Chris Bertram

Socialist Worker has “an interview with Les Roberts”:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6271 who led the team which conducted the Lancet survey which estimated 98,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the war began. (via “Lenin”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/ .)

The British Conservatives have been covering the country with horrible posters asking questions like “How would you feel if a bloke on day-release [from prison] attacked your daughter?” Some enterprising character has now produced a design-your-own-Tory-poster website. Here’s my own feeble effort:

(via Nick Barlow)

Avian flu sounds pretty nasty, and a pandemic would be a disaster. But John Sutherland, “writing in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1462141,00.html , is in the grip of statistical confusion when he asserts that it could kill 70 per cent of the population. As I understand it, the virus kills 7 out of 10 people that it infects, and the number infected is far below 100 per cent. Moreover, the 7 out of 10 figure may well be an exaggeration, since people who recover and don’t die are less likely to be be included in the figures than those who do. The WHO “impact assessment”:http://www.who.int/csr/disease/influenza/preparedness2004_12_08/en/ isn’t encouraging (2 to 50 million dead, but could it be worse than that). I’m sure we have some epidemiologists among our readers. Any thoughts?

I’ve been working my way through the archive of Steve Earle’s radio show on Air America. The sound quality is variable, but the content isn’t and they’re great for burning to CD and listening to when driving places. My favourite so far is with Emmylou Harris as guest. She chooses a variety of political songs including Johnny Cash’s Ballad of Ira Hayes, Joan Baez’s Birmingham Sunday and Woody Guthrie singing Plane Wreck at Los Gatos. Plane Wreck is a good song to hear at any time, but, here in the UK, with the parties competing to stigmatize the “economic migrants” (such as the cockle-pickers who died at Morecambe Bay) it has an immediate relevance. Recommended.

[Update: the server for the archive seems to be down because of exceeded bandwidth. This is probably due to the link here — sorry! I’ve deleted the link, but those who want to should try googling for it in a couple of days.]

How many surveys can one man produce? “Yet another Chris Lightfoot effort”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ , which places you on two axes: “crime and punishment, internationalism” (where I’m apparently “very left-wing”) and “economics, etc.” where I turn out to be a “centrist”. Again, rather Britocentric I’m afraid. (You can see my position “here”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/scripts/quiz?s=AAGBHBEFDBAEABEEEDAABCCBDDBBDDBDBCBEBBBDDA . ) (Hat tip: Robin Grant – who is collecting results over at “perfect.co.uk”:http://www.perfect.co.uk/2005/04/political-survey-2005 )

Essays from essay banks are “crap”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2020840 , according to the THES :

bq. Students who think they can beat plagiarism detection software by paying an internet ghostwriting service to produce bespoke essays may want to think again, writes Phil Baty. An experiment at Loughborough University, in which students bought essays from internet services that write one-off pieces of work to order, found that they were of poor quality, sometimes riddled with mistakes and unlikely to earn more than a third or lower second-class grade. …

bq. The lowest-marked essay was by Essays-R-Us (www.essays-r-us.co.uk), which charged £205 and produced work that barely scraped a third, with 42 per cent. Professor Oppenheim said the essay had basic errors and suffered from “appalling” English. … The best essay was delivered by Degree Essays UK (www.ukessays.com) , part of Academic Answers Ltd, which is registered at Companies House. The service described itself as “the best essays and dissertation service in the UK” and said its essays were “guaranteed to be of a 2.1 or a first class standard”. However, Loughborough gave its essay 56 to 58 per cent – a lower second.

(via “Black Triangle”:http://blacktriangle.org/blog/ . )

The preliminary results from the first 13,000 voters on the “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/press4.php site are interesting ….

bq. Party the user expected:
Labour 21%
Conservative 20%
LibDem 37%
UKIP 2%
Green 6%
NONE GIVEN 14%

bq. Actual party suggested: Labour 4%
Conservative 9%
LibDem 58%
UKIP 12%
Green 17%

“Over at John Band’s site”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=970 they’re all doing Chris Lightfoot’s “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/ (in the coming UK general election) test. Annoyingly, I came out Lib Dem on this though I fully intend to grit my teeth and vote Labour anyway. But for the purposes of this post I’m going to go all meta and discuss what we are trying to do in voting and how that affects how we should vote. Here’s something I posted on the philos-l list just before the 1992 general election:

bq. A friend asked me to provide him with an argument against tactical voting and I came up with this – derived very loosely from some of the things Geoff Brennan says in his ‘Politics with Romance’, in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit eds The Good Polity (Blackwell 1989).

bq. The only situation in which an individual voter can affect the outcome is one where there is a tie among the other voters. But in a large electorate this is unlikely to be the case. I want to do two things with my vote: express a preference and secure an outcome. But since my chances of the latter are so small, I may as well concentrate my deliberations on the expressive side. If I am a positive identifier with a particular party — and this is more important to me than my negative feelings towards another party — then even if my party is third I should still vote for it (if I vote). By doing so I secure one of my objectives (the expressive one) but run only a vanishingly small risk of incurring the cost of bringing about a worse outcome than if I had voted tactically. The rational voter should therefore vote for the party she prefers unless it is more important to you expressively to declare your hostility to the party you loathe most – in which case vote for the best placed challenger to that party.

In other words: it is a waste of time and effort to try to bring about a determinate outcome. You’ll almost certainly make no difference. Tactical voting is an attempt to bring about some determinate outcome. But if what is important to you is saying “Blair hooray!” or “Howard boo!” then you can do this perfectly well (voting being only one way of doing it of course). And there’s no merit to the argument that voting for the Lib Dems, Respect, or even the Monster Raving Loony Party is a “wasted vote”. It is no more wasted than any other. So vote for whom you like best, or against whom you hate most, instead of making micro-calculations about effectiveness.

(BTW I realise that this argument deprives me of one lot of nasty things I might say about people who voted for Ralph Nader in either 2000 or 2004, but there are many other nasty things to be said about such people anyway, so I don’t care that much.)

I had a conversation at the weekend where the topic of baby-farming came up. Unmarried mother in Victorian England? Can’t stand the social stigma? No problem, babies disposed of no questions asked …. The full details are in Dorothy Haller’s online essay “Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England”:http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm . A sample quote:

bq. Baby farmers, the majority of whom were women, ran ads in newspapers which catered to working class girls. On any given day a young mother could find at least a dozen ads in the Daily Telegraph, and in the Christian Times, soliciting for the weekly, monthly, or yearly care of infants. All these advertisements were aimed at the mothers of illegitimate babies who were having difficulty finding employment with the added liability of a child. A typical ad might read:

bq.

NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT — The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.

This ad may have been misleading to the general public, but it read like a coded message to unwed mothers. The information about the character and financial condition of the person soliciting for nurse children appears to be acceptable at first glance, but no name and no address is given. No references are asked for and none are offered. The sum of 15s a week to keep an infant or a sickly child was inadequate, and a sickly child and an infant under two months were the least likely to survive and the cheapest to bury. Infants were taken no questions asked and it was understood that for 12 pounds no questions were expected to be asked. The transaction between the mother and the babyfarmer usually took place in a public place, on public transportation, or through a second party. No personal information was exchanged, the money was paid, and the transaction was complete. The mother knew she would never see her infant alive again.

No doubt this practice flourishes in certain societies today and would do wherever the theocrats get the upper hand. Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other is wont to say.

I’ve been doing some sums following a conversation last week with Daniel and John Band. Tesco, as is well know have just announced “their fantabulous corporate profits”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4435339.stm . They have “639 stores in the UK”:http://www.ethibel.org/profile/uk/tesco_en.html (OK that figure is a couple of years old), and a UK turnover of £29.5 billion. This gives us turnover per store of just over £46 million. UK higher education has, according to “HESA”:http://www.hesa.ac.uk/ , a turnover of about £15.5 billion and 171 “outlets”, giving us a turnover per store of just over £91 million. Chelsea football club — expected to win this year’s premier league — has “a turnover of £92.6 million”:http://www.givemefootball.com/display.cfm?article=4009&type=1&month=8&year=2004 . All of this gives us the useful equation of

1 average university = 1 top football club = two branches of the leading supermarket.

Make of that what you will.

Blair has “called the UK general election for May the 5th”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4409935.stm . Though the polls seem to be indicating a Tory surge, the “current odds at bluesq”:http://www.bluesq.com/bet?action=go_events&type_id=850 are Labour 1/14, Tories 13/2, and LibDems 100/1.

I watched “Der Untergang”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/ (Downfall) last night at Bristol’s Watershed cinema. An astonishing film. Bruno Ganz is fantastic as the increasingly stressed and incoherent Hitler and Corinna Harfouch is chilling as the the unremittingly evil Magda Goebbels. The film works partly through the contrast between above-ground where Berlin crumbles under Soviet bombardment and the bunker where reality impinges on fantasy intermittently and increasingly shockingly. There’s a great scene where Hitler addresses Albert Speer across the model of his planned Berlin-of-the-future whilst the real Berlin is flattened. Hitler is petty and selfish to the end, screaming of betrayal, his hatred of the Jews, and telling all that will hear that the German people deserve to die for letting him down — personally. The only slightly false note was when Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) escapes at the end — one suspects some embellishment.

When the film ended the cinema was perfectly still for a moment or two. Everyone in the audience was, I think, psychologically winded by what they’d seen. Ganz, Harfouch and director Hirschbiegel deserve Oscars for this, no question.

It wasn’t my intention to post twice on Wagner in 24 hours, but “the Observer’s report on the ENO’s Twilight of the Gods”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1451219,00.html has me worried:

bq. In what will come to be regarded by opera fans as a moment of bizarre heresy – or of creative triumph – Brunnhilde, the leading character in the ENO’s new production of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, was portrayed as a suicide bomber. Clad in a modern jacket packed with explosives, the betrayed lover of Siegfried, played by Kathleen Broderick, obliterated the rest of the cast by detonating herself in the dramatic ‘immolation scene’ that ends the opera.

I have tickets to see this production at the end of the month and, since, I have already attended the previous three in ENO’s cycle, I’m going to go. I hope my worst fears won’t be realized.

From “a piece by Andrew Clark”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8cf0b7c8-a0e0-11d9-95e5-00000e2511c8.html in today’s Financial Times:

bq. Until the final scene, the Hamburg State Opera’s November 2002 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg had proceeded without comment. Everyone was primed to applaud the hymn to “holy German art” that brings Richard Wagner’s four-hour pageant to a climax. Then came the bombshell. Midway through Hans Sachs’s monologue about honouring German masters over “foreign vanities”, the music came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly one of the mastersingers started speaking: “Have you actually thought about what you are singing?” he asked. No one had experienced anything like it in an opera house. There followed a lively stage discussion – some of it shouted down by outraged members of the audience – about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the context of 19th and 20th century German nationalism.

There’s much to disagree with in Clark’s piece, both in terms of particular judgements about the relationship between ideology and music and over the claims he makes for the extent of Wagner’s influence. Still, worth a look.