relatively apolitical. Certainly the medical students can’t really think of jeopardizing their careers through unauthorized absences and potentially getting into trouble with the police. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the students’ cause, police behaviour has unquestionably been deplorable. I’d have thought that the one thing a Liberal-Conservative coalition could agree on was that people have the right to express their opinions through demonstrations and protests. Apparently, though, we’re going to get all the disadvantages of a right-leaning government but none of the benefits.

I agree with the analysis that some people in my circle have been discussing, that the proposed situation for paying university tuition fees isn’t actually much worse financially than what we currently have. Indeed, it’s essentially a graduate tax being called by a different name for reasons of spin that I don’t totally understand. And raising the threshold at which graduates must start repaying loans is very likely a good thing.

That’s not to say I think the protests are groundless, though. For me the problem here is the principle issue: this is the first step in a move from public funding of university education and research, to a consumerist model where students pay for their own education, and research is supposed to muddle through somehow. I had the same problem when I did march in 1997: true, £1000 a year is a small sum compared to the clear benefits of university education. But at that time we were promised that the fees would never rise beyond inflation, and it took no time at all for that £1000 a year to become £3000 and now, less than 15 years later, it’s looking very much like £9000. Once you’ve established the idea that universities bill students directly for their education, you’ve created a situation which I am pretty convinced will lead to a university degree becoming the entrance fee to an exclusive plutocratic club. If £9000 is accepted, well, £12,000 isn’t a big increase. In another decade we’ll be looking at people borrowing more than their lifetime earnings. For that reason of principle, my heart is very much with the students (and many of my friends) out on the streets confronting police violence, even though not everybody involved has a clear head about the numbers right now.

The other issue where I’m strongly on the side of the protestors about is the withdrawal of EMA payments. There is absolutely no point making noble-sounding declarations about pushing universities to do outreach to students from poor backgrounds, if those students can’t afford to stay in school after 16 to do A Levels. I think a large part of the problem here is that the politicians, and the chattering classes as a whole, see £30 a week as pocket money. For EMA recipients, though, it’s the difference between possible and impossible. I’m horrified to see the government bribing married couples with £5 a week, even though most of them are adults who have one or more full incomes, have had a chance to become financially established and so on, when at the same time claiming that the financial situation is so dire that we can’t afford to support the poorest teenagers to the tune of £30 a week so that they can complete their secondary education and gain access to tertiary education.

I’m concerned for myself, because I have pretty much planned my life on the basis that there would be public funding for higher education, including research. I didn’t imagine that this funding would be generous or reliable, but I imagined it would exist! I don’t know how I would feel about working for a university that was a profit-making institution, selling certificates of middle-class status to act as entry tickets to the professions. Because if we start treating education as a marketable commodity, it won’t take long before we’re selling qualifications, not education. But hey, somehow, somewhere I’ll find someone to pay me to teach, whether it’s Jewish communities, primary schools or some kind of alternative adult ed track for those who can’t afford gilt-edged degrees.

So I’m much more concerned for the future of the country as a whole. At the moment I’m incredibly pessimistic, I foresee a social structure where only those with inherited wealth have a hope of a decent job, political influence, home ownership, financial stability etc. I’m not saying this is something that has suddenly happened, but I am saying that the government’s approach to withdrawing from funding HE is really consolidating this stratification. And I’m really distressed to see that anyone who has a problem with this future is in danger of being treated like a criminal at best, and actually suffering serious assault by police at worst. Apart from being unjust, this kind of society is incredibly unstable, and ultimately not at all beneficial even for those at the top of the heap.

Many people are disappointed with the Lib Dems for reneging on their promise to oppose tuition fees. Me, I basically expected that of the Lib Dems; I’ve seen what they were like in coalition in Scotland, where they had very little influence on their Labour coalition partners, and were far more interested in staying in power than in acting in their constituents’ interests. At election time, I hoped that the Lib Dems would be principled enough to refuse a coalition with Labour, which would have led to them reneging on their promises to oppose the Iraq war and support civil liberties. So, I got what I was hoping for in that sense, but I’m bitterly disappointed with the Conservatives, because they haven’t lived up to their promise of restoring individual freedoms. Plus I expected their educational policy to be about reducing the numbers of people going to university to the point where we could fund HE properly. I would rather see the brightest 10% of the country attending university than the richest 50%, alongside decent educational alternatives for people who want to learn practical and career-focused skills rather than pure academic subjects. I can’t criticize people who naively thought that the Lib Dems would uphold their principles in coalition, because I was equally naive in thinking that Cameron’s Conservatives would come up with a fair educational policy and rein in the worst injustices of the Labour term.

On a related matter, I’m a bit peeved at people uncritically repeating and re-tweeting that stupid article about Oxford’s admissions policy. Some guy cherry-picked statistics to create some eye-catching headlines suggesting that Oxford is reluctant to accept Black candidates, and made a big fuss about how much effort it was to find out the detailed breakdown of the data via Freedom of Information requests, when in fact most of the ethnicity data is publicly available on university websites, and he just wanted something more fine-grained. Besides which, separating out different ethnic groups who all happen to have black skin is a valid exercise; clearly actual Africans, African-Americans, and people who live in Britain but ancestrally hail from Africa recently, or the Caribbean a generation ago, are different groups of people with different experiences. Conflating specific data about Black British people of Afro-Caribbean origin with data about Black applicants in general is bordering on deceitful.

I’m not at all claiming that Oxford totally doesn’t have a problem with racism! There may well be racism. But making a big fuss about statistical noise fluctuations in tiny numbers of applicants isn’t at all the way to address this. Part of the problem, of course, is the numbers of students from particular ethnic groups who get the kind of school education that makes applying to Oxbridge feasible. There is very likely racism involved in that situation, but it’s not the fault of any university or college. But even if you’re trying to deal with actual racism on the part of Oxbridge colleges, this approach is IMO counterproductive. Repeating alarmist articles all over the place simply discourages ethnically disadvantaged students from applying in the first place. It’s like stereotype threat, only more extreme, and I think it’s highly irresponsible to spread that kind of misinformation.

I’m reminded of a case when I was at college: there was a whole big fuss about some kid who was rejected from Magdalen college even though she had four As at A Level, and her headmaster went to the press claiming that she had been discriminated against because she attended a state school. He ignored the fact that all the candidates for medicine at Magdalen had straight As at A Level, not to mention that the girl hadn’t made up her mind whether she wanted to read medicine or biochemistry. All this achieved was a marked dip in applications from state school pupils the following year; so much for all those righteous crusaders up in arms about Oxford’s biased admissions policy! Innuendo sticks; people remember the shock horror story of bias, not the careful debunkings that follow. Simply repeating this kind of stuff for the pleasure of outrage does far more harm than good.

I’ve probably offended everyone by now. Oh well, that’s my political rant for the week.

I was a teenage pirate

I just bought my 1000^th song in mp3 format (Vienna Teng’s Whatever you want). This seems a good excuse to talk about buying digital music.

I didn’t really start buying music until 2007, because that was when it started to become possible to buy legitimate single individual tracks without either DRM or massive hassle, for a reasonable price. At that point it was still a bit of a pain; I joined the emusic site, which has done me very well but has some drawbacks. You have to sign up to the site, you can’t just buy one-off tracks. And you have to pay a monthly subscription, which doesn’t roll over, so although the official price per track is pretty low, you end up paying more than that unless you’re incredibly organized about making sure you finish each month’s allowance (which I’m not!) It was still worth it to me so that I could get DRM-free versions of commercially released songs. The alternatives at the time were iTunes which sold you music you could only use on the same computer where you made the payment (and what on earth is the point of that?!), Napster where you paid a subscription to listen to music but didn’t actually own it, and various greymarket or outright illegal Russian sites. There were other DRM-free sites, but they were also effectively self-publishing outfits, they were selling music by quasi-amateur musicians who hadn’t signed contracts yet and needed exposure even more than they needed money. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to buy music that I’d actually heard of as well.

For the ten years before that, I didn’t buy digital music at all, because only these inferior alternatives were available. In fact, when I first got online in 1997 you couldn’t legitimately buy music online even with DRM. If you wanted to own music at all, you had to buy a CD, usually paying £12 to £15 for the whole album even if you only wanted one track. And you had to take on the responsibility of storing and transporting the CD, which was not a small thing when I was moving across the country 6 times a year. Even since graduation I’ve moved from England to Scotland, from Scotland back to England, nearly moved to Australia but had to cancel at the last minute, moved from England to Sweden at short notice, from Sweden back to England, and across the country. That’s not unusual for my peers; indeed I’d say that I’ve had more of a settled life than many of my friends, staying in the same place for three years at a stretch. The fact that I’ve been able to keep any of my possessions at all is mainly because I have parents who have a big house and a lot of generosity, so they were able to look after things temporarily while I was moving. When you take into account the fact CDs have a limited shelf life, digital music made a lot more sense, but it just wasn’t (legally) available.

There was a huge, thriving black market for mp3s back in the late 90s, and yet nobody seemed to see this as a commercial opportunity. I would gladly have paid for legal mp3s if they had existed, and I was in no way alone among my friends, even students who had fairly limited incomes. Instead I ended up scouring the internet for contraband (AltaVista is, to this day, the best search engine for finding individual tracks; Google has never overtaken it because it assumes you’re looking for information, and routinely discards pages that are just catalogues of available files). I joined in schemes that were the precursors to today’s torrenting and peer-to-peer networks: FTP based systems where you uploaded a desired track and in return got a password that allowed you to download what was already there. Some of my music I acquired because college was one giant network. We were the very narrow generation who had completely unmonitored T1 ethernet, which was used for a lot of LAN gaming and other distinctly non-academic purposes. It was the culture that you made your music folder available to the whole college network, and people helped themselves to any music they liked the sound of.

Thing is, you might imagine that music labels (and consequently artists) lost a ton of money due to this sort of behaviour. In fact the situation is quite the contrary; the very minute that it was possible to buy this music legally, I couldn’t wait to give them my money for music that had a special place in my heart since it was the soundtrack to such a formative part of my life. But it took ten years for said labels to grudgingly allow me to give them money.

The situation isn’t a lot better nowadays. Apple, bless em, finally jumped onto the mp3 bandwagon; once the iPod became a fashion item, everybody started making portable mp3 players, and phones which double as mp3 players, and there’s clearly a market to buy actual music to put on them. But a lot of the major labels are still insisting on DRM’d music only, which means you often can’t buy it at all outside the US (even without considering the multiple other disadvantages of DRM). And you have to download some software which only works on one or two OSs, so if you have anything non-mainstream or just old you’re out of luck. So here I am, still pirating music, because the copyright holders simply refuse to sell me what I want, at any price at all, let alone a reasonable one. I pirate a lot less now; I’m reasonably happy to buy just whatever is available in mp3 format, and do without stuff that isn’t. But there are some songs I really like that are still, even today, simply not available legally at all.

How do I choose what to buy? Well, I get recommendations from friends, often sub-legally since you’re not technically allowed to give your friend a copy of music so they can get into it too. Of course this is exactly like the whole 80s thing where “home taping [was] killing music”; in fact, most of us discovered new groups which we spent money on because our friends made mixtapes for us. (doseybat has been a huge, lifelong influence on my musical tastes and probably caused hundreds of pounds to flow from my bank account towards the artists she recommended to me when we were teenagers.) And I use various internet services that point to music that has something in common with what you already like. Back in the 90s it was Yahoo radio where you could make custom stations, and they weren’t bad for music discovery. Nowadays it’s Last.fm and the wonderful Pandora music genome. Of course, the music industry goes to huge lengths to restrict these services, making them available only in the US (unless you use hacks and cheats to get round their restrictions). Because in the US they can put pressure on the courts and the legislature to make providers of such services pay exorbitant fees to run them at all, eventually driving them offline because just to cover their costs they have to charge more than consumers are prepared to pay.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the music industry don’t actually want people like me to spend more money on music, which you’d think would be in their interests. No, they want the musical tastes of the public to be completely predictable and ideally entirely dictated by the companies that own the music. They want to make sure that nobody ever discovers a new artist except by listening to mainstream commercial radio, and nobody ever buys any music except from distributors which only really stock the same songs that show up on those highly controlled radio channels. Never mind the long tail, never mind the convenience of an entirely digital distribution chain, they want to know exactly which artists they should sign because consumers can spend money only on the artists that they have chosen to back. They’re using mechanisms like DRM, like really disproportionate reaction to copyright infringement and “file sharing”, like closing down music discovery services and removing fanvids from YouTube, not to protect copyright as they claim, but to make the music market predictable.

This is pretty grim for actual musicians, and not that promising for consumers. I’m just hoping that capitalism will prevail, and the desire of millions of people like me to find a way to spend money on music we like, in convenient format, will create enough of a demand that the market will act to fill it. There are traces of it; the fact that it’s even possible to buy plain mp3s from mainstream distributors like Amazon and iTunes is a promising sign. But it is very weird to find myself in the position of being almost forced to steal things because nobody will sell me them!

Porn

I’ve been thinking vaguely about issues around porn since reading the discussion chez Yuki Onna. I’ve come across a couple of other essays on the subject too, mostly because of that bias where something that’s in your mind already seems to be all over the place. Mostly considering what an amazingly polarizing issue it is among feminists and other generally liberal types I associate with. So I thought I should probably have some kind of opinion on it…

Gender balance

When I went to university, I left an almost exclusively female environment for a male-dominated environment. The differences I noticed were very small, and all positive. But this weekend I returned to my old college for a reunion, and there were several things that started me thinking.

From the age of 8 until A Levels, I attended an all-girls school where nearly all the teachers were female. It took me a couple of years to reach the point where I was considered acceptably feminine by my peers, and even after that I was sometimes a bit of an outsider. That said, the general attitude at school was that academic achievement mattered, and girls who were perceived as caring more about clothes, fashion, makeup, appearance etc were looked down on much more than I was for never quite being girly enough. And the school environment really reinforced the attitude I had from my family, that I could do anything I wanted, that academic success and assertiveness were rewarded, and that science was king.

Though on the down-side, school was often intensely homophobic (I have the impression this is not typical for girls’ private schools of the era), and there was some associated gender-policing. Computer literacy and domestic skills were actively discouraged, on the grounds that we should aspire to something “better” than mere pink collar secretarial or clerical work, and not even think of devoting effort to becoming good home-makers. I remember our headmistress refusing to pass on an advert offering pocket money jobs as note-takers for Cambridge students with disabilities, because that was too much like being a secretary. (I found out about said job via other channels and took it anyway, and I’m very glad I did!) I think on the whole it was better to be encouraged to learn lots of maths and science and discouraged from learning to cook and sew than the other way round, but there were definitely some prejudices there. (And the IT thing was at least partly just failure to predict the future.)

I did quite a lot of research into where I should apply for university, though not as extensive as a motivated school-leaver these days, as I didn’t really have access to the internet. School kind of pushed the most academically able towards Oxbridge; in my case this was good advice anyway. When I chose a college, I was aware that my first choice had been the last of the former men’s colleges to go mixed, and had the smallest proportion of female students in Oxford. This didn’t bother me at all. My college might have had a ratio of 2 men to 1 woman at undergraduate level, and a tiny fraction of female faculty, but it had recently appointed the first woman in history to head a mixed sex college. My college tutor was to be a female professor, a rarity within the whole university and the whole of science academia, not just in my particularly male-dominated college. And I was applying to read Biochemistry, the one subject with a 50/50 gender balance, not just in student numbers but in distribution of grades.

Unlike a lot of my class-mates, I had plenty of male peers as a teenager, partly through the Jewish community, and partly because I have two brothers close in age and their friends were often part of my circle. (Not, I should add, in a “hot sister” way since I had the good fortune of not being at all hot, which meant that the most obnoxious teenaged boys didn’t deign to notice my existence, and the slightly less obnoxious never tried to see how far they could push minor sexual assault in order to impress me or their mates.) Also, I had the confidence instilled by both home and school that I could succeed, that there was no reason to believe that boys were any more capable than me because of gender. The not being hot thing also meant that I completely screened out any advice I might have picked up from the surrounding media about needing to pretend to be stupid or demure in order to “get a boyfriend”; I just assumed that such a thing as a boyfriend was completely unattainable.

Anyway, I turned up at university and took to it like a duck to water. I never felt outnumbered, though of course I was! (To be fair, I think science students tend to socialize more in subject groups than in colleges, and in the biochem department I was not outnumbered at all.) I enjoyed the academically competitive atmosphere of college, and never had a problem speaking up in tutorials. In this respect I had advantages over many female students, who found that a heavily gender-skewed environment did not at all suit their learning styles, who found it hard to get attention from tutors and all the other stuff that makes equally able women do less well than their male peers. I also found that the burden of trying to live up to a gender I didn’t understand was completely lifted; I was allowed to just be me, and nobody cared whether I was feminine “enough”. In addition I got into the LGBT scene, being, in fact, bi, and that gave me lots of tools for looking critically at gender. There was essentially no direct sexism, and I was too thick-skinned to even notice the institutional kind. I made male and female friends, both in college and out.

Anyway, the thing is that this reunion was partly in honour of this first ever female head of college, who is retiring this year. Since I’m a great fan of hers, I decided to attend. She has her portrait up in the dining hall, which captures her sardonic smile and doesn’t particularly draw attention to the fact that she’s the only woman among old white men spanning three quarters of a millennium.

As part of the event, there was a talk from some guy high up in the FSA about the financial crisis and whether it could have been foreseen or prevented. During the questions afterwards, I noticed that question after question was coming from the men in the audience. And then I realized that, well, it’s mostly older people who bother coming to college reunions, and that meant that nearly all the women in the audience were spouses rather than alumni. And then I thought I’d better ask a question just to balance things a bit. It wasn’t a very brilliant question, but lots of the questions from men were similarly just demonstrating general intelligence and a bit of bluster, not particularly detailed knowledge of banking and finance.

A few more of my generation showed up for the farewell lunch. Not a huge sample, certainly, but it was universally true that every woman I spoke to of around my age is currently taking a career break to raise a family, and no man I spoke to is. There are quite a lot of intra-college marriages, actually, so this isn’t about alumni versus spouses. It doesn’t prove anything at all, it just struck me how completely one-sided the situation is.

Everybody else is more interesting than me!

Darryl Cunningham has written a really beautifully drawn cartoon history of the MMR scare. I kind of want this to be a pamphlet that could be distributed in GP surgeries and schools and anywhere people might get medical information from sensationalist journalism. Thanks to Moominmuppet, who included it in one of her many fascinating link roundups.

And on a medical issue which genuinely is controversial, Rivka managed to host a discussion about assisted suicide which is actually thoughtful and doesn’t just rehash tribal positions. Key point from the comments:

In my line of work I have met many people who clearly expressed their desire and intent to die. Some of them have tried to kill themselves, and have been foiled by an insufficiently lethal method or a rescuer that comes along at precisely the right/wrong time. It doesn’t seem unusual or notable to me that a suicidal person would speak positively of suicide, right up until the end.

I think that assisted suicide supporters typically haven’t had broad exposure to suicidal people, and so they think that suicidal people who have a profound disability or a terminal illness are somehow different from people who are suicidal for other reasons. But to my knowledge there is no psychological research to back up that claim.

This is really incredibly important, IMO. I’m not necessarily against assisted suicide in abstract principle, but it can’t be morally acceptable in practice until we’ve sorted out a major social problem, which is that a lot people believe that the default state for anyone disabled is “suicidal”. An able-bodied person who has suicidal thoughts gets psychiatric help, while a disabled person who has suicidal thoughts gets help with dying (or people agitating for such help to be more legal).

I’m a lot more worried about this than scare scenarios of relatives pressuring someone to kill themselves in order to inherit their money. There will always be some evil people, and we can only do our best to create a legal system which prevents them from carrying out their evil intentions. But a much bigger problem here is entirely well-meaning, ethical people who genuinely believe that suicide is the best option for anyone who doesn’t fit their definition of normal, who assumes that disability automatically means bad quality of life. Now, sometimes suicide may be the best option, and sometimes a particular person’s life is in fact unbearable. But this is assumed far, far too often. To quote Rivka again:

There are many realistic fears/concerns that could lead someone who is terminally ill to think suicide is their best option: fear that pain will go uncontrolled, fear that you will lose your ability to communicate and be subjected to unwanted life-extending procedures, fear of dying alone in the ICU instead of at home surrounded by your loved ones.

It isn’t that I think these concerns are not legitimate; I know that they are. It’s that I think we need to fix them, not throw up our hands and say “we aren’t willing to make our society a better place for you to die in your own time, so the compassionate thing is to help you kill yourself now.”

There are a lot of different issues caught up in the assisted suicide debate. For example, the difference between withdrawing treatment or not starting it in the first place, and actually killing someone. The difference between helping a terminally ill person to die in the way they want, and killing someone because they can’t face the thought of life at the level of functioning that they expect to have. The differences between physician-assisted suicide by the medical team actually treating someone, and assisted suicide by a relative acting as a carer, and actual suicide clinics. Lots of these distinctions aren’t entirely clear-cut in actual practice, but lumping them altogether isn’t helping the discussion.

And nearly all these issues are blighted by ableist prejudices. The issue of consent is incredibly fraught; lots of people truly, sincerely believe that they would rather die than live with X illness or X impairment, and are quite likely to be unable to communicate that the actual reality of it isn’t as bad as they expected. So the person has to rely on the goodwill of other people who don’t have the condition, and who may indeed have witnessed the person concerned stating definitively that they would rather die than [whatever]. I think the only moral way of dealing with this is for everybody to consider very carefully why they have the views about quality of life that they do, so as to make the most moral possible decision. And obviously there is a huge range of views on the topic among people with disabilities, who should on no account be treated as rhetorical point winners rather than actual people.

The thing is that we live in a world where a convicted multiple murderer is regarded as a hero in the cause of assisted suicide. Muddled beliefs about disability and quality of life let people like that get away with quite literal murder. Let alone people who are honestly trying to do their best in a highly fraught and ethically very difficult situation.

Immigration

A topical post regarding the election campaign:

People who blame all the problems in the country on “immigrants” and talk about “flocking Eastern Europeans” are, in fact, bigoted. Elmyra’s moving response has already been linked all over the place, and even ended up in a national newspaper, but I’m linking it again because lots of my readers aren’t following UK politics closely, and I think this is important. (Now, some Americans don’t like discussion of racism against white people, and I have some sympathy for this position, but I do want to be clear that the fact this issue of xenophobia and hatred towards immigrants is important does not at all mean that I’m treating all the history of oppression of African-Americans and other PoC as trivial.)

I’m also really worried and distressed that the comments to Elmyra’s post have turned into a horrible spEak You’re bRanes mess. I am seeing far too many variants on the sentiment that it’s not racist for working class people to blame immigrants when they feel betrayed by the main political parties. It comes up so often that I am starting to think it’s almost scripted, an astroturf type of campaign. Though maybe it’s less sinister than that, it’s people repeating what they read in the tabloids. I completely accept that a lot of people are angry with the main political parties and aren’t getting as good public services as they ought to be. Complaining about that is valid, blaming it on immigrants, using inflammatory language that makes out immigrants to be a mass undifferentiated horde overrunning the country is, in fact, racism, no matter if you preface it with “I’m not racist but” or “I don’t have a problem with genuine, hardworking immigrants, but”.

Now, obviously politicians should be careful of their language and treat voters with respect. Brown is a professional, he should have known that there’s no such thing as “off-the-record”, that there can always be a hidden mic anywhere. So I don’t think his comment was particularly admirable, and I do think he needed to apologize. However, the Murdoch press is trying to whip the incident up into something much bigger than it is, partly as general anti-Labour propaganda, and partly to distract people from actually discussing political issues in a meaningful way. You might say that I’m contributing to this by mentioning the incident at all, but I want to talk about the larger issues of immigration and xenophobia and I have to say something so that people don’t imagine something false about what I’m saying about Brown. Also because I do very much accept Elmyra’s point that silence on this issue can look like assent.

Also, the comments making horrible generalizations about people with “low intelligence” or people from the provinces or working class folk all being racists are very much part of the problem. Get off my side, bigots!

The point I really want to make is that I really wish we weren’t having an electoral debate about whether we should hate immigrants a little bit, or really really hate immigrants. I want a pro-immigration party, not a slightly less xenophobic one, to vote for. I don’t want to discuss how we can reduce immigration, and whether it’s reasonable to do so by using incredibly inhumane measures like deporting asylum seekers back to countries where they will be tortured and killed. I want to discuss how we can encourage more people to come here!

True, I personally am fairly recently descended from immigrants and I’m proud of that. That’s not the whole point, though; politically and philosophically I’m committed to the idea that people should be able to choose where they want to live, and they should be able to choose which country they want to become a citizen of. Further, a lot of the reason why Britain is more economically successful than the countries of origin of immigrants is because Britain was complicit in oppressing these countries, so we have a special obligation to welcome immigrants. And Britain has always been multicultural, always had a mixed population, always been a destination for immigrants, and that’s exactly what’s so good about living here.

Immigration is a good thing. Let’s have more of it, please.

Are you religious?

“Are you religious?” is often the second or third question people ask soon after meeting me. The fact that I’m Jewish usually comes up fairly early in conversation, and it’s a natural small-talk follow-on, but I find it really hard to answer.

When it comes from Christians it usually means something like, do you have a deep spiritual connection with the Divine? And really, I’m the least spiritual person you could imagine. I am mostly a believing monotheist, but it’s an intellectual belief, not something I experience or feel viscerally, unlike many of my friends. I suppose you might say I have agnostic tendencies.

I’ve had a couple of experiences that I might describe as spiritual, I suppose. But I don’t trust that kind of thing at all; I know very well that the human brain is extremely good at fooling itself about things like that. Those experiences are the furthest thing from being the basis of my religious identity; I am fairly certain that if I were a convinced atheist I would have had similar emotionally intense, almost visionary encounters at some point and I would have called them something else.

For me, religion isn’t an emotional state at all. It’s a way of living your life, it’s a community with a common purpose, it’s an identity. I’m just as much Jewish when I’m tired and blah as when I’m feeling uplifted by beautiful music or similar. I’m probably more Jewish, if it’s possible, when I’m at my most intellectual and scientific.

When it comes from secular people from a Christian culture background, it often means something like, are you one of those incredibly virtuous people who disapprove of everything fun? Sometimes even more sneering than that: are you insufferably pious and homophobic, then? Well, no. Not even the more neutral version of that.

It’s a bedrock principle for me that my religious practices are mine, not to impose on anyone else. It’s wrong for me to eat pork; it’s not immoral in general to eat pork, and in fact non-Jews are explicitly permitted to eat it within the same system that forbids me. I wouldn’t criticize a fellow Jew for their dietary choices either, because my particular Jewish background, Reform, is founded on the principle that these kinds of practices are a matter of personal choice. Now, if someone explicitly buys into the same system as me, and I thought they were behaving unethically, I would criticize them or at least disapprove of them, but that’s a whole different scenario.

I’m also not in the least ascetic, and there’s very little of that tendency in my religious background. Fun isn’t in principle harmful, and suffering and self-sacrifice aren’t considered desirable. So from a religious perspective I’m very much in favour of people enjoying themselves, eating good food, using alcohol and sex and whatever mind-altering system they prefer to have a good time. I do disapprove of some things that some people find fun, notably gossip. Though it’s a vice that I’m very much prone to myself; I try to restrict myself to positive gossip rather than the cruel kind, but I can’t afford to be too hypocritically self-righteous about that one!

On the homosexuality issue, I know there’s a lot of pain coming from Queer people about how they’ve been treated by religious institutions. I don’t at all want to minimize that, and if it sometimes means that a person I’ve just met makes a negative prejudgement about me because I’m religious, that’s really completely understandable. Still, the truth is that English Reform Judaism, while by no means perfect on gay issues, was ahead of secular society and way, way ahead of mainstream Christianity when I was growing up in the 80s. Many of the rabbis I really looked up to were (and are) openly gay. And while some segments of the Jewish world are homophobic, we’ve never been into taking half a Bible verse out of context and basing our whole moral system on that, there’s always commentary and interpretation.

So yes, my religion does guide my ethical choices, otherwise it would be a completely pointless religion, honestly. It also does affect things like my diet, clothing and sexuality. So in that sense, I am religious. However, I’m not in the least interested in trying to convince anybody else to take on the same practices as me. And I certainly don’t think I’m in any way superior to anyone else who has a different religion or none, or who practises Judaism in a different way from me.

Jews quite often mean: do you keep a very detailed set of rabbinic laws down to the last letter when it comes to sabbath observance and eating kosher? (Sometimes they use the Yiddish word frum, which conveys this concept more directly, but based on its Germanic roots it probably does literally just mean religious, and religious is the nearest English translation we have.) The simple answer is no I don’t. I use electricity on the sabbath, I carry small items, I use transport and sometimes spend money, though I do try to place limits on how I do those things. My kitchen at home is kosher to a reasonably high standard but there are certainly people who are more strict about these things than I am, and I eat anything vegetarian when I’m away from home.

However, I’m certainly not completely secular either. Obviously Jewish ritual practices are a reasonably important part of my life. If I simply answer no, then people may be surprised when I turn down the prawn cocktail. Also, it bothers me that these two elements, out of the whole huge and complex body of Jewish law and ethics and philosophy, are used as identity markers to the exclusion of everything else. If someone eschews electricity for 25 hours a week, and refuses to eat anything that doesn’t have a completely known and controlled origin, then they’re a “religious” Jew, and if not, then not. I think this is partly down to the Orthodox attempt to define Orthodox Judaism as the real, authentic Judaism, and Orthodox-style diet and sabbath observance are the two most obvious ways to mark someone as a member of that tribe. (I should make it clear that I am not criticizing people who do put a lot of emphasis on detailed sabbath and food observances; that’s a perfectly reasonable expression of Judaism, my problem is when it’s seen as the only valid expression of Judaism.)

For me, religion is a little bit about keeping the detail of Jewish law. That’s a very important way to keep the community together, and to ensure that there’s still a recognizable continuity of religious practices over multiple generations. Shabbat is an amazing institution in lots of ways, and diet has such a strong emotional pull on people, as well as being something that you have to think about several times every day. But that’s not the main point. The main point is treating all human beings like the image of God. It’s about moving through the world in a way that’s fitting for interacting with God’s creation. Rituals and detailed law about everyday habits help with that, but they’re far from the whole picture.

And then, well. Supposing I answer all these people with their different assumptions “No, I’m not really religious”, that doesn’t make any sense of how much time and effort I put in to running services (which occasionally bleeds over into running communities), and Jewish education. The Jewish community is a huge part of my life, and that’s a deliberate choice I’ve made, not something forced on me by my family or anything like that. Mind you, it’s a huge part of my parents’ life too, and obviously that is something that has influenced me.

Just the very fact that people are asking me whether I’m religious is itself a sign that the answer is yes. To say I’m not religious feels like denying a big part of my identity and background. When I approach the world, I do so through a Jewish framework. Now, if I were completely secular, I could say, “I’m Jewish but I’m not practising”, or “I’m a secular Jew”. And that would be the whole story without needing to deny any aspect of my identity. This is certainly an important part of what being Jewish means; I don’t have hard numbers but I suspect the majority of Jews in the world identify as Jewish for ethnic and cultural reasons rather than religious ones.

Also, I kind of find the question embarrassing. I don’t actually mind being the explainer of Judaism, or the first (actively, or at all) Jewish person that another person has met who needs to answer all their basic questions. I quite enjoy those things. (Though that is not blanket permission to go and pester all the people you meet who come from a different culture from yours; lots of people find it intrusive and hate it!) But talking about something as personal as religion and identity and stuff when the conversation is still at the small-talk level, that’s not something that comes easily to me.

Still, I’m making a start by writing this post, aren’t I?

STEM girl

Lots of fun posts celebrating Ada Lovelace day. I particularly enjoyed Helenic’s piece on confidence and how it affects women who write about tech in public.

Also Rachel asked for women in science and technology to represent, so I thought I might have a go.

My official title is Lecturer in Bioscience, at a small but research-driven English university. What I actually do is spend half my time teaching life sciences to the undergraduate medical students, and half my time setting up a cancer research group. Well, eventually it will be set up and then I’ll be spending half my time doing actual research.

In more detail, my subject is cancer cell biology. I’m interested in how cells make the “decision” to grow and divide or remain static or die, how cancer can result when those decision processes go wrong, and how to use that information to develop better cancer drugs. I spend some of my time developing systems for trying out thousands of compounds on cancer cells to pick the ones that are best at making the cancer cells die but doing minimal harm to normal cells. And some of my time trying to figure out exactly what’s going on when cells start growing, and how their natural defence mechanisms work to prevent inappropriate growth and cancer. (One of those natural defence mechanisms is a protein called p53, which is pictured in my icon.)

What I love about my work is the balance between teaching and research. The teaching gives me human contact and immediate gratification. I’ve always loved teaching, and it’s fantastic to be working with these bright, motivated students who find my subject nearly as fascinating as I do. Having that in my life makes it much more possible for me to do the research part, which I love because it’s endlessly interesting and an intense intellectual challenge; there’s no ceiling on how well I can do it. But at the same time it can be quite isolating and sometimes frustrating, because it may take weeks, months or even years before I see whether my effort has yielded any useful progress.

I am a little uncomfortable with the concept of Ada Lovelace day, to be honest. I think it can make a difference to see visible women doing STEM subjects. It’s just that when I was a kid I found it really frustrating that I was always expected to have female role models, I was pushed into fangirling Rosalind Franklin when I wanted to fangirl Francis Crick, assumed because of my gender to be more interested in Dorothy Hodgkin than Max Perutz and so on. In some ways the message I want to send out to girls and young women is that they can do anything they want and gender doesn’t matter, not that we can manage to find one or two female names in the list of influential scientists in your field, so that makes it ok for girls to have science ambitions.

But then, I did have one very important female role model growing up: my grandmother, who qualified as a doctor around the start of WW2 and devoted her whole life (literally, she died in the middle of a consultation with a patient) to women’s and children’s health, especially in deprived parts of the country. She also worked closely with Isabella Forshall, a surgeon born in 1902 who pretty much invented paediatric surgery.

On beauty

Some background: for a long time, I didn’t identify as a feminist, for a number of reasons. Eventually I came to feel that certain feminist issues were important enough to me that I wanted to call myself a feminist in spite of these problems. (I still massively object to racism, transphobia and ableism, mind you, I haven’t softened that stance at all.)

Anyway, one of the things that I found, and to some extent still find, very alienating about feminism is the policing of women’s appearance and gender identity. I couldn’t get my head round endless debates about whether women “should” wear makeup, or shave their legs, or have breast implants. I just couldn’t see that as a political issue, or something that should be decided by moral arbiters rather than just being up to the individual. I could observe a lot of people who would otherwise be sympathetic to feminist causes being excluded from the feminist movement because they made the “wrong” choices.

The whole thing just seemed so narrowly prescriptive: Don’t wear revealing or sexy clothes, because then you’re desperate for sexual attention from men. Don’t wear clothes that are too covering, because then you’re supporting a patriarchal ideal of submissive, modest femininity. Don’t wear clothes that are too frilly and flowery, or grow your hair long, because then you’re being girly and accepting gender stereotypes. Don’t wear clothes typically associated with men, or cut your hair short, because then you’re valuing masculine things above feminine things. In short, any deviation at all from the current fashion (I use fashion in the sense of mainstream clothes that most people wear, rather than in the sense of high fashion or up-to-the-minute trends) means you’re anti-feminist.

One could caricature typical internet feminist debates on the topic as falling into two camps: on one side, the radical or second wave or older or gender feminists, who reject any sort of adornment, and want women to burn bras, shave their heads (but never their legs or armpits), wear dungarees and so on, or failing that, at least to eschew makeup, high heels, jewellery, dresses etc. On the other side, liberal or third wave or younger or equality feminists, who say that what a woman wears is totally her choice and totally above any possible criticism. I didn’t find either position satisfying, but the second at least has the advantage of allowing a range of gender and style expressions. I think however that this dichotomy is one of those emergent properties of internet arguments, where a lot of people end up taking a position without really understanding the issues, and the debate is further muddied by trying to address a lot of bystanders who aren’t feminists at all but are looking to find fault with feminism.

My impression is that it’s possible to move to a level deeper than that, and discuss the political implications of choices about clothing and appearance without insulting or excluding women based on the choices that they make. Perhaps one way to do this is to look at the consequences of not making the approved choices about appearance. For example, in some parts of society, women may face workplace discrimination, overt or indirect, if they don’t dress in a way that’s considered professional, which just coincidentally happens to be a lot more effort than is required of men to look professional. But if they are seen to put too much effort into their appearance, or just plain look too pretty / attractive, they are not taken seriously, they’re assumed to be bimbos or airheads or trading on their looks or even their sexuality. I really want to have this kind of conversation without falling into the exact same trap, of saying that if women don’t make enough effort to conform they are displaying internalized sexism, but if they make too much effort they are selling out. There’s actually a distinction between “women should not be punished for not wearing makeup” and “politically conscious women should not wear makeup”, and that distinction seems to be getting blurred in a lot of places.

Another angle I would like to take is to discuss appearance and expectations about appearance without assuming that the only reason a woman would ever care about looking good is to please men or to be a slave of the “patriarchy”. That’s a huge, dangerous over-simplification. There are lots of good reasons to care about your appearance; it’s a way of expressing yourself, it’s confidence-boosting to look your best, and so on. Also, it’s very much part of human nature to respond better to people who look good, and there’s nothing at all wrong with wanting to benefit from that positive response. It doesn’t mean you’re trying to attract sexual attention, just the general halo that goes with attractiveness. (Actually, I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with wanting to attract sexual attention in the right circumstances, but it’s probably not a good idea to make that the whole aim of your life.)

For most people, of all genders, for most of history, it’s been completely natural to want to look as good as possible. It’s not frivolous to want this. My feeling is that a lot of feminist arguments have been contaminated by an idea that is essentially sexist: that caring about your appearance is feminine, and being feminine is weak and unintelligent and trivial. Hence women who put time and effort and money into looking beautiful (and sometimes even women who just happen to look beautiful) are considered by sexists to be shallow and stupid, but they are also considered by many feminists to be, well, shallow and stupid and in addition politically ignorant or even anti-feminist.

Our society, by which I mean the anglo-influenced world of the last hundred years or so, is a historical and social anomaly in that one particular group, high status men, can get away with a bare minimum of effort with their appearance and still be respected. Or if they do make effort with their appearance, they aim to look as plain and unobtrusive as possible. I can see some value in arguing that women should have the same right as men to make minimum effort with their appearance, to wear plain, comfortable clothes which do not lean heavily on sexuality. But actually I think the whole issue is more complicated than that. One way it’s complicated is that there’s a huge class element in what’s considered an acceptable amount of effort, and even within roughly the same class level, it’s not just that women have to make a lot more effort than men, it’s also that fat people have to make more effort than thin people, and visibly disabled people have to make a lot more effort than apparently able-bodied people, and I gather that POC have to make a lot more effort than white people. Another way it’s complicated is that there’s also an important need for expanding the range of options for self-expression available to men.

Myself, I am in the category of women who aren’t at all interested in clothes, makeup, fashion, accessories or generally spending time on my appearance. I think feminism has been very good for people like me. I generally haven’t had much trouble in my life because I want clothes that are simple, comfortable and convenient, and I don’t want to have to put time or money into looking pretty. In fact in many situations it’s illegal for anyone to treat me worse because of this choice. But I don’t want this advantage to be at the expense of women who do enjoy dressing up. Or women who may not positively enjoy clothes and fashion, but who find the benefits worth the effort.

Of course, another feminist issue that could be discussed is about all the labour that goes into producing clothes and fashion accoutrements. It’s mostly done by women and far too frequently by women with really poor employment conditions. But that’s a separate topic.

Defend to the death your right to say it

I was tangentially involved in a consultation between Staffordshire police and the local interfaith group regarding the police response to the EDL protest here at the weekend. Kudos to the police for even bothering to have such a consultation; admittedly the kind of people who attend interfaith groups set up for police-community liaison are not exactly representative of the general population of Muslims, but I definitely approve of a serious initiative to learn what affected communities want rather than imposing policing on them top-down. Plus, the police attitude was incredibly sensible: they knew that the EDL were looking for trouble, and were working hard to avoid being provoked into fights, but were prepared to intervene against any actual violent incidents.

They were operating from the standpoint that these people have a right to peaceful protest even about distasteful topics. (They very much don’t have a right to vandalize mosques and other Muslim-owned property, much less to attack anyone.) But yeah, I can definitely support the philosophical position that free speech isn’t much use if only warm fluffy liberal speech counts. I could only wish that the police were equally committed to peaceful protest rights when the protests in question are against corporate interests (cf environmental and anti-globalization demos) rather than vulnerable immigrant communities, but that’s another thing. They did the right thing in Stoke on Saturday. Official numbers say 2500 protesters, apparently bussed in from all over the country and mostly not local, and to have a protest that size, by a group who are setting out to cause trouble, and end up with nothing worse than a handful of arrests for minor property damage and public order stuff, is a very positive outcome.

This isn’t an abstract issue for me, by the way; I am absolutely terrified by a neo-fascist protest on that scale in my town. And not in the least reassured when they claim that they “only” hate Muslims and not “established” (ie white-skinned) immigrant groups. Neither am I reassured by the fact that it’s “only” a few thousand extremists, which is a small proportion of the population of the UK. A few thousand people still outnumber me! Even so, I do think the police made the right decision in allowing the protest to go ahead and handling it with the lightest possible touch.

As the BBC article I linked alluded to, some Muslims are upset by the way that the establishment has suddenly decided to be all about free speech and tolerating diversity and so on when the out-group is a bunch of racist thugs. Why do we not hear these kind of righteous proclamations about free speech when the issue is for example a Muslim cleric preaching about the decadence of western society? Or a bunch of Muslim teenagers on a web forum somewhere debating whether democracy is the best form of government? The response to this sort of thing is very far from pious statements about how we might disagree, but people have the right to free speech even if we don’t like their opinions! Instead there’s a lot of hand-wringing and worse about how “Muslims” don’t “support British values”.

Trying to discuss this issue led to a sort of tragically hilarious argument about media representation of Muslims; one of the Muslim reps repeated the standard canard that phrases like “Muslim extremist” and “Islamic terrorist” are clichés, but you never hear about “Christian terrorist” attacks. The Christians in the group got very angry about this, claiming that people who commit violence are absolutely not in any sense Christian. When asked why we are not hearing this message from Christian pulpits, why there is no official condemnation of violence and hatred perpetrated in the name of Christianity, the Christians were offended again and said that it’s totally unnecessary because nobody who attends any church would ever subscribe to racist and intolerant views… They were really not seeing any irony in this discussion.

But on a serious note, it does seem that a lot of media reporting about the EDL is buying into their rhetoric. They are reported as objecting to Muslim “extremism”, or “radical” Islam, when in fact it is very clear that they are against all Muslims and everybody whose ancestors come from an area where Islam is the predominant religion, regardless of their own personal beliefs. It’s taken as a given that EDL people are just thugs who don’t represent the general population, even though there is a constant stream of islamophobia from supposedly respectable people. Any Muslim or Muslim-origin person anywhere who says something offensive, much less commits violence, is used to argue that “Islam” is a danger to civilization and that Muslims are fundamentally opposed to “our” values.

The other point I want to make is that free speech is not a catch-all excuse for hatred. Graffiti-ing offensive slogans on a mosque does involve saying something, but that doesn’t make it an expression of free speech that must be protected at all costs. People have the right to express racist opinions, but they do not have the right to harass and torment people from minority ethnic backgrounds by constantly subjecting them to racist abuse. Inciting racist violence is not exercising your right to free speech, it’s suppressing somebody else’s right to free speech, not to mention their right to a peaceful existence free of fear and assault.

I’d question just how much effort is needed to protect the right of some hooligans to gather together and chant islamophobic slogans. They’re often only a few shades cruder than the kind of thing that is absolutely mainstream in the tabloid press, and more highbrow media often just repeats the same stuff with longer words. If you really believe in free speech, you ought to be putting at least equal effort into protecting the right of Muslims to express their own religious beliefs, even if that includes criticizing British society. The worst thing that will happen to someone expressing racist views is that a small minority of people may disparage their opinions. That’s not a free speech issue; a person may have the right to whatever racist rant they want, but I have just as much right to call them a vile racist scumbag. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from criticism! In contrast, Muslims are in danger of being attacked or killed for expressing unpopular opinions, and that’s a much more serious restriction of free speech.

Aunty Sarah makes a very similar point about the “free speech” rights of transphobic fuckwit Julie Bindel. She has the right to express transphobic views; she absolutely does not have the right to impose those views on a venue where trans and other Queer people gather to feel safe and comfortable. She doesn’t have the right to use her freedom of speech to encourage violence against trans people. There is no free speech requirement for all organizations everywhere to invite her to speak in order to provide “balance” between her hatred and more tolerant attitudes. She doesn’t have the right to a complete exemption from criticism when she says hateful things; calling her a bigot doesn’t obstruct her freedom of speech. She doesn’t have the right to receive awards for her contribution to society when her negative actions so much outweigh her positive achievements. And if I refuse to buy newspapers which publish her hateful, transphobic journalism, I am not restricting her free speech; she has the right to say whatever she likes, but she does not have the right to my money to support her having a prominent, national platform for her views.

Parable

Imagine someone holds the opinion that people should not face prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of height. That’s almost so obvious it’s not worth stating, but what if instead of agreeing that it’s completely obvious, people started arguing against our heightism activist by loudly declaring that of course height exists, there’s no point being politically correct and ignoring the fact that some people are shorter than others!

Obviously, it’s quite easy to argue against height-based discrimination without denying the existence of height as a parameter that we can quite easily observe and measure in humans! Even if the heightism activist quite correctly points out that the experience of being a particular height is dependent on society and cultural background (someone with lots of male Scandinavian or East African friends might think 5′ 8” was short, but someone with mainly East Asian women in their social circle would think 5′ 8” was pretty tall), that’s not saying there’s no such thing as height. Differences in cultural experience are part of reality, just as much as differences in physical bodies are part of reality. Noticing that height interacts with other characteristics like gender, ethnic background, social class and so on (a very tall, working-class African-American might be in demand for basketball teams, while a very short, middle-class white English guy might be encouraged to become a jockey, but probably not the other way round!) is not saying that height is a completely imaginary construct or denying the existence of professions where tallness or shortness could be a real, practical advantage or disadvantage.

Some people are attracted to short people, some to tall people, some don’t care or base attraction on completely unrelated criteria. Nobody is criticizing anyone’s individual preferences when they point out that tall men on average enjoy more romantic success than shorter men, while tall women tend to have a harder time finding partners than average height women. That’s a small but measurably real phenomenon, and I have seen some stats indicating a similar trend regarding promotion and salary in the professional world: being taller than average is a slight advantage for men, but a slight disadvantage for women.

If a Little Person complains of social stigma they encounter, it’s both illogical and unhelpful to say, oh, never mind, just wear platform boots and pretend to be “normal”, height doesn’t matter anyway. If they need treatment for some of the complications that arise from medical dwarfism, we wouldn’t expect anyone to tell them, oh, you don’t deserve any medical help, because you’re reinforcing prejudice against short people by involving doctors in your situation.

In spite of the obviousness of this point, a lot of people seem to be confused on it when the issue is not height, but gender. I have seen a lot of fruitless arguments like this, even among generaly intelligent and sensible people:

Feminist: Don’t discriminate based on gender.
Peanut gallery: But gender totally exists!
F: Our culture is often prejudiced against women.
PG: But gender is totally real and biological, not just cultural!
F: Sexism forces women into low-status roles.
PG: But gender totally exists, so men and women are suited to different jobs!
F: Everyone should be able to choose the path that best suits their talents and personality, regardless of gender.
PG: But gender totally exists!
Random Observer: I guess I must not be a feminist, then, because I definitely believe there are differences between men and women.
F *headdesk*

I think a big part of the problem is that people are unclear about what the word gender means. In some ways it was an unfortunate choice of term, because it already had a meaning referring to languages which have two arbitrary declensions, even for inanimate objects. But that’s the word most commonly used to refer to the complex interaction between a person’s identity and how they are perceived in society. Usually, but not always, the person’s biological sex, ie their configuration of genitals, reproductive organs and possibly chromosomes, is going to be a major component of their gender identity. Now we have a big problem, because some people believe that sex and gender are absolutely congruent in all cases, and some people are embarrassed to use the word “sex” in formal situations (or confuse it with the other thing we call “sex”, namely the act of having erotic intercourse). And some people have picked up the idea that “gender” is a more polite or more academic or more PC way of saying “sex”, so they always say “gender” even if sex is what they mean, which is a bit like people thinking it’s posher to say “whom” instead of “who” and overcorrecting.

Look, sex obviously exists. It’s a (mostly) objective aspect of biological animals, including humans. No sane person is denying that the majority of humans belong to either the male or the female sex, and you can reasonably easily tell who is in which category. (You can get some problems when people insist that what is true for the majority must be true for everyone, but that’s not my major point here.) It’s also mostly trivial; there are circumstances for which it matters, such as pregnancy, and susceptibility to certain diseases. There are a few physical traits which are roughly divided along sex lines, such as height, muscle mass, fat distribution and so on. It would be extremely stupid to deny that these differences are real, physical differences, but it would also be extremely stupid to claim that all men are taller, stronger and leaner than all women; we humans just don’t have that degree of sexual dimorphism.

But the point is that we live in a culture that has collectively decided that differences in somatic characteristics aren’t important outside these narrow, mostly medical contexts. Most people having these debates broadly agree that it’s wrong to treat people differently based on differing appearances, especially if the treatment is favourable to one kind of appearance and hurtful to the other kind.

However, gender is a different thing. I don’t know why gender identity often goes along with physical sex; could be something that has evolved in the way human brains work, could be a consequence of the human tendency to divide people into categories based on superficial but immediately obvious traits, like sex in fact. It doesn’t really matter; gender identity is clearly real as well, and the fact that it is psychological and social rather than physical doesn’t make it any less so! It’s also obvious that lots of people become very unhappy if the social rules for how they can express their gender identity are too rigid. Although in general in our society, having a masculine gender and a male body are relative advantages, men are just as likely to be miserable if they have to behave in ways they find completely unnatural and uncomfortable in order to get those advantages. That’s sexism, in a nutshell (and it possibly should be called “genderism” according to the argument I’ve just made), and I’m against it because it makes people unhappy, it’s an inefficient way to run society (putting effort into making people conform to generalized expectations instead of changing the model when it doesn’t match reality), and most importantly because it’s unfair.

One of the ways that sexism is unfair is that it severely and unjustly punishes people for having a gender identity at odds with their physical sex. That can be men who are effeminate or women who are butch, or it can be people who have such a strong sense of non-congruent gender identity that they experience dysphoria about their bodies. Now, if you knew nothing at all about gender dysphoria, you might hypothesize that undergoing surgery to bring one’s body in line with one’s gender identity would be totally useless and probably harmful. However, if you look at the actual empirical evidence, it turns out for some such people, no amount of counselling or brainwashing, and no amount of rejecting sexism and gender essentialism does any good, whereas reassignment surgery is pretty much curative. For others, simply behaving in ways typically associated with the opposite sex is not enough to make them feel right, but getting other people to acknowledge them as the sex that matches their gender, for example with names and pronouns and legal certificates with the appropriate sex category on, is enough. Again, you might not think this would do any good, but for some people, it does.

I have little respect for people who cling to their first assumption when the empirical evidence overwhelmingly contradicts them, and I have even less time for this attitude when it involves expecting other people to live their lives in misery in order to better suit the disproven theory. I suspect that the number of people who can get such major (and unexpected based on pure thought experiments) benefits from reassignment surgery or non-surgical transition is probably quite small, but there is absolutely no call to punish this small group for all the social ills related to sexism (which in fact has little to do with their unusual gender status anyway!)

That was an aside, really, or rather an extreme and topical example of the kind of question it’s hard to have a useful, communicative discussion about, because every time someone brings up the issue, it devolves into an argument about whether gender exists. This argument is stupid and unhelpful! Gender exists, duh. Also, sexism is bad, duh. And trying to do something about the latter is in no way contradictory to the former. Just because gender exists, doesn’t make it ok to force people into a really narrow set of behaviours based on their physical sex (or even to argue that biological sex doesn’t matter, as long as people stick rigidly to one or the other set of gender rules). Just because gender exists, doesn’t make it ok to discriminate against people based on their gender, or treat things and people regarded as “feminine” as inferior to things and people regarded as “masculine”.

Disclaimer: I have a really weak gender identity myself, so a lot of my ideas about gender are quite theoretical, and I’ve never been strong at social science anyway. And my take on trans issues is going strongly for the basic human decency angle, based on what I’ve picked up from friends and reading, but I am in no way an expert. Check out Aunty Sarah at The Bringer of Tea or the excellent Questioning Transphobia for much more in depth information.

Fear is the mind-killer

So Cereta made an impressive and widely linked post about the pervasiveness of rape. The reaction to it has been really bizarre, and I want to talk about that and about a related issue: the one about women taking personal safety precautions.

(Detailed discussion of rape behind the fold)

I’m probably going to regret posting this

So a brave and much-admired gynaecologist was murdered in America, and lots of people are upset and frightened by this attack. May Dr Tiller rest in peace, and may all of you who are grieving or in shock find the best comfort you can.

The internet being what it is, several people are responding to Dr Tiller’s death by rehashing the abortion debate. Some of it is the absolute usual stuff, with people parotting the same old talking points from the two camps (though the “pro-life” side are perhaps slightly more embarrassed and subdued than usual after the atrocity perpetrated in their name). And feminists getting into long, passionate arguments with people basically on their side about whether any desire to reduce unwanted pregnancy is an attack on women’s autonomy and right to choose.

But because the late Dr Tiller specialized in “late-term” abortions, the pro-choice voices are focusing more than usual on the reasons why abortions of fully developed foetuses are sometimes necessary. There’s a desire to put a human face on the debate by retelling stories of women who had to have late-term abortions. And, well, these stories follow a certain format or even style, which is not surprising due to the way that the internet magnifies and reflects things back. The model is that we have a couple who are joyfully waiting for the birth of a beloved and wanted child, and go for a scan at the six month point and suddenly find out that something has gone horribly wrong, so the only possible option is to have an abortion, and everybody is devastated, but deeply grateful for the existence of doctors like Tiller for averting an even greater tragedy.

I can see that the point is to present cases where the mother who chooses abortion is as sympathetic as she could possibly be, and counteract the pro-life propaganda against selfish, promiscuous, careless women who kill their babies on a whim. Fair enough as a rhetorical tactic, but I’m a little worried about what traits are needed to make a woman sympathetic. She has to be married, she has to be a potentially ideal mother, and it helps a lot if she’s middle class and respectable. I’d like to hear some stories about women who are in unconventional relationships or none, or who have perhaps at some stage expressed the slightest possible doubt about whether they really truly want a baby, or who maybe do have some worries about whether they can afford to raise a child. After all, if the point of the rhetoric is that these late term abortions are necessary to save women’s lives, then surely it shouldn’t matter how saintly the women in question are. Medical necessity is necessity, emergency treatment in a life-threatening situation shouldn’t be a reward for living up to the romanticized ideal of Motherhood.

The other thing that’s really, really bugging me is the “something has gone horribly wrong” part of this style of story. The much loved and wanted baby turns out to have a congenital defect, so all of a sudden it’s no longer a loved and wanted baby, it’s a terrible tragedy. The only possibly humane thing to do is to kill it as quickly as possible so that it doesn’t have to suffer. In some of the stories, the baby is already dead or obviously non-viable. In others, the baby has spina bifida or a hole in the heart or bone problems or an unspecified “genetic condition”. There are heart-string tugging descriptions of how the baby if brought to term would need massive surgery, or be in terrible pain, or be born with cancer, or have a learning disability, or would never learn to walk, or would be… (and this is an actual example from one of the “my heartbreaking late term abortion” stories I’ve read) incontinent. And all these things are considered to be equivalent to the baby developing without lungs or a brain.

The thing is, there are people I love who are in a lot of pain, or needed significant surgery at some point in their life, or have cancer, or need expensive medical treatment or long-term care. And I’m basically too upset to even talk about how a baby which is predicted to be unable to walk or toilet herself absolutely must be killed right now, otherwise the parents and doctors are evil cruel monsters for bringing such a tragedy into the world. And yes, I understand that the pro-choice movement puts a lot of weight on arguing that a foetus is not a person. But this kind of rhetoric about the kind of babies that absolutely must be aborted no matter what hurts real people who are currently alive.

Note I’m not proposing that anyone should be forced to carry to term a baby she doesn’t want. Please don’t accuse me of taking that position! I’m saying that the people who are arguing so passionately in favour of abortion rights should select their arguments with care. Sometimes the pro-life side are accused of only caring about the life of pure innocent little unborn babies, but not actual living humans (and that accusation is certainly true in the case of the evil man who murdered Dr Tiller, and those extremists who encouraged him and are celebrating his action.) But at this stage in the debate, it’s coming across as if some of the pro-choice side only care about the rights and autonomy of women who are young and healthy and able-bodied and neurotypical and preferably pretty and socially valued (and I have this sinking feeling that pretty is really a figleaf for “white, middle-class and sexually conservative”).

Pretty much the only people I’ve seen addressing this issue are the wonderful Kay Olson and Wheelchair dancer. And that only in comments buried deep in a blog discussion. I want to add my voice to theirs, with a top level post, not that I have all that much traffic or prominence.

PS: I’m going to be pretty harsh about deleting comments that don’t acknowledge people with disabilities as people. If you can’t talk about people, not “tragedies” or “burdens” or “medical costs”, please don’t talk to me about this topic at all. And I don’t particularly want to hear your personal views on the abortion debate in general either, because that’s strongly missing the point of what I’m trying to say.

European elections

It’s very interesting being a foreigner and watching the electoral campaigns. The thing is, I don’t have any preconceived notions about what the various parties stand for, so I get the emotional impact of the advertising more or less undiluted. Pretty much every party has a poster campaign consisting of large images of their candidates with some kind of slogan, but they convey very different impressions.

On this very unsophisticated emotional level, the Centre party seem most appealing to me. They have by far the most diverse slate, in terms of age, ethnic background and other visible markers. Their slogans are enthusiastically pro-EU, for reasons that seem to boil down to “together we’re stronger”. The green party have very witty posters (and break the general rule of having portraits of their candidates dominating their ads), but I am automatically biased against single issue parties like that. The main opposition party, the left wing Social Democrats, are pretty much treating the European elections as a chance to campaign for their usual domestic issues and not really saying anything about European politics specifically.

There are a couple of anti-EU parties which make me roll my eyes, I mean, really, what’s the point of standing for European elections on a platform of “we hate the EU”? And they tend to be at the extreme ends of the political spectrum anyway, the “leftist” party who would be communists except that the communist party got banned some years ago, the “workers’” party which is some splinter group from that, the “feminist” party which is a national joke. On the right, the weird nationalist and “Christian” parties who are knee-jerk against foreigners. And a single issue anti-Europe party, which is possibly the stupidest of the lot.

The “liberal” or centre right party are also pro-EU, but for the wrong reasons. They want an international police force, tougher anti-immigrant policies, free trade within the Union but protectionism outside it, and as far as I can tell from my superficial impression they seem to be pushing for some form of federalism. The right wing incumbent party, the “Moderates” (known colloquially as “the Borg”) seem to be taking a pragmatic attitude to EU politics, implying that a strong national government can push the EU towards working for Sweden’s benefit, but will be vigilant against any erosion of sovereignty.

The thing is that we’ve been hearing reports that some of the Moderates’ posters are getting defaced by people scrawling “JEW” across them. In Sweden the political left tends to be very anti-Israel, whereas the Moderates have a vocally pro-Israel wing and even their mainstream party line is at least vaguely sympathetic to the Israeli state. None of their candidates actually are Jewish, but apparently antisemitic slurs are a way of expressing frustration at the unpopular current government. It’s happening in the parts of town with high immigrant populations, but I don’t infer from this that (presumed Muslim) immigrants are responsible; areas with lots of immigrants tend to contain lots of poor and disaffected ethnic Swedes as well.

It’s of course an unfortunate historical accident that the Swedish word for “Jew” happens to be identical to the German word. And I personally think it’s most likely that these “attacks” are being perpetrated by kids who feel angry and want to get a reaction, rather than an organized anti-Jewish campaign. But there are an awful lot of people in the Jewish community who are very triggered by seeing JUDE ✡ all over the place.

Actually, I found the Moderates’ posters disturbing already, even without the graffiti. They’re over-photoshopped, in some attempt to make the candidates look flawless. But the effect is to create a wall of very blonde faces, with perfect smiles and unblemished skin, and a slightly robotic air. They’re very blonde because, well, it’s Sweden, the majority of people and the very great majority of the kind of people who are in a position to become major politicians are blonde. Just, on the irrational level where I’m receiving political messages this election, it’s creepy.

That “mixed” relationship thing

So I’ve been going out with the Beau for about a year and a half now, and we’re doing well. I’ve been more or less refusing questions about whether it’s a problem that he’s not Jewish, because, well, we’re just us, we’re not a paradigm of a mixed relationship. I have a slight suspicion sometimes that people are hoping for drama when they pose questions like that. In any case I’ve decided to introspect about it now.

I must admit I had some doubts about getting into a relationship with someone who isn’t Jewish. Mostly because I find romantic relationships difficult anyway, and I was daunted by adding to the inherent difficulty of being emotionally entangled with a whole separate person by choosing someone from such a different background. My last relationship with a non-Jewish guy kind of imploded; he very nobly went around telling everybody that the issues were all on his side and I had no problems with it, but that doesn’t mean that I feel good about hurting someone I cared about. But I don’t generalize from that that no mixed relationships can ever work, it was that particular person and those particular circumstances which led to a bad outcome. When I was considering getting together with the Beau, what it came down to was that I was pretty sure I wanted to be with him as an individual, not as a hypothetical example of the sort of person I would ideally want to date.

On a personal level, things work incredibly well; Judaism doesn’t get in the way any more than any hobby or social activity that happens not to be shared. J is veggie, which pretty much removes any food problems. And he’s supportive and interested in my Jewish stuff, to a point where the fact that he thinks that the underlying principles are complete nonsense is no more than one of those topics for relaxed couply teasing. The long distance thing may help with this; we’re not trying to run a joint household where my religious practices might get in the way. And the Beau doesn’t resent the time I spend doing community stuff, or having to fit round my commitments.

Considering mixed relationships in the abstract I worried that a partner might fail to understand something that’s a very important part of who I am. But actually being able to understand me depends more on good communication than shared background, and good communication we have lots of! There is no problem of an atheist not being able to understand being religiously committed.

The only thing that seems a little weird sometimes is when I notice the way my Beau has complete confidence there’s a place for him in the world. He doesn’t have an inkling of what it’s like to know that there are people out there who want to kill you, just for who your ancestors are, without any regard for anything you might say or do. I find it hard to think that’s a bad thing, though; I want a world where everybody has that sort of basic expectation of the right to continue existing without violent threat. In our wanderings around Europe touristing, we’ve come across quite a few reminders of the Holocaust or other historical attacks on Jews; I get the impression the Beau finds this sort of thing shocking. And, well, it is shocking, it’s just that I’ve known about the Holocaust for as long as I’ve been aware enough to know anything at all about how the world works. I don’t think this difference in experience is a problem for the relationship, not at all; after all, my identity is very much not about being a victim of antisemitism. I would say the Holocaust has a relatively minor influence on my life (all my family close enough to know about were in England at the time, for example). It’s just that it’s part of my understanding of what it is to be human, and I’ve grown up with a community including many Survivors and people who were directly affected.

So in fact, the only real issues have been about how we are perceived by others, and those are mild. My parents are not delighted about the relationship, but they have too much wisdom to go around openly disapproving of their kids’ choice of partners, much less putting pressure on us to date according to their wishes. (I think his family are a bit bemused at his choosing a religious Jewish girlfriend, but the weirdness is the religious part (they’re all atheists!) not the Jewish part.) And most of my friends are generally sensible and realist about these things; they may have qualms, or be unwilling to date non-Jews themselves, but understand the situation I’m in and aren’t judgemental. Sometimes it’s just slightly awkward because when I introduce my sweetie, people naturally assume that he’s Jewish.

Stockholm is in fact the ideal place for a mixed couple. The demographics here are such that 90% of married Jews have non-Jewish partners. Finding a Jewish spouse means, unless you’re really lucky and happen to fall in love with someone who chooses to convert, you pretty much have to stick to marrying someone from the very small group of kids you grew up with, and that’s often not an attractive or even an expected choice in our society. I know a few people who have decided they won’t get involved with non-Jews; there a couple of guys in their 50s and 60s who are still half-heartedly hoping that one day their Jewish Princess will come. Actually this harsh reality is part of why we spend so much of our time hanging out with my religiously committed Jewish friends; most of the non-Jews I know around my age are married with small kids, so less interested in or available for the kind of social activities I participate in. Some of the 30-ish Jews are still waiting for a Jewish partner, so they haven’t embarked on serious relationships or reproduction yet. But basically, nobody here bats an eyelid at discovering the Beau isn’t Jewish.

Outside Stockholm, well, it’s mostly just eyelids. It seems that several of my friends assume that the relationship is automatically a problem, and several of his assume that he’s thinking of becoming Jewish. I don’t think anyone assumes we could fix the supposed problem via me giving up being Jewish, I think mainly because you can’t really give up being Jewish, even if I became totally atheist and never set foot in a synagogue again, I’d still be Jewish, and it would still be, in many people’s eyes, a mixed relationship. I think much of the potential for internal problems would be the same if I were going out with someone just like my Beau, equally atheist, with equally little religious background, who just happened to be ancestrally Jewish. It might even be worse because there would be a danger that anything I did in terms of Jewish practice and involvement could easily be perceived as an implicit criticism of my hypothetical secular Jewish partner for not being religious enough. But the world would be congratulating me on my good luck in finding a Jewish partner, instead of being concerned for me.

The other thing is that I’m at a point in my life where I’m considering taking the Jewish leadership thing further, maybe even professionally. Running services and education was something I did in Dundee because I had to, but I’ve grown into the role and I now find that it brings me real joy and satisfaction. Lots of my friends here think I should train as a rabbi, and they really mean it, it’s more than just a compliment because they enjoyed my latest sermon. It’s something I’m putting serious consideration into, but having a non-Jewish partner, however supportive, is going to be a major, major obstacle. I don’t think any denomination will train me as a rabbi unless I lie about, or end, the relationship. And even for more informal leadership positions, outside Scandinavia it’s going to count against me.

When I start thinking about the future, whether or not I do decide to go down the Jewish leadership route, I must admit I get scared. We’ve got to the point of having vague, highly hypothetical conversations about whether this could be a long term thing. And I really don’t see why not, except that at some point I’d have to make the leap and start saying: this is the person I’ve chosen, deal with that or not. Perhaps that’s the same thing as deciding to get married (or make an equivalent long-term commitment) in the first place, you have to decide that you’re going to push this relationship through no matter what opposition or challenges you face. But having the mixed thing hanging over us makes it harder to do the more natural thing of just spending more time together, perhaps making plans to overcome geography or even move in together, and just see how it goes. (This would be a million times more scary if long term also meant kids, but if I’d wanted to have children I’d have married one of my Jewish exes, not because they’re Jewish but because they were willing to start a family with me and I love them, and if that was what I wanted I would have acted.)

At the same time, I’m acutely aware that all of this is really extremely mild. I’m not in any danger of getting beaten up, or cut off from my family and community because my partner isn’t Jewish. From a practical, legal standpoint, getting married would be perfectly easy, and I don’t even think I know anyone who would refuse to attend a wedding. In a lot of ways, the friction resulting from being in a mixed relationship is completely eclipsed by the social credit I gain from being in an opposite sex relationship. This Shapely Prose piece about being a queer woman with a male partner resonated really strongly with me, in ways that I’m not quite ready to articulate, even when I’m in this confessional frame of mind.

Power imbalances and the internet

This is tangentially about both RaceFail and AmazonFail, but only in that they’re both examples of the phenomenon I want to talk about. And I’m not drawing any direct comparisons between the two incidents.

Let’s take a sequence of events: Somebody is Wrong on the internet. And not just Wrong about, you know, gun control or abortion or whether to vote Democrat or Republican (or whether the rest of the world outside the USA actually exists as anything more than a fable or source of rhetorical ammunition) but displaying bigotry against some minority group. Because the internet is inherently a public medium, people who belong to the minority group are going to notice, and are quite likely to express their hurt feelings. What happens now?

People don’t like being criticized in public, especially when it’s something that touches an important part of their self-image. A bigot is a bad person in most people’s understanding these days, so it’s hard to hear “this action or comment has bigotry-promoting consequences” without hearing “you’re an evil bigot!” So the accused person is very likely to get defensive. In scrabbling to find reasons why the accusation can’t possibly be true (because I’m a good person!), they’re likely to cause more harm. For example, they may accuse the minority group of being over-sensitive or stupid, or claim that bigotry is a thing of the past. If the targeted minority was hurt before, being called stupid or told that their experiences of discrimination don’t really matter to real people is likely to make them incensed. Because the internet is the internet, they’ll deal with this by complaining to all their friends. The friends will rush to support the target and try to make the originally accused person see reason. Inevitably, the accused person will also get support from their friends, and the more tempers run high the more random second-degree connections and eventually total strangers will start following links and everything will get amplified and messy. (I very much like CartesianDaemon’s comment on outrage: if I’m a little bit outraged, it might either look like (a) I think amazon were only a little bit culpable or (b) I only care about discrimination a little bit.)

Once things get horrible in public, people who don’t really know the original facts will conclude that the whole thing’s just a pointless flamewar, and that both sides are equally at fault. The people who are complaining about bigotry get accused of dogpiling, of ganging up, of being too angry and aggressive. And because emotions are already running high, you hear the rhetoric of violence, talking about mobs or lynching or angry hordes.

I think what really drove this home to me is that some people are taking this line regarding the AmazonFail story; the people who twittered about it and got large groups of people shouting about how Amazon is homophobic and they’re going to stop buying from Amazon until there’s a proper apology are being classified as an angry mob, getting carried away by the crowd dynamics, rushing too quickly to violence before they know all the facts… Waitaminute! Deciding to buy books from Barnes and Noble instead of Amazon because you don’t like Amazon’s homophobic policies is not violence. It’s not even a little tiny bit like violence. Googlebombing is not bombing. A commercial boycott is neither social shunning nor, most certainly not, declaring war! And this is Amazon, this isn’t even an individual person who meant well but said the wrong thing in an internet discussion and ended up getting their feelings hurt and understandably their friends want to take their side.

Part of it is an instinct to go against whatever the crowd is doing; if everybody is angry with Amazon, it’s natural to want to defend Amazon, to feel like a balanced person who sees both sides of the argument. But realistically, Amazon is not the underdog here. Straight, gender normative, able bodied individuals are not the underdog here. (Some of the worst of this is in the Making Light post on the subject, and again understandably, the mods are not very happy about the comparison to RaceFail. Which is why I’m taking this here rather than trying to comment in that thread.)

The other thing I want to talk about is the asymmetry. On a very crude level, it means something different when a white person calls a black person stupid, from when a black person calls a white person stupid. A white-only club is a very different thing from a club for an ethnic minority group to get together and provide mutual support. But there’s another aspect to this. There are some techniques which the powerful use against outsiders, such as shunning and social exclusion, such as getting a big group together to gang up on one individual, such as shouting and aggressive mannerisms, and so on. That’s definitely bullying, and since many people who make their social life on the internet were bullied as kids they’re very sensitive to it. But when a group of hurt people get together and decide that they don’t want to socialize with someone who keeps hurting them, that’s not the same as social exclusion. When people get support from their friends in order to defend themselves against bigotry, that’s not the same as ganging up or piling on. When a member of a minority gets angry about being constantly mistreated based on a superficial characteristic, that’s not the same as a powerful person yelling at someone in a subservient position in order to intimidate them. Refusing to do business with someone because you don’t like their skin colour is not the same kind of action as refusing to give your money to a business that discriminates.

Equally, some of the dynamic I’m seeing is that people with power are adopting some of the tactics used by discriminated groups to try to lessen discrimination. For example, suing institutions for discrimination against white people or men if they have policies to try to support POC or women. Accusing people of intolerance when they complain about bigotry. Again, complaining about homophobes is not at all equivalent to discriminating against gay people!

There’s another aspect which is a bit harder to define. Often, part of unconscious prejudice against minority groups is that the same reaction is perceived as being more aggressive than coming from a higher status person. This is partly because of direct stereotypes about the group (eg “black people are violent and animalistic”), and partly because groups that experience discrimination often learn to be extremely polite, deferential and conciliating and any deviation from that is perceived as threatening (eg a woman who complains about sexism instead of trying to adapt to it is “a man-hating feminazi”). It’s also partly because people are quite naturally more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people like them, and if people like you happen to run society, then they get a whole bunch of automatic credibility on top of that. Also, it’s a big problem when a group that is generally not subjected to violence uses the rhetoric of violence to dismiss the complaints of a group who do fear actual, literal violence.

In the probably vain hope of forestalling annoying responses to this, I want to point out that I am NOT saying that anything that a person from a discriminated background ever does is right, or that anyone who shares characteristics with the people who generally wield social power is automatically in the wrong. I’m saying that I’ve seen a lot of dynamics where an argument between powerful people who are behaving in a bigoted way, and vulnerable people who are complaining about that bigotry is perceived as “both sides are just as bad as eachother”. Or when both sides do in fact behave badly, the less than perfect behaviour of one or two representatives of the minority is treated much more seriously than all the bigotry which led to the situation in the first place.

In conclusion: calling someone a homophobe is really not equivalent to calling someone a f*ggot. Calling someone a racist is really not equivalent to using a racial slur.

Hard cases make bad law

There’s a really sad story in the news here at the moment: it concerns a premature baby, whom the medical team had decided couldn’t be saved so they agreed to turn off the life support. They followed normal procedures and sedated the baby so she wouldn’t experience distress, but the dose was miscalculated and the baby died from the sedative. The consultant responsible for the overdose has been arrested and imprisoned, facing charges of euthanasia, ie murder because euthanasia is not legal under any circumstances in Sweden.

Even if it transpires that the doctor deliberately gave an excessive dose and killed the baby, there doesn’t seem to be much moral logic in punishing her for ending the baby’s life a little faster than she was planning to end it, legitimately, anyway! Every step leading up to the doctor being in prison is perfectly reasonable, but they add up to horrible unintended consequences.

I think it’s right to prohibit euthanasia, because although in theory I accept that it can be moral for a doctor to assist a patient to commit suicide, in practice there is no way to enforce the law to prevent its abuse by those who want to murder “undesirables”. In a society where people with disabilities, poor people, and old people were fully valued, legal euthanasia would be morally good, but we’re a million miles from such a society. I think it’s right that causing death by giving the wrong dose of sedatives should classify as murder (or manslaughter depending on intent). I even think it’s right that the accused doctor has been temporarily imprisoned; the Swedish legal system jails people arrested on a murder charge, purely in order to take witness statements without the suspect interfering in any way. Once this process is complete, the doctor will be released on bail and await a full trial like any other criminal defendant.

It seems likely that the doctor will be found innocent when the case does come to trial. If not, I foresee a new unintended consequence: doctors in an end of life situation may be reluctant to give adequate pain relief in case they are held criminally responsible for hastening the patient’s death. There has to be a distinction between active killing, and simply ceasing treatment (otherwise doctors would have to go to extreme lengths to save patients in every case, and nobody could ever be removed from life support). The problem is that dividing line is ludicrously fine in practice.

When I was a kid we had a neighbour who was found to be carrying a foetus with spina bifida. Being Catholic, she would not consider abortion, but when the child was born, simply didn’t feed her until she died. I can’t help thinking that it would have been “kinder” for the baby (if you believe that an unborn child has the status of a baby) to be killed by a lethal injection at an early stage in pregnancy, than to be brought to term and then starved to death. Similarly with this case: surely being put to sleep with an excessive dose of sedatives involves less suffering than being taken off a ventilator. Yet, on a technicality at least, the crueller alternative avoids active killing.