Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Money keeps you safer than masks

    Yet more evidence that we really aren’t in this together: the Office for National Statistics reports that the Covid-19 death rate in England is more than double in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived.

    In the most deprived areas the death rate is 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population; in the least deprived, 25.3. In Wales it’s similar: 44.6 to 23.2 deaths per 100,000.

    That’s partly because poorer people tend to live more closely together, partly because poorer people tend to have worse health, and partly because poorer people are more likely to be in jobs classed as “essential” that they can’t do from home.

  • This is not a lockdown

    It’s May Day, the day when we celebrate international workers’ day. But in England many workers have nothing to celebrate: what the papers call a lockdown isn’t stopping employers from forcing people to come in to work non-essential jobs.

    Caroline Molloy, in OpenDemocracy:

    we don’t actually have a lockdown. The government has allowed people to continue to go to work – and allowed bosses to make people continue to go to work – far more than we’re being led to believe, and far more than most of the media seem to have noticed.

    And as openDemocracy has just exposed, across large sections of the economy, many workers in ‘non essential’ jobs are being forced to show up to potentially dangerous workplaces. And some have already got sick. And some have already died.

    51% of the people currently working are not working from home.

    In England, unlike in Scotland and Wales, the government has not even introduced any new legal sanctions if offices, call centres, factories, construction sites, warehouses, and so on, don’t enable social distancing in the workplace. English bosses are expected to “make every effort to comply” with social distancing, but not legally mandated to do anything. Indeed, as “lockdown” progresses, the non-binding guidance has been watered down

    It’s hard to disagree with Molloy’s argument that the reason the media isn’t highlighting this is yet another example of a myopic media class: if they can’t see it, it can’t be happening.

    The baristas and bookshops aren’t there, and who really knows anyone who works in a call centre, factory, or warehouse?

  • Glasgow is going to lose another historic building

    To paraphrase The Onion: I can’t believe this is happening in the only city where this regularly happens.

    Glasgow is set to lose another iconic building, the ABC in Sauchiehall Street. The music venue – one of my very favourite places – was badly damaged by the second Art School fire and has effectively been left to rot since despite promises of its rebirth; it is now in danger of collapsing. That means the previous block on demolition is almost certain to be lifted.

    That’s rather convenient for the developer, because the ABC was a major obstacle to plans to build yet more student flats.

    The entire block in which the ABC sits is owned by a single developer, and the developer’s plans for a seven-story block of flats on this prime bit of real estate were rejected in 2017; the developer appealed to the Scottish Government and was turned down again. The flats would be “detrimental to the historic environment”, which included the Art School’s Macintosh building and the ABC.

    That “historic environment” went on fire (for the second time) in June 2018. As the A Thousand Flowers blog reports, the developer promised to rebuild the ABC as “a world class music venue” but submitted no plans other than an application to completely demolish it.

    The all too frequently toothless Historic Environment Scotland chipped in to say that, “It is our view that the applicant has not made an adequate effort to retain and preserve this C-listed building (or any part of it), and has therefore not met the tests for demolition”. Garnethill Community Council have said it would “devastating and totally unacceptable” to lose the building. Omnipresent heritage fan and MP Paul Sweeney pointed out in his objection that the building hosted Glasgow’s first ever public film showing, in 1896.

    Glasgow School of Art have also objected to the demolition, pointing out that there are currently no plans for the site’s redevelopment and that the ABC building, with temporary props, is under no imminent danger of collapse. Conveniently, their letter also reiterates that student flat plans for the neighbouring building have been rejected several times and that the ABC’s facade is an effective and important part of the streetscape. We can, perhaps, read between the lines here.

    One pretty sure-fire way to destroy a damaged building is to leave it open to the elements. That appears to be what’s happened to the ABC.

    ATF:

    If the owners are granted permission to flatten the ABC, how long will it be before the student flat proposals for the neighbouring block emerge out of the ashes?

  • “How discriminatory do you have to be before you’re called out?”

    Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch explains why UK trans people are really scared right now.

    For some time trans people have understood the current media debate in the UK isn’t actually about the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, it is about our basic rights to live and move as full members of our society.

    …Most trans people I know in the UK are now absolutely terrified.

    They understand an arcane procedure for changing legal gender is probably going to be maintained in some form.

    But they realize their ability to function in any meaningful way as members of our society is about to be removed

  • Using coronavirus for a culture war

    Rachel Shabi in The Guardian:

    the key issue in the right’s current culture war is the lockdown, which is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU. Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism, those challenging the overwhelming consensus of global expertise cast themselves as lockdown “sceptics”. And cleaving to a rightwing populist script, these sceptics say their legitimate concerns are being silenced.

  • Never trust a Tory

    The UK government’s new equality minister, Liz Truss, has set out her priorities for the coming months. It isn’t good news for trans people.

    This isn’t a surprise. In 2019 Andrew Gilligan, the journalist who spearheaded The Sunday Times’ scaremongering about trans people, was appointed as a key advisor for No. 10. The conservatives have long discussed demonising trans people as a culture war strategy. It’s entirely on brand for the party of Section 28 to want to roll back trans people’s rights.

    Truss says the UK government will respond to the Gender Recognition Act “by the summer, and there are three very important principles that I will be putting in place.”

    First of all, the protection of single-sex spaces, which is extremely important.

    Secondly making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system.

    Finally, which is not a direct issue concerning the Gender Recognition Act, but is relevant, making sure that the under 18s are protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future.

    The announcement is already being misreported by the right-wing press, so for example the Telegraph claims that “trans children [are] to be banned from surgery”. Surgery isn’t given to under-18s. The announcement clearly means puberty blockers, which it seems the government wants to withhold from teenagers until after puberty.

    “Single-sex spaces” is a dogwhistle. They are not affected by the Gender Recognition Act. The equalities minister of all people should know that.

    The second point suggests that letting trans people live free from persecution is conditional rather than universal.

    That third point is a direct threat to Gillick competence, which says that you do not have to be an adult to get essential healthcare without parental consent: it’s what enables teenage girls to get contraception. By saying that under-18s lack “decision-making capabilities” even though they are old enough to legally become parents, get married or join the army, it paves the ground for an assault on young women’s reproductive rights.

    I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve said previously that I think the government will do something with gender recognition that they can pitch as progressive but that actually removes trans people’s rights: I think it’s highly likely that they will make the existing gender recognition system very slightly more accessible but change the role of the Gender Recognition Certificate so that if you don’t have one, you are not protected from discrimination.

    As the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights put it:

    In her speech she says there must be “checks and balances” before trans people can live freely; an ominous admission that we will not be allowed to live without special restrictions, because of the “danger” of us being trans. This is not equality.

  • Overconfidence and incompetence

    Something we’re seeing a lot of during the coronavirus crisis is the rise of the armchair epidemiologist: the men (it’s mainly men) presenting themselves as authoritative voices about things they have no expertise in.

    Sarah Weinman, for InsideHook.com:

    They are lawyers, former reporters and thriller writers, Silicon Valley technologists, newspaper columnists, economists and doctors who specialize in different parts of medicine. Their utter belief in their own cognitive abilities gives them the false sense that their speculation, and predictive powers, are more informed than the rest of ours.

    They’ve been with us for a long time, of course – the blogging world is full of them – but coronavirus has given some of them a much bigger audience, and that has made some of them dangerous. The UK press and social media is full of grifters speaking with great certainty about things they know nothing about, and those things currently include how to deal with a lethal global pandemic.

    There is a name for this, and it is the Dunning-Kreuger effect. The effect is often explained as “stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid”, but it’s more nuanced than that. It’s not that people are stupid. Many of the people who clearly have DK are very clever. It’s that they are blinkered: they lack the knowledge to understand what knowledge they are lacking.

    For example, let’s say you’re an economist. If you turn your attention to the likely outcome of the coronavirus, you may come up with different answers than the virologists and epidemiologists do. That doesn’t necessarily mean the virologists and epidemiologists are wrong; it’s much more likely that you’re making ignorant assumptions and rookie mistakes that people in the field don’t make. You don’t know that you’re making them, because this isn’t your area of expertise.

    Where the Dunning-Kreuger effect comes into play is when you decide that if the experts disagree with you, it means it is the experts who are wrong.

    Who better to speak to about the Dunning-Krueger effect than David Dunning, one of the two professors who coined the term? That’s who Sarah Weinman interviewed.

    The problem is that some people can take things they know and misapply it to this new situation. A lot of people think, “Oh, this is a flu,” so they use what is common knowledge of the flu to guide them. But this virus is not the flu. Knowledge is a good thing, but they don’t realize it’s a misapplication.

    I used the example of an economist because that’s a field Dunning specifically mentioned.

    Confidence comes from knowing something, but not realizing you don’t know everything you need to know. If you’ve been rewarded as a successful economist, you deal with formal models in math, and you have confidence in what you do. This can be true of all of us in our area of expertise.

    That confidence may be perfectly justified in economics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have anything valuable to say in other fields.

    Elon Musk is a great example of this. The Tesla boss has an electric car company and launches rockets into space. And when a bunch of kids got stuck in a cave in Thailand, Musk rode to the rescue with a special high-tech submarine to save them.

    The submarine was useless, because it wasn’t able to navigate the caves. When criticised, Musk called an expert diver – the diver who actually helped rescue the trapped kids – a “pedo”.

    Musk has since moved into providing ventilators for coronavirus patients. The machines he supplied are not ventilators. It’s surely just a matter of time before he calls the doctors “pedos” too.

    Here’s one example of why these overconfident men are dangerous: Richard Epstein. Epstein has arguably contributed to the US death toll: his prediction that the coronavirus would only kill 500 Americans was widely shared in US conservative circles and helped inform US government policy on how to respond to the potential loss of life.

    As NY Mag reports:

    A week later, Epstein conceded that he had committed a math error, and the real number would be 5,000 deaths, though “it, too, could prove somewhat optimistic.”

    At the time of writing, the US toll is about to pass 50,000 deaths.

    …Somehow this experience has not shaken Epstein’s confidence in his own ability to outthink the entire field of epidemiology.

    There’s an astonishing interview with Epstein in The New Yorker where he throws a tantrum.

    O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.

    What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.

    O.K. Can I ask you one more question?

    You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?

    Part of the reason grifters have achieved such prominence is because the people in authority often have the Dunning-Krueger effect too.

    The UK government is a stellar example, but you can also see it in things such as authorities urging us not to wear masks because they don’t really prevent you from getting the virus (even though proper ones do, which is why health workers use them, and though they do have a proven effect of reducing the danger of you spreading the virus to others if you don’t realise you have it). When official sources are often wrong, it creates a vacuum that grifters are all too ready to fill with bullshit.

    In the MetaFilter discussion of the article, one commenter posted:

    Science and these various “experts in stuff” both operate in uncertain environments, but treat uncertainty in totally opposite ways.

    …Experts in stuff… use uncertainty as a means to an end, so they generally try to increase it. Since science shows its cards with regards to uncertainty, they can always argue a reasonable level of skepticism of science. Then they can turn around and present some alternative facts and arguments about their own position on the matter. The idea isn’t about the next researcher, or a process to eliminate uncertainty, it’s simply to be convincing. They don’t care if they are right – only if they are perceived as right.

    This is why these “experts” can be so troubling to deal with. They’ll stake a claim against anything, as long as it gets them to their goal. Sometimes it’s just to be respected, but sometimes it can be much darker.

  • Priorities

    To add insult to fatal injury, the headline that dominates the front page isn’t even true.

  • Don’t be an optimist

    If you’re worried about losing your mind during lockdown, here’s some advice from an expert: don’t be an optimist.

    Admiral Jim Stockdale was held in the “Hanoi Hilton” prison camp for seven years, where he was tortured more than twenty times. He says he came out of the camp stronger than when he went in. Speaking to Jim Collins, he explained:

    I never ever wavered in my absolute faith that not only would I prevail—get out of this—but I would also prevail by turning it into the defining event of my life that would make me a stronger and better person.

    When Collins asked him about the people who didn’t survive so well, Stockdale answered:

    I can tell you who didn’t make it out. It was the optimists… They were the ones who always said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ Christmas would come and it would go. And there would be another Christmas. And they died of a broken heart.”

    Of course, being in lockdown in a nice house or flat is hardly the same as being a prisoner of war. But Stockdale’s argument is a sound one. To take a slightly less impressive character, John Cleese’s headmaster in the 1986 film Clockwise:

    It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.

    Or perhaps you prefer Stephen King? Here’s a bit from his novel Joyland:

    You think Okay, I get it, I’m prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that’s what fucks you up. That’s what kills you.

    I’m not suggesting we should all go around in abject misery, weeping and wailing and gnashing our teeth. But I do think that focusing on anything that is not within our control is going to be bad for our mental health. For example, if you were hoping that the lockdown would be lifted last week, how did you feel when it was extended? How will you feel if it’s extended again?

    Stockdale:

    This is what I learned from those years in the prison camp, where all those constraints just were oppressive. You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are. We’re not getting out of here by Christmas.

  • “All our planning was for flu”

    It’s interesting to see The Sunday Times turn its guns on the UK government and on Boris Johnson in particular. This piece by the Insight team, which hits print tomorrow, is utterly damning.

    Last week, a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. In particular, the prime minister was singled out.

    “There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the adviser said. “And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

    …An investigation has talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners, public officials and politicians about the root of the crisis and whether the government should have known sooner and acted more swiftly to kick-start the Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing.

    They told us that, contrary to the official line, Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.

    …the warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears.