The "insanity" defence

[trigger warning]

The news that the murderer of 77 people in Norway has been declared "insane" is not surprising. After all, he was white and not a believer in some scary foreign religion - if he was "sane" he wouldn't have done what he did.

The psychiatric report concluded

[...] he lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions"

Okay - this has probably been translated from the original Norweigian, and may well have lost some nuance, but let's break it down:

1. His beliefs about the nature of reality were inaccurate
2. His thoughts and actions were based on his beliefs about the nature of reality.

The second part of that is essentially what everyone does.

So the "insanity" must be concluded from the first part - that his beliefs about the nature of reality were inaccurate. But this is true to at least some extent of everyone, too.¹

Furthermore, plenty of people share his particular belief that there is a Muslim invasion of Europe planned and that our governments are complicit in it. Most of them do not commit mass murder as a result, however.

So: the Norweigian murderer has a commonly-shared mistaken belief, and chose highly illegal actions as a consequence. He therefore cannot be held - by "insanity" - to be criminally responsible for those actions.

Meanwhile, for less default-y terrorist suspects - black, Muslim, non-European, etc. - the idea that they could rationally decide to kill people (even if the decision was based on faulty premises) is completely accepted, and they're tried as criminals.

The idea of that form of "insanity"² being treated as in some way excusing him of responsibility is completely wrong.

Footnote

¹ For an entirely uncontroversial example that affects almost everyone: optical illusions. They're artefacts of millions of years of evolved visual processing where an "optimisation" that works most of the time gives the wrong result in a few cases.

² Using the definition of "mistaken belief about reality", anyone who had no reasonable way of knowing based on their perceptions that their action would have a particular criminal consequence should not be held criminally responsible³ - and most of our laws recognise this fact: there are exceedingly few "strict liability" laws.

³ I'm aware that, given what we know about rapists, many of them would be able to use this "defence" on the grounds that they are also deeply mistaken about the nature of reality. However, the precedent that people whose mistaken beliefs make them a general danger to society - highly rare among those considered "insane" by psychiatrists - may be separated from it for as long as those beliefs remain is well-established, and would have much the same effect. At any rate, if we get to the stage where accused rapists are advised by their lawyers to plead "not guilty due to insanity", we'll be at a stage where rape culture is generally considered a "mistaken belief" - and, minus the ablism in that sentiment, I'd be happy with that.

Assume a spherical frictionless population

So, we've got the government sponsoring a review of sick leave, that essentially recommends that we treat people with acute health conditions in the same way that we now deal with chronic and terminal health conditions.

Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit? has more on the particular problems with this proposal, which I won't try to duplicate here. I want to focus on the last sentence of the article for what it says about government overall:

The DWP spokesman said: "The economy loses £15bn in lost economic output each year due to sickness absence and we cannot continue to foot this bill."

Interesting claim... After quite a bit of searching, I can't find a source for this. I have found:

• Several other unsourced repetitions of the figure, sometimes accompanied by a claim that there are 150 million working days lost annually in the UK due to sickness absence.
• One claim that £12bn (instead) in economic output is lost, but 200 million working days are lost
• Claims in the original press release for the review that the total cost of sickness absence (which is not the same as lost output) is £100bn, £60bn of which is paid by the government.

However, it does seem fairly clear that the main assumption for losses and costs is as compared with an economy where no-one was ever ill.

On that measure, we "waste" about £70 million annually on street lighting, compared with an idealised country which flies around the world on jet engines so that the sun never sets on it, or a country populated entirely by people genetically modified to have sonar.

People are people. They get ill. I'm all in favour of reducing the amount that people get ill through advances in medical science, good¹ public health initiatives, improved safety measures, more efficient treatments, and so on. But anyone seriously basing their government policy essentially on the assumption that people should never be seriously ill has such a bizarre idea² of what humans are that they shouldn't be in charge of the country.

And it leads to policies like this where the sickness absence itself, and by extension the person who is ill, gets treated as the problem - when actually it's a symptom of the facts that we don't have sci-fi medical technology now, that we have unsafe and unhealthy working environments (especially for mental health), that we place toxins into the environment far more than we should be, and so on.

That's what's "costing" us the £15bn in "lost output", not people being ill. Not getting that distinction - and so making a policy based on the belief that people shouldn't be ill (which is not unique to our current central government) - means policies like this, which are likely to make the situation worse, not better, and so cost the economy even more overall - and a lot of ill people a great deal personally.

Footnote

¹ i.e. non-dehumanising

² Admittedly, the ablist idea that "not ill" is normal and "ill" is deviant is so common that finding a member of government who doesn't believe that may take some work - but as with many discriminatory assumptions they just sound silly if you say them explicitly.

Loitering within tent

[trigger warning: state violence]

Why aren't the people in charge simply ignoring the Occupy movement? It's not obvious to me.

Petitions, protests, marches, letter-writing campaigns, voting - all can be and are largely ignored by elected politicians. A representative who is already sympathetic to their cause can use these things to be more forceful in Parliament. With consistent effort of this sort over many years, then the number of sympathetic representatives in Parliament can be grown and public opinion can be altered - but this is an extremely slow process and as, for instance, the blatant racism or heterosexism shown by some MPs today demonstrates, can be ignored at will by an unsympathetic representative.

The "ultimate sanction" of making them lose elections is only a statistical deterrent. A party may occasionally lose power temporarily - though that was going to happen anyway - but individual representatives in safe seats (and there are equivalents in almost all electoral systems) can stay in office as long as they want.

So, given that, what is it about Occupy that stops it being ignored. Look at it entirely from an abstract point of view - ignore the aims, just look at the methods.

• A protest march will, if it's large enough, block off multiple streets in a major city for several hours. Normal day-to-day life is disrupted over a large area. Then, everything returns to normal, and it gets pushed back in to the pile of previous marches.
• Occupy take an area of public space, put some tents up, and stay there. The vast majority of the city continues as normal - indeed, from a distance, it's not obviously there - and even nearby it's generally relatively straightforward to walk around them. Generally, far fewer people are participating at any one time, in any particular Occupy location, than would appear at any medium-sized protest march in the same city.

The only thing that makes it more "disruptive" than a protest march is the permanence in a public space. But alone, that's not particularly disruptive¹. They may be a reminder of something governments and the powerful don't like to be reminded of - but they should be an easily avoidable and ignorable reminder. The late Brian Haw camped outside Parliament for years without changing policy, and only really made the news on the (many) occasions where they tried to have him removed.

Likewise, while the Occupy movements are - to a greater or lesser extent - trying to develop alternatives to the established order, that they're doing so in a square in the rain, instead of on an internet forum or on a commune somewhere out of the way, shouldn't be particularly threatening. It's not as if people merely walking by are going to pick up the interesting details of that, as opposed to a few messages and slogans on signs.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if the governments and powerful had completely ignored Occupy Wall Street, giving non-committal platitudes about the right to protest and "they can stay if they want[, I don't care]" if anyone asked, then it would not have reached the numbers it has - across North America and Europe - and not have received anything like as much press coverage.

Occupy LSX has pretty much only been in the news since it started over disputes as to whether they should be "allowed" to stay there or forcibly removed. The reasons they're actually there are getting very little press coverage. If they'd been passively allowed to continue without interference, then they'd still be there, of course - but no-one who didn't physically go past them would have noticed.

Similarly, the recent attacks on Occupy Oakland - and now New York and Seattle, at least - and the slightly less aggressive ongoing policing and "health and safety" disruptions of the sites - may have deterred some people from attending ... but they've also kept the protests in the news, encouraged the protestors, often grown their numbers overall, and made them think that their strategy is working.

Gandhi's "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" statement has been repeated to the point of cliché about Occupy - but while their eventual victory (and what that might mean, anyway) is still nowhere near inevitable, they're larger in number and angrier as a result of governments and the powerful not being content to remain at the "ignore" stage.

So why try to repress them so much? It can't be the ideas alone. There's nothing new in their ideas (and that is not a criticism!) - and there's nothing new about a significant angry minority holding those ideas. The economic collapse has made more people receptive to those ideas, and the Occupy camps mean that (a few) more people hear about those ideas.

It also can't be about permission to hold those ideas and express them publicly. The only part unique to Occupy is "in a square" or "in a tent". Again, if ignored, they wouldn't be powerful there.

It can't be personal inconvenience or conscience. If the powerful had those, then plenty of other forms of protest would either be more rapidly effective, or more heavily restricted, or both.

It can't be about "health and safety" or other such concerns. The only health and safety potentially being affected is generally that of the people inside the Occupy camps - which they obviously don't care about. Yes, the protests may after legal argument be found to be breaking some technicality of the law. But probably most protest marches could after the fact be found to have done the same. It's largely irrelevant to whether they can be ignored, and it's more focus on enforcing every single law at once than ever gets applied anywhere else. Enforcing laws - and making up new laws to enforce - is a means, but it can't be the end in itself.

It shouldn't be about personal fear - hundreds of thousands of people in a square like Tahrir Square can be threatening to a government: that's enough people that if they did turn out to be armed revolutionaries they could do some serious damage to the government even if the police and army stayed loyal - and a sign of enough popular support that a dictator can't rely enough on their loyalty. So Egypt's government fell.

But a few hundred people? Maybe a few thousand at the biggest? That's not dangerous. They're not even particularly close to government buildings, or the offices of the truly powerful. Even if they were all armed to the teeth if they tried anything violent they would go down very quickly in the "fatally failed revolutionaries" list. And clearly if they were armed and shooting, the loyalty of the police and army is nowhere near weak enough yet in North America or Europe to end up defecting: the recent police assaults on Occupy should show they don't have a problem there.

So - there seems to be nothing to lose by simply ignoring Occupy like they ignore every other protest and fringe movement. And much more to lose by attacking them through the courts and through violence, thereby increasing anger and public sympathy. So why pick that strategy?

I really don't get it. What do the rich and powerful know that I don't that makes Occupy so specifically threatening to them that they're willing to take such disproportionate and panicked action to try - counter-productively - to stop them? What am I missing here?

Footnotes

¹ If the public space is "across a major motorway" or "in the middle of Oxford Street" or "right where you wanted to build a block of flats" or "in front of the gates of a military base", then it's definitely very disruptive. But that's not what Occupy is doing.

We are the 70-100%. Tax the 40-70%.

While writing my thoughts on Occupy, I was thinking quite a bit about how revolutionary and protest movements are often either explicitly about the interests of the relatively-privileged upper-middle and middle classes, or end up co-opted towards their interests anyway.

And then an example comes along.

I wrote about the tuition fee plans last year when the original Browne Report was published. At the time I thought they were surprisingly good, all things considered - though with some potentially very dangerous and largely ignored consequences.

Political changes to the report's proposals in the process of turning it into legislation took away the most dangerous consequences - but at the cost of taking away most of the proposals' internal logic and consistency too.

My general assessment, though, remains about the same: a surprisingly good deal for students and universities. The protests against the tuition fees - and they're mainly about the tuition fees - are effectively a protest by the rich against the poor. That's not to say that the participants think that's what they're doing - but the protest and anger has been quite effectively co-opted by upper-middle-class interests.

Lets look at the current system first.

A student on a typical undergraduate course will pay around £3.5k in fees a year, and take out around £4.5k in maintenance loans each year, for either 3 or 4 years. This will leave them with a maximum payment requirement of either £24k or £32k (indexed to inflation), to be repaid at a rate of 9% of all gross earnings over £15k. Because that £15k earnings figure isn't indexed to inflation, just about everyone will repay all of it - in 25 years, when the debt is written off if not repaid, the median wage is likely to be around £40k in absolute terms (assuming an average 3% nominal inflation). Repayments will therefore be over two thousand a year even for that salary - and a graduate 25 years after graduation is likely to be earning considerably more. Total real-terms payments are therefore going to be approximately the full value of the maintenance and fees "loan".

Furthermore, if this scheme were to continue, the gap between £15k and nominal salaries would increase, so repayment sizes would rise.

Now compare this with the new system.

Repayments are now at 9% over £21k, but the repayment threshold is itself linked to changes in median wage. This means - using this calculator, which seems accurate - that, depending on the exact assumptions made¹, to repay more than (real terms) £24k under the new system would require a salary greater than around £29k in real terms. A slightly higher salary would be required to repay more than £32k.

On the one hand, £29k is not a huge salary. On the other hand, it's quite a bit higher than the median income - it's currently around 70th percentile of income. It's also higher than the median income for almost any age-band, gender and region combination: that is, the majority of people² will not earn more than £29k (in real terms) at any point, never mind as a career average salary!³

So under the new scheme: The bottom 30-40% don't pay anything under either scheme. The next 30-40% or so pay less than now both in total and per year. The top 30% (by income) pay more in total (though still less in the early years). The ones who have to repay the greatest additional amount under the new scheme compared with the old are the top 10-20%⁴.

Very approximately, therefore, the protests are about trying to persuade a right-wing mostly-Conservative government that it should charge the rich less and the middle more for their education. Even more strangely, the government is refusing: tax rich graduates instead, they say.

Footnotes

¹ I pinned personal salary growth in the simulator to equal the average earnings growth (both at RPI+1 or RPI, it makes little difference) to mimic having a fixed real salary over the whole time period. That's not realistic, but it allows a comparison with median wages.

² Now, graduate salaries are generally higher than non-graduate salaries, and there's nothing like a bit of self-interest, but even then it's mainly benefiting the richer graduates. It's very tricky to assess by how much and there are several conflicting sources (and the premium varies by degree, too) - but it probably works out, on average, at only around £3-4k additional gross earnings a year. Even the median graduate is therefore unlikely to be earning much more than £29k in real terms.

³ And this is also assuming continuous employment for the full 30 years after graduation. Take time off to raise children, or become unemployed for more than a couple of months, or become ill and spend a year off work on long-term sick leave, etc. etc. and the likelihood of repaying more than £24k falls further.

⁴ Above a very high threshold - in to the top 5% or so - total repayments start falling again because their earnings clear the loan before the higher interest rates only charged on higher earners have much effect. But they'll still even in the absolute best/worst unrealistic case (walk straight out of university into a £400k corporate directorship) repay almost twice as much under the new scheme as they would under the old scheme. And someone with that sort of immediate earnings potential probably has sufficient family wealth and connections that the cost of university is largely irrelevant anyway.

Riots and responsibility

[Trigger warning: violence, also applies to most of the links]

So, riots. Some other reading on the subject first:

• Hangbitching: Peckham Monday
• Camila Batmanghelidjh at the Independent: Caring costs – but so do riots
• Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: On UK Riots Part 1 and Part 2
• Andy's Miscellany: Thoughts on riots
• Left Outside: Even Rioters with Blackberrys can be Poor
• Kevin Sampson at the Guardian: Liverpool riots: I remember the buzz of mob mayhem from 1981

And for some idea of the general public response:

• This rapidly-growing petition to remove all benefits from rioters (presumably after they've been released from jail) is by far the most signed petition on the government's new petitions site.
• YouGov polling reports significant majorities in favour of major escalations of force against the riots, and 33% in favour of the use of live ammunition.

My own thoughts...

There are two things that the government needs to do. Immediately, it needs to restore an approximation of order to the affected cities. The people involved in the riots do need to be arrested and tried if possible. The government are taking this - after a shaky start - pretty seriously¹, with a large police presence in city centres at night, and rapid work to arrest the rioters during the day. The rioting isn't going to be completely over for a while - but provided nothing escalates it (see footnote¹ again) then normality should return fairly soon.

As soon as that is done, however, the government needs to do a much more important task - stop this happening again.

Riots could in theory break out at any time. There are nowhere near enough police across the country to stop this. If thousands of people decide at the same time that they want to make a point through violence, it's really difficult for the police to stop this happening.

Generally, they don't, however. Most of the time, people feel they have better choices available to them, or don't co-ordinate their attempts to riot.

The police can maintain a strong presence enough to stop these riots. They cannot maintain that presence indefinitely - already officers have been on duty for much longer than they should have been. Eventually they will need to stand down - and then, if nothing has changed, it will only be one more spark needed for more riots to start.

Unfortunately, the government seems to be determined not to change anything.

Its all too clear that we have a big problem with gangs in our country. For too long there has been a lack of focus and a complete lack of respect shown by these groups of thugs.

I am clear that they are in no way representative of the vast majority of young people in our country who despise them frankly as much as the rest of us do. But there are pockets of our society that are not just broken, but frankly sick.

When we see children as young as 12 and 13 looting and laughing, when we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear there are things that are badly wrong in our society.

For me the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing I have spoken about for years: it is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society.

People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences. Well they do have consequences.

We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line. Restoring a stronger sense of responsibility across our society in every town in every street in ever estate is something I am determined to do.

That's David Cameron PM (Conservative) there. But with all that talk about how people should "take responsibility", it could easily have been his Opposition counterpart, Ed Miliband MP (Labour). As the Guardian reports:

He said: "Then we have got to look into the causes, why people are going around doing this. And I think there are a complex number of causes."

He said he thought it was "partly about parental responsibility, partly about gangs and some of that culture".

Pretty similar thoughts from both. In summary, the causes of the riots are that "the rioters are scum, and their parents are scum, and their culture is scum, and we should punish the lot of them".

And with that level of shallow political analysis and responsibility-dodging from our political leadership, there are always going to be people who feel that society is giving them nothing.

Today's rioters can be dealt with. Arrested. Tried. Imprisoned. Tomorrow's rioters are still going to grow up in the same hopeless situations, being blamed by the politicians for being in those situations. And in a few years we'll arrest them too, because that's far easier than trying to figure out what the real underlying problems are and then fixing them. Far easier than treating people as actual people and listening to them and taking them seriously before they get so desperate they take to the streets to loot and destroy because that's all that's left. But no. They're scum, their families are scum, and they deserve what they get. Political consensus acheived, Parliament adjourned.

I think tomorrow's Parliamentary debate will be very reluctant to look "soft on crime" and consider why these riots might be happening. Why decades of social deprivation and institutional racism and cuts to what few bits of social safety net there were might be giving people nothing left to lose by rioting. I hope I'm wrong about that, but if I am it'll have to come from the backbenches.

Footnote

¹ Populist but dangerous and largely useless measures such as water cannon and plastic bullets aside, that is. Because they worked so well in Northern Ireland.

The overtallness epidemic

[trigger warning: body issues]

Researchers have announced that (BBC) being overtall gives an increased risk of cancer.

I haven't looked at the study itself, so I can't comment on whether it was well-conducted or not. I'm just interested in how the reporting has gone, so I'll assume it was well designed.

Essentially the study has found that an increase in height in women from around 150cm to around 170cm was associated with an increase in the cancer rate from 0.75% a year to 1% a year. Not a large effect for individuals, but certainly a noticeable one at the population level.

They also carried out a meta-study that suggested that a similar effect existed in men, though the BBC article goes into less detail about this.

There's a suggestion that this effect is in part behind the rise in cancer prevalence, since average height has risen by about 1cm every decade in Europe.

Cue panic and press articles about how the so-called "overtallness" epidemic is ruining our health, and we're all going to die if we don't wear heavy shoulder pads to shrink ourselves back down to 19th Century levels, all illustrated with photos of headless tall people.

No? My mistake.

The BBC article is actually calm and measured on this topic. It points out that there's no known mechanism by which overtallness could affect cancer prevalence, though a couple of theories are suggested. It doesn't blame tall people for bringing it upon themselves or suggest that they need to do more to reduce their height¹. Nor does it ignore the structural issues that make it hard for people to avoid being tall, pointing to better childhood nutrition and fewer diseases as reasons for overtallness.

One of the theories even suggests that overtallness doesn't cause cancer at all, but is merely a marker for underlying conditions that cause both overtallness and cancer. Correlation is not causation, after all.

If every medical research sub-discipline was so cautious about claiming causative relationships between health conditions and physical attributes, and similarly restrained about suggesting drastic individual measures to change the physical attributes, then we might have considerably better public health policy.

Footnote

¹ As I've said before (almost), there is no known safe way to permanently reduce height, though there are several methods which will appear to give noticeable effects if the follow-up period of the study is - no pun intended - too short, There are also some surgical methods that appear somewhat more effective but have extremely dubious safety records and large side effects.

For balance

In most discussions on the news, the press nowadays are careful to bring in a dissenting voice - no matter how outlandish the dissent is - to express an alternative view.

The matters that they don't are those that are universally agreed - "Mr Jones, of the 13th Century Society, condemned the proposals. 'Everyone knows that disease is spread by miasmas', he said.".

And, of course, those that the press might like to be universally agreed.

[trigger warning for the links]

So, for instance, the BBC uncritically reprints a DWP press release claiming that "most" benefit claimants are "fit for work" - despite there being massive problems with this conclusion - without any evidence of an opposing view. Like gravity, the round earth, and so on, the "fact" that most benefit claimants are scroungers is too uncontroversial to need one.

Conversely, on other issues where there should be no controversy at all, they go to find the most hateful people they can, just to get "an opposing view". Got to have balance, and if no-one mainstream is willing to provide it, then find someone who isn't.

Likewise, most science reporting has some other scientist saying "well, we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on one experiment" - but take some of the worst research ever, and not only doesn't it need an art historian pointing out "Wait, what? That makes no sense" - it also gets a second independent speaker for the same proposition - you know, for balance.

So - this is neutrality, this is impartiality, from the fabled BBC - it can be taken as uncontestable fact, just as it can be taken as uncontestable fact that France is in Europe, or that the A1 runs from London to somewhere up North, that default people are superior and morally good, and everyone else is clearly inferior and brought it upon themselves.

That's impartiality for you.

Aside

The BBC gets a lot of criticism from the right-wing Politicians¹ for being too left-wing, and a lot of criticism from left-wing Politicians for being too right-wing. This is taken by centrist Politicians to show that clearly it is impartial.

Again, since the battle between right-wing and left-wing Politics is for which bunch of mostly-default people should be in charge, that's hardly surprising.

¹ I use the capital P to distinguish "the mostly-default people who are thought of as involved in politics" from the much larger set of people who - "the personal is political" - are actually involved in politics.

Or it might be that your major underlying assumption is rubbish

[trigger warning]

Another piece of terrible BBC reporting (complete with stock "headless fatty" photo), this time about life expectancy and the "obesity epidemic".

The lead paragraph is:

Life expectancy in the UK is on the rise, along with the rest of Europe, despite fears over the impact of obesity, a population expert has said.

In summary: life expectancy has been rising in the UK, mainly because of better treatment for heart conditions. This is a surprise, because as reading the news makes clear, everyone is becoming "obese" and should be dead already.

It can't at all be because - as major population studies in Canada, Germany and the USA have consistently shown - there is no statistically significant link between BMI (the measure of "obesity") and life expectancy.

We are yet to see the impact of a generation of people who have been obese from childhood through to adulthood. We can't predict how that will affect life expectancy figures in the future.

While more individuals nowadays are likely to be sufficiently far above the government-mandated weight that they count as "obese" for most of their lives (and especially now that the government - through the time-honoured technique of "making it up" - is defining more and more children as "overweight"), there are plenty of people who have been "obese" for all their lives, who were in those major studies, and who didn't die at any greater rates than anyone else.

But this argument¹ will keep them going on the "fat will kill you" track for a few decades.

At some point historians of medicine are going to look back and show how researchers managed to completely ignore major population studies saying "no effect" in favour of studies that don't get beyond correlation is causation, because they were so convinced of the truth of their main hypothesis that they just ignored evidence against it.

Until then, more terrible public policy and reporting, and more encouraging of hatred against fat people.

Footnote

¹ It occurs to me that this resembles the backstop argument for people when presented with unbeatable evidence of (e.g.) gender or racial inequality: "that is due to discrimination 30 years ago the after-effects of which haven't worked their way out of the system yet; in another 30 years it'll have gone". It's an argument that never gets old.

Where did that analogy come from?

There's been quite a lot of talk recently about how the various protest movements against the government that are springing up (well, it's doing lots to protest about) are "open source". Here's a Left Foot Forward post, for example.

As someone who's both organised protests and developed open source software, my reaction to the analogy is extreme bafflement.

The idea behind the analogy is that the "new protest movement" is open, transparent, decentralised and largely non-hierarchical, with everyone able to contribute in the ways that they are most suited to.

Which is fair enough. Legitimate ideals, and they seem to be reasonably effective in practice too, but the areas in which it's actually similar to open source software development projects are areas in which it's also similar to just about every other protest movement ever, so the analogy just doesn't work.

Open source software development is considerably more hierarchical than the stereotypes suggest. It has to be, if it's to actually develop useful software. For any complex piece of open source software - any of the big ones with widespread name recognition like Linux or Firefox, but much smaller ones too - there are a core set of leaders, who make most of the decisions about what the long-term aims of the project are, and all the decisions about which individual contributions go in to the project.

The advantage of open-source over closed-source is not that it doesn't have leaders and hierarchies, but that a popular rebellion against those leaders and hierarchies doesn't have to start from scratch when providing a replacement. Nevertheless, someone disagreeing with the current leadership will have a difficult and time-consuming task on a large project in getting enough supporters, hardware and hosting budgets, and so on, to make a "fork" of the project viable. Successful forks are extremely rare, though hypothetical ones are pretty commonplace.

But there are definitely leaders and a hierarchy, because once a software project gets complex, there is an intense need for quality control. Contributions that aren't up to the necessary standard, or which just aren't considered useful, don't get in.¹ That sounds much more like a "traditional" centralised protest movement to me.

Similarly while the outputs of an open source software project may be transparent, the process is not necessarily so. There can be a lot of "back room" discussion about controversial decisions.

As far as the actual similarities between open source software development and "open source" protests go, you'd be hard-pressed to run a protest without them.

• Everyone can contribute? Most protests work on that basis, since they want the numbers. The more common problem is that protests aren't selective enough and let in unrelated people who try to make the protest about something else.
• If you don't like the direction, "fork" it? No protest movement has yet, as far as I know, tried to patent the concept of protesting against a particular thing. This is automatic. Unlike with software, there's not months of dull and boring work to be done before you get back to something vaguely resembling the original if you start from scratch.
• Sharing of ideas/materials? Again, most protests don't try to trademark their slogans, or to threaten with copyright infringement people who modify their sample letters to MPs before sending them.
• Transparent output? By definition, yes. Once you've seen a protest you're at liberty to copy its methods or slogans for your own. As with open source software, though, you might not be aware of the tangled route it took to get to that finished state.

• "Many eyes make all bugs shallow"? A protest has no underlying "source code"² that one can inspect for bugs. The output of the protest is the original form. As with closed source books, where you don't need access to the original typesetting to spot the typos and layout errors, "bugs" in a protest are open to anyone to find regardless of the protest organisation.

  Transparent organisation can make the "bugs" obvious before "release", just as many bugs are found and fixed in development versions of software before they ever make it into a formal release, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be fixed.

  Meanwhile, just as allowing the public to help test planned releases is not limited to open-source software, being transparent about future protests and listening to suggestions and criticism is not something that non-hierarchical movements have a monopoly on.

Call it "decentralised", or "non-hierarchical", or "chaotic", or "anarchic", call it "crowd-sourced" if you must, but don't call it "open source" because it's not in any meaningful way similar to that (indeed, the social network tools used to organise most of the actions are largely corporate-owned and closed-source).

Footnotes

¹ The idea is that the hierarchy and the leaders are a meritocracy of sorts: if you do enough good work for the project you'll be invited to join them. The Geek Feminism blog has some good articles pointing out that - as with everything else - the definition of what counts as "good" and "work" is default-biased

"Democracy", however, is generally not something that open-source software projects use or need.

² The actual openness of the source is not a major factor for finding bugs in most projects. Just about all of the bugs reported for projects I've been involved in have come from users using the software who'd never read the source, not from people who happened to read the source and thought "hey, that'll never work". For any successful project, the proportion of its users who have the time, skill and energy to read the source for bugs is approximately zero.

Likewise, I've never found a bug by reading open source code. I've found bugs by using software and then been able to report them to the developers complete with a cause and a fix, in a few cases, and this is a useful advantage of open source software - especially those pieces of software such as system tools likely to be used by people who can program. More usually, despite in theory being able to read the source and provide a fix, I've just told them about the bug and let them get on with it.

But anyway, on this metric our Parliament is "open source": read the draft Bill, write in with a "bug fix", and the "developers" might well accept it before "release".

Wiio's laws, and how privilege helps make them true

Viestintä yleensä epäonnistuu, paitsi sattumalta (Communication usually fails, except by accident)

Wiio's First Law

Wiio's Laws are unfortunately not generally well-known in English-speaking countries. Jukka Korpela provides an English translation of the laws and commentary on them, which is definitely worth reading.

I was reminded of them by some recent discussions, and so two related reasons for communication failure I want to highlight are privilege and "core assumptions".

Failure of communication due to privilege is commonplace, and the reason is probably sufficiently obvious to most readers that I won't spend much time on it. The nature of privilege is that it's difficult to notice when you have it, which makes it easy to assume everyone has it, which means that the usual pattern-recognition features of the brain go in the wrong direction.

This makes people immune to both anecdotal and systematic evidence. Anecdotal because the anecdotes, regardless of number, don't fit their personal experience, and so get written off as unusual occurrences rather than commonplace. Systematic because for any study you care to name, in any field beyond the highly obscure, there will be another study that contradicts it (and it doesn't matter if there's only a couple of contradictory studies to hundreds or thousands saying the same thing¹).

Core assumptions are more generally important, though. The connection between core assumptions and privilege are many. You could define privilege entirely as a core assumptions problem, though to do so would ignore that fact that the core assumptions a person holds are often a consequence of their privilege: the whole thing is self-reinforcing.

I'm using "core assumptions" to mean the assumptions about the way that the world works that are so fundamental to a person's way of thinking that they're not (always) aware that they're making them.

For instance, a common (and generally harmless) core assumption is that effect follows cause, and not the other way round. If I attempt to present an argument that relies at some point on the cause being after the effect, regardless of how much evidence I provide that this was apparently the case, then if you share that core assumption you won't accept my arguments. If I hold the core assumption that cause and effect can come in either order, I probably also will find it difficult to understand why you don't accept my arguments. I've given you plenty of evidence that X happened because Y then happened; the fact that you consider this inconceivable will not occur to me. Almost everyone has been in plenty of discussions where the other party appears to accept all the evidence you present and then come to a diametrically opposed conclusion from it.

It's very difficult to have an ultimately productive discussion with someone whose relevant core assumptions are not compatible with your own.

Core assumptions aren't necessarily harmful - common ones like the nature of cause and effect, in fact, are generally helpful to the majority of situations because they provide a common basis for discussing the world². The core assumptions linked to privilege, however, are harmful, because they make it difficult to get people to see the privilege.

Core assumptions aren't static - but if someone has a core assumption that is getting in the way of seeing privilege, it's very difficult to shift it. Conversely, if you can remove it, they might very quickly come the rest of the way into agreement on the basis of the evidence you've already provided.

So, the question is, how do you shift a core assumption? If you want to do this other than accidentally, the most important thing to do is to identify what the core assumption is. If you get this wrong, and argue against something that logically follows from the core assumption instead, then it will be an uphill struggle to get any evidence to stick.

Having identified it - and that's difficult in itself, because a person who doesn't consciously know they're making an assumption is unlikely to admit to it - you can then work directly on the assumption. Misidentifying it will often just lead to wasted effort.

(I'm writing this as applied to arguing against someone else's core assumption, but of course it applies without much modification to the extremely important task of identifying one's own privilege-influenced core assumptions so that you can stop assuming them and begin the long process of reconstructing your world view without them)

For instance, some people defending privilege will have the core assumption (and they might even be aware enough of it to state it explicitly):

"X and Y are different, and this explains differences in outcome without needing there to be discrimination"

There are studies carrying out controlled experiements to show that this isn't true, and discrimination is statistically visible across the population.

For other defenders of privilege, that won't be the core assumption. The core assumption will be "Y are inferior", and the assumption above will be a logical consequence of it. In that case the studies above will be useless. I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done to argue with such a plain assertion as a core assumption.

Footnotes

¹ It's not necessarily true that the massively greater volume of studies is correct, because the studies are themselves made by researchers with varying degrees of privilege, and this can let core assumptions of the entire field be entirely wrong but remain unchallenged even in the face of strong counter-evidence. (e.g. most research on the "obesity epidemic")

² There are of course plenty of core assumptions that are both extremely common and extremely harmful. "Gender is strictly binary and immutable", for instance. These core assumptions are very strongly self-reinforcing, because almost everyone acts as if it's completely and self-evidently true, which means most people never consider that it might not be (and dehumanisingly write-off any counter-examples).

Survey unsurprisingly confirms ubiquitous rape culture

[trigger warning]

The Havens, a set of Sexual Assault Referral Centres in London, have recently released a report "Where is the line?" (PDF) on, among other things, opinions on what constitutes rape.

The survey was of Londoners aged 18-25, though its findings are likely to apply to older and younger people, in other locations, without much variance.

A quick summary of the findings:

• Around 25% of the men sampled would "attempt to have sex" (i.e. rape) if the other person didn't want to.
• Depending on the details, between a fifth and a third of men would assume consent to sexual activity based on previous "sexual activity". I put "sexual activity" in quotes because one in five would "expect someone to have sex with them after kissing".
• Only 54% of men surveyed believe that if someone changes their mind and withdraws consent that it is rape to continue. (only 75% of the women surveyed believe this)
• Only 60-70% believe that it is rape to "continue having sex with a person who is asleep"¹
• Only 47% of those asked would view being physically pushed away as indicative of a lack of consent.
• Only 57% of those asked would assume saying "No" indicated an absence of consent. However, 77% of men and 92% of women state that continuing with sexual actions in those circumstances constitutes rape. It's not clear where the discrepancy is coming from between the two figures.
• Only 56% of those asked say that "they would never pressure their partner into having sex with them against their will".

No gender breakdowns are given for the final three figures, but all of the other questions have more men giving the "not rape" answer.

Unsurprisingly, therefore:

• 41% of the sample said that they had been pressured into some form of unwanted sexual activity, with only 38% never having felt pressured into any. (The difference, presumably, being those who felt that they were being pressured into sexual activity but whose partners eventually accepted their refusal).

So, looking at those figures, and assuming similar gender breakdowns for the questions where it's not specified, the majority of 18-25 men in London are willing to rape their partners. They won't call it that, firstly because they don't believe that "non-consensual sexual activity" is involved in the definition of rape, and secondly because their partners mysteriously always "consent" (due to their assumptions that "saying no" and "being pushed away" are not markers of an absence of consent).

Several things are clear from this, none of them new.

• The findings of surveys such as Lisak and Miller that around 5-15% of men will admit to actions constituting rape if you ask them about the actions are almost certainly underestimates. Cara at The Curvature points out one obvious area in which those surveys might undercount, for instance. It's difficult to ask questions even using a behavioural survey, given how different many people's definitions are from the theoretical² ones.
• The BCS survey on the prevalence of rape, despite using action-based questions rather than "rape" or "sexual assault" directly likewise considerably underestimates the number of victims and survivors.
• Our education system is an abject failure. It fails the victims, and it fails the rapists too, who might with better early education on consent, boundaries and sexuality not have become rapists.³ The current guidelines vaguely mention consent - which is still an improvement on previously. A good teacher, within those guidelines, could do a lot to teach about consent. A bad teacher could mostly ignore the whole subject and still be within the letter of the guidelines. Having failed to give good guidance to people as children before they become rapists, there's then very little in terms of "behaviour X is rape: don't do it" public information campaigns later on. There have been a few recently, but there need to be more.
• Rape and sexual assault are defined in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 as [a sexual act], without consent and "[the perpetrator] does not reasonably believe that [the victim] consents". As I've said before, that last condition only makes sense⁴ if society in general, as a matter of strong consensus, knows what consent is. This survey suggests that at least half of society doesn't, which makes it trivial for perpetrators to get away. Under the definitions being used by many of the survey respondents, most rape allegations are false, and most rapists "belief" in "consent" is "reasonable".

¹ There's some unusual wording here, but we can probably assume similar numbers for the more common case where the rape starts while the person is asleep, rather than someone who originally consented falling asleep in the middle.

² I want to say "real" here, but how real is a definition that over half the population doesn't believe to be accurate?

³ I do wonder how many of the "committed suicide after a false accusation" cases are actually "committed suicide after realising that the accusation wasn't false".

⁴ I cannot construct even a theoretical situation where someone who was actually taking reasonable steps to ensure consent would nevertheless end up raping someone, so the best this condition gets to in an ideal society is "unnecessary". For now "actively harmful" is about right.

Male as default

Dear Mark Hendrick MP (Labour & Co-operative, Preston)

The 18th Century called. They want their gender essentialism back. Please contact your nearest temporal courier.

Also, you may want to spend more time with your constituents, since you seem to have forgotten what they look like.

Yours sincerely

Me

Privileged Analogies, and a suggested replacement

One thing I've been seeing happen a lot recently is the use of various mental health conditions being used as analogies in the discussion of political ideas or proposals or strategies.

Or rather, the author's privileged misperception of what a mental health condition is actually like being used as an analogy.

Now obviously there are serious problems with appropriating someone's experience to use as an - invariably negative - analogy for your feelings about a political debate. They're well-documented; a few in summary:

• It adds to the negative general opinions surrounding mental health conditions.
• It alienates people who might have supported your view if you'd used an analogy that wasn't an insult to them.
• It creates an environment generally hostile to people with mental health conditions.

There are also obviously serious problems, purely from a literary standpoint, of using analogies where the thing used for the analogy does not in fact have most of the properties the analogy requires for its effectiveness. Given the widespread misperceptions about mental health, it's not even likely that the default members of the audience have the same misperceptions as the author of the analogy does anyway, so the "I didn't mean X in the mental health way" defence (which was already ridiculous anyway) becomes even more tenuous.

But, of course, neither of these problems actually matter to the people using these analogies. I've seen many an author, confronted with people pointing out both the social and literary problems with their analogising, nevertheless defend the analogy as the right thing to do.

So, if you can't convince them otherwise, why not join them? Not with mental health-based analogies, of course. Use non-harmful analogies instead. Making the uselessness of the analogy even more obvious might even help convince them: if their utterly inaccurate analogy is justifiable, why aren't these less harmful cases? As examples:

The Conservatives are like strawberries.

It works as an analogy because strawberries are red with a green top, and the Conservatives aren't. There are also many other ways, by the reverse logic of mental health analogies, in which this analogy works (strawberries are best in season, while Conservatives are there all year round; etc.)

The government's policy is like a plug hole.

Water doesn't actually swirl in opposite directions in opposite hemispheres, but enough people think that it does for the analogy to work. If commonplace misperceptions are a vital part of analogy making, then they can be used without ableism.

Incompatible views on equality legislation

Those following my correspondence asking of the Equalities Office why the exceptions in the Equalities Act were there might like to see how it ends. This is the reply to the last message I sent, and further follow-ups to them don't seem productive as I think we're talking at cross-purposes. (I do have another plan)

I've cut the reply up, because it's a long message.

In reply to your further e-mail, I should say at the outset that the Equality Act 2010 is not drafted in terms of exceptions to harassment protection, so my reply does not use that terminology. Rather what certain provisions in the Act do is to disapply the protection from harassment as provided for in section 26 of the Act.

I am not at all sure what the legal difference between an "exception" and a "disapplication" is, but okay.

It may be helpful if in answering your questions, I first provide some background to why there is any specific protection from harassment in our discrimination law at all.

The Equality Act 2010, as with the discrimination law currently still in force, contains a patchwork of protection against conduct which would be considered to be harassment. This has happened as a freestanding right not to be harassed has been introduced gradually into domestic law to comply with our European legal obligations in relation to specific fields and specific protected characteristics.

Prior to the introduction of the freestanding right, behaviour which amounts to harassment was outlawed by the prohibition on subjecting an individual to a detriment, which is one method of committing direct discrimination. Therefore the detriment provision covered most acts of harassment related to all relevant protected characteristics - certainly in the sense that the word is commonly understood. The detriment provision remains part of the law, which means that where a victim of harassment cannot bring him/herself within the definition of the freestanding right, that individual can nevertheless argue the offending behaviour amounts to a detriment.

It is for this reason that there is not blanket protection from harassment in the Equality Act. This explanation of the current position in domestic discrimination law addresses your questions 1 to 3.

This particular reasoning strikes me as rather backwards, but I'll look at it in more detail later.

Returning to the first part of your e-mail, this deals with the practical application of the law. With regard to how the law has been working in practice, since 1986, there have been successful tribunal cases where victims of sex-related, sexual and race harassment at work were found to have been subjected to a detriment. However, we are not aware of any cases of this nature outside employment (which includes schools) reaching the courts since the introduction of the Sex Discrimination and Race Relations Acts in the 1970s, nor since specific protection was first introduced into domestic discrimination law in 2003. So the evidence suggests that pupils are not looking to discrimination law to deal with these issues.

It never even occurred to me, when I was being bullied at school, that there might be a provision in the law that prevented it. Certainly, applying the letter of the law to school bullies is something that gives confusing results. I can't imagine that there would have been any support should I have decided to pursue either a civil case for damages or a criminal case against the bullies at my school, nor could I have afforded a sufficiently good lawyer on my pocket money anyway.

In the case of LGB and/or trans pupils, who might not be out to their families, legal action (or any form of official action) takes on even more difficulties.

At any rate, this seems more to be an argument for not applying any harassment protections to pupils (or indeed any legal rights at all, if you take the argument much further), not for specifically excluding homophobic, transphobic and religionist harassment.

I shall turn now to why we believe the provisions in the Equality Act are adequate. We recognise that the detriment protection would not cover cases where the employer treats everyone equally badly, for example where he or she subjects both men and women to sex-related verbal abuse but only a woman finds this particularly offensive. However, there is no evidence that this is the sort of situation which lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGB and T) people are concerned about outside employment. What people are worried about are homophobic bullying and harassment which would be covered by the detriment protection because it is only LGB and T and not heterosexual people who would be subjected to such abuse. Similar arguments apply in relation to instances which might be considered to be harassment-like conduct related to religion or belief.

Nope, no evidence at all that trans people are concerned about this outside employment. Definitely none. They got a lot of letters about this at the time, and amendments were tabled in Parliament (though they sadly didn't get scheduled for debate).

The idea that people who are straight and are known to be straight are not subjected to homophobic slurs is also in obvious denial of the facts. This happens all the time. It's indisputably nowhere near as serious in effect as the same slurs being used against LGB people, but it's still not right. Anyway, the Act provides the same (lack of) protection to heterosexual people.

We do not therefore think there is a gap between the LGBT harassment protection offered by the detriment approach and the protection offered by the freestanding right. We are clear however that in every case we can envisage, such acts would constitute less favourable treatment or detriment and therefore be covered by the direct discrimination provisions in the Equality Act.

As for the intent of the Act, what both the Act and the Explanatory Notes say is effectively that where a person is subjected to harassment-like conduct, they can bring a claim of harassment, where there is express harassment protection or a claim of direct discrimination where express harassment protection does not apply, but a claim cannot be made for both harassment and direct discrimination on the same facts.

Turning to your question number 4, the harassment provisions in the Act give effect to specific obligations in certain European Directives, namely Directives 2000/43/EC, 2000/78/EC, 2002/73/EC and 2006/54/EC. The harassment provisions in the Act are therefore not redundant.

This still doesn't make sense. If the provisions in the Act aren't redundant because they're needed to implement European Directives, then this means that they provide some protection over and above the direct discrimination protections, even if the Equalities Office has a self-admitted lack of imagination in this area. In which case, why not protect against all forms of harassment in this way?

Furthermore, "we're only protecting people against harassment because the EU says we have to" doesn't strike me as the best attitude for an Equalities Office to have. I would expect - of all offices of the government - them to be taking the most proactive approach. (More worryingly, they probably still are).

There seems to be a major difference in approach here - I think discrimination on unfair grounds should be illegal in all its forms. The government seems to think that only certain forms should be illegal, those that have received the most complaints in the past (trans people are going to lose that numbers game every time, of course), regardless of what this says about the actual amounts of discrimination occurring, or whether even a small amount should still be illegal.

At any rate, this seems to be the answer to the question - to get harassment protections extended to LGBT people and religious groups will require an EU Directive to give the government no choice.

I have three MEPs, one from each major party, so that seems like a good place to start. More on this once I've drafted the letters...

You wouldn't discriminate against someone else like that

It's very common for people faced with one form of discrimination to say something like "you wouldn't say/do that about/to [other group]". In practice, the other form of discrimination used in the comparison is almost always racism. Here's a recent example from Stonewall UK (The F-Word have a screenshot and some more context).

It's a terrible argument.

The basic assumption behind the argument is that racism is taken more seriously than homophobia (since the recent example is those two, I'll use them in this post, but this all generalises to any form of discrimination). The evidence presented for this is generally that the use of racial slurs is condemned, but the use of homophobic slurs is not condemned (or at least not as strongly)

Oppression Olympics

The first thing wrong with this is the standard "Oppression Olympics" problem. The nature of oppression means that it's not meaningful to ask which is worse. This does not mean that in a particular society all oppressions are equally bad, just that they're all linked together in such a complex way that even determining where one sort begins is tricky. Weighing up the effects across society of two sorts to determine which is "worse" becomes impossible. Even if it were possible, there wouldn't be a lot of point to doing so - once you know "severe, sometimes fatal", it's usually a waste of time to go around putting more precise numbers on it.

When you go from effects on society to effects on the individuals that make up society, the "which is worse" question gets even more absurd.

The line of argument of course generally ends up erasing people who are both BAME and LGB - if the response to "you wouldn't do that to a black person" can be "but I just did" the argument clearly doesn't work, but often the people using the argument assume that people can only be one or the other.

An argument that generalises to "You wouldn't discriminate on one ground in exactly the same way that you discriminate on other grounds" might be true but it's not particularly useful, since of course there are differences between oppressions beyond exactly which part of humanity is on the sharp end.

Only true if it isn't

A second problem is that the argument relies for its effectiveness on the basic assumption being true, but relies for not being obviously absurd on the basic assumption being false. Let's swap out racism for something that really is generally considered unacceptable in this country. "You wouldn't steal from a charity, so why do you use homophobic slurs?" or "You wouldn't insult people for their eye colour, so why do it for their sexuality?"

Or keep it as racism, but use an archaic slur - "You wouldn't say [obscure 15th century racial slur], so why do you use [homophobic slur]". It still doesn't work as an argument, because the whole force of the argument is in the instant shock value and familiarity of the racist slur.

But if the racist slur actually has shock value, then that's because racism is a problem. And if racism's a problem (which it is), the first half of the argument that "you wouldn't use a racist slur" isn't actually generally true. And, of course, using a racist slur purely for its shock value is exactly the sort of behaviour the argument is saying is unacceptable.

It's right about the "unacceptable" bit, though it'll be a while before that's generally agreed on.

A low standard

A third problem is that since racism is still a serious problem within society regardless of the exact severities of its various manifestations. A campaigner against homophobia really does not want to have "Why don't you discriminate against us more like you discriminate against BAME people" as their argument.

This brings out the assumption behind the argument - that because you "can't say X any more", racism is over or at least substantially weakened. It's not a good claim.

The social model of non-disability

Note: This post is further thoughts from me after reading Anna's FWD article Assistive Tech & Pop Culture: “Miss Smith, without your glasses you’re beautiful!”, so it might make more sense if you read that first.

The "Social Model" of disability states loosely that the major reason that differences between people are disabilities is that society is set up so that one point on the scale of human variation (colloquially and unhelpfully called "normal") is privileged by the way society is set up, and others aren't.

There has been a lot written elsewhere about the (usually relatively small) adjustments that could be made to fix current society so that particular variations weren't disabilities or were less severe.

It was created in contrast to the commonly-used "Medical Model" which stated that the variation itself was the problem (which at its worst justified eugenics, and at its best still did nothing about the underlying social problems). Only some variations are considered a medical problem, of course, and which those are changes from time to time (the history of the inclusion of homosexuality in the various revisions of the DSM, for example).

This post is about the Social Model of non-disability, or at least some examples of it. Human variation that could be a disability, if it wasn't for the fact that our society (well, my society, for these examples) is set up so that it makes virtually no difference.

The hypothetical societies below do of course also have effects on things that are currently disabilities - making some more disabling and some less disabling. I've based the non-disabilities for both from variations that I personally have that aren't disabling in my current society - you might the same variation but find it to be noticeably disabling in your current society: if so, I'm failing to recognise some element of my class or national privilege that makes it that way.

Sense of smell

It's a fair indication of how little UK society actually requires a sense of smell that there isn't a common word or phrase for having a below-average one. "Partially-nosed"? "Hard-of-smelling"? Anyway, my sense of smell is well below average, as far as I can tell - even if I don't have a blocked nose, I can't smell much.

The "Medical Model" symptoms of this are about what you'd expect - it takes a higher concentration of a smell in the air before I notice it, and similarly for tastes.

The actual effects in this society are relatively small. Society is just set up so that a sense of smell is very rarely required. Sometimes the only warning of a gas leak is the smell, but I think that's the only case where a message is intentionally conveyed only through smell, it's a very strong-smelling chemical that's been chosen because of that, and it's not a situation where in general an alternative warning can be given.

Experience means that I can cook food that's good to eat without more than the usual problems. When I'm cooking just for myself, I do put more spices in than most people would consider sensible, though.

Of course, society could be set up to be more difficult for people with a below-average sense of smell. It's such an under-used sense currently that I'm having trouble thinking of examples, though - smell trails ("follow lemon for the southbound line") are possible, as is more explicit use of odours to set the tone of art or speeches (like background music is currently used).

Reading while travelling

I don't particularly like travelling in general, but one thing that makes it particularly unpleasant is that I can't focus and concentrate on nearby objects for very long while doing so without getting headaches and nausea sufficiently strong to make further concentration impossible for several minutes or more.

So, I can't read, or do puzzles, or look at maps, while in a moving vehicle. Fortunately, society is again set up that this isn't that necessary. There are jobs where working on a laptop - or in previous times, pen and paper - while travelling up and down the country on a train is a major part of the job. There aren't, however, that many - it's a sufficiently rare requirement that people almost certainly can avoid jobs that need it.

Now imagine that the prevailing architectural paradigm of the last few centuries had not been "buildings of varying sizes, on the ground, with four walls and a roof, in clusters" but "individual small rooms, raised off the ground on stilts to various heights, separated by some distance and connected by walkways, ramps, and in more modern times, miniature railways". It has lots of advantages - much more garden space, the land below can be used for farming and keeping animals, and doesn't need to be particularly flat to build on - enough that a suggestion of "why not build houses" would be looked at oddly by people used to this method.

Much more travel is needed, as a small village might now loosely span several square miles: over rather than inside its local farmland. The rail networks provide a convenient solution, though - office train cabs with a built-in desk. Get in at the start of the day, and set the destination for your first meeting. The network operator (nowadays, this is mostly all computerised, with a few supervisors, but thirty years ago there were points boxes each with their own operator, and complex procedures to hand-off from one zone to another) will set the points accordingly for you to make sure you get there at the scheduled time. When you get there, your cab moves onto a short circular meeting track, to be joined by the cabs of the other attendees. Unoccupied projector cabs, whiteboard cabs, and so on can be put onto the track as well, or in the fancier meeting-tracks, a separate higher track so that they rotate at a different speed to the meeting and you're never stuck with your back to the screen.

People like me, who can't work on the move, get stuck with a low-status ground job (literally looked down upon), unless we're lucky enough to get a job in one of the few stationary installations. Which, since we spent our entire time in the class-tracks being ill, isn't that likely.

Add in a social moral approval of movement, from the secularisation of a nomadic ancestors' religion, and the ideas of having stationary rather than moving meeting-tracks and class-tracks, and having stopping points with nice views for office cabs, start to get considered "special accommodations" that get in the way of most people's enjoyment of a varied view through their working day, which has been shown to be vital to creativity and efficiency.

The radical suggestion of building compact office complexes, where you could just walk from place to place, is completely rejected. They'd require far too many stilts to be stable, you couldn't place enough windmills on top of something that big to power it without them getting in the way of each other, it'd shade too much ground surface, need lots of flat land, and you'd still have to travel some way to get to it. They'll be suggesting we live in ground cities like our primitive ancestors or foreigners next.

Other variations

So, what other variations, currently either having a neutral or positive effect on your ease of living in this society, or only causing very minor and extremely situational problems, have readers experienced, and in what alternative societies would they be considered (possibly severe, possibly medicalised) disabilities? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Insulting patients improves health, minister suggests

So, the BBC is reporting (with stock photo of "headless fatty", of course) that Anne Milton MP (Conservative, Guildford), the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Public Health, is suggesting that the NHS should use the term "fat" rather than "obese".

The article has the typical "opposing" views of "It's a harsher term, which is better" and "It can be considered offensive, which is hardly productive for doctor-patient relationships". A third view of "I consider it a neutral description of what I am, and would much prefer to be called fat than the negative overweight or obese." doesn't get a look into the article.

I'd had some hopes that the new government was going to drop some of the previous government's panic about the "obesity crisis". Sadly not (while the Minister was speaking in a personal capacity, her opinions presumably indicate something about how she thinks her department should be run). She talks about "personal responsibility", which completely ignores the social and especially class-based issues regarding access to good food or exercise, and the genetic diversity of body shapes.

As is usual for assumptions that are embedded so deep into the majority culture that they can barely be spotted, this makes absolutely no sense with even cursory thought. The Minister's contention is that people will take more "personal responsibility" for their weight if they are told about it in terms they find insulting.

Let's falsely assume that:

• All patients will in fact find "fat" more insulting than "overweight" and "obese".
• There is a general health benefit to be gained from weight loss. While some health conditions are more common in heavier people some are more common in lighter people, and the overall effect on life expectancy is basically zero. Some people might benefit from losing weight. Other people of the same weight might not.
• There is a way to cause long-term weight loss that doesn't have side effects worse than the health benefits of weight loss to this person. In other words, there's a "personal responsibility" that people can usefully take in the first place.

Even with those assumptions the idea that intentionally insulting your patients makes it more likely that they will follow your advice (as opposed to avoiding doctors entirely, or for those with sufficient privilege and luck finding a doctor who was awake in the "bedside manner" classes) is absurd.

Doctors have been advised to call their mountain-climbing patients 'sky-heads' to try to encourage them to avoid the hobby.

Patients will find "sky head" more insulting than "mountain climber". Even though they've never heard the term before because I just made it up. Mountain climbing generally increases health risks, and most people can easily choose not to do it. Nevertheless, no-one's going to suggest this approach.

Even for other cases where slurs previously existed related to a medical condition (plenty of disablist slurs to choose from here) or health-risk-increasing activity (lots of insulting terms for people addicted to drugs, for instance) it's not usual for ministers to hold up doctors who use them to their patients' faces as examples of best practice, as if there's some sort of debate to be had over whether it's a good idea.

(Ministers have other more socially acceptable ways to harm disabled people, drug users, and so on, which they'll use instead)

Yet another demonstration of how not only the "fat as super-dangerous" narrative is embedded, but also how the "fat-shaming is good" narrative is embedded.

Writing to the government

Some letters I've sent recently regarding recent issues. Specifically:

• Via Goriler of 3B, a letter asking that funding for a rape crisis centre not be cut. Please, if you have time, send your own as well, especially if you live in or near London.
• A letter to the Health Minister asking that they stop the letters accusing children of being too heavy.
• A letter to the Equalities Office to see if they have any idea what these exceptions are for.

Letters below.

[trigger warning]

As usual, please feel free to use these for inspiration for your own letters, though remember that letters in your own words are more powerful than copies of other letters, if you have the time and energy to do so.

Regarding RASASC

I sent this by email to mike.fisher@croydon.gov.uk.

Dear Mr Fisher,

You have recently announced that the funding for RASASC, the Croydon Rape Crisis Centre, will be cut by 27,000 pounds a year. This is a significant amount for a rape crisis centre, and it is likely to lead to the centre being unable to support hundreds of rape victims a year.

As the only rape crisis centre for the London area, the service it provides to victims is invaluable, and the effects of reducing its funding will spread well outside your own Council's boundaries. By running a helpline, supporting survivors of rape through counselling and through legal assistance at trials, it not only provides a vital public service, but provides a highly cost-effective way for your Council to support victims of crime.

The government have promised to improve the funding provided centrally for rape crisis centres, but it is not clear when - or even if - this promise will be fulfilled. Until then, it is necessary that others such as your Council play their part in keeping these services open. With thousands of rapes occurring in London each year, RASASC's ability to help additional victims is crucial.

Please restore RASASC's funding.

Yours sincerely,

[me]

Letters regarding children's weight

I sent this using the contact form on the Department of Health's website.

Dear Andrew Lansley MP, Health Secretary

I understand that you are looking for programmes run by the NHS and other health providers within your remit that could be reduced or eliminated without impacting the quality of front-line service.

I would like to suggest the sending of letters regarding the weight category of children, which is carried out as part of the National Child Measurement Programme. While the general aims of that programme are not in question, and the statistical data it gathers is perhaps worth much more to your department than the cost of gathering it, this particular application is not a good use of limited resources.

There have been a few reported cases - for example one last February reported at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8523707.stm and one recently reported at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leeds/10505584.stm - where letters telling parents that their child is overweight and warning of dire consequences, have been sent out to the parents of children who were physically active, eat healthily, and nevertheless happen to be marginally above the guidelines set out by the previous government for a person's required weight.

It is extremely likely that these cases are only the tip of the iceberg and there are many more letters being sent out in similar circumstances. The mechanism used to determine who gets the letters guarantees this.

Firstly, the letters are sent out based on Body Mass Index. This measure was developed as a way of providing a statistical estimate across a wide population of adults. It has never been appropriate to use as an individual measure, has not necessarily coped well with the increase in average height over the century since its introduction, fails to account for normal racial and sexual variations between individuals, and other forms of normal genetic variation, fails to distinguish between fat and muscle mass, and certainly was never intended to apply to children, whose shapes vary considerably and rapidly as they grow, especially in early puberty when the second set of measurements for the NCMP takes place.

Secondly, the children in regard of whom these letters are being sent are at a young and impresssionable age. It may have been the aim of the previous government in introducing these letters to encourage healthy eating and exercise habits to start early. In practice, of course, the effect can be quite the opposite - the child in the second article above refused to eat their meal when they discovered that - as is of course natural and desirable for growing children - their weight had increased since the NCMP measurement. This is something that could very easily turn into a serious eating disorder.

Thirdly, the science regarding weight is inexact. Multiple research studies - Orpana et al 2009 in Canada (doi:10.1038/oby.2009.191), Lenz et al 2009 in Germany (doi:10.3238/arztebl.2009.0641), or the NHANES studies in the USA (Flegal et al 2005) have shown that - at least in Western industrial societies - the mortality risk of people with a BMI in the 25-35 range is not statistically different to that of those in the current government-recommended 18-25 range (indeed, there may be a marginally lower risk for those in the so-called "overweight" 25-30 range). This is the research for adults, suggesting that the BMI guidelines set out by governments for them may not be correct. There is no similar research I know of for children - because, regardless of their weight, children very rarely die of weight-associated conditions other than eating disorders - but it seems very unlikely that the BMI guidelines set for them are correct either.

Fourthly, even if increased weight is correlated with an increase in risk for various health conditions, and even if that correlation is causative, which has generally not been shown, there remains no reliable long-term method for reducing weight in the long term. The few 5-year follow-up studies that have been done show that dieting is ineffective. Exercise certainly improves general health, but does not appear to cause weight loss. Early indications are that the surgeries currently being trialled have a greater chance of causing early death than any of the health conditions associated with above-average weight.

As you have gathered, I would like to see a general move away from the overemphasis of the crude BMI measure, and from the excessive conflation of weight and health carried out by previous governments, in general.

For now, however, I would appreciate it if the money used to produce and send these letters was reallocated into other more useful areas of your department's activities.

Yours sincerely,

[me]

Equality Act exceptions

And finally this one to the Equalities Office general enquiries address, to see what they know. I'll post up the response if I get one.

Dear Government Equalities Office,

I have a number of questions regarding the Equality Act 2010, that are not answered by the explanatory notes provided. Could you please provide me with the Goverment Equalities Office's current opinions on these matters.

The wording of Section 12 is not completely clear to me. While the application of legislation would ultimately be a matter for the courts, does the Government Equalities Office believe that this section would protect those people who identify as asexual (i.e. they are not sexually interested in people of any gender) as well as the bisexual, heterosexual and homosexual people that it more obviously protects?

In the areas of dual discrimination (Section 14), the protected characteristics of "marriage" and of "pregnancy" are excluded. Does this mean that an organisation that did not in general discriminate against people who were married, and did not in general discriminate against women, would still be allowed to discriminate against married women? If so, could you outline a situation where it would be desirable for this to be legal for an organisation to do?

The same characteristics are excluded from Section 26 (harassment). Could you outline a situation where the harassment (as defined in 26b) of a person or persons due to their marital status or pregnancy would be desirable, please?

In Sections 29.8, 33.6, 34.4, 35.4, 85.10, and 103.2, sexual orientation and relgious belief are excluded from the Section 26 harassment prohibition. For each of these situations, could you explain why it might be both necessary and desirable for a relevant organisation to carry out harassing behaviour against LGB people or people of a particular religion?

Section 85.10 also allows harassment on the grounds of gender identity. Again, please could you outline a situation where this is desirable?

Section 85.10 applies to the admission and treatment of primary and secondary pupils. Section 91, which covers the treatment of students in Further and Higher Education, does not contain a similar exception. Could you explain why it is not necessary for tertiary education providers to be allowed to harass LGBT applicants, given that this is apparently necessary for primary and secondary education providers?

Section 95 states that the chapter on General Qualifications Bodies does not apply to marriage or civil partnership. In what case would a qualifications body wish to do make use of this (for example by withdrawing qualifications from people when they were married) and why is it required?

With regard to the above questions, if the Government Equalities Office cannot provide an example of a situation in which a particular exception would be desirable, could you tell me if there are any current plans by the government to remove that exception.

Thank you

Yours faithfully

[me]

Computer says "lose weight, fatty"

[trigger warning]

The government continues its campaign to give every child their very own unhealthy relationship with food. The complaints about their plan only make the news - as in this case from February, or this one yesterday - when the child is fit and active and only just above the threshold at which the letters are triggered, but of course that doesn't mean that the letters actually make sense.

According to this earlier article [trigger warning: full of unchallenged fat hatred], letters are sent out to parents after measurements of 4-5 year old children and later of 10-11 year old children.

As a general principle, the National Child Measurement Programme is a good idea. Getting this sort of broad statistical information - and being able to compare it across years and decades - lets you track changes in the population and adjust accordingly (by making door frames taller as height increases, for instance)

This particular application of it, on the other hand, is absolutely terrible.

There are so many things wrong with the idea it's hard to know where to start, but for example:

1. BMI was designed as a population statistic measure. Since it's being used in a population statistics assessment, that's not unreasonable. However, it was never designed to be applied to individuals and has a number of extensively documented flaws for those who try.
2. Among those flaws is that it is designed for adult humans rather than the rapidly varying body shapes of children in early puberty or pre-puberty growth. Even if it was semi-meaningful for adults, it makes no sense for children at all.
3. Children tend to gain weight in early puberty anyway, which then often gets converted into energy to gain height later on. That's what's supposed to happen.
4. The letters seem to be sent out based on a point cut-off. So in the February article, we have:

   ... said that for a young girl, this meant she was 1% outside the healthy category and could be at risk of heart disease and cancer.

   There is not - obviously to anyone with any grasp of anatomy, medicine, or even basic statistics - any sudden step change in risks as you cross the arbitrary and suspiciously round number of the heavy edge of the government-mandated weight zone. (It's furthermore - as I've mentioned previously - not even clear that the risk gradient is upwards at this point). It's a hopelessly broken idea anyway, but applying this sort of step cut-off is absurd.
5. Equating health with weight and nothing else is as usual totally wrong, which is just obvious enough that the "but my child does ten different forms of regular exercise" stories make the news, but not quite obvious enough in UK culture that the rest of the logical conclusions get made.
6. As usual, it's going to completely ignore anyone who can't exercise for whatever reason, whether that is disability, a lack of local facilities, lack of time, or something else.
7. While there is a correlation in older adults between weight and some health conditions, it's not yet been shown that there the weight causes the conditions: for many it's more plausibly a symptom. Furthermore, of course, there's no known correlation between weight as a child and gaining these conditions in later life, certainly no correlation between weight as a young child and childhood incidence of these conditions, and people's body shapes and BMIs gradually change - sometimes quite significantly - over the years anyway.
8. The advice given, as the articles make clear, is going to be counter-productive. Exercise is all very well, but only for those people who can actually do it. Putting children on diets - or worse, permanent "weight-loss" surgery - will usually actively harm them, either through childhood malnutrition (which is strongly correlated with a bunch of nasty health conditions), or causing an eating disorder, or both).

I wonder if the coalition could be tempted into making an "efficiency saving" in the NHS and stopping sending out these letters. At about 1.8 million children in the relevant age bands, "most" of whom are surveyed and presumably receive a letter, that's potentially quite a bit of money saved.

Making a rough guess that the cost of sending the letter, not counting any costs that would have been incurred by the useful bits of the programme, is about £1 for the envelope, bulk postage rate, paper, printer ink, additional wear and tear on equipment, and staffing costs, that's around 1 million pounds a year that could be spent on either hospital equipment and staff, or on an effective and useful public health initiative.

The coalition so far hasn't said much on the "obesity epidemic" and neither party mentioned it in their manifestos. The Health Secretary rightly criticises the approach of Jamie Oliver, which seems to have been as counterproductive here as when he was temporarily exported to the USA. So perhaps there's a chance that this policy could be dropped.