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An observation

If there’s one lesson I hope everyone concerned has learnt from the current US election cycle: it’s a really stupid idea to disenfranchise a whole bunch of your constituents for any reason. I’m thinking of the debacle surrounding the Democratic primaries in Florida and Michigan.

Of course it has only become such a thorny issue because the race is so close; in a lot of years it wouldn’t have made any difference. But it’s one of those situations where, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems blindingly obvious that to disenfranchise whole states and millions of voters should not have been the solution to a matter of internal party discipline. I mean really, what were they thinking?

As I’ve said before, I think the US primary system is nuts anyway. But that’s not a reason to screw it up even further.

Tags news, politics, USA

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Lies, damn lies and religion

Post author By Harry
Post date 8 May 2008
4 Comments on Lies, damn lies and religion

There’s an article in today’s Times about the rapid decline in church attendance in the UK. The particular angle they’ve chosen to take is that within a mere 30 years, the number of people going to mosque every weekend will outnumber those going to church. This is illustrated by a dramatic graph with the Christian line sweeping down at a vertiginous angle and crossing the lines for Muslims and Hindus, which are creeping up a bit slower at the bottom.*

Leaving aside the huge uncertainties involved in extrapolating the trends forward, I can’t help feeling that the graph is missing something important: a line for the vast majority of us who don’t go to any kind of religious service. If they had included us, and changed the scale of the y-axis to accommodate us, all the religious people would be squashed down into a very flat and unimpressive bit at the bottom of the chart.

Of course it’s an interesting and significant demographic shift if the number of churchgoers changes from about 8% to 1% in 45 years, as the graph suggests. But if you say instead that the number of people who don’t go to church/mosque/temple regularly is rising from 90% to 94%, it doesn’t seem quite so dramatic.

As regular readers will know, I’m not about to lose sleep over shrinking congregations; and I certainly don’t believe there’s some kind of essential connection between Britishness and Christianity. But I was mainly annoyed by the use of statistics.

*The graph isn’t available online or I’d link to it. The Times’s consistent habit of having less in the way of pictures and graphics online than in the dead tree edition always seems to be completely missing the point, to me, but hey-ho.

Tags news, religion, statistics, The Times, UK

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Marginalia on the word ‘cunt’

Post author By Harry
Post date 4 May 2008
4 Comments on Marginalia on the word ‘cunt’

In a generally interesting post about Obama, Hillary and all that stuff, Sherry says this:

I have to admit it’s true that Hillary Clinton has never been called a nigger but I suspect Barack Obama has never been called a cunt.

I think the difference in the way that word is used on each side of the Atlantic is quite telling. Because if he was British, it would be quite likely that sooner or lately someone would have called him a cunt: I know it has happened to me. Not usually in earnest, but at least once, in a pub in Bristol when I was a student and one of the locals took offence at my green hair.

And that is the norm, I think, in British English: although it is still a coarse slang term for the female genitalia, it’s mainly used to insult men. Not out of any kind of profound sensitivity to gender relations, but just because that’s the way it is. And as a result, although it is regarded as a very offensive word—you can’t exactly use it on daytime telly—it doesn’t have the same kind of edge it clearly has in America. The parallel with ‘nigger’ is interesting: the word ‘cunt’ is taboo in Britain, but I don’t think anyone thinks of it as hate speech.

I guess if you call a woman a cunt you’re attacking her for being a woman, whereas if you call a man a cunt you are… well, doing something different, anyway.

» ABC, posted to Flickr by monkeyc.net. An amusing sidenote: my computer’s spellcheck flags up the word cunt as a possible spelling mistake, even though it’s in the built-in dictionary. I guess they think it’s important to warn all those people who were trying to write ‘count’ or ‘aunt’. It would be more useful if, every time I typed ‘form’, it asked me whether I really meant ‘from’.

Tags language, UK, USA

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Manchester United 1-0 Barcelona

Post author By Harry
Post date 29 April 2008
1 Comment on Manchester United 1-0 Barcelona

… and Paul Scholes scores. It’s just like the old days.

Really, though, I know we’re all supposed to get terribly excited by the prospect of all-English semifinals and finals, but I don’t watch the Champion’s League for the chance to see Chelsea play Liverpool at Stamford Bridge. I watch to see games like today’s: English teams playing against glamorous foreign opposition, with players like Messi, Eto’o and Deco that have amazing reputations but who I’ve rarely seen play.

Tags football, Manchester United

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China hoist by their own petard

Post author By Harry
Post date 6 April 2008
No Comments on China hoist by their own petard

BBC News:

“Thirty-five arrests have been made after clashes between pro-Tibet protesters and police as the Olympic torch made its way through London.

Of course, in the parallel world of the Chinese official news machine, the only thing interfering with the movement of the torch was a sprinkling of snow. Actually, to be fair, there is an article about ‘the attempt by some “pro-Tibet independence” activists to sabotage the torch relay’. It’s not exactly hard hitting journalism, but at least they don’t completely pretend that nothing happened.

It’s not part of the traditions of the Olympics to send the torch all the way around the world on the way to the host country: they did it in 2004 because the games were being held in Greece and the trip from Olympia to Athens was a bit too short. But China had to make it as high-profile as possible, and have, as a result, created a three-month long opportunity for protests and bad publicity. By the time the Games come round, far more people will be able to recognise the Tibetan flag that ever could have before.

Personally, I think the focus being Tibet all the time is slightly missing the point: for me, China’s human rights record as it applies to the other 99.8% of the population is rather more important than Tibet, if only because of sheer numbers. But Tibet is a much simpler, more photogenic issue with a charismatic spokesman, so perhaps it’s not surprising it attracts all the attention.