Feeding The Fish

Some have hailed the internet as the savour of democracy and I have found the ultimate proof, it’s not the power of the blogs to reconnect the grass-roots with politics, but imitation computer games!

I present, TAXMAN GORDON, a game that isn’t at all like Pacman!

Let me unwrap this particuarly subtle piece of symbolism:

There I am, picking up all this money off the ground, when suddenly TAXMAN GORDON comes up behind me, so I run! And I run, and then there’s this tree in front of me and it strikes me…by voting for this tree, I can keep my hard earned coins and my lives! So I ‘vote’ for this tree….and suddenly the taxman is on the run! Ha ha, how the tables have turned!

Now, it’s possibly that if you finish a level, you gain a piece of information about these stealth taxes but I don’t know, because just like Pacman, I suck at it and can’t get past the first level.

I’m hoping that other political parties jump on the bandwagon here, I’m looking forward to the Republican release of ‘Donkey CON!’ and the BNP replacing the Space Invaders with immigrants. There’s a rich new political battlefield here, and I’m glad to see the Conservatives taking the initiative.

Well this makes me feel appreciated, apparently my lack of faith makes it impossible for me to contribute to society.

Speaking at a conference of Traidcraft, the Christian-based fair trade organisation, Mr Timms said: There is positive impact when people of faith are involved in the lives of their community, because these people bring valuable qualities in their service which are rare elsewhere and they are qualities modern Britain urgently needs.

He also said that political and social activism, rooted in faith, has a vital role to play in shaping modern Britain. He told delegates at the conference that they represented an outstanding example of how effective and influential faith-based organisations could be.

Timms, who boasts on his website that he is heavily involved in the Christian Socialist Movement, added: In Government we recognise, increasingly, that faith communities are sustaining families, building cohesion, reaching the disadvantaged, communicating positive values the length and breadth of Britain. And we need much more of that, not less. (emphasis mine)

Because you see, those atheists are cold, cold, unfeeling bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. Hell, we’re barely human. Sure, I may have worked directly for a charity for a few years and donated and assisted in a smaller way for a number more, but that doesn’t count you see: I need to believe in God to help people.

I’d certainly wouldn’t be petty enough to point out to Mr Timms that as for ‘reaching the disadvantage’, atheist doctors have a better track record. Or that the hall-mark of religious run charity isn’t so much helping the needy as helping the needy who are not living in sin. I can completely understand this, gay people should obviously be denied soup at soup kitchens, they’re ungodly.

As always, the problem isn’t that all religious charities are this bad, but that religious charities are demonstrated over and over again to be no more effective than secular charities from which EVERYONE can benefit. With the amount of money Mother Teresa raised, secular charities wouldn’t have built 500 convents, they would have built hospitals.

But no, government ministers again bring up the amazing argument that groups that have been actively campaigning to maintain their rights to discriminate in provision of services are ‘building cohesion’. Just as Mr Timms is ‘building cohesion’ by telling the 41% of people in this country who have no declared religious faith, who work in hospitals, schools, care homes and charities of every variety that they are incapable of contributing to society as much as people who go to church every Sunday. This is beyond stupid, it’s just plain insulting.

The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has been saying that

Some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected “in order to finish quickly the African people”.

I’d say I was shocked, but I’m really not anymore. It’s sad that this is exactly the kind of thing I’m coming to expect.

Telling people that one of the most effective ways to combat AIDS in fact causes it is more than false, it’s disgusting. Because of this man and his groundless accusations there will be more people who die from AIDS than would have otherwise.

I’d like to think he really believes this and its merely stupid and destructive rather than the other angle that could be taken - by spreading rumours like this he encourages people to stick to the church’s own ineffective line of AIDS prevention through abstinence. Anyone who plays with people’s lives for doctrinal reasons can only be called evil and I hold hope that this isn’t the case.

It wouldn’t be the first time however, figures like Archbishop Trujillo have been saying HIV can get through the ‘holes’ in condoms for years, despite endless evidence and outcry to the contrary. Actual facts aren’t important in this debate.

People have died, are dying and will die when it can easily be prevented. But Condoms are evil and that’s that.

A head-teacher trying to remove the religious requirements placed on all schools has been told that it’s ‘politically impossible’. The UK has this archaic law that schools must take part in a daily act of worship of a ‘mostly Christian’ nature and when they don’t, they lose points with the Ofsted inspectors.

Is God really impressed with compulsory worship? I’m of the opinion it does a disservice to everyone. Prayer is quite literally something sacred for believers and to go through the motions of something believers find of huge importance seems to me to do a huge disservice to them. I don’t believe God exists, I don’t believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, I deny the existence of miracles - Surely it makes every believer’s prayers hollower when I said ‘amen’?

A spokesman for the Church of England said: ‘If he is arguing for a way for individual schools to opt out of those bits of the act he does not like that is not something we would support. Either overtly or by default, this country is still a Christian one.’

We don’t want to opt out of the act; we want to CHANGE the act. These are schools with no religious charter being forced to worship when there’s no guarantee the schools or parents (let alone the pupils) agree with it, and why? Because this is a ‘Christian’ country. But who’s Christianity? Certainly not the CoE’s anymore, the Catholic Church surpassed them a little while ago. Every single religious group out there is a minority, and whilst Christians together make up 56%, that’s not a case for a ‘Christian’ country. ‘As a group we loosely share a similar set of beliefs, therefore our slim majority gives us the right to set the agenda’, really?

Dr Kelley says it quite well ‘I feel that children have a right to not having a particular point of view, they should not be promoted to a political party, nor should they to a religion. The daily act of worship is, I think, inappropriate at school.’ The political party analogue I’ve always felt is quite apt, there is a difference between learning about the Labour Party and singing ‘The Red Flag’ in assemblies. If the party in government created a law saying schools must venerate its ideals, there’d be outrage but if the established religion does the same, almost no-one seems notice.

For freedom of conscience to be preserved for all our official religion must be no religion. A secular state discriminates against no religious or not-religious group. The more political the church becomes, the better it makes the case for its disestablishment.

I personally doubt the effectiveness of CCTV, but I don’t think this story proves it either way.

“Our figures show that there is no link between a high number of CCTV cameras and a better crime clear-up rate,” she said. “Boroughs with thousands of CCTV cameras are no better at doing so than those which have a few dozen.”

Proponents of CCTV’s usefulness usually focus on its role in preventing crime, rather than solving it. But although the cameras across London’s public transport system allowed police officers to identify within a few days those responsible for the July 7, 2005, tube-train bombings in the city, the cameras did nothing to prevent the attack.

This is just hopelessly confused. Hypothetically, CCTV can reduce crime by ensuring identification after the fact or by preventing it in the first place. The first stat tells us that it is not useful at catching criminals afterwards but tells us nothing about the absolute crime rate in low and high CCTV saturated areas. It wouldn’t matter if the clean-up rate was the same if there was far less crime near the cameras. This is utterly useless for telling us if CCTV works or not.

And really, the best example of the system failing to prevent crime is the July bombers? I assume that the kind of people who CCTV would deter are those who don’t want to be seen, these people were planning to blow themselves up and were carrying as many different forms of ID as possible so people would know who they were afterwards. They WANTED to be seen, cameras were not a disincentive in this rare case. And they were able to identify them after! This is a bad example in every possible way to the point of the paragraph before.

I’m willing to be convinced but you’ll need to try harder than this guys.

I’m pleased to see the government bringing out what looks like intelligent measures to fight cyber bullying. I’m also happy they’re actually working with companies like YouTube instead of decrying them as unfixable evil.

There’s been a lot of noise about teaching unions wanting to shut down YouTube outright, or at least block it within schools. The trouble with this is blocking within schools doesn’t address the problem. Bullying uses of YouTube are in the minority and throwing the whole thing is impracticable at this point. Given how easy YouTube makes marking ‘inappropriate’ videos for removal, this should be where the future of this discussion lies.

Simply banning YouTube within schools doesn’t solve the problem as cyber-bullying is so insidious precisely because it isn’t rooted at school, students are still free to offensively use it yet schools have closed themselves off from being able to monitor the problem. Schools need to be actively pushing themselves into YouTube, setting up alerts on keywords related to the school and teaching students how to (and that they should) flag up offending videos. Banning it simply sends the message to the bullies that it’s their domain. If schools start to take ownership, this message could be reversed.

Now having a look around on the subject, I ran across this.

Teachers are demanding that YouTube, the hugely popular video sharing website, be closed down for refusing to remove violent, threatening and sexual content involving children and staff.

If this was true and YouTube were ‘refusing’ to take down such videos, it absolutely wouldn’t be something that could be trusted on the web, let alone in schools. Deeper in the article I found an example that made reassured me about exactly what ‘refusing’ entailed but also showed a different nature to the problem.

This month three pupils at Hayling College, Hayling Island, Hampshire, were suspended after mobile phone footage of two girls fighting was placed on YouTube. Max Bullough, the college’s headteacher, said he had great difficulty getting the video taken down and eventually had to turn to the police.

Bullough found he was unable to ‘flag up’ the video for YouTube’s attention because he was not a member of the site and then he could not find contact details. ‘They don’t seem to operate a complaints policy,’ he said. ‘They say they have a team who deal with flagged up content operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but I don’t believe it.’

The problem here is that instead of working through the system in place, Mr Bullough decided to instead ignore it completely and then complain. From my perspective registration is free and easy if he’d done so he’d have been able to flag up the video before a lot of people had seen it. In fairness however, that’s a lot of seemingly un-necessary steps for someone in unfamiliar territory to go through. This isn’t an isolated mindset and so YouTube needs to reach out here.

It makes perfect sense to need users to register before flagging so schools should be given incentives to create accounts, more powers on YouTube might help them be more willing to engage. I’m envisioning trusted accounts for schools that have the power to remove videos instantly, but which is quickly followed up by a review from YouTube. Accounts that consistently remove videos according to the Terms of Use would be allowed to continue, whilst those that abuse their power would be relegated to the standard flagging power. What I’d really love to see are some stats from YouTube about the processes of removal. Their press page says videos are reviewed ‘within minutes’ and given what I’ve seen I’m inclined to believe them, but I’d like to see something more numeric than that to convince sceptics.

They do have a complaints page, but I will agree it is not easy to find, in fact the only public email address I can find are for security issues and the press. A separate contact for dealing with institutions like schools would be a good idea.

YouTube needs to make it easy for people who don’t really want to deal with it too much to talk to them. Otherwise it and the huge number of educational videos on it might be on the outside for a long time. This is a double blow to students as they lose the educational material inside and when outside still have to face cyber bullying because schools have abdicated responsibility for dealing with it.

Other problems such as camera-phones in classrooms don’t have easy solutions. Of course, for a mindlessly technical solution to the problem, there exist prototypes of boxes that sit in rooms and blind any camera lens they see. Whilst I’m slightly concerned about the potential abuses of the technology (couple a few of them with the pain ray and you have a mobile torture squad that can’t be photographed), this is exactly the sort of situation a VERY low cost version would be perfect. In the meantime we might actually have to give teachers some usable powers over students, and no one wants that.

I currently have a post over at OurKingdom discussing the problems with FPTP and my alternative electoral system.  My full length piece on the system can be found here.

Depending on feedback, I might rewrite it as a series of smaller blog posts. Alternatively I’ll find out it’s an old idea that’s been dismissed and feel a little silly about the whole thing, but isn’t learning fun!

James Graham points out the hypocrisy of Rabbi Sacks fronting a BBC program on the virtues of a faith school with a diverse religious community, whilst at the same time opposing legislation that would force all schools to have 25% of students from outside their faith.

So, here we have a man lauding the power of faith schools to bring people together, while actively fighting legislation that would actually mean it happened. On a programme about a religious festival; some would call that politicisation. And he uses license fee payers’ money to indulge in this wanton hypocrisy. Doncha just love it?

And whilst I may like the idea of RE in theory, Philip Beadle shows us that the curriculum at the moment is hardly neutral.

The aim of this scheme of work is that children “understand that historians of science now view the conflict account as misleading”. Let me unpack this disgracefully disingenuous phrase for you: the government’s desired final outcome of religious studies teaching in British schools is that children realise there is no conflict between religious belief and the evidence of science. This is a lie, the extent of which hits the three criteria for a mortal sin: it is grave, committed in full knowledge of the sin and deliberate.

Francis Beckett shows that absolutely the last organisation to trust to run schools is the Catholic Church:

This summer, the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien had the brass nerve to say that sex education in schools was akin to “state-sponsored sexual abuse” of children. And the Catholic Church knows a thing or two about sexual abuse of children; have a look at the dreadful story of Graham Wilmer.

Scotland has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe and yet Cardinal O’Brien sees sex education as an evil. I think it’s fairly obvious if the church is part of the problem or the solution here.

And let’s close with something from the NSS with polls saying people don’t want religious schools.

The NSS’s Executive Director, Keith Porteous Wood, said: “The Government is arguing against all the evidence. Schools based on religion are divisive, they create injustice in their admissions procedures and they cause parents to lie and cheat to get places in publicly funded schools. The academic success of church schools has been shown repeatedly to be because of their ability to select  which they do in many instances quite ruthlessly, and this is why they are popular with some parents. A poll in the latest edition of Readers’ Digest shows that the majority of parents do no agree with the existence of faith schools and yet the Government - known for its high proportion of believers - is about to create more. Parents want good schools, not religious schools.

Here’s a link to the actual report on faith schools using their ability to select.

This is something interesting from Real Clear Politics; apparently the Florida Democrats have agreed to make their primary non-binding in order to restore their delegates to the national convention. This must have meant they saw the DNC as willing to follow through on the rules making their delegates non-binding for holding a primary earlier than they were supposed to. Some people were sceptical the DNC would hold out all the way as avoiding Florida for the primaries could cost the Democrats support they’d need to win the general but it seems the Florida democrats didn’t want to risk of being made redundant. It’s yet to be worked out what the Florida Democrats will do instead of the primary, either a state convention or vote by mail seem to be the current choices, neither are perfect but this is definitely the best way out of a sticky situation for both state and national parties.

This is a great example of the DNC actually exerting power over a state party and should hopefully set a prescient; this might be the last we see of the front-loading trend for a while.

The Catholic Church in Ireland looks set to abolish Amnesty groups in schools as a result of its recent pro-choice stance. I doubt there’s ever been such a potent example of the danger of giving religious groups the authority to impose their sometimes limited sense of morality on students. Perhaps Amnesty should start a new campaign for freedom of conscience in those schools where students are prohibited from taking part in groups that oppose the moral stance of those that run them.

What’s even more infuriating is that there are plenty of middle paths here. Amnesty operates under a campaign structure where groups can take up campaigns on choice. Very little of its activities in school are about fundraising for the general organisation, its campaigns tend to be about education on human rights issues and promoting direct action like letter writing. There is absolutely nothing stopping these schools from refraining in campaigns that conflict with their stance on abortion and still allow students to take part in some of the most important work that exists in the world today.

The Vatican has said Amnesty has “has betrayed its mission” but I think it’d be more fair to call this an example of mission creep; Amnesty’s original mission to free prisoners of conscience has over time evolved into an all pervasive human rights movement which, while laudable, inevitable bring a confrontation between those who hold the freedom for a women to choose to be a fundamental right and those who don’t.

Much as I hate the idea of this great human rights movement being held hostage by groups whose objection is grounded not in objective reason but faith based assumptions on pre-birth human nature, it must be weighed up if taking a stand on these issues is worth the lose of support for it’s core missions. For the women this helps it absolutely is, but does it harm its future effectiveness across all areas? One Amnesty’s greatest strengths is it’s authority and support from all areas of free society, by taking a stance on a subject that still brings division in our society it reduces that strength. Is this a significant hindrance? Only time will tell.