What exactly is denialism?

While doing some research last year, I came across the word denialism.  The author - an Australian academic - did not explain what the word meant, but he was clearly using it in respect of defending his own point of view.

In a previous post on this blog, I presented the reader with a word which I had just invented: mortocracy.  Nevertheless, I was careful in that post to specify what the word means.

By contrast, communists often resort to using words which they have not taken the time to define properly.  My starting point when writing this blog post was to decide whether or not the word denialism is a useful word in academic debate or just another example of communist weasel speak.

In some of my previous posts I have used the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as a source, but at the time of writing it carries no definition for the word denialism.  I merely observe that fact.

I am unwilling to refer to Wikipedia as a source because I believe that the content of Wikipedia pages can be altered by almost anyone at any time.  At the time of writing, the lengthy Wikipedia entry on denialism can perhaps be summed up as defining denialism as the refutation of the consensus view in a given academic debate, whether in the field of science or history.  It appears also that denialism is invariably a negative thing.  There is no hint that challenging the consensus is ever a good thing.

The Skeptical Science website lists five characteristics of denialism: conspiracy theories, fake experts, cherry picking, impossible expectations, and misrepresentation and the use of logical fallacies.  So far as I can make out, the site does not offer any instances of where it is accepable to question the consensus point of view.


With regard to the first characteristic, I am apparently a denialist if I believe that people hold to a consensus point of view because they are part of a conspiracy.  But why should I not assume that?

One of the most famous hoaxes of all time was the discovery in 1912 of skull fragments which supposedly provided evidence for an early human being known as Piltdown Man.  It has been convincingly argued that at least some people in the early twentieth century knew it was a hoax, but were unwilling to say so.  In other words they were part of a conspiracy.

With regard to fake experts, no definition of a fake expert is offered.  Am I expected to believe that an expert who defies the consensus is a fake expert merely on the grounds of his defiance?

With regard to cherry picking, am I expected to believe that people who hold to a consensus point of view never indulge in the selective use of evidence?

With regard to impossible expectations, let me repeat what I said in an earlier post: it is debateable whether or not there is such a thing as proof in science.  Likewise, I remember the headmaster at my school - a historian - asserting that you cannot prove what happened on the way to school this morning.

With regard to misrepresentation and the use of logical fallacies, are we to assume that the consensus point of view is never founded on misrepresentation or the use of logical fallacies?  Also, even if I resort to deception in a bid to discredit the consensus point of view, then that in itself does not prove that the consensus view is robust.

Academic history is full of beliefs which were once well received but which have since been discredited.  The pseudoscience of phrenology is an example.

There are also many current beliefs which could be discredited at any point, and one obvious example is the belief that certain species are extinct.  I will give two examples.

A freshwater dolphin known as the baiji was declared functionally extinct in 2006.  The zoologists who reached this conclusion were not implying that no baiji were left alive, but that there were either no baiji left or at best not enough to provide an effective breeding population.  A baiji was sighted the following year, but this merely proved that the baiji was not extinct.  One baiji on its own does not provide a breeding population.

The Tasmanian Tiger is widely believed to have become extinct in the 1930s, but some people maintain that it still exists.  The difference between the Tasmanian Tiger and the baiji is that any confirmed sighting of a Tasmanian Tiger would allow us to conclude not only that it is not extinct, but also that it is also probably not functionally extinct either.  It is safe to say that any Tasmanian Tiger which was alive in the 1930s is now dead, and so the only way even one Tasmanian Tiger could be alive today would be if a breeding population remained active long after the 1930s.

I will add that a film clip from 1973 shows a creature which I firmly believe to be a Tasmanian Tiger.

In conclusion, the concept of denialism appears to be seriously flawed.  Unless someone can provide evidence to the contrary, I will continue to regard it as yet another example of how communists seek to distort or even suppress academic debate.

Related previous posts include:
What is mortocracy?
Fundamental issues in science

Fellow blogger is wrong about the minimum wage

For the first time ever I am replying to another blog on this site.  The blogger is someone whose output I tend to admire.

She has recently posted a comment in which she argues that the government is wrong to increase the minimum wage.  The government announced in March this year (2015) that the minimum wage is to rise by 20p to £6.70, and Enza Ferreri links to a report on the BBC website which includes the following comment:

It ... would allow the recipient of that wage to rent a one-bedroom place in a dowdier part of London, so long as he or she didn't eat, use power, pay council tax, or wear clothes.

Before I continue, anyone who is new to my blog might like to know that I have written extensively on the subject of salaries, covering both low pay and the fat cat salaries often enjoyed by managers.  I link to some of those previous posts below.

Ferreri claims that: If a worker A's skills don't have enough value for an employer B to pay A the minimum wage ... B will not hire A.  What I would like to know is how employer B - or anyone else - is expected to place a monetary value on someone else's work.  There is no simple formula that I know of which can determine the value of work.

Furthermore, many companies in Britain are led by company directors earning salaries way in excess of what most people can hope to earn.  Nevertheless many companies still manage to go out of business, and I have never come across a single case of a company director agreeing to repay his salary in the event of his company failing.  Surely the first duty of any company director should be to ensure that your company stays solvent.  If you cannot do that, then maybe you do not deserve to earn much more than the minimum wage.

Ferreri also claims that a higher minimum wage would make it harder for the unemployed to find work, but that might not be the case.  It is easy to envisage a higher minimum wage leading to workers having more money to spend, and this in turn leading to companies recruiting more staff because workers are spending more.

Another claim is that a higher minimum wage will drive up prices, but I have already tackled that misconception in a previous post which is linked to below.

Ferreri concludes that workers should seek to earn more by making themselves more valuable, but fails to explain the logic of this.  Suppose I spend my evenings studying things which are relevant to the job I do, and as a result make myself more useful to my employer.  It does not follow that my employer will pay me more as a result.

Consider pilots.  Pilots in the UK tend to be very well paid, but anyone who has seen the 2009 film Capitalism: a love story will know that it was common at that time for pilots in the USA to be poorly paid.  A search on the internet suggests that this might still be the case.  Does anyone know for certain?

If workers are paid according to their value, then surely a pilot in the USA would earn about as much as a pilot in the UK - or am I missing something?

I could write a lot more on the subject of wages, but instead I will invite the reader to look at some of my other essays on this subject.

Related previous posts include:

Should we increase the minimum wage?

The minimum wage and prices

The fat cat conundrum

The Labour Party dish it out, but don't want it back

A senior Labour MP ... is gathering support for a move to stop the [leadership] contest, on the grounds that Labour’s political enemies were warping the process by signing up members to vote for Mr Corbyn in September.

So reports The Mail on Sunday. It continues:

... the Daily Telegraph urged readers to pay the £3 fee to join Labour to try to destroy it from within by voting for Mr Corbyn.

My first comment is that I do not care much who wins the Labour leadership, because all four candidates are communists.  My second comment is that the Labour Party has never been keen on democracy.  For example, the first ever Labour government in 1924 planned to lend money to the government of Stalin, even though they knew that Stalin was unelected.

Another relevant comment is that any political party which allows people to vote in a leadership election after paying just one very small membership fee is asking for trouble.

My final comment is that the Labour Party is happy to use infiltration as a method of attacking its enemies.  In the 1970s, a Labour government recruited people to infiltrate the National Front.  (The evidence for this is, for example, a World In Action (Granada Television) documentary screened on 3 July 1978.)

In 1996, West Yorkshire Police recruited a man called Gary Shopland to infiltrate the British National Party.  He worked undercover for seven years, and six of those years were under a Labour government. It was also under a Labour government that a police officer called Mark Kennedy worked undercover for many years as a climate change campaigner, while another undercover officer tried to obtain information about the family and friends of the murdered Stephen Lawrence.

It may be the case that undercover officers occasionally obtain useful information, but consider the following.  Mark Kennedy was hugely well paid to go undercover, and yet a criminal trial collapsed when the defendants demanded answers to questions about his involvement in the alleged crime.  The Guardian has reported that many undercover officers were allowed to take part in criminal activities and also commit adultery while on duty.  Channel 4 has reported similar facts about an undercover officer called Bob Lambert.

The BBC also joined in the fun when it employed a lying scumbag called Jason Gwynne to infiltrate the British National Party.  This too happened under a Labour government.  He worked with another undercover scumbag called Andy Sykes, although it is not clear who exactly was pulling this other man's strings.

In short, the Labour Party is utterly immoral, and I hope that whoever is elected its leader will lead it into the oblivion that it deserves.  Ideally the Conservative Party would follow it there.

Related previous posts include:
Musings on the general election
The great paedo cover-up continues
The story of Peter Francis

MPs don't make the Z list

You might think that as a keen political blogger I would know the names of lots of MPs.  I recently looked through a list of the 652 current MPs in this country, and I can safely say that I know something about at least ten percent of them – maybe fifteen percent at most.  In other words, I know nothing whatever about nearly all of the current MPs.

I studied this list in reponse to reading a comment by Dominic Lawson about the wives of Simon Danczuk MP and Commons Speaker John Bercow.  (For those who do not know, Dominic Lawson is the son of the evil former government minister Nigel Lawson, and the brother of the television celebrity and former dopehead Nigella Lawson.)

I then looked down the home page of the Daily Mail website, and made a list of every current MP whose name or photograph appeared in a headline.  The answer was just seven, which included three members of the government and three Labour leadership contenders.  I did not count the number of headlines which mentioned celebrities I know nothing about.

The first I ever knew of Karen Danczuk was a press report about the selfie-loving younger wife of a Labour MP I knew nothing about.  As it happens, Simon Danczuk is one of the seven MPs mentioned in today’s Daily Mail headlines, but he is mentioned only in the context of his estranged wife.

Lawson accuses Karen Danczuk of feeding off her husband’s name, but this is grossly misleading.  On the one hand, we would never have heard of her if she had not married an MP, but equally most of us would never have heard of her husband were it not for his glamorous wife.

Lawson also claims that:

... the full-length pictures supplied by Mrs Danczuk of herself wearing only a bikini, I am obliged to report that if they had been sent in to a glamour modelling agency, they would have ended up in the bin without so much as a second glance.

Perhaps Lawson does not know that supermodels often do not look like supermodels on their days off work.  If you don’t believe me, then feel free to watch this video.  (If no video is visible below, then try searching on YT for Cameron Russell TED).

Also, with the exception of supermodels, most of the women who are paraded in the press as beautiful are famous for being actresses or singers or athletes - in other words whose fame is not necessarily dependant on their looks.
 

Where celebrity is concerned, most MPs do not make the Z list, and very few MP’s spouses attain any degree of celebrity, and so Karen Danczuk certainly punches above her weight where celebrity status is concerned.

  
Many people think that she is self-obsessed, but I wonder how many of those people were repeatedly raped as a child.  Karen has alleged that she was sexually abused hundreds of times between the ages of six and twelve, and subsequently suffered body confidence issues.  Her obsession with selfies is merely a reaction to her earlier insecurities.

Like her husband, she is a member of the Labour Party, and her husband is known for his campaigning work on paedophilia, which may seem a curious pastime for a member of the paedophile-supporting Labour Party.  He is also known to be dismissive of the British National Party, presumably because he objects to its relentless campaigning against paedophilia.

Related previous posts include:
The archbishop speaks out

Do we really want what we vote for?

The great paedo cover up continues

Who is the Liberal Democrat paedophile?

The price of West End theatre tickets

There is an ongoing debate in British politics as to whether or not the government should subsidise the arts, and I hope to address this debate in a future post.  My purpose in writing this post is to consider the impact of state subsidy on theatre prices.

It is reported in the national press that the famous actress Juliet Stevenson has complained about the price of theatre tickets in London’s West End, and these tickets are certainly not cheap. Tickets for musicals can apparently cost up to £200.

Let us suppose that you establish your own theatre company, and rehearse a show.  You book a theatre, and your play comes before the public.  You need to recover your production costs from the ticket sales, and so you price the tickets accordingly.

It is probable that you will sell more tickets if you opt for a low price than if you opt for a high price, but either way you need to make a guess at the minimum number of tickets you will sell, and then ensure that the tickets are priced so that you will at the very least break even.  If your tickets are priced too high, and you do not sell enough to break even, then your theatre production fails.

Now suppose that your production receives some government subsidy.  This can be offset against your costs, and you can adjust the price of your tickets accordingly.  Your tickets can be sold cheaply, and you stand a good chance of covering your costs.

At the point at which your theatre production opens, the ticket price is guided primarily – perhaps exclusively - by the need to cover costs, but another factor could soon come into play.

Suppose now that your play is well received.  The reviews in the press are glowing, and before long you are selling out every performance.  Covering your costs is no longer an issue, as you are making a healthy profit.  The price of your tickets is now driven firmly by supply and demand.  A high demand relative to supply allows you to charge a high price for your tickets, and some people start complaining that your prices are beyond their means.

In this situation a subsidy would make no sense at all.  You are making a profit, and you are free to make use of this profit to reduce your ticket prices so that more people can afford them.  The drawback here is that lowering the ticket price of a sell out show will merely cause it to sell out the sooner.

Suppose you try to book tickets for a theatre play, but are told that it is fully booked for weeks ahead.  The logical conclusion is that the tickets are not priced highly enough.  Raising the price will dampen demand, and allow people to book tickets at short notice.  Any tickets for a given show which are unsold on the day of the performance can be sold at a reduced price, but otherwise the price remains high.

Some readers may note that charging a high price for theatre tickets merely exchanges one unfairness for another, and this is true.  Nevertheless it tends to replace the said unfairness with one that is more efficient.

When tickets for a popular show are priced so as to be affordable to as many people as possible, then it causes the afore-mentioned problem of people having to buy tickets a long way in advance.  It also creates a situation where revenue is lower than it could be.

If your theatre play owes its success to the presence of a famous actor, then that actor might leave if another theatre company offers to pay him more money.  In other words, not pricing your tickets highly enough could be counter-productive to your show’s ongoing success.

By contrast, if you price your tickets so as to exclude those on modest salaries, then you can maximise your revenue and potentially keep your show running for many weeks – or perhaps even years.  The success of your show might also encourage another theatre to stage the same play - albeit with a less impressive cast - and charge a lower ticket price, and so the less well off might not be completely excluded.

A small victory in Hertfordshire

Many years ago, I watched a popular television programme in which a presenter confronted an old man about dropping litter.  The old man asked the presenter if he knew of anyone who had ever been prosecuted for dropping litter, and the presenter replied to the effect that he did not.

Back in those days it seemed easy to get away with dropping litter.  I remember someone once explaining that in order to be prosecuted for dropping litter a police officer had to see you drop the litter, and had to tell you to pick it up.  Only if you declined to pick up the litter could you be prosecuted.

I remember also that Mrs Thatcher when Prime Minister in the late 1980s promised a war on litter, but nothing came of it.

Nowadays it is different.  It is common for local authorities to employ litter wardens who are able to impose spot fines for anyone they suspect of dropping litter.  Specific cases I am aware of include:

• A woman who accidentally let some ash fall from the end of a cigarette.
• A woman who dropped the wrapping from a packet of cigarettes, even though she immediately picked it up.
• A woman who was accused of throwing a cigarette end from a car window, even though she maintained that a child in her car had thrown a Cheesy Wotsit out of the window.

In this last case - if I remember rightly - the woman went to a council depot and picked up a number of cigarette ends which had presumably been dropped by council employees.

In short, while I welcome the drive to reduce the amount of litter dropped in the streets, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some councils use litter enforcement procedures as a means to extort money from innocent people on a fairly random basis.

It has recently been reported that Broxbourne Borough Council has lost a court case against a man called Luke Gutteridge, who refused to pay a spot fine for dropping a piece of orange peel.  The magistrates in the case ruled that littering is an offence in respect of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 only where there is proof of intent.

It appears that the council brought a case to court without regard for the wording of the law, and have left the taxpayer with a legal bill of thousands of pounds.

I will add that Broxbourne Borough Council has been run continuously by the Conservative Party since its inception in 1973.

Related previous posts include:
A small victory in Barnet
Court victory on bank charges

Hunger in Greece, hunger in the UK

As I write, the world is awaiting the outcome of the Greek referendum, but it looks as if the no vote will prevail.

There is a side of me that feels compassion for my fellow Europeans living in dire poverty, but another side of me reflects that most Greeks are the victims of their own cowardice.

The people of Greece elected the politicians who took the country into the single currency, and since then have persistently refused to vote for politicians who support a return to the drachma.  What is worse, the one party I can think of in Greece which has consistently supported the drachma is widely vilified and persecuted.

It now seems that a return to the drachma is inevitable, but it could have been achieved a lot sooner, and with far less pain.

Here in Britain we have a growing economy, but we still have a lot of severe poverty, and I know for a fact that my local food bank is still seeking donations.

National newspapers sometimes try to act as if they care, and I have seen reports on how people can eat cheaply.  Sadly though these reports are usually poorly written.

It is true that a lot of food can be bought cheaply in supermarkets late in the day, but there is only so much discounted food in any supermarket, and not everyone is able to visit the supermarket shortly before it closes.

Also, meal plans in newspapers are often unrealistic.  For example one plan implied that a packet of six sausages could provide both a dinner and a lunch for two people.  I make that two sausages per person for dinner and one for lunch - better than nothing I suppose.

Another problem with these meal plans is that they tend to overlook the fact that many people work, and so are unable to cook their own lunch.  Canteen lunches may well cost more than someone on the minimum wage might reasonably afford, and packed lunches are often far from appealing.

Instead of insulting attempts at meal plans, maybe Britain's national press could acknowledge the fact that successive Labour and Tory governments in this country have failed to tackle the root causes of poverty.

Related previous posts include:
Austerity versus democracy in Greece
Starvation Britain