Psybertron Asks

One for future interest.

When did “existential threat” come to mean “a threat that exists”?

Heard it twice recently – Cameron describing Islamists in Saharan Africa, Copson describing extremists in general.

We do care about the beautiful game of football, but this piece by Seth Godin is about some other televised sport, played with the hands whilst wearing full body armour, weirdly called “football” in just one country in the world.

The tribal culture is a common theme, sure, but I disagree on several points.

• The tribe can be, and is, much wider, more positive, than any one team / club against another. The allegiance is to football.
• TV suits real and fake football because it provides multi-angle replays – but this feature is common to any televised sport or any other event. Games that take place in smaller spaces, or where the action is highly static or localised benefit even more.
• TV being asynchronous, of course you can see multiple games, including those you are unable to get to live (see live below).
• The TV advertising model does NOT suit real football timing-wise, and that’s because:
• TV beats live football, only if you can’t get to the game. You can’t be at two games at once. It is difficult, inconvenient and time-consuming and expensive travel-wise to get to multiple-games in any one day / week. Otherwise live beats TV – see tribal culture above. With real football, TV is no substitute for the real thing.

Yet real football does benefit enormously from TV investment, for the quantitative, multi-game, multi-angle, non-real-time benefits – even though the real thing is infinitely, qualitatively, better. Wonder which is actually the bigger business – the real thing or the fake version?

Now there’s a turn up for the BHA.

Hopefully enough to make the BHA think about its position.
Hopefully we’re beyond this being “just a bit of fun”.

[Video Here. No time to watch the whole right now, but after Copson vs the outgoing Archbishop, you can already see where the more subtle argument lies. Organized churches as agencies of communal humanity and tradition, BHA same as CofE in this respect. Immediate unmediated communities – social media etc –  allow freedom of communication and thought, but they bring no “conservative” narrative to the whole (*). Social, cultural and intellectual evolution without conservatism cannot progress, any more than biological evolution, merely change and repeat errors. The “aim” – purpose and meaning – needs to be enshrined “metaphysically”  (or maybe “transcendentally”) beyond the current process and content – even the concept of humanity beyond individuals – “bigger than themselves”. BHA is currently too naive and “scientistic” about where that value is maintained. Dawkinzzzzz …. when will he let go of childish things …. sarcastic, arrogant, ignorant, dogmatist and childish. How could this debate go any other way? As a humanist I’m embarrassed by the BHA.]

[Having listened on, Copson loses it at 1:07 by saying in his very own words that he is NOT actually for the motion as stated. Hope for him. Unmitigated disaster for the BHA. Tariq Ramadan and most of the students all very impressive. (*) As Douglas Murray says – we’d find ourselves living “The Only Way is Essex”. The opposition wins hands down – anyone know the actual voting numbers?]

Sorry folks. The site has started running very slowly – 4 seconds to load?

Something to do with memory cacheing and the database size (growing over 12 years). I have a dedicated VPS with 800Meg allocated RAM running this baby, though it barely ever reaches 0.5 CPU capacity. Guess I need to optimise the cacheing somewhere?

Where there’s ALF & Hope (Akpan) there’s a way. Fair bit of  rhetoric (standard memes) about skills, spirit, youth, experience & character too, but it’s telling that Brian says

“We sign the person first.”

And I think he means it, judging by the other relationships in the club. Some mad results for Reading FC recently. ALF’s late goals as substitute striker (1, 2 & 2) giving us points in three important games recently, despite him failing to score in the cup game where we scored 4 and he was on the pitch the whole 90 minutes.

Particularly mad yesterday where ALF came on in 66th minute and scored in 87th and 94th, both assisted by Hope Akpan, and both scored by single-touch volley / half-volleys, and the ONLY two touches he had in the whole game, a game in which  we barely even got into their final third, let alone a single shot on or off target until then.

BHA have an “Are you a humanist” quiz doing the rounds at the moment. I scored 80% incidentally but I had to be playfully creative with the actual responses to get through it since there were too many questions (including the first one) where my answer was none-of-the-above.

I’ve been a humanist since before the BHA existed, and it makes a mockery of humanism to reduce it to a caricature of scientistic arrogance.

I’m a big fan of George, not least because a party called Respect names the right virtue for a complicated life, and politics is as complicated as it gets. And, being a small independent, you can be fairly sure George is genuinely true to his expressed principles. Trust and respect – a great combination.

Much twittering around the personally dismissive straw-man Dave threw back at George in response to his PMQ – about hypocrisy in which Islamic regimes we support and which we don’t. Now (see complicated, above) there is always a level of “hypocrisy” between actions and justifying reasons, and even with open debate before the Mali action, I doubt the outcome of supporting the French in Saharan Africa would have been different. Even with principles, in practice you always need to choose your battle-grounds, fighting where you might expect a positive result, pulling punches where …. life’s complicated.

George is a first class rhetorician, and an ace orator in steadily enunciating his whole question amid the house heckling, and ultimately in resisting the impulse to react to the personal insult he received for his troubles. In fact you might say he’s too good; hoist by his own petard even. His own use of rhetoric, right from the off with the euphemistic “adumbrate”, followed by a string of emotive venom-loaded barbs within the basic question, meant the undoubted moral high-ground in the question, is largely eroded by the time we get to its end. In essence:

“Could the PM explain why his government chooses to support Regime X but not Regime Y?”

The PM is maybe entitled to respond to the rhetorical barbs, but he is not entitled to introduce a straw-man of George’s controversial personal history, nor is he entitled to use it as a deflector to avoid the actual question. Too many barbs let Dave off the hook. (Anyway – the follow-up is in writing.)

But of course the question was not framed to elicit an answer, it was framed as a sound bite to raise the debate in public. Too good ? Very good. Dave and George both knew it full well. It’s a tough high-stakes game, a rhetorical arms-race. Another case of “the medium is the message” when the medium is George – quite clear from the moment Bercow introduces George to speak.

[Post Note: Here in intelligent debate with Andrew Neil – very impressive. A side issue, but given my rhetorical comments above, interesting that Neil opens with the question of his PMQ leaving him open to the attack.]