O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

(William Blake, The Sick Rose, Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794)

plate here

There is a canker eating at the heart of our political society. I felt that the KRudd government was interested in appearances rather than reality, but despite the change of Prime Minister, things don’t seem to have changed. And I certainly don’t feel that the Opposition is any better, or an alternative for which I can vote.

How did things come to this pass? I have decided that, in part, it is the obsession with opinion polls. I presume that when Abe Lincoln was President, he didn’t have access to opinion polls. All he could do was go out there into the public and say what he believed in, and what he thought was good for the people, and why that was. How did he find out what their opinion was? I suppose he would have had an immediate gauge if people started to pelt him with rotten vegetables or heckle him, or alternatively, if they cheered him uproariously. He had to actually speak to the public and engage with them to get an idea of what their reaction was, though.

As I’ve already said, I didn’t watch the GillAbb debate. In comments, Dave Bath wondered if Australian politics had always been like this, or had it just plumbed new depths recently.

The worm typifies the problem. It’s a blow-by-blow account of how the audience is reacting to each little thing the debaters say. Thus, pollsters can obsessively follow it and see which arguments appeal to voters more, which policies are more popular.

My disappointment comes down to this. I do not feel that either party will pursue policies that are initially unpopular but which they believe are the good of the country. Neither party is guided by belief, or principle, or by a sense that they are representing us. They just seek to stay in power by appealing to popular sentiment.

Opinion is a strange thing, though. A while back, I participated in an Insight episode on climate change scepticism (unfortunately it hasn’t aired yet, but I guess it will after the Election). At the end of the show, we were asked if we’d changed our opinion. No, I hadn’t changed my opinion, because I was still thinking about it. In fact, a month after filming, I’m still mulling over the questions that were raised in the program. I wouldn’t say that my opinion is settled, and I’m always open to further discussion. Just simply asking, “Have you changed your opinion?” (Yes/No) doesn’t cover the complexity of my response.

There have been occasions on this blog where I have taken a particular position with respect to a political or social issue, and through informed discussion and debate with other commenters and bloggers, I have changed my opinion. Sometimes I don’t change my opinion instantly. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes I don’t change my opinion until after something occurs, and I see that the effects were not as bad as I thought (or that they were far worse, as they case may be). The proof can be in the pudding.

A lot of people take a while to think about their opinions too. My Dad and I develop our opinions by talking out aloud with other people. My Mum and my sister hate this. They both need to go away with the information and mull over it in private. “Why do you and Dad always ask me what I think of a movie as soon as the credits roll?” complains my mother. “I’m still thinking about it.” By contrast, Dad and I are likely to have an opinion straight away, but in talking it over with each other, we might change our opinion or firm up why we think as we do.

If I wanted to get my sister to think about something, I learned to toss the new argument or information at her much as one might lob a grenade into hostile territory, then close the door to her room and leave her in private rather than immediately asking, “What do you think about that?” She hates being put on the spot, and if I corner her with a new argument without giving her time to digest, I’m likely to hear one thousand reasons why I’m wrong. If I want a considered answer, I wait until the next day. My daughter is very similar to my sister, just a lot louder.

The point of this discursion into my family’s opinion-making habits is simply to point out that some people don’t react very well to new proposals if you don’t give them time to think about it. So naturally enough, if you ask them straight away what their opinion is on a new proposal without giving them time to digest it and research all of the available information, it’s likely that their opinion will be negative.

Bu there seems to be no attempt to explain a policy, to let people take it in and digest it, and then to discuss why it might be necessary. It’s simply presented as a fait accompli and initially, if people react negatively, they’re just dismissed. However, if they continue to react negatively in enough numbers, then the policy is dropped because it might affect opinion polls. There’s no middle ground.

Dave said, “The agenda of both appeals not to a single virtue, but to the vices, probably all of the 7 deadly sins.” My aunt yesterday said, “It seems like both parties are engaging in a race to the bottom.” I’d say rather that the politicians are playing on fears. Of course, fear always plays a part in politics, and this is hardly a new thing. Demagogues of the right and the left have long played on fear.

There’s fear about boat people, fear about immigration and different cultures, fear about jobs, fear about climate change, and the politicians are all trying to play on it. Politicians should be aware of these fears, and understand them. It’s important not to dismiss fears, even if you think they are foolish or bigoted fears. Nonetheless, politicians shouldn’t play on fears to get policies through, and fear shouldn’t the driver behind decisions. As I’ve said long ago, I decry the politics of fear:

Fear doesn’t make for intelligent, reasoned decisions: people make panicked, knee-jerk reactions based on prejudice rather than fact.

If you are seeking to persuade me that a particular course of action is necessary, don’t try to make me fearful to push me down that path. Reason with me, engage with me, talk to me.

What would my advice to politicians be? The Worm should be ignored. Politicians should focus on principle; on doing what is best for the people, not on keeping high in the opinion polls. They should be attempting to allay and address fears, not playing on them.

I didn’t watch the GillAbb Debate because I am so shizzed off about the direction politics is going in this country at the moment. I just feel like it’s so much hot air, and unpleasant hot air at that. What the hell is happening when parties are vying to outdo each other on cutting immigration?! Take away the word “sustainability”, and I think you start to get a bit of a Hanson-esque feel. There is very little difference between the two parties, and neither are going in a direction I particularly like. They seem to be focused on the Worm rather than on a long term vision for what’s best for our country or our people.

I didn’t watch Master Chef either. I don’t have anything against it particularly; I just have other things to do of an evening (mainly PhD, and if I’m not doing that I read a book or write a blog post). Apparently it’s full of lawyers who are trying to get out of the law. Why does this not surprise me? In fact, my husband thought he might nominate me – what a dear man! – they do say that the road to a man’s heart is via his stomach, and it seems I have conquered both. Nonetheless, although I love cooking, I wouldn’t want to compete on a show. My meals are a labour of love for friends and family, and I wouldn’t want to compete in that kind of a way.

Someone was asking a lawyer friend and I whether we knew any of the lawyer contestants. Nope, I don’t think I do. Apparently one or two of the lawyers were at Clayton Utz. Both my friend and I did articles at other big firms, 10 or so years ago. We thought about it. Almost nobody we know from 10 years ago is still at a firm. They’ve gone to the Bar, or in-house, to government, to academia, or they’ve quit law altogether and become something entirely different. I’d say about 10% of my Articles cohort are still with a firm.

When I turned my mind to the firm I was at 5 years ago, I could only think of one lawyer at a vaguely similar level to me who was still there (out of 20 or so). Again, there was a similar picture. Some had moved to other firms, but most had moved out of firms altogether. My own apocryphal observations are backed up by a 2008 study, which showed similar results. I’d love to do a long range study of people over 15 years or so, and work out how long they lasted at firms, why they left or stayed, and what their career progression was.

I suppose law firms don’t have to worry about treating graduates well because there’s plenty more fodder where that came from. I can’t see how firms could be happy with the massive churn they experience (apparently roughly equivalent to an entire staff turnover after 5 years). No wonder Master Chef seems like a better option, even if you do break down in tears because your coulis has lumps in it.

As a friend who is still in practice observed glumly, many firms combine the worst of owner-managed businesses with the worst of large corporates. Partners use junior lawyers to line their own pockets, and I suspect that they don’t really care how many they go through as long as the clients keep coming and the money keeps rolling in, because nothing changes.

I just feel that the world is going crazy at the moment and that there’s a distinct lack of sense on the part of politicians, lawyers and the media. Do people (politicians, law firm partners, or whoever) get so consumed in their own reality that they start to believe their own BS? Glah. On that note, I am going to go and read a nice fantasy sci-fi book and escape from this world for a little while.

1. HeathG at Minimal State wonders if GetUp! will get into trouble with copyright law as a result of its political satire video (which lends from various Hollywood blockbusters). I hope not, the video is rather funny, but my lawyer side thinks they might be skating near the edge.
2. Tim O’Dwyer at Online Opinion bewails the rule of lawyers in our Parliament (he is a lawyer himself – takes one to know one!)
3. Armagny wonders whether people smugglers should all be tarred as villains, something I’d been wondering too. This whole debate is depressing me. Surely there must be other ways of solving the problem?
4. It’s a hard job being a psychic octopus: people don’t just want to shoot the messenger, they want to eat the messenger! Paul the psychic octopus correctly predicted Germany’s downfall at the hands of Spain in the World Cup, and his tentacles are at risk.

He then asserted that the form “wasn’t a contract” and that “you can get out of it in 14 days, half a month anyway.” I looked at the form. It sure looked like a contract to me. And if it wasn’t binding, why was there a need to “get out of it”? I said again that I preferred to think about things and that I’d rather keep the contract and look over it for a few days. He demurred and said that wasn’t necessary, whereupon my alarm bells were well and truly ringing. So I told him I wasn’t interested and could he please leave my property.

The fellow was really hard to get rid of. I kept saying, “I’m not interested,” but he just kept standing there. I could feel myself wanting to start to channel Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino: “Get off my lawn” (or my front doorstep, really). I felt violated and upset afterwards. I punched the guy’s company into Google, and the search immediately disclosed a litany of complaints from other people who’d had similar experiences to me. Some of them had been pressured into signing up with the company, and were very unhappy with the service, but had discovered they were locked into a two year contract. Suffice to say, I placed my experience on the bulletin board, and alerted every single consumer body I could about this selling tactic.

The aspect of this incident which really upsets me is when I imagine some poor old person being bullied by this guy into signing up, and not knowing how to get out of it. Or some person who cannot speak English, or who cannot read what the contract says. I’m a literate lawyer, and even I found it hard to pierce this guy’s spiel of half-truths initially.

After this incident I did a lot of research. It’s a no-brainer really, but if a door-to-door salesman wants you to sign up immediately and doesn’t want you to be able to think about the offer or to do any research, it’s highly unlikely that the agreement is advantageous to you. What is more, you have a right to ask a door-to-door salesman to leave your property at any time, and they have to leave.

The Consumer Law Action Centre Victoria (an excellent organisation with which I am well acquainted) has a sticker which can be downloaded which notifies any door-to-door salesperson that you do not wish them to knock at your door, and that any attempt to do so is unlawful. They also have some simple fact sheets which explain your rights.

Please never be bullied or intimidated into accepting offers by door-to-door salesmen. If they are making you feel uncomfortable, simply ask them to leave.

Here endeth the Community Service Announcement.

Update: I’ve now spoken to the Energy and Water Ombudsman in Victoria, and they confirmed what I already suspected – there’s no such thing as a government rebate for a SmartMeter. The Ombudsman can help consumers who have been bullied into signing up by an energy salesperson, and assist in getting the consumer out of the contract if they so wish.

O wad some Power the gift tae gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us! 
It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 
An foolish notion.

From Robert Burns, To a Louse

The course Burns commends has, of late, become unfashionable. Instead of observing others unlike ourselves and reporting back, we have been enjoined to comment on things within our ken and to leave others alone. Sometimes those who wish to comment on others–on those unlike themselves–are even chased away with sticks. Whole critical industries are devoted to writings from this or that minority group, or this or that victim group, forgetting that the first task of all imaginative literature (in which I include cinema) is to engender empathy in the reader or viewer, to make us imagine people and places at least partly unlike ourselves. It’s even better if the writer can engender readerly empathy for things wholly unlike us or outside our ken. Homer even makes you pity his horses.

This focus on the local and familiar has, of course, diversified literature at the expense of its imaginative depth. Our writers are licorice allsorts, but none of them can make you care about their human characters as much as you care about one of Homer’s horses. We seldom have to dust off our willing suspension of disbelief and ask whether the writer pulled off the high wire act or not, for the simple reason that most writers no longer try walking across Niagara Falls on a length of rope. This, I think, is a loss, and while diversity is nice, it is only nice, and perhaps it is time to reward imaginative power again.

A good opportunity to sample a large imaginative vision is to watch Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, to date the only decent film about the Iraq War. This film succeeds because it honours warriors without expecting that they should be other than what they are. Unlike the preachy failures Redacted and Syriana, Bigelow’s film is painted on a much smaller canvas: a three man bomb-disposal squad in Iraq when the IED war was at its height (2004) and it seemed that the United States was getting nowhere. The Burnsian skill of Bigelow’s film is that she gifts us a woman’s vision of warriors, and does so with extraordinary skill and psychological insight. Some people, unfortunately, find this threatening:

What’s the point of this metaphor? It’s that I’m still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America. While Wayne set the testosterone standard in playing characters who lived to fight, his guys also found time to love women — Ethan’s Martha (Dorothy Jordan) in “The Searchers” and the Ringo Kid’s Dallas (Claire Trevor) in “Stagecoach,” to name two.

When they bonded with young, earnest boys, Wayne’s men became meaningful mentors — Gillom Rogers (Ron Howard) in “The Shootist” couldn’t have grown up without the wit and wisdom of Wayne’s John Bernard Books. But Will, with his Wayne-ian steely gaze, his laconic ease at the portals of death, and his patented hero saunter, loves “just one thing,” as he tells his baby boy before leaving him, maybe forever, to return to the killing fields of Iraq. And it isn’t women or kids.

The same critic goes on to complain about an absence of rom-coms at this year’s Oscars. A woman director, it seems, is to be penalised for seeing men as others see them, for giving us Burns’s gift. It is very sad. This despite the greatest imaginative art being about the ability to get inside other people’s heads, you know, like Tolstoy did to  Anna Karenina and Jane Austen did to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. 

It is also fashionable, these days, to pretend that all soldiers come back from the front damaged beyond repair, unable to become full and fit members of society again. It is similarly fashionable to run down what they do while at the front. In America at least, this quinella no longer puts bums on seats, hence the failure of Redacted and Syriana. The Hurt Locker–apart from its deliberately confined vision–captures the extent to which some men are extraordinarily good at war, and that this skill does not make them bad men or cruel men, just different men from the common run of man (and woman) hood. The line ‘war is a drug’ comes from Chris Hedges, and is featured as part of a larger quotation at the start of the film:

The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

Will James (Jeremy Renner) may be crazy brave, even drugged on war, but he is very good at what he does. And he likes it. He is also less good at other things: the scene where this consummate warrior is all but defeated by the Wal-Mart cereal aisle back home is chilling in its intensity and power. He is not, however, a bad father–that is made very clear. He just likes other things more than fatherhood. Quite a lot of men do; ditto with women and motherhood. It may not be fashionable to say this, but it remains true.

James is joined by Sanborn (Anthony Mackie)–a sane and seasoned operator–and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), the squad’s newbie. Sanborn is initially hostile to James, partly because he thinks he takes too many risks and partly because James’s predecessor in title was popular and well liked, not least of all by Sanborn himself. At one point he and Eldridge seriously consider manufacturing a ‘blue on blue‘ incident, so irritating does Sanborn find his new commander.

This hostility is diverted when the three men encounter a group of British mercenaries hunting down high ranking members of Saddam’s erstwhile government, featured–as you may recall–in the form of a deck of cards. Led by Ralph Fiennes, the Brits have gone Lawrence of Arabia native, and the Americans initially mistake them for insurgents. When this misidentification is overcome, the mixed group finds itself under fire from real insurgents, and there then follows fifteen minutes of the most suspenseful cinema you will ever see. This is broken by unintentional humour that is never forced or contrived: Fiennes’s character coyly reminding Sanborn that, ‘ah, we’re on the same side,’ or a soldier’s rifle jamming because the ammunition cartridge has been soaked with blood (necessitating extensive spit and polish in order to be made serviceable again).

Kathryn Bigelow is being heavily tipped for the Best Director Oscar. If she wins, it will be because she has held a mirror up to an aspect of humanity and made us see things we didn’t notice before. That’s the best, I think, we can expect of the narrative arts: they remind us what real life is like, if we’re willing to be reminded.

Briefly, I attended a conference in Washington DC and rather than catch the red-eye express back to London, I am staying with a fellow BCL graduate in New York (a city I have never visited before) until Friday. Today (my first day without the effects of jet lag) was spent tramping around Liberty and Ellis Islands.

Unfortunately, the US hasn’t had a great deal of practice at responding to home terrorism (unlike the British) and watching this basically friendly and welcoming people enforcing Tower of London style security (badly, I might add) at the base of the Statue of Liberty was quite distressing. I particularly felt for the young chap from the National Parks service who had to keep shouting the same information (no water bottles, no back-packs, take off your shoes etc etc) over and over again until he was hoarse. No-one had thought to put up a sign, or prerecord the announcement. No-one had even thought to give him a megaphone.

As I mentioned in the comments to this thread, the Statue of Liberty is a rather fetching green, something I hadn’t appreciated fully until now. A photograph of her in all her greenness is therefore included in this post. 

Presumably because it is less symbolic and thus less likely to be a target for loonies, Ellis Island (the main processing centre for US immigrants between 1892 and 1924) was not overburdened with security. It is a striking piece of Victorian architecture, lovingly restored (comparable to Kings Cross-St Pancras in London). I have included a photograph of the vaulted reception hall. It also contains within a museum that I recommend to anyone with even the most passing interest in statistics.

It is one thing to present masses of data in an economics paper to an audience with some training, and another thing entirely to make that information accessible to those who can but add and subtract. The thought that has gone into conveying statistical information in a three-dimensional visual form in the Ellis Island museum is second-to-none and very informative. Highly recommended if you haven’t seen it before.

Iran’s supreme leader has denied it is developing nuclear weapons, after a new report from the UN atomic watchdog, the IAEA, sparked an international outcry.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said any fears were “baseless” as Iranians’ beliefs “bar us from using such weapons”.

The blunt report raised concerns Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

Russia said it was “very alarmed” over the report while the US warned Iran it faced consequences if it failed to meet international responsibilities.

According to the unusually forthright report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran’s level of co-operation with the agency was decreasing, adding to concerns about “possible military dimensions” to its nuclear programme.

Britain and Germany both said the report reinforced their “great concerns” about Iran’s enrichment of uranium and other nuclear activities.

Enriched uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power plants. Very highly enriched uranium can be made into atomic bombs.

- BBC News

SkepticLawyer is at a libertarian conference in Washington this week and LegalEagle is down with a tummy bug so I’m throwing open the thread for general discussion. What are you up to? What do you think about the departure of Pauline Hanson? Or the Canonisation of Mary MacKillop? (Or the canonisation of Pauline Hanson..?)

Is the recession really over or will the massive public debts incurred in bailing out the banks mean a double dip is inevitable? Is Manib al-Masri the next Palestinian in line for assassination, or should he be?

Feel free peeps.

An octopus and its coconut-carrying antics have surprised scientists.

Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says it is the first example of tool use in octopuses.

One of the researchers, Dr Julian Finn from Australia’s Museum Victoria, told BBC News: “I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time.”

He added: “I could tell it was going to do something, but I didn’t expect this – I didn’t expect it would pick up the shell and run away with it.”

The veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus) were filmed between 1999 and 2008 off the coasts of Northern Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia. The bizarre behaviour was spotted on four occasions…

The octopuses were filmed moving up to 20m with the shells. And their awkward gait, which the scientists describe as “stilt-walking”, is surprisingly speedy, possibly because the creatures are left vulnerable to attack from predators while they scuttle away with their prized coconuts.

The octopuses eventually use the shells as a protective shelter. If they just have one half, they simply turn it over and hide underneath. But if they are lucky enough to have retrieved two halves, they assemble them back into the original closed coconut form and sneak inside. The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.

- BBC News

WTF?

They run away on tippie toes. This has to be seen to be believed…

For those who get the joke, you might like this

I will be attending a conference in Washington DC from 19-21 February, 2010, and (having done this once before) would like to avoid flying across the pond, staying for two nights, and then flying back across the pond. Jet-lag and I were on first name terms after that little exercise, and I had a week with screwed-up sleeping patterns. I would also like to see some more bits of the USA (I have never, shock-horror, been to New York City).

This means I would really like to spend the week before or after the conference staying with someone in the US. I realise this is something of an impost, but if you feel you have untapped skills as a tour-guide and don’t mind the thought of an Oxford legal academic in your house, then I will do my level best to be an unobtrusive guest! Of course, reciprocal visiting rights in Oxford are on offer, and those who have taken them up have tended to have a most enjoyable time staying in Brasenose’s gorgeous late Medieval Old Quad (early 1500s).

If you think you can help me out, please leave something in the comments to this post, contact me via facebook or use the email address on our donations page. You will make someone who is relatively untouristed in the USA very grateful indeed.