Twindignation

10 things you should do when confronted with violence against women

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:11:20 +0200

The following post was written by Jane Ruffino in a note on Facebook. Facebook then removed it because they maintain it breaks their terms of service. I really wonder about the priorities of Facebook here considering the subject in question was convicted. Where exactly is the libel? You be the judge, and spread the lesson widely because it’s too rare we read the articulate expression of a woman who’s experienced violence in her relationship. I know I’m guilty of some of the well-meaning but useless attempts at expressing support Jane is talking about here and I’ll bet most other people are too.

Exactly a year ago, my then-boyfriend put me in a headlock and punched me until his hand shattered. The only reason I didn’t die on my bedroom floor on the night of May 3, 2012 is that he didn’t know where to put his thumb when he made a fist. It wasn’t the first time, nor, I’m sad to say, was it the last time, but it was the one he got caught for, and the one I can’t get sued for talking about.

He spent the night in a hospital, having his hand rebuilt with pins. I spent the night strapped to a trolley in a different hospital, having everything x-rayed. I left with stitches in my face and my blood-soaked clothes in a Dunnes Stores bag. He left the hospital five days later, in a cast, and with a diagnosis of “work and home stress”.

I still get concealer in my scar (and it is still sore), and I’m still not totally safe, but I’ve started to rebuild my life, and it’s getting pretty good. But while my life improves, dudes are still beating up women.

As much as I’d like to shut up about this and have people stop identifying me with something that happened to me, it’s not that common for an abuser to be convicted. I’m in a position to do something that many women are not, so I’ll keep talking until dudes stop beating up women.

We all know victims, so we all know perpetrators. It’s always someone you wish it weren’t. Believe me, I know this better than anyone.

Even though you can’t make a relationship with a violent dickhead safe for his girlfriend (or possibly for any woman), we can make the world safer for women by making it harder to get away with cracking our faces open.

Here’s some of what I think we need to do differently.

1. Swap your sympathy for empathy, and get angry: Nothing could get better for me until I got really angry, and empathy helped me get there. Empathising with me means you’ll stop asking me why I stayed, and assume that, like with any violent crime, it could happen to anyone. Empathising with him means you accept that it’s done by seemingly normal human beings, and not by easily identifiable monsters.

I do appreciate the “Sorry for your troubles”, but I’d rather you be angry with me than sad on my behalf. I know the sympathy comes from the right place, but it can feel a little like a pat on the head, and even a bit isolating. We live in a world where you can beat your girlfriend nearly to death and walk out of a criminal court straight into a pub for a burger and a pint. That should piss you right the fuck off, so if you don’t think it’s my fault, then don’t make it all my responsibility.

2. Trust us: Women like me lose the ability to trust ourselves, and we don’t often speak believably about what’s happening until it’s well in the past. Even I sometimes don’t believe me. And yes, we all take them back. It seems to have undermined my credibility with a lot of people, forever. Because hey, if I hadn’t been exaggerating all along, then why would I take someone back after he put me in the hospital?

I managed to gloss over the time I woke up with a pillow being pushed to my face. I didn’t want to believe he was capable of it any more than you did, so you should probably trust that I’m not going to make this shit up.

3. Start calling bullshit: Does your friend, your brother, your colleague insist that his girlfriend or wife is“batshit crazy”? Does she sound like a wild-eyed shrieking harpy who is totally ruining his life? I’ll tell you something: having the shit slapped out of you makes you a little crazy. Five weeks after I contacted his family to ask them to help him, I was in the hospital with a busted face. They hadn’t believed me because they’d been told I was crazy. I’m not, by the way, which I feel the need to say because trauma does all sorts of things to you, whether or not you ever get your face broken. But maybe if someone had started calling his bullshit years ago, he wouldn’t have ended up the way he is, and I would not have to rebuild my life and my sense of self.

Try it. Next time some guy says “She’s crazy”, assume what he really means is, “I’m an enormous dickhead with no respect for women.”

4. Stop looking for the truth: My account is true and real, and verified in a criminal court, but his account also represents a world he truly lived in. The fact is, we were both delusional. He believed I was a monstrous asshole, and I thought if I stopped being such a monstrous asshole, he would stop throwing things at my head and be the loving boyfriend he promised he’d be – if I only changed a few more things about myself.

It’s a Venn diagram, where the overlapping bit was “Jane is an irredeemable piece of shit”. It’s when I started insisting I was a worthy human being, when the punches and the slaps would start. You can rearrange the data points all you like, and get a hundred different versions, but there is no grey area between two overarching perspectives where you’ll find the truth you’re looking for. That crisscrossing of narratives applies to normal human relationships, but these were two competing and incompatible narratives, neither of which were rational.

This was a situation where I was trying to have a normal relationship with someone who once threw a pint of beer over me to prove he wasn’t an alcoholic. OK, so maybe that is a little crazy.

5. Let go of the checklist: You know the one. You Google “emotional abuse” because someone was a dick to you, and there it is. It’s a useful guide, perhaps, but you can’t identify abuse through a Cosmo quiz. Yes, abusers fit a profile, and in some ways, they’re all the damn same. They all try to smash your computer. They all put your phone through a wall. They all search your fucking email. And they all cry and beg for your love right after you’ve cleaned up the glass they smashed at your feet.

But there are times when we all fit the more minor things on those checklists. I’m talking about the name-calling, the voice-raising, the times we manipulate and goad and cajole our partners; it’s not OK, but it doesn’t make your relationship an abusive one. I’ve seen you cringe and turn all confessional when I tell you about things he did -– you’re like me, trying to make absolutely sure the same terrible tendencies aren’t in you. Every one of us probably has the capacity to turn into despots, or become complicit in terrible acts. Being mean doesn’t make us despots, but covering up domestic violence does make us complicit.

Working only from a checklist makes it easy to ignore the enormous difference between acting like a dick in an argument, and wanting absolute power over your partner. I’d hate to add up the amount of money I spent on therapy, desperately trying to understand if I was really the abuser all along. Until one day the penny dropped: sometimes I am a fucking asshole,but that doesn’t make me an abuser. Maybe this is obvious to you, but it was news to me. And yes, I still feel the need to prove it over and over, and I’ll never fully believe it myself.

Even I’m still looking for the truth, and I’m never going to find it.

6. Get over your need to diagnose: We live in a pathology-obsessed world. “He sounds like a psychopath.” “That’s sociopathic!” “How totally psychotic!” “Is he bipolar?” I don’t know, and frankly, unless you’re his doctor, it’s neither your place nor my place to slap a diagnosis onsomeone based on my description of him, especially given the bias I have since he cracked my face open like an egg.

Diagnosis is also what he used on me, as part of his pattern. I was Google-diagnosed with everything from premenstrual dysphoria to narcissistic sociopathy to -– wait for it -– Munchausen’s By Proxy (I told him I thought he drank too much). I think diagnoses are partly a form of excuse-making, but also, sometimes people are just assholes.

If you want to ask what diagnosis is most likely for him, try to be satisfied with “gigantic piece of shit”.

7. Focus on the perpetrator: Outside of gender-based violence, is there any other crime where the focus is so much on the victim that the criminal becomes practically invisible? Remember his name; forget mine: his name is Mark Patrick Kenneth Jordan and he broke his hand off my face. I get that it comes from a good place when you say I’m the last person you’d think it could happen to, but there’s an uncomfortable implication that it had more to do with me than it did with him.

In fact, he used my outward confidence to his advantage; it made me less believable, and it made people question me. Because rather than seeing me as the sort of person who sends work emails with my neck strapped to an emergency-room trolley, my ability to cope made me look suspicious. I don’t know what’s more humiliating: knowing people think I’m a domineering and irredeemable asshole, or people knowing how easily I caved on just about everything.

But until we shift the discussion from “Why do so many women get abused?” to “Why do so many men beat their partners?” it will continue to be a sympathy-driven discourse that puts the onus on the victim to stop getting her ass kicked.

8. Cut out the platitudes: It’s not that I don’t understand what you mean by “There’s nothing you could have done” or “Nobody deserves it” or “Even if you were batshit crazy” – I get it, but those phrases are meaningless. When I say that I want to find out why I am afraid of spiders but not the guy who smashed a door to splinters with his bare hands, I’m not blaming myself for staying. When I talk about the things I did wrong, I’m not blaming myself, I’m actually kind of revelling in the fact that I’m now safe to be a complicated and flawed human being without getting a smack for it. Just respect my intelligence and my agency, and accept that I am able to grasp the complex dynamics; I still want to understand why I had such terrible risk assessment.

I think that people are pretty good, generally, that most people try to do the right thing, but platitudes are part of an “I don’t want to get involved” attitude. You’re involved, like it or not. You think I wanted to be involved?

Stop spouting cliches and talk for real. As long as what you say isn’t worse than “you fisheyed c*nt”, you can be sure I’ve heard worse.

9. Stop raising awareness and start demanding consequences: The week of Mark’s sentencing, Women’s Aid did a balloon launch. Women’s Aid is an indispensible organization that does great work, but what does PR fluff achieve? How much more aware of violence against women do you need to be before you do something? And are we so afraid of women’s anger that our own organisations are resorting to nice-girl complacency?

Pretty much every one of my calls to the cops – even with a barring order in place – was met with dismissiveness and impatience. They won’t start taking women like me seriously until the community makes it impossible to get away with beating us up.

It’s a crime against the state, which means the victim is only a witness. Violence against women is a crime against you.

10. Don’t hit women: It’s statistically likely that some of you reading this hit your partners, or will eventually. If this is you, then, hey – go fuck yourself.

Experiencing crime abroad...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 17:23:00 +0200

About 10 years ago, I moved to The Netherlands with my wife. Within a week of moving, my wife had her handbag snatched from a pub without any of us noticing until we made to leave.

My wife’s reaction? “Well that’s a nice welcome.”

It seems a bit unfair to lay the actions of a criminal on the entire country they live in but an immigrant’s relationship with their adopted country can sometimes be a fraught one, particularly if the locals have their own pre-conceived notions about your native land. The feeling of violation when you experience a crime is swelled by a feeling of being alone in a strange place.

You don’t realise it at first but finding your way in a new country involves all the skills and experiences of a new relationship, with excitement and novelty intermingled with moments of hypersensitivity about how you should act and delicateness about any slight from your new sweetheart.

A crime is about as much a slight as a male panda is a little bit coy around the females. Your friends will tell you it’s terrible and support you all the way to the cop-shop but your environment suddenly feels a lot colder. Conflating your experience with every negative emotion you already feel becomes very easy. If you were already headed for a break-up, then this is the bail of hay that broke the spider’s back.

Where does this increased insecurity come from? Well apart from the lack of family around you, the entire set of stereotypes you spent your teens and early 20’s fighting don’t always exist in your adopted country. Stereotypes make the innocent guilty, but a complete lack of stereotypes denies you the (usually inaccurate) shorthand you use to detect danger. The names of the high-crime areas of your new city are nothing more than places on a map. The pubs, clubs and people your parents warned you about are all somewhere else now so you’re starting from scratch.

Mostly, the lack of stereotypes is liberating because you treat people on their individual merits; however when you’ve experienced a crime, your automatic reaction is to retreat into the familiar, however what you find familiar might be 1,000 kilometres away.

In my time in The Netherlands, I had three bikes stolen, three attempted break-ins, two successful and one failed (all while I was home) and my wife had her bag pinched. This meant that I bizarrely felt safer when I was out in the city rather than sleeping in my own bed.

Crime figures give statistics a bad name because no other set of numbers feel further removed from people’s experience. Reports of falling crime never reassure anyone, much less an immigrant that experiences crime. However individual acts of kindness can and do help. The morning after my wife’s bag was taken, a woman called around to our house. The thieves had thrown the bag in the front basket on her bike when they hadn’t found anything worth stealing and this woman cycled across town the next day to return it, having found our address in the bag.

My wife said, “That was a much nicer welcome”

I've heard this conversation twice, almost verbatim...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:35:09 +0200

- He went totally mad at me for having two cigarettes at the wedding.

- I thought you’d given up?

- Don’t you start.

- Sorry…so he went mad because you had a cigarette?

- I know! I’ve been really good, I’ve only had about 6 or 7 in the last month.

- But, won’t that mean you never really lose the addiction?

- I’m not addicted to nicotine.

- Really? I’ve never heard that before.

- I’m not, I just smoke out of habit.

- I’ve never heard a smoker say they aren’t addicted to nicotine before.

- It’s not that unusual, I just do it for something to do, I don’t have to smoke.

- Then why did you need to smoke at the wedding

- Jesus, you’re as bad as him, you two should be happy for me, I used to smoke ten-to-fifteen every day…I told him that I’d likely have a couple of cigarettes during the evening of the wedding and he went apeshit.

- Yeah but that sounded like “giving in” to him.

- Come on, it was a wedding, I was just preparing the ground.

- But do you not think that by having a cigarette every now and then, you’re just keeping up the addiction?

- I’m not addicted.

- Ok, so then stop altogether.

- What’s wrong with you two? You should be happy for me that I’m smoking so little. I said to him “surely you don’t love me less just because I smoke?”

- It’s not about whether he loves you or not, it’s about why you’re giving up. I know somebody else who gave up but had the odd smoke for over a year. They now smoke at least a pack a day.

- If I stayed like this for the rest of my life, I’d be happy.

- Will you?

Do public servants have the senate sewn up?

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:31:52 +0100

There’s quite a major accusation at the bottom of Marc Coleman’s article in the Sunday Independent today that being a public servant gives a candidate a major advantage when it comes to running for the Senate. He based the accusation on his own experience of running for one of the three Trinity seats.

Lets test that theory using the count from those seats:

Here is a graph showing the average number of votes per candidate for each count:

Looks like Marc has a point, right? Well public servants in this case include existing senators. Papers like this one demonstrate the advantage incumbents have in elections.

If we isolate senators versus non-senators, we see:

The effect here is much bigger than the effect in the previous graph but more importantly, look at the effect on the “Public servant advantage” when senators are removed from the graph:

The advantage virtually disappears, apparently. Looks like the theory needs work…

How to be a politician.

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:54:00 +0100

In a long discussion on Twitter yesterday, Marc Coleman said that he believed not getting elected into the Seanad had to do with the structural advantage civil servants had since given that people don’t trust politicians, the populace agree with his politics.

People don’t trust politicians because they regularly decontextualise real information to reach false conclusions or other times, simply make stuff up because it sounds believable. A lot of the techniques used can be found in Marc’s column, so I’ll give a few examples:

So then, what do you think we should do? Sack the special needs assistant earning €40k? Or reduce the pay of a university professor from €148k a year to €108k a year?

This single paragraph has so much wrong with it, I don’t know where to start. Firstly, the cut to special needs assistants was reversed anyway. Secondly, if an SNA earns 40k, the cost of employing them will be higher due to admin, Employers’ PRSI, pension, etc so one SNA is not saved for every 40k cut from a professor’s salary. Lastly, there are 6000 SNAs but only a few hundred professors. Marc might as well have photoshopped a professor into a combine harvester while adding a little whimpering puppy in its path.

In case the point wasn’t hammered home enough, he follows it with:

[The secular Labour party are forcing us to] kill the special needs assistant so we can keep paying prof more than his Catholic majesty the King of Spain (who, by the way, earns €145k a year for heading a nation of 45m people).

Given that the SNA cuts were reversed by a Labour minister (Joan Burton), I would be interested in how Marc justifies this remark. However here comes an old canard:

With average earnings 44 per cent above private sector levels and between 20 and 40 per cent above EU norms (even adjusting for cost of living) the answer is clear [that pay should be cut, rather than staff].

People trust one thing even less than politicians and that’s statistics. Marc seems determined to prove that he could have been exactly the politician people don’t trust and here’s why:

The average earnings figure comes from a CSO report which shows that the average pay in the public sector is 44% higher than the private sector, however the CSO themselves say:

It should be noted that estimated averages do not reflect differences in characteristics of the job or the employees. As EHECS collects aggregate data from each enterprise, it is not possible to correct for such differences using EHECS data.

The point is that the mix of jobs in the public sector is entirely different to the private sector. You don’t have a massive, low-paid retail sector in the public sector, for example, nor do you have a massive police/teaching/army component in the private sector. This gives the entirely false impression that an individual could earn 44% more if they could switch to the public sector and this is simply not true.

This one’s funnier than Marc realises:

Funny, isn’t it, how household charges, private pension levies and VAT hikes can be “bulldozed” on taxpayers but when it comes to cost-cutting in the public sector, “bulldozing” becomes impossible?

One question, aren’t the very public sector people you’re wishing to bulldoze already taxpayers? Essentially, aren’t you asking for them to be bulldozed twice? However the next one is quite sinister:

But then where Catholic morality calls for treating all citizens the same, Labour’s ethic seems to be a secular North Korean one where proles exist merely to serve the party elites and army.

Essentially, to be Roman Catholic is to be fair-minded, however to be secular means supporting tyranny. North Korea isn’t secular, by the way, given that they believe their leader is divine and the populace is forced at gunpoint to worship him. This is old-fashioned bigotry, pure and simple. The next quote is simply untrue:

Little wonder that Labour’s next conference will discuss a motion calling for Catholics to be “screened” for civil service positions (to test whether they are “Catholics first and Irish second”)

If Marc actually bothered to check with the Labour party (see next paragraph for correction), he’d know that they have no intention of bringing the so-called “screening” motion before the party and have apologised for it ever having been raised, as was reported here.

Marc has since responded on Twitter to say that he tried repeatedly to confirm this point with the Labour Party but they didn’t respond. I can’t fairly call his factchecking into question then but it remains true that the argument is built on something that is false.

Marc, if you want to get elected, check your facts and stop spinning. It’s obvious and it’s embarrassing.

Submitted to the Press Ombudsman

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:32:10 +0100

I believe the article breaches aspects of principles 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8. I also believe that the clarification the following day does not fully apply the principles of redress in the code of conduct.

To take each principle in turn:

Principle 1

Part 1.1 expects a newspaper to strive for accuracy. Armed only with Google Translator, a number of bloggers very quickly and trivially established that the article was grossly incorrect with respect to the original interview carried in a Polish newspaper. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/p6028/polish_waitress_packs_in_job_for_good_life_on/c3msb3a (According to this tweet by Allan Cavanagh, his post in the comments section of the article of a link to a rebuttal was removed by the Independent. https://twitter.com/#!/AllanCavanagh/status/164697610215636992)

Given the sensitive nature of the material, and the obvious backlash that would result from an article where a non-Irish member of the community is seen to abuse the welfare system, the lack of effort is egregious. It is also scarcely believable that the Independent attempted to contact anybody in the Polish newspaper to confirm the accuracy of their story. I personally infer from this that the journalists and editors in question were motivated to present the story in the way they did for sensationalist reasons.

Part 1.2 and 1.3 both essentially state that the correction should be given due prominence. An article was written the following day which essentially reprinted a more accurate translation of the original Polish article. No attempt whatsoever was made to highlight what was incorrect about the original article and where the new translation corrected this. I think that this gives an inaccurate impression that the original article was largely factual but contained minor issues. In particular, given the sensational nature of the original, the second article, in avoiding direct reference to the original, does not satisfactorily remove the impact of the original article.

It was left to the Polish Ambassador to rebut the article. However anyone who believed the original article would not be receptive to a Polish national defending another. The substance of his objections should be made by the paper itself.

This is a link to the clarification: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/do-i-have-a-problem-with-the-fact-that-i-claim-welfare-yes-3007769.html

This is a link to the Polish Ambassador’s rebuttal: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/polish-ambassadors-response-to-irish-independent-article-3007331.html

Principle 2

Although a newspaper is entitled to have, and forward an agenda, I believe that this article was editorialising dressed up as news. Even if the story had been fully true, no attempt was made to put the story in context. For example, an article in The Examiner before Christmas cited a study showing that only 3% of dole recipients were better off than if they had been working http://examiner.ie/ireland/only-3-of-jobless-better-off-on-the-dole-170515.html. There was no attempt in the article to establish that this individual was an outlier. Instead, the choice of a foreigner abusing the system seemed designed to stoke up anger and presumably sell more newspapers. It is cynical to present agenda as pure news coverage and in doing so, The Irish Independent breached this principle.

Principle 3

The arguments for breaching principle 1 apply here. Given the ease with which the article was refuted, it is clear that no real attempt was made to establish that it was fair and honest. The clarification article, for reasons already given, seeks to underplay the egregious errors in the original. For that reason, neither article seems to me to be fair or honest.

Principle 4

Again, the article did not take reasonable care in establishing facts. Although they did not identify the person in question, her identification now could put her at risk, or indeed any Polish woman presumed to be the subject of the article.

Principle 8

The Irish Independent established a Polish layabout archetype in this article and, on the evidence of the angry response elicited from Councillor Seamus Treanor on The Right Hook the same day, preached to a receptive audience. They clearly fed existing prejudices about greedy foreigners abusing the Irish welfare system. Only two possibilities exist, they did it deliberately to generate controversy, or they did it neglegently by not fact checking. They acknowledge neither in their clarification and thereby do not make a serious attempt to reduce the fall-out from the original article.

Letter on the Polish Waitress

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:52:59 +0100

Dear Sir,

I read with bemusement the story of the Polish waitress who preferred to live on the dole according to you but who had said precisely the opposite in the article in the ‘Gazeta Wyborcz.’

Given the catastrophic failure to check the most basic facts in the article and the obvious negligence with regard to the inflammatory nature an article about an invented foreign sponger was going to have, do I assume that you’ll be replacing the journalists and editors involved with their Polish equivalents from Gazeta Wyborcz? They seem to be clearly more able to write accurate and responsible articles.

Yours sincerely,
Colin McGovern

On academic salaries

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:40:00 +0100

I’ve always found the comparison between public and private sector individuals a little perplexing. The government only pays the wages of one of these sectors so when it needs to rein in cash, the public sector wage bill will inevitably come under the microscope.

The previous government made a spineless error in allowing wages to rise with no apparent checks and balances but they weren’t alone in this since the private sector were hardly models of prudence either. It’s not surprising then , that the subject of public sector wages comes up a lot in discussions about where to save money, and while a lot of people talk about reducing wages across the board, the left and right are agreed: those at the top of the civil service are massively overpaid and we could save a fortune if we cut their salaries.

The point about those at the very top is well made, however a cut in salaries, when compared with the size of the hole in our accounts, seems largely symbolic, albeit morally justified. Fintan O’Toole reckoned in an Irish TImes column that the “overpaid civil servant” meme was essentially a politically motivated invention to insulate the government from accusations of unfairness when it came to harsh budgets “it’s not our fault we’re closing your hospital, blame the overpaid staff that run it but refuse a pay cut.”

One of the biggest cheerleaders of this meme on the radio and Twitter has been Marc Coleman of Newstalk. He does make a specific claim, which is that assistant professors in Ireland are paid 40-60% more than their Dutch counterparts. (The claim varies, at one point it was Germans, and the range is quite wide.)

The source of his claim is a column in the Irish Times by Dr. William Reville, where Reville says that a Rotterdam senior lecturer earns €44,589-€69,361 whereas an Irish assistant professor earns €99,097-€116,386. This means that a Dutch senior lecturer earns 45% (at worst) or almost 60% (at best) of what an Irish assistant professor does.

On the face of it, that’s ridiculous. The cost of living is not massively different in each country, and certainly isn’t enough to justify earning twice as much money. However the figures are completely suspect. Here’s the current situation:

In Trinity College, an associate professor earns between €78,935 and €104,688 per anum (correct at 1st Jan 2010). So far so simple. In The Netherlands, university salaries are governed by a collective agreement (the CAO correct until March 2010). According to this, a H2 professor earns €65,805 to €94,810 (each entry in the salary table is monthly salary, to which you add 8% holiday pay and €2,250 structural bonus minimum). This figure is most likely too low since the structural bonus percentage is not known. This means that a Dutch assistant professor actually earns between 83% and 90% of what an Irish professor does.

Irish professors are still better paid but the figures are not sensational. It’s not crazy to discuss the public wage bill as part of a cost-cutting exercise; it is crazy to hysterically accuse Irish academic staff of earning double their European counterparts when they don’t. Instead of a sane discussion on the topic, all it does is prove Fintan O’Toole’s point that the topic isn’t motivated by a genuine need to reduce costs but merely comes down to settling old scores.

Roman Catholics are losers and no-hopers

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:09:00 +0100

Let’s get straight to the point: Roman Catholics are losers and no-hopers. And most of them, it seems, cannot even attempt to defend their own irrational views.

That’s bad enough, but to hide rational enquiry from your own children, to rob them of a natural sense of meaning in life, to bring them up with no hope of intellectual happiness, is incredible cruelty. And lapsed Catholics especially, should know that.

Today’s Roman Catholics want us to merely accept that God exists on faith. Don’t they realise how daft a demand that is?

But they get away with it because their fellow Catholics in education, the media, the golf club, etc never challenge them, would even think it odd to have to challenge them.

Modern Catholicism deals with ethereal things, stuff that can’t be measured and weighed, that can’t be seen through a microscope or a telescope, that can’t be used in experiments.

It has produced some great results, in charity, philosophy and art, for example, but that’s its full scope. It is interested only in imaginary things.

To deny that rational enquiry is a reasonable way to understand the universe is to want to make up the rules yourself and shout down any and all dissent. Pathetic.

They have taken the great searching powers of the human mind and narrowed them down to fairy stories!

Thus they go through life with closed minds, incapable of asking the big questions:

Has life any purpose? What is freedom? Does love really matter? What makes humans special? Is death the end? Can our deepest longings be fulfilled?

For them, death is the endgoal, it’s when they think they’ll live in the clouds but discover all of their fairy stories mean nothing. They’re the ultimate losers, having missed out on the meaning of life.

And yet some Atheists are intimidated by Roman Catholicism. How very odd!

Any Roman Catholics offended by this might want to first visit here and direct their complaints to the editor.

SocialFlow Company Blog: Breaking Bin Laden: visualizing the power of a single tweet

Sun, 08 May 2011 14:58:26 +0200

SocialFlow Company Blog: Breaking Bin Laden: visualizing the power of a single tweet:

socialflowteam:

A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden’s death, Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White…

Screenshots of my next app (in beta)

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:52:48 +0100

Screenshots of my next app (in beta):

This project came along while I was developing TwextMessenger. The need to get something out there was too great. This project is currently in beta-test and should be launching soon.

Kenneth Tong doesn't tell the full truth shocker!

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:48:00 +0100

Not being a fan of Big Brother, I had never heard of Kenneth Tong before yesterday but his Twitter campaign to promote a slimming pill has caused a remarkable reaction. If there is no such thing as bad publicity, then Tong is a genius, however I get the feeling that this will end in tears.

Kenneth Tong has decided that size zero is the only acceptable body shape for a woman and to that end, he has decided to relentlessly insult “curvy” or just plain “fat” women and not just sell his pill as a solution but encourage the use of “managed anorexia” as well.

Tong’s definition of fatness seems remarkably extreme, currently accusing model Larissa Summers of putting on too much weight at Christmas although his exhortations to his “friends” seem rather tongue-in-cheek; although that’s not necessarily obvious to that part of the audience that are most susceptible to his bizarre message.

There are enough studies out there to show that developing an abhorrence for food is in no way healthy and by far the best reposte to Tong came in a blogpost by Sir Joshua To Thee, who wrote about his daughter’s struggle with anorexia.

Since the campaign, however attention-grabbing, is remarkably irresponsible, I was shocked to see that Tong, on his corresponding Facebook page, was calling Max Clifford, “My agent, mentor, and friend” (frustratingly, I didn’t take a screengrab at the time) so I contacted Max Clifford’s agency to find out more.

Here is what they said:

I can assure you that Kenneth Tong is NOT a client of MCA. We did represent Kenneth and his girlfriend Carly in 2009 after their appearance in Big Brother which lasted only a few months and since that we have had no contact with him and certainly do not condone his actions on twitter.

I now see that Tong has removed the reference to Max Clifford. I guess they’re not friends any more.

Is the list system really an alternative for Ireland?

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:17:09 +0100

One of the common complaints about the Irish Single Transferable Vote system is that it encourages clientelism on a scale that ensures that no member of parliament rates national issues above issues in his or her own constituency. When you see how the system works, it’s not a huge surprise that this occurs.

Voters cannot vote for a party but order candidates by preference. This allows them the luxury of given candidates preferences for different reasons. One might get a vote because of the party they represent but many will get votes because of favours done in the past to the voter (or his family) or because the candidate is prominent in the locality whenever a major issue arises (inevitably, the issue is either a road, major factory or a hospital.)

Such a system will inevitably produce a corrupt parliament since the motivations of the members is so nakedly provincial and narrow. So then, why not get rid of constituencies and introduce a list system like that in The Netherlands?

The motivation is admirable. My experience living in The Netherlands shows that voters will examine manifestos when voting and these manifestos concern themselves with exclusively national issues. Even where roads are mentioned, they are roads with national importance, for example the main artery from Amsterdam to Brussels or Rotterdam to the Ruhrgebiet.

However there is one major issue with lists, and this is something that is perhaps amplified by the pervasiveness of media nowadays. In a system based on constituencies, a party must establish a major organisation in every part of the country if it has any pretensions of becoming a major political force. In a list system you need two things: enough candidates on the list to fill a majority of the seats and a major media personality to lead the list. A wonderful example of this is Geert Wilders.

Geert Wilders leads a party that has since been shown to be made up of the politically naïve and the criminal. However his party now controls a minority government, by voting with it rather than actually providing ministers (how could he, given the quality of the list?). This gives this individual enormous power with virtually no political base, only the votes of people who are attracted to his simplistic, populist delivery.

Given the economic turmoil at the moment, the last thing most countries need is a system that allows populist media personalities to hoover up votes from voters desperate for a way out of our current problems.

I believe that it’s more important in Ireland to restore the link between local taxation and local government (not to increase the tax-base in general but rather re-align it.) As soon as local government has tax raising powers, people will start to make councillors responsible for their decisions and leave TDs to deal with national issues.

Freoreviews - A warning

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:02:01 +0100

I don’t even remember anymore why I registered an email address with Freoreviews but I think it was because a pdf looked interesting. I don’t worry about registering email addresses since I use a webserver called otherinbox, which allows me to invent a unique email address for every website that calls for an address.

The point of this post is that I know for a fact that addresses supplied to them end up with spamming companies (assuming, of course, that they are not a spamming company themselves, I obviously don’t know one way or another.)

I have tried to contact them each time but I don’t receive any response, which doesn’t help my confidence that they are legit. What follows is what I know so far (all publicly available):

www.freoreviews.com is registered with Domain Privacy Group, meaning that it isn’t possible to get contact details through WHOIS. I will be contacting them to tell them about their client, and will update in the comments any response I get.

The three (penis-enlargement, hardly original) spams advertised the following (please do not follow these):

pharmacyxet18.com
yrnxv.screwthank.ru
lockdrip.ru

The first URL is registered to Mariya Astfurova (astfurovamariya@yahoo.com), who turns up on a lot of domains, at least one of which winds up in a malware warning (where her name is Mariya Gopchy). The other two are registered to generated email addresses at free-id.ru so they aren’t much use.

What it looks like is that the email made it’s way from freoreviews.com to a single person who sent all three spams. How they got the address, I do not know, however it isn’t encouraging that freoreviews refuse to explain.

Please be careful using www.freoreviews.com until they are willing to answer comments.

Morgan Kelly vs Brian Lenihan

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 13:22:15 +0100

Speaking on the Last Word on Wednesday, November 24th, Brian Lenihan said that he saw no evidence for Morgan Kelly’s assessment of the problem with Irish banks with respect to distressed mortgages.

Lenihan has said previously that the bank bailout for Anglo is in the region of 30 billion with 16 billion for AIB and BoI. Kelly says that this is untenable and that the real figure is 30 billion for AIB and 16 billion for BoI alone since they were racing to catch up with Anglo and “probably lent to worse turkey’s than Anglo did.”

As Moore McDowell said on the show (although in relation to something else): “Time will tell.”

Our difficulty is our opportunity

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:31:00 +0100

With The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein wrote a book that made me angry. I felt angry that a bunch of idealists painted themselves as realists and set about ruining the lives of millions by ruthlessly apply their ideologies whenever a country found itself in a crisis.

Ireland isn’t far from such a situation, in fact it would be easy to argue that we’re already there. If we were Chilé, Russia, or any of the other examples Klein gives, then a visit from the IMF is to be hugely feared, since it involves the imposition of a libertarian economic model on the country that would further solidify the position of the elite, such as it is.

Fintan O’Toole has done what writers do in a crisis: he’s written a book. However it’s a timely book because it reminded me that a crisis is as much an opportunity for Irish people to change the country for the better as it is a laboratory for a bunch of idealists to test their theories.

O’Toole’s book contains 30 steps that he believes would improve the country. His major thesis is that the standard of decision-making at every administrative and political level in Ireland is so dysfunctional that developing a coherent plan is hard enough but properly implementing would be near impossible.

This post shouldn’t be taken as either an endorsement or rejection of the steps (that comes later) but rather an endorsement of the notion that we need to stop being automatons and start trying to solve our own problems. To that end, these are the steps. Each will be replaced with a link once I’ve dealt with it.

O’Toole’s steps are as follows (taken from the article in the Irish Times):

1 Establish a genuine system of local democracy. Introduce a property tax to fund it.

2 Transfer the useful functions of quangos to local councils.

3 Bring in legally binding national standards for planning and development and give the National Spatial Strategy statutory status.

4 Implement the Kenny report of 1974, allowing councils to purchase development land for its existing value plus 25 per cent.

5 Establish “deliberative democracy” experiments in every substantial community.

6 Severely limit the ability of governments to use the guillotine mechanism to pass legislation that has not been debated in parliament.

7 End the fiction that Ministers are responsible for everything that happens in their departments. Make them responsible for decisions they take and for information they ought to know. Make senior civil servants responsible for the decisions they take.

8 Restore the right of the Oireachtas to inquire into all activities involving the use of public money.

9 Make all appointments to state and public boards open to public competition and subject to Oireachtas scrutiny.

10 Reduce the size of the Dáil to 100 members.

11 Either make the Seanad representative of civil society, social partners and the new local councils within a short time frame or abolish it.

12 Change the Dáil electoral system to the additional-member system.

13 Introduce a gender quota of at least 30 per cent, to be enforced by reducing public payments to political parties by the degree to which they fail to introduce gender balance.

14 Hand primary schools over to local and democratic ownership and control.

15 Replace GDP as the primary measure of progress with a well-being index.

16 Radically curtail tax incentives for private pensions and stop putting money into the National Pension Reserve Fund. Use the money to increase the state pension for everyone to 40 per cent of pre-retirement income.

17 Switch spending from both social-welfare rent supplements and tax breaks for landlords to the provision of decent social housing.

18 Introduce a national system of social health insurance, abolishing the two-tier health system and radically reducing the size of the Health Service Executive.

19 Switch more health spending towards community and preventive services. Implement the primary-care strategy.

20 Charge university fees to those who can afford them. Increase grants for those who are currently excluded.

21 Expand adult and continuing education. Consider the idea of individual “education funds” attaching equally to each citizen.

22 Identify children at risk of failure from an early age and intervene immediately with personal and family supports.

23 Make the pay of those at the top a fixed percentage of that of those at the bottom.

24 Bring taxes up to average European levels. Reduce tax breaks to average EU levels, saving more than €5 billion.

25 Limit to three the number of directorships of public companies that any one individual can hold at the same time.

26 Give coherent legislative protection to bona-fide whistleblowers.

27 Restore the Freedom of Information Act to its former status.

28 Create a register of lobbyists and publish records of all meetings between lobbyists, ministers and public officials.

29 Review company law to end impunity for white-collar crime.

30 Ban all significant private donations to political parties and force all registered parties to publish full annual accounts.

I plan to write a post on each of these points (each one will turn into a link as I write about it) but the real value will be if they spark discussion and debate within the comments. I will try to link them as far as I can to similar discussions elsewhere.

Who knows, maybe Ireland could be the first country to crowdsource a solution…

Did I rebut the correct argument?

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:37:22 +0200

Seán Moncrieff got back to me to say that he wasn’t sure that this was exactly what John Lennox was arguing on his show. So I thought it only fair to examine what he did say.

Here is the quote in full from the radio show:

Seán asks: What evidence is there for God?

John Lennox responds: The very fact that we can do science. In other words the universe itself as every scientist believes is accessible to the human mind at least in part. Now, if I’m an atheist and believe that the human mind is simply the end product of a mindless unguided process, why should I believe that that apparatus should tell me anything about the truth of the universe? Whereas as a Christian, believing that God created the universe out there, the human mind in here, I have a perfectly self-consistent explanation of why it is we can do science.

To whittle this down, I believe that he is saying the following:

The fact that the universe can be described scientifically by humans establishes that God designed the universe and designed the rational human intellect.

Looking at his video, he means that for the universe to be describable by science, it must be rational (i.e. understandable and predictable), not merely random. He quotes Einstein in the video:

The only irrational thing about the universe is that it is rational.

This gives us an interesting premise for further arguments: All rational things must have been designed.

If God is a rational being, then means that He too was designed. If he is not a rational being, then a rational universe was created by an irrational being.

The consequence of the first sentence is a reducio ad absurdem argument where you endlessly need to create the creator, unless you can provide a convincing argument so show why the universe must obey one law and God another. I have yet to see that argument.

The consequence of the second sentence is that all rational things do not need to be designed.

This is slightly technical, but the major intuitive point is that regularity in the universe in no way proves a design.

The other major point is that if John Lennox’s argument were true, then it would equally apply to any mythical being so far invented.

Since the original argument was in response to Seán wanting proof for God, Mr. Lennox needs to explain why the existence of his specific God is proven by this argument and not Zeus or Thor, as Richard Dawkins would say.

Is this the same as the argument I dealt with in the previous post? It is in most ways. The only difference is that John Lennox never said that we completely understand the universe; however he did say the rest…

Yet another creationist rebuttal

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:03:00 +0200

This topic has probably outstayed its welcome (or maybe I should make this the theme of the blog since it clearly vexes me) but I need to react to what at first look appears to be a more sophisticated creationist argument to the ones I read in the sample chapter of John J May’s book released this week.

On Seán Moncrieff’s excellent show on NewsTalk a maths professor at Oxford, John Lennox, made the following argument:

Since the universe is such that it can be understood by man, we have evidence of a designer and thereby proof of God.

This argument was presented in a slightly longwinded way in the interview and understandably completely bamboozled Moncrieff, who manfully tried to parse what the Mr. Lennox was saying.

In a nutshell, the point of the argument is that it is innate in humans to understand systems that act in a predicable way. Since the universe, with its constants and elegant laws, is one such system, this provides proof that the universe was designed, and therefore couldn’t have occurred naturally.

I’ve just realised that when you write it like that, it doesn’t look all that sophisticated; however just to provide a proper rebuttal:

Firstly, there have been numerous moments throughout history when humans assumed that they fully understood the universe, not least when we assumed that the heavens revolved around the Earth. It would be churlish to say that this rebuts the argument by itself but it points to a massive problem with the argument.

We don’t completely understand the universe today.

One of the greatest stuggles in physics today is the fact that quantum theory and relatively theory don’t agree with each other. The attempt to create a “theory of everything” is well known, although apparently not to Mr Lennox.

Of course even if we do develop a theory of everything, that doesn’t provide a slam dunk since by definition, we make the assumption that the universe as we observe it is completely representative of the entire universe.

The second part of the argument is that since the universe shows regularity, it therefore shows design. This is pure conjecture based on our own limited common sense.

Just because we impose an ever more sophisticated understanding on the universe does not prove in any way that the universe was designed. It only proves that we are used to assuming that regular patterns must be artificially created.

Until we understood the true nature of the sun, humans thought that it was a sentient being because they could not understand how a natural object could be so vital to them. I’m assuming that the professor will not be applying his argument to the sun.

Fógra amháin: I made the mistake of assuming that this was a reverend. Seán has since pointed out the following:

The guy I interviewed - John Lennox - is a professor of Maths at Oxford. He just sounded like a reverend

I’ve updated the post accordingly.

The patience of Richard Dawkins in this video is remarkable....

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:31:59 +0200

The patience of Richard Dawkins in this video is remarkable. You’ll notice that she uses a lot of the standard creationist tricks of ignoring evidence, repeating already demonstrably false statements and accusing Dawkins of being aggressive.

Is God an agile developer?

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:51:00 +0200

One of the stuffier Computer Science courses in UCD (in the 90’s at least) was the Software Engineering course. Software Engineering in this context deals with the way you get from an idea (or a customer’s idea) to a design, to a working program, to a test cycle, to a delivered product. What I’ve just described is how most people think of the process of software development and how development was originally tackled by most programming teams.

Any developer will be familiar with the idea that it’s cheaper to change a requirement than a design and cheaper to change a design than a program. You therefore should get the requirements right before you start designing and the design right before you start coding.

This is called the Waterfall Model, for which you need to imagine a series of waterfalls, one for each stage of the process. The implication is that once a stage is completed, there is no need to revisit it. So since earlier stages are cheaper to correct, we should move mountains to get them perfect before moving on, right? Wrong.

The major flaw with this logic is that the enduser cannot approve each stage with any confidence since the product still exists only in their imagination. Then Rapid Prototyping was born. With Rapid Protyping, you gather some basic requirements and build a basic model. With something tangible to work with, the customer is far more likely to get what they really needed since their feedback is more meaningful.

Rapid Protyping scares the bejaysus out of managers because it’s impossible to know which prototype will be the last. Agile Development is (amongst other things) an attempt to put a measurable framework on Rapid Prototyping. What’s wonderful about Rapid Prototyping though is that you can see very quickly what doesn’t work and cut it out. You start with an extremely simple program, which grows in complexity with each passing iteration until eventually, you end up with a product you are happy to deliver.

The classic Christian explanation for creation appears to follow the Waterfall Model. Since God managed to create the universe in an impressive 6 days, we can assume that He spent the eternity preceding this on the requirements and design. Since we cannot know the mind of God, we cannot begin to guess what the original requirements were but the extensive design work is there for all to see. There’s no way God could have just come up with something as complex and precise as human reproduction in a mere 6 days. He would have needed at least 30 million years to design something as complex as the human genome, I reckon.

Since creation is perfect in its complexity and beauty (or so we’re told), we’ve made the assumption that God is also perfect, because any attempt to use the Waterfall Model that I’ve experienced inevitably ends up with massively buggy software and a lot of compromises by the customer before they can accept the final product.

God wouldn’t need to be perfect if He were an Agile Developer, however!

He could have started with a single-celled organism; let it reproduce asexually. He could then move on to more complex organisms by making tiny mutations every so often. Whenever an organism proved a mistake, He could simply make it extinct and try other mutations. Eventually, He could move onto creatures with hard shells, then to creatures with softer skin that could grow much larger. When dinosaurs dominated, He might regret their tiny relative brain size and work on new kings of the planet by sending a massive meteorite to wipe out the old. Eventually, after a number of tweaks, he could end up with us.

Now, tell me again why creationists believe that a designer, rather than an endlessly iterating process is the more likely explanation for the amazing world we see around us?