sillypunk's posterous

I don't profess to know everything or to entirely understand the nuances of all the arguments about GM.  I'm not even a scientist.  My last science course was in 1997.  However, I can still weigh arguments and separate the hyperbole from genuine argument.  

The reason I went along to Rothamsted was to support scientists who were having their research threatened by protestors.  I'm rather ambivalent about whether or not GM is a good thing or a bad thing.  It's probably more nuanced than 'solving the world's food crisis' and 'total ecological disaster'.  I imagine the end result of GM will be like any outcome of science, good and unexpected consequences that could be bad.  However, we'll never know if its good or bad without research and trials.  

Just like any early technology there are going to be some pitfalls.  We aren't going to know all the outcomes.  As well, research never exists in isolation.  GM in the right hands might be open sourced, might help those in the UK but also those in Uganda with increasing crop yields and providing for families.  However, inevitably, as we leave in a society that is heavily influenced by corporatism, there are going to be companies that make terminator genes.  I think this is where everything got a bit conflated with the GM protestors.  They hate all GM, despite the fact that humans have been modifying their environment since they were a newly evolved species.  Just like every  animal modifies their environments.  We've just become particularly adept. 

There seemed to be a lot of quasi-pagan language to the protestors, as Nick Cohen points out in the spectator.  I was desperately not trying to make stereotypical hippie jokes but it was hard not to after the drums and sing-song started in the park.  I wondered if they had spent more time critically evaluating their own evidence rather than rowdily threatening vandalism, we could have all sat down in the park together to chat about the concerns.

The thing that really bothered me was that in many other situations, we may have been on the same side.  Protesting against Monsanto or corporate influence in energy policies.  But at a certain point something has gone terribly wrong with aspects of the environmental movement.  Perhaps there always needs to be that radical fringe that pushes boundaries and maybe it was my discomfort that it was not a radicalism that I was willing to cross the line for.  Maybe its where my radicalism butts against pragmatism.  I think its more useful engaging in debate or attacking the source of the problems rather than attacking people using the science of the people you don't like.

At the end of the day, it seems like some groups don't want to engage in any sort of process but their own.  Rothamsted, it seems, tried to do everything to make people who had concerns about GM happy.  They had public consultations, took into consideration everything people might be upset about and tried multiple times to get a dialogue going with the groups threatening to tear up the experiment to no avail.  In the end, the anti-GM group looked more like kids who were upset that they didn't get their way.  If we lived in a society like that, we would have nothing.

As one of my friends pointed out - well, what about women's suffrage?  There were people protesting against unfair treatment when the government wouldn't address their concerns.  But I don't think its the same thing.  It is one thing to blatantly deny people's rights on the basis of their sex and another to destroy researchers' work which is not infringing on anyone's rights.  Like anything people ever do, there is a certain amount of risk involved but if these protestors are that upset about this particular amount of risk - why aren't they up in arms at any other assessment of risk that is too high for their liking?  There is a difference protesting against Monsanto for GM and protesting against a publicly funded trial which has tried to safe guard against any problems that could arise.  We don't like in a risk free world.  Science is not risk free.  But if we reduce what can be done to those things that are 0 risk, then we won't get anywhere.  These people who have concerns about GM shouldn't remain on the sidelines and throw metaphorical stones and metaphorical windows - they should voice their concerns at things like terminator genes and be part of a political process and public dialogue about the concerns.  Instead, they seem increasingly content to just pay attention to their own group think and call anyone outside that group a whole host of wrong-headed epithets. 

There are those that are upset that GM will ever happen and I don't know if we can win that sort of argument.  It is the same thing as arguing with a creationist on some level.  There are the things they believe and no amount of evidence is going to convince them otherwise.  They have free right to protest but their right to protest ends where vandalism begins.

The thing that worries me about all this is that I consider myself an environmentalist.  These are the people I'm supposed to like and support.  I am the person they are supposed to try and convince to vote Green.  But after today, I'm not sure I can.  Calling Sense About Science at one point a PR company and another a libertarian front organisation seems to me that they are bending in the direction of conspiracy theory than actual science.  

This is the root of my discomfort.  I want the Green Party to become a force for good, to help influence our policies to be more sustainable.  But if the Green Party reps (like Jenny Jones) start calling people bullies just because they are asking rather poignant questions than they aren't held together by rational, well thought out policies.  They are being ruled by a group of knee-jerk reactionaries.  People understand that we need to be more sustainable - the better argument to be had is in the public sphere, in parliament - translating how we get to a sustainable future.  It's not scientists facing off against green protestors in a park, outside a research facility.  It's just not.  As the hippies and geeks face off, all the other corporations and groups that don't give a fuck about the environment or what we do to it laugh at us.  If we're fighting each other now, we haven't got a chance.

If the Green Party wants to be a force for change, they better have a good hard look in the mirror and at their evidence.  I think it's about as flakey as those who are anti-climate change, anti-evolution, anti-vaccination and fundamentally anti-science.  They've lost my vote until then.  

Apparently in completely different light.  No idea how that happened!

There was a picture going around on Facebook the other day of a bookshop with a notice in the window.  It said the taxes it paid would pay for one trainee nurse.   That combined with the fact that Amazon doesn't appear to pay corporation tax has broke me. No more amazon, no matter how convenient.  Fuck 'em.  I apparently pay more tax than them.

There is a lovely independent book store down the road, so I'm going to help pay for student nurses.

There was one place with some vegetarian options.  But in fact it was one type of vegetarian option.  It was a cheese sandwich but your choice of THREE DIFFERENT CHEESES. 

WOW AMSTERDAM. LOOK AT YOU WITH YOUR BLOODY CHOICE.

Two bloody days in Brussels and Amsterdam and I want to never eat cheese again.  Seriously, its 2012, discover humous or bean burritos.

Some lovely man in an Italian Restaurant made me the largest bowl of vegetarian tagliatelli this evening though, so that was a win.  But this is a small northern town.  It has kicked Amsterdam and Brussels' ass at what is good to eat as a vegetarian.  

VEGETARIANS CAN'T SURVIVE BY CHEESE ALONE!

Thus ends the tourist whine.

I think it's a few things throwing up this road block.

1 - There isn't actually a lot of research done in my area.  It is really annoying to constantly read reams and reams worth of articles and books with no reference to your research area.  I guess it's a good indication of why I can do a PhD on this area.  But in terms of a road map of information to block in my research, it's not very helpful.  I think I need to just finish my current ream of books and then start on some proper research.  This might throw up some new people and areas that may have been researched to give me a few more guide posts along the way. At least with my MA I was well within the historiography that exists but it simply disappears after 1890.  

2 - I need to write something.  I'm not taking my own advice and writing something every week about the research/reading I have done.  I think I need some place to clear my head of thoughts and solidify them somewhere.  At least that feels like progress in one sense and helps me get these disparate ideas down.

3 - I don't know if I've taken on more than I can chew in terms of other things.  I might have to make some tough decisions and just back away from some of the stuff I do.  Part of my anxiety with not getting enough work done includes all these disparate things going on.  Either that or I just need to schedule my life better.  Hopefully the latter.

Anyway.  Onward and upward.  I have my first bit of writing that I need to submit next month so I should probably stop feeling sorry for myself.  After all, it looks like I am on the track to contributing some original research!

For example, Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, the daughter of the 19h century arch-atheist Charles Bradlaugh had to repeatedly put to rest assertions by those of faith that Bradlaugh had a death bed conversion.  I'm sure there are equal amounts of them claiming that Darwin converted at the end or was really religious all along.

Reading today in A history of Atheism in Britain: from Hobbes to Russell by David Berman (1988) I was amused to find some aspect of this phenomenon dovetail nicely with the skeptical side of things.

"The Medium and Daybreak, a spiritualist newspaper, carried a detailed report of a message sent from the next world by Bradlaugh through a Birmingham medium.  In this message the 'ghost' of Bradlaugh affirmed that there is a 'life beyond the grave that I did not wish for nor believe' and, even more noteworthy, that 'there is a God!  There is a Divine principle.'  This attempt by the spiritualists to show that Bradlaugh did in the 'end' recant, whether it was conscious fraud or unconscious self-deception, shows, one again, the power of the suppression (if conscious) or repression (if unconscious) of atheism (p. 220).

There is a very pedantic element of my brain wanting to know if he swore or affirmed that there was a God while convening with this Birmingham medium, since he is famous for passing the law that allowed everyone the right to affirm rather than swear in court and parliament in the UK.

I think I need to get me a copy of that paper and perhaps keep a closer eye on this phenomenon as the period that will make up a large part of my study will including the passing of a lot of the Victorian old-guard of secularism.  Perhaps it would make a rather amusing talk or page (at least) in my overall dissertation.

First off:  Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain which was okay, I guess.  It's just that sociological looks at things generally oversimplify the history which gets rather old.  It also does nothing to help me with the history of the period when it just goes off on these sociological expositions.   This was oh so evident in Herwig Arts, Faith and Unbelief, Uncertainty and Atheism.  It was rather religion heavy which I would have suspected given the university it was printed at.  It ended up having a lot about belief but not so much about unbelief.  A bit useless when you are studying the secular movement.  Wound up much of David Nash's Secularism, Art and Freedom but did rather a lot of skimming near the end as I bought the book anyway (these are all library books that I want to return in the next month or so).  It has a lot of super useful stuff (being history rather than sociology) which will be useful later but not so much at the moment.

Cracking on with a couple of essays in Realism, Ethics and Secularism:  Essays on Victorian Literature and Science which I hope will have something useful in it.  

So far my troubles are:

• monographs that talk about secularism are sociological and not very helpful
• the history is thin on the ground  post-1880.
• everyone treats 'secularism' 'freethought' 'ethicism' as different things where I think they broadly fall under a G. W. Holyoake broad tent of secularist activism.  I don't know if I can go against the historiography that much but I don't see why I shouldn't poke at the idea for a bit.
• still not a real focus on defining what secularism is - which may be my get out for confronting the historiography as aggressively as I want to, mentioned above.  

I need to get through all these books so I can get some more.  This shall be my life for at least the next year.  :p

My friend @TheatreGreekAmy is growing a person INSIDE OF HER and I promised a baby blanket.  Usually I knit such things but I have had no time.  So! To THE INTERNETS for something interesting which turned out to be a fabric panel with the Milky Way.

So I made a blanket today. Hooray!

How come every time there is an upsurge in religious feeling it is called a revival? Why isn't it categorised as "neo-christianity"?

Perhaps established churches have some claim to continuity but every time there is a new policy doctrine, different groups will split off.  The Reformation being such a massive break up of Catholic Europe is never looked at in terms of creating 'new' religions but rather as the title suggests - a reform movement.  Perhaps some of the anabaptists are looked upon as vaguely new and threatening, but even they are covered under 'the radical reformation'.  Even through these religions different greatly in terms of emphasis of different parts of the Bible, they are never new.

I'd wager that most of the newer congregations in South London have a shorter historical narrative than that of the UK Secular Movement.  Why are they not new/neo?

There is so much historical research on the religious groups in the UK so they can claim continuous historical narrative even though they differ radically from what the Christian Church started out as.  But, atheists and secularists who have had many of the same goals for centuries are still new.  There is no doubt that we also have our differences but I think if we are called new/neo every five years, so should new churches.

Ugh.  More things to write about after his whole PhD thing!  Or part of the PhD!

I think I have a few writing styles.  One is for Twitter, messages boards and blogs where it is quite a bit more informal and lackadaisical when it comes to grammar and capitalisation.  Another is for one I attempt to write fiction which is far more playful.  Then there is of course, my academic writing which sometimes feels like an entire other person.  I think it seeps into some of my blogs once in awhile, especially when I'm thinking of academic subjects.  

However, the main reason I am thinking about language at the moment is in an 'achievement unlocked' way, to borrow something from Xbox.  Going back to my undergraduate essays is sometimes quite painful but again quite good as I can see how much I've improved (though my 'German or Brit' punctuation has remained as one of my professors told me in 3rd year).  I don't really recall thinking of language all that much when I was doing my MA but I know my language had also improved.  I guess its the 4+ years that I'm going to dedicate my life to writing 100,000 words on a single topic that is causing this introspective look at my own prose.  Not only that but the literature review itself is going to be analysing language to a certain extent with critiquing how people use certain terms like secularism, atheism, freethinker, humanist and the like.  In the first book that I've picked up (mainly because it is the most relevant) I've already become rather annoyed with the use of Humanist.  The author is using it in it's current modern sense to describe all secular activities in the nineteenth century (!).  To some that may be mere pedantry but in historical terms is somewhat heretical.  It is a sociological study from the 1970s which is part of the problem no doubt.  At least it will give me something to write about.

I would like to have the more conversational tone that Hitchens has in his memoirs as it makes it seem like you are having a rather informative conversation.  However, that is probably not going to match well with academic rigour.  Perhaps I can use some of it as I'd prefer my panel to enjoy reading my dissertation (as much as one can).  It's not so much style to mimic flow of the story that would be emulated as that will no doubt help the argument.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how my writing style evolves once again (hopefully it won't involve being told off for punctuating like a Brit now that I am on the correct side of the Atlantic).  

Anyone up for editing when the time comes ;)