Two quick thoughts

ATOS are apparently getting rid of internal email. Apparently it's to improve productivity, which may be true, but I expect - given the dubious nature of what our government employs them to do - that the more transient nature of instant messages compared with email is a big bonus.

Meanwhile, in good news for future ATOS contracts, polling suggests an increasing number of people are blaming poverty on poor people and less willing to pay taxes to help others. Mark Easton says:

One would expect that when the economy goes down people become a little less judgmental of those in need but this year's report finds 26% of people feel poverty is the result of 'laziness' or 'lack of willpower'. In the mid-1990s that figure was down to 15%.

I'm not sure - benefit of hindsight! - one would expect that. Obviously as people get into worse financial situations, their likelihood of being in favour of extra taxes on them personally decreases. Also, of course, there's an important psychological effect of blaming poverty on the poor - if it was due to flaws in character or morals which you, of course, do not share, then it won't happen to you. It's not surprising in these times that the increased number of people who need reassurance it won't happen to them outweighs the increased number of people who know so many exceptions that they know the causes are bigger than that. So far, anyway.

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.

More research on weight

DeeLeigh at Big Fat Blog reports on a Canadian study on weight and health in Manitoba. Full report (PDF).

A few interesting points

Mortality rates

The results - not surprisingly, by now - confirm the previous US, German and Canadian population studies. There is no statistically significant correlation between mortality and BMI - a person with a BMI of 19 and a person with a BMI over 40 have virtually identical chances of dying in any year. (Chapter 6)

There does seem to be some difference in causes of death - respiratory conditions are less common causes of death in "obese" people, and endocrine and metabolic conditions are more common - but as the German study pointed out - that just means we have a better idea of what statistically kills fat people. It doesn't make thin people any less dead.

Health service usage

The study also includes a very interesting look at health service usage by BMI in Chapter 5. Fat people do use more health services than thin people - to a statistically significant degree for some but not all services - but generally not by a very large margin. For instance, for visiting GPs, were the campaigns to get men to visit the doctor to succeed, bringing male GP visit rates up to the same as female GP visit rates, this would increase visits considerably more than if everyone visited the GP as often as a government-approved weight person of their gender.

Comments on the Big Fat Blog piece point out some reasons why correlation may well not be direct causation here - misdiagnosis of fat people necessitating repeat visits and weight gain caused as a side effect of medical treatment - and the German study also notes underdiagnosis in thin people of conditions popularly associated with obesity as another possibility.

The study doesn't cover health care costs directly - but they did do a brief literature review. Emphasis mine.

Studies of health care costs (not analysed in this report) show significant positive associations with BMI level (Andreyeva et al., 2004; Borg et al., 2005; Raebel et al., 2004; Thompson et al., 2001). This is consistent with the higher use of some healthcare services as shown in this report, though the differences appeared to be higher in those studies than results from this study would suggest. Some of this may be due to differences in the context and costs of healthcare, as most of these studies were done in the United States.

Or, paraphrased, if your health system is massively inefficient, expensive to use, and encourages people to only seek treatment in emergencies, you might well have very distorted costs. That doesn't mean that countries with more sensible health provision will have comparable costs.

Arbitrariness

Unlike many previous studies, this one recognises the arbitrariness of the BMI measures. After describing the World Health Organisation categories:

These categories were created by examining relationships between BMI, mortality, and morbidity. However, the cutoffs remain somewhat arbitrary and have changed over time: a BMI of 27 used to separate the low risk from the high risk categories [...]. Furthermore, these groupings may not be equally useful for older adults [...] or different ethnic groups, including Aboriginal peoples [...]. Therefore, analyses in this study used continuous BMI values whenever possible, with summarized data for the standard groups shown above as well.

I've mentioned the "step change" attitude that public health seems to take - it's good to see a study that explicitly takes the opposite approach, and doesn't take the WHO-set boundaries as definitionally accurate.

They also acknowledge many problems with BMI as a measure of weight categories (including assumptions of white European as default) - but note that they need to use something and

[...] it is the only measure available in existing data sources that covers a large and representative sample of the population (excluding residents of First Nations)

Changes over time

There are a couple of graphs in Chapter 2 noting that weight distributions have been basically static since 2000 in Canada (very similar to the situation in the UK). One of the things they note is that "overweight" is more common in men than women.

I suspect that a partial explanation for this may be due to flaws in the BMI measurement. BMI is based on a ratio of weight and height². But that's not a ratio found in nature¹ - scaling something up generally involves a ratio of weight to height^2.5, because of the way circulatory and nervous systems work at small scales.

So the simplification - which makes BMI possible to calculate without a scientific calculator or a log table - means that for people of the same build, BMI will increase with height.

Men tend to be taller than women, so will tend to have higher BMIs for the same build. (Also, there's not actually any reason, given that men and women have statistically different anatomies, that the BMI distributions shouldn't be different)

Afterthoughts

Studies like this leave governmental "obesity" strategy not as "correlation equals causation" but as "lack of correlation equals causation". There's no evidence that heavier weight harms life expectancy (though it may have some statistical effects on cause of death), and the effect on health care costs is likely to be trivial. It will be interesting to see if the Manitoba government, which commissioned this study, changes policy as a result.

Unfortunately the popular belief that "obesity" is both morally disgusting and voluntary² means that research into "how obesity is bad" gets far more attention and support than research into "is obesity actually bad for health?"

Footnote

¹ If you can view images, there's an unintentional "uncanny valley" effect in these images, where simple rescaling of the image of a person gives a slightly unusual effect. The relative sizes of body parts aren't supposed to be identical at each size, so it gives a strange effect.

² Even aside from the studies suggesting that weight and build are to a large part genetic, and that the "diet and exercise" mantra is so oversimplfied it's almost useless, this ignores the concept of constrained choices and so also contains a lot of classism, disablism, and other forms of discrimination.

Atheism and the kyriarchy

There have been quite a few high-profile incidents of racism and sexism among some atheist communities recently. These have been followed by the predictable pattern of soul-searching about what can be done to prevent them and get more people who aren't white men involved in atheism, countered by the predictable denial that there's any problem at all by the selectively skeptical.

Now, obviously any community that exists in this society is going to be vulnerable to reproducing this society's ideas of the default person, even if its aims are apparently unrelated to structural discrimination. Privilege is designed to be invisible to its owners, so without a concerted effort to work against it (and even then...), people will inevitably repeat dominant social values even if they don't want to.

But I think these particular atheist communities have more fundamental problems than that.

Firstly, what Tami said in the post linked above:

But there is a difference between seeking to use reason and making skepticism and reason an identity. The latter, I'm beginning to think, results not in injecting more reasonableness into public discourse, but less, as people who are invested in touting their own superior logic are rarely self-aware enough to spot and acknowledge the places where their thinking has been colored by bias. And make no mistake--no one is immune to the biases inherent in our society--not even the guy who calls himself a Skeptic and fancies himself the smartest person in the room.

Secondly, their aims are, by definition incompatible with the ending of kyriarchal systems of privilege.

Their rhetoric makes it very clear that they¹ wouldn't be satisfied with a society in which religious belief and lack of religious belief were treated as equal. They want to be above religion, with religious people the subject of disdain for their "irrational" and "obsolete" beliefs.

And there is the problem. They want to be on top of the heap. They dispute the construction of the heap - why are atheists not at the top of it² - but they don't object to its existence. It's no surprise therefore that debates over "what should the relative position of men and women in the heap be?" are frequent - the alternative answer of destroying the heap entirely is unthinkable.

All forms of oppression are so strongly entangled that it cannot be possible to eliminate one³ without attempting to eliminate all of them. By supporting and encouraging the existence of the heap, they make it impossible to eliminate the other parts of the heap they disagree with.

Footnote

¹ I've had to be fairly non-specific about exactly which atheist communities I'm referring to, because it's not as if there are official denominations of atheist. So the definition is going to have to be somewhat circular: "the sort of atheist I'm talking about is the sort of atheist who fits the description I give". But I hope nevertheless it's obvious enough that there are many atheists and atheist communities that are not like this, and who I'm not talking about here.

² How far down they are of course varies considerably by country and region, as well as many other factors. Trends suggest that they will get to the top of the heap and be the default eventually, at least in some places, just through weight of numbers.

³ That's not to say that I believe, ad absurdum, that all existing forms of oppression will end simultaneously or not at all. Clearly on some day in the distant future it may be that racism ends but some heterosexism continues, or vice versa. For now, however, all forms are so entangled that trying to end one (or a few) in isolation is doomed to failure.

Given the attempts by some of these atheists to, for instance, redefine religion as mental illness, I think they're more likely to increase the entanglements between oppressions than decrease them.

The moral equivalency of Miliband

So, Ed Miliband MP (Labour, Doncaster North, Leader of the Opposition) gave this speech today on "Responsibility in 21st Century Britain"

The basic theme - and if you read the speech, you'll see that I'm not exaggerating in the slightest here - is that there is a moral equivalence between:

1. fraudulently running a business for years, stealing millions for your own pockets while leaving your vulnerable customers to face abuse; and
2. claiming benefits instead of getting non-existent jobs.

and between

1. causing a global financial crisis while taking millions in remuneration; and
2. having an overgrown and litter-strewn front garden

and that a future Labour government needs to deal with the people who aren't "taking responsibility" for both.

I'm not going to pick apart the entire speech - it's quite long and just about every line involves some sort of confusion, false equivalence, and/or factual error - but a few examples.

The speech opens with:

While out campaigning during the local elections, not for the first time, I met someone who had been on incapacity benefit for a decade. He hadn’t been able to work since he was injured doing his job. It was a real injury, and he was obviously a good man who cared for his children.

But I was convinced that there were other jobs he could do.

And that it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him not to work, when other families on his street are working all hours just to get by.

Lisa and DaveG at Where's the Benefit? have both written on this already.

Misty's post at Shakesville - "Those People" was written days before Miliband's speech, and about a different country - but could easily instead be about Miliband's bizarre belief that there are tens of thousands of job vacancies just waiting to be filled by disabled applicants, if only they'd apply.

The idea that looking after children is work - though not paid work, which is the only real sort, of course - also appears to have passed Miliband by.

In Manchester, as well as helping the most vulnerable with housing, they give priority to those who are giving something back to their communities – for example, people who volunteer or who work.

They also look to reward people who have been good tenants in the past and who have paid their rent on time and have been good neighbours.

This approach means that rather than looking solely at need, priority is also given to those who contribute - who give something back.

In other words, rather than basing benefits decisions on how much you need the benefit, they will in future also be based on how much Ed Miliband MP approves of your life.

Well, no change from the current or previous government's policy there.

For too many people at the last election, we were seen as the party that represented these two types of people.

Those at the top and the bottom, who were not showing responsibility and were shirking their duties. From bankers who caused the global financial crisis to some of those on benefits who were abusing the system because they could work – but didn’t.

Labour - a party founded by hard working people for hard working people - was seen, however unfairly, as the party of those ripping off our society.

So: Labour were seen as being "not tough enough" on people on benefits. This is despite them bringing in massive restrictions on benefits over the 13 years they were in power - reducing eligibility, making the forms longer, bringing in the widely-criticised assessments for ESA, introducing an attitude of "better ten eligible people don't get benefits than one ineligible person does" to tackling fraud, and so on.

His solution - despite acknowledging that the perception was unfair - is to do it again, only more so, in the hope that it will work this time.

Well, so much for the claims that Labour under Miliband would be different to Labour under Blair. I suppose we've got several more years of headline-chasing to look forward to. Perhaps if a few more MPs had experience of claiming benefits and being looked down on as "scroungers" they might come up with some decent policies instead.

Some actual Opposition would be useful right now

The Welfare Reform Bill is currently working its way through Parliament, and unlike some of the other controversial Bills of the coalition, it hasn't got much attention. The various protests against it by disabled people have largely been ignored by the press, and Labour appear to have chosen it as an issue to be "reasonable" and "pragmatic" on.

If you have time, and are in the UK, please write to your own MPs to ask them to vote against it. Where's the Benefit? has a huge amount of background information on this Bill and the reasons why it's so bad.

Here's the letter I sent to my (Labour) MP.

Dear [MP]

The Welfare Reform Bill will be reaching its third reading in the Commons soon, and I ask you to vote against it when it does so.

Taking away benefits that people rely upon is a bad idea at the best of times, but while the economy remains stagnant and unemployment high, it is even worse. The idea that cutting someone's benefits will encourage them to find work - when hardly anyone is able to find work - is absurd, but the basis of this Bill.

In Durham, Wilkinson advertised 59 jobs when they opened. There were over 1,000 applicants - inevitably, hundreds of qualified applicants would have been turned away. Now, the government, through this Bill, wants to increase the pressure even more - by cutting benefits that people need to survive. People cannot get jobs that don't exist.

The changes to Disability Living Allowance, converting it to the misnamed Personal Independence Payment, will be particularly harsh. The government has already decided that too many people claim DLA, and aim to have a significant reduction in claims under the new PIP, on the grounds that some of the people currently claiming are "not disabled enough" to need benefits.

Their rhetoric against disabled people has been particularly vicious, with the implication from the government being that most people on disability benefits are "scroungers" and undeserving of government assistance - when in fact the disability benefits have the lowest fraud rate of any benefit, and also the highest successful appeals rate as people are impersonally assessed as fit to work against the recommendations of their own doctor.

Meanwhile, support and encouragement for employers to help them employ people with disabilities and pay for any reasonable adjustments required remains non-existent, and hate crimes and abuse towards people with disabilities has increased significantly since the coalition came to power.

Passing the Welfare Reform Bill will, quite literally, cost lives, and I hope you will vote against it and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

Yours sincerely
[Me]

Kyriarchy for kids

Durham County Council has recently put out this press release, which was reprinted in the local free paper and probably elsewhere.

The search is on for young people in County Durham with an outstanding school attendance record.

Durham County Council is tracking down all final-year primary and secondary school pupils who have never taken a day off.

The council is planning a special celebration to reward young people with a 100 per cent attendance record at either primary or secondary school.

Maureen Clare, Durham County Council’s head of countywide services, said: “Never missing even half a day of primary or secondary school is a fantastic achievement and one we want to reward.”

Unauthorised absence from school is a problem, but there are serious problems with this plan.

[trigger warning]

Pupils spend six or seven years at primary school, and five (optionally seven) at secondary school. School is generally open 5 days a week, 39 weeks a year - so that's an unbroken absence record for over 900 days (primary) or over 750 days (secondary). This includes no absences for the various authorised reasons.

According to the Department for Education, there are just under 36,000 primary-age pupils in County Durham (so probably around 5,500 in their final year), and around 30,000 secondary age pupils (so probably around 6,000 in their final year). I suspect the odds of never missing a day are well over 1 in 12,000.

Managing this is a "fantastic achievement" only in the sense that winning the lottery is a "fantastic achievement". I very much doubt that they'll find anyone. I hope they don't find anyone. Rewarding someone for that combination of luck and privilege sends entirely the wrong message.

A partial list of children who - through no fault of their own - will not be getting the prize.

Health and disability

• Those who were seriously ill for at least one day out of several hundred. Even with a great immune system and full vaccinations that's going to be tricky to achieve. I don't know anyone who didn't miss at least a couple of days of school for general illness - stomach bugs, severe colds, etc.
• Similarly, anyone who's seriously injured. Break an arm? Tough. No prize for them unless they splint it with their school ruler and carry on. Break their arm while playing rugby for the school? Still tough.
• Disability or other condition requiring medical treatment, or making continuous school attendance difficult? Nope. No prize for you.

Yet again we have "being ill is immoral". The same attitude permeates government at all levels, and society in general, with well-documented effects.

Family situations

• Bereavement? Family member terminally ill? No taking time off to visit them in hospital or attend their funeral. They should have the decency to die at a weekend and so not harm productivity. Similarly for happier family occasions.
• Family moves in or out of the county? I suppose the Council might try to chase up attendance records from other education authorities, but I doubt it. In or out of the country? No chance. Similarly for people who were home-educated at any time - it's legal, and rightly so, but that doesn't mean the government likes it.
• Abusive family so they run away from home? Or get placed in care? Not conducive to a perfect attendance record. The Council is fully aware of this

Bullying and other peer abuse

• Bullied to the extent of needing time off to recover from injuries (physical or mental)? See above.
• So (justifiably) terrified of the bullying that they make up an illness to avoid going in, or are ill because they're so worried, or just don't go in without telling their parents¹, or their parents rightly refuse to send them in? No prize for them.
• Sexual violence? Still the victim's fault.

LGB kids, or fat kids, or neuroatypical kids, or really, any kid that doesn't conform to the exact social stereotype, tend to be even bigger targets for bullies, but it can and does happen to anyone and we somehow accept it as largely inevitable; there are no equivalents of Trades Unions to speak up for childrens' rights here, and children who go on strike in protest... well, that's an unauthorised absence.

Even worse, there's nothing in this section to stop the bullies themselves having a perfect attendance record and getting the prize. "Trample those beneath you to raise yourself up" is perhaps not the ethos schools should be trying to instil.

Miscellaneous bad luck

• The last couple of winters have been extremely harsh, with schools closed several days for snow. There will have been days when the school wasn't closed but children living in more isolated parts of the county will have been snowed in anyway. Didn't walk three miles through over a foot of snow? Tough.
• Foot and mouth outbreak causes your farm to be quarantined? As usual, that's no excuse - you should break the law and come in anyway.

The TUC were very critical of the employers who expected their staff to come in, at risk to their life, during the severe weather this winter. Again, apparently this is something that starts early.

Closing thoughts

There's nothing unusual about these proposals. The value of attendance - whether you should be there or not, whether you're productive there or not, whether your attendance causes more problems later or not - is insisted upon by many employers and starts off at school. The idea that people who are ill, or disabled, or victims of assault and bullying, are somehow morally and otherwise inferior, or brought it on themselves - it's an idea probably as old as humanity, but that doesn't make it right.

There's another bit of point-missing, too. The reason that Councils have a legal responsibility to provide education and to require attendance at some form of education, is for the benefit of the children, who will have better chances in life, on average, if they receive education.

The children who attended every day have already, by that logic, received their reward - an education - and don't need an extra reward. The children who were missing are surely the ones who need more attention and help. It's far easier to reward attendance - useful attendance or not - of course.

I've sent the following letter to the Council itself, and to my two local councillors.

I write regarding the scheme described in your April 28, 2011 press release "Search for 100 per cent school attendees".

I fully understand that unauthorised absences from school can be a serious problem, and one which the Council has a legal responsibility to deal with. However, I do not feel that this plan is an appropriate part of that strategy.

Not missing a single day - out of the several hundred that must be attended - is only a "fantastic achievement" in the same sense that a lottery win is a "fantastic achievement". Not only must the winning child - I will be very surprised if you find even one, given the odds - not have had any unauthorised absences, which is quite possible, but they must not also have had any authorised absences either.

Not needing any authorised absences is, however, largely a matter of luck. People get ill. Children, who generally have less well-developed immune systems than adults, get ill even more often. Getting through over 750 days of schooling without being ill even once requires a perfect immune system, which is largely a matter of genetic luck and other factors outside the child's control.

Children with disabilities, chronic health conditions, cancer, or other conditions requiring regular treatment would find it impossible - through no fault of their own - to win the prize being offered. Effectively the Council is declaring that the genetic luck of being in perfect health is "an achievement" - which implies that it is something that the children had a choice in and control over. That is not a pleasant implication.

While luck of birth is one factor the winner or winners of this prize will need, they also need other sorts of luck too. The County's schools all have anti-bullying strategies, but these strategies are not fully effective, and one reason for unauthorised absence can be an entirely justified fear of bullying. (Being bullied can also affect one's physical and mental health, causing authorised health-related absences)

LGBT children, children with disabilities - including learning difficulties or mental health conditions, and children who don't "fit in" for any other reason are more likely to be targets for bullies, again, through no fault of their own.

Not being bullied is not "an achievement" - rare as it is - and to treat it as such is to blame the victims of bullying for the bully's actions. Worse still, the bully could still attend every day and be eligible for the prize while their victims are not!

There are many other good reasons for absence too - a bereavement in the family, being snowed in during the winter's bad weather, road accidents, and many more - for which describing it as "an achievement" to have avoided them is wrong and extremely insensitive. Think of a pupil who had an otherwise "perfect" attendance record, but took a few days off when their father died to grieve and attend the funeral. How will they feel if they hear about this prize?

I understand why the Council wishes to encourage attendance at school, but this is very much the wrong way to go about it, and I urge you to withdraw the scheme.

Yours sincerely

[cim]

Footnote

¹ The only item on this list that actually counts on school records as unauthorised absence, I believe.

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.

The misguided quest for ultimate simplicity

There's a big tendency for politicians especially to say that the simpler something is, the better. Simplicity, above all else, should be the consideration. If they're looking at being elected, a promise to cut red tape - the red tape has now been cut so many times that the next government will be buying special nano-scissors to separate it atom by atom - is inevitable.

Now, I'm not saying that simplicity is a bad thing as such. Any added complexity has to be justified, because the more complex a system is to understand, the fewer people will understand it, and the more likely it is that someone whose life, health, family or livelihood depends on understanding it won't be able to.

Generally this added complexity on average benefits default people - who are more likely to have the spare time, energy and resources to look into it - and harms less privileged people. Most people spend most of their time not interacting with any particular system. The more complex and unintuitive¹ it is, therefore, the harder it'll be to use when they have to.

The process for claiming benefits is designed to be complex to "catch fraud". What's not been acknowledged by government is that - almost by definition - real fraudsters are going to have more time to understand the forms, get the various bits of supporting paperwork together, and so on, than a person who actually needs the benefits and is trying to complete the form while also dealing with the situation that means they need the benefits in the first place.

At a commercial level, companies can offer a confusing range of choices to make it unlikely that their customers will pick the optimal one.

So, simplicity is good. But like a lot of things, not an absolute all-overriding good thing. Added complexity in the form of protective regulations can be helpful - equalities, health and safety, employment law, housing standards, etc. - and yes, it's more complex and costly² to run a business or build a house to those standards, but the benefits received in terms of people being alive, more productive and happier are usually worth the costs.

When mainstream politicians talk about "cutting red tape", though, they don't generally mean "simplifying the benefits process". Instead, they go for the regulations which are probably doing more good than harm to keep. But it's a populist stance, and it's generally supported by the press - whose owners and editors also have a dislike for regulations that prevent them maximising their short-term profit - so it's one of those rarely-questioned truths: "simplicity good, complexity bad".

I was reminded of this recently when some publicity for the coming referendum dropped through the door, for the No campaign. One of the pages had a comparison of the FPTP and AV systems - the FPTP system with a short three sentences describing it, the AV system with a full column of long paragraphs: all accurate, but written in a very expanded form. Above both, a description of why one should vote No for simplicity.

In the spirit of that - and since the No campaign is opposed to spending money on voting:

Which is simpler?

Dictatorship

Democracy

You do what I say.

We divide the country into a number of "constituencies" of approximately equal population size, attempting to make the boundaries between the constituencies follow natural borders, historical divisions, group similar settlements together, and so forth. These boundaries are then reviewed and revised at great expense every few years to account for population migration, new buildings, and so on. Within each constituency, all citizens aged 18 or over (almost all, anyway - see Appendix A for exceptions) will be placed on an electoral register to register their entitlement to vote in elections. Every five years, or sooner if the government wishes or if the government is unable to maintain the confidence of parliament, or later but at the earliest possible opportunity in the event of a major national emergency, parliament will be dissolved. There will then be an election by the following process, with an expected cost of around £100 million. Candidates will then be appointed on payment of a £500 deposit in each constituency, requiring at least ten signatures of residents of that constituency in support of their candidature. All eligible voters will be entitled to be a candidate if they can meet those requirements, and need not be registered within the constituency they are standing for election in. [several pages about postal votes, proxy votes, campaign funding regulations, campaign regulations, vote secrecy, vote security, payment rates for counting staff, the largely honorary role of the Returning Officer, avenues of appeal to the courts, etc. omitted at this stage] The winners of the elections then form the parliament. [several more pages about by-elections, forming of governments, etc. omitted.]

Footnotes

¹ A term that implies that things can be universally "intuitive" despite different people having different intuitions, based on their personal history, culture, neuro[a]typicality, learning, practice, and so on. Still, even if it's not possible for a system to be entirely intuitive, it can be designed so that it isn't needlessly obscure.

² Some types of accessible design are actually either cheaper or no more expensive than the "traditional" inaccessible forms, provided that they're planned for from the start. Fitting them into the design as an afterthought, or on to existing technology or buildings, on the other hand, can be very expensive.

Apologies for unchecked privilege

[trigger warning for ablist language]

As eateroftrees and others point out, using X-phobia to describe a type of discrimination is appropriative and disablist in its own right. Privilege and intentional hatred, not a disability, is the cause of the discrimination.

I apologise for not realising this far sooner. In retrospect, of course, it's incredibly obvious - just as racist behaviour is not "crazy" or "blackphobic", discrimination against LGB and/or trans people is heterosexist and/or cissexist, not "homophobic" or "transphobic".

I've removed the problematic labels from older posts and replaced them with the suggested alternatives, so new posts and the label list won't contain this language. (Older posts will still contain X-phobia constructions in the body: there doesn't appear to be a way to do a search and replace on every post - again, my apologies for it being there in the first place)

The cost of democracy

The No to AV campaign, apparently lacking good arguments in favour of First Past The Post, has claimed that AV would cost too much.

Plenty of other commentators have already pointed out that their claims are absurd - including the cost of the referendum itself as a cost of AV is the sort of accountancy that would get you investigated for fraud if you tried it on your corporate expenses; paying a huge amount for unnecessary vote counting machines₁ that we wouldn't actually buy; and so on.

The idea that a relatively trivial sum should be used as an excuse not to run a democratic process in one of the richest countries in the world has also been widely criticised, and rightly so. Next Left, for instance, points out that extrapolating the votes in a seat from a statistical sample would be even cheaper - Isaac Asimov's Franchise being the end of that road. (I didn't put cost saving as an explicit advantage of Vote From Hat, but perhaps I should have).

What's been missed, at least in the commentary I've read so far, is that while the principle that democracy is too expensive is repulsive to most Britons, we do it all the time - not in the choice of vote counting system, but in the operation of our vote collection.

At the last general election, there were several cases of disenfranchisement through underfunding - shortages of ballot papers that would have cost more to print; people being turned away from polling stations because local authorities didn't want to pay enough polling staff to meet the Electoral Commission recommended minimum staffing levels; intentionally using inaccessible polling stations; failing to spend time and money reviewing the accessibility of polling stations and fixing the problems, and so on. For some people with disabilities, the idea that it's not worth paying money to allow them to vote is well established.

I certainly believe that if you're going to have a democracy, you can't then put a maximum price on establishing a universal franchise - you pay the costs happily.

If First Past The Post is to be considered superior to Alternative Vote - a stance I disagree with, of course - it should be on the grounds of its ability to democratically reflect the will of the electorate, not on the grounds of cost. But let's apply that to other areas of electoral administration too, not just the vote counting system.

Footnote

1. The Meek variant of Single Transferable Vote, because it recursively adjusts the transfer values to get the optimal result (rather than the near-optimal estimates used by other STV variants), can only be counted by computer. Every other vote counting system I'm aware of, including most STV variants, can be done entirely by hand.

   A computer-assisted count - using generic laptops or desktops the local authority already has to run a spreadsheet or OpenSTV, not expensive specialised hardware - would make things considerably easier for most Single Transferable Vote variants, Borda, and Range Voting, but even that isn't necessary for Alternative Vote.

This is not the time for insubstantial opposition, Labour

The government proposals to reform Disability Living Allowance are extremely worrying. They've been strongly condemned by numerous disability rights groups and charities. There is a petition to Maria Miller MP, the government minister responsible for the consultation, asking for the proposals to be withdrawn, which you might be interested in signing.

What's also worrying is that Labour, as the main "opposition" party, doesn't seem to be doing much to actually oppose these changes. There have been a couple of ministerial statements about some of the details, but the broad proposal to reform DLA - and significantly reduce eligibility - seems to be being accepted by Labour, with Douglas Alexander MP (the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions) stating that:

Labour’s position is clear: we want to work with the government to reform Disability Living Allowance and introduce a new gateway as set out in the Budget.

I've written the following letter to my MP to try to get Labour to oppose the plans, or at least to find out why they aren't already doing so.

As usual, feel free to modify it for your own MP if you want, though this one more than most of my letters is very much written for a Labour MP, and would need considerable modification for tone to be suitable for a coalition MP.

You can write to your MP online using Write To Them.

Dear [MP]

The Department of Work and Pensions are currently running a consultation on the Disability Living Allowance, proposing to replace it with a "Personal Independence Payment". While the DLA system is flawed, the coalition government's proposals will make the situation even worse.

The proposal is based on flawed assumptions, claiming that the award of DLA discourages people from working. While there is a correlation between low employment and receiving DLA, this hardly implies causation. People with disabilities are both likely to receive DLA and less likely to be employed due to either the nature of their disabilities making many forms of employment impossible, and/or a refusal by employers to make the necessary adaptations and other discrimination in the workplace. Concluding from this that DLA contributes towards unemployment is absurd.

The consultation claims in paragraph 14 of Chapter 1 onwards that DLA is "not fit for purpose", but nowhere in the following paragraphs is it explained why. Instead, statements are made to imply this. Here, the real purpose of the reform becomes obvious. Paragraphs 14 and 15 note that receipt of DLA has expanded considerably since its introduction, but why this is a bad thing is not explained.

Their aim, as other public statements by government ministers have made clear, is to reduce the number of people receiving disability benefits. They have stated that one of the aims is to reduce the number of people claiming disability benefits by around 25%. They have put forward no evidence, however, that the people in this 25% - over half a million people in total - do not need the support that DLA provides. Meanwhile, the fraud rate for DLA is the lowest of any benefit.

We can therefore conclude that the people currently receiving DLA have a genuine need for it. To introduce a new scheme that would leave up to a quarter of them without the money they need to lead their lives is a cruel decision, made with thought only for the bottom line and not for the people who will be affected, many of whom will have to give up their jobs, or their homes, or their independence, if their DLA is removed.

This fits with the general pattern of this coalition government so far, cutting vital services not because it is necessary but because their ideology demands it. This proposal, targeting people with disabilities, is particularly insiduous, because of the increased barriers to participation in the democratic process, through lobbying or protest, that many of them face.

It is clear that they intend to make the assessment for the "Personal Independence Payment" considerably harsher than that for DLA, which itself has been criticised for being too restrictive in its criteria.

There are additional cut-backs in the document, such as the removal of mobility allowance for those in publicly-funded hospitals or care homes (but not from those rich enough to afford private treatment - a reverse means-test), or the inclusion of assistive technology in an assessment of eligibility when the benefit may be necessary to afford that equipment in the first place.

Could you state whether you will personally oppose any reforms to disability benefits which are intended to reduce eligibility and so leave hundreds of thousands unable to afford basic necessities, and whether the Labour party, as the main opposition to the coalition government, intends to present a united opposition to these plans?

Yours sincerely,
[me]

(I am, of course, indebted to sites such as Where's the Benefit?, The Broken of Britain and One Month Before Heartbreak for much of the information used when writing the letter)

Absolute or relative need?

The BBC are reporting that the proposed cuts to Disability Living Allowance could break the Human Rights Act. It's worth a try legally, though I doubt it'll work.

There's a quote from Maria Miller MP (Conservative, Basingstoke), the Minister for Disabled People at the end of the piece.

We are dealing here with a benefit which as I said is one of the largest benefits that's paid in the UK and that we need to make sure it's getting to the people who need it most.

"Need it most"? "Need it" would be a much better attitude to take to these benefits (and indeed benefits in general). Someone's need for additional cash to support themselves is not diminished just because some else has an even greater need.

Of course, given that there is a consensus between all major political parties that DLA is too easy to get - despite it already being refused to people with severe disabilities - there's not much hope here.

Much more information about the proposals and their flaws is at Where's the benefit.

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.

In praise of unreasonableness

So, the Pope recently visited the UK, though thankfully not Durham, and there were numerous protests. As head of the Catholic church he's said a large number of extremely unpleasant things, and endorsed many anti-women and anti-LGBT views. Then there's the church hierarchy's treatment of numerous abuse cases across the decades. The protesting was hardly surprising.

One of the consequences of this, as well as the general justified sentiments against the Catholic church hierarchy and the Pope personally based on their roles in covering up abuse, recommending discrimination, and so on, has been various criticism of Catholicism and religion in general, and then from that general attacks on the idea of people believing in anything "supernatural" (including deities). There's a very short slippery slope from criticising the genuine problems with the Catholic hierarchy to anti-religious discrimination (protests are not a good place for fine distinctions like that, either, unless you're very careful).

The atheist criticism of religious belief is - in their¹ own words - that it is "not reasonable", "not rational" or "not based on the evidence". The three phrasings are given much the same meaning in practice, and the disablist connotations of irrational (and the general insult of unreasonable) are generally desired.

I entirely agree that there is not sufficiently strong scientific evidence for the existence of anything that could reasonably be described as a deity, but that's really besides the point, and the use of "not reasonable" or especially "not rational" as shorthands for "not based upon scientific evidence" is extremely problematic.

I'm going to use "unreasonable" (note the quote marks) as a shorthand for "not based on scientific views of evidence and logical conclusions from that evidence" to save space, because even though that's not quite the normal meaning of the word, it's the meaning given to it in these debates. It's true that given that definition, belief in any deity or non-deific supernatural² occurrence is "unreasonable". The problem is that so are rather a lot of other things that are commonly held beliefs and take place entirely within the natural realm.

Ethics and morals

Ethics and morals are unavoidably "unreasonable" (this is why straw-atheists don't have them). It is not possible to prove solely by the application of evidence and logic that a particular moral stance is superior to another stance.

Once you make some assumptions about what the purpose of having morals in the first place is - to keep society intact, or to maximise some measure of happiness, or to prevent certain behaviours, or whatever - you can then "reasonably" use evidence and logic to make a decision about the best ethical and moral decisions to achieve that purpose. But since your purpose was selected arbitrarily, and in practice based on socialisation and other factors external to your "reasonableness", it is itself "unreasonable".

Anything else that involves a values judgement - aesthetics, what to have for breakfast, etc. - ends up with the same situation.

The scientific method

The scientific method - in extremely concise outline - is that you make a theory to explain an aspect of nature, carry out experiments to test the theory, and refine or abandon the theory according to the results of the experiments. The idea is that over time the incorrect theories will be contradicted by experiment, and the correct ones won't, and the accuracy of the set of all current theories will therefore on average increase over time.

There's lots of added detail in practice to make sure that you don't throw out correct theories, or hang on to incorrect ones, in an attempt to get to the real right answer faster, but that's not really relevant here.

The scientific method is something I personally have a very strong belief in (the basic principle, anyway - I have quite a lot of criticism of some of the details of implementation, especially in some fields of study). It is, however, an "unreasonable" belief - I cannot prove, from the evidence, that the scientific method works.

I do have a straightforward circular argument in favour of the scientific method (summarised: "it seems to have worked so far"), but it's generally not considered "reasonable" - or indeed reasonable - to use circular arguments.

Free will

This might fall within the scope of "supernatural" for some people, but it need not. I believe that I have free will, and that so does everyone else. I don't even think it's philosophically interesting to discuss alternative situations where free will does not exist because I don't believe there's a self to exist without the existence of free will - there's just particles moving along their probabilistic paths.

I have no evidence of a scientific sort for this, and only a circular argument similar to Descartés "I think therefore I am" for non-scientific evidence. It's not a "reasonable" belief, but I think it's an entirely reasonable belief given the alternatives.

So, in praise of unreasonableness

The "sceptical atheist" community is right that religious beliefs and faiths are not "reasonable". Where they're wrong is the giant leap many of them take from that to "and therefore a sign of lack of intelligence / moral inferiority / mental illness / closed-mindedness / other insult of choice." and in the implication that one can get by entirely on "reasonable" beliefs.

This results in the usual problems that happen when one group of people believes another group to be inferior to it. These are all of course criticisms that can be applied to religions too, but atheists claim to be above the "irrational" actions of religion.

Firstly, while in the UK atheists don't have the structural power to discriminate against the default religion of Christianity (whatever the Pope might say), they are by a significant margin the second-most powerful belief group and so can quite happily contribute to the oppression of believers in religions lower down the local kyriarchy. See also France and the way an aggressive anti-religious message (masquerading as secularism) has been mixed with racism for a wholly counter-productive ban on Islamic veils.

Stereotyping the extremely diverse beliefs of a billion co-religionists to their most extreme members lends itself to being a cover for other forms of bigotry (most directly racism and disablism, and a claim that one is being "unreasonable" or "irrational" is an extremely common silencing tactic everywhere).

I don't want a situation where atheists end up at the top of the pile instead. This isn't going to happen any time this century even in a secularish country like the UK, but it shouldn't even be a goal - the goal should be to end religious privilege and discrimination, but that's a goal that many atheists would reject as treating "unreasonable" beliefs as valid.

Secondly, it makes it more difficult to get co-operation between atheists and religious people on mostly unrelated social justice matters. This also makes it harder to work together on matters related to the conduct of religious organisations where, to return to the start of this post for an example, the majority of both atheists and UK Catholics have serious disagreement's with the Catholic hierarchy's decisions on abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, women's rights, and so on.

You end up with the usual problem of intersecting oppressions, though perhaps with the default in the other place, where the existence and experience of Catholic LGBT people gets erased by both their own religious hierarchy and by their supposed allies, or action within religious communities in favour of women's equality is dismissed as irrelevant because it takes place within a religious setting.

There seems to be an attitude that because religious people have an "unreasonable" belief in one area, there's no point in trying to work with them in other areas despite this disagreement, but instead one must convince them of the truth of atheism first. This never ends well. It can also lead to an approach where people try to find scientific justifications for ethical decisions, and I've looked at one example of the problems with that approach before. Science is a valuable tool for humanity, but it's not supposed to be used for everything.

Thirdly, as I've said above, it misses the point. I don't believe in social justice because I have scientific standards of evidence that the world would be a better place without the kyriarchy - I don't even know what a non-kyriarchal world would look like in practice - but because I have what would be insultingly dismissed as "faith" that it would be better (according to my own ethical values) than what we currently have. I'm happy to hold that "unreasonable" belief and work towards it. Having decided "unreasonably" that this is a goal, my approach is going to be at times very much based on scientific evidence, of course, but that doesn't make the goal itself scientifically "reasonable".

Let's be "unreasonable", because there is too much that is important that cannot be dealt with "reasonably". Let's let other people have their own "unreasonable" beliefs, if they don't cause harm; and let's focus on the harm caused, not whether that harm has a scientific or an "unreasonable" backing³, if they do.

Footnotes

¹ While my personal beliefs in deities and other supernatural things are very similar to those of a sceptical atheist, and while I agree that there is no scientific evidence for deities and the supernatural, I don't at all agree with the conclusions generally drawn from this, so I'm not using "our" here.

² The definition of "supernatural" versus "natural" is hardly the dichotomy that it's made out to be - see Clarke's Third Law. Determining whether a "supernatural" event is really "outside nature" or just a sign that some previously reliable theories need refining would in practice keep people busy for centuries or longer. Meanwhile, by definition, anything genuinely supernatural would not be amenable to scientific study.

³ People asserting a scientific backing for their claims, when their claims do not meet general scientific standards, should be criticised for this, of course, and claims that are purported to be scientific can of course be meaningfully analysed by scientific methods.

Coalition continues not taking rape seriously

[trigger warning]

The government has shelved a study into police handling of rape cases, to "save money". The total expected cost of the study was £441,000.

Meanwhile, Essex Police have been strongly reprimanded by the Independent Police Complaints Commission for, essentially, doing absolutely everything wrong when investigating a rape case. In summary: a woman reported twice - several months apart - that someone had broken into her house and raped her. On both occasions, the police reported that "no offence had occurred", without checking for actual evidence, because they were sexist ablist bigots (or as the IPCC puts it were "adversely influenced by the woman's mental health history"). When the suspect was finally arrested he admitted to the crime.

But I'm sure there's no need for an actual investigation into police handling of rape cases and consequent steps to get them to consistently do it properly. Baroness Stern's report pointed out that actually following the existing guidance would be a very good start, of course, but I doubt that £441,000 - a tiny amount in the context of government spending - will be going towards that either.

Meanwhile, the report the government was promising on "why anonymity for suspects is a good idea" has been delayed yet again, until October. This is hardly surprising, of course, given the lack of evidence there actually is for this claim, and the fact that - when I asked in August - the ministry had no evidence at all regarding the number of suspects their current proposal would affect or the likely effect on media reporting their proposals would have.

It was fairly clear right from the start that they didn't actually have any evidence backing up their proposal, but it's always useful to have more official confirmation of this.

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.

Disenfranchisement by design

The disability charity Scope has released its 2010 Polls Apart Report (PDF) on the inaccessibility of the general election.

67% of polling stations surveyed by the charity had one or more serious accessibility flaws. 68% in 2005, 69% in 2001, so at this rate, we should have accessible polling stations for the 2345 general election. Only around half of the polling stations without serious accessibility flaws did not have some other flaws, so perhaps even longer than that.

They note - with evident anger at what the press considers newsworthy - that the unusual reported disenfranchisement of voters in the recent election is a regular and unreported occurence for many disabled voters.

Some quotes from the report follow, but if you have time, the whole thing is worth reading.

Page 12 of the PDF:

When we wrote to all local authorities, we found that they already knew that 14 percent (n = 3,851) of the polling stations they had reviewed for accessibility and intended to use at the election would not be accessible to disabled voters.

More details on page 17 of the PDF, including the finding that up to 11% of local authorities had failed to meet their legal obligation to review polling accessibility, and that of the 890 polling stations that were found to be inaccessible, only 60 were changed.

Page 20 of the PDF, regarding voters who require an assistant to help them vote:

Over the course of the Polls Apart campaign we have come across a number of worrying cases of disabled people not being allowed to vote (or only being able to after a long and strenuous confrontation) because presiding officers do not know when to grant admittance to a companion to assist with voting. As this Polls Apart 5 campaigner told us:

"I arrived accompanied by both my wife and one of our daughters to vote. We checked in, and one of the electoral staff asked: (not sure who it was directed to wife or daughter) `Does the gentleman need help in completing the form?' `Excuse me I am here.' was my response. The electoral officer became agitated when I suggested that either my wife or daughter would assist me if I was unable to cope. This, it appeared, was like a red rag to a bull in that suddenly all sorts of obstacles were thrown up, not least the: `Well, I am supposed to help, but if a family member helps then there is a lot, a great deal of paper work to complete.' He seemed even more perturbed when I responded: `Fine, get the forms ready as I want someone I know and trust to help me, not a stranger.'"

They draw attention to the fact that many disabled people were not allowed to vote at all until 1949 or 1983 (depending on disability). Suffrage was not entirely clear until 2006, though, as this reversed the burden of proof - rather than the voter having to prove that they are capable of making an autonomous voting decision (a requirement obviously open to abuse), it is now required to prove that they cannot.

We will get to universal suffrage one day, I'm sure. I remember being told that we had had it for years, but 1949, 1983, 2006 all gave it to more people who should never have been denied the vote in the first place, and none of those dates were even mentioned. Sadly, though, not all the polling staff are up to date on this. From page 33 of the PDF:

However, we found that 6 percent of disabled voters had their ability to vote questioned by polling staff. This is a significant concern and implies that, despite clear guidance from the Electoral Commission, some electoral staff still feel they have the right to make ill-informed decisions about who can and cannot vote.

The report of polling stations not being prepared for blind voters seems to have been the norm: only 25% of polling stations had a tactile voting device that they knew how to use.

Page 37 of the PDF, in a section on the accessibility of postal votes (better than that for polling stations on average, but that average hides a lot of details):

Postal voting remains inaccessible to many disabled people, particularly those with visual impairments, dexterity issues, learning difficulties and low literacy. Postal voting should be a choice, not the only option, and we were concerned that some disabled people reported feeling pressured to choose a postal vote as an alternative to their inaccessible polling station.

Page 41 of the PDF makes an excellent point:

Finally, on a wider point, a notable absence at the 2010 General Election, and past elections for that matter, are disabled election staff. We all know that when a particular group is not represented in a particular area of life, at work or in our school, then the needs of the group are not visible and therefore not addressed.

[...]

This theme has been addressed in part through a parallel debate centred on the difficulty disabled people face in becoming elected representatives in public life, and the solutions that have been proposed to promote more disabled people to stand for office. There is clearly some learning that can be taken here to design solutions for increasing the number of disabled people who are involved in an official capacity in the planning and delivery of elections. The increase, in turn, may lead to greater awareness and understanding amongst electoral services about the access barriers that many disabled voters can face, and most importantly, how to remove them.

...and on Page 42 of the PDF a clear criticism of privilege and disablism.

What was interesting for the Polls Apart campaign was the way in which lack of access to the ballot and unhelpful behaviours and actions by election staff were portrayed as something new. As something that only happens in the fragile democracies of `third world countries', to borrow the phrase of a number of commentators and broadcasters at the time. We have been reporting for over 18 years about the fact that hundreds if not thousands of disabled people at every election, here in the UK, have experienced significant access barriers or not been able to cast their vote safely or in secret. What we are seeing in these experiences is the more visible articulation of the extent to which our inherently inaccessible voting system is vulnerable to unexpected events, such as an increase in voter registration or turn out, and the serious impact it has on voters' experiences.

Scope set out a broad set of recommendations to solve these problems. Whether any of them actually get done will be harder to tell - I'll certainly be watching to see if any of them make it into the government's electoral reform bill, whenever that appears.