I'm just a girl who cain't say 'no'

"I heared a lot of stories an' I reckon they're true
About how girls are put upon by men." 

("I Cain't Say No," from Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II)

In Tulsa, Oklahoma last year a 17 year old male was charged with Rape and Forcible Oral Sodomy. A 16 year old female had been unconscious as a result of being intoxicated, and when she was taken to hospital, routine examination revealed the male's DNA around her mouth. He claimed she had consented to oral sex, while she had no such recollection.

The trial judge dismissed the case. This dismissal was appealed by state prosecutors, but on March 24th 2016 the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the grounds for dismissal, ruling that "Forcible Sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation."

Sodomy is illegal in under Oklahoma Statute Title 21 O.S. §886, which says that anyone “who is guilty of the detestable and abominable crime against nature, committed with mankind or with a beast” may be punished by a maximum of 10 years in prison. This is despite the US Supreme Court striking down sodomy laws in 2003. The definition of sodomy in Oklahoma includes both anal and oral sex.

The state is unlikely to pursue charges for sexual acts between consenting adults, and Oklahoma is rated by various LGBT+ groups as relatively tolerant as a consequence. However the crime of “Forcible Sodomy,” in which one person does not consent or is unable to provide legal consent, is a severely punished sex offence.

The law prohibiting rape in Oklahoma pertains only to vaginal and anal sex. This was the reason the initial rape charge was dismissed and the state sought to pursue the accused with a change of Forcible Sodomy instead. But, while it is illegal to rape someone "where the victim is at the time unconscious of the nature of the act and this fact is known to the accused" in Oklahoma, in the words of the court ruling, "the Legislature's inclusion of intoxication circumstances for the crime of Rape [...] is not found in the [...] requirements for the commission of the crime of Forcible Sodomy." Provision is made for coercion, mental illness, abuse of public office or a teaching position, and the age of consent, but not intoxication.

This omission and inconsistency means that the law of Oklahoma is a twisted, surreal Venn diagram where sex, rape, and sodomy overlap each other to leave consensual anal and oral sex illegal while non-consensual oral sex is legal if one of the participants is unconscious as a result of intoxication.

While we are considering inconsistencies, it seems the definition of rape in Oklahoma allows a rapist the defence that he was unaware his victim was unconscious, that "this fact" is not "known to the accused". We can contemplate the possibility that a rapist claims his unconscious victim nevertheless stirred enough in her sleep during some drunken encounter for him to believe she was awake and that he interpreted these stirrings as consent. Would this lead to dismissal of the case in Oklahoma? Is this another legal car crash that is just waiting to happen in Oklahoma? Do we have the ridiculous situation where a rapist in Oklahoma is excused for violating his victim orally because she was asleep, and for violating her in other ways because he didn't realise it at the time?

The definition of rape must not make any reference to the assailant's understanding of consent, only to the victim's. When we consider the law regarding hate crime, in general this is understood to have occurred entirely on the basis of the victim's perception. The perpetrator's interpretation of events does not determine whether a crime has occurred. It does not matter what is "known to the accused." Otherwise a perpetrator can always rely on a defence based on their own subjective and unverifiable perception. The same must be true of laws regarding rape. However it would seem the legal definition of rape in Oklahoma admits this possibility.

And this is the 21st century. Oklahoma has been a State for 109 years.

I hesitated to post this article because the issue here, superficially at least, is just one particular instance of the law being an ass. But this has wider ramifications. Is the failure on the part of legislators to prevent this omission from existing on the statute book a consequence of a culture of neglect towards areas where the law impinges upon female experience? Surely this situation could have been anticipated by competent legislators who were paying attention at some point over the last 109 years, just like the potential ambiguity in the definition of rape discussed above?

In the final analysis it doesn't really matter what we think.

All that is matters is that this degree of legislative negligence, real or imagined, can be perceived as granting licence to disregard the requirement for consent by those who need firm guidance about what is and is not acceptable behaviour the most. 17 year old males are not short of cues about how to behave and the urge to act on them, and so we must not mix our messages. After all, consensual oral sex is only permitted in Oklahoma because the authorities turn a blind eye to something that is actually illegal. What message is sent by finding that, under certain circumstances, oral sex without consent is in fact legal? Lack of prohibition will be interpreted as permission by some.

This case is part of a broader context in which young men see their peers get away with rape, like the individual in this case, or face a derisory level of punishment, like Brock Turner, who is being released on Friday after serving half of what was already a ridiculously brief sentence, and a host of other widely publicised cases.

These young men are exposed to the relentless institutionalised misogyny of the frat house and their expectations are distorted by violent online pornography and an endemic rape culture perpetuated by rape apologists like Roosh V. This is a culture in which claims are made that must be challenged, not confirmed. These crimes are committed by people who either think what they are doing is acceptable (entitlement) or that they can get away with it (impunity).

It doesn't matter that we may understand the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law. We need to remove all signals that can be interpreted as permission by those inclined towards sexual violence. We must eliminate impressions of entitlement or impunity. Otherwise we continue to expose our young men and women to a sickening and persistent rape culture. This verdict, irrespective of the reason for it, regardless of its legal probity, is just such a signal to boys getting drunk at parties on college campuses across America and elsewhere this Fall. Other girls will inevitably render themselves unconscious through intoxication at these same parties. It is up to us to make sure it is "known to the accused" that there are no circumstances, no entitlement or impunity, that will permit assault.

We are struggling to deal with the torrent of misogyny unleashed by the internet and its impact on the minds of young men. Judgements like this don't help.

In the words of the song I quoted at the top, a song penned with innocent enough intentions and depicting circumstances in a young Oklahoma Territory full of promise and hope on the eve of statehood in 1906, but lent an unwelcome new significance by recent events:

"Whatcha gonna do
when a feller gets flirty
An' starts to talk purty
Whatcha gonna do? [...] 

"Other girls are coy an' hard to catch
But other girls ain't havin' any fun!
Ev'ry time I lose a wrastlin' match
I have a funny feelin' that I won! [...] 

"Though I can feel the undertoe
I never make a complaint
'Till it's too late for restraint
Then when I want to I cain't
I cain't say no!"

How we win Indyref 2

The jostling for position has begun, even though a date hasn't been announced yet, so I thought I would chip in my tuppence worth. How can the Yes Movement win Indyref 2?

We've got to turn this echo chamber inside out!

We can expect the original Project Fear playbook will be reviewed by our adversaries, and the tactics that were most successful will be repeated while others are dropped. Changed circumstances will elicit a suitably altered approach.

We can see already from various well-reported strops that the cybernat slander will feature prominently. This is a tactic to take control of the conversation with faux outrage. If the debate dwells to an uncomfortable extent on austerity, or Trident renewal, or Brexit, or any one of a number of highly germane topics, the tactic is to change the subject by claiming some spurious victimhood which a supine and compliant media can then treat as the story.

When responding to this, strike a balance. Invest enough effort to debunk the slander to all but the most uncritically partisan, but do not allow yourself to be pulled off topic. This debate will be won on the high ground. No-one you really need to convince is listening to you complain about media bias. That discussion takes place in your little social media bubble where everyone agrees on the injustice of it all. But the world is not fair. What's more, we do not remedy that unfairness by complaining about it. We must maintain the standards of our own conduct, the ambition of our own objectives, and the unwavering resolve or our own purpose. We must behave in a way that warrants attention. We must turn the echo chamber inside out. We must inspire confidence, not indulge in complaint.  

Last time Better Together were interested in winning the campaign while the Yes Movement were interested in winning the argument. That granted Better Together a Pyrrhic victory. They didn't care who found common cause with them as they circled the wagons and as a result have squandered most of their appeals to reason while the UK Government deprives them of any others that remain. In the long run they will not prevail. The risk next time is not that they win, it's that we lose. This time we must let them come to us, not fight on their terms. Challenge the sock puppets to have original thoughts. Then people will see they can't.

But by far the most important feature of our approach to the next campaign must be the erosion of unfounded but persistent negative assumptions about us that close the ears of those we are trying to convince. These are the assumptions that inform the attitudes of many former No voters. These assumptions are resistant to the sort of arguments we deployed last time. I am not saying they are irrational, but that the form of discourse to which they respond is not the same as the narrowly defined debates in which we might normally seek to prevail. We must embody the positive, inclusive ambitions we advocate, we must set the standard, at all times we must present a unified and consistent counterexample to every easy adverse assumption our opponents will seek to confirm in minds of those we seek to persuade.

And stop talking to people who agree with you! Find people who disagree with you, respect their right and find out their reasons. You must risk having your own mind changed if you want to change the mind of others. Turn the echo chamber inside out!

Talk about Trident, talk about the real social justice and inclusion agenda, talk about self-determination and our relationship with Europe, talk about the effective stewardship of green sunrise industries, and so on. Don't directly challenge assumptions that Scottish Independence is coupled to the electoral fortunes of an individual political party, or that the party they assume it is coupled to, the SNP, are tartan tories, or that the desire for Scottish Independence is motivated by some narrow Chauvinistic form of nationalism. Don't complain. Let those assumptions gradually wither through exposure to every counterexample in the way you conduct yourself and every subject you raise.

For various reasons I have said on one occasion previously that Indyref 2 should happen as soon as possible, and on another that 2020 would be the perfect time. Events overtook us, and the wave of bigotry and intolerance unleashed by the Brexit campaign once they realised they could not rely on positive arguments to deliver the result they wanted urgently requires a corrective. Therefore most recently I advocated Indyref 2 as soon as possible as an opportunity to formally make and gain public endorsement for counterclaims to prejudice.

However, the timing will most likely be dictated by Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. When the UK Government triggers Article 50 they start the countdown to Brexit. This changes the context from likely to certain disaster for Scotland within the UK. Therefore 2020 once again begins to look more propitious.

This time has to be different in another way though. The referendum is no longer just about Scotland. All around the world fascism is on the march. Wherever disengaged electorates are being re-engaged, it is by the shallow appeal of policy-lite fascists gaining power on behalf of unscrutinised corporate interests. This week we witnessed the remarkable emetic that is Donald Trump and Nigel Farage on the same platform. Everywhere intolerance and prejudice is developing new socially acceptable vocabularies, from Brexit to the burkini-free beaches of Nice and Corsica.

In Scotland our electorate is engaged and energised by arguments of substance pursued with logical rigour and the critical appraisal of real evidence. We have a chance to provide a counterexample, not just to our fellow Scots, but to the world. Let Indyref 2 be a celebration of inclusive, positive values and authentic engagement and a rejection of all the lures and lies with which fascists seek to tempt the people elsewhere. Show people there is another way.

Let's turn our echo chamber inside out and provide a beacon of reason and hope and tolerance to which the wider world can rally.

The study

We could not yet read, and were still innocent

of the glamour of words, and so, unbeguiled,

in those endless book-bound intervals of time

when our father withdrew to his quiet place

we would sometimes stand at the door listening

and wondering, but were not permitted to enter

in case we rioted in its stillness. We would hear

Radio 3, or the scribble of his pen, as he wrote

his sermons on how a wounded and imperfect god

was the only kind the human mind could conceive

with words weighed on his bookshelves, stories

balanced on the scales of his estimation. 

During those book-ended hours as a child

I dreamed of a world of instant and eternal access

to the Edenic grove that surely lay behind that door,

walking together hand in hand with him

forever in the cool protective shade of ungrown trees

never to be felled, pulped, rolled, pressed, never

to feel the clumsy thumb and inky smudge of type

and learn the knowledge of print.

Panem et circenses

... nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.

(... for they who once conferred military command, high civil office, legions, everything, now restrain themselves and anxiously hope for just two things: bread and circuses.)

Juvenal, Satire X

Kiri Te Kanawa, from New Zealand, appears on German TV, wearing a German flag as a dress. She's literally wrapped in the flag.

"Ich habe mich in euch verliebt, ihr Deutsche," she says. "Und euer köstlicher Yorkshire Puddings. Mmm. So, dieser Olympischen Spiele werde Ich in der Ecke des Deutschlandsmannshaft sein." She raises her hand aloft and challenges us "Wer ist mit mir?"

Then a sort of Caribbean arrangement of "Deutschland uber Alles" (the old version with the uncomfortable supremacist lyrics) plays in the background while a succession of people in unrelated everyday situations declare "Wir sind in der Ecke des Deutschlandsmannshaft."

Yes, this is completely ridiculous and I made it all up.

But it is no more ridiculous than what we saw on British TV during the Olympics: Hawaiian Nicole Scherzinger advertising a popular German dairy product by wrapping herself in the Union Flag, declaring herself to be in "Team GB's corner" and asking "who's with me?" as a succession of salt-of-the-earth British types pledge their allegiance and a cosy, nonthreatening arrangement of the supremacist anthem "Rule Britannia" plays in the background to extol our superiority and rouse our patriotism.

Yoghurt and the Olympics. Bread and circuses.

The Summer Games of the 31st Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro have concluded, and we can now review them in full.

Two things stand out for me:

• The exceptional human achievements of the athletes, which it was a privilege to watch, and 
• The utterly dismal, shallow and jingoistic British media coverage, which served to cheapen and diminish everything it remarked upon. 

It was Team GB as light entertainment. It was Strictly Athletics, filling in the schedule before the next series of The Great British Bake Off and Britain's Got Talent kick off.

I am sick of tedious interviews, repeated ad nauseam, with athletes sitting on the celebrity sofa in the studio, being asked how they feel about their event, or how their mum feels about their event, or how their cat feels about their event. Tell us how you feel. How did it make you feel to win/lose? Tell us! Let our audience use you to emote with a flick of the remote.

I really don't need to know how they feel, and I am sure there is a lot they would often prefer not to discuss, but always the media are there like parasites, insisting, intruding, and using us, the audience, as their justification. And the athletes comply because of some spurious sense of obligation we have inflicted on them, some convenient myth that they are doing it "for their country" and that they are in some way indebted to us. Which really is just our way of taking these supreme human specimens and making them our bitches.

The medal table serves no athletic purpose. It exists only to let us undeserving couch potatoes feel good and look down on other people, those foreign couch potatoes, the other ones who would come over here and steal our couches, even though we have run no race, thrown no javelin. Citius, Altius, Fortius ("faster, higher, stronger") is replaced by "louder, lazier, smugger."

The medal table does not let the mediocre excel. It makes the excellent mediocre by reducing their accomplishments to a mere boast for the rest of us to borrow and abuse. The athlete's renown is subordinated to the lazy notoriety craved by the bigot who hijacks their triumphs to celebrate post-Brexit Britain. The athletes' sacrifice, the knowledge they gain, the human capabilities they discover in themselves and demonstrate to the gods, are considered noteworthy only if they confirm our petty assumptions and prejudices, our Great British sense of superiority. This is the party Number 10 invites us to when it claims our athletes' success demonstrates the benefits of the Union.

The first time the Olympics had a significant TV audience was in 1936. The venue was Berlin. The Nazis invented the Olympic torch relay to enhance the occasion's PR potential. Germany broke spending records and topped the medal table. We all know what point they were trying to make.

The overhaul

Such a gentle and deceptive doing,

such a smiling assault: the world

is such a dangerous place

and your sweet words describe its violence

like a claw's caress, the downy residue

of some recent kill adhering to the talon,

tickling us as it softly brushes

against our skin as we are scarred. 

The Moon bends

the low crescent bow of her back against us

and draws pure light from her quiver;

an ecliptic clock winds up an equinox;

and the sky puffs full with stars

that, by one reckoning of time,

are (very) slow motion sparks

struck by that single hammer blow

whose attenuated impact reverberates

through all your nuanced observations:

the beaks and talons nature crafts

to fulfil purposes beyond the ken

of the creatures She asks carry them,

to convey these implements of evolution

to their target; the betrayal coiled

in every genetic helix;

the cruelties we are condemned

to commit against ourselves;

and you remind us, Kathleen, that beauty

is a hammer blow in slow motion,

a hammer blow on pause,

and we can only catch our breath

between its nauseating chimes,

and after every betrayal

and inevitable disappointment,

once we emerge altered

by unsought struggles, even once

all we first thought we fought for

is revealed as a lie and we collapse

gelded by the knowledge of our failures

we can still rededicate ourselves

and survive in the tales

we tell our heart's

around their hidden campfires, tales

of who we once were long ago.

Instrumentality

What kind of thing is a word? It is a tool for conveying meaning?

Maybe it is like a spade: we can use it to dig a tunnel to escape from the solitary confinement of our solitude? We are all imprisoned in the Château d'If and need words to tunnel towards each other, like the Abbé Faria. Or perhaps it's a stone we use to tap out a tentative halting jailhouse Morse upon the plumbing that passes through our cell, infiltrating the isolation of others with our insistence that the apparent solipsism that besets them and causes them despair is in fact a fiction?

Or maybe it is a ticket for a train, taking us from some tense internal exile in some chill northern town in Siberia to a warm Black Sea resort and a tearful reunion with those who also always knew this thaw would come, this day where we reveal to each other the secrets we already knew about each other but were prevented from speaking by the kind of distances that describe the endless steppe, knowledge shared long before it is explicitly told in our cheerful comparison of heart-hoards?

Or perhaps it is a crowbar, a tool with which we extract the abstract from the objects in our hand, a tool which we use to prise and peel the red from the apple we eat so that we can describe the tint that glints and glows in the distant mists of blushing Betelgeuse and stains the sands of Mars?

Or is it a pick-axe, exposing the precious ores that glisten in the marrow of our meanings, splitting the seam of all our seemings?

Or a pen, chronicling the tautologies that taunt epistemologists from the misgivings of Meno to the ramblings of Rumsfeld? A tool with which we find a label for the world's unknown unknowns.

Or a bellows, fanning the embers that illuminate the mansions of the heart with breathy protestations of love, filling us with love's strange surreal surgery of warmth, reaching into our flesh, where we remain forever altered in each other during the intimacies we share when we fall silent at last?

Or perhaps it eludes our grasp, slipping through the net of benign cross purposes from which we weave our conversations, skipping with the unmoderated joy of a child over the hop-scotch of coincidences that occur when we imagine we understand each other. A living sound, created but not controlled, making each tongue chime with the turn of its heel as it dances out of reach.

And when we wonder why it avoids us, it laughs at the absurdity of our question.

Our world is what happens when the absence of purpose is witnessed by one intent on reason, one determined to see meaning whether it is there or not, binding time in knots of thought.

Knots that eventually unravel in ironic and depleted silence when we try to describe the impossible worlds where we can be together.

Olympiad

Just once I would like to see an athlete tell a journalist to fuck off, at these Summer Games of the 31st Olympiad of the Modern Era currently being held in Rio de Janeiro.

Why should they be expected to immediately give a track side interview, even before they have caught their breath after crossing the line. As far as I am concerned their achievements are individual achievements and they don't owe us anything in respect of them.

I want to see an athlete decline the offer of a microphone, saying perhaps "I'll speak to you in half an hour" or "I might have some time tomorrow," all perfectly reasonable responses after having breasted the tape at the culmination of a race that didn't just start with the discharge of a pistol at the blocks under the gaze of the world's cameras, but years earlier in moments of doubt and lonely determination. Their victory answers a question asked by them alone long before we even knew their name. I am content if they should never want to discuss it.

The demand by the media for their immediate attention is just prurient, reducing their achievement to a performance for our entertainment.  

I appreciate that athletes benefit from support from the country they represent. Facilities are funded, coaches and doctors are hired to gain incremental improvements, and fans cheer and wave flags to provide encouragement on the big day. But I do not consider that these athletes owe me a thing in return for that. If they possess what I lack, the talent and the temperament to win, then I am satisfied simply with their success, and it is my privilege, not theirs, when I witness their achievements. I don't need to share in their achievement, it is an honour even to have contributed to it in some tiny way.

An agenda is promoted by the media at these events, a jingoistic narrative in which success indicates superiority. But I say tear down the medal table. Remove the flags. Don't keep scores that teach us nothing of importance. Celebrate the individual human achievement. The urge to excel does not require this gaudy excess.

Competing is about doing the best that we can, while accepting our flaws. It is about testing the limits of what it means to be human, about achieving self-knowledge through struggle and supreme effort, not trophies and accolades and medal tables. Athletes ennoble us all with their accomplishments. When they show us what humans are capable of they elevate everyone. Demanding they offer these accomplishments up at the altar of the media, performing obsequies for the entertainment of the TV audience, only cheapens them and us. We don't need to be told. We saw. We know.

My favourite moment of the Games so far was after Andy Murray's victory in the men's singles tennis. Not the fact of it, or the instant it was in the bag when Del Potro netted his backhand. Not that correction of a journalistic gaffe at the press conference afterwards that garnered so much attention. It was the greeting and consolation of his opponent at the net immediately afterwards that epitomised for me the nature of his, and by extension every other athlete's, achievement.

Two men had tested each other thoroughly over a gruelling four hour period, but in the end only one could win, and when that happened, the victor consoled his defeated opponent and both men were united in a knowledge they had unlocked in each other through their efforts, a revelation reserved for them alone, of which no amount of media scrutiny, no interview, no dutiful standing to attention and clutching of hand on heart as a flag is raised and some national dirge is played once more, can grant even the most meagre share to his compatriots.

Their solitude in that moment was a perfect contrast to the spotlight that tried and failed to intrude upon it.

To be proud of one athlete is to be proud of all, no matter where they are from. We are present and we bear witness. That is enough.

From Pine Ridge to Gaza (Part 1)

This week the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a remarkable statement, "something that some of you will not believe." He claimed that he and "Israel [...] care more about Palestinians than their own leaders do,"

The basis of this claim was that accusation that Hamas, "the terrorist organisation that rules Gaza," has misappropriated humanitarian aid funds. "Hamas used this stolen money to build a war machine to murder Jews," he continued. The implication is that Israel would ensure the aid funds were put to their intended purpose. Of course this completely overlooks the fact that their intended purpose is the mitigation of consequences of Israeli government policy in the first place. He's like a school bully who stole your lunch money pretending to be your friend by pointing out the person who said they would buy you lunch instead has actually spent their money on something else.

But what interests me here is the conflation of the terms Israeli and Jew.

Israeli and Jewish identities are not the same thing. They are not freely interchangeable. There are some Israelis who are not Jewish (although a small minority with a specific status). There are many Jews who are highly critical of the Israeli Government . Importantly, we must always remember there is a very significant body of opinion within Israel itself that is highly critical of current government policy towards the Palestinians in the same way that many within the UK were highly critical of the Westminster government’s illegal war in Iraq.

Nevertheless on occasion the two identities are casually conflated.

Advocates of the Israeli government position often point out how someone motivated purely by antisemitism can use criticism of Israeli government policy and the broader objectives of modern Zionism in general as a pretext for indulging their prejudices. They accuse their critics of conflating Jewish and Israeli identities to find a socially acceptable way of indulging their socially unacceptable prejudices.

However this conflation seems to me to be practised most often the other way round, to allow the persecutors of the Palestinians to become the victims, to facilitate the "spurious victimhood of the aggressor" I describe elsewhere in my article "The Natives." Sometimes accusations of antisemitism are used to take control of a conversation that was initially about something else entirely and stop us talking about the real problem. We have to be careful that, when pointing out the possibility that sometimes criticism may not be sincere, it does not mean all criticism may be dismissed out of hand as disingenuous, even if it is sincere and valid.

So when Benjamin Netanyahu claims to "care more about Palestinians than their own leaders do," as he did this week, he is repeating exactly the same sort of rhetoric used by Eurocentric North American nativism in the 19th century to justify rounding up people to whom a degree of indigeneity has been attributed and restricting their freedom "for their own good."

He is caring about Palestinians in exactly the same way the US Government cared about Native Americans when they relocated them to inhospitable, multi-deprived reservations like Pine Ridge. As President Andrew Jackson said, to justify the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which resulted in the Trail of Tears, "it will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites [and] enable them to pursue happiness in their own way, and under their own crude institutions." The violence is portrayed as benefiting the victim. Netanyahu's concern about humanitarian aid intended for the Palestinians is reminiscent of concern expressed in 1830 that the "Indians" were “aided in their transportation [and] receive subsistence for the first year."

He was caring about the Palestinians in the same way the British cared when they put Boer women and children in concentration camps in South Africa, and deported the Kikuyu to detention camps in Kenya, and relocated the Chinese into "new villages" in Malaya.

On every occasion indigeneity is attributed to an inconvenient population, who are then oppressed for their own "benefit" by a group professing an assumed nativist identity that confers a supposed superiority to enable them to "know what's best." The leaders of the oppressed are blamed by the oppressor for forcing the oppressor's hand. Resistance is considered an awkward, contrarian refusal to just "get with the programme."

On this occasion the reservation into which the oppressed are herded is Gaza and the fragmented remains of the West Bank.

And as discussed previously, the justification for seizing Palestinian property is the same as the justification for the dispossession of the indigenous peoples resident in North America: for "manifest destiny" read "chosen people," for "pioneers" read "settlers." Israel and America are locked into a pattern of mutual legitimisation. However a nagging insecurity undermines their confidence, making their demonstration of it all the more strident.  

For centuries the Jewish diaspora sustained a unique Jewish identity and tradition which forms a part of our glorious global patrimony of cultures to which all communities contribute and from which all benefit. The form the preservation of Jewish identity took was necessitated by the scattered and stateless nature of these diaspora. A completely different set of circumstances apply now to the state of Israel. It is wrong to treat Israel as though it was the ultimate diaspora. It is a modern state with protections and obligations under international law, and a member of the United Nations. And yet this is the response articulated in Israeli government policy. The same sort of exceptions and exclusions that were necessary in one situation are being enforced in another even though they are damaging and divisive under these altered circumstances rather than protective and unifying.

Ultimately all national identities are artificial. There is nothing special about any of them that is not shared by the rest. We are all human. The only things unique and individual about our identities are the stories we tell ourselves to perpetuate each of them. Where an identity comes from is not important. What matters is what you do with it, whether that means you act as though it entitles you to land and property, or confers moral authority to indulge in illegal wars, or - as is supported by every tradition in the world - you consider that you have a duty of compassion to all people as equals whether or not they share your identity, and seek a stable and just peace through truth and reconciliation rather than violence.

Dark energy

A distant murmur dips towards us from beyond the horizon

                or does it quietly insist already inside our ears:

                a message that has no trajectory,

                a signal without attenuation,

                a rumour in our marrow?

The word it speaks eludes the loud gossip of atoms

                with their clubs and cliques,

                their molecules and mobs of jostling form

and stands silent in our immediate presence.

It knows no limit of earshot, and so without raising its voice

                can shout with all the accumulated whispers

                of the furthest most red-shifted points,

                a chorus that sings

of the kinship and common birth of every time and place

                and the faintest of all whispers

                calling them home

                to the beginning of time,

                to the edge of space,

will be made deafening and irresistible by distance at last.

The bookend

I see you have noticed the wooden bookend on the shelf,

holding up some old odd volumes of Browning, Tennyson,

and whatever else - I have never read them,

but they do lend a certain ambience to the shop,

don't you agree? I found the wood discarded

in a forgotten corner of the timber merchant's yard.

He let me have it for free, thinking by some guile

he was sweetening a far more lucrative deal

which saw him sell me more highly valued stock.

The tree from which it came remains unknown!

He could not tell me, nor did he care,

and I have found nothing like it described in any library,

and suspect no worldly pages are made of its pulp

nor any bookcases shelved with planks of it,

such a stranger to our knowledge was this discovery.

At first its ungainly grain resisted my efforts to carve it

with a stubbornness that would exhaust the patience of most,

but finally I found it yielded once I used long-neglected tools

which lay idle and ignored in a forgotten corner of my workshop

all these years:

beloved tools with which I made my first attempts so long ago,

before the imperatives and urgencies and expedients of trade

wrought their effects upon my now hasty methods, and my success

and more frequent failures brought me to this place.

Late at night I worked upon it,

marvelling as each seam of red and yellow was revealed

in candlelight, to spur me on to morning.

The grain's knot and twist meant the design

would not suit every taste, indeed it would please few,

but it pleased me, and so this was the piece, I felt, at last,  

for which I owned the tools I had set aside in my youth,

and I decided every warp and seeming flaw, each curve

matched perfectly the only lines my implements could take:

tools I once had thought were broken were perfect for this task,

and I imagined that all my follies were in fact an accidental procession

that led me unwittingly to this brief beautiful moment of perfection.

Others have noticed it sitting there, its smooth but unpolished form

arousing curiosity in some, ridicule in most, but once in a while

a customer will coyly wait until others have left the shop

and when we are alone will awkwardly approach and ask what it costs,

and in reply I tell him I cannot part with it for all the emperor's riches.

Epistemology, teleology and eschatology

My knowledge is incomplete.

The incompleteness of my knowledge extends to my knowledge of its incompleteness: I don’t know what I don’t know. Plato believed this meant it was impossible to find anything out.

But maybe you know what I don’t know I don’t know? We cannot predict what we can learn from each other. We rely on each other to point out what we may have overlooked ourselves.

This means we must measure, derive, discuss, disagree and debate in a collaborative way to learn about the world. Science and progress are fundamentally social rather than solitary activities.

But when we finally reach agreement, how can we be certain that everything we think we agree on about the world isn’t just a coincidence?

How do I know (rather than just believe) that what you think I mean and what I actually mean (or, for that matter, what I think you mean and what you actually mean) aren't two entirely different things which we both just think are the same? The fact that knowledge is necessarily a social artefact makes this question crucial to our epistemology. Even if it wasn't, the interlocution is our individual encounter with the universe itself and the dilemma still exists.

Certainly, circumstances can arise which make it obvious. But, although we can be certain of a misunderstanding once this becomes apparent, we cannot be certain we fully understand each other if it hasn't, not without an infinite amount of time to eliminate every possible cross-purpose. Agreement is a gross and fictitious thing and reality resides in the eternal subtleties of our confusion.

The scientific method is the most efficient way possible to generate circumstances that reveal our misunderstandings, and its power is derived precisely from the way the incompleteness of the task is formalised in its procedures. Science is a contradiction factory. What a scientist calls "certainty" does not have the eternal significance of theology or popular parlance. It has a heavily qualified, tightly technical meaning of the sort journalists rejoice in disregarding.  

Put it another way: there can be no final theory until every other possible theory has been rejected. A falsehood may fail to stand in the full passage of time, but proving something is final, seeing it stand time's toughest test, can only be achieved once time has ended. Until then every object is an illusion and all truth is useless, indistinguishable from lies. We reside in error until the End of Days.

You have heard people say that they “agree to disagree”. We have to acknowledge that the rest of the time we don't agree, we merely “agree to agree,” in precisely the same sense that we "agree to disagree". There are only unknowns and everything else is a story we tell ourselves to help us get on with things until we inevitably cock up.

The choice between whether the universe is meaningless or miraculous is then just point of view. We can take a statement about the universe and flip it between paradox and axiom with successive iterations of self-referentiality. What it all means is a matter of choice. Indeed, this choice is the only aspect of the universe in relation to which we are truly and completely free.

A whisky grace

I raise a glass to you, Lord: there is no fountain,

no breath-taking conceit of ornamental marble

spouting perfectly orchestrated jets and arcs of water

that does not find its source without rolling up its sleeves

and reaching down through the sewers, stretching, fumbling

and squeezing dry the booze-swollen bladders of drunks at bar urinals

through which the water has passed on its way from Adam's lips to mine

since you first sent your spirit forth upon the undefiled firmament,

and yet the liquid in my glass is clear, its bite precise,

its burning taste a purification, and I celebrate

the parting of these waters.

But this is a grace: a prayer, not a toast;
I offer you my humble prayer,
rolling pious words out over my tongue
and catching them in my clasped hands,

but I fold each dismal word over and over in my hands,

pressing them together in front of me as I kneel. I press tight

to squeeze out any pretence of meaning from these rude words,

trying to silence the centuries of blasphemy

that culminate in the insincere applause

all hands ever joined in prayer have become in my hands now,

each word just like a bag of piss
carried from Adam's lips to mine by religion,

history's tedious relay of the righteous,

                                                               and I can't do it anymore.
I prove and disprove your existence as a sport, Lord,
as a performance of my cleverness to amuse myself and others.

My head is a desperate warren of white corridors
that I pace alone, through echoes of mockery.

I have tutored my tongue only in rebuke,

pious falsehood, casual delusion, and habitual disparagement.

So it is up to you, Lord: grant me grace.

Distil the substance I aspire to be from me,
as clearly as this spirit has escaped
the world that recycles it through sewers,

and leave whatever must remain to fall,
or stand as soiled testament that this spirit

does not distil itself.   

You wait all day for a bus ...

... then two come along at once. That's the popular remark on what seems to be a common, valid observation.

This article is not about public transport per se though. There is an interesting element of truth in the observation that busses arrive at bus stops in pairs (or sometimes more) which is absent, or at least not as evident, in some other sayings, such as the assertion that toast always falls butter side down. So why should busses do this, and what does it tell us? It turns out this is not really an article about busses. It is really an article about God, creationism, thermodynamics and evolutionary biology. Clearly we have a bit of a journey to get there though.

Bear with me.

Advocates of Intelligent Design often cite the stunning improbability of the occurrence of complex living structures as evidence of a divine origin for life. How could the beautiful, unpredictable variety of life have happened by chance? The only possible explanation is that they serve some purpose, that they manifest some divine intentionality.

But creationists are not seeing the whole picture. They are not considering the processes by which the information content of the environment is imprinted on the organisms that inhabit it. It is as though they are marvelling at the apparent structure in the order and timing with which busses are arriving at the bus stop without considering how the busses got there and why that process makes this structure inevitable rather than unlikely.

As with all religious explanations that rely on an appeal to a sense of awe, science reveals a truth infinitely more marvellous and beautiful than all the possibilities that can occur to even the most devout.

I am not denying God. I am saying you short-change Him when you attempt to use your inevitably limited understanding of His omniscience and omnipotence as an explanation for what you can see. It is only the incomplete, provisional, conjectural, incremental endeavour that is science that permits truth and beauty to impinge, however imperfectly, upon the puny awareness of our flawed and fallible thinking apparatus.

Let's consider the busses again. They are not just driving around uniformly distributed in a circle without any interaction with each other or their surroundings.

We know they encounter bus stops. They also encounter junctions and traffic lights. If a bus has recently reached a bus stop it is likely there will be no passengers waiting for that service immediately afterwards, and while this persists the subsequent bus doesn't need to stop and so can catch up and even overtake the other bus. Similarly with busses stopped at junctions and traffic lights. An effect known as "platooning" can occur.

The busses are embedded in a complex environment, are circulated around it and interact with it and each other, and this process is driven by energy provided by fuel. This process encodes the information content of their environment on the distribution of elements within it, until apparently unlikely structures emerge. It doesn't take much for structures to emerge once you provide energy to power a process: consider Conway's Game of Life. In this context, a swarm of busses, prowling the bus routes, consuming and disgorging resources in the form of passengers, loosely bound by the processes I have described, is a sort of organism. We could even define an entropy based on the likelihood of encountering busses in groups, rather than individually, which tells us something about the information content of their environment.

Imagine now the material being circulated is atoms and molecules rather than busses. Imagine the interactions and combinations that might occur as the energy of the sun powers this cycle, directly or stored by photosynthesis. Imagine the variety of structures that will emerge through the infinite recursion by which they interact with their complex environment on the one hand and form part of the environment itself on the other. The equilibrium we observe is anything but simple. Indeed, given the complexity of the environment and the abundance of its information content, with mountains and rivers and oceans, polar icecaps and tropical jungles, it would be remarkable if it was. We do not need to seek the information manifested by life in a remote divine origin. It is all around us.

So the next time you are waiting for a bus, remember that if you wait long enough, it isn't two busses that you will see going past.

It is a cheetah chasing a gazelle. It is a baby elephant with its trunk wrapped around its mother's tail. It is a bird of paradise performing a dance to attract a mate.

It is that thin greasy film adhering to a pock mark on a volcanic rock next to a ocean trench three and a half billion years ago to form the lipid membrane of the first cell, cradling its precious cargo of amino acids. It is that eukaryotic organism that first underwent mitosis.

It is that one mesoproterozoic microbe that was eaten by another microbe a billion years ago, but refused to be food, and survived by sharing its genetic material rather than allowing it to be obliterated, to initiate instead the sequence of sexual reproduction that ultimately delivers you into the arms of your beloved tonight, after a meal illuminated by a candle shedding sunlight captured by a leaf long ago, drinking Champagne effervescing with an oxide of carbon atoms that complete a long solar powered journey around this earth that began when they arrived with the Late Heavy Bombardment four billion years ago.

Serendipity

Everything is achieved through failure,

every destination worth reaching

arrived at in retreat.

This poet's tongue is chipped sharp

and purposed like a flint arrow head

launched hopefully towards his prey

only because he botched the axe

he was originally trying to make,

and found a fragment he could rescue.

The quarry he eventually provides

falls under the edge of his blade

only after what he was first pursuing

has escaped, and he turns his attention

elsewhere. And yet

he witnesses the sunset

without sensing defeat, heading home

along the shoreline at the end of the day,

and as the tide recedes once more

after its most recent advance into the bay,

on the shingle that is revealed by its retreat,

he finds below high tide, a gem stone

washed there by chance, and it will adorn

his wife's throat, and his children will eat. 

To live is to retreat without regret.

The wind will take our arrow where it may.

If we don't accept its loss with grace we make sharp

an arrow that will pierce our heart some other day.

The natives

The recent campaign to have French words removed from the British passport has been many things: a source of amusement, as it is pointed out the word "passport" is itself French in origin (as are a significant number of other words in the petition to have the offending French words removed, including, for that matter, the word "petition"); a source of deep embarrassment, as we have to look our French friends, family and colleagues in the face while knowing our compatriots are openly expressing such disregard for them.

It has also provided another example of a paradoxical phenomenon: spurious and ahistorical nativism. But this is more than just merely interesting. It is a particular example that illustrates a more general point, one not just about behaviours which recently influenced the Brexit outcome of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU (of which this ridiculous petition is just one consequence), but which are associated with aggressive supremacist movements all around the world, and the worrying tide of prejudice Brexit has endorsed and unleashed (see "The Arena and the Agora," "The Clash of Civilisations," "We need indyref 2 as soon as possible for everyone's sake," "The Hinge," and "Project Fear Squared"). This nativism provides another basis for interpreting the result, and another reason to reject it.

Nativism in general refers to "the political idea that people who were born in a country are more important than immigrants" or "the political position of supporting a favoured status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants." It seems a good description of the anti-immigration sentiment that led to Brexit and the xenophobia encouraged and exploited by Donald Trump in the USA.

But the nativism in evidence here is a specific corrosive fantasy, a particular Anglo-Saxon idyll, which I would like to dissect. Because, although immigration was a key issue in the recent referendum, the nativism I want to outline initially arises in an encounter with others in which the "natives" are in fact, originally, the immigrants, in contrast to the definition above. This is why I use the term "paradox." I want to talk about the origins of nativism when the roles are reversed.

For example, when early modern European colonists sought to establish themselves in territories around the world already occupied by indigenous peoples, a nativism would be manufactured which exemplifies this paradox. They acted as though this paradoxical or inverted nativism entitled them to aggrandise themselves of any land or resources necessary to them in the lands they invaded. An ethnicity was synthesised so that its defence could be used to justify other acts of cupidity.

Their nativism was not the benign outlook of tribal peoples following an age-old way of life that sustains communities, observes balance with the environment and preserves ancient memories transmitted down generations in oral traditions. Ironically, their nativism was an artificial prop for invented identities. It is not an ideology needed by genuine "natives," who do not in general embark upon imperial adventures overseas which then require post hoc justification. It is the fabricated, toxic nativism of aggressive alien intrusion. It is contrived to allow the invaders to replace indigenous communities and to legitimise a new order in the absence of shared memory and with utter disregard for the environment.

Rather than connecting one to the land, it alienates one from it and unlocks extreme and destructive behaviours that would otherwise be moderated by that sense of connection. Reckless exploitation of people and resources can then accelerate out of control to create illusions of vast wealth unencumbered by limitation or consequence: the very mirage we still inhabit today, which shimmers on the brink of vanishing in the face of climate change.

It is a cruel caricature that mocks indigenous claims and compensates for the incomers' own claims' lack of moral substance. Its pioneers become founders of a new identity, an emergent invader ethnicity, and the threat posed to its foundational mythology by the presence of existing indigenous peoples is neutralised by their dehumanisation. Nativism is born in a act of aggression towards those with no need of it. I would contend that all nativism originates in this encounter, in relation to this emergent invader ethnicity, to confer a veneer of moral purpose to a common cause of cupidity, even though we now see it in an inverted form, directed outwards.  

The theft of land and resources, or more specifically the identification and redefinition of what they found as land and resources that could be capitalised and exploited, the re-purposing of the entire landscape, then become the "manifest destiny" of the new natives. The indigenous people, the genuine "natives," become a nuisance, vermin, a mere impediment to be removed. Historically, they were physically removed to reservations like Pine Ridge, or simply killed in massacres like Wounded Knee and death marches like the Trail of Tears. "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead," in the words attributed to General Sheridan. Or in the words of the song from The Lorax, "How ba-a-a-ad can I be? I'm just following my destiny."

A culture of violence develops from the spurious victim-hood of the aggressor which plagues settler societies even today. Historic injustices incurred and perpetuated to create and maintain the new society also create a context of fear and suspicion. This then requires a "right to bear arms" and a readiness to use them. Law enforcement officers are then particularly nervous and hasty when confronted by people immediately identifiable as belonging to communities marginalised and victimised by these historical injustices. Meanwhile Donald Trump re-asserts nativist claims once more, this time directed against external threats.

The same pattern of the synthesis of a settler or invader ethnicity and its associated spurious nativism arising from conflict with indigenous peoples is repeated elsewhere, like Australia, where the legal status of Aboriginal Peoples was similar to livestock until the late 20th century. H. G. Wells was inspired to write "The War of the Worlds" by accounts of the extermination of the indigenous people of Tasmania and a desire to render their experience somehow comprehensible to a European audience by role-reversal.

The encounter between Israel and Palestine can be understood in a similar way. The policies enacted by the state of Israel and settlers against the "indigenous" Palestinians are justified with reference to an emergent Israeli nativism that arises from an encounter in which the Israelis are incomers defending the claims of an ethnicity defined in part by the conflict. The ease with which Americans support Israel is often attributed to the belief of fundamentalist Christians in the literal truth of the Old Testament. We should also consider how the Israeli experience reflects the experience of their own pioneer forefathers and how America and Israel are today locked into a pattern of mutual legitimisation. Their mythologies justify the elimination of a previous society occupying the same space. The pioneers were as ruthless with the red man as Joshua was with the Canaanites.

The acts of colonists were legitimised by the contrived nativism of settlers and motivated by the sense of entitlement it was spawned to support. The cruelty of the atrocities committed against their dehumanised victims historically, guilty only of crimes imagined in the mythologies of the new nativism, is matched only by the inventiveness of those that committed them. The delight with which this sport was pursued is unrivalled in human endeavour. Nothing undermines faith in humanity more than a true account of these events. The horizons of our imagination were extended not just by new lands, but by the crimes we committed in them, when we rehearsed in private every genocide we subsequently came to abhor in public.

And the affluence we enjoy is a dividend achieved only by the undervaluation of the efforts of exploited people and the pillaged ores they excavate and harvests they cultivate and process on our behalf around the world in blighted lands our ancestors brutally subdued. And the original act in the imposition of our value system to enable the enforcement of this devaluation was the spilling of indigenous blood on the soil from which our coffee and tea and teak and tin are taken.

Once the new nativism is established through extirpation of indigenous peoples it is used, without a hint of irony, to persecute new waves of incomers. It is this that renders the term apposite, rather than the terms xenophobia or racism, and this is the context in which the term is most commonly encountered. Chinese, Catholic (Irish) and German immigrants in North America in the 19th century faced hostility from the self-styled "natives" whose forefathers had arrived only a few generations prior, and who now inverted the nativism with which they defended their invader ethnicity and directed it outwards. In the early 20th century in South America preference was given to white Europeans over black and Asian immigrants in the same way. This inverted nativism is what we now recognise simply as xenophobia and "nativism," leading to the perception of irony and paradox discussed above.

So the irony of the passport petition I mentioned at the outset extends beyond the use of language replete with French etymologies blossoming in our speech from the Norman Conquest to the Entente Cordiale and beyond to condemn the usage of French language itself in the kind of documents for which French was the original Lingua Franca (the historical reason for their diplomatic bilingualism).

The encounter from which the xenophobia we are witnessing today emerged occurred, I believe, over one and a half millennia ago. The settlers on this occasion were Anglo-Saxons. They established their trading posts in hostile territory among the indigenous people wherever the place-name element "-wich" is found on a map of England, and granted preferential rights to the incomers. Just as regions of North America were named after places in England, so England itself was named after the province of Angeln in Denmark from whence so many settlers came that contemporaries commented that it was almost entirely denuded of population.

In fact, the explicit devaluation of the life of the indigenous population is preserved in the Laws of Ine, an early Anglo-Saxon king in the south-east of England. The "wergild" or blood-money due for killing the indigenous people (the "Welsh") varied between a half and a fifth of the corresponding sum due for killing an Anglo-Saxon. The Welsh could be killed with relative impunity if you could afford it. It cost more to kill slaves.

The violence of the encounter from which a reactionary invader ethnicity emerged to persist until the present day in England is recorded in the other element of the demonym "Anglo-Saxon:" the word "Saxon" is derived from the word "saex" denoting a particular kind of knife or short sword popular with hired thugs at the time.

Anglo-Saxon identity is among the original contrived nativisms. It is no coincidence that those who profess it should excel in imperial pretension, and that their descendants should find this toxic fiction compels them to turn on themselves once they no longer have the opportunity to conquer other lands. From this point of view Brexit is an example of history coming full circle: we have colonised and subjugated ourselves using the same kind of mythology used to endorse genocide in our overseas possessions.

The Drip Feed

I watched about 20 minutes worth of BBC News last night. It reported on the Rio Olympics by observing "It has already been a big summer for sport: Frome in the Tour de France, Murray at Wimbledon, Wales at the Euros, Leicester in the Premiership ... but this has the potential to top even that."

This was after ten minutes of unremitting negativity in which the Rio Olympics were reported exclusively in relation to public disorder, political and economic turmoil, the zika virus, security challenges and opportunities for terrorism, and doping scandals.

It would seem the BBC considers Brazil to be guilty of the heinous crime of not being British enough. The UK being such a paragon of political and economic stability and moral probity these days.

The next item on the news was mainly about how the Eistedfodd - an annual Welsh language event held in Wales - might not be immediately accessible to people who don't speak Welsh. In a week when BBC Radio 5 Live asked itself the question "should we just let Welsh die?" one might perceive a pattern of hostility towards Welsh from our "British" state broadcaster.

BBC Scotland ("news from where you are") then led with an item about "Rangers" having an unspecified complaint about a police report that reflects poorly on them. The details of the complaint are unknown: they refuse to say what's wrong, just that they're unhappy. That is newsworthy apparently.

RBS are about £50bn into paying off the £70bn they spent on ABN Amro before it turned out to be worthless. The situation was reported on in suitably apocalyptic terms without making reference to any of the salient facts.

We are being slowly poisoned. We are drip fed an agenda by the supposedly impartial and objective BBC. This agenda is toxic.