It was reported the other day that French planes had bombed a school in Mosul in northern Iraq and that 28 children died.
Across the region, from Syria and Iraq to Gaza and Lebanon, children who survive, and have survived, the decades of chaos visited upon them, live through a childhood blighted by fear, pain, trauma, loss and grief until it is no longer childhood at all, and have done so for a generation.
Interrogations of captured ISIS fighters by the Iraqi army and researchers into the resolution of intractable conflicts have found one thing they all have in common. They had no childhood or adolescence, at least not in the way we understand it, not as a stable, developmentally productive period of life, and they are, in one form or another, in mourning for its loss.
In 1996, Madaleine Albright (the USA's ambassador to the UN at the time - she became US Secretary of State the following year) was interviewed about the "excess deaths" arising as a result of UN sanctions of Iraq. "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" she was asked, and Albright, finding herself cornered, replied "we think the price is worth it."
But clearly 500,000 children was not enough after all. As the example I listed at the beginning shows, we require at least 28 more.
The answer to the question that forms the title of this article is, of course, no more children must die.
As we drop bombs in our futile macho gestures against ISIS, we are dropping bombs on an organisation that is supported by Turkey. They do this because they want to topple Assad, and because ISIS fight against the Kurds, thereby destabilising the domestic Turkish left wing platform in which Kurdish organisations participate.
They are supported by Saudi Arabia, because they fight against Shi'ite "apostates" and "Safawis" like Iran. They are supported by Israel because they fight against Hezbollah and seem to be happy to let Israel retain the Golan Heights with its recently discovered oil reserves.
And ISIS are of course supported by everyone who likes the idea of buying oil at $25 a barrel and doesn't care where it comes from, and by various commercial entities with interests in particular oil and gas pipeline routes.
ISIS are in financial crisis. They have run out of banks to rob. Their tax base is being eroded as refugees flee the country (indeed every hysterical response in the West about refugees is used as domestic propaganda by ISIS to persuade people to stay). The infrastructure that supports their oil exports is being degraded and they are finding it difficult to recruit engineers and skilled personnel to operate what remains. They rely more than ever on the support of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, indeed they would not continue to exist without it.
ISIS clearly represent an epochal evil. However, there are no "good guys versus bad guys" here. The cycle of violence has persisted so long it has led us to a situation where we are no longer fighting our enemy any more, we are fighting our enemy's enemy's enemy, and every enemy has at some point been an ally, and every ally has at some point been guilty of the very violations of human rights and dignities we use as a pretext for punishing our enemies. Once war starts the logic that gave it birth mutates with every grievance and atrocity until the only remaining legitimate war aim is its end.
But Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel are our allies. It would be nice to think we could influence them in some way that does not involve killing children.
To make a table or chair fall over, we could remove the various legs that support it, or we could bomb the house it's in. Only one of these involves killing children. Only one of these is guaranteed to work. And not the same one.
Friday, 27 November 2015
Monday, 23 November 2015
The song of the arms dealers
We stuffed our coffers fast and full while workers filled their coffins,
We piled our profits rafter-high and left them just one option:
to take a single shilling and to make their children orphans,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
Year after year, war after war, we sold the guns they'd need.
We sold the bombs and kept no scores, whatever made them bleed.
He sold them his, I sold them mine, we'd toast how well we'd done,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
No mustard gas in St Tropez, no mistral at Verdun,
no justice bought for any price while we controlled the coin,
and French and German coughed their last while we were having fun,
and giving them thanks of a grateful nation.
It wasn't champagne in our glass, it wasn't crystal chiming,
it wasn't fine wine that we drank while dancing and fine-dining,
but workers blood in workers skulls, while workers did the dying,
and got from us thanks of a grateful nation.
And you sleep soundly in your bed. You do not drown in mud
beneath a flare and flack filled sky amid the screams and thuds.
You do not really wonder why. You do not ask. Instead
you give to them thanks of a grateful nation.
We piled our profits rafter-high and left them just one option:
to take a single shilling and to make their children orphans,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
Year after year, war after war, we sold the guns they'd need.
We sold the bombs and kept no scores, whatever made them bleed.
He sold them his, I sold them mine, we'd toast how well we'd done,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
No mustard gas in St Tropez, no mistral at Verdun,
no justice bought for any price while we controlled the coin,
and French and German coughed their last while we were having fun,
and giving them thanks of a grateful nation.
It wasn't champagne in our glass, it wasn't crystal chiming,
it wasn't fine wine that we drank while dancing and fine-dining,
but workers blood in workers skulls, while workers did the dying,
and got from us thanks of a grateful nation.
And you sleep soundly in your bed. You do not drown in mud
beneath a flare and flack filled sky amid the screams and thuds.
You do not really wonder why. You do not ask. Instead
you give to them thanks of a grateful nation.
Wednesday, 11 November 2015
Remembrance
When we remember the fallen today, remember all of them.
Not just the ones our governments bring to our attention.
Don't let the dead be a matter of convenience to the living as they justify and pursue policies that betray a failure to learn anything at all from the past. Commemoration must not be allowed to be merely expedient. It must be the grossest of inconveniences.
Remember them all, friends and foes, foreign and domestic, military and civilian, known and unknown. Remember the victims of our own aggression, innumerable nameless millions lost to history whose very existence is reduced to a matter of speculation by our genocides and war crimes.
Remember the heroes and the villains. Remember the deserters shot at dawn. Remember those crushed in insurrection against the world we have made over their unmarked graves. Remember the reviled.
Remember them all and take no comfort in your commemoration.
Not just the ones our governments bring to our attention.
Don't let the dead be a matter of convenience to the living as they justify and pursue policies that betray a failure to learn anything at all from the past. Commemoration must not be allowed to be merely expedient. It must be the grossest of inconveniences.
Remember them all, friends and foes, foreign and domestic, military and civilian, known and unknown. Remember the victims of our own aggression, innumerable nameless millions lost to history whose very existence is reduced to a matter of speculation by our genocides and war crimes.
Remember the heroes and the villains. Remember the deserters shot at dawn. Remember those crushed in insurrection against the world we have made over their unmarked graves. Remember the reviled.
Remember them all and take no comfort in your commemoration.
Love Song
In love we contain
each other's secret name,
names we didn't even know we had,
and with kisses we steal from each other
the breath we need to say them
like they were the first words spoken:
Love
created the world
because it wanted something to love
and love hid itself inside us
to see its beloved through its own eyes,
our eyes,
but from us it learned to forget:
the sin we call knowledge, the emptiness
we invent all the colours and all the shapes
to disguise; we forgot our own divinity
and thought ourselves mere creatures,
prowling, alone, lost, afraid, fighting, dying,
but sometimes,
even when we can't find it in ourselves,
sometimes we see our divinity briefly glimmer
and elude our second glance,
hidden in someone else,
somewhere almost
but, as we eventually find out,
after all the quests and reversals of fortune,
all the half-remembered myths
through which we heroically drag ourselves
from ritual to history,
after all the murdered gods and sacrificed children,
and elaborations of atrocity and annihilation,
and after that infinite chasm of time that elapses
between first seeing you and first touching you
almost, but, I promise, not quite impossible to reach,
and we discover love again, and for all time,
and recreate the world anew,
safe from every cataclysm.
We all contain
each other's secret name,
and steal the breath we need
to speak it with a kiss,
and when we repeat it aloud
we discover they sound the same
and in each others arms
beside the river of time
we sing our names together again
and again
and again.
each other's secret name,
names we didn't even know we had,
and with kisses we steal from each other
the breath we need to say them
like they were the first words spoken:
Love
created the world
because it wanted something to love
and love hid itself inside us
to see its beloved through its own eyes,
our eyes,
but from us it learned to forget:
the sin we call knowledge, the emptiness
we invent all the colours and all the shapes
to disguise; we forgot our own divinity
and thought ourselves mere creatures,
prowling, alone, lost, afraid, fighting, dying,
but sometimes,
even when we can't find it in ourselves,
sometimes we see our divinity briefly glimmer
and elude our second glance,
hidden in someone else,
somewhere almost
but, as we eventually find out,
after all the quests and reversals of fortune,
all the half-remembered myths
through which we heroically drag ourselves
from ritual to history,
after all the murdered gods and sacrificed children,
and elaborations of atrocity and annihilation,
and after that infinite chasm of time that elapses
between first seeing you and first touching you
almost, but, I promise, not quite impossible to reach,
and we discover love again, and for all time,
and recreate the world anew,
safe from every cataclysm.
We all contain
each other's secret name,
and steal the breath we need
to speak it with a kiss,
and when we repeat it aloud
we discover they sound the same
and in each others arms
beside the river of time
we sing our names together again
and again
and again.
Monday, 9 November 2015
Do you suffer from TDS?
TLA Dissonance Syndrome (TDS) affects people of all ages in all walks of life, where their job requires them to know the meaning of various three letter abbreviations (or TLAs) but where there are identical TLAs with different meanings. Often context does not even allow them to differentiate between TLAs, leading to elevated levels of stress, producing harmful toxins, dizziness, nausea and irritability.
My name's Peter Clive, and I work in the wind power industry. I find context can often be helpful when dealing with TLAs. It is usually clear, for example, when EDF means Électricité de France (a utility with a large renewable energy portfolio) and where it means Erbium Doped Fibre (a key component in some laser based remote sensing systems for measuring wind conditions).
But sometimes context doesn't help. I can find myself wondering if PPA is used to refer to a Power Performance Assessment (which tells me how efficient a wind turbine is) or a Power Purchase Agreement (which tells me how much I can sell the electricity it generates for). I find myself experiencing increasing levels of TDS related anxiety as I struggle to discern if NWP is used to mean Numerical Weather Prediction or Normal Wind Profile.
Critically, even those engaged in the study and mitigation of TDS are forced to endure the most hideous TDS related injuries, as wikipedia's disambiguation page for TDS itself shows. And studies have yet to determine the relationship between Three Letter Acronym Dissonance Syndrome and Three Letter Abbreviation Dissonance Syndrome - whether they are related but distinct disorders, or the same thing. The data simply is not yet available.
Please help us raise awareness of this debilitating condition, and hopefully we can get legislation passed to ensure that clear and unambiguous TLAs are adopted across the various industries that rely heavily on their use. Please help curtail the unregulated use of ambiguous TLAs and provide some relief to the country's estimated 7.5 million suffers of TDS.
Don't suffer in silence from TDS.
My name's Peter Clive, and I work in the wind power industry. I find context can often be helpful when dealing with TLAs. It is usually clear, for example, when EDF means Électricité de France (a utility with a large renewable energy portfolio) and where it means Erbium Doped Fibre (a key component in some laser based remote sensing systems for measuring wind conditions).
But sometimes context doesn't help. I can find myself wondering if PPA is used to refer to a Power Performance Assessment (which tells me how efficient a wind turbine is) or a Power Purchase Agreement (which tells me how much I can sell the electricity it generates for). I find myself experiencing increasing levels of TDS related anxiety as I struggle to discern if NWP is used to mean Numerical Weather Prediction or Normal Wind Profile.
Critically, even those engaged in the study and mitigation of TDS are forced to endure the most hideous TDS related injuries, as wikipedia's disambiguation page for TDS itself shows. And studies have yet to determine the relationship between Three Letter Acronym Dissonance Syndrome and Three Letter Abbreviation Dissonance Syndrome - whether they are related but distinct disorders, or the same thing. The data simply is not yet available.
Please help us raise awareness of this debilitating condition, and hopefully we can get legislation passed to ensure that clear and unambiguous TLAs are adopted across the various industries that rely heavily on their use. Please help curtail the unregulated use of ambiguous TLAs and provide some relief to the country's estimated 7.5 million suffers of TDS.
Don't suffer in silence from TDS.
Friday, 6 November 2015
We are all Echidna's children now
In Greek mythology Echidna was half woman, half snake. She lived in a cave and, with Typhon, youngest son of Gaia, had many children, the most fearsome monsters of Greek mythology: the many headed dog Cerberus; the Chimera; the Sphinx; the Hydra; the Gorgons; the Harpies ...
CRISPR technology has been developed that allows us to edit genes in situ. The reality of this may not be quite like the title sequence of an X-Man movie, but the consequences are much more far reaching, as has been discussed here. Please read the article, then continue.
Radioactive spiders are no longer required if you want to become Spiderman. You can now customise your own mutant X gene. Come down to the superpower boutique and get fitted out with some enhancements.
Natural selection is side-tracked. Sexual reproduction is redundant. We shall discover the ultimate freedom, the ultimate illusory consumer choice, when we as adults can choose as our parents some random individuals from magazines found on the table in the waiting room of the clinic we attend for our gene therapy, with their glossy airbrushed celebrities finally vindicated and made vivid and real by our imitation of them in the flesh.
Nature and Nurture yield at last to Culture. We are at last outcomes of our own artifice.
And who will save us when it all goes horribly wrong? Where are our original selves going to be backed up? Indeed, what frame of reference remains when all that made us human is swept aside?
How do we revert to our original genetic code after we have given a new one a test drive and have had enough? Or maybe we won't want to: the modification may also alter our attitudes, and once you become the "new you" you are incapable of wanting to change back.
The article I alluded to above is correct. It is impossible to overstate the significance of CRISPR technology. Doudna and her colleagues are ushering us over a threshold greater than anything Copernicus dreamt of, greater than the advent of metallurgy, greater than language and tools. This is more important than having opposable thumbs, because this allows us to choose whether or not to have opposable thumbs.
Imagine a world where no-one inherits their grandfather's eyes. They choose their eyes from a catalogue as adults. The colour of the eyes and the number of them. Imagine a world where you can fly. Imagine a world in which you can inflict the most nightmarish mutations on someone, where you can rewrite someone and delete the original.
Imagine a world where rationality disintegrates and mythology becomes literally true. Imagine a world where we are all Echidna's children.
People have worried about the singularity and the idea of downloading their consciousness into a machine. People have anxiety about a trans-human condition enabled by information technology. Maybe now that day can't come soon enough! Maybe disembodied electric consciousness is preferable to genetic soup.
Radioactive spiders are no longer required if you want to become Spiderman. You can now customise your own mutant X gene. Come down to the superpower boutique and get fitted out with some enhancements.
Natural selection is side-tracked. Sexual reproduction is redundant. We shall discover the ultimate freedom, the ultimate illusory consumer choice, when we as adults can choose as our parents some random individuals from magazines found on the table in the waiting room of the clinic we attend for our gene therapy, with their glossy airbrushed celebrities finally vindicated and made vivid and real by our imitation of them in the flesh.
Nature and Nurture yield at last to Culture. We are at last outcomes of our own artifice.
And who will save us when it all goes horribly wrong? Where are our original selves going to be backed up? Indeed, what frame of reference remains when all that made us human is swept aside?
How do we revert to our original genetic code after we have given a new one a test drive and have had enough? Or maybe we won't want to: the modification may also alter our attitudes, and once you become the "new you" you are incapable of wanting to change back.
The article I alluded to above is correct. It is impossible to overstate the significance of CRISPR technology. Doudna and her colleagues are ushering us over a threshold greater than anything Copernicus dreamt of, greater than the advent of metallurgy, greater than language and tools. This is more important than having opposable thumbs, because this allows us to choose whether or not to have opposable thumbs.
Imagine a world where no-one inherits their grandfather's eyes. They choose their eyes from a catalogue as adults. The colour of the eyes and the number of them. Imagine a world where you can fly. Imagine a world in which you can inflict the most nightmarish mutations on someone, where you can rewrite someone and delete the original.
Imagine a world where rationality disintegrates and mythology becomes literally true. Imagine a world where we are all Echidna's children.
People have worried about the singularity and the idea of downloading their consciousness into a machine. People have anxiety about a trans-human condition enabled by information technology. Maybe now that day can't come soon enough! Maybe disembodied electric consciousness is preferable to genetic soup.
Thursday, 5 November 2015
Science is "Natural Democracy"
I see there is another one of the periodic spates of climate change denial going on, with a rash of shares of a widely discredited Daily Mail article from 2012, and various incoherent chemtrail rants that are logically lazy to the point of being comatose being posted in social media.
It's really not difficult, guys. Science isn't some cult with a restricted membership of initiates. Science isn't about secrets and conspiracies. Science is not a racket or a private members club. Everything you need to know is freely and widely available. Everyone is a scientist if they simply apply a little bit of critical thinking and make a little bit of effort appraising evidence and inferring its logical consequences.
Is that really too much to ask?
People used to refer to science as "natural philosophy" to distinguish it from various moral and metaphysical speculations and indicate its reliance on hard experimental evidence taken from "nature". But in this day and age science and technology is so crucial to all of our activities and all of the decisions we have to make as consumers and citizens, that I would like to propose a new term. Science is "natural democracy". Democracy is not possible in a technologically enabled society when its citizens do not habitually think in a scientific manner. They are prey to spurious unexamined authority and buffeted by fallacious reasoning into random, often damaging decisions and outcomes.
You don't have to know everything in the science books to avoid being taken for a fool by the various interest groups that seek your approval for whatever course of action they propose or oppose. The science books are constantly being re-written, after all, as new things are found out. And it is important to note that the process of revision does not invalidate science - it is precisely the point! Scientific knowledge is provisional because science embraces human fallibility and rejects illusions of certainty.
What you do need to avoid being taken for a fool is an ability to think in the way the people who work out where the books need to be rewritten think. And that way of thinking requires no special qualification, no diploma, no years of study, no knowledge base. It can be described in one word: human.
It's really not difficult, guys. Science isn't some cult with a restricted membership of initiates. Science isn't about secrets and conspiracies. Science is not a racket or a private members club. Everything you need to know is freely and widely available. Everyone is a scientist if they simply apply a little bit of critical thinking and make a little bit of effort appraising evidence and inferring its logical consequences.
Is that really too much to ask?
People used to refer to science as "natural philosophy" to distinguish it from various moral and metaphysical speculations and indicate its reliance on hard experimental evidence taken from "nature". But in this day and age science and technology is so crucial to all of our activities and all of the decisions we have to make as consumers and citizens, that I would like to propose a new term. Science is "natural democracy". Democracy is not possible in a technologically enabled society when its citizens do not habitually think in a scientific manner. They are prey to spurious unexamined authority and buffeted by fallacious reasoning into random, often damaging decisions and outcomes.
You don't have to know everything in the science books to avoid being taken for a fool by the various interest groups that seek your approval for whatever course of action they propose or oppose. The science books are constantly being re-written, after all, as new things are found out. And it is important to note that the process of revision does not invalidate science - it is precisely the point! Scientific knowledge is provisional because science embraces human fallibility and rejects illusions of certainty.
What you do need to avoid being taken for a fool is an ability to think in the way the people who work out where the books need to be rewritten think. And that way of thinking requires no special qualification, no diploma, no years of study, no knowledge base. It can be described in one word: human.
Monday, 2 November 2015
We should welcome Labour opposition to Trident renewal
The decision by Labour in Scotland to oppose Trident renewal must be welcomed.
The urge in some quarters to score petty party political points must be resisted. We must seek new opportunities for constructive cross-party engagement in pursuit of progress where there is common ground. This common ground now appears to extend to the issue of Trident renewal. No-one "owns" opposition to Trident. We must now secure the passage of a cross-party motion at Holyrood opposing Trident renewal in advance of the SNP's opposition day debate at Westminster on the subject on the 24th.
Every reason our opponents gave to vote No during the referendum campaign represents an issue on which we require people to change their minds. When they do we should congratulate them for being open to persuasion, rather than ridicule them for contradicting themselves. An independent Scotland will only be achieved through mature inclusive politics that involves people who are able to disagree with each other. No-one knows everything, but everyone knows something, and you can never predict what you can learn from someone else.
And if Labour are not ultimately able to deliver it only further substantiates the instrumentality of Independence.
The urge in some quarters to score petty party political points must be resisted. We must seek new opportunities for constructive cross-party engagement in pursuit of progress where there is common ground. This common ground now appears to extend to the issue of Trident renewal. No-one "owns" opposition to Trident. We must now secure the passage of a cross-party motion at Holyrood opposing Trident renewal in advance of the SNP's opposition day debate at Westminster on the subject on the 24th.
Every reason our opponents gave to vote No during the referendum campaign represents an issue on which we require people to change their minds. When they do we should congratulate them for being open to persuasion, rather than ridicule them for contradicting themselves. An independent Scotland will only be achieved through mature inclusive politics that involves people who are able to disagree with each other. No-one knows everything, but everyone knows something, and you can never predict what you can learn from someone else.
And if Labour are not ultimately able to deliver it only further substantiates the instrumentality of Independence.
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