On "bogus" and "bullshit"

Some posts in the sceptical world have got me thinking about the word "bogus, the word "bullshit", and the difference between them.

Mr Justice Eady, at the High Curt in London recently ruled that the word "bogus" meant something akin to deceiving people with malice aforethought. The word "bullshit", however, has this marvellous definition, courtesy of Harry Frankfurt:

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

I cannot help but wonder (especially in light of the BCA's infamous "plethora of evidence"): if Dr Singh had described the BCA's claims as "bullshit" as opposed to "bogus"... would they have been able to sue for libel quite so easily? And what meaning would the judge have attributed to the word?

Is it legally safe to describe the BCA as "bullshitters"? I await a professional opinion on the matter, but it is certainly an interesting point to ponder.

When logic fails

Logic is great. Really fab. But it cannot and should not be used in all areas of life.

A great example of this happened to me tonight: I have some friends (yes, really), and some of them are in a band. Their debut gig was this week, and it sold out in advance (they have some canny publicity behind them).

These guys are talented. And I mean really talented. They call themselves The Clockwork Quartet, and their music is available for free download. I got to see them live: and they played a style of gig which I think is very original and entertaining. I also got to hear their new tracks: two of which especially show great promise (the Magician's story and the tale of the General's wife).

Given that I attended the debut gig of a band so chock-full of talent, logic dictated a specific course of action. The programmes were on sale for £10, and this included a limited-edition CD of their music. Bargain! So I bought two copies. One copy I intended as a keepsake, and the other I had the band members sign (a tiresome task which I asked a friend to perform for me whilst I socialised and admired younger women wearing corsets). That's going to be part of my pension fund*, I thought, if any of them ever get famous (and I firmly believe that the odds are in my favour here).

So far, so logical. But one of the band members left a personal message for me when he signed: an in-joke between us involving naked nymphs and their stubborn unavailability to myself. Don't ask.

Anyway, I realised afterwards that no matter what logic (and large wads of cash) suggest, I would find it almost impossible to part with that particular memento. So I'll have to flog the unsigned copy at auction in twenty years, for much less moolah.

Clearly, then, logic has its time and its place. It's not always applicable, and what an awful world we would live in if it was.

Therefore, I shall leave the signed version to my kids, who can flog it for as much as they want. They won't care: they weren't there, and if they know anyone who was, it'll be an elderly person who they call "Uncle", and who smells funny. I think that this is a very logical solution.

* The "signed programme" would have been be part of my pension fund, not "younger women wearing corsets". This fact annoys me almost as much as my consistently missing the Naked Nymph Parties.

The Glenn Beck rape and murder allegations

Sometimes.. just sometimes, I think that schadenfreude is justified. Case in point: Glenn Beck. For those who don't know, Glenn Beck is a presenter on Fox News. He treats evidence and logic as equally inconvenient, and he doesn't seem to bother much with either. Instead, he makes impassioned rants which don't make a lot of sense, and which are filled with vitriol and rhetoric.

Mr Beck recently claimed that President Obama is racist. Which is slightly ironic, since (by his own definition of racism), Glenn Beck is racist himself.

Not content with this, Mr Beck recently asked a Muslim Congressman to prove that he's not working with the enemies of the USA. This is typical of Beck's style: he abandons logic and uses the obvious logical fallacy of asking somebody to prove that a baseless claim (made by Beck himself) is wrong.

But of course this will be lost on many of Mr Beck's viewers, who probably aren't au fait with the finer details of logical arguments. What they may hear is that the Muslim guy cannot disprove that he's not their enemy and assume that there may be something to the (utterly unfounded) allegation.

Thus I found it nicely ironic when I heard of the meme which is asking Glenn Beck to prove that he did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990.

Naturally Mr Beck cannot disprove the ludicrous accusations, because he cannot prove a negative. This minor point of logic is, however, likely to be missed by many of Glenn Beck's viewers, who are not au fait with the finer details of logical arguments.

So that's not the story which many people will hear. Now people who don't know the source of the meme are starting to ask if Mr Beck has anything to hide.

To see somebody who abuses logic to the degree that Mr Beck abuses logic being hoist with his very own logical petard is irresistibly delicious.

Update: This blog has been sighted by didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com :)

UPDATE: further links.

A blog following the Glenn Beck allegations

The lawyer acting for the website owner gets interviewed

Funny pictures:

quiz show

Einstein

Glenn Beck Rape Graph

Glenn Beck police report for rape

Einstein again

Google Glenn Beck rape murder for many, many more...

How to leak your personal details when using Facebook

This is nothing to do with logic, but it is perhaps to do with silliness. Facebook recently offered users the chance to get their own, unqiue link on the site, so they can send people a URL which takes them directly to their page.

It seems that some people have bookmarked this URL, and are using it as their default page to access facebook. They see their newsfeed and so forth when they go there.

So far, nothing too surprising - until you remember referal tags. When you browse the web, your browser tells the site you're going to where you came from. So if I search google for the BBC, for example, then if I click the first link in google, then the BBC web server will be sent a tag which tells them that I came from this page:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bbc

If you go to the Facebook page with your unique address and click on a link in your newsfeed, then the site you are visiting gets to know exactly who you are in real life.

If your privacy settings are not locked down, then they could also easily obtain have a whole bunch more about you too - anything you have on Facebook, in fact. You'd think Facebook would have considered this, and had the unique URL redirect to something more generic, but it seems to have been overlooked.

Which I find a tadge uncomfortable. So I'm letting people know.

Do I feel sorry for Ted Haggard?

Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is: "yes".

I just watched a documentary about his life after he was forced from his position as a national leader of evangelicals in the USA for his sexual activity with another man.

I am uncertain as to the objectivity of the documentary. Haggard is portrayed as a really nice guy, doing the best he can in a tough situation. This may be true: but he's an amazing speaker, he excels at rhetoric, and he can carry a crowd. He knows how to say the right thing. So I am unconvinced that I am hearing the absolute truth here. Even if the documentary-maker is objective, Mr Haggard knows how to play to the media and to the crowd: he made a living from it for years, after all, and so I regard him in the same way I would regard a skilled politician - he sounds genuine, but is he? I remain on the fence.

So why do I feel sorry for him? Well, he and his family have lost friends and have been exiled from their home state (yes, in this day and age - exiled) for no other reason than his sexuality.

That's the bottom line: he's not hetreosexual, so he lost his job, his livlihood, many of his friends, and could well have lost his wife into the bargain.

How much simpler everything would have been if he could have simply been honest with his wife, his family, his friends, and his employers.

But because he isn't 100% heterosexual, and subscribes to a dogma which tells him that this makes him sinful rather than just human, he instead lead a secret life - which made him feel very guilty and unhappy. When his secrets were discovered, his life was destroyed.

So yes - I feel sorry for Ted Haggard and his family: he is a victim of the intolerance of dogmatic people. That he himself subscribed to that dogma I cannot blame him for: he was offered love, hope, and bliss. Who doesn't want that? In accepting it, Ted Haggard showed that he was human.

It is such a pity that in doing so, he had to deny that he was human and live a lie.

Some may say that he was hoist on his own petard, and to a certain degree this is true. But I think he has been a victim of the deceit of a religion* which claims to preach love but which actually practices hate.

* I do not refer to Christianity in general, but the specific sect to which Mr Haggard belongs. Though many other sects also preach hatred and intolerance, not all of them do.

It must be nice to be a wanker

It must be nice to be a wanker: to believe with all your heart that a thumping bass, an almost-nice car, and a slightly askew baseball cap are all that is needed to find your perfect mate - and be right.. every week.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to just know that gays are bad, or women should stay at home - without having to think too hard about why.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to be moved so much by simple rhetoric, and to vote for the man who sounds most generically like you do down the pub.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to live so free, and unencumbered by consideration or compassion.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to be astounded and fulfilled by day-time TV.

Oh! To be a wanker! Why do good things never happen to me?

Is terrorism being UNDER-reported in the media?

An interesting article came my way recently, via a facebook post of a friend. I must say that I was quite shocked when I read it. I am going to share the essential details, and then link you to the article itself.

Khalil Khan was found guilty recently of making bombs out of tennis balls. He aimed to kill many people, and had extremist literature in his house. He was arrested by chance at a railway station for an unrelated offence. His ex-girlfriend said that he was always a violent man, and had talked of killing his boss (I found this data when I googled his name, in an article on the BBC website).

The article I am about to link to says:

One veteran home affairs correspondent told me he had asked his editors why the trial wasn’t being covered. “They didn’t want to hear about it,” he said. “They just weren’t interested. It’s outrageous.”

In another case, Ali Shah was arrested,tried, and found guilty of posessing a huge amount of explosive material in his home which was:

described by police at the time of his arrest as the largest amount of chemical explosive of its type ever found in this country. The national coverage [of this story]... amounted to exactly 56 words in a single “news in brief” item in the Sunday Times.

There was almost no media coverage.

Or take the case of Ayaan Ali. Police found:

nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat, as well as a note in which he had written, “I am so sick and tired of hearing... talk.. of blowing up churches, of fighting back. Only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act.”

Again, there was very little interest in this story. Do you find this as shocking as I do? There are other cases described in the article I am about to link you to, and apparently none of them were given much coverage by the mainstream media.

I'll give you the link to the article in a moment, but before I do I want you to remember just how shocked you were, and why.

Now I have a small confession to make: I told a fib or two. I changed the names of the people I spoke about above, and I replaced the word "mosques" with "churches". But I left all the other facts alone. Every single one of those people was a white British citizen, and not a muslim.

Dutch people will have probably suspected this already, since "Ayaan Ali" was a (female) Dutch politician, who is an ex-Muslim and to say she's outspoken against Islam would be like saying that George W Bush likes Jesus a bit.

Here is the link.

My question to my readers is this: were you shocked by the first part my post above? And did your feelings change when you learned that the terrorists were not muslim, and not asian?

You should also google the names in the linked article. It claims that all these trials were hardly reported. But google the names, and you will find news reports.

The article claims that the total national news coverage for Robert Cottage (the BNP member jailed for the huge amount of explosive in his house) amounted to 56 words in The Sunday Times.

Yet google linked me easily and directly to a BBC article, published in 2007, which was well over 57 words in length. Admittedly it's a local article, not national. But it has quite a different slant: the defence stated that he intended to make "bangers", and when he was found guilty, he got less than three years. Is this a terrorist, or a fucked-up racist twat with a thing for making things go "bang"?

The linked article implies the former, but the BBC article implies the latter. Who is right? The linked article tells us it was the largest amount of an explosive material found: but does that mean that he had a lot of nitro cylerine stockpiled, or did he like dropping magnesium into water and watching it fizz?

What is meant by "explosive material"? We are not given that vital detail.

But regardless of bias and possible cherry-picking, the article has a valid point: I was not aware of these stories before now, and I would very much like to know why that is. Why have these acts of terrorism not been thrust into my face by the media as other acts of terrorism are? I agree with the central point of the article: had these guys really had the names which I attributed to them, then I am pretty sure I'd have seen their photographs on the front page.

The moral for today is this: question everything. No matter what the source, and no matter how much you insinctively agree. Including the links that I direct you to. Ask your own questions, and reach your own conclusions.

I leave you now, feeling safe in the knowledge that I have, as usual, been patronising to an annoying level. I am also feeling quite smug.

The BCA announce their "plethora" of evidence

Quite an eventful day in blogland. I really have nothing to add, and lack the expertese so to do.

That won't prevent me from talking at length, however, as people who have met me will attest.

Anyway, other (actual expert) bloggers have already reviewed the BCA evidence and the legal position much better than I could hope to do (see links below).

NOTE FOR ANY LAWYER REPRESENTING THE BCA: THE BELOW IS OPINION ONLY, AND IN NO WAY INTENDED TO REFLECT FACT OR THE PRACTICES OF YOUR CLIENTS. USE OF THE WORD "BOGUS" IS MERELY IN REFERENCE TO THE CURRENT CASE, AND IN NO WAY REPRESTENTS MY OWN VIEWS: IT IS USED MERELY IN A SATRICIAL CONTEXT.

The BCA statement appears to be exactly what I expected it to be: largely irrelevent, biased, and not based on good research. It appears to have been hastily put together by people with no real grip on evidence-based research (according to the people who have cast a glance over it in the blogosphere, anyway). That's odd, because the BCA, according to their own rules, value evidence-based research: so why don't they quote anything of value?

In my opinion, the BCA really ought to cut their losses and run. The publicity they are generating about their profession seems to be overwhelmingly negative. After a prolonged internet campaign for them to back up their views with evidence, they can produce nothing of substance. Meanwhile, they are being commented on in many blogs, and in mainstream newspapers. What can they possibly gain from all this negative commentry? They could have prevented this merely by asking a reputable scientist what the value of their evidence actually was before they published it, and dropping the case.

I mean: who cares about a Guardian article? People with long hair, beards, and sandals, surely? I read "The Times": I wouldn't ever have known about it if they hadn't sued.

Even if they win the libel suit against Dr Singh, surely the exposure of their claims to peer review will damage them far more than any possible gain they could acheive?

I really don't understand what they are doing.

Neither, it appears, do the BCA. They say that they never wanted this to end up in court: yet they launched a libel action. As Jack of Kent eloquently points out: if you launch a libel suit, it's very possible that it'll end up in court. That's kind of the point, after all. If you disregard the other reasonable avenues open to you - such as the right to reply in the same publication (the mention of which is noticably omitted from the BCA's recent press release) - then if you didn't want to end up in court, then why did you go to court?

The BCA's press release also claims poverty: yet they have no problem launching a libel suit in the UK: which is the most expensive country in Europe (by a very long way) to launch such a suit. If the members of the BCA were not seriously questioning the management of the organisation before now, then they surely must be after this (latest) debacle.

Analysis of the BCA statement is available from Jack of Kent (legal stuff), Ministry of Truth (science stuff), Lay scientist (more science stuff), and Professor David Colquhoun (detailed science stuff, with links to more science stuff).

I'd lend the BCA a leg to stand on, but I only have the two myself, and I dislike hopping.

The BCA continues to stun people

The British Chiropractic Association continue to make themselves look incredibly bad. Their recent press release is really amazing. They are currently suing Dr Simon Singh for libel over an article he wrote in The Guardian newspaper.

The BCA's response has been amazing. Firstly, they sued a science writer for stating a scientific opinion. That in itself is bad enough, but now, according to them, they have "disclosed to the Courts a plethora of medical evidence showing that the treatments work and that the risk associated with the treatments is minimal, if indeed any risk exists at all."

Really? If this evidence does exist, as they are claiming, then surely it was available a year ago, when Dr Singh wrote his article, and his book on the subject was published?

So why have the BCA never published this before? You'd think they would be keen to promote and back up their views with solid evidence. If good evidence had been around at the time, then Dr Singh would surely have included it in his analysis: he is a very thorough scientist, and his book seems to have been very well researched.

Why have the BCA submitted this evidence to the court? Why not to the general public and the scientific communities as well, so that it can be subjected to the normal peer-review process? It seems very odd that a "plethora" of evidence exists, and yet nobody outside the BCA seems to be aware of it.

The rest of the BCA press release seems equally odd. They make various claims about Dr Singh (such as he has refused to answer questions about which studies he has reviewed) which seems strange. Why would a scientist refuse to answer questions on the research he studied? What is the quote? What's the context? We are not told.

We are, however, given a quote, purportedly from Dr Singh:

His attitude is best exemplified by his statement to the BCA when the association tried to find a sensible compromise. Dr. Singh said that he would continue to litigate because “I’ve got the time and I’ve got the money.”

How many questions are there here? What would the BCA consider a "suitable compromise"? We're not told what their proposed compromise was, so there's no way to tell if it was reasonable or not.

I'm sure he will be happy to retract his statements as soon as the BCA allow him access to the "plethora" of evidence which nobody except them has ever seen before, if it is as good as they claim that it is. He is, after all, a scientist, and cares passionately about evidence-based evaluations.

As for the quote from Dr Singh: what's the context? What else was said around that? It doesn't sound much like the Dr Singh whose books I have read and who I heard speak in person on this issue a week ago. All I can tell for sure is that the context of the quote is missing. I wonder why that could be?

The questions all remain:

• Why did the BCA sue, instead of engaging in debate, as would be normal practice when discussing the effectiveness of a treatment?
• What is this evidence which they claim to have, and why haven't they shown it to anyone outside the court?
• What has happened to the leaflet that the BCA published, promoting spine manipulation for the treatment of cholic in children? Why was it seemingly withdrawn?
  
• Why don't the BCA comment on the seemingly withdrawn leaflet, and whether it still supports those claims? Especially in light of the recent ASA ruling about a Chiropractor, dissected there by legal blogger Jack of Kent and here by writer and comedian Dave Gorman.
  
• Why are they pursuing a seemingly aggressive campaign against Dr Singh, while still refusing to provide any good evidence to support the effectiveness of their treatment of cholic in babies by spine manipulation?
• Why have they launched a libel case in an attempt to silence a critic, and then claimed that this is not a freedom of speech issue, when they had other courses of action open to them?

The case continues.

Important questions

Following on from my post about Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, I was intruiged to find a site which gives various Fatwa (judgements on points of religion by Islamic scholars). Browsing the "selected fatwa" was quite amusing. One wonders what the criteria are for selecting these questions of huge importance.

For example: are you allowed to have silk curtains? To which the answer is "yes", but you can't have carpets with 50% or more silk in them. Obviously. Oh, and you can't have wall hangings or clothes made of silk. That's sinful.

The guy who wants to know if it's OK to take photos with women is in for a shock: "Image-makers will be in Hellfire, for every image they made, Allaah will create a soul that will keep on punishing them in Hellfire." With digital cameras, the soul factories must be running overtime these days.

You'll be happy to hear that it is permissable to show your elbows while praying (if you are a man). Other good news includes the fact that it is OK to wear a condom, as long as you don't do so with the intention of completely preventing pregnancy. I know I always wear a condom to only partially prevent pregnancy, so I think I'm good on this one.

Both men and women cannot dye their hair black. Though women are allowed to use other colours - with their husband's permission, naturally.

Apparently it is not compulsary to have sexual intercourse on the first night of marriage: well, not compulsory for the husband, anyway. If he wants to then it is compulsary for the wife.

But women don't get all bad news: they are allowed to study English Literature and other subjects, as long as they are accompanied by a man when travelling to her exams or otherwise leaving the house.

Finally, and most importantly for women, it is permissable for a man to take penis enlargment pills. Oh, but they mustn't pluck their eyebrows, as that would be sinful.

I simply do not know how I got by without this sort of advice before now.

London Police

It's been a while since the G20 and the death of Ian Tomlinson, but new video footage of the police behaving appallingly continues to surface, from the minor (but illegal) act of refusing to identify themselves to the more serious acts of police assault (towards the end, one officer appears to knee a protestor in the family jewels, and all the officers appear to be trying to cause serious danger to the crowd by repeatedly crushing them into a confined space).

If you can get over the annoying middle-class-teenage-whinyness in the voices of those taking the video footage, then there's serious issues here, and I shouldn't have to point them out. But I will anyway.

The police must be accountable for their actions, and they must remain neutral at protests. It's not their job to interfere with a peaceful protest, and it's certainly not their job to assault people who are doing nothing illegal. They are there to keep the peace in a neutral fashion.

When did police assault become an acceptable tactic for policing peaceful demonstrations?

It's odd that the police attacking hippies and students is now kind of common place and seen by many as just another demo.

I've never been to a major demo, though I would have been to the one prior to the invasion of Iraq if I hadn't been ill. Normally I simply whine a lot, which makes me feel better for much less effort. But now I'm waiting for somebody to organise a demo specifically against the London Police, so I can attend.

I figure I may as well exercise my right to peaceful protest while I still can. But if I'm near the front, I'll be expecting to get a few hard knocks from the police, even if I do nothing but stand still.

It's sad that while I still have the right to protest, I am a little nervous about actually doing so. But maybe that's the whole point.

Scary.

When in robe...

Ahh, Sunday morning! Time to hit the cafe for some egg and chips and read the paper. Uh-oh.. what's this? Stewardess Lisa Ashton is sacked by BMI for refusing to walk behind men and wear a humiliating garment?

The tribunal actually ruled against her! I cannot for the life of me understand how that happened. They said that her employers had the right to impose "rules of a different culture".

Saudi Arabia is a sexist country, where women are treated as second class citizens - they aren't even allowed to vote, and are subject to many other abuses.

The silly regulations about wearing a humiliating garment and showing subservience to men by watching where you walk were more than enough justification for Ms Ashton to refuse to fly, IMO. But even if those rules were not mandated, I think that she would have had a reasonable case for refusing to go on ethical grounds alone: Saudi Arabia is a human rights disaster area.

Would the tribunal use that exact same logic about a black employee asked to travel to the Deep South in the 1950s or to South Africa in the 1980s? "Well, you know, they have a right to refuse to serve you in any of the good shops, because it's their culture. Walk behind the white crew members, and don't ever talk to white women!"

I think that the hypothetical black guy would be given a choice, and that everyone would understand if he declined such a wonderful opportunity to bask in warmer climes at the end of his flight.

I'm all for respecting other cultures - but only those cultures which actually deserve respect. What is happening in Saudi Arabia to women is an inexcusable travesty. Why on earth should I respect that? And why should anyone else (especially a woman) be forced to do likewise?

How about respecting women's human rights? BMI, if you're listening: that would be a good start. In the meantime, I'll be exercising my right to never fly with you again...