further on Flew, inter alia

I wrote a response, a bit of feedback, yesterday, to the article on Alister Mcgrath, and got this response from one of the moderators of the site, known as internet infidels, re types of atheism: There are other posts on this issue, but I supplied a number of definitions of "atheism" from respected authoritative sources just eight posts back. These definitions indicate that belief, or lack of it, is an important element in the accepted definitions of "atheism." That is one issue that is more or less settled, so far as I can see.
I’m not sure that I agree, for to say that ‘belief, or lack of it’ is an important element etc’, is like saying x or not x is important, which hardly gets us any further. The various dictionary definitions provided are mostly of the ‘belief that there is no god’ or strong atheist (or even polyatheist) type, and they include, interestingly, the Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and the Free Online Dictionary of Philosophy. So I’ll stick to my view that atheism implies a positive belief in the non-existence of a putative entity, or a set of putative entities.
And so to Flew’s claim that the teleological argument has become stronger. First, Flew is impressed with the difficulties involved in the origins of life. “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote to Philosophy Now last spring. He has a point, though his concern about Darwinism’s failure to account for it does seem misplaced. The theory of evolution by natural selection is designed to account for the origin of species, not of life. Something very different is required to account for that particular origin. But has Flew exaggerated the difficulty, and what of the current candidates? It does seem on the face of it, a positing of a god of the gaps. Extraordinarily, Flew has admitted that he hasn’t examined any of the material published on the science of life’s origin in the past decade or so (he’s eighty-one, but is that an excuse when you base your arguments, or your doubts, largely on this issue?)
By the way, apropos of almost nothing, here’s a great website providing 78 solid arguments for the existence of the Christian god.
More seriously, on another part of the same site there are some interesting reflections on abiogenesis (‘a hypothetical organic phenomenon by which living organisms are created from non-living matter’). This little article clarifies some of the conditions required for replicating forms to develop, and touches on the most complex self-replicators so far discovered/created, and the simplest life forms known (Mycoplasma genitalium has a genome of only 400 units).
An interesting quote from the article (grammatically corrected):
In order to explain all life as we see it today, all we need is one single molecule capable of replication and mutation. Once we have that, evolution will take over. This can be achieved in a molecule containing a sequence of only 32 amino acids. If we can order 100,000 coloured balls in 5 minutes, how long will it take to order just 32 molecules out of the billions of billions of atoms available over a period of billions of years? Remember that these molecules are attracted to each other and will readily bond together given appropriate conditions.
Put this way, it all sounds a bit more promising. So, before tackling teleology more broadly, I’ll focus next on abiogenesis.

more ramblings

On Easter Sunday, trying to flee religion and holidays and other unmentionables I betook myself en voiture towards the hills with a vague plan to bush-walk, but I just drove windingly and listened to various items on the radio, film reviews, art discussions, discussions about the influence of Walter Benjamin, about the rising influence of the religious right in Oz politics, with half an eye out for places to stop the car and walk, I haven’t bush-walked for years and obviously wasn’t prepared, didn’t have any maps with me, or water, though I have a swag of bush-walking maps here, and galleons of bottled water. Then I realised I was running low on petrol and wound myself back to the city, finally back to the Market Bazaar where I picked up money owing, bought an old two-dollar book and took a large lunch alone at a window bench and read some pages of the book, Frank Kermode circa 1969 writing on Walter Benjamin writing on Kafka and Proust, Benjamin had this clever idea that the asthmatic ever-out-of breath Proust’s long-winded style was an antidote of sorts, an ideal space where one never had to stop to draw breath in one’s rambling reflections. Be that as it may, I stumbled back to the car feeling exhausted strangely, hot between the legs, bit of a bowel problem and a familiar touch of rash in the heat, just as well maybe I didn’t go walking but I need it, so home I came and some trouble with the foster-lad which I’ll pass over, and the poor wee tiny dog’s got a kinked back and’s in terrible pain, so a trip to the vet’s in the offing, early next week, and waiting for me was the atheism stuff, yes quite interesting, a whole bulletin board of expert and other commentary on Flew’s apparent conversion, is it really such a big deal, he’s eighty-one, getting soft in the head but hey we’re all living longer, hale and hearty and wits aplenty, and anyway Flew’s reasons for ‘converting’ seem a bit weak, invoking a god of the gaps because we can’t explain the origins of life and maybe the origins of the universe itself, pre the big bang, so roll out god to make these big things happen that we can’t explain then roll him back into his celestial closet, sorry not a he.

evolution again, etc

I’ve been making a couple of comments at Online Opinion, in which every month there’s an article on religion. This month it was the sceptics’ turn, with a piece on the advance of science and the retreat of religion. It also dismisses, I think rightly, Stephen J Gould’s attempt to separate science and religion into mutually exclusive spheres. But boy what a commotion these issues cause. About ninety comments so far, way more than for any other article this month.
Out of the comments, some remarks about Anthony Flew’s apparent switch from atheism to ‘deism’, according to one commentator. I’ve yet to discover what the difference is between deism and theism, if any, but Flew says, in an interview with Gary Habermas that he has not been swayed by any versions of the cosmological argument, or the ontological argument, or any other argument but the teleological one. He claims that the argument for intelligent design has become much stronger in recent years. My next task, then, will be to examine these arguments.
Flew claims that new work in physics, around the big bang theory, has helped to turn his mind towards deism. He also feels that the theory of evolution increasingly suffers from serious flaws. He also seems to have problems with the failure to account for the origin of life itself within the theory of evolution or any other theory. Another commentator on the essay at Online Opinion, incidentally titled The Science of Religion, points out that self-replicating organisms are ‘irreducibly complex’. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it must be addressed.
This brief article by Edward Max responds well to some of the issues raised by creationists, but it doesn’t touch much on the origin of life issue, presumably because he considers it irrelevant. It does provide a clever challenge to present the evidence against evolution on the basis of its violation of the second law of thermodynamics, an argument or ploy often used by creationists, apparently. That’s to say, to present a detailed mathematical analysis of how evolution violates the second law. Apparently no ‘creation scientist’ has taken up this challenge, though many still make the claim regardless.
So much to do, I just drift or shift from one fascinating theme to another, moving along the thread of my own wonder. I’ve read today an article critiquing most negatively a book by Oxford theology professor Alister McGrath, and why not I say, for McGrath clearly blames atheism for way more than it could reasonably be blamed for thereby revealing much prejudice and ignorance, but along the way, and what most interested me about it all, was the question of whether atheists positively believe in no god or just negatively disbelieve in a god or gods, and the article claims that you just have to not believe to be an atheist, but some have distinguished two types of atheism, weak atheism or negative atheism which just doesn’t believe, and positive or strong atheism, which does believe in no god, or takes the positive position of denial. Now I personally believe you can’t be an atheist without taking up the strong or positive position. Babies don’t believe in god because the concept hasn’t been introduced to them, but it would seem absurd to call them atheists. And the same for dogs or cats for that matter, they’ll always be atheists if to be an atheist simply entails not believing in gods, but calling a dog or a cat an atheist is simply a category mistake, I think that’s what they call it. No, to be an atheist is to take up a positive position, to affirm a particular belief, that there are no gods in the universe. I agree that this doesn’t amount to a belief system, though it is a position, and I suppose for it to be coherent it has to fit with other beliefs (for example, atheists tend not to believe in the after-life, or spiritualism, or astrology, and these non-beliefs are not accidentally associated with atheism. Atheism is often, indeed surely almost always, associated with a non-supernatural or a materialist worldview). You can see how believers would tend to see a belief system there (though of course communism is no more a part of that system than is belief in capitalism or democracy or absolute monarchy).
Maybe though I’m getting weak atheism as a position all wrong, since some fairly astute thinkers claim to be weak atheists. This atheists’ website describes weak atheism as ‘simple scepticism’, so it’s not really like not having a position is it? And where does it sit with agnosticism? The same website offers two types of agnosticism, strict agnosticism and empirical agnosticism, the first based on the idea that we cannot ever know, the second claiming simply that we do not know. So where so I place myself? A strong atheist? Can I prove this negative? No, but I firmly believe that there are no gods. So how do I defend myself against the claim that this belief is based on faith and not on evidence? Wouldn’t it be easier to do a Bertie Russell and ‘retreat’, if that’s what it is, to strict agnosticism, saying that, whatever my firm conviction might be, I don’t believe that there’s any conclusive proof one way or another? Maybe if I was a better logician I’d do just that, but out of ignorance and maybe pig-headedness I want to assert the non-existence argument, citing as proof that naturalist explanations reduce substantially the likelihood of a god’s existence, except maybe as initial ball-roller, something very remote indeed. I do think though that a better understanding of the origin of life itself would deal a further blow to the theists, and that this might come from extra-terrestrial examples (Mars being an obvious candidate). That’ll be enough of this meandering stuff for now.

BWT, like the pickie?

I’ve managed to download this picture of myself for the delectation of fans. Okay it was taken eighty-odd years ago but I did look rather raffishly paragonic in my youth, doncha reckon?

a laugh, kind of

Have been living in the slough of despond lately (no love, no friends, no life) and suffering sleepless nights and I-don-wanna-face-the-day mornings, but something slightly bemusing roused me this morning. A nine am phone call from a woman whose politics I’ve not been able to work out suggested I listen to a radio this morning on child abuse ‘because I might be interested’, and also invited me to a talk to be given next month on the abuses of the media. I like going to these sorts of public lectures, she told me (and so do I but I have nobody to go with, to kick me into gear). Turns out the speaker will be David Flint. I was non-committal.
So what are her politics? The last series of radio talks she told me about was by Noam Chomsky. She’s Polish, a devout catholic, and I think she just takes a naïve interest in all these clever people…

foster-caring, a few general remarks

Wanting to be careful these days to avoid specifics and naming names, a limit which might even stimulate me to improved writing. So, carefully, to foster caring, with teenagers who are new to me. It’s rather like teaching, though more informal. I recall many years ago hearing Simone de Beauvoir remarking that as a teacher she was only interested in the clever ones. Teachers are probably prohibited from saying that sort of thing these days. I sympathised with de Beauvoir but also felt uncomfortable – a sort of vicarious guilt that she/I might be happy to leave the flounderers floundering. Since then I’ve dabbled in teaching, or at least learning about teaching, and I’ve been impressed beyond measure at the sacrifices and the efforts made by some professionals to assist the flounderers (while also secretly feeling that they must lack something, whether in imagination or in intellect, to so allow themselves to keep company with those who will never make much of an impact on the sum total of human knowledge and achievement).
As a foster-carer I’ve been involved with kids some of whom have had a history of behavioural problems, problems in bonding with others, problems of trust, problems with the education system and learning generally. With the supported system I work in, I’m advised not under any circumstances to come down too heavily on my charges. My role, first and foremost, is to provide a roof, a relaxed bond, security. The social workers, the house support network, the department (CYFS), these are the people to apply the heavy hand when need arises. My role is to help out, to facilitate progress towards independent living.
This all sounds easy-peasy, but of course it isn’t always. For example, it’s very easy to forget just how wet behind the ears many teenagers can be. Some come to me without ever having been allowed in the kitchen, without ever having washed a dish or switched on a vacuum cleaner. They can’t necessarily be trusted to catch a bus to school. They’ll turn up their nose at all the exotic food you bring in and cook up, while a trip to KFC is better than sex for them.
For me the hardest thing is to not blow up at the egregious conservatism of the teenager. Was I like this at sixteen. In some areas maybe, but mostly not. Most parents, though they might suffer the enormous frustration of having their teen offspring repudiate all their efforts to educate or even simply advise them, at least see those teenagers emerge from these years of trial with all their old traits of determination, curiosity and venturesomeness surprisingly recast. The foster-carer is different, the gap might be wider but at the same time less concerning, since it’s more of a teacher-pupil relationship than a parent–child one. There’s generally nowhere near as much investment on the adult’s part. In some ways this causes other problems, as the carer might more easily become dismissive, even contemptuous of the youth’s inflexibility, dullness and apparent laziness. The carer has to be constantly aware that what he says to the youth will have far more significance than what the youth says to him. The imbalance is enormous. So it’s vital to be positive. Sarcasm has often been a failing of mine, I have to keep it within bantering limits. I’m also not in the habit of complimenting or praising people, ask my former wife. Considering that I’m cast in the role of inadvertent teacher in a one on one situation with a largely switched-off student, the urge to deliver praise or encouragement isn’t strong, so I have to constantly remind myself that the switched-off state is sometimes more apparent than real, that behind the veneer that tries to tell me everything I do is boring, there’s in fact a real hunger to know, to be guided, as well as to be appreciated and accepted. Get too pushy though about imposing your knowledge or values and you’ll quickly meet resistance. You have to let them unfold casually as part of the relationship. It requires some patience, some detachment, maybe some maturity. A lot of this is about leadership. These kids, perhaps more than most teens, are desperate for leadership in their lives, desperate too to mask the fact.

time for some html

I think it’s time to bite the bullet and learn some computer code, it’s probably the only way to create a decent blog. The blogger help etc for my current blog isn’t helping much, I can’t even get a photo onto my profile, it keeps asking me for a url for my photo, but I don’t have any photos of myself online. Does a url have to be an internet address? I just don’t get it.
I doubt if learning about html will solve this specific problem, but obviously it’ll give me a bit of flexibility in terms of creating a unique blog, so away I go.
Have done two tutorials out of a seven-day tutorial thing, and have learned quite a lot, like that with any page you view online you can also view its source code, and from it, once you get the language, you should be able to work out how to set things up similarly. I’ll soon be looking at my blog template with a much more learned eye. However I’ve hit a snag in that the script editor or html editor which will allow me to convert text to html isn’t installed on my computer – I need a CD-Rom for it. Does this make sense even to me? Not really, but I’m making strides. Of course, this is all about text, but I do get a feeling that this is essential background to manipulating images too. Embarrassed at not having looked at this sooner.
Next day - I've just downloaded Evrsoft 1st Page 2000, which touts itself as better than Microsoft's built-in script editor (naturellement), because i can't wait for the person who's run off with our Office XP discs to come back. So we'll see how that goes...

my café’s au lait, fin d’histoire

Always been a mite sensitive to animadversions on my fave indulgences, such as coffee-imbibing and dairy product-scoffing. Eg as a chronic bronchitic, I’ve been advised from time to time by chronic experts (not including doctors) that if I gave up the white stuff my phlegmy webs would soon dissolve away. Then the medical profession was swept up in findings that dairy’s role in phlegm production is more or less precisely zero, and this repeated to me by my local GP only a few months ago, to my great satisfaction. Now I’m told, by someone who loves discovering new diets, that, no, that’s all bullshit, dairy is the cuprit. Cow’s milk, they reckon, is a real worry, what with caseine and all. Caseine? Do I really want to know?
The same person has often been on at me about my coffee-drinking. All that coffee just can’t be good. Well, as far as I know, they’ve not been able to pin anything particularly nasty on this wonderdrug. What’s more, a recent New Scientist article reports that it may reduce the risk of liver cancer. Apparently a big study in Japan (ten years, 90,000 people) has found that regular coffee drinkers have half the rate of a common liver cancer than the rest, and the more coffee they drank, the lower the risk.
The general NS position on coffee/caffeine: ‘Despite their ubiquity, the long-term effects of coffee, tea and caffeine remain uncertain’, and that’s about as clean a bill of health as we’re ever likely to get.

best jekyll

Charlotte Mendelson, a young British author, does have a way with amusingly gross descriptors, and her description of one character as looking ‘like an alcoholic baby, self-decorated with plughole hair’ provides a fine intro to John Barrymore’s portrayal of the fiendish alter ego of Doctor Henry Jekyll in a 1920 silent version of Jekyll and Hyde which I picked up on DVD a couple of months ago and promptly forgot about. Turns out it’s a real gem, the best film version I’ve seen by far.
When looking at these old movies, I tend to be impressed not so much by overall structure, or the script, or depth of character development or even acting prowess, but rather by particular images or scenes, and their visual impact. In fact I think you could almost trace the history of cinema as a very gradual shift away from this impact, as the visual language of cinema becomes more familiar to us. Or rather, the visual impacts are now quite different, the striving is different, rather less for symbolic impact…
No, actually I’m not so sure about this.
In any case, the theatrical roots of early cinema are particularly evident in this film, while the purely cinematic special effects are obviously pretty crude.
Moments I liked (some of which I have pickies for):
Barrymore as Jekyll for the first time quaffing off the potion that turns him into Hyde, and reacting as if there’s been a massive explosion inside his brainbox.
Good Jekyll treating the poor (and one young boy in particular) in ‘the human repair shop’.

handy 
Nita Naldi’s absurdly perfunctory dance routine in the nightclub to which Jekyll is taken by his worldly future father-in-law, Sir George Carew.
The sheen of the Jekyll's top hat in the 'repair shop'.
Hyde’s ‘effeminate/sensual’ hands and his fascination with them.

very handy 
Hyde’s hideous face as he approaches Millicent, his alter ego’s fiancée.

lovely lust 
The murder of Sir George.

Barrymore is just fabulous in this dual role, elegant self-contained and magnetic as Jekyll, convincingly primal as the plughole-haired Hyde - his gait and movements clearly modelled on that of an ape. It really does show, as others have commented, that more is less, that a gifted actor’s performance can do so much more to encapsulate horror than an overblown budget of special effects.

I must say that trying to work out how to post pictures to this blog has shortened my life.

more on harassment

It may be, though, that another approach might be tried. That is, that my email might be considered harassment simply because of the fact that it was sent.
Looking back at the history of my emails to this person over the past two years, i find i've sent twenty. I include only those sent exclusively to this person, rather than to a larger group of which this person was one. Nine of them sent in the last twelve months, eleven in the preceding twelve months.
Of the nine sent in the past year, four were sent in a perplexed and angry response to accusations made against me by this person in an email sent to me as well as to various other persons. Of the other five, one was the recent offending email, and another was a brief, tersely worded email raising concerns about things this person might be saying to third persons about me. Of the remaining three, two were very brief, one containing a joke, the other providing the address of a blog I liked. The only other email (the furthest back in time) contained, as an attachment, editorial comments about the first draught of a novel I’d written, in which this person was described, thinly disguised. The content of this email, as well as those of the previous year, indicate that my relationship with this person was rather more cordial then than now.
I should mention that, though this person asked me to remove their name from a mailing list which I used to send emails involving political reflections, reviews etc, in August 2003, no mention was made then that I should stop sending emails of any kind. In fact one of the reasons given for not wishing to receive such emails was that they didn’t want their names on a mailing list which might allow persons unknown to discover their email address. After August 2003 I continued to send very occasional emails to, and indeed to occasionally visit this person, who in any case I encountered socially on a regular basis. At no time did I receive any complaints about emails between August 2003 and October 2004, when I received a bitterly complaining and indeed threatening email about an SMS message I had sent more than a month before. The SMS message was indeed unfortunate and I apologised for it, but I was bewildered by what I considered an extraordinary level of response, in which accusations were made for the first time about harassment and unsolicited emails. I responded very strongly and very fulsomely to this in an email of October 13 2004.
However, I admit to being in error in one important respect over this last email (of March 5), because in that email of October 13, I wrote ‘let me swear that this will be absolutely the last email or SMS I ever address to you’.
Oops.
I confess to having forgotten this promise. I write a lot, probably far too much, so that it’s like conversation with me, and I assume that people won’t take exception to my conversation, or maybe that they’ll forgive me when they hear the fascinating things I have to say. My enthusiasm got the better of me, mea culpa. I hope it’s not a hanging offence.
That, I hope, is the end of this story.

on defamation, harassment, ethics and the internet

The Concise Oxford defines defaming as attacking a person’s good reputation, or speaking ill of a person. I’m sure we’re all grateful that the law has a rather more narrow definition. Australian law distinguishes between criminal and civil defamation, but I’m only concerned here with the civil kind.
A civil defamation finding will incur monetary penalties only. Such a finding will of course depend on the definition of ‘defamatory matter’ (I’m here talking of ‘published’ or written material, in blogs, emails etc), and this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It should be noted though – and this is relevant to my case – that emails sent to someone, and to that person alone, cannot be found to be defamatory, since they don’t involve a third person, or a fourth, fifth or seventeenth, before whom that person’s reputation can be besmirched (lovely word that).
But enough of defamation and the law, there are other more purely ethical issues here, issues around what a person chooses to post on a blog, and how it affects others. The issue of airing the dirty linen of others in public. Hurt feelings and so on.
It has been brought to my attention that I’ve already published material on my blog that has caused offence to a person close to me. I apologise for this and am in the process of deleting this material from my blog, though ultimately it is up to me, as the author, to decide what to leave in and what to leave out. So if anybody else finds anything offensive in my blog, please leave a comment, and I will have a look at the material and decide accordingly.
May I just say in my defence that, as a person still in my first months of blogging, and as a person who has kept a regular journal for more than twenty-five years, I’m still adjusting to the new situation.
As a journal writer, I gradually became accustomed to the idea that nobody knew or particularly cared about my writing. In any case, nobody ever read it. This gave me a greater sense of freedom, though I always had some imagined, idealised readership in mind. With the transfer to blogging, I didn’t change my practice much, I didn’t really think through the implications of my writing actually being available, to friends, loved ones, as well as people with a bit of time on their hands in Iceland. This was reinforced by the fact that, in the first, well, many months of blogging, I had no evidence that anybody was reading it, since I haven’t really advertised it, and I haven’t worked out a way of getting it ‘out there’. A couple of months ago there was a flurry of comments on some posts I did re evolution and religion, and I think these people found my blog because I’d listed it on the ‘Adelaide Blog Directory’, now unfortunately defunct.
With that excitement came a gradual realisation that I must watch what I’m writing, and only in the past few months have I stopped simply transferring all journal entries to my blog. I shall be more careful in future and shall cull my archives of anything I deem to be offensive or an invasion of someone’s privacy. Having said that, I cannot of course be held responsible if someone claims to be traumatised by the mere mention of their name in my blog. Mere mentions won’t be deleted.
Since the beginning of this entry I’ve been informed that the person making complaints against me made no mention of defamation, so I may have been barking up the wrong tree. Apparently some mention was made of my blog, and I hope I’ve covered this issue already. Just to keep all bases covered though, I need to explore the area of harassment, sexual or otherwise, and the internet.
I think it’s fair to say that if one person accuses another of harassment, via email, text messages, phone calls, personal visits to home or work-place, or a combination of the above, some evidence must be cited. This is a tricky area to write about, for I don’t wish to go into personal details but I do wish to defend myself stoutly against any foreseeable claims.
Much of the material I’ve found on sexual harassment refers to workplaces or university campuses, which have developed their own policies, presumably in line with broader laws. I believe these laws are state-based.
Lawlink NSW presents a handy definition of how that state defines sexual harassment. It states that, in general, sexual harassment is ‘any form of sexually related behaviour that :
- you do not want
- offends, humiliates or intimidates you
- in the circumstances, a reasonable person should have expected would offend, humiliate, or intimidate you’
Let’s assume that the definition under SA law is the same. I’m also assuming that, for behaviour to be deemed sexual harassment, all of the criteria above have to be satisfied, not just one of them.
Now, I’m not sure if the person is accusing me of sexual harassment, but I do know that a recent email sent to this person, whom I’ve known for many years, has brought about a reaction, which, quite frankly, has surprised and shocked me. I think it is also fair to say that the extremity and severity of the reaction has affected my own health and well-being.
Problems with any foreseeable accusation.
First, I don’t think it’s necessarily clear that the sending of this email constitutes ‘sexually related behaviour’. Whether there is any real sexual content in the email would be a matter of perception, and I think opinion might be equally divided. Certainly there is no overt sexual content. There may be an attempt to argue that there was a sexual ‘mission’ behind the sending of the email, but given the wording of the email, and the current nature of the relations between the two parties, I don’t think that argument would get very far.
So it may be that just simple harassment should be charged. However, let’s assume for the moment that the sending of the email is established as a piece of ‘sexually related behaviour’. Then the three criteria would have to be met.
The first criterion, that the email was not wanted, is easily met. If the recipient says they don’t want the email, then that is that.
The second criterion is also pretty easy. The recipient must find that the email was offensive, humiliating or intimidatory. Again, if the recipient says that they were either offended, humiliated or intimidated by said email, it’s very hard to argue with a person’s feelings.
The third criterion, though, is the crucial one. Should I have expected, as a reasonable person, that this email would have offended or humiliated? (We may strike intimidation, I don’t think even the recipient would want to claim that it was intimidatory). Of course I expected to get a reaction, the email was sharpish in places, and was intended to be a robust rejoinder to a person whose remarks I occasionally find offensive. I also tried to lighten it at the end with a humorous touch, which appears to have been taken completely the wrong way. In any case, I’ve strongly defended elsewhere my sending of the email, and emphasised my complete astonishment at the reaction to it.
To conclude, I’m confident that any accusation of harassment, sexual or otherwise, based on this email would comprehensively fail on the third criterion.

a fair day, a red day, a green day, a rough old day, a new day

and she arrived at last, nut brown maid
I called her, hard rocky crow call
but all I wanted was the smile again, and got that
and got more, a first rite, slow over her neck and arms
a warm, solemn touch

back to the ordinary day, dust and heat
brackish gum leaf, needles and ‘corns
a city’s green swirl, my dirty black mouth, my slouch
and home, just holding off the slime of a dazed passion
contrasting, what a contrast

refreshed, goodly, I returned
faint with faint hope, slightly shameful silly old grey hope
watched dumb as a friend, lover, friend
slipped an arm about her, slipped it off again like silk
the fair’s colour’s red but I’m green and green

better than being colourless, and the smile she gives me
it is all right just maybe

blogging and the law

I’m currently in the middle of a storm around an email I recently sent out, and around posts to my blog which have been brought to the attention of my erstwhile. Much of the storm around this has to do with writing, publishing and ethical issues debated for centuries. As an observer to this debate, over more than thirty years, I’ve always sided with the author’s right to publish, whether in thinly disguised autobiography or in direct factual terms, material about his or her life, the people that he or she knows, and so on. Of course with this right comes the responsibility, either to be as factually accurate as humanly possible, or to make it clear that this is the author’s perspective. I’m certainly not absolutist about it. In fact this is a very murky and complex area, as any examination of the debate would show, and I’m not always sure that I’ve stayed on the right side of the line, but I’ve always been acutely aware of the issue.
The burgeoning of blogging highlights this old problem anew. Nowadays it’s the easiest thing in the world to start blogging, and there are plenty of blogs, for example, being published by juveniles. What does the law say about a fourteen-year-old-boy writing a hate blog about his mother? About a depressive writing positively and invitingly about suicide? About an ex-husband slagging off at his ex-wife?
The blog is different from the journal, which is often unearthed after its author’s passing, when the issues it deals with are no longer ‘hot’. It’s more immediate and therefore perhaps more potentially dangerous, but the dangers are diluted, it seems, by the fact that starting your own blog is as easy, almost, as raising your own voice. So one poisonous blog can be easily antidoted by another’s. Also most blogs have provision for commentary, making them sites of contestation, very po-mo. Of course the blog-owner finally oversees those comments, as is only fair, so that the truly unacceptable can be eliminated, but this also problematic, obviously.
You would expect, I think, because of the greater looseness of the blog in terms of its possible content and style, that the application of the law to limit it would also be looser. A greater subjectivity, a greater freedom of expression might be allowed. This is no doubt happening, though perhaps only because the general public is allowing it. That’s to say, there have probably been few cases as yet of bloggers being brought to book under defamation laws, because blogs are not yet seen as being as potentially damaging as the stuff made from dead trees.
After having just quickly glanced at Australian defamation laws, the first second and third words that come to mind are complexity, complexity and complexity. For a start, defamation laws vary with state and other jurisdictions – an obvious problem for a medium that transcends such jurisdictions.
It’s been suggested, in my case that, since there’s a person out there who’s apparently traumatised by the fact that I even mention that person’s name on my blog, my webhost could be pressured to ask me to remove all references to this person from my site. I can’t imagine, though, why webhosts would be susceptible to such pressure, unless they were jumpy due to previous defamation actions. In any case they would surely check out the site themselves first, and make some sort of independent assessment. They might also make some sort of effort, if they could, to check out the person doing the pressuring, to determine whether that person had the wherewithal to mount a defamation action, bearing in mind these chilling remarks from a website on defamation and the internet - ‘In practice, the laws are inaccessible to ordinary individuals who are defamed due to the exorbitant legal costs involved in bringing a defamation action’.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself, if true (and it surely is), tends to render the rest of my exploration merely academic. However, there are still some very important ethical issues involved, and I’ll have a look at them in my next post.

Centrelink and volunteering

While battling with the tedious job search training rigmarole in the last week I sent an email to Centrelink regarding their policy on volunteering and paid work. I would much rather volunteer than go through the wringer of interviews for paid work of any kind. Centrelink (or the govt) clearly doesn’t like to subsidise volunteers, their agenda is to get people into paid work, but the government also likes to make noises occasionally about the importance of volunteers, so it’s always going to be a grey area. I’ve just received a response to my email in the form of a phone call from someone who told me that voluntary work can only be with an organisation registered with Centrelink as a volunteer organisation. I asked for examples and she mentioned the Sally Army ‘or something like that’. Does this mean that Centrelink discriminates between large, established organisations and smaller, fledgling ones such as the Campaign for Fair Trade? (assuming such an organisation exists – I know something like it does). Further, she claimed that ‘under mutual obligation’ people in the 40-49 year old bracket are ‘permitted’ to do 150 hours of volunteer work every six months, which is 11.5 hours per fortnight. However, I haven’t yet signed a mutual obligation agreement, though I have signed a preparing for work agreement. It’s all a bit confusing. The website under mutual obligation (which doesn’t ‘come into force’ until you’ve been on Newstart for 6 months – I’ve been on it for 4 or 5) puts it a bit differently. Mutual obligation actually requires you to do 150 hours (or more, depending on age and the type of activity undertaken) of ‘work for the dole’ (where volunteering comes in) or a training course, or part-time work or ‘some other activity’. I think it’s in connection with work for the dole that the organisation has to be registered with Centrelink. So what organisations are registered with Centrelink? I’m particularly interested in the fair trading org as well as Trees for Life – bit of bushwalking. Also would like to know if I can volunteer for work for the dole, before my time as twere. I’m sure I can, but I think that this stuff is all over and above the looking for full-time paid work, which they’ll still hassle you over, though probably not as much.

health and fitness, seriously

Bought another pedo, having returned the other to my erstwhile, and yesterday was my first full day with it. Achieved the regulation 10000 plus, with the help of a briskish late evening walk, 35 minutes or so. I’m hoping to reach the stage where I can chuck the pedo out like a toddler’s dummy, and get into more serious fitness stuff. The gym beckons, and I could rejoin today. Was biffed yesterday evening at a dinner for the erstwhile’s son, at which one daughter made a casual remark about me in leotards. Another daughter was put off her dinner by the hideousness of the image. I’ll show em.
Brekky this morn, weeties with vanilla yoghurt, and two pieces of buttered toast – this butter must be my last.
There are so many things I can do, apart from gymming. Swimming, cycling, walking, the barbells (just done some), regular sit ups, the exercise machine (the climber), pilates (via my book) and the Carnegie fitness system, all easily available to me, so there’s no excuse. My future days will be filled with graphs and charts and measurements.

the fine art of bludging

One i forgot to post from a week or so ago.
I’m an unemployable dole bludger. As such I’ve been sent by Centrelink to a Job Network provider, namely Ask Employment (a Catholic mob, to add insult to injury), where I’ve been told – I was interviewed two days ago – that I must do 100 hours, over four weeks, of job-search training. To get out of this I could give up on Centrelink benefits. This would of course reduce my circs but I’d still survive. I’m reluctant though because of a kind of vendetta I have with Centrelink. I incurred a huge debt with them eons ago, involving a court case and the whole shemozzle, a cool amount of $19000 (nout by comparison with what the ‘illegals’ are being forced to pay for their ‘accommodation’), because I claimed payment from one department rather than another while I was a student. Long story.
The difference between the two payments was negligible, and I wasn’t doing it out of greed, and I’m convinced that demanding all of the money back is an injustice, so I’m intent on collecting my entitlement for as long as possible (my foster-carer subsidy isn’t treated as income, so everything’s perfectly legal) so that the owings will continue to be deducted from their payments to me – in effect they’re paying themselves. I only have, according to my unreliable calcs, about $850 left to pay. So I’m prepared to go through the hoops, and it should be interesting to report on what those hoops are.
I’ve been given a swatch of papers by my Ask worker (a useful contact as she’s previously jobbed in housing and welfare, so I could actually pick up paid work through this stuff, as long as it’s not too much, for I don’t want to be severed from Centrelink for reasons above, and of course I just don’t have the time or the inclination for F/T work), including a couple of sheets titled ‘job search training confirmation of hours,’ in which I have to account for every tick-tock to show that I’m jumping through the correct hoops using the correct techniques. I’ve been asked to mark down time spent looking through the paper and on the net etc, which sounds easy to bullshit through, but they want me to attach the jobs I’ve looked up and applied for to the confirmation of hours sheets, so I may have to bite the bullet…

enduring love

Visited the film festival at last, and it’ll be over in two days, and lots of gatherers and atmosphere, the artsy crowd I still hanker for, and women… but I was with my erstwhile, as always, mea culpa but that was fine, we were there because her daughter had tickets, or a booking, and we almost couldn’t get in because we weren’t Catherine, but we managed, though due to unexpected lifts across town and labyrinthine carparks we missed the first ten minutes or so.
Enduring Love’s a Brit film based on the Ian McEwan novel, which it follows quite closely (McEwan was executive producer). Looking for a review of the book (I mean my review), I find I didn’t write one, though I recorded that I read the book in January 1999, quite a while ago now. I do remember a few qualms about the book, reinforced by the film, or at least brought back to my consciousness by it.
The first part of the book was particularly memorable, the description of the ballooning accident, the moral dilemmas involved, the guilt, as well as the description of the body – McEwan, for all that he has ‘reformed’ clearly relishes the macabre aspects of such a death. The resultant bizarre connection between the narrator and a disturbed young man who falls in love with him was also a theme I was able to take in my stride, more or less. What I couldn’t quite accept or fathom was the narrator’s way of dealing with the stalker, and the lack of effective communication about the matter between himself and his nearest and dearest. In the film, the central character has an intensity and obsessiveness, after the initial, calmer, scenes, which makes him hard to warm to, but of course this is the point, and it’s a point that the medium of film can make more effectively than the novel. The incident with the balloon has triggered some self-questioning, has raised some serious doubts in him which have the effect of cutting him off from others, rendering him more vulnerable than ever just when the stalker makes his appearance, at first sharpening his sense of guilt and failure.
Obviously this is essentially the narrator’s story, the narrator’s journey. The actor, whose name I can’t recall, has been chosen, clearly, because of his physical resemblance to McEwan himself (though I suspect a more flatteringly muscular version), which is an effective touch. Yet I can’t help but feel that the lover/assailant, who’s so clearly not right in the head, is treated appallingly. Wouldn’t common sense guide you towards jollying him along (within limits) while immediately seeking professional assistance? I seem to remember that in the book the police were called in but that they were singularly ineffectual. In the film there’s a scene in which, after waking his girlfriend up in the middle of the night with the results of his internet research into the stalker’s peculiar mental condition, he notices that the stalker is waiting across the road from his house, in a child’s playground, in the dark, in the rain. I found this scene a little contrived, rather in a Hardyesque sense. The girlfriend, worn out by his intensity of late, is unwilling to take in his information, or to confirm the sighting of the stalker. Mighty bad luck, but surely the stalker would be there on other nights, surely there would’ve been a wealth of opportunities to point him out to her? Apparently not, and this failure of communication has enormous consequences. My erstwhile is unconvinced by my concerns, and thinks that without these accidents, these missed communications, there’d be no drama would there, no film? She’s more willing to recognise that the failure here is a failure in the central character, his preoccupation with his ‘manliness’, his worries about being overly theoretical. These have cut him off from simple communication, rendered him half-mad himself, caught in the space between action and contemplation, a la Hamlet. I’m not quite convinced though, I feel that the bloody dénouement to this particular tragedy could’ve been more easily averted. Mundane, true, but I suspect more authentic.
Having said all that, the intensely claustrophobic nature of the story is brilliantly rendered cinematically, with close-ups, up-from-under-shots, jumpy and sometimes swimming hand-held stuff – I don’t know the technical terms. The scene in which he rushes home to find his wife entertaining the nutter is a classic example of technical variety to create overlays of panic and urgency. The performances too are solid and nuanced in typically Brit fashion. Might reread the novel now, to focus further on detail. Seem to recall that in the novel he was a science writer, with the ballooning experience leading him to hanker after real scientific activity as opposed to mere reportage. In the film he’s a lecturer, apparently on love. It was left vague, but used as a counterpoint of course. Not entirely effectively, because love isn’t really the object under investigation here. Love and madness, yes perhaps but only superficially. The nature of the nutter’s madness/love is never really questioned or considered. In the end, you could argue, blood and guts, homosexual unpleasantness and cheap drama win out. That’d be a harsh conclusion, but what we have here isn’t quite satisfactory, to my mind.

fitness – big improvement already

Without really trying I’ve improved my BMI, because this morning (March 1) I weighed myself in the proper fashion, post-ablute, pre-brekky, and came up with a figure of 74.7 kgs, big improve, bringing my BMI down to 25.8, still in the overweight range. I had a lapse though last night, and failed to go out walking or otherwise exercise. Could’ve brought things down further. I’ll try to refrain from weighing myself again till after three sleeps and three walks. Will also try measuring my height today once and for all. Still haven’t got a dressmakers’ tape. Need to monitor food intake too, but that’ll entail trying to extend my memory back twenty-four hours, a Herculean task.