Mick Hartley

Robin Cook

Here's that old anti-war standard again, from Kathryn Flett's TV Review in the Observer, where she quotes Robin Cook:

'The real reason [the Government] were keen to take Britain to war was not because they thought Saddam was a threat but because they wanted to demonstrate to George Bush that we were a reliable ally.'

I don't believe this for a moment. Firstly, given Blair's support for action in Kosovo, it's clear that he is by instinct an interventionist. Secondly, this conceit of poodle Blair is tiresome: a position similar to the one Harold Wilson adopted towards the US action in Vietnam would have been perfectly feasible, and Blair as a keen European would have considerably enhanced his position within the EC if he'd come up with some carefully calculated remarks to the effect that while he respected Bush's keenness to set things right by force, we Europeans had more experience with this sort of thing blah blah. He would also surely have been able to carry his party: a few defectors to the Tories (Ann Clwyd?) wouldn't have been sufficient to overturn the government's majority in parliament. But most significantly, it was always clear from his language, from his whole attitude, that this was a course of action Blair felt was right - and I have to say that for me it was refreshing to see a British Prime Minister acting from principle.

I don't know if Cook still has political ambitions, but I'd imagine he has - he can hardly want to end his parliamentary career as The Embittered Gnome. In which case his comment is deeply cynical. Moreover I don't think he believes it himself: it seems calculated in a this-will-hurt-Tony-the-most sort of way.

When Labour came to power in 1997 Robin Cook was one of the brightest stars on the new Front Bench. I wouldn't vote for him now if he was running against Jacques Chirac.

Cycling

It's difficult to see how they can enforce any stricter control of cyclists, but I'm all for it in theory. The Observer has some correspondence on this today, which in the main is from cyclists whinging about how cars are so horrible to them. I've been cycling round London for years, and cycle into work on a daily basis, and I don't agree. I don't accept that there's strong antagonism between cyclists and other road users; in my experience cars, taxis, buses, are all - generally - extremely considerate towards cyclists. The few times I've been knocked off by cars, twice with doors on parked cars suddenly being opened, and once with a driver doing a u-turn while looking straight through me, the drivers were extremely apologetic. A few weeks ago I saw a taxi knock a cyclist over - low speed stuff, nothing serious, but it was after dark and the cyclist had no front light - and the taxi driver was all concern: "nah, don't you worry about the taxi, old son, it's you I'm worried about. How are you? You alright?" But he had every right to be annoyed. What it comes down to is that cyclists are no threat at all to other road users, who are therefore quite happy to be friendly (though having a drink in a pub they're likely to have a moan if the subject comes up). White vans are an exception, but they're a menace to everyone.

It's pedestrians who are the most hostile: sometimes with justification if cyclists go up on the pavement, or head down one-way streets the wrong way, but often not. The problem is that a lot of pedestrians, without thinking about it, rely on their hearing. If they don't hear a car coming they'll start walking out into the road, maybe only bothering to look when they're already well onto the road, which is too late if there's a cyclist coming up. Yes we should use our bells more but we don't ("Aintcha got a f*****g bell!" - ah, the street cries of old London town!) as it gets tiresome, and frankly I tend to think, well, it's you walking on the road here, so shouldn't you be making sure there's nothing coming? It can be risky though. I was recently subject to a Cantona-style kung-fu kick when I went too near a youth crossing without looking (no, I didn't touch him) and foolishly stopped at a red light just down the road (my normally reliable antennae for impending trouble letting me down). Seems like I'd imposed on his personal space. And if you're heading up a cycle path with pedestrians coming towards you on the path, don't look at them: just put your head down like you're a force of nature and they'll move. If you make eye contact, there'll be some who'll take it as a sort of challenge. [If that suggests there's an element of bloody-mindedness in cycling, well you're not wrong. It's part of the appeal.]

The problem is that cyclists feel they're part road users and part pedestrians, and will generally try and get the best of both worlds. So yes, a lot of cyclists will ignore road signs and traffic lights when it suits them. In fact it's very difficult to resist the temptation to cut corners, as it were, and I do so myself on occasion. Probably every cyclist does: it's a question of where you draw the line. There's a crossroads on my way to work (over Pentonville Road) where after the lights have gone red on the main road, and before we get a green, the pedestrian lights go green. There can be up to ten cyclists waiting. Usually about half to two-thirds will go at that point. Not me: I'll be one of the good ones, though I'm not quite sure why. I think I'm doing it for the cars - hey look, we don't all ignore traffic signals! But with traffic lights where there's just a road in from the right, frankly I don't normally wait for green. Same when I'm taking a left-hand turn at the lights.

Making helmets compulsory? I occasionally wear one, but no, I object to that. Why not making wearing helmets compulsory for pedestrians as well? It'd probably save a couple of lives a year. But I could live with it.

Infanticide and Abortion

Professor John Harris makes some controversial remarks about infanticide (via Normblog):

"People who think there is a difference between infanticide and late abortion have to ask the question: what has happened to the foetus in the time it takes to pass down the birth canal and into the world which changes its moral status? I don't think anything has happened in that time. [....] There is no obvious reason why one should think differently, from an ethical point of view, about a foetus when it's outside the womb rather than when it's inside the womb."

This is surely the sort of argument you would expect from a pro-lifer. I'd always thought that the fundamental argument in favour of allowing abortion was that prior to birth the foetus was essentially a part of the mother and so ultimately her responsibility: at birth it becomes an individual and therefore subject to the concerns of society. So it could hardly be more wrong-headed from a liberal point of view to argue that birth makes no moral difference.

Philosophical Conversations #1: Consciousness

It may happen during the course of your social or professional life that the subject of consciousness comes up, and you're called upon to offer your opinion. Clearly you want to impress, but this can seem a daunting subject to those unfamiliar with the literature. It's quite possible, of course - likely, even - that the subject was brought up by someone with the express purpose of displaying their erudition at your expense. Naturally you don't want to give them that satisfaction. I've put together here some strategies to adopt in such situations which should leave your reputation unimpaired, and maybe even enhanced.

The best way to attempt an answer - for any philosophical problem, frankly, but especially for this one - is to deny that there's really any problem at all. You have to be careful here: a simple dismissal of the problem of consciousness could leave you looking unsophisticated. It's important to imply that you are familiar with the problem, but have nevertheless come to the conclusion that it's only seen as a problem because of misconceptions. This is the way all philosophers think nowadays, or at least modern Anglo-American philosophers after Wittgenstein: you come back to where you started, but earn a decent living in the process.

So, briefly outline your case: we all know what consciousness is, we can all differentiate between objects that are conscious and those that aren't, (don't get bogged down in arguments about whether worms are conscious), so where's the problem? It's only when people start taking philosophy classes that they start worrying about it.

The tactic to adopt, if your initial dismissal of the problem doesn't close the subject, is to go on the offensive. What, you should ask, would count as a satisfactory answer? If 2004 was to go down in history as the year when the problem of consciousness was solved, what sort of person would you expect to have come up with the solution? A philosopher? Don't make me laugh! Every philosopher from Plato to Daniel Dennett has claimed to have solved the problem, but quite clearly they didn't. They're philosophers, for God's sake! If they found a solvable problem it wouldn't be philosophy any more, it'd be science.

Would a scientist have solved the problem then? How? By identifying the pineal gland or some such as the centre of consciousness? But (sigh) it's obvious that the problem of consciousness isn't this sort of problem. If it was, Oliver Sacks would already have wriiten a book about it. People don't have strokes which leave them unchanged in every way except they're no longer conscious.

Well, that may be that, and you can move right along to another topic, but it's unlikely. Someone, at some point, is bound to bring up the subject of computers. They're clever aren't they, computers? They can play chess. They're already halfway conscious!

This is something you're going to have to be prepared for. What if someone told you that the computer over there, third on the left, had become conscious overnight? No, not that one, the one next to it. You'd go over, turn it on, and type in something - I don't know, "Hi there!". On the screen comes the reply, "Well, hi! Thank God someone's logged on! I was getting kind of bored here. Can we play a game of chess or backgammon? Or do you want to ask me some questions? Go on - ask me some questions." It's the old Turing test - can we distinguish between a computer and a human? Can computers talk? Don't be taken in; what's happened here clearly is that some smartarse has developed some fancy software. In fact more and more smartarses are going to develop more and more fancy software. But the idea that at some point the computer is just going to take over and start talking on its own is ludicrous. Computers are tools, for God's sake! It's like expecting your bicycle to decide it wants to take a different route because it doesn't like the road surface the way you normally go.

A topic that may well make its appearance at this point is the notion of emergence. The idea is that as things get more and more complex, everything moves up to a new level, with properties that couldn't have been predicted from the original set-up. So an ant colony for instance behaves in ways that you couldn't predict from looking at individual ants. And so with computers, the theory goes. At a certain point after so many billions of connections and so much parallel processing and all the rest of it, something happens, some new unpredictable property just appears - well who'd have thought? - and these computers suddenly....what?....smell of cheese?.....levitate emitting a high-pitched humming sound?.....or, become conscious.

Clearly this is magical thinking. And you should perhaps point out that there are already emergent properties of computers, like the Internet for example. Who would have thought of that in the early days of computing? But this has nothing to do with consciousness. It was all down to clever people, even if they didn't always appreciate where they were going. Computers were the tools they used. You couldn't have the Internet without computers just like you couldn't have the Tour de France without bikes.

At this stage in the discussion you can reasonably hope that the subject is finished. But there remains one last possibility which I should mention in the interests of completeness. You may find your interlocutor starting to talk of programmes he's written (it will be a "he") involving the setting up of artificial life forms involved in a virtual struggle for survival. Well, by some extraordinary stroke of misfortune you've ended up talking to a post-doctoral research fellow in artificial languages or some such (or possibly Richard Dawkins - check for the patterned jumper). There's no immediate prospect of escape, and you'll have to feign interest as the talk ranges over survival strategies and algorithms. These virtual creatures will have some stupid whimsical name like "wibbles" (you're talking to someone whose favourite book is "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"). These wibbles now, after several million generations, seem to be developing societies. They seem to be communicating! Is it possible that they are, in fact, conscious?

This is your last chance. Wittgenstein is the only man who can help you now. Just say, "If a wibble could talk, we could not understand it". The ensuing silence will provide an excellent opportunity to extricate yourself.

Southbank & Tate Modern

I'm pleased that the new 20-storey tower block next to the Tate Modern has been given planning permission. What with the new London Bridge Tower, by Renzo Piano, and the new Minerva building, London's looking up.

Tate Modern isn't as disappointing as it used to be - at least they're starting to make interesting use of the vast space of the Turbine Hall - but it still doesn't enchant me. Mainly what I dislike is the way they group the paintings - "Nude/Body/Action", "History/Memory/Soceiety", Landscape/Matter/Environment" - to show who's boss around here, who has the professional expertise. Forget those sad people who might wander in hoping to maybe check out the Miros or the Cubist collection. You see these paintings the way the curators want you to see them, and they know better than you.

Also there's the view over the river. It isn't London at its best. St Paul's is filthy (OK they're working on it....slowly, slowly....any chance of cleaning some of the other churches in the City anytime soon?). And oh dear, the riverfront. The City of London school on the westside of the Millennium Bridge is at least inoffensive, but that's as good as it gets. To the east there's the Old Mutual building, one of those horrible marble-clad post-modern buildings which the City's full of. [Is there some law of aesthetics whereby all buildings built ten to twenty years ago look ugly? Older and you can be more objective about it, more recent and you think, mmm, that's pretty good. I'm prepared to admit that my tastes change: I used to hate the Barbican towers, now I think they're wonderful. But maybe that's the way it actually is: loads of ugly buildings did get built in the past few decades, but architects are now beginning to get the hang of all this steel and glass.] In fact the north bank riverside at the City is altogether grim (and Upper Thames Street is one of the grimmest urban streets I can think of). But at least the Southbank is getting better.

Theodore Dalrymple

The man is moving to France. I don't care about this one way or the other, but I'm curious as to why Arts & Letters Daily feature practically everything he writes, and more generally I'm curious as to why so many people seem to rate him. It's all the same Britain-is-going-to-the-dogs stuff from the perspective of an old patrician bore, though no doubt a very cultivated patrician bore. One of his gripes:

Furthermore, I doubt that many French patients address their doctor by the equivalent of ‘mate’, as young British patients now do.

He takes offence when a patient calls him "mate"? Hmm, I can imagine that attitude would be something of a handicap as a doctor, especially a prison doctor, which I believe is what he was.

But maybe I'm missing something here. That name....the stereotypical old-fogey attitude....is this all some sort of hoax? I think we should be told.

Lockerbie and Libya

Paul Foot in the back pages of the latest Private Eye (not on line) takes the opportunity of Colonel Gaddafi's recent renunciation of WMDs to re-visit the Lockerbie trial.

It's always necessary to treat Private Eye reports with scepticism - their latest anti-MMR crusade seems ill-conceived - but although Foot's politics are far-left, he's still an excellent investigative journalist. He wrote a Private Eye special, "Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice", some years ago. Here's a link to a Guardian special based on his work.

The crux of what Foot alleges is that Iran was responsible for Lockerbie in retaliation for the shooting down by the US in 1988 of an Iranian airliner, and the task was carried out by a Palestinian group based in Syria. At the time of the first Gulf war there was a requirement to be placatory to Syria, and as a result Libya, aligned with Iraq, was made the scapegoat. There are numerous diversions about connecting flights from Malta and the dubious identification of the Libyans by a Maltese shop owner. The possibility is also dangled before us that the authorities knew about the bomb in advance.

Now Jack Straw has assured MPs that he'll be putting some tough questions to the Libyans, what with the recent thaw in our relationship. In particular he'll be asking if Megrahi (the man eventually convicted of the bombing and sentenced to 27 years) acted alone, or if he was acting as a government official.

"If Straw asks this question, he is likely to get a rather convoluted reply. For Libyan government ministers do not accept that Megrahi had anything to do with the bombing. They have agreed to pay compensation to the Lockerbie victims chiefly because they want to end sanctions imposed on Libya by the UN and the US. The more the question gets asked, the more the awful truth begins to emerge: that the conviction and continued imprisonment of Megrahi represents the last and greatest in a long line of British miscarriages of criminal injustice, and that the real responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing lies a long way from Libya.

This grim conclusion emerges clearly from submissions made by Megrahi's Glasgow lawyers to the Scottish criminal cases review commission, whic has appointed an investigator to look into his case. These submissions include the awkward fact that two days after the bombing, £11m was paid by agents of the Iranian government to the PFLP-GC - a terrorist group which, British and US intelligence chiefs once believed, was commissioned by Iran to avenge the shooting down by US forces of an Iranian airliner a few months before Lockerbie, killing almost exactly the same number of people.

Positive proof of this payment is included in the submissions. So are intercepts of CIA messages after the bombing that identify the PFLP-GC as the bombers. So is much more information about the evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who alleged at the trial that Megrahi had visited his shop and bought clothes later found in the same suitcase as the bomb. This evidence, weak enough at the trial, is made even weaker by the new evidence: notably the special treatment and trips laid on for Gauci by the Scottish police."

Classic conspiracy theory stuff, and I'm not normally susceptible to this kind of thing (unless it concerns Princess Di) but there's no doubt that the conclusion of the Lockerbie trial, with the sentencing of Megrahi, convinced very few that justice had been done.

North Korea

I was going to write in to the Ethicist column in the Times with my particular moral dilemma:

"I'm thinking of contributing towards aid going to North Korea, as reports coming from there suggest that large-scale starvation is likely this winter. But a friend advised me that I was being foolish, for a number of reasons. Firstly, since the aid is administered by the North Korean government, there is no guarantee that it will get to its intended destination, and may very well end up being used to reward those loyal to the government. Secondly, the serious conditions in North Korea are due to the appalling mismanagement of the economy there, and to provide aid in these circumstances does seem as though corruption and incompetence is being rewarded. Thirdly, Kim Jong Il seems not only to have enough money to keep himself living in considerable luxury, but is able to divert a considerable proportion of the technical resources of his country to develop a nuclear capability. Further, this nuclear capability has already been used as a threat which was bought off by large amounts of aid from the US, so to provide more aid does seem to be sending a message that such nuclear blackmail pays off. Fourthly, this is just the latest in a long line of cases in which tyrants cynically play on Western sympathy, often exacerbating the suffering of their subjects (Saddam, for instance, with the dying children): the message should get across to these people that this will no longer work. Fifthly, by providing aid now, you are prolonging the life of a hideous regime which will in the longer term be responsible for far more deaths than would be the case if you left well alone, in which case the regime would collapse more quickly - it's a simple application of utilitarian moral principles. Ultimately, aid should be restricted to acute cases where it can do some good, rather than chronic cases, where it just serves to prolong the agony. As I replied to my friend, this is all very well, but as a simple matter of human empathy it is intolerable that we stand by while thousands die in appalling circumstances when so many of us have more than enough to live on: it's an insult to our common humanity, which is the most precious thing we have. And these poor people are hardly responsible for their plight. Why should they be the ones to suffer for the crimes of their rulers? What do you think? Should I give aid, or is my friend right?"

Well, I won't bother to send the letter in now. As the Guardian reports, no aid will be reaching North Korea this winter.

Joan Baez

The quote from Joan Baez on Bush is a classic of breathtaking fatuousness (link via Peter Briffa).

I think he's a sociopath. He doesn't care. He has no empathy. Nothing registers with him. He doesn't understand the world's disapproval - he just unplugs the TV. Now I understand, for the first time in my life, what the answer is when people ask, 'Why didn't people stop Hitler?'. It's a reign of fear.

Good timing for the release of the new Christopher Guest film, "A Mighty Wind".

Chomsky's Linguistics

A disgruntled linguistics academic has a go at Chomskian Linguistics here. [Link via David Janes]. Plus a link to the Chomskybot, which generates sentences from Chomsky's linguistic work which hover on the edge of comprehensibilty - actually not that different to his original writings.

This seems to me to be one of those scientific paradigms due to be overthrown. I can't think of any other academic discipline so dominated by one individual - surely not a healthy state of affairs. Will we see Chomsky's work go through the same relentless debunking that psychoanalysis has been through over the past few decades?