Friday Links

• s.e. smith: ‘She can’t be poor! She has a cell phone!’
• UK Polling Report: A reminder about crossbreaks
• Transgriot: Watergate 40th Anniversary
• Complicity: Google data shows UK back as most snooped on population
• Aphra Behn at Shakesville: Today in Fat Hatred: U.S. Fatties Doom the World
• Left Outside: The Rt Hon Richard Benyon MP, Parliamentary Under-secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
• Haynes, Service, Goldacre and Torgerson: Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials
• Mindy at Hoyden About Town: OMG Zombesity crisis, again.
• Another Angry Woman: It’s OK to like science, girls. It’s sexy now.
• Jessie at Racism Review: Visible Evidence of Racism
• Transgriot: Who Is Woman Enough to Participate in the Olympics?

Blogspot and Disqus

Blogspot and Disqus have an incompatibility:

• Blogger uses per-country domains like refusingthedefault.blogspot.co.uk for the UK, and refusingthedefault.blogspot.com for the US (and anywhere not specifically stated). A few other countries are similarly affected.
• Disqus ties its comment threads to a particular URL. So while you can allow multiple domains to connect to the Disqus account in Settings => Trusted Domains, that ends up with you having a separate unrelated comment thread for every country. Not great if you have any international readers.

For now, people can go to refusingthedefault.blogspot.com/ncr to make the domain stick with country geo-location. This is not great, but it kind-of works at great inconvenience to your readers...

I've found a better fix, which does not appear to be documented elsewhere on the web (and Disqus support didn't mention it when I asked), but it's so obvious from a programming perspective I find it unlikely I'm the first to think of it. On the other hand, it does require a little bit of willingness to dive into the raw template code to implement, so make sure you backup your template first in case it goes wrong.

Code for the fix below the cut...

In the Blogger template with Disqus installed there'll be a section like:

<script type='text/javascript'>
                var disqus_url = '<data:post.url/>';;
                var disqus_title = document.getElementById('disqus_post_title').innerHTML;
                var disqus_message = document.getElementById('disqus_post_message').innerHTML;
        </script>

(Edit the template, edit the HTML directly, disregard the "are you sure" warning, and expand the widget templates)

After the line starting 'var disqus_url' add:

disqus_url = disqus_url.replace(/refusingthedefault.blogspot.[a-z.]+/,"refusingthedefault.blogspot.com");

(replacing "refusingthedefault" with your blogspot domain, or it won't do anything useful...)

This will pass the canonical post URL to Disqus, and your comments will be unified. There will probably be a bit of a mess with old comment threads that needs migrating on Disqus.

Add the blogspot country subdomains to your Trusted Domains in Disqus and it should all work (except for the comment counts on the summary page, which will always say zero, but that's bearable)

Come back! We can campaign about trees together!

I've been critical before of political groups and movements whose entire platform basically boils down to "we're not the Conservatives". They avoid setting out principles as much as possible to attract a broad audience - "a united left", or whatever - which works fine right up until they actually try to do anything.

The result is usually a group which is run by and for default people, and often one viewing political power as an end rather than as a means.

I bring this up now because there was [content note: heterosexism, especially in comments] a fine example yesterday of the intellectual knots one can get oneself into when attempting to run a campaigning organisation without reference to any underlying principles¹.

Paraphrased:

The membership's desire to take action in favour² of non-default people was a clear but not unanimous majority. This was hard to interpret, so we resolved to only take late, ineffective and partial action on the subject.

Despite the considered ineffectuality of our response, approximately 0.1% of the recipients of our call to action found it too much for them, and delivered us a series of insults, or even cancelled their subscriptions. Please tell us what you think. Should we have made our action even weaker, or not done it at all?

We don't want to lose important people over this! Please come back... We can campaign about trees together. We won't do it again...

Another example of why I strongly prefer campaigns which both start from and stick with their principles, then.

Footnotes and rambling digressions

¹ Yes, I'm aware they claim to have underlying principles. Under both "defend fairness" and "protect rights" this one should have been fairly obvious (though see next footnote too).

² There is of course a principled argument that marriage - either in its current form as a concept or in all forms - is itself harmful, and therefore to extend it to more people is to go in completely the wrong direction; instead, heterosexual marriage should be abolished. I very much doubt any of the objections received were along those lines.

Certainly, I would agree that in so far as the state needs to have a means of registering relationships between individuals, the model of "marriage", even opened up so that it does not require particular genders of the participants, is massively insufficient. Relationships between more than two people, relationships which desire some but not all of the legal statuses attached to "marriage", and so on, are not well-served by the current set up. This should not be considered the end of the reform process, though with the exception of those religions which would like to run religious ceremonies for marriages, it probably will be for quite some time.

I can also envisage societies in which the "state" either has no need to register relationships at all, or does not exist in such a form that the concept even makes sense. At least some of these social models would, for me, also be preferable to the current system.

Nevertheless, I think even if the long-term plan is to get rid of the concept of state recognised marriage (and remember that this digression is irrelevant to the main post, where that clearly is not the long-term plan!), the current concept has so many flaws that refusing to fix them in the short term is the wrong approach.

(See also: Andy's Miscellany: Marriage Equality and Primogeniture for a different analysis)

Friday Links

• Ministry of Truth: Lansley’s NHS funding plan will make it even grimmer up North
• s.e. smith: Norming access and To Each According To Their Own Abilities: Disability and Environmentalism
• [content note: rape] tigtog at Hoyden About Town: Food for thought: if rapists just can’t control their urges…
• [content note: fat-hate] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: "I realized those issues are real."
• richie79 at Big Fat Blog: UK Government criticises obesity epi-panic
• Jolene Tan at The F-Word: Families: only for the wealthy
• Jim C Hines: Boundaries
• Complicity: Spooks in the Middle: How the Home Office might break HTTPS

Rape culture in government

[Content note: abuse of power, rape]

There was a debate in Parliament yesterday regarding undercover policing, raised by Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion).

One of the issues raised was the practice by police infiltrating a group suspected of criminal activity of forming sexual relationships with the members of that group (so far, the cases which have received publicity have all involved male police officers and female members of the group).

It is of course fairly likely that many of the people with whom the undercover officers formed sexual relationships would not have done so had they known that the other person was an undercover police officer. As Lucas states:

The eight women allege that the men’s actions constitute a breach of articles 3 and 8 of the European convention on human rights. Article 3 asserts that no one shall be subject to inhuman or degrading treatment, and article 8 grants respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state. The women go on to allege that the actions amount to common law tortious acts of deceit, misfeasance in public office and assault.

It's not at all clear to me from a reading of the precedent and legislation whether people in a similar situation could also allege rape, as has been suggested (and rightly, because morally it is). It hinges on what "capacity to consent" means in the legislation, and the positive precedents generally have elements which are clearer than in this sort of case¹.

In that context, the government's answer is disturbing.

Nick Herbert MP (Conservative, Arundel and South Downs), the relevant Minister, replies - regarding the legality of this under RIPA, an issue which remains untested by the courts and on which a number of conflicting public statements have been made by the police:

What matters is that there is a general structure and system of proper oversight and control, rather than specific directions on behaviour that may or may not be permitted. Moreover, to ban such actions would provide a ready-made test for the targeted criminal group to find out whether an undercover officer was deployed among them. Specifically forbidding the action would put the issue in the public domain and such groups would know that it could be tested.

So it's okay for an undercover police officer to commit actions morally (and possibly legally) constituting rape, if to do otherwise would put their cover at risk, according to the government.

Herbert doesn't explicitly state it one way or the other, but presumably given some of the other cases that Lucas raised, he also considers it legitimate for an undercover police officer to plant a live incendiary device in a public area, if to refuse would put their cover at risk (a blanket ban on committing life-threatening acts of terrorism would obviously make it too easy for terrorist groups to out undercover officers, right?).

Footnote

¹ Generally one of:

1. The offender viewed the act as sexual but convinced their victim(s) that it wasn't (e.g. fake medical examinations)
2. The offender had used some sort of threats or pressure
3. The offender was pretending to be an entirely different person (as opposed to presenting a different identity of the same person). The distinction between the two is not trivial, given how many people have extremely legitimate reasons to have multiple identities for different contexts.

One of the things that makes me angry about this sort of case is that I can't think of a way to word legislation such that (under rape culture: the existing legislation would be more than adequate if we weren't) this would be illegal, but legitimate omissions about one's past or other identities would not be, especially in the context of a government (and much of the populace) which believes that people can legitimately only have one identity.