Divide and rule

I’m so tired of all these silly little factions.

If the last few years since the financial system crashed have taught us anything it’s this….

The majority of people are used as cashcows for a tiny minority to grow wealthy.

Here in UK we see a widening gap between rich and poor with the most vulnerable being denied even the meanest living whilst the mega rich receive major tax cuts. We see disabled people denied all benefits via ATOS and unemployed people forced into slavery via workfare under threat of destitution and starvation. Rents are rising whilst housing benefits fall and there are calls to remove the minimum wage whilst its hardworking recipients are demonised as ‘scroungers’. And all the time the richest citizens grow wealthier as others literally are starving to death on the streets.

There’s a name for this sort of unfairness: Exploitation.

And yet it doesn’t have to be this way. If only the exploited majority could stand together the whole sordid system would change – it would have to. But that would take something that the human race seems unable to provide as yet. It would take solidarity.

Instead we have polarisation and factionalisation. We have downtrodden whites blaming oppressed blacks. We have exploited women blaming (allegedly) privileged men. We have underprivileged, undereducated natives blaming equally exploited immigrants and we have religious factions clamouring to outdo each other in conspicuous ‘victimhood’.

And all the time, while each exploited group bemoans its lot at the hands of every other exploited group, the mega rich continue to advance their own, selfish interests.

We see nationalist groups like the BNP, EDL & UKIP spreading their racist narrative of hatred. We see extremist groups like Radfem blaming all men and trans women for all the evils of the world whilst their male counterparts in the MRA make equally ludicrous claims against all women in opposition. It’s silly, it’s divisive and if society is ever going to deal with all this shit then it has to stop. For pity’s sake grow up people!

I had an interesting twitter conversation last night with a black women who complains that white people dislike being called ‘white’. I pointed out that I didn’t object which, judging from her response, seemed to confuse her a bit. She didn’t address it at all – presumably I don’t fit in with her prejudiced worldview.

I also pointed out a little later that I don’t think white working class people are all that privileged. After all where I come from the main privilege of working people, whatever their colour, heritage, religion, sex or sexual orientation seems primarily to involve the luxury of working themselves to death. Her response to that didn’t really surprise me, unfortunately. She wrote….

“Look this is redundant. All white people have privilege even poor white people. Let it go. If you can’t see it then you’re being willfully ignorant. Something you can do on your own tl. Not on mine.”

There’s a name for the way that such people play into the hands of those who would exploit them too.
The bigger the chips on our shoulders about our own victimhood and about each other’s abuses the easier it is for us to be exploited. The more we fight amongst ourselves the harder it will be for us to stand united and refuse to waste our lives in the service of wealthy bankers and multinational abusers.

What this blinkered, divisive approach achieves is far from positive. It is the exploiters’ greatest weapon and we turn it upon ourselves with all this infighting and special-pleading. The name of this weapon is well known and simple to understand…..

Divide and rule

PS: I’ll check my privilege when you check your bigoted assumptions about me!

Hard wired 2: How we know what we know

In many ways this chapter may be the hardest for me to write. That’s not because evolution is particularly complicated but because it’s so obvious. At least it is to me. But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I really struggled with the whole concept of evolution. Again, that wasn’t because it’s complicated – it was because I really didn’t want it to be true.

However, regardless of what I wanted to believe all those years ago, evolution is true – it is a fact as indisputable as gravity or heliocentric theory (the notion that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa). In fact we have more evidence for the fact of evolution than we have for the theory of gravity, heliocentric theory, or even most of what we think we know about quantum mechanics.

So why did I once find it so difficult to accept evolution? The answer to that is both simple and complicated….

I found evolution to be challenging because I was a fundamentalist, creationist Christian – a ‘young earth’ creationist at that and evolution contradicts most of what I chose to believe. That’s the simple part.

I was a fundamentalist, creationist Christian for a variety of reasons, mainly social and based upon a need to ‘belong’. That’s the complicated part.

I’m aware that some readers of this blog – some of whom are good friends of mine will find these concepts just as challenging as I once did. To those people I say this…..

I have no wish to attack you and nothing that follows is intended to offend anyone. However, this information is based upon the best available evidence, at least the best evidence available to me – evidence which I will try to introduce as this series progresses.

But first we need to say a little about the nature of evidence, how we know what is true (or at least how we make our best guesses) and how we know when something is likely to be false. This will involve a little detour before we begin talking properly about evolution and evolutionary psychology – bear with me.

By far the easiest way to test whether something is true is to see if it can predict what we might find in the real world. That’s why scientists come up with hypotheses (possible explanations for stuff) and then devise tests to see if what really happens is what we would expect according to the hypothesis. Hypothesis really means ‘an explanation with little or no supporting evidence’. The more tests the hypothesis passes the more evidence it acquires to support it until eventually it moves beyond the status of hypothesis and becomes a ‘theory’.

Hypotheses with loads and loads of supporting evidence are still technically just theories although in common language they become known as facts. That’s the situation with the theory of evolution. It’s still a theory because in science everything is only a theory – an explanation that is supported by evidence – but nothing is a fact because there’s always the chance that new evidence might arise to disprove it. In fact the bulk of scientific testing is designed to try to find conflicting evidence, to disprove theories. If no evidence can be found then the theory is accepted provisionally. But the moment evidence is found that proves it cannot be true the theory is abandoned. That’s how science works. The process of trying to find evidence to disprove a theory is known as ‘falsification’. Remember that term – it’s really important. Falsification.

It’s a bit of a paradox but we can only really know what’s true by trying to disprove stuff – trying to prove our theories are correct doesn’t work. Here’s why…

Let’s assume that I have a hypothesis – I suspect that all mammals live on the land and so I set out to prove it. I go to the internet (doesn’t everyone use the internet these days?) and I type into a search engine ‘land-dwelling mammals’. Instantly I’ll find loads of evidence confirming what I already thought and I’ll be more convinced than ever that my hypothesis is correct. I’ll elevate my hypothesis to a theory because I have the evidence to support it – even to ‘prove’ it but I’ll be wrong.

Had I typed a different search term into my computer I’d have come up with a completely different result. If I’d looked for the evidence against my hypothesis instead of just trying to confirm it I’d have a much better way to test it. What would happen if I searched for ‘sea-dwelling mammals’?

Instantly I’d have been confronted with images of whales and dolphins and my hypothesis would crumble before my eyes. I’d know that my hypothesis was incorrect and I’d have to modify it. I’d eventually end up, as most people already know, with a hypothesis that ‘most’ mammals live on land but that there are a few exceptions. Such is the power of ‘falsification’.

This idea is so powerful that a famous philosopher of science called ‘Karl Popper’ suggested that falsification is the key condition when trying to solve what he called the ‘demarcation problem’ – the difference between ‘science’ and ‘psuedoscience’ or even ‘science’ and ‘nonsense’.

‘Psuedoscience’ and ‘nonsense’ seek only to prove their claims whilst ‘science’ seeks to disprove hypotheses and theories – it seeks to ‘falsify’ claims.

That’s why scientific ideas progress. As each hypothesis or theory is disproven, scientists modify their beliefs and retest, all the time coming closer and closer to reliable truth. Psuedoscientists and nonsense merchants do the opposite – they seek only to find evidence that supports their existing beliefs and ignore or suppress ideas that contradict them. This process of looking only for supporting evidence is what researchers call ‘confirmation bias’, a tendency that scientists work hard to ‘factor out’ of their research methodologies. The confirmation bias lulls us into a false sense of security, even a false sense of competence – we believe that we were right all along and so we don’t ever try to improve upon our existing beliefs.

That’s why creationism hasn’t really changed for thousands of years whereas the theory of evolution keeps getting more and more refined and so more and more reliable. It’s because of this process of falsification. The attempts to falsify evolutionary theory mean that the overall picture is continually refined. We now talk about the ‘modern synthesis’ of evolution – a significant improvement upon Darwin’s original idea which, however brilliant it was (and make no mistake Darwin’s theory was brilliant) was incomplete. Modern theories are also incomplete but they’re getting better and better with every research study. So much so that although some of the fine details are still being refined we now have more than enough evidence to talk about the ‘fact’ of evolution in all but the very strictest, scientific terms where ‘theory’ is as certain as one can ever be.

That’s because, if it wasn’t true, evolution would be easy to falsify. The esteemed English biologist JBS Haldane, when asked what discovery would falsify evolution retorted:

“Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”

That’s because, according to the theory of evolution (and it is a theory – it’s not just a hypothesis) rabbits didn’t evolve until well after the Precambrian era (around 500 million years ago) so fossil rabbits in those early geological layers would pretty much discredit all (or at least most) of evolutionary theory. In fact, almost any ‘out of time’ fossils would be a major problem for evolution and a number of organisations have dedicated themselves to trying to find such an anomaly – so far without success.

Remember the principle of falsification – the more you try and fail to falsify a concept the more reliable it becomes.

Contrast this with the idea of creation by intelligent design (the latest incarnation of creationism). It’s hard to think of a single piece of evidence that would falsify creationism because whatever evidence we throw at the problem the creationist will simply say that God designed it that way. Creationism is ultimately unfalsifiable (at least by its own standards) and therefore it’s impossible to prove as well. It’s a perfect example of what Karl Popper would describe as ‘nonsense’ or, in its latest form of ‘intelligent design’ (ID for short), ‘psuedoscience’.

You see the evidence is the thing – that and the lack of sought after falsification. That’s how we know what we know and also why we don’t have to base our beliefs on the origin myths of a handful of middle-Eastern desert nomads who lived several thousand years ago and knew nothing more about genuine scientific inquiry than their ancient Egyptian counterparts who worshipped Osiris and Ra.

I wonder if this is true

Faith healing GP Accusations have come forward that a Staffordshire Dr. told his patient God would heal her & to stop taking her psychiatric medication. The GP denies any wrongdoing and claims that the allegations represent an attack on his Christian faith.

Whether or not this particular GP is guilty of such serious misconduct is a question yet to be answered. However it wouldn’t be the first time such medieval recommendations have been made in UK. The last few years have seen UK psychiatrists like Rob Waller refer psychotic patients for exorcism, several deaths resulting from exorcism worldwide and an Archbishop calling for exorcism of ‘the mentally ill’ in the House of Lords.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Tiddles, ATOS and the Dept of Health

ATOS, the hated French firm responsible for denying benefits to more disabled and incapacitated people than you can shake a stick at, have done it again. This time they’ve come up with a money-saving scheme that looks set to save the Department of Work & Pensions a veritable fortune without having to deny the health needs of claimants.

Previous attempts to victimise seriously ill and disabled Britons involved declaring them fit for work so that they could be denied benefits. The basic idea was that once these unfortunate former taxpayers had starved to death the government would save a few quid looking after them – money that would be better spent elsewhere. After all – relieving hard-pressed multi-millionaires of their financial responsibilities to the welfare state is far more important than keeping their less fortunate compatriots alive to leech off the wealthy.

Recently it has become clear that ATOS’ original approach of denying medical evidence and just ignoring the hardship of claimants has been more bother than it was worth. Thousands of claimants have appealed against their judgements and the subsequent exposure of ATOS’ cynical cruelty has been damaging not only to the French firm of venture capitalists but to the beleaguered UK government as well. So ATOS has come up with another, less obvious suggestion and the government has been grateful enough for their inspiration to pay them handsomely. ATOS executive Pierre Le Chat has been paid an undisclosed 6 figure sum for the idea which the government claims will save billions of pounds for the independent health providers now profiteering in the newly privatised NHS.

Instead of merely pretending that people are healthy ATOS suggests that the mode of treatment changes. A classic example of this is the newly recommended treatment for cardiac patients. Previously such people have been treated with a range of drugs and exercise-based physiotherapies, none of which come cheap. And yet, as Le Chat pointed out in familiarly superficial style, they all do essentially the same thing. They are all intended to lower blood pressure.

Lowering blood pressure isn’t particularly hard to do. Exercise works. So does stroking and cuddling pets. So the solution is easy – at least so far as the Dept of Work and Pensions is concerned.

From tomorrow, new cardiac patients will not be prescribed medication at all. Instead they are to be given a kitten to stroke. The kitten will be provided free on the NHS although it will be the responsibility of the individual patient and their family to feed it and pay any associated veterinary bills. It is expected that patients will have their kittens sterilised as soon as they are old enough but should this not happen and more kittens are produced they can be returned to the NHS for redistribution to other workshy malingerers.

Obviously some patients will need more than just a new pet cat to resolve their physical health needs. Monsieur Le chat wasn’t available to comment on provision for these people but junior health minister, Kitty Laville, perhaps in a bid to rise above her hitherto obscurity has been prepared to comment. In a truly stunning illustration of her government’s callous stupidity this inept Lib Dem turncoat, a latter day version of Judas Iscariot, told the BBC:

“When there’s no money for health care some people will die. That’s a shame but at least it’ll be the undeserving poor that leave us. That will save precious resources for those who are prepared to work for a living.”

Oh well. So long as the nice Tory and Lib Dem voters stay around to vote for their right wing heroes next time who cares? I mean really, who cares? Do you?

Laville was equally unsympathetic when asked about cardiac sufferers who also experience pet allergies, itself a major contributor to elevated blood pressure. In the now familiar style of this callous, divisive government she replied:

“All medical interventions have side effects. We have to accept that not everyone will respond to treatment. However the new regime won’t start until after the bank holiday.”

Click here for more information.

Wow! Only 1 ‘excess death’ at Mid Staffs?

This blog by SKWalker is long but fascinating.

If you have any interest in truth, justice, the future of the NHS or the way that cynical politicians & the right wing press manipulate the public then you really must read this.

Let me put it another way….

This may be the most important blog a UK citizen can read this year. It has implications way beyond the Francis report & Stafford hospital.

Read it. Read it now.

People are just people

Just a short point (may become a blog series in time)…

If we are to complain about Islamic fundamentalism, as the English Defence League never tire of doing, we must also complain about the abuses of Jewish & Christian fundamentalism. They’re all based upon the same God of Abraham (what Dawkins describes as “The bronze age God of war”).

Have you read Leviticus lately? Whatever charges of brutality can be brought against Islam can also be brought against Christianity and Judaeism. There’s plenty of stoning, sexism, genocide, rape and general nastiness on God’s part in all three religions. Fortunately though not everyone goes in for such antisocial practices.

The reality is that most Europeans (including European Muslims) reject fundamentalism in favour of a more pragmatic approach to society – live & let live. Let’s face it there’s a huge difference between Muslim & Islamist just as there is between Christian & Creationist. That’s why European law & the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) regularly chastises the more extreme devotees of all three religious groups.

Let’s celebrate similairity instead of fighting about difference.

People are just people!

The old (archived) blog content

If you were wondering where all the blog’s content has gone it’s here (well most of it is) in downloadable PDF and other formats.

You’ll find loads of stuff on mental health, human rights, and a few other topics as well. Go and have a look. You know you want to

Enjoy

Debates 9: winning versus growing

As we know an increasing number of people think of debate as though it were a competitive sport with winners and losers, where the objective is to ‘beat’ the ‘opponent’ at all costs. This leads them to employ a range of underhand, manipulative and ultimately futile strategies to ‘advance their cause’. Unfortunately however the result is precisely the opposite. Here’s why…

‘Checkmating’ the opposition

To ‘win’ a debate is to beat the other person into submission, to expose them as a fool (or worse) and to rise victorious as the other person lays bloodied at your feet (metaphorically speaking, of course).

For some people that’s all they wanted to achieve and so they consider the humiliation of their opponent to be a job well done and move on. They’re the lucky ones. They have achieved their desired result and can now forget all about it. But their hapless opponent won’t.

When we humiliate the other person (or worse, when we grind them down with the deceitful tactics described earlier) we create a sense of injustice and resentment that is hard for them to let go. Sometimes it festers and smoulders within them for years, decades even before returning to bite us and our cause just when we are at our most vulnerable.

Checkmating tactics create enemies

Never insist that the other person acknowledge your position or apologise unless you already believe that the situation is irredeemable and need others to understand the reality. I did this myself recently by repeatedly demanding an apology that I clearly was never going to get from a group of radicals on the social media site, Twitter.

The reason for asking was not to get the apology – that would have been meaningless even if it had been forthcoming. The reason was to goad them into showing their hand in front of all my followers who had seen me accused of sexism and bigotry. By insisting that they either ‘put up or shut up’ I ensured that they eventually felt obliged to find some evidence – and what they produced was so transparently weak that their accusations were exposed as the nonsense they really were. That in no way helped my case in the ongoing argument but it did save my reputation from the worst effects of their collective slander. Sometimes – just occasionally checkmating the opposition might be worth it – but it’s never a good debating strategy – more a form of ‘damage limitation’.

Never pretend that one injustice justifies another

This tactic is also depressingly common (and equally futile). I remember that when I was involved in a campaign to push the American ‘charity’, Project Prevention out of UK, this tactic was extremely prevalent in their strategy to discredit the opposition.

This group had decided that women who used drugs were not fit to bear children and so, having failed to get enforced sterilisation passed into law in their native USA they had begun a campaign of coercion in which addicted women were bribed to undergo sterilisation ‘voluntarily’.

My perspective was that all women have the right to choose what happens to their bodies and to make their own reproductive choices without the interference of right wing ideological groups like this encouraging them to give up long-term rights for short-term benefits. Project Prevention is the group who also targeted Haitian women for being ‘too poor to breed’ and Kenyan women because of the prevalence of HIV.

Because I was one of the most vociferous critics of Project Prevention I came under a lot of personal ‘fire’ from the charity’s founder, Barbara Harris and her family who essentially claimed that…

1. Since some children are damaged by in-utero addiction then Project Prevention’s abuse of women by removing their right to bear children is justified.
2. Anyone who disagrees with them is a child abuser by default.

This is a clear attempt to pretend that ‘two wrongs make a right’ or that one injustice justifies another. Fortunately the people of UK saw right through the strategy and kicked them out (as did the people of Eire, South Africa, Haiti and a host of other nations). Nevertheless this is a perfect example of the fallacy that one injustice justifies another.

You can download a free PDF of this entire blog series here

Debates 7: Straw men win no victories

Think back to the film ‘The Wizard of Oz’, that irritatingly twee little tale that crops up with relentless regularity each year to ruin your Christmas television fayre. Remember Dorothy, the little girl with the face we’d all dearly love to slap, the cowardly lion and the heartless tin can. ….. er ‘man’ whose legendary heartlessness is surpassed only by the overall pointlessness of the plot itself.

And then remember the scarecrow – the brainless one who, although loyal and courageous would be easy meat in a debate. He may have been brave and he was undoubtedly compassionate but let’s face it – you wouldn’t want him on your side in a serious discussion.

Of course if the scarecrow (the straw man) really was on your side that would be great for the other person – especially if all they want is to ‘win’ the argument; if they see themselves as your ‘opposition’. Some ‘opponents’ are so keen to oppose the straw man and his typically stupid arguments that they simply invent him and argue not against what you said but against what they wish you’d said instead. They invent the straw man because his arguments are easier to defeat than your own.

I remember, for example discussing evolution with a creationist who, unable to argue against the science underlying evolution decided to try a different tack. He pretended that evolution meant immorality and that I was arguing for a lack of compassion in society. It didn’t matter that I never said that – his imaginary straw man apparently had and that was easier to argue against.

‘Straw man’ arguments don’t help

Of course all he really demonstrated was that he’d already ‘lost’ the argument (for all his sugary-sweet pretence of ‘love’ this evangelist clearly did see me as the enemy he wanted to defeat). But rather than do the intellectual work necessary to understand the arguments before beginning to knock on doors; rather than display the honest integrity that exists in those who genuinely seek ‘the truth’, he chose to distort the conversation and score a few cheap points.

The problem with the straw man argument is that it’s really nothing more than an admission of defeat. People usually use the best arguments they have and if the best that this evangelist could offer was a straw man rebuttal then he clearly didn’t have a viable case – and what’s more, equally clearly he knew it. Why else would anyone twist the terms of the debate so deceitfully unless they knew that their position was hopeless?

Point scoring leads to no more than an empty victory

This tactic is so transparent and so dishonest, not to mention so common among evangelical creationists, that it has even attracted its own twitter hashtag: #lyingforJesus.
Indeed, the more a person uses the straw man argument the more obvious his own dishonesty becomes. And almost by definition the more he demonstrates how wrong his position is too.

Just as so many deceitful evangelists demonstrate the untenability of creationism, so do many others illustrate the ludicrous nature of their own arguments by scoring the ‘own goals’ that straw man arguments represent. The radical accuses the other ‘side’ of privilege, of hostility or whatever ‘ism’ comes to mind without a shred of evidence to support their claim. The zealot resorts to claims of pejudice and discrimination in a wild attempt to shift the topic to easier (more favourable) grounds for their own case. That’s why the radical feminists I had the misfortune of ‘debating’ with resorted to accusations of sexism – it was easier to argue against than my actual position. It’s far simpler to defeat a straw man than it is to engage a real person with an actual brain. So the straw man fantasist lies in a desperate attempt to win at all costs.

But that doesn’t work. Even if they ‘win the battle’ in this underhand way they ‘lose the war’ the moment they sacrifice their integrity and abandon the real argument in favour of such rhetorical fantasy.

I’d like to illustrate the futility of the straw man argument with a quote from the late, great Rudyard Kipling:

“A man convinced against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.”

You can downkload a free PDF of this entire series here

The older posts

Just for info.

Although I removed much of this blog’s content I saved some of it as PDF, audio and video files. They include many of my writings on human rights, mental health, the fight against Project Prevention and more.

Start here to browse and follow the links (or the tabs at the top of the page) for more