Homophobia and the Church

On Tuesday, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons. While it's by no means guaranteed that it will become law, this seems likely.

The Bill received significant opposition from many members of the House of Commons, and from a number of religious groups, including the Church of England. That has led — as always happens in discussions of this kind — to accusations that the Church (both "of England" and in a wider sense) is bigoted, homophobic, irrelevant, out of touch and so on.

One way of reacting to this is to do the rhetorical equivalent of crawling under a rock and waiting for it all to blow over. And believe me, that's an attractive idea. But it's also a very bad idea, because the more the Church stays silent on matters that affect it and everyone, the more it cedes the ground for discussion. The Church believes — as do I — that it is bearing witness to the hope of the whole world, and talking about this kind of thing is therefore not only important, it is vital.

With that in mind, I wanted to put down a few thoughts about homophobia, and in particular what the Church's relationship is with it. First I'd better define my terms. When I refer to what "the Church" says, I will be talking about the churches that I know well; that is, the Church of England (or rather its official policies) and the opinions generally held by the kind of evangelical free churches that I know (I'm a member of a Newfrontiers church, if that gives you any reference point).

Homophobia is a little harder to define in this context, because it's a much more vague term than you might think. At its broadest, it can refer to any action or attitude that specifically disadvantages or disapproves of gay people or homosexuality. The definition I'll be using is slightly more specific, and reflects the common thread in most of the definitions I've found: "discriminatory acts or attitudes, born of a hatred or intense dislike for gay people or homosexual orientation".

OK then. So, now that our definitions are in place, the first thing I want to say is that the Church's position on gay marriage is not inherently homophobic.

Don't believe me? I really can't blame you.

To explain why I think this is true, let's look at how the Church has reached this position. First off, it comes from the concept that sex outside the context of heterosexual marriage (henceforth abbreviated SOTCOHM, because I'll be talking about it a lot) is incompatible with what the Bible teaches. The Biblical justification for this covers quite a lot of ground, starting in Genesis ("That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.", Gen 2:24) and getting mentions in the New Testament as well (see this fairly long passage from 1 Timothy). Other people have covered this far better than I can (here's a good and very positive article on the subject), so I'll simply say that the key point here is that if you're going to take the Bible seriously, you are probably going to find it pretty hard to square allowing SOTCOHM with that¹.

Disregarding the arguments put forward that basically amounted to "blah blah tradition grumble grumble redefining blah", the Church's position regarding same sex marriage was therefore this:

Biblically, SOTCOHM is not something I can support.
Marriage is, essentially, defined by sex².
Gay marriage would therefore be creating a context for sex that falls under the definition of SOTCOHM.
That's not something I can support³.
Therefore, I cannot support gay marriage.

Whether or not you think that reasoning is correct, please understand the absolutely key point here: it does not come from a position of hatred towards either gay people or their identity as gay. As such, it is not, in itself, homophobic.

This brings us on to the next problem, which is, of course, why do people see the Church as being homophobic? I think the answer lies with the cultural context in which we live, and specifically with the shifts in attitude towards homosexuality that have occurred over the years. These have been absolutely massive. It's not even 60 years since the British government hounded Alan Turing to suicide over his sexual orientation, despite his vast contributions to victory in World War II. It's less than 45 years since the Stonewall Riots, 40 years since homosexuality officially stopped being treated as a mental illness, less than 30 years since the UK had its first openly gay MP, only 13 years since the repeal of Section 28, and less than ten years since Civil Partnerships were introduced to this country. While the "ambient homophobia" of Western society is a long way from disappearing completely, it is receding at an immense rate, and particularly among the young it is near-unthinkable that anyone should be hated just because of who they happen to be attracted to. And to be absolutely crystal clear, these shifts are a fantastic thing, and should be applauded not only by Christians but by everyone in society.

The Church's problem, then, is that when it was surrounded by this ambient homophobia, opposition to gay marriage wasn't at all unusual. Let's contrast the above reasoning — which, again, regardless of whether it's correct, is not inherently homophobic — with the below, which definitely is.

Eww! Gays are icky!
Therefore I don't like them.
Therefore I don't want them to have the things they want.
Therefore, I cannot support gay marriage.

Or how about this one?

Gay people are scary and I don't understand them.
Allowing them to marry would also be weird and scary.
I don't like weird or scary things.
Therefore, I cannot support gay marriage.

The problem should be obvious — opinions which started out from very different places have produced the same result. As the tide of homophobia has receded around the church, suddenly its opposition to gay marriage stands out as unusual, and all that people can see is this opposition — which, because it has been associated for so long with homophobia, and because we have done so very, very little to correct this impression, now itself looks homophobic.

So we can blame it all on an image problem, which other people have to learn about? No. If you take nothing else away from what I'm saying here, at least pay attention to this: If the Church has placed itself into a position where it looks homophobic to all who see it, it has utterly failed to adequately witness to Christ's love. We can argue after the fact in blog posts like this one all we like, but when people look at the Church's opinions and actions, they are going to apply what is sometimes called the "duck test": If it looks like homophobia, and it walks like homophobia, and it quacks like homophobia, then of course everyone's going to think it's a duck homophobia.

So what can we, as a church, do about this? The answer should be simple. We need to never shut up about how much Jesus loves people — gay, straight, whatever. We need to be the most loving and welcoming people in our communities. We need to make it absolutely clear that everyone is welcome in our churches, that Jesus is for everyone, that there is Good News here for all people. When people think "where can I go in this community that will welcome me just as I am, will support and befriend me, and will treat me as a human being", if they think "the pub" before "my local church" then we have done something very wrong. And if this means focusing a bit less on how SOTCOHM is a sin, then I think we can live with that — everyone's already heard that message many, many times!

Finally, given that we as a Church have dropped the ball so badly on this one, we need to avoid complacency, and seriously think about what else we might be saying that can easily be confused with hatred. What are we doing that makes people feel unwelcome or unloved, which we haven't spoken about because everyone else is doing it too? And how can we learn to stop doing it, in order to truly witness to who Jesus is to the people around us?

Footnotes

1. This conclusion is, of course, disputed by some Christians! One argument I've heard is that there was no concept in Bible times of a loving homosexual relationship, and that all the warnings about it are therefore actually regarding abusive homosexual relationships. It's an appealing theory, certainly, but I'm not personally convinced that the text supports it — the Greek culture in which the early Church grew up was very familiar with homosexual behaviour of all kinds, and if this was really the intent of the Biblical authors I'd have thought they would have mentioned it in contexts other than what basically looks like a blanket ban on anything other than celibacy or heterosexual marriage.
2. Yes it is. Sure, "lifelong devotion" and "expression of commitment" come into it as well, and are very fine things, but Biblically speaking, the only thing that needed to be present for a marriage to exist was sex.
3. It's worth mentioning that this is also a leap of logic that not everyone's going to agree with — it's an open question to what extent one's personal or Biblical views on gay marriage should affect national policy, particularly in what is essentially a secular nation. I'm not certain myself how I would have voted on Tuesday if had been an MP, and I'm certainly happy to accept that the Christians who unequivocally support this Bill can be doing so from a position of loving both God and his Word.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Over 650 words, and not one George Orwell reference. Result.

You may have heard about the Government's proposed plans to extend online surveillance powers to a frankly ludicrous degree. I certainly have, so I wrote the following letter, which will be going to my MP tomorrow morning. If you feel so inclined, can I suggest you do something similar, and kill this kind of legislation before it gets going?

(This being the Internet, personal details have been excised.)

Dear [my MP],

I am writing to ask you to oppose the recently reported Government plans to introduce much more pervasive monitoring of online activity. It seems clear that these plans are deeply flawed on a number of levels, and I'm very concerned (particularly speaking as a [my occupation in the IT industry]) about the possible impact on both civil liberties and the IT industry as a whole.

The plans, as reported by the BBC, would apparently involve requiring internet service providers (ISPs) to provide records of their users' emails, social networking and web use to GCHQ on demand, without warrants. These records would be sufficient to determine the recipients of emails sent by users, the list of sites that they had visited, and the amount of time spent in contact with others.

My first objection to these plans is from a civil liberties perspective. At present, this information is protected by considerable legal force, such that any request for it would need at least some form of judicial review. Removing this judicial oversight gets rid of both a short-term protection from the abuse of this power (and it is very evident that power of this type is frequently abused – witness the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to spy on parents who are suspected of not living in the catchment area for a particular school), and also means that such abuses would not be recorded in any way that could result in their later prosecution. Even if we were to trust the current governmental security services with this power (and I generally do), it is extremely dangerous to put such a power at the disposal of any and all future governments.

Secondly, the proposed plans would not be of any real benefit in terms of preventing crime or terrorism. It is trivially easy to defeat this kind of network surveillance in several ways, either by using a service such as Tor to route one's requests and emails through a network of anonymous servers, or by using an encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN). Both of these technologies are freely available and widely known (my workplace has been using VPNs frequently for years), and any organised crime network or terrorist cell with any kind of competence is almost certainly already using them. In short, the surveillance plans as put forward would do no good at all in catching criminals, but would do a fantastic job of invading the privacy of innocent citizens.

Thirdly, the security implications of requiring ISPs to keep detailed records of everything that a user does are immense and worrying, in no small part because it is difficult to predict what could happen if these records were released to the public (through incompetence, hacking, a disgruntled employee, or any other scenario). To give you an example, in 2006 AOL released a large text file containing web searches made by many of their customers. Although they had had the foresight not to put names or personally identifying details beside each of the searches, because people tend to search for things personally connected with themselves it became very easy to work out who these people were, resulting in a huge loss of privacy for the people concerned.

Embarrassing though such an event was, it would be as nothing compared to what could happen if an ISP's user data collected in accordance with the Government's surveillance plans were to be released. Such an event could quite easily result in identity theft and fraud on a massive scale, not to mention the accompanying loss of confidence in both the ISP in question and the wider IT sector – a loss of confidence that we can ill afford, given the current economic situation!

In short, the proposed surveillance plans are nothing short of a disaster on all fronts, and I would urge you to oppose them strongly should they appear in the forthcoming Queen's Speech.

Yours sincerely,

[me]

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

This can be solved only one way...Manson/Goulding rap battle!

I've been listening to a lot of music recently, thanks to my shiny Android phone, my shiny headphones, and my new habit of listening to music at work (thanks, co-workers with annoyingly loud headphones of their own). This has led me to discover quite a bit of new stuff, and it's also caused me to discover anew a principle that I already knew — namely, don't judge a book by its cover.

That's unnecessarily cryptic, so let me expand a bit. When you're looking around for music (and I'm thinking particularly of people buying music for others, maybe for kids), there's a great temptation to listen to a couple of tracks and get a quick impression based on those. That's not something I can really fault that much, as people are often rushed for time; that said, it can be a pretty bad idea, because what you see on the surface of a track is not what you see underneath. That point was driven home for me recently when listening to a couple of songs whose worth (or otherwise) is not necessarily apparent from a casual listen.

The first is Garbage's track "Sex Is Not The Enemy", off their 2005 album Bleed Like Me. Garbage are possibly the most adolescent band I can think of. I don't mean that in a bad way at all — their music certainly doesn't lack for either skill or sophistication. Rather, I mean that no other band I know can capture the feeling of what it's like to be about 16, knotted up with anger and anxiety and uncertainty, but also knowing that the entire world with all its potential is not far away from you. The energy of their songs, topped off by Shirley Manson's distinctive voice, means it's no surprise that they appeal to the young.

They probably don't appeal much to parents, though, given that Garbage's lyrics tend to be pretty unapologetic in their coverage of sex, violence and politics. And let's be fair, if you were a parent who had just heard their daughter listening to the song below (or worse, seen the video, what with Manson rolling around on a bed and getting her pixelated boobs out), there's a chance you wouldn't be overly happy about it.



Now, there's plenty to criticise about that song, and it would be pretty easy to take a message away from it of "have lots of sex all the time, right on!" But dismissing it entirely on that basis would be a big mistake. Let's have a closer look at some of the lyrics.

I don't feel guilty
No matter what they're telling me
I won't feel dirty and buy into their misery
I won't be shamed cause I believe that love is free
It fuels the heart and sex is not my enemy

Any song that is telling young women not to feel shamed, not to feel dirty, and not to let anyone else use their sexuality to make them miserable instantly puts it miles above a lot of the dreck that gets pumped out into the charts these days. And if you'd avoid the song because you're a Christian...take a look at the third verse.

True love is like gold
There's not enough to go around
But then there's God and doesn't God love everyone?
Give me a choice
Give me a chance to turn the key and find my voice
Sex is not the enemy

Yep, direct appeal to the universal and all-pervading love of God to argue against the horrendous Hollywood concept of "there's one person who is your perfect soulmate and you must search for them alone". The theology is possibly a mite dubious there, but those are still some pretty powerful and thoughtful lyrics. Not bad for a thrashy, provocative teenagers' song, eh?

Now let's go to the other end of the scale, where you might find someone like Ellie Goulding. I should probably mention that I quite like Goulding — she's got a great voice, and her fusion of folk, pop and electronica is pretty unusual and works really rather well. "Starry Eyed" and "Under The Sheets", in particular, are very good and well worth a listen. But then you have something like...well, this:



That's "The Writer", off Goulding's debut Lights. Our hypothetical parent is probably feeling pretty good about this one. It's a gentle, twinkly ballad, with some lovely imagery in a soaring chorus. Frankly, Goulding being an unthreatening, pretty young woman isn't going to hurt matters either. But once again, let's have a closer look at some of the lyrics.

You wait for a silence
I wait for a word
Lie next to your frame
Girl unobserved
You change your position
And you are changing me
Casting these shadows
Where they shouldn't be

We're interrupted by the heat of the sun
Trying to prevent what's already begun
You're just a body
I can smell your skin
And when I feel it, you're wearing thin

Nothing too strange there, right? I suppose there's a couple of slightly ominous hints — what is that's "already begun" that they're "trying to prevent"? What does it mean that he's "wearing thin"? Well, maybe we'll get some more out of the second verse.

Sat on your sofa...it's all broken springs
This isn't the place for those violin strings
I try out a smile and I aim it at you
You must have missed it
You always do

Well, that's even more ominous. In context, "violin strings" are probably a metaphor for romance, which apparently is lacking in this relationship. "You must have missed it / You always do" is more worrying, as that seems to imply that there's not a lot of warmth here; having to "try out a smile" doesn't sound good. This also puts a nasty spin on "girl unobserved" from the first verse — I don't think our unnamed dude is paying Ellie much attention at all, and things are slipping badly. So what's a girl to do in this situation? Hit us with the chorus, Ellie!

But I've got a plan
Why don't you be the artist; and make me out of clay?
Why don't you be the writer and decide the words I say?
Because I'd rather pretend
I'll still be there at the end
Only it's too hard to ask... won't you try to help me

Now, call me paranoid, but that sounds a lot — an awful lot — like Goulding's proposed solution is to allow herself to be changed entirely. The message, in brief, reads very much like "you don't love me any more, so I'm going to let you change me into someone that you do love". I may be misinterpreting it, but if that's the message I took away from it, it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of Goulding's audience (many of whom will be teenage girls) did the same.

And that message, right there? That is poisonous. Yes, relationships involve give and take, and a certain amount of change on both sides is inevitable. But the idea of handing over complete control of one's character to another person, particularly when it's a girl suggesting this course of action, is worrying on a whole lot of levels. The icing on the horrible, horrible cake is the line "Because I'd rather pretend / I'll still be there at the end", suggesting that Goulding's character in the song is happy to just fake it, being in the relationship for the sake of it while she subsumes her own identity into that of her partner.

If it's a choice between young people listening to that, and having Shirley Manson declaim sexual liberation messages at them with a megaphone? Bring on the Garbage.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Anyone who even thinks of the word "midichlorians" is not welcome here.

(Yes, I know it's been the best part of a year since I posted here. No, this probably isn't the start of a resurgence in posting. Sorry to disappoint.)

As a fully certified geek, it is not at all surprising that I'm entirely familiar with the Star Wars universe. I hear and recite quotations from the films frequently, I own two of the video games, I can give you a potted summary of the "Han shot first" controversy at the drop of a hat — I have certain credentials here, is what I'm saying.

So I was rather surprised to realise recently that not only did I not own any of the films in any format, it had actually been well over ten years since I had seen any of them. (We're talking the original trilogy here, of course — my geek cred extends far enough to know that the recent prequels, aka abominations against the very concept of cinema, don't count.) So, taking advantage of the January sales, I headed into London to pick up the DVD box set, and spent a reflective couple of hours the other night watching Episode IV.

It took me a while after finishing watching it to decide what I thought of it. Given that the established wisdom of...well, pretty much everyone I know, with the exception of my mother, who wanted to take a tin-opener to C-3PO when she first saw him...is that the original films are classics of modern cinema, masterpieces that soar above lesser films like an X-Wing twisting between bursts of turbolaser fire, it's difficult to have any kind of unbiased viewpoint here. Nevertheless, for what it's worth, here are my conclusions. (One note on formatting in this post &mdash I'll use the italicised Star Wars to denote Episode IV, as that's its original theatrical title, and plain Star Wars to denote the franchise.)

1. Good grief, this is EPIC.
From the opening shot, as an Imperial cruiser (I don't think the term "Star Destroyer" is mentioned anywhere in the first film) slides almost endlessly across the top of the screen, to the climactic battle above a space station the size of a moon, Star Wars has a sense of scale unlike almost any other film. This continues almost everywhere &mdash our heroes move between entire star systems, at speeds greater than light, landing on worlds that consist entirely of desert, fighting an Empire that, we're told, spans the galaxy. Lucas went all-out to create this compelling atmosphere, and he pulls it off admirably.

2. Intergalactic Planetary Planetary Intergalactic
An essential element of the sense of scale throughout Star Wars is John Williams' score. It's utterly beautiful, moving from urgency to wonder to triumph to shock with ease. I was surprised that even after having so long over the years to become sick of it, the mournful theme as Luke looks out over the desert he's so desperate to leave behind was still really moving. As with his score for Jurassic Park, Williams came up with something at once unique and yet very obviously his own.

3. It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know
As Ben Kenobi strode onto the screen, I began to wonder "how did they persuade Alec Guinness to appear in as large a gamble as this?" I think the answer has to be that Guinness could tell he was among people who knew what they were doing. All the casting is inspired — Mark Hamill probably wouldn't thank me for saying that he really looks and sounds very ordinary in this film, but that's precisely what was required for the role of an everyman farm boy, caught up into something larger than himself. Carrie Fisher is as Princessy as you could wish for (in looks, if not in character — more on that later). Even the Rebel fighter pilots and the various generals on the bridge of the Death Star are well-portrayed. (And, as Eddie Izzard is fond of pointing out, they're all British.)

As for Harrison Ford, well, it's a shame that he picked up the "action hero" stereotype in this franchise, because he really can act. There's a scene towards the end, when Obi-Wan has just died (or been absorbed by the Force, or whatever — the film's intentionally ambiguous here) and Luke is sitting on board the Millennium Falcon, stunned and unable to take it in ("...can't believe he's gone."). Han Solo comes down the ladder to find Luke, as he's going to need him to fend off Imperial fighters, and he says just one thing: "Come on buddy, we're not out of this yet." It's a simple line, over almost immediately, but Ford's delivery of it is pitch-perfect, conveying kindness without being at all sentimental, and still maintaining the urgency required by the situation. It's worth noting here that the script is also better than one might expect from a sci-fi blockbuster — I'm not certain, but I think this is the first time Solo refers to Luke as "buddy" rather than "kid", and the quiet character development signalled by that tiny change is significant.

4. My Explanations, Let Me Not Show You Them
One of the most surprising aspects of Star Wars, for me, was the extent to which it doesn't fall into the trap of so many bits of sci-fi, that of over-explaining everything. We're treated to practically no backstory for any of the characters, at no point does anyone tell us just how a lightsaber works, the Force is vague and mysterious. The most stunning example of this was when Han Solo talks to Greedo and then Jabba — there are no subtitles, despite both the characters he meets speaking completely alien languages, and we're left to decipher what they must have said from Solo's side of the conversation. (Come to think of it, my DVD-playing setup is a little ropey, so the subtitles may simply have been broken. If that's the case, then feel free to disregard this point!) This general attitude towards the viewers — that they are intelligent enough to figure out what's going on, and that the story is more important than explaining the fine details of the setting — is refreshing, and really helps to move things along.

5. I Am No Man
Speaking of subverting expectations, I was really impressed by the role of Leia. The word "princess", when applied to a film role, is usually code for "fairly drippy character whose involvement in the plot is restricted to a) getting captured and/or rescued, and b) falling in love with the male lead". And yet our first sighting of Leia is when she is confronting the 7-foot tall, half-man-half-machine-all-evil Darth Vader. And it is a confrontation — she chews him out for boarding a diplomatic vessel, threatens him with the wrath of the Galactic Senate, and shows no fear whatsoever. This kind of can-do attitude isn't a one-time thing, either — she's the one who gets them out of the detention levels, she's the only character who cottons on to the fact that their escape from the Death Star was too easy, and she's pretty handy with a blaster too. Even though there is a romantic subtext between her and Han, it's never over-the-top, and she maintains the upper hand throughout — note that in the ceremony at the end, it's Luke and Han who have to walk up to Leia to receive their reward, not the other way around.

6. Aaaaaaaagh I'm Running Out Of Time
And so we come to the only thing I really didn't like about Star Wars. At the end of the film it took me a while to put my finger on why, though I'd enjoyed it a lot, I'd also found it a bit disappointing. I think the answer can be summed up in one word: Pacing.

The impression throughout the film is that, much like me when starting to write one of these epically long posts, Lucas thought he had all the time in the world. We spend seemingly forever in and around Luke's home, meeting Obi-Wan, and following the droids. Oh, man, the droids. Is there any particular reason why we had to go through the whole "R2-D2 and C-3PO go off in opposite directions, complain for a few minutes, get captured by the same set of characters and have a glorious robotic reunion" storyline? It has precisely no bearing on any of the rest of the plot, and could equally well have been done by simply having the Jawas find the escape pod as soon as it landed. As it stands, this and other scripting and editing decisions mean that the first half of the film moves glacially slowly.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a film that runs slowly to give the audience time to take in the atmosphere. Nor is there anything wrong with a film that builds pace throughout. But Star Wars does this to a ridiculous extent, such that it takes at least a good quarter of the film before we've met all the main cast, while the final battle, from the Millennium Falcon landing on Yavin to the destruction of the Death Star, takes place in-universe in less than half an hour.

Even the pacing within some of the scenes is odd. Take the destruction of the Death Star, for instance. Luke drops his bombs into the shaft, he and Han fly off, Vader spins away, we cut to the people on the Death Star looking unconcerned, and then it immediately blows up. The whole sequence has taken a couple of seconds at most. No anticipation, no time to wait for it, just BOOM. For me, at least, that took a lot away from what should have been the climactic shot of the film.

For much the same reason, the final ceremony is unsatisfying, because it feels forced and tacked-on, leaving completely unresolved the question of what the Rebels are going to do next, how the Empire is going to be destroyed (it's only lost one of its weapons, and is far from powerless) or even how the various character relationships are going to work. From a position of knowing that there were two more films, it's not so bad that things haven't been resolved — we know there's more story to come. But if you're going to do that, you surely have to either do an explicit "to be continued" type of ending (as the Lord of the Rings films did) or make the films stand entirely on their own (as the Matrix films would have done, had there been any sequels). Star Wars, however, doesn't know what it wants to do and it ends up falling between two stools, with a rushed and unsatisfying ending that leaves too many questions open.

Obviously, given that I've just spent 1800 words discussing this film, I found a lot to enjoy, and I'm certainly glad I came back to revisit this touchstone of geek culture. If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to argue violently in the comments. And maybe — just maybe — come back soon when I re-watch The Empire Strikes Back...

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Your Vote Matters (Well, To A Certain Extent, I Suppose)

OK, sorry for yet another politics post, particularly after such a long gap, but we're almost at the election! The day after tomorrow, the polls will open and Britain will flock to cast their vote for whoever they want to lead us for the next however many years it is.

Well, some of them will, anyway. One of the major problems with our first-past-the-post electoral system is that it's entirely too easy to find yourself stuck in a constituency where your preferred candidate has not the faintest chance of being elected, even if they're from one of the major parties. And in those circumstances, it's completely understandable that a lot of people will simply not bother, or vote for someone who's kind of close to their preference, but isn't quite what they were after. I think that's a shame.

So, I'm going to use this space to give you three good reasons why you should vote, and moreover why you should vote for the person you actually want to get in rather than the person who might make it. I may as well note before I start that the cornerstone of democracy is that everyone is free to cast their vote for whoever they want, for whatever reason they want, or indeed not to vote at all. If you want to vote for the BNP to "send a message" to the "political elite", for instance, that's your democratic right. (That said, we have a great tradition of free speech in this country, so it's also my right to call you a complete idiot if you do.) Essentially, I'm fully aware that if you don't want to vote for anyone, or if you want to vote tactically, that's absolutely your right, so don't let me guilt you into it. But if you'd care to read on, here's why there might be a better option.

First, parties become competitive by people voting for them when they are not competitive. That's been the Liberal Democrat pattern for ages — they very rarely take a seat out of nowhere, but rather do it over two or more electoral cycles, slowly gaining enough support to be seen as potential challengers to the incumbent, at which point enough people take them seriously to get them the rest of the way. Another example is the Greens, who haven't had a decent shot at a Parliamentary constituency since their formation, but who stand a reasonable chance of taking Brighton Pavilion this time around. So even if the vote you cast for a non-competitive party this time around doesn't get them into office, people will look at the vote total next time. Not just the voters, but also the parties themselves — the more people vote for them in a given constituency, the higher the chances that they'll pour some more cash into campaigning there in the future.

Secondly, people look at the popular vote. Even in our voting system, where the popular vote is technically irrelevant, it gets a lot of attention from the parties when they're campaigning or when they're trying to argue that their opinion should be taken more seriously. And in this election, where there's a reasonable chance of the Liberal Democrats coming second in the popular vote but a distant third in seats (and of Labour coming first in seats despite coming second or even third in the popular vote), the popular vote is likely to be a powerful argument in favour of voting reform. When we're talking about popular votes, every vote is as important as every other.

Thirdly — and perhaps most importantly — this is the least predictable election for a generation. The Lib Dem surge caught everyone unawares (watching the Conservatives scrabble madly to regain the initiative after the first debate was a particular highlight for me, I have to admit), and with this coming on top of the expenses scandal (which has resulted in around a hundred MPs not seeking re-election), a lot of constituencies are suddenly way more open than they have been for years. In short, unless we get some kind of voting reform before the next election, this may well be the public's best chance for decades to upset the normal order of things and bring a bit of variety to politics. Don't blow it now!

Campaigning is in its final stretch, and if you haven't decided who to vote for yet, you're almost out of time. Whatever the outcome, this is the most exciting election the UK's seen for ages and the possibilities are fantastic. I don't know about you, but I for one am looking forward to it.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Politics is always improved by a little injection of Science.

We're into the last few weeks before the General Election. At least, I assume we are, our Glorious Leader having apparently neglected to officially call one, and seeming to want to hang on until the last possible minute. And who can blame him, frankly? The poll numbers have been showing the Conservative lead evaporating recently, going down from a lead of around 18% last July to a mere 7% or so. The Budget seems to have pushed it back in their favour (not unusually, given how people don't tend to like being told they're going to pay more), but whether that's the start of a new trend back towards the blue end of the scale or a mere blip on the way to the great British public being completely undecided is something we just won't know for a little while longer.

Either way, it's an exciting time in politics, and the pollsters are having a lovely time. But how do we interpret the poll results? Well, I've been letting my geeky side (which is, I must admit, pretty enormous compared to my non-geeky side) run riot a little more than usual, with the result that I'm now in a position to put forward a tentative projection.

There's two main ways of predicting Parliamentary results based on poll figures. The first is the Uniform Swing Projection. In a nutshell, this method compares the vote share predicted by a poll with the vote share at the previous election to calculate the swing towards or away from each party, then applies that swing to the vote share in each separate constituency.

It's not the most sophisticated way of doing predictions, and suffers from a few limitations. For example, a strong negative swing can result in a prediction of zero votes for a party, which is fairly unlikely. It also fails to take into account boundary changes and the size of a constituency, and is likely to hit particular problems in an election like this one where a number of MPs have resigned or have had their reputations tarnished by the expenses scandal. It's a good place to start, though, and gives you a reasonable idea of the general trend of the election.

So, what's the prediction? Well, based on the most recent YouGov poll listed on the UK Polling Report, which gives figures of 38% Conservative, 31% Labour, 19% Lib Dem, 12% other, I'm projecting a Hung Parliament with the Conservative Party short of a majority by 51 seats. That's not far off UK Polling Report's current projection of a Conservative shortfall of 19, so I think I'm in the right neck of the woods.

Of course, that's only one poll, and I've heard bad things about YouGov (it's an online outfit, which does make them susceptible to outside influence). So let's see some more recent results, with my projections.

• 29th March (YouGov), Con 39% Lab 32% LD 18%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 35
  
• 29th March (Opinium), Con 38%, Lab 28%, LD 18%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 3
  
• 28th March (ComRes), Con 37%, Lab 30%, LD 20%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 59
  
• 27th March (BPIX), same results as ComRes above

All of which seems to suggest that there may be quite a bit of variability, but the Conservatives have a lot of work to do if they want to form a majority government.

I've got some more work to do on my projection model, and I've had some ideas for getting it a bit more accurate, so watch this space for more details (I'm also going to open-source my code shortly so you can play around with it for yourself). Until then, I'm going to leave the parties to frantically scrabble for those extra few votes...

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Harmonicas make everything sound sad.

What with all the excitement of the Winter Olympics (which have been fantastic so far) and the Six Nations (which...hasn't, at least from an English perspective), I forgot to make an update which I really shouldn't have missed, even in these days of very sparse additions to this blog. That update is the annual anti-Valentine's entry.

OK, so it's a little cynical to always make sarcastic comments about love at this time of year, but on the other hand, there is such a field of mawkish sentimentality to choose from when selecting something to methodically deflate, it seems churlish not to do something.

Fortunately, I've gone the classy route this time, by doing something creative for a change. That would be recording a song, on the theme of love. Have a listen to "So We'll Go No More A-Roving".



The music may be mine, but the words certainly aren't — they're taken from a poem by Lord Byron (original text here). It's a sad song, telling of a love that used to be bright, but has faded; love itself must have rest, as old age takes over.

Byron wasn't exactly in any position to know about old age, being only 29 when he wrote this, but the note of weariness that pervades the poem is very powerful. It's always a bit surprising to see someone who was a notorious hellraiser — he was the first man to be described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" — coming up with something as tender as this. Maybe it indicates that the what he thought was love to start with wasn't actually what he was after.

This poem feels like it's nothing but sadness, leaving the reader with no love and nothing to replace it. But maybe that's the point. If the first rush of love — wild, passionate, roving late into the night — doesn't last, then we have to find something with which to replace it before that happens. Whether Byron ever managed this is unknown, but it's unlikely; he died only seven years after writing these verses. Maybe our challenge, then, is to see whether we can do better.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Earthquakes, Evangelists and Evil

What would be a proper Christian response to the recent events in Haiti?

That's not just idle speculation, it's actually pretty important. After a US General has suggested that the death toll may top 200,000 (that's considerably higher than the population of Newcastle, in case you were wondering), the world is in shock at what seems like a completely senseless tragedy. At emotionally fraught times like this, the church has traditionally been one of those places that tries to bring "meaning" (in so far as that's possible) to those situations which seems meaningless, in the hopes that people will be comforted.

That's not always a good thing, of course — it's entirely possible that what people really want from the church is an assurance that this kind of thing won't happen to them, that there was something different about those "others". Sadly, some people are all too eager to give such false assurances; Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, has blamed the earthquake on a pact with the devil that Haitians allegedly made in order to gain their independence.

I don't mind admitting that when I first read Robertson's words, my immediate reaction to them was decidedly un-Christian, and I'm certainly not going to repeat it here. (Not without a long disclaimer and a video of a kitten, anyway.) How someone so influential, who commands a large audience of Christians, and who is apparently well thought of by his audience, could spit out such poisonous rubbish is beyond me. Needless to say, that is not the right way to approach the topic.

So what can we say? Well, it makes sense to start with what we know and have always known — that God loves the world and the people in it. This is a theme that runs right through the Bible, from the world's creation (when God looks at all he has made, and sees that it is very good), through to its salvation, in which we find that God loves the world so much that he will send his Son to save it. This is a love so great that literally nothing can separate us from it. So whatever happens, we can be sure that God hasn't left us, and that he cares for us.

But if God loves the world, why do things like earthquakes happen? Although I'm going to have a stab at this, it's really far too large a topic to cover in a single blog post, even if I thought that I had a handle on it (and I really don't). People far more intelligent and wise than I am have spent years trying to solve this. Some people have even used the problem of evil as an argument against God's existence, often phrased in the form of The Riddle of Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Personally, the point where I would take issue with this is at the second line, in which it is claimed that not consistently preventing evil is logically equivalent to malice. This doesn't logically follow, to my mind at least. There are situations in which permitting evil to happen is not necessarily an evil act in itself, if it allows a greater good. Take imprisonment, for example. Is it evil to deprive someone of their liberty? In a vacuum, you'd have to say yes. (Particularly if by that you meant imprisoning people inside a huge vacuum. That's definitely evil.) But if, by imprisoning someone, you prevent him from killing someone else, then you've done more good than evil.

"But wait!" I hear you cry. "That doesn't work, quite apart from the whole 'ends justify the means' thing which you appear to have completely ignored, even if it was for the purposes of avoiding long digressions like this one. If you're carrying out little evil acts to prevent big evil acts, you're presupposing the existence of big evil acts! That doesn't explain evil at all!"

And you'd be right, annoyingly perceptive voice in my head. What it does let me do, though, is lead up to what Wikipedia tells me is Plantinga's Free Will Defence (the whole Wikipedia article on the problem of evil is well worth a read, by the way). Plantinga argues, in a nutshell, that if God wishes us to have free will, we can choose either good or evil. Now, the fact that free will pops up in the Bible so very early (Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree) indicates that it's part of the original plan, the one that God calls "very good". So, if evil can occur, this is only because a much, much greater good — the ability to choose to serve God, or not to — is its result.

Right, so we've reached the stage at which we can say that God who is both all-powerful and completely loving isn't necessarily incompatible with a world where terrible things happen. That doesn't go far enough as an explanation, though. Sure, we can say that murders and violence may happen, but that's because people exercise their free will and do bad things. It doesn't cover earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, or any of the other million and one horrible things that the Earth periodically does. How does this square with the image of a world that God made, and with which he was very pleased?

I think the key to understanding this is that we always like to remember the first half of the verse I linked to above ("God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.") and we forget the second half ("And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day.") Each part of the story of Genesis is linked to a particular and very specific time; just because the world was perfect then doesn't necessarily mean that it's still perfect now.

(I'm going to take a moment here to digress, and say that I'm not going to put forward any opinion, one way or another, on the extent to which I consider Genesis to be a literal, historical account of creation. That's a topic just as large as the problem of evil, and far too much ink and vitriol has been spent on it for me to try to wade in here. What I will say is that even if one takes the most metaphorical view possible — and I'm not saying that I necessarily do — there are still many, many important themes and valid bits of theology that we can draw from the book. In other words, Six Day Creationism isn't the only game in town, and it's possible to take just as active a part of the conversation if you're on one end of the spectrum as if you're on the other. Right now, I'd prefer to focus on the stuff on which we stand the slightest chance of reaching some kind of agreement. Sound good?)

What Genesis makes very clear is that although the world was perfect, there was a Fall. After Adam takes the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, God says the following to him:

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

From that point on, everything goes wrong. Adam and Eve get clothed in animal skins rather than the leaves they were wearing before, highlighting the fact that death is now a part of their lives. Adam has to work the ground before it will give him any food, which implies that before this it was working with him. Again and again the point is hammered home that just as humanity is no longer living in the type of relationship with God that he originally planned, so their relationship with the Earth itself has gone sour.

For the record, I should note that Pat Robertson (and those of his ilk) probably wouldn't disagree with any of this. Where we part company is the assumption that because the Earth's brokenness is because of sin, therefore any manifestation of that brokenness — for example, an earthquake — is in response to a very specific sin, such as the one Robertson attributes to the inhabitants of Haiti. I think this seems like a very odd idea. Should we assume that if we get weather we want, for example, that God is particularly pleased with us? No, of course not. After all, Jesus makes it very plain that the rain falls both on the righteous and the unrighteous. Although the Bible reports that God has used natural disasters as a form of judgement (the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind), it doesn't remotely follow that any natural disaster is therefore part of such a judgement.

What's more, it's daft to assume that any particular sin you see is going to receive a visible punishment. Take the Roman Empire, for example. This was a society that far outstripped our own in terms of capacity for evil (bad though Big Brother may be, we haven't yet reached the stage of having people raped and murdered in public for our entertainment), and yet it never received so much as an errant asteroid.

Of course, all this ignores the number one reason not to blame particularly sinful Haitians for the earthquake: Jesus tells us not to. You can't get much plainer, really — Jesus is told about specific tragedies, and states in no uncertain terms that these were not due to their victims being unusually bad. He does add the very ominous warning "But unless you repent, you too will all perish", but he's not backtracking on his own words. He's not suggesting, for example, that even though people who have towers fall on them aren't necessarily sinful, if we don't repent we will also have a bunch of towers fall on us. No, he's pointing out that sin is a big deal to God. What we might think of as something inconsequential is something that has completely broken our world. It didn't cause a tower to fall, it caused our relationship with God to be completely twisted out of alignment, and that matters a lot more.

I've clearly gone on at some length here (hello, all two of you who made it down this far!) so let's draw things to a close. What is our response to the earthquake?

Well, first, don't blame the victims. I'm looking at you, Robertson. What the victims of this need to hear from us is not that God is not chuckling away at the carnage that he has caused, but that he loves them and cares for them.

Secondly, we need to back up that expression of love by actually helping them. If you possibly can, donate to the aid effort. If you're in the UK, I'd recommend donating to the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation of several charities working together to get help out there. The Red Cross, or Médecins Sans Frontières, would be good choices too. Anything you can do to help is a good thing.

Thirdly, and most importantly, pray. We're living in a broken world, one which periodically does terrible things to its inhabitants, just as they do terrible things to each other. And we can't fix that, but we believe in a God who can. When we've done all we can on our own terms, the only thing left to do is to ask God to do all he can on his.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

You know, I don't think I want to even touch the part where he suggests that Banksy should have been murdered at birth.

I've posted here before (and at some length) about graffiti and its artistic potential. Indeed, I was reminded of it just the other day as I was heading back to London on the train, going past a rather fine mural of a shark beside the track (can't find a photo of it online, sadly). London has a fantastic supply of awesome graffiti — this and this are just beautiful, for example, and I love the South Bank combination skate park and graffiti wall.

Now, I can fully appreciate that even though I really like some graffiti work, it isn't to everyone's taste, and some people would rather it be removed. That's an occupational hazard for street artists, and if the people who live in the areas where it's particularly prevalent really don't want to look at it every day, it's hardly my place to tell them that their opinions shouldn't count.

All of which brings us to a news story that caught my eye today, about Bristol City Council planning to let members of the public vote on whether specific bits of street art should be kept or removed. This seems like a great idea, if they can make sure the voting's fair (apparently they're using an online poll, which isn't exactly immune from interference and will naturally skew the vote towards the younger end of the population). And if the public decide that a particular piece isn't worth keeping, more power to them.

Some people aren't happy with this development, though. To quote from the article (with emphasis added by me):

"The two words 'graffiti' and 'art' should never be put together," said the art critic Brian Sewell. He added the council were "bonkers". "The public doesn't know good from bad."

"For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don't know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn't matter if they [the public] like it. It will result in a proliferation of entirely random decoration, for want of a better word," he said.

Oh dear. Who let Brian Sewell out of his crypt? I'm sure he knows a lot about art — at least I hope he does, given that that's his job — but he's committing the cardinal sin of a critic, that of thinking that only certain people are permitted to be critics.

That isn't to say that everyone's viewpoint is equally correct, or even equally worth listening to. If you can't back up an opinion with at least some kind of reasoning, no-one's very likely to listen to it. But that's a very long way from suggesting that only those who offer these opinions professionally should ever be heard, or indeed that people without the "proper" education are necessarily incapable of forming a reasoned judgement. I know practically nothing about art or its history, for example, and yet when I look at any particular bit of artwork I can generally come up with something specific that I like or dislike about it.

Sewell may have a grain of truth in his objections — after all, this is the country that has repeatedly voted on Big Brother enough to keep it on our screens (although not any more), so there isn't any guarantee that the people involved in the vote will choose a course of action that will improve Bristol. However, the main reason he's wrong in this case (quite apart from a breathtaking degree of arrogance &mdash and I know arrogance, given that I apparently think enough of myself that I write a bunch of stuff on a semi-regular basis and assume that a lot of strangers on the Internet might care about it at some point) is that this particular bit of artwork doesn't exist in a vacuum. Because it's street art, it's very much part of the city — and it's a city which enjoys a general lack of Brian Sewell, given that he lives in London.

That means that although Sewell may be perfectly within his rights to criticise street art in the context of art, his opinions as to its place in the city have no weight at all. And, more to the point, the people who do live in Bristol automatically have something of a right to decide what goes on there. Sewell's thesis, that the public shouldn't be allowed to decide what their city looks like because they don't necessarily know what a city "should" look like, is therefore flawed on two fronts. Not only does being part of a city give you at least some rights in shaping it, opinions are not necessarily exclusive to those who can back them up most effectively.

Now, given that I live in London, I wonder if I can vote to paint over Brian Sewell...

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

This does, of course, assume that all alien civilisations are familiar with the ASCII character set.

While browsing the internet today at lunchtime (yes, it was at work, but if they're going to give me an hour to eat lunch and also give me an unrestricted internet connection, the two are going to intersect sometimes), I came across Hello From Earth. This is a project that aims to send a whole lot of messages out to the nearest Earth-like planet we've yet found in the Galaxy, Gliese 581d. (Shame they couldn't come up with a snappier name.)

It's referred to as "Earth-like" because it's in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" of its parent star, Gliese 581. That means that it's neither too hot nor too cold, but the right temperature for liquid water to exist. Perhaps, then, we might find the much-vaunted "life as we know it" there. That is quite a large assumption — after all, we probably wouldn't notice if someone speculatively sent a burst of radio waves at our planet from squillions of miles away. Assuming, therefore, that it'll work at Gliese 581d, if there is indeed water there, and if there is indeed life, and if that life is advanced enough to detect radio, and if it happens to be listening at the time, and if it can decode our messages in any meaningful way, seems to be a bit of a tall order.

Not that it matters, really. Obviously it would be cool if someone did turn out to be listening, but the real value here is in seeing the kinds of things that people want to send out to the cosmos. Some of them go with general friendly greetings; Katrina from California, for example, will send the following:

Hello from Earth ! We come in peace. I look up at the universe every night wondering what magnificent things are out there, this could be one of those things.

Very nice, but perhaps not very informative. Other people have gone down the "dire warnings to the aliens" route, like CruelAngel from Budapest:

For your own safety... You should NOT land on our planet. It stinks.

A little pessimistic, perhaps.

There's plenty of vague platitudes, messages directed more at the people reading the site than at any hypothetical aliens, and (this being the internet) attempts to slag off everyone else using the site, although the fact that all messages must be verified and approved has kept the spam to a minimum. There are some funnier ones that I do like, though:

If you plan to study our species, please don't start with our television broadcasts. They require a lot of explanation.
Eric Zak
Phoenix, United States

To the owner of a red Porsche 944, your lights are on.
H C
Wichita Falls, United States

Hello from Earth, please visit. We have cookies.
Chris Hully
Ottawa, Canada

Xenu, save us!
Tom Cruise
LA, United States

And lastly we have the people who are determined to demonstrate that the Earth holds advanced civilisations, and that we know stuff. I particularly liked this one from Luiz in São Paulo:

3,14159265358979323846 ***, * **** * ***** ********* ** ****** ***** *** ***** ******** ********* ******* ********* *** ** *** ******** **** ******

Simple and elegant.

So what, I hear you ask, did I decide to send? Well, I managed to up my geek points considerably by transmitting the following out into the Galaxy.

. . .. ... ..... ........ ............. ..................... .................................. .......................................................

Yes, with all the vistas of human knowledge open before me, I opted to send them the Fibonacci sequence expressed in full stops. I hope they're grateful for it when it turns up in December 2029.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Typing this up was not as cathartic as I'd hoped.

Time for a quick warning before we get into this post — it will be about swearing and bad language in general. Given that I don't normally swear at all, either in text or in speech, that's going to present some problems. My general position is that I want the front page at least to be entirely suitable for all ages, so I could simply avoid saying anything throughout the post that might be offensive. However, it's going to get really confusing if I start using constructions like "that word that starts with an 'f' and is very offensive", and I consider it an intellectual cop-out of the highest order to blank out words with asterisks. Anyone who reads the post is going to be entirely aware of which words I'm actually talking about, so I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that blanking it out is any better.

So, the only real solution is to quote these more objectionable words in full, and to hide the rest of the post behind a cut. So here's the warning: The rest of this blog post will contain extremely strong language that you may find offensive. If you're the kind to be offended by it and would rather not read the rest, then feel free to go on your way. Please accept my apologies, and enjoy this video of adorable kittens instead. (For those on the RSS feed or reading this post anywhere but the blog's front page: the cut will not work for you, so anything after the video is unsafe.)



Awww. How sweet. OK, those of you who are still with me, and haven't been completely overwhelmed with kitteny joy (and if not, go and take a look at Cute Overload), let's get into it.

Certain parts of language have been deemed unacceptable for polite society for thousands of years, probably since the first caveman's wife threw the first caveman out his cave for saying "oog" too many times. Shakespeare was sailing pretty close to the wind with some of his language — "zounds" appears rather a lot (source) and is short for "by God's wounds"; "gadzooks" means "God's hooks". Both are references to the Crucifixion, and in a very Christian society (like the one in which Shakespeare lived), both of those words were very offensive. Go back further to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and you'll see the same thing, as the Parson scolds the Man of Law for using expressions like "for Goddes bones" and "by Goddes dignitee".

As you can see, religion has long been a source for swearing. That must go back at least to the Ten Commandments, the third of which forbids misusing God's name. Even so, faith-based swearing (to coin a phrase) is clearly not the only way that people could swear in Biblical times. The book of James goes on at some considerable length about how words can be harmful ("out of the same mouth comes praise and cursing", for example), and Paul had similar things to say in Ephesians 5:4: "Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving."

It's pretty clear from a Christian perspective, then, that despite swearing's long heritage, it's not necessarily a good thing to exercise one's entire vocabulary all the time (and whatever the circumstances, misusing God's name is right out). However, does that necessarily mean that there are no circumstances in which some forms of swearing may be acceptable? How about the place where it's most often controversial, in art and media? Let's take a look at a few case studies, to see how language tends to be used and what its impact is.

Stand-up comedy
I may as well come out and say right now that I'm a huge fan of Eddie Izzard, but if I'm going to do a post on swearing there's no way I'm going to avoid talking about him. Here's a clip from his show "Glorious".



In case you weren't counting, that clip contained 14 "fucks" or variations thereof, two "bastard"s, two "bloody"s, and a "Jesus Christ". And yet, I don't find Izzard remotely offensive. Obviously I'm not about to quote his work verbatim in mixed company (I tend to strategically miss out words, of which more later), but I'm more than happy to watch him for hours despite the near-constant barrage of four-letter words. I think the reason is that the swearing isn't the point of the joke. In the above clip, for example, it serves as little more than punctuation — his miming and observational humour is considerably funnier than the fact that he's saying "fuck" a lot, but the swearing does also help to give him a rhythm and a recognisable vocal persona.

Now, contrast that with Billy Connolly. (OK, this is a little unfair, as this clip is Connolly on the subject of swearing, but still.)



Don't get me wrong, that's still funny (and Connolly does make a good point, which we'll come back to in a bit). However, because the swearing is the point of the joke — note how everyone's in raucous laughter after the first bellowing "FUCK OFF!" — I don't find it nearly as entertaining, and I certainly wouldn't be happy showing it to anyone else. (Apart from all of you, of course.) When swearing gets you a laugh, regardless of what else you might be saying, it must be very tempting for comedians just to sprinkle a few swearwords in and leave it at that.

Films
The first time I watched the classic The Silence of the Lambs, I don't think I knew what certificate it was. I wasn't left in any doubt, however, when about three minutes in, Miggs, one of the prisoners in Hannibal Lecter's cell block, snarled "I can smell your cunt!" at Clarice Starling. Bang, instant 18 certificate. Now, The Silence of the Lambs is not a nice film anyway, and the violence later on would push it well into 18 territory regardless of the language used. Nevertheless, the tone is set very early on. Having seen very little of the film, we're already aware of the kind of person that Miggs is, and (by extension) the kind of person that Lecter must also be, to be locked up with him. It's very clever writing, which works because of the choice of language rather than despite it.

On the other hand, we have films like Wanted, on which I made my opinions abundantly clear some time ago. A quick search of an early draft of the script reveals 25 uses of the word "fuck" (again including variants), 18 uses of "shit", and (somewhat surprisingly) only a single "dick". This is a film that is trying very, very hard to be edgy and controversial, but completely fails on every level by being utterly ridiculous. As such, the swearing doesn't add anything to it, and simply feels like it's overdoing it to no great effect. (And in case you were wondering, The Silence of the Lambs makes it to a comparatively clean eleven uses of "fuck".)

So far, then, it seems that swearing can be a valuable tool for creating an atmosphere, but because of its potency it requires good writing and acting to then back up that atmosphere with something more meaty. Get it wrong, and your atmosphere becomes a load of hot air, and becomes offensive not only for the swearing but only because you can't believe you just paid money to see something quite so poor.

Books
As words are obviously the key medium for carrying information in books, far more than for any other medium, this is a pretty huge topic. As such, I'm not even going to try to cover the whole thing. Instead, let's look at just one example of how swearing can work with not swearing to create something very impressive.

The example I'm going to use is from Terry Pratchett, one of the authors I read more than anyone else when I was younger, and who still sits comfortably in my list of favourite writers. He has a real gift for language, but doesn't go in much for lyrical word-pictures. His speciality is more that he picks the right words for the task, and brings about the effect he wanted in just a few words. He also tends not to swear at all in his writing, and in fact turned that very fact into a joke in his novel The Truth, in which one of the characters constantly left gaps in his speech, such that the other characters kept remarking on what the word "___ing" could possibly mean. So it was quite a surprise to suddenly hit this near the end of the book Hogfather:

"Worlds of belief, she thought. Just like oysters. A little piece of shit gets in and then a pearl grows up around it."

That use of "shit" shocked me when I reached it, not because the word is inherently shocking, but because the whole book is about children and how their beliefs shape the world around them, and the language tends to match that. Having had nothing that could be remotely construed as offensive for page after page, that one word was a jolt, and one that gave the metaphor being used a lot more potency.

Perhaps more importantly, there is no word that could have been used in that metaphor that would have had quite the same impact. Evoking an extreme of distaste shortly before swinging it back to beauty with the word "pearl" is a very clever construction, and serves to turn something that was horrible into something wonderful.

Music
So, was Billy Connolly right? Are there situations where you just don't get the right effect unless you're swearing? I would suggest so. One of my favourite musicians, Mark "E" Everett of American rock band Eels, penned a song that illustrates this perfectly. Do me a favour — hover your mouse over this link, close your eyes so that you can't see the title of the song (the link takes you to Youtube), and click. Listen through the beautiful piano-and-strings introduction, and pay attention to the lurch that the opening line of singing produces. Go ahead, I'll wait.

For those who didn't follow those instructions, I'll just plough ahead anyway. I'm entirely aware that the word "motherfucker" is extremely unpleasant. The word doesn't even sound nice, even if you don't pay attention to its connotations. And yet, E has used it brilliantly here. He's taken the depth of feeling that the word evokes (and it's pretty deep), but instead of directing it into anger, he's made it melancholy. The overall effect is one of incredible sadness, giving us a feeling of great loss and tragedy, and he's done that in hardly any words. Once you take into account that E has had a very difficult life (and he wrote that song mere months after his mother died of cancer, practically in his arms), you begin to feel that (to quote E way out of context) "if anyone knew that it is, indeed, a motherfucker", it's him.

The same effect is present on other songs, too. Radiohead's "Creep" is a prime example; when Thom Yorke sneers "I wish I was special / You're so fuckin' special", it turns what could be an expression of admiration into a sarcastic dismissal. Other words don't quite cut it — the radio-friendly version replaces "fuckin'" with "very", which still kind of works, but doesn't have the same bite to it. Conversely, I almost always skip over REM's "Star Me Kitten" if it comes up on shuffle, because of the chorus:

You, me, we used to be on fire
If keys are all that stand between,
Can I throw in the ring?
No gasoline
Just fuck me kitten
You are wild and I'm in your possession
Nothing's free so, fuck me kitten

I can't pretend to completely understand Michael Stipe's lyrics (in any of his music, come to think of it), but this seems like a very bleak song. I can't detect any love in what's being said, and the use of "fuck" here just seems cold and empty. It's unnecessary, and adds nothing to the song, which allows its inherent offensiveness to take over again.

The mention of "Creep" above takes us into the final thing I want to talk about, which is censorship of swearing. Because it has been decided that certain words are not for young ears (a concept that seems fine in principle, but leads to some strange effects in practice), music producers have come up with a number of ways of making sure that young people can still buy their songs. The first is simply to blank out swear words, either by beeps, or by cutting the volume of the vocal track at that point, or even by playing the swearword backwards. I have very little time for this tactic — as I said in the introduction to this post, anyone who hears a bleep is certain to be able to work out from context what the word actually was, and therefore has experienced the swearing just as much as someone who hears the unbleeped version. Worse than that, even if the bleeped word was actually not that offensive, they're now imagining the worst. If you don't believe me, have a look at this, and see what your brain fills in.

Alternatively, artists sometimes record a completely different version. We've covered "Creep" already, which at least doesn't do too much damage to the song; it can, however, get ridiculous. The worst offender I've seen recently was Katy Perry's "Hot and Cold". The song itself isn't bad, as songs go — fairly chirpy dancy pop, with pretty funny lyrics and a good hook. However, a couple of lines in the first verse caused trouble with the censors:

"You change your mind
Like a girl changes clothes,
And you PMS
Like a bitch - I should know..."

Not even that offensive, really. Perry gets away with making a PMS joke by virtue of, well, being a girl, and also because she does so in a self-deprecating way. The meaning she's going for is "you act like a cranky bitch, and as I'm a cranky bitch myself, you'd better believe me."

Once the censors got their hands on it, though, the word "bitch" was replaced with "girl". Suddenly, not only does it become way more offensive, implying that all girls are cranky and irritable, but it also makes absolutely no sense. "You act like a cranky girl. I'm a girl too." Yes, Katy, we had noticed. You're wearing a dress. It was fairly obvious, really.

So, after nearly 2,500 words, we come to the conclusion. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is. Is swearing something we should probably try to cut out of everyday language? Yeah, I think it probably is — for the most part, it doesn't really do a whole lot of good. Are there times when it is necessary? Also yes. Now and again, a swearword is the only one that could possibly fit with the concept you're trying to evoke (Margaret Atwood makes a very good case for her use of "fuck" in The Handmaid's Tale, for example). And can you frequently get into difficulties when trying to remove bad language from art? Most definitely.

So how do we reconcile those ideas? Probably not with hard and fast rules. What's offensive for one person may not be for others (I'm guessing that if you're still here and didn't abandon ship shortly after the kittens, you're not easily offended), so give and take is definitely going to be required. And this is the important part — give and take doesn't mean that one side only gives and the other only takes. If you're not comfortable with swearing in media, that's fine, but please understand that there are those of us who don't mind it and think it can be useful without being offensive. Likewise, if you swear like a longshoreman, be aware that someone who doesn't like hearing certain words is not actually trying to infringe upon your human rights.

You know, I wish my posts didn't end so frequently with the equivalent of "so basically we should all be nicer to each other," but seriously people, isn't it a message worth hearing?

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

A change is as good as a rest, or so they say.

As promised, The Beautiful Hypothesis has undergone a redesign. New colour scheme, new logo (it's new by default, I suppose, given that I didn't use a logo at all before), slightly cleaner design, and fewer gadgets cluttering up the sidebar. Oh, and the post expansion function works again, although it isn't running on my own code (that turned out to involve rather more complicated Javascript than I'm capable of managing).

It is entirely possible that I've broken some of the old posts, or made them look weird. If you happen to notice anything going wrong (or more wrong than before), would you be so good as to drop me a note, either in the comments or to the email address in the sidebar? General comments are also welcome — for instance, I'm not sure whether I've hit that sweet spot colour-wise between "so vivid it burns our eyes, preciousss" and "so gloomy it makes me want to cry".

Normal posting service should resume shortly. Thanks for your patience!

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Thank you for calling The Beautiful Hypothesis Technical Support. All our operators are currently busy. Please hold...

You may have noticed if you've been here recently that the "Continue Reading..." links, which function in much the same way as a LiveJournal cut (ie. they hide the particularly long and/or boring bits of the post and let you just read a few paragraphs if you so wish), have suddenly stopped working. This is because of rather poor design on my part, I'm afraid — you'd have thought that even two and a half years ago, I might have been technically savvy enough to realise that making your entire blog dependent on code that was hosted on some complete stranger's server was a really bad idea, for quite a number of reasons — but there we go.

The upshot of this is that any post with a "Continue Reading..." link will continue not to work until I replace the missing code that used to do the expansion with some of my own. It may take me a few days to get round to doing that, so I may as well fold it into a full redesign that I was planning to do anyway. (Various shades of brown are so mid-2007.)

With any luck, I should manage to do that this weekend, so the problems should be fixed by then. In the meantime, if you want to read any post which does have a broken "Continue Reading...", just click on the post title. That should load the entire post, including the content from behind the cut, in a new page. Or alternatively, use the RSS feed, which doesn't include cuts at all.

Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience!

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

How come it's never the Communists doing this? We do still have a Communist Party, right?

Blimey, it's been a long time since I posted anything here. Consider it an extended summer recess. In the time since the last post...

• I've moved house
  
• I've spent two weeks in Wales (which has sparked some interesting ideas — couple of posts in the pipeline for that one)
  
• Swine flu returned to the news, despite being largely ignored by most people
  
• Norway won the Eurovision Song Contest with a record-breaking score that it really didn't deserve. Come on, people, it was hardly Hard Rock Hallelujah.
  
• Michael Jackson died and had the most bizarre funeral ever seen
  
• Sarah Palin quit politics, at least until she decides to announce her 2012 candidacy and makes the Internet a horrible place to be once again
  
• Roger Federer surprised absolutely nobody by winning Wimbledon again, and Andy Murray also surprised nobody by not winning Wimbledon (one day, Andy...one day...)

And amongst all these other occurrences, the UK elected two far-right racists to the European Parliament. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons of the British National Party are now being paid around 84,000 Euros a year (currently about £72,500) to sit in what has been called one of the most powerful legislatures in the world.

If you get the impression that I'm not overly thrilled with this development, you're entirely correct. The BNP (no, I'm not going to link to their website — Google it if you really want to) is a horrendous organisation, committed to the idea that non-white people are inherently inferior to whites. Their policies include bringing back corporal and capital punishment, "voluntary repatriation" of immigrants (and you can imagine just how "voluntary" that would really be), criminalising mixed-race relationships, and barring the provision of any public money to "non-British" (for which read non-white) organisations. Nick Griffin has done his very best to hide the party's ugliest attributes under a veneer of respectability, but quotations like "power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate" and a call to support its policies with "well directed boots and fists" show you where his sympathies really lie.

It is very important that we prevent the BNP from ever getting any real kind of power. However, I have to say, I'm not that worried about them, for two main reasons. The first is that Britain is not actually populated by a jack-booted horde of thugs. The vast majority of people vote for parties that advocate policies in line with basic human decency. You'll notice that the BNP is the only far-right party that even gets any attention in the media, for the simple reason that none of the others ever get enough support to even mount candidacies, and they've managed that precisely because Griffin has been actively trying to hide their racism.

The second reason is that the BNP do, in fact, provide a useful function in British politics. So long as we can keep them from gaining any real power, but keep their supporters thinking that they might, the BNP will act as a filter, funneling all the foaming Nazi lunatics off into itself and keeping them out of the major parties that might actually stand a chance of getting power.

To see what happens when the far-right parties get marginalised almost out of existence, you only have to look at the USA. There, the racist morons and rabid far-right have all ended up going into the Republican party, where the voice of sensible small-c conservatism (advocating small government, reduced taxes, personal responsibility for finances — things that are incredibly valuable to public discourse, even if I don't think they're always the right way to go) can all too often be drowned out by "they're taking all our jobs! Kill everyone who doesn't look like us!"

You don't have to look too far to see this happening. It reached fever pitch during the recent Presidential election (this is the kind of thing I'm talking about - not safe for those who get angry easily), but elements of the same craziness are present right up to the top. See, for example, Sarah Palin trying to paint Barack Obama's supporters as not part of "real America", or Minnesota Congressional Representative Michele Bachmann making a terrifyingly McCarthyist call for Congress to be investigated to see which of its members were anti-American. And if you've got some time on your hands, read this illuminating article to see what the American right gets up to when it thinks the journalists aren't around.

So should we be opposing the BNP? Oh, yes. Any power they do manage to get is undoubtedly too much, and any of their influence is most unwelcome. But at the same time, they're a useful safety valve. We're always going to have right-wing racist nutjobs in this country — we have a long record of breeding them (hi, Oswald Mosley!) But we have a record just as long of not electing them, and that's the key. In the meantime, those on the left should be concentrating their efforts against the slightly more moderate right. UKIP made huge gains in the European elections, for example, and a party that decides it has to put "non-racist" in its search engine result summary (see result #1) doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. Neither do their rather worrying manifestos, which seem to promote deregulation of practically everything.

Not that it matters too much right now, anyway. We're some way off the next election — Gordon Brown is almost certain to hang on until the last possible moment. And, while crazy racist nutjobs are undoubtedly a problem...

...they're a problem that can easily be handled with eggs.

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Constable does not know the power of the Dark Side...

Taking advantage of the lovely weather and the Bank Holiday weekend, I ventured into London once again yesterday, and did Cultural Stuff. By which I mean that I went to the National Gallery. And it was there that I found out several fascinating things.

1. Pictures of Mary and the infant Jesus were remarkably popular a few hundred years ago.
   
2. Almost without exception, the infant Jesus is portrayed in these pictures as either gigantic, or terrifying, or sometimes (for bonus points) both.
   
3. A subset of these pictures involve Mary nursing Jesus. The artists who produced these ones seem to have had some very funny ideas about female anatomy. One in particular (which I sadly can't find on the National Gallery website) appears to suggest that Jesus was able to feed by suckling Mary's collarbone.
   
4. While we're on the subject, this is Jan Gossaert's Adam and Eve:
   
   
   Not only is Adam sporting a fine 'fro, he also seems to have just as well-developed a chest area as his wife. Maybe Gossaert only knew extremely thin women or something. And those trees are clearly both sentient and easily embarrassed.
   
5. Seeing a painting in the gallery lets you pick up on all sorts of details that you might otherwise miss. This, for example, is John Constable's The Hay Wain.
   
   
   You've probably seen that painting a hundred times. At my primary school, we even had an enormous version of it done as a collage (although that's understandable, given that the school was about twenty minutes' walk away from the spot where Constable painted it). But I bet you never noticed who was hiding in the reeds over to the right...
   
   
   Uncanny, eh?

Time for boring copyright stuff! So, none of the images here are covered by the blog's CC licence. I reckon all of them are, for this specific use, covered by the Fair Dealing provision of UK law (and in any case they're hosted on Photobucket, which is a US-based service, so fair use probably applies too). As you can tell from the watermark, the detail from The Hay Wain was unceremoniously yoinked off the National Gallery website. Everything else is either from Wikipedia or from other online image repositories (or in other words, I can't quite remember).

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

For the record, I wrote the original email before the G20. It would have been rather angrier if I'd waited a week or so.

As you'll notice if you look back a couple of posts, I sent an email off to the Home Office the other week about the frankly appalling Policing Pledge posters currently around the UK. Well, in a move that has left me pleasantly surprised, the Home Office has responded! (By sending an email with the letter in an attached Word document for some unfathomable reason, but you can't have everything...)

23 April 2009


Dear Mr Brien

Thank you for your email of 29 March 2009 to the Home Office about the Policing Pledge. As the Home Secretary receives a large amount of correspondence and is unfortunately not able to respond to each item individually, I have been asked to reply.

As you will know, all 43 forces have implemented the Policing Pledge. This is a fantastic achievement and means that now, for the first time, the public know the standard of service they can expect to receive from the police and have a greater say over the issues that they would like the police to prioritise in their local areas.

The communications aim is to make the public aware that they now have access to local crime information through an improved online service via Directgov. This includes a better and quicker search by postcode taking the public directly to improved Neighbourhood Policing Team pages on force websites via www.direct.gov/policingpledge which also has more information about the Pledge and a facility to search by postcode or map for your local contacts and your local crime information.

We note your concerns, but would like to thank you for taking the time to write and also your support for the Policing Pledge.

Yours sincerely


Duncan Mitchell

Well, I have to say, Duncan, that's a rather more pleasant response than I was expecting, given the levels of snark I threw at you, so bonus points there. On the other hand, I'm not at all sure what "we note your concerns" means; it sounds suspiciously like "thanks for writing, but we're not going to so much as acknowledge the possibility of changing anything we do".

Nevertheless, the air of form letter that pervades the whole thing does at least suggest that they've sent quite a lot of letters similar to this one. Can but hope that if enough people did, then the message has got through that maybe accidentally threatening the public with poorly-worded signs isn't the way to go..

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...

Assuming Men Can Fly: Apocalypse in the Year 3000

I've been without the internet for the past few days, after Thames Water managed to dig through an "uncharted obstruction" on the Olympic stadium site which turned out to be one of BT's major communications links. Suddenly BT was running on hugely reduced broadband capacity, which meant that everyone to whom they acted as a broadband wholesaler was also having problems, bringing pretty much all ADSL connections in much of England to a shuddering halt. Not the ideal way to spend a week's holiday, but oddly calming.

Not having web access has meant that I've had plenty of time to watch DVDs with my family, one of which has been The Big Bang Theory, a fairly new US sitcom about two nerdy physicists whose geeky lives are interrupted by the arrival of an attractive young woman in the flat next door. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.

The show's main attraction is not the storylines — practically nothing actually happens from week to week. Rather, it's the interactions of the main characters, most of whom are the most insanely nerdish people you've ever seen. Speaking as someone who is not only a fairly high-level geek, but also lives and works with them every single day, and indeed celebrates his geekishness, I can confirm that although The Big Bang Theory's nerds are exaggerated, it's not really by that much. The reason the show works is that it goes far enough from real life to be funny, while still letting the true geek see himself (or, rather more rarely, herself) in some of the behaviour on screen.

For example, in one of the earliest episodes, our four loveable nerds get into a protracted argument about the physics of Superman, and why Lois Lane should have been cut into three equal parts by Superman's arms of steel when he caught her after a fall of several hundred feet. This is something that I love doing — taking the rules presented by a work of fiction, and extrapolating them to test their internal consistency. Star Trek nerds are famous for it, to the point where the show's writers went so far as to rewrite bits of the script to acknowledge problems pointed out by fans.

I like doing this so much, in fact, that I'm going to give it the kiss of death by starting yet another occasional blog feature. I'm fully aware that most of these are languishing in one- or two-post obscurity by this point, but screw it, it'll be fun while it lasts. In homage to its sitcom roots, I'm calling it Assuming Men Can Fly.

Entry #1 in this series is something that has bugged me for entirely too long — the lyrics to Busted's song "Year 3000". Here's the song in all its questionable glory.



I'm fully aware that there are plenty of reasons to dislike Busted, but I'm not really objecting to this song on most levels. It's chirpy, fairly harmless, and considerably better than the saccharine version by the Jonas Brothers, which manages the rather implausible feat of censoring Busted's lyrics while Auto-Tuning the vocals more than I thought possible. No, my objection is based purely on the mathematics of that chorus.

He said "I've been to the year 3000,
Not much has changed, but they live underwater,
And your great-great-great-granddaughter,
Is pretty fine."

OK, let's look at the rules under which we're operating. The first verse has already provided the premise — the singer's next-door neighbour Peter is capable of visiting the future and has in fact done so. We therefore have to assume that time travel is possible, that Peter is not lying, and that his report of the year 3000 is essentially factually accurate. Other than that, the present-day world in which the song takes place is indistinguishable from our own, so we can assume that all its restrictions apply equally well.

The problems focus on the singer's great-great-great-granddaughter. The singer himself is in his 20s in the above video — let's make the (not unreasonable nowadays) assumption that he will be about 40 when his last child is born. Over the timescales we're looking at, we're as nearly as makes no difference at the year 2010 right now, so we can therefore assume that this child is born in approximately 2030. Let's chart the data so far.

Generation	Year of birth	Age at birth of last child
Singer	n/a	40
Daughter	2030

Next, we'll assume that medical science advances at such a rate that in each successive generation, lifespan and general health have increased the age at which you can successfully have children by 20 years. That's probably quite a generous assumption, but the song's optimistic enough (at least at first glance) to think that we won't have wiped ourselves out with nuclear war, overpopulation or disease epidemics in the next 1000 years, so let's go with it. That puts the singer's daughter at the age of 60 when she has her last child, so we can fill in the next row of the table as well.

Generation	Year of birth	Age at birth of last child
Singer	n/a	40
Daughter	2030	60
Granddaughter	2090	80

From there, it's a pretty simple operation to fill in the next three generations as well.

Generation	Year of birth	Age at birth of last child
Singer	n/a	40
Daughter	2030	60
Granddaughter	2090	80
Great-granddaughter	2170	100
Great-great-granddaughter	2270	120
Great-great-great-granddaughter	2390	140

So essentially, the singer's great-great-great-granddaughter — who, we are told, is "pretty fine" in the year 3000 — is also six hundred and ten years old. Even with our generous assumptions about medical science, this seems rather implausible — even if she's somehow managed to live that long, the odds of her looking "pretty fine" are slim enough that it tells us rather more about Peter's taste in women than it does about the future.

So, like all good scientists, the first thing we change is our assumptions. The first thing we can do is assume that the last child in each generation, apart from the great-great-great-granddaughter herself, is always male. Men can reproduce to a much greater age than women (practically to the end of life), so if we make the assumption that this is what's happening (despite the rather unpleasant accompanying mental images), we can get a much bigger increase in reproductive age in each generation. Let's assume that longevity is improved to much better degree than maximum age of childbirth, and that 40 years are therefore added to each successive generation. Our table now looks like this.

Generation	Year of birth	Age at birth of last child
Singer	n/a	40
Son	2030	80
Grandson	2110	120
Great-grandson	2230	160
Great-great-grandson	2390	200
Great-great-great-granddaughter	2590	240

Hmm. Well, it's an improvement, but not a great one — now she's a sprightly 410 years of age when we see her. Clearly there's a gap somewhere of several hundred years, during which no successive generations are produced but the family continues. There are several mechanisms by which this could happen.

1. Global catastrophe. A war, or an asteroid impact, or some other cataclysmic event causes the Earth's population to be drastically reduced. In a bid to keep humans genetically diverse, scientists take DNA samples from as many surviving people as possible while the population decreases. When conditions improve, new humans are cloned from these samples, thus keeping a consistent bloodline while still allowing for a long period of time to pass.
   
2. Cryonic preservation. At some point in the family tree, one of the singer's descendants becomes critically ill and, before his death, opts to have himself cryonically preserved until such time as medical science can cure him. After several hundred years, either this occurs, or the scientists involved suddenly realise that there isn't actually any cure for death, and just clone him instead.
   
3. Suspended animation. A technique is developed, several hundred years from now, which can slow down time over a very small area. One of the singer's descendants, either by design or by chance, gets trapped in an area of this type and is preserved until such time as the effect is removed. As far as he is concerned, almost no time has passed, so he is still biologically viable; reproduction continues naturally.
   
4. Time travel. One of our starting assumptions is that it's possible to travel to the future. Perhaps the singer took further jaunts into the future with Peter, and at some point managed to start a family several hundred years further down the line than expected.

All interesting possibilities, and I'm certain all of them have been used in science fiction stories before now. But which, if any, has occurred in this case? The clue is in the chorus reproduced above.

Not much has changed, but they live under water...

This seems to suggest that option one is the most likely. A disaster of Biblical proportions has either caused the sea levels to rise, or rendered the land uninhabitable, with the result that humanity now lives under the sea. It has also apparently changed human physiology (a later verse suggests that there are now three-breasted women who swim around totally naked), which may indicate a higher rate of mutations, possibly indicating in turn that the land's surface is off limits due to dangerous levels of nuclear fallout. In this reading, "Year 3000", far from being a perky song about time travel, is actually a dire warning about the coming threat of nuclear Armageddon.

However, there is an alternative reading, suggested by the lyrics of the last verse:

I took a trip to the year 3000,
This song had gone multi-platinum,
Everyone bought our seventh album...

A cursory reading of Busted's Wikipedia page shows that, prior to their split in 2005, the band in fact released only two albums. This suggests a fifth possibility:

5. Multiple timelines. The original trip into the future did not, in fact, visit our world as it will be in the year 3000; rather, it caused the universe's timelines to fork, delivering the singer and his neighbour to a different world, one in which lifespans increase by 78 years each generation (the exact amount required, under the all-male assumptions, for the great-great-great-granddaughter to be aged 30 by the year 3000), where Busted stayed together long enough to record 7 albums, where humans live idyllic lives among the fishes, and where women have three breasts for some reason.

The question now, of course, is this: if our cheery spiky-haired singer went off into that timeline, and his offspring populate that one rather than this one, presumably he stayed there. Does that mean that, in the song's universe, the members of Busted no longer exist within the world as we know it?

And if so, please can I go there?

Continue Reading...

Make It Shorter Again, Please...