The stupidest prize ever.

I'd never heard of Adnan Oktar before today. He's obviously heard of James Randi, though, as he's offering a prize of a quite staggering 4.4 trillion pounds "to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution."

But this is nonsense. Thousands of such fossils have already been found, including fossils of creatures more human than chimpanzees and more chimp-like than humans. But no doubt Oktar is defining the word "intermediate" on his own terms, to mean something quite different to what it says in the dictionary. In other words, what he'll give you the money for is a fossil that changes his mind. And he'll never change his mind, because he has faith.

Besides, I don't get it. If you're religious, what, exactly, is wrong with the "God put the dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith" explanation? That's the whole point of faith: it doesn't depend on evidence. And the whole point of an omnipotent being who created the universe is that, if they exist, their existence explains everything — even things that might appear to be proof of their non-existence. When that's what you believe in, regardless of whether you understand the fossil record, why challenge it? Really, what's the point?

Playing the game.

A lesson in cluelessness:

[Joseph Biden] expressed alarm that the McCain campaign might be encouraging speculation among their supporters that Obama is himself a questionable character

Oh, the horror.

Leadership and belief.

There's a nice post here from Tim Newman about how baffled he is that believing in Creationism attracts so much more opprobrium than believing in any other stupid, ignorant, nutty, ridiculosity.

Sarah Palin believes in creationism, and she might one day be president. Yet the incumbent president, and our own glorious leaders, believe in trade tariffs. Putting all the evidence together on a table, which belief is more irrational? And which belief causes more harm?

Sarah Palin chooses to defy scientific findings, close her ears, and believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Most of the world’s leaders choose to defy an awful lot of scientific findings, close their ears, and believe the earth is heating up uncontrollably, and we the public must stump up billions in taxes to do something about it. Which is the more irrational? And which is most likely to cause me, you, and everyone else serious harm?

This prompted me to look up this old piece by John Derbyshire and — lo and behold — I find that he need do little more than change the word "Bush" to "Palin" and he could republish it tomorrow as is, topical as ever.

My ideal nursing-home attendant, auto mechanic, or president would be a cheerful, capable, well-motivated person who was thoroughly au courant with the theory of evolution — and indeed with all the most recent advances in astronomy, biochemistry, cosmology, dendrochronology, endochrinology, fluviology, geomorphology, hydrodynamics, ichthyology, jurisprudence, kinesiology, limnology, microbiology, neuropathology, ophthalmology, psychometrics, quantum chromodynamics, rocket science, seismology, trichology, urology, virology, wiretapping, xenodocheionology, yachting, and zoology.

Life, however, often consists of making a choice between unsatisfactory alternatives. Invited to choose between having my kids educated, my car fixed, or my elderly relatives cared for by (a) people of character, spirit, and dedication who believe in pseudoscience, or (b) unionized, time-serving drudges who believe in real science, which would I choose? Invited to choose between a president who is (a) a patriotic family man of character and ability who believes the universe was created on a Friday afternoon in 4,004 B.C. with all biological species instantly represented, or (b) an amoral hedonist and philanderer who “loathes the military” but who believes in the evolution of species via natural selection across hundreds of millions of years, which would I choose? Are you kidding?

I'm sure I've said this before, but at least Creationists, as a rule, have some understanding of evolution — and they disagree with it. In my experience, most of those who agree with it haven't got the faintest clue how it works and will give laughably bad explanations if asked to explain, for instance, why peacocks have such elaborate tails or why there's a gap in the fossil record. The gleeful derision towards Creationists by those who are every bit as ignorant, if not more so, but who are confident that The Truth they believe in has been certified by experts, always strikes me as a rather good illustration of the essential repulsiveness of mobs.

There's more to being right than believing something that happens to be true.

Who should suffer.

I work in the investment banking sector at the moment. It was horribly busy the week after Lehman's went down, but WaMu and Monday's crash seem not to have had the same effect. Funny old world.

Anyway, here's what I think.

Ordinary everyday members of the public have better things to do with their time than to snort the FT every day, subscribe to Bloomberg, and move their savings between banks every couple of weeks depending on market conditions. Insisting that they do so would simply lead to the collapse of the economy as no-one would ever have the time to do anything else. So it is right and proper that the government should use taxpayers' money to guarantee savers' deposits when a bank goes under.

Investment bankers, on the other hand... well, it's their job, isn't it? They are supposed to trawl through every bit of financial information they can get their hands on and assess profit, liability, and risk from one minute to the next. It's what they do. And, when they completely and utterly screw it up, it is not the taxpayers' job to bail them out, any more than it's our job to guarantee jobs for journalists who can't write or builders whose work keeps falling over or gardeners who kill everything they touch.

Bradford & Bingley were going under for a reason: they were crap. Our idiot leaders, by nationalising them, are keeping that crap alive and kicking so that its influence can continue to poison the rest of the system. Great. Only, given the track record of nationalisation, they won't just be preserving the crap: they'll make it crappier.

Bought a British car lately?

Redundancy.

This is just ridiculous:

Government whips have launched a witch-hunt to track down the Labour politician blamed for sending copies of a vicious attack on Gordon Brown to all 350 of the party’s MPs.

OK, more of the Brown Government tearing itself apart, you might think. Same old same old. And you'd be right, actually. But there is a quite beautiful little detail which makes this particular episode one of their stupidest:

The investigation follows a ferocious verbal assault on the Prime Minister last week in the Guardian newspaper written by former Brownite cheerleader and Left-wing pundit Polly Toynbee.

Within 48 hours of its publication, every single Labour MP received an anonymous letter containing a copy of Ms Toynbee’s near-hysterical tirade via the Commons internal mail.

That's right: a Polly Toynbee column from The Guardian was mailed to every single Labour MP. Had it not been, presumably they might never have seen it. And so quick! This column from a daily paper was dispatched within a mere forty-eight hours.

You can see why the whips would want to track the perpetrator down before Labour MPs start receiving week-old Hansard transcripts or something.

Justice.

It is excellent news that Barry George has been acquitted. What we usually see with miscarriages of justice is people who were locked up on the basis of compelling evidence but are later released on the basis of even more compelling evidence. Barry George, on the other hand, has had eight years of his life confiscated by the state on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. One of Tim Worstall's commenters, a Mr Dodgy Geezer, puts it well:

The shocking thing about George’s conviction was that it was NOT based on ANY evidence. He was convicted entirely on circumstantial evidence, which was that he lived in the area and behaved oddly. The ‘particle of residue’ was hardly defended against forensically at all, and could as easily have been a bonfire particle for all the defence knew.

This was the first case I have seen in the UK courts where someone was convicted on no evidence since the end of the witch trials. It was NOT the case that the police constructed a frame-up - they didn’t need to. Everyone just assumed he was guilty, and what circumstantial evidence there was was just there for show. Mr Justice Gage has a lot to answer for…

There was never any excuse for trying this man, let alone convicting him. Some of those responsible for the original trial should be up in court themselves. This wasn't a forgivable mistake.

Let's just remind ourselves how British justice operates in these cases, shall we?

It is the tradition in Britain, when someone is wrongly convicted and locked up, to present them with a bill for room and board when their conviction is overturned. Yes, that's right: if you are locked up for, say, twenty years for a crime you did not commit, when your conviction is finally overturned, the government will present you with a large bill for the luxurious prison bed you slept in and the scrumptious prison food you ate.

So Barry George now has that to look forward to. Nice.

There's such a fine line between clever and stupid.

Not that this strays anywhere near that line, mind you:

[Ged Fulton] said: “I’m a bit disappointed Sean has basically done the same thing as me. But I’m probably the best person to advise him. ..."

Forget the subject matter here. It really doesn't matter what it is Sean has done. If all he'd done was to build a really shoddy sandcastle, that quote there from his dad would still be quite phenomenally stupid.

Impressive.

Logic as a model for humanity.

Yet again, being stupid, I've been arguing with people on the Interweb. If you want to read the whole thing, it starts here then continues here. It really is quite interesting, you know, but I'll summarize it here to save you the time.

The argument takes place at Samizdata, one of the Web's more popular forums for libertarian and anti-state thinking. I rarely visit, because, much as I agree with most of its denizens' views on how big and powerful a government should be (really not very at all), and much as I know, having met a couple of them, that some of them are dead nice people, some of the others, well... basically, they suffer from exactly the same problem as the Communists. That is, they refuse to allow their theories to bend to fit the annoyingly wonky shape of humanity. In other words, they're batshit crazy.

The chief protagonists in this argument are named Johnathan Pearce and Ian B. Here's their argument, boiled down to its salient points.

If you were to circumcise an adult male without his consent, that would be assault.

Babies do not give their consent to circumcision, because they're babies and they can't.

Therefore, circumcising babies is assault.

Therefore, circumcision should be banned. In fact, it is already effectively banned by the law that prohibits assault, but that law is inconsistently applied. It should be applied absolutely consistently. Circumcising one's child should lead to arrest and prosecution.

This policy would in no way discriminate against Jews. Jews would be perfectly welcome to stay in the UK. All they'd have to do is stop circumcising babies. Which is hardly a big deal, is it? Besides, religion is stupid.

Anyone who says that this policy would discriminate against Jews is paranoid. Furthermore, religion is stupid.

If you suspect me of exaggerating to make them look worse than they really are — and, let's face it, I'm not above that sort of thing — please do follow the links and get it from the horses' arses' mouths. You might think they were just your basic Jew-haters in really bad disguises, but I don't think they are: they really don't see why what they're proposing is the expulsion of the Jews from Britain. They must be intellectuals: no-one else would believe anything so stupid. I said to them yesterday:

If you know what's important to people, then you either get rid of the Jews deliberately or you don't get rid of the Jews. It takes a libertarian to get rid of them by accident.

But anyway, I don't want to address all that nonsense here. I've done it over there, and you can go read it if you like. I want to make a more general complaint.

See, the thing is, some of us would like to see something like a libertarian state. We want the state to be less powerful and less intrusive, the government to be smaller, taxes to be lower; we'd like a government who'd go through the thousands of pointless laws passed as knee-jerk reactions to made-up crises and actually repeal some of them, rather than just mindlessly churning out more and more. We'd like the right to defend ourselves and our families and our homes; we'd like to see criminals picked on instead of the inanimate weapons they may use. We'd prefer not to be arrested for throwing out the wrong sort of rubbish. None of this is going to be delivered by the British brand of political Conservatism, sadly in no way related to the American variety. The only people interested in fighting for these things in this country are the libertarians.

Now, the Samizdata guys are, in libertarian terms, the elite. Quite a few of them get to meet influential people fairly often, they talk on the radio from time to time, they meet MPs at posh dos. Not all that much, perhaps, not compared to your average leader of the NUS, but then that's libertarianism for you: it just ain't that big a political deal at the moment. But what little bigness it does have, it has in the environs of Samizdata. These guys have devoted themselves to getting libertarian ideas out into the consciousness of the British public, and they do so, and not just via their website. Good on 'em.

Except... well. I'm sure you see the problem. "Oh, libertarianism?" says your average member of the public. "Isn't that that bunch of frothing maniacs?" And in comes another ten years of Labour Socialism or Tory Socialism, as if I give a damn which.

I had this argument with the awfully nice Brian Micklethwait once. He argues that the job of libertarians should be to constantly put forth their opinions in a polite and unashamed manner, in order to make sure that our ideas are thought of as the sort of things that nice ordinary people like us can think, and thereby we gradually change the context of the public debate and that gradually filters up to politics. He's very much against the idea of toning down our ideas to make them more palatable, as that road leads to the likes of David Cameron: make policy by opinion poll, give the public what they already think they want, never attempt to change their minds about anything — in short, political stagnation and all parties essentially the same. But I don't think he fully understood what I was talking about, probably because I was quite drunk.

I don't suggest that libertarians should claim they want taxes lowered to 20% when they really want them down to 2%. I'm not suggesting libertarians should publicly advocate a slight relaxation in weapons laws while secretly wanting complete freedom to bear arms.

What I suggest is simply the marginalising and enthusiastic stamping out of this absurd militant tunnel-visioned self-important empathy-free logic-fetishizing tradition-destroying intolerant hateful claptrap. That's all. Because, as long as libertarians keep striving so hard to maintain their reputation as people who are so completely bloody stupid that they can't even figure out why parenthood is important unless someone draws them a diagram with full footnotes, appendices, and explanatory accompanying video, we will be stuck with the encroaching state.

And bugger that, frankly.

The language.

Loads of people have been linking to Giles Coren's beautifully expressed hatred of sub-editors, and who am I to resist a bandwagon?

I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn't going to happen anymore, so I'm really hoping it wasn't you that fucked up my review on saturday.

It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh."
it appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best".

Well, you fucking don't.

Brilliant.

Gary points out Roland White's impassioned defence of the subeditor (which may or may not be serious — or, rather, it's clearly not serious, but it's not clear whether he really likes subs), and adds:

I’ve had subtle gags ruined by unnecessary exclamation marks

[shudder] That's about the worst thing you can do to writing, that is.

Generally, though, I’m with A.A. Gill:

The joy of being a hack is that there is a back room of people far cleverer, more experienced and adept than I working to make me look clever, experienced and adept. If on occasion I fail to do so, naturally it’s their fault.

The whole thing has got me thinking, and I've decided that modern subediting, which doesn't stop at merely correcting mistakes but goes way beyond what should be its remit and amends a writer's style, is not just annoying for Giles Coren but is actually wrong in principle.

Thing is, language is defined by its writers. It makes no real sense to talk about whether there are grammatical mistakes in the King James Bible, for instance, because our grammar is based on the King James Bible. When considering whether a particular usage is valid, a linguist would refer to the King James Bible — as well as Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Bronte, Wilde, Carroll, and the other greats — to see whether they used it. Basically, if it's in there, it's correct. They all made mistakes, sure — Johnson really should have put an H in "discord" or no H in "chord" — but their mistakes were theirs only: it's not my mistake when I spell "chord" with an H in it, because Johnson, errors and all, was one of the writers whose work defines our language.

Now, journalists aren't quite as influential, usually, as Shakespeare. But the same process does take place with their work. New words and usages enter the lanuage, with the OED citing newspaper columns as their first recorded instances. The language is supposed to change, and journalists, with the size and frequency of their audience, are agents of that change. Look at "misunderestimate": a brilliant and useful word, coined (by accident) by George Bush. If he had just said it, I reckon it would have remained forever a one-off mistake. It was the word's appropriation and repetition by journalists that caused it to catch on.

Now, do we want a language whose future is built by imaginative, creative writers or by subeditors with lists of rules? As I said on Gary's blog, Tolkien reportedly spent hours going through The Lord of the Rings, laboriously changing back every instance of "try and" that American subs had changed to "try to". This is JRR fucking Tolkien, writing one of the greatest books ever written, and the bloody subs still thought they spoke better English. Would you rather have read their version?

A surprise.

Apparently, eating soya products lowers your fertility.

Just imagine what the population of China could have been.