Read up, wise up and join in

Next Sunday afternoon I will be at the Isle of Man Freethinkers AGM. This year I have a more than usual interest in proceedings (more on that after the event).
Sadly, though, it means that I will not get over my Britphobia long enough to experience this amazing conference (see https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/marieme-h%C3%A9lielucas-maryam-namazie/promoting-global-secular-alternative-in-isis-era and the full conference agenda at http://www.secularconference.com/agenda/ ). Still, I can at least urge anyone in the UK who hasn't yet booked to get along to what is - without a shadow of a doubt - the most important meeting of secular minds in the British Isles this year; in fact, given the timeliness of the subject matter and quality of the speakers, possibly this decade.
Maryam Namazie, Houzan Mahmoud, Taslim Nasrin , Gita Saghal and numerous other speakers are people who shatter the myth that secularism is somehow a white or 'Western' project. I am proud to say I have corresponded and worked with a few of them in recent years, and if I have learnt anything about global secularism in the last decade it was directly due to them. While straight, white, male and old “celebrity atheists” are the ones inevitably appearing on TV or pushing flabby abstractions in opportunist pot-boilers passed off as “serious books”, these are the folk at the coalface, squaring up to the mad mullahs and getting chased out of their homelands (or, if born nearer here, their ethnic ghettos) by pitchfork-wielding mobs. As if that was not bad enough, once in supposedly more liberal places they are blacklisted (I know, joke in poor taste, but absolutely correct here) by the kind of pathetic, white and privileged guilt-trippers who make many ”progressive left” organisations a nonsense (check Gita Saghal's experience with Amnesty International as a typical example).
In between the UKIP-lite shite about non-whites being peddled by some “celebrity atheists” and the Stalinist groupies who think it is somehow cooler to hug self-hating to the point of suicidal, religious apologistic bombers than properly deal with the complexities of neo-colonialism, trying to do the right thing without resorting to magic and Imaginary Invisible Friends has never been a tougher gig – and more necessary.
As Maryam concludes: “It is not racist to defend equality or secularism. In fact, it is racist to deny people the same rights and freedoms because they are deemed “different”. Also, secularism is not a western concept but a universal one. It is a demand of people everywhere. Nor is it “progressive” to support Islamism vis-à-vis imperialism. Islamism is our far right. Any progressive person or group must oppose all forms of fascism including the religious right. And they must support and show solidarity with those who have survived and are resisting. This is a fight we need more people to join.”
So read up, wise up, and join in.

Of honours and bombers

An old habit from my full time journo days has just paid off again. Before recycling I routinely check through old local papers and magazines for stories and tip-offs I might have missed. Today I found another to make me laugh, and to offer much more insight into the honours system.
Now, this piece of sycophantic claptrap (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/long-goodbye-for-governor-1-1740566 ) really should have been the last time the nastiest RAF flyboy since Bomber Harris got a mention in a Manx newspaper.
Sadly, not so. Because on 12th August we learnt in the Manx press that he was “surprised” to receive a knighthood.
Not half as surprised as me.
For the benefit of those who take no interest in war crimes against civilians, Macfadyen was the RAF chief of staff during the first Gulf War, i.e. the one that stopped when the survivors amongst Hussein's untrained conscripts from the foreign labour force left a wealthy neighbouring country we do loads of business with and his full time army emerged from their British built nuclear bunkers to gas the Kurds.
The latter, apparently, was none of our business. It was also none of our business that the much famed and filmed carpet bombing of Iraq hit almost no military targets but did kill around 350,000 civilians. By contrast, I would hazard a guess that some reconstruction contracts also fell the way of UK businesses via a long chain of offshore middle parties - in the UAE for example.
So another thing that does not surprise me is that, when Macfadyen's part in both this and the early Al -Yamamah arms deals became too awkward for the RAF and he was offered the governorship of the Isle of Man instead, he notoriously admitted to having to look the place up on a map. Frankly, given his poor map-reading skills I'm more surprised he found it.
By the way, if you know little about Al-Yamamah this (see http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=9008 ) may help put things in context.
By chance, years ago, I was putting on an event in a Manx venue when Mrs M showed up with some American ladies. With a little sly probing I was able to find that El Guv was deep in hospitality with old US war chums, so the memsahibs had been sent out to see quaint local sights while the boys got down to business.
And it was nasty business too. Because with a little more sly probing I found that old US warhorses were regular guests at Dunbombin and interestingly, like him, their retirement interests revolved rather a lot around arms companies consultancies.
This was a period in UK business history when the OECD and FATF were causing a clean-up of the offshore finance industry, and organisations like Campaign Against the Arms Trade were taking so much interest in a civil service unit attached to the UK Department of International Development that it had to close down. The unit, in a nutshell, had for years employed around 100 civil servants to advise and assist the UK arms trade in efficient use of offshore entities in order to avoid public scrutiny, not to mention hassle with end user certificates (which by international treaty are required to prevent arms sales by “respectable” countries to the uglier type of dictatorship, such as the ones Lockheed and BAE might find very profitable).
This use of the governor's quarters (politically a bit of a grey area because not strictly under control of either Tynwald or Whitehall) for quiet chats about arms deals via cosy third country offshoots of major arms companies was, I feel sure, continued by Mcfadyen's successor and may not have tailed off until we got a civilian governor (though again one with extensive business experience of Africa).
Also note that (1) at least one former employee at the shadowy DID outfit went on to work in the Isle of Man public sector and that (2) a scheme which on paper helps Manx finance sector “experts” to help small nations develop more honest international trading practices and stamp out corruption (and was sold as such to FATF to help us clean up our own reputation) is substantially a creation of the Said Business School in Oxford and was originally based at the Isle of Man Business School.
That's the Said Business School started with a £23 Million donation from Saudi-Syrian businessman Wafic Said at around the time Blair & Co were shutting down a government enquiry into Al-Yamamah and the Isle of Man Business School which went belly-up because....... well, many wonder if the faculty and management knew much about basic business or accounting practices.
My wife sometime wonders why I laugh so much when I read Manx newspapers.

The real public health menaces

I had the, um …... interesting(?) experience of meeting some people who either already are or shortly will be indirectly employed to tackle the island's so-called substance abuse problems last week.
Inevitably, I was not impressed, and rather than yet again hear fact-free drivel that's been printed uncut in the local media for years fell to musing what might be done to tackle one of the island's real social problems.
You know, some days I really worry about the Manx addiction to inventing social panics, linked to the ease with which intellectually challenged middle class deadwood can feed off a social network close to government which will find things for them to do. Frankly, I'd rather they stayed home and did something less socially damaging ..... drink a bottle of supermarket own brand sherry daily, read what Sunday supplement critics pass off as literature, weave baskets, make pots....anything really but engage with the real world and drag others down to their level.
Now this (see http://www.clivebates.com/?p=2391 ) is the kind of thing they should be reading, and to stay well ahead of their publically subsidised games you should too. Take a quick look and have most of your misconceptions about “public health” blown away ...... just like that.
And as Chris Snowden commented (see http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-conceit-of-public-health.html for more):
“Clive is too polite to mention one of the other reasons why 'public health' people are "surprised to find there are people who get up and do something, and do it for nothing", which is that they would never consider doing anything without being paid for it, preferably by the government. A grass roots, volunteer-run 'public health' group is an oxymoron.”
Over here, it is even worse. I suspect most morons would be offended to be associated with the kind of woo-woo merchants and research-free tactics all too common in Manx health scams.
And for another succint analysis of the way this stuff works, you really have to see http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2014/09/soda-sock-puppets.html
Local Government running an astroturf campaign to promote their own no-brainers and money-drainers to taxpayers? You just could not make this stuff up! Thank goodness that kind of stuff never happens on the Isle of Man...
..oh hang on a minute......

Slaveheart

“Management” found a new game at her workplace on Friday – taunting exiled Scots who, if they had a chance, would have voted No anyway.
As she so aptly put it, “I hear Mel Gibson's making a modern sequel to Braveheart . It's going to be called Slaveheart.”
Ouch! But couldn't you just predict that, once finally given a chance, all those Presbyterian dullards would opt for an English Nanny over free choice and responsibility?
A fear of freedom perhaps? I blame John Knox myself. Once you've internalised the doctrine of Predetermination, maybe you can never think and act for yourself.
If you do have enough self-respect to get involved in a major contemporary political issue, get down to the Manx Legion Club in Douglas tomorrow night (Monday 22^nd) for this (see http://positiveactiongroup.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=518:pag-public-meeting-disability-and-equality&catid=34:pag-meet ).
Gareth and Paul are two of my favourite Manx human rights activists. Since coming here just a year or two ago, Gareth has galvanised the whole local debate over disability and moved it on decades. As in the UK until the 1990's, it used to be dominated locally by patronising faith-led “charities” who would do anything to help the disabled except get off their backs and stop using them as an excuse for lifetime subsidised employment. Gareth, by comparison, has a practical grounding in the Disability Rights Movement, the kind of militant crips who, if you lay in a bath of baked beans to buy them a wheelchair, would quite rightly smack you in the mouth instead of thanking you.
Paul has been slogging away for as long as I can remember on equality issues. He was key to the abolition of the vacuous Section 38 (the Isle of Man's equivalent of UK section 28, which prevented schoolteachers assuring kids that there is nothing abnormal about homosexuality or gay relationships) and to various moves to abolish institutionalised Manx homophobia in the 21^st century. More quietly, he was the sole advocate prepared to help two Muslim guys refused bail because they could and would not attend daily prayer meetings at the island's bail hostel, run by a Christian charity. The case was also important because the Manx government's answer to the first local request for asylum was going to be to quietly ship them back to the UK and pretend the applicants had never been here, thus ensuring a legal judgement would not be made and a legal precedent could not be set.
But while Paul and Gareth will raise valuable issues, this Equality Bill is a much bigger deal and we all need to be thinking about how it might affect us.
For example, luckily I was married in a civilised country, and if my daughter ever gets round to being married or entering a civil partnership I will want the same for her. As long as a superstitious cross-dresser, calling on his imaginary invisible friend as witness, is deemed to be a fit person to pronounce her legally married but a responsible and rational adult is not that ceremony is unlikely to take place on the Isle of Man. I will advise her to go to Scotland or the Irish Republic instead.
Similarly, we all have to pop our clogs sometime, and I would rather my friends do not suffer the indignity of seeing me off in a room dominated by the amanita muscarita-inspired ramblings of ancient Middle Eastern goat herders, thank you very much. Some will say that as I will be dead at the time it does not matter, but, honestly..... Yuk! I would not EVEN be seen dead in a drab dump where the furnishings are that tacky, P-U-L-L-E-E-A-S-E!!!!
Maybe we should all get serious...or maybe not. When even some of my loved ones' jokes bear more serious analysis than what passes for the serious contemplations of the average Manx politician it may only be necessary to be awake, laughing and active to make a difference.

Oh, OK then....

OK, in the last week alone several people have asked if I've given up on blogging. Of necessity, I did have to stop for a while to attend to other things, which took longer than I expected. But numerous times in the last month or two I started looking at a local topic, then prevaricated so long that posting would be irrelevant. Anyway, I gave my word I would be back online within the week and I've stalled long enough, so here goes......
Assisted Dying then, as it is back in the news (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/health/looking-at-the-issue-of-assisted-suicide-1-6846326), though I wish people would pay enough attention to get the terms right. Ten years ago, as is public knowledge, I helped Patrick Kneen and, after his death, his widow to run the Manx Death With Dignity campaign. It started as a personal favour for friends who nobody else wanted to go out on a limb for. As I said to Patrick at the time, I was actually fed up with talk about older people dying well and wanted a bit more talk about younger folk living well. But oddly enough, despite the grim subject matter, it was mostly fun and a year or so of life lived as fully as it can be when you have the courage to - though in the process I also learnt just how devious, dishonest and plain nasty powerful local people with no interest in human rights or democracy can be if nobody smacks them down.
So, as something of a reluctant expert, I think it necessary to explain why the terminology matters, especially when exponents of emotional fascism use it to misdirect us (though all fascism works by excluding logic and provoking a pure emotional response).
First, discard anyone who still uses the term Euthanasia as they are either lying or too idle to keep up. The term euthanasia originates in the ancient Greek concept of mercy killing, which was inevitably involuntary in a society where “democracy” discounted 90% of potential voters and politicians as it did not consider them adult - or even human. Modern advocates of Assisted Dying first used it in the naïve belief that anyone joining the debate would be educated enough to know and intellectually honest enough to discuss it in those terms.
Dumb mistake, sadly, when arguing with pathological liars with an economic interest in perpetuating the dark ages, though in fairness not helped when the Nazis made euthanasia as oxymoronic a term in the 1940's as, say, military intelligence or social security in the early 21^st century.
Involuntary Euthanasia happens quietly anyway. If that alarms you, fund the health service properly, abandon semi-privatised end-of -life care run by greedy faith-heads at public expense and change the focus of management from economic bead-counting to deciding (1) what the objectives are of optimum socialised medical care and (2) the reasonable expectations of those who use and pay for it, then deliver it. Simples.
Assisted Suicide is helping someone who would like to commit suicide but is physically incapable of doing so to overcome those physical barriers to kill themselves - for example by self-administering pills or an injection. It is not the same as the broader term Assisted Dying, which recognises that the potential suicide is not able to self-administer and so someone else will have to administer the medication. Too often we unconsciously assume this has to be a doctor, but this is a lazy assumption, and I suspect that many friends of physically incapable suicides who quietly help illegally may not be medical professionals but will be intelligent and well informed enough to know what they are doing. By the way, for a broader discussion of the unconscious but strictly speaking illogical privileging of state-determined medical 'professionalism” try Ivan Illich's excellent 1970's classic “Medical Nemesis”.
All clear? Can we move on?
I just wish the discussion as outlined in the press could. Inevitably, if you get an overdue discussion going then the politicians sideline it for a decade new people come to it without the benefit of prior knowledge. Fair enough, but there is no excuse for the current Bishop not to have studied the joint response to a Tynwald committee on a possible Bill drafted by a previous Archdeacon and approved by his predecessor and three other faith leaders (but without daring to consult their flocks).
All this talk of slippery slopes and failure to acknowledge that, in every objective survey, around 80% of the population of any country (across all ethnic and faith subcultures) want legal Assisted Dying makes it look as if he is disinterested. Manx DWD also did a strictly confidential survey of local doctors (somewhat hindered as the GMC list of Manx doctors was so old around a quarter had moved on or died) which showed cautious acceptance of the case for tightly controlled legalisation in very specific cases.
I also know from that survey alone that, in a community of around 80,000 people, it is perfectly possible to find one or two doctors prepared to help if subject to a strict medical and legal process. To put things in perspective, this would be about the same as the number of Manx NHS surgeons legally permitted and expected by their contracts to carry out an abortion in tightly defined circumstances but who, oddly, always seem to be “unavailable” when such circumstances arise. Incidentally, a bogus survey passed off as representative of local medical opinion was also presented to the Tynwald committee, but it bears no serious analysis. According to some who were “consulted”, it was done by a senior Hospice figure, face to face only and in a somewhat disorganised fashion, and they had the distinct impression that “wrong” answers would lead to a very short medical career on the island and bad references for work elsewhere.
Finally, while I have little time myself to get seriously involved in a new campaign, I wish it well. In particular I applaud one Manx politician who is willing to make an informed stab at long overdue change and stop playing to the idiocracy in order to get re-elected.

Closure by cake

You might have seen my obituary for an old friend in the Examiner a couple of weeks back (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/bernard-caine-a-man-of-principle-1-6664211 ). No, I have no gig there, I just sent it in because it was starting to look like Bernard's life would not be celebrated the way it should be.
But last Monday I was squeezed on a pew at the very back of a Peel Cathedral packed with both his friends and the island's self-selecting elite for his funeral. Maybe the latter really wanted to pay respect to a genuine Manx giant, or maybe I shamed them into taking a couple of hours out of their pointless lives. Either way, they were there - which mattered to his family and many genuine friends and might have tickled Bernard if only he could have seen it.
I rarely go to funerals. Mostly of necessity, as I have to work, but also because I find the religious variant in particular unsatisfying. When the religious are so keen to stress that death is not the end, just the terminus where the faithful get their tickets stamped for Heaven, you might think they would make more effort with the send off.
For all the pomp and loving use of the Manx language and culture to whose revival Bernard devoted his life, this one just made me glad I am neither a Christian nor a pillar of the community. I am sure it was a moving experience and satisfactory farewell for others there. But to use that awful pseudo-therapeutic vernacular, I did not get closure and could not move on.
It took yesterday and a family day out in Peel to do that. This allowed me to retrace a routine Bernard and I had throughout our shared time on the local papers and magazines – walking out of the office and 100 yards or so up the street to a modest home bakery for cakes, fresh air and mischief.
At 12 noon daily you could have set your clocks by the pair of us ambling amicably up Market Street, trading banter with the bakery staff, then back down to 14 Douglas Street, stopping to look in every window or swapping skeet with everyone Bernard knew, which was pretty much the entire town.
So I did that one last time; some buns from the bakery, then a detour into a charity shop where, any Saturday after we stopped working together and Bernard retired, I could inevitably find him around noon on a chair in the basement perusing the books. Finally, popping my head into a few of the emporiums which officially sell antiquities, Manx historical tomes, local trivia …...or just junk, but unofficially are little more than an excuse for ageing Govags to gossip. In over 25 years I doubt if either Bernard or I spent more than £5 in total in such retail disasters, though I have to admit they did provide a steady stream of leads on obscure local historical topics.
So that was my day. Sunshine, home made food, charity shop finds and sore feet. Less than £10 spent in total but memories recalled of time with Bernard which are beyond price.
A happy era reminisced on, summed up, and finally laid to rest.
Now I really am  ready to move on.

Two hours of Nutty-slacking

Well, Monday night was fun. I spent it at this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/health/relaxing-cannabis-law-could-benefit-isle-of-man-claim-1-6589370 ) and, as I said elsewhere, enjoyed the rare pleasure of seeing a genuinely knowledgeable person speaking in a Manx public building. As far as I can recall, that has only happened three times in all my years on the island.

Media reports of the event are a little sketchy, because reporters on a topic which, eventually, was all about personal freedom and enjoyment and not “serious” moral issues were only ever going to get space to pick one sound-bite and play it up. Personal reports will vary enormously, and considering that even within a row of me were folk ranging from sixties burn-outs and semi-pro tree-huggers to conservative clergy and hardcore UKIP groupies that is no surprise.

So, for the record, if you have already seen David Nutt on, say, that live Channel Four Ecstasy experiment last year or read his book then there was nothing new. He ran through his routine in a manner calculated not to frighten elderly ladies, hung together with a jokey slide-show, and finished by politely answering questions from mostly middle-aged, middle brow types who had, quite reasonably and with admirable public spirit, turned up to find out what they could about illegal drugs from someone who ought to be able to tell them. The questions from the public were fair enough, and he answered them objectively and in comprehensive detail.

Actually, I did clarify a couple of my own local suspicions from these questions.

Firstly, that the only real drug threat on Manx sink estates is the latest generation of prescription drugs (the ones which were supposed to replace benzodiazepines, AKA “mother's little helpers”).

Secondly, that those who set up and have benefited from the Chief Minister's Task Farce on Drugs and Alcohol still pan-handle for cash and tell whoppers without shame. These whoppers would be immediately discredited the moment our Public Health professionals have the courage to publish - in full- all the surveys they have conducted at public expense into drug and alcohol “abuse” exactly as they were published in peer-reviewed journals, including the methodology and the true parameters and numbers of the survey groups. They never will, because even the two examples I was able to obtain from university libraries via friendly academics clearly show that neither the experiments nor the findings bear much resemblance to the 500 word press summaries (and, sadly, even they went unread by the local media once a couple of shock stats had been quoted, wrongly and out of context).
The more serious question posed by Nutt on the night was if the island could and should profit from the problem caused back in 1971 by a UK government which, in ensuring cannabis must never be legally available, simultaneously ensured that university research could never explore any medicinal benefits because to possess it was a common crime and even to cultivate it under licence was prohibitively expensive. Since the 1980's research in other countries has begun to open up some amazing possibilities (just check the excellent and extensive Wikipedia entry on cannabinoids to get a sense of these). Meanwhile UK scientists, once world leaders, are now reduced to reading other people's research and begging knee-jerk politicos to look beyond the next focus group and ballot box. With just a little of the horse sense that saw us develop the TT and the finance sector, we could develop a niche pharmaceutical industry to fill the gap when both of those vanish – as they must within a decade or two at most.
But the only real question is do you trust mature adults to take decisions over their own lives, and then be responsible for the results? Just that.
If so (and as a libertarian my obvious answer is ”Yes”) all that remains is how you organise things (legally, socially, economically..) so that the mature and responsible are free to get on with it, those who refuse to take responsibility will find it too much hassle and those who cannot (the young and otherwise vulnerable) are not going to be capable or exploitable. The question itself should be no different when it comes to other adult pleasures, such as cigarettes and alcohol.
Nutt half addresses it with the comparative risks of rock-climbing, horse-riding etc. and the way that pleasures enjoyed by the relatively powerful never seem to get restricted while working people's cheap relaxants do, but then screws up by setting up alcohol and tobacco as alternative folk panics to dope. He starts off by correctly pointing out that alcohol is also a drug, but then it all goes rapidly downhill, and he ends up peddling a variation on “reefer madness” about currently legal (if increasingly socially proscribed) substances in order to advance his own special interest.
Those who follow the debate seriously (rather than with one hand on the bible or the bong) know about Nutt's shortcomings already. He causes defenders of drinkers or fag smokers in particular to grind teeth in despair as the “evidence” of his prattlings is taken up by dopey Guardianistas and neo-puritans alike. When he should be identifying and seeking common cause with all who oppose a prohibitionist industry which out-prudes the Victorians (and lacks even their genuine social concern for the dispossessed) he hands it half-truths to shoot down all opposing views (including his own expert opinion).
For a real attempt to put the wider picture in context, try Chris Snowdon's excellent little book The Art Of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition since 1800. Towards the end, in assessing current threats to liberty of the responsible adult, he comprehensively covers the wrong done by government and tabloids to David Nutt, but also Nutt's unfortunate habit of shooting himself and potential allies in the foot. If you cannot find time to read the book, at least check out some of the short and pertinent blogs on Snowdon's website (Velvet Glove, Iron Fist) and those of a few endangered fag smokers ( Dick Puddlecote is a prime example). If you cannot then begin to see the bigger picture, then maybe the liberties you are losing are just liberties you never deserved.