Music nostalgia

This is deep music nostalgia - positively subterranean. I'd completely forgotten about this band until I heard them on the radio recently. They're a hard rock outfit called UFO. In retrospect it's an unfortunate name for them because today on Google and YouTube rankings they have to compete with people looking for shit about alien autopsies.

Quite a few bloggers who are around the same age as me talk about how they used to like punk - saying it as if this was cool or something. It really isn't. You do realise you're keeping company with Michael Gove, don't you?

"But the righteous anger she displayed, denouncing McLaren for his cynicism in ripping off young record-buyers, ripping into the Pistols for their lack of musicianship, only reminded me what it was that I liked about punk."

The ripping off record-buyers and the lack of musicianship? Well he is a Tory... I used to like punk - until I was about thirteen. Then I realised it was a big pile of cack - at least as commercial and pretentious as anything it imagined it was reacting against. So I made a backward progression that ended up in the blues - but stopped off with a little hard rock. Forgotten how good this crew were. Saw them live in 1981, I think - at the Glasgow Apollo.



This song in particular has more of a punky edge than I realised at the time. How the Clash might have sounded if they'd ever learned to play their instruments properly. "Ah but punk wasn't about musicianship", says the ex-punk. I know. That's why it was shit. A triumph of style over substance every bit as much as the Flock of Seagulls.

Edookashun news

From the Queen's speech we learn that children in England are to be given legal rights to a good education. Blair may be gone but the Project lives, its essence distilled in this proposal: why actually do something when you can pass a law that says something must be done, instead?

You'd think that after twelve years of government, they might ponder that perhaps the whole central control thing hasn't been an unalloyed success - but you could only think this if you haven't been paying much attention during the last decade or so. They have, it should go without saying, concluded that there is not nearly enough central control. For example:

"New curriculum guidance says the well-being of "mini-beasts", including bees, ants and worms, should be taught in classes as part of primary school's "animals and us" section of the citizenship curriculum.

By the age of seven, pupils will have learnt that "not stamping on insects" is appropriate behaviour "in areas where animals live"."

Fair enough - but my own view is that pupils should be taught to extend this courtesy to their fellow humans first, and then work their way down the food chain.

Anyway, the government is also including the right to more press-ups in their educational Magna Carta. No, really:

"[P]upils will have guaranteed access to five hours PE or sport a week in and out of school."

I'm not sure this is enough though. Today our youth have more PE and possess more tracksuits than at any time since the dawn of civilisation - yet they are also increasingly large. Discuss...

Our English friends are also going to be released from the tiresome burden of teaching discrete subjects:

"The bill will legislate for a new primary curriculum, starting in September 2012, to reorganise traditional subject areas such as history and science into thematic areas of learning, such as "historical, geographical and social" lessons, to try to ease the pressures of the cumbersome curriculum on schools and give them the freedom to do cross-subject thematic lessons."

You could take an Italian theme, for example - with a couple of lessons on the Risorgimento, followed by The Merchant of Venice, pop off to home economics to make a pizza - then during their copious PE time, pupils could learn to make a huge drama out of a barely perceptable foul on the football park. Inspiring isn't the word.

Technology and religious criticism

Marina Hyde argues that the internet has done a great job in exposing the dark heart of Scientology but regrets that this fire isn't brought to bear on other belief systems too:

"Clearly, Scientologists should be forced to justify their doctrinal lunacies – the only sadness is that other religions are apparently exempt from having to do the same. Imagine for a moment a Bashir-type interviewing some senior cardinal. "So," he might inquire, "you're saying that by some magic the communion wafer actually becomes the flesh of a man who died 2,000 years ago, a man who – and I don't want to put words into your mouth here – we might categorise as an imaginary friend who can hear the things you're thinking in your head? And when you've done that, do you mind going over the birth control stuff?""

Yes, why is there this disproportionate energy devoted to debunking this particular cult rather than other religions? Perhaps for the same reason that when discussing 'other religions', Marina Hyde picked Catholicism and the doctrine of transubstantiation rather than, say, Islam and the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Koran: because it's easier that way?

Probably a bit unfair. At least part of the reason why people are interested in Scientology is because while it doesn't have many followers, they count a disproportionate number of celebrities amongst their ranks. Celebs seem vulnerable to all manner of eccentric religious beliefs. I was wondering if this isn't a strain of man's social being determining his consciousness: celebrities by the very nature of their existence are going to find it much easier to believe that the cosmos has been arranged for their benefit than those of us who tend to collide with reality on a more regular basis?

The drugs debate: all a bit Nutt's

Like most people who have commented on this, the sacking of Professor David Nutt from the government's drugs advisory council has left me wondering what the point of soliciting independent scientific advice is, if you're just going to ignore it? Add to this the political ineptitude of the walnut with sledge hammer approach that Alan Johnson has taken here. Whenever drugs are discussed in the media, there's always some journo who recycles the line about how the biggest danger posed by drugs is that it makes the user a crashing bore. Hmmm, but not as boring as some hack striking a libertarian, yet world-weary, pose. The 'drugs debate' is boring - so most people are understandably uninterested in it. If Alan Johnson's goal was to shake people out of this relative indifference, he could have scarcely done a better job.

But there my agreement with those journalists and bloggers who seem to have adopted Professor Nutt as some kind of rationalist liberal hero/victim ends. Because while some appear to think the case represents the primacy of science and something called 'evidence-based policy-making', I was rather under the impression that Professor Nutt was making a case for the primacy of scientists:

"Professor Nutt said that the council was no longer tenable as a functioning advisory group. 'I can’t believe any self-respecting scientist would serve on it,' he declared. Writing in The Times today, he calls for the creation of a truly independent advisory council on drugs modelled on the way that interest rates are set by an expert committee."(Emphasis mine)

Hmph! The setting of short-term interest rates is something that has since 1997 been put beyond ministerial control. Is he seriously suggesting this should be the case with drugs policy too? And if so, why stop there? Why not have a government of experts in health, education, defence? Because as well as having grave implications for anything resembling democratic government, there's every reason to question the notion that just because someone may have expertise in one area - in this case, science - they'll be any good at something quite different - in this case, policy-making. I would have thought this was obviously the case with Professor Nutt. He takes as given the business whereby drug use is arranged into a hierarchy of harm, to which is then attached an appropriate level of disincentive and punishment. He says, for example, that, "The reason for making drugs illegal is to let society reduce harms by punishing their sale and use", without offering much in the way of any opinion as to whether this approach actually works or, even if it did, whether prohibition can be justified in these terms. In other words, there is no evidence as yet that Professor Nutt is particularly interested in politics - which tends to reinforce the impression that he has indeed strayed into areas that are beyond his competence.

On Calvinism

Why the hatred for Calvin, asks Andrew Brown? Well, he wasn't a very nice man and the blood of Michael Servetus bears witness against him - but since this isn't enough for Andrew Brown, thought I might take a moment to take issue with his argument.

Calvin's cosmology was remorseless, depressing and anti-human - can anyone who has actually read him take issue with this? Brown's point is that since a number of secular philosphers take an equally bleak view of the human condition, why is Calvin given such a hard time for it?

Methinks the answer is pretty goddamn straightforward: no matter how bleak an atheist philospher's view of the world is, at least they don't invite us to worship a deity that created it this way.

Weber had Calvin's measure when he said that Calvinism overcomes the theodicy problem by utterly obliterating the goodness of God. Was there ever an artist that hated his own work quite as much as Calvin's god? I don't think so. This is why theists and atheists alike despise Calvin. They are right to do so, in my view.

Anyway, here's a question that, in my experience, believers find more difficult to answer than the theodicy question. It's this: why does god want us to worship him? Believers usually respond with reasons why they want to worship him and why He is worthy of it and so on. But that isn't what I asked. The prize for a winning answer to this question is a copy of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.