The meaning of ‘moderate’

I understand why people resist the label ‘moderate’: it sounds mild, milquetoast, and, like its cousin ‘centrist’, like you orient yourself solely by comparison to others. Identify the extremes, position yourself somewhere inbetween, and, there, you’re a ‘moderate’.

But when I describe myself as a ‘moderate’, I mean something different.

When I was a teenager, I went on a bunch of Scout camps. I remember one, where a loud, aggressive kid called Adam — I must have been 17 or so, Adam around 14 — managed to get pretty drunk. This transformed him into (or revealed him to be) an excitable child, one minute jumping up and down, the next flashing everyone, the next bursting into tears. It got bad enough that the grown-ups found out, and believe me, they turned some pretty blind eyes to mild tipsiness. Anyway, later on, when we’d managed to get Adam into our tent and he had calmed down, one of them stuck their head in. “A word, Adam,” he said: “Everything in moderation.”

He didn’t say, “you’re too young to drink.” He didn’t say, “alcohol is bad.” He said, “everything in moderation.” He knew there was no point getting into a debate about the rights and wrongs of alcohol per se, or even alcohol for a 14-year-old. He focused on a message he could confidently deliver: whatever you do, just don’t go crazy, OK?

I’ve thought about that a lot since.

Aristotle argued that for every good, there are two ills: the ill of deficit, and the ill of excess. When I think about this, I can immediately see the truth of it. Confidence: too little, you’re painfully shy; too much, you’re heading for a fall, and probably pissing a lot of people off at the same time. It’s true of exposure to the sun, it’s true of work, it’s true of food, (and of specific foodstuffs).

In fact, there are vanishingly few things which are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, however you calculate that, on their own. Goodness comes not from the ‘right things,’ but the right amount of things: enough delicious food, enough healthy food; enough work to feel pride and earn a living, but not enough that you don’t see your kids. Even a certain amount of things we think of as bad, like war or unemployment, can have benefits; even things we think of as desirable, like money or physical attractiveness, can become problematic in excess.

To me, to be a ‘moderate’ means to embrace this essential truth. To focus not on abstract principles and binaries, but on finding the right quantity of things: the right amount of immigration, the right amount of growth, the right amount of inequality.

But they way we talk about issues makes this incredibly difficult. Human beings seem hardwired to think about things in binary terms. Immigration ‘critics’ talk about how immigration is bad, its ‘defenders’ talk about its benefits — when in reality, it’s too much immigration that strains services and community cohesion, and too little that denies economies flexibility, people from poor countries a chance to branch out, and so on.

To be a moderate is to be constantly translating our binaries and value judgments into quantitative judgments. Moderates understand that when Reagan said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he wasn’t saying government is always the problem, no matter how much modern Conservatives like to pretend he was. He was saying, right now, there’s too much government. Moderates understand that if you embrace ‘government is the problem’ as a lifelong principle, you’re likely to end up in a situation where there’s too little government instead.

Moderation, as a political orientation, recognises that ‘government intervention in the economy’ is neither right nor wrong; you need the right amount of government intervention, in the right aspects of the economy. Moderation says that prison is neither ‘about rehabilitation’ or ‘about punishment’; rather, it looks for the balance of punishment and rehabilitation that best achieves broader goals.

Take inequality. The debate about inequality tends to fall into two camps: one that says ‘inequality bad,’ and focuses on the ills of poverty, crime and unhappiness it can bring; another that says ‘inequality OK’, and points out the problems that can come from government action to reduce it. But both sides are talking about the issue in the wrong way. The anti-inequality advocates are rarely arguing for an end to inequality, merely for a return to the lower level of previous decades. The pro-inequality camp would all admit that there is some level of inequality that is uneconomic, immoral, undesirable; but they mostly avoid this admission. The two sides are not really ‘anti-’ and ‘pro-equality’ at all; they’re arguing ‘there’s too much inequality right now’ and ‘there isn’t yet too much inequality’, respectively.

This is subtly different to pragmatism, which tells us to focus on the consequences of actions, but offers strikingly little guidance on what to do if the consequences are unknowable or difficult to assess. Moderation, however, offers a clearer guideline: if in doubt, hew to the course which seems least likely to steer you into one of Aristotle’s ills, of deficit or excess. In the case of inequality, for example, a pragmatist might argue that more inequality would inspire ambition and boost growth; but another might argue that more inequality could boost crime. And they could both be right. So we throw up our hands, and do nothing. A moderate, however, would say: if we’re not sure about this, and there’s more inequality than there has been for fifty years, it’s likely that the smart thing to do is arrest its growth.

With the data revolution happening in government, in capitalism, and in our personal lives, our ability to quantify things, to assess the impact of our actions in quantitative terms, has never been greater. But we’ll misuse this information as long as we consume it through the lens of ‘is X good or bad’?

Asking: ‘What’s the right amount of X? What’s an acceptable range of X?’ is a habit of thinking that better reflects the reality of the world. I doubt Adam avoided alcohol completely after that Scout camp, but I bet he stuck to more moderate amounts.

Buying is not consuming

I was reading a couple of articles on weight loss yesterday. Both made an observation, that one of the most important rules for eating healthy in restaurants is just not to eat all the food you’re brought. Portion sizes have increased steadily in recent decades: the average pizza in the 50s was 10 inches, against 12 or even 14 now. At a time when we’re probably eating alone in restaurants more than ever, we’re more likely to find ourselves ordering more food than one person can healthily eat.

And yet, if I’m being health-conscious, I’m more likely to order something different than to order something delicious but not eat it all. It’s when I order the food that I think strategically about my food choices, not when I actually eat the food.

But it isn’t just food. I’ve realized I equate the act of buying an item with the act of consuming it in all walks of life. When I smoked, I’d often find that simply buying a pack of cigarettes would satisfy the psychological craving without my actually having to smoke one. (I’d smoke them anyway, of course.)

Similarly, I was browsing my Kindle library today. I noticed three categories of books: books I’d read, books I’d downloaded a sample of but not bought, and a surprisingly large number of books I’d bought but not read. And the bought ones skewed highbrow: development theory, Thomas Pynchon, etc. Clearly I have felt that to buy a book is in some way to guarantee that one day I’ll get round to reading it, instead of just reading crap news on the internet.

In reality, though, just because you order a 14” pizza, doesn’t mean your body needs that much pizza; and just because I buy a highbrow book, doesn’t mean I’ll read it. The act of paying for something simply gives you the right to consume it. It’s the consumption that matters — for your health, for your mind, for your happiness.

But for some reason, we forget this. It’s a cliché of TV and film that someone going through a breakup needs to go out and buy themselves some hot new outfits; much less attention is paid to whether they actually wear those outfits. The act of buying focuses your decision-making: your choice between hunger and your diet, prudence and those jeans, realism and ambition in your reading choices.

But it’s not the buying decisions that matter, it’s the consumption decisions. Borrowing Bleeding Edge from a friend and reading it is better than buying it and not reading it. So from now on, I’m going to try to do focus a little less on the act of buying and more on the act of actually consuming.

Owen Jones: “Voters were given too much fear before election – now they need hope”

Let’s parse Owen Jones’ election response a bit:

The message now is the party must rewind to the Blair era.

Not exactly, but, OK, fine.

It is fantasy to believe shifting right would win back Scots who defected to a party with a more radical message

It’s a fantasy to believe shifting right would win back those Scots who defected to the SNP because they had a more radical message. But pretty leafy areas went to the SNP as well. It’s baffling to suggest that a win for the SNP eight months after the referendum wasn’t at least partly about Scottish self-rule as well as austerity.

– or indeed more than a million who went Green.

This is certainly true. It’s also true that one million is a small fraction of the votes we need to make up.

Neither would it appeal to those who fled to UKIP, angry about immigration in the Blair-Brown era.

Hmm. Why not? Immigration was most rapid in the Blair-Brown era because that’s when the EU expansion kicked in. ‘Back to Blair’ would involve toughening on immigration, not loosening. I don’t see how that doesn’t attract Ukip voters.

Only politicos talk about ‘left’ and ‘right’. Most voters think about issues and want convincing, coherent solutions.

Agreed. Examples?

A living wage, instead of wasting taxpayers’ money on in-work benefits.

Well, if we’re going to have a living wage as policy, this is certainly the way to talk about it.

A radical house-building programme, instead of lining landlords’ pockets with housing benefit.

Agreed. If a policy is supported both by Labour’s left and The Economist, it’s probably a no-brainer.

Tax justice, where those at the top pay a fair share.

Agreed, if this is code for 50p.

Utilities and services run by the British people, not foreign governments and profiteers.

Wait, what? Oh, Owen, you were doing so well. Why is opposing immigration racist, but opposing ‘foreign governments’ progressive? Surely our concern should be how efficient and effective our utilities and services are, not who runs them?

Workers with rights.

I, too, believe that workers need rights.

Free childcare so Britons don’t have to choose between their kids and a job.

Agreed.

A society run in the interests of working people, the real wealth creators.

Who are these ‘working people’ anyway? Is a lawyer a ‘working person’? If a nurse moves into management, do they magically stop being a ‘working person’?

Ill-advised election hot take:

How could we have deluded ourselves that this wasn’t going to happen?

Over the last few weeks, in the face of so many polls, I started to believe that Labour was going to make enough progress in England to offset whatever losses they faced in Scotland.

But with the economy growing – slowly, anemically, far less well than it could have been without all that disastrous austerity, but growing nonetheless – of course the government was going to do well. With rumours flying of constitutional chaos, of course people were going to vote for stability. Of course many English people hate the idea of the break-up of the UK more than the idea of the UK leaving the EU.

But there’s more than that. The truth is that Ed Miliband’s whole vision was based on a hopelessly optimistic delusion about English voters. England is not a centre-right country, exactly, but it is one with a deep-seated fear of left-wing governments. That’s why the only elections Labour has won for more than thirty-five years – a generation – were won by a party with an avowedly centrist agenda.

Labour face an agonising path to power if they seek to both outflank the SNP on the left, to regain votes in Scotland, and hew to the right to win votes in England simultaneously. It can’t be done.

Instead, Labour must return to the new Labour agenda, with fiscal prudence at the centrepiece of its platform, not a seeming afterthought. The direction of Ed Miliband’s spending/deficit reduction plan was the right one. But it was too vague, came too late, and it didn’t seem to anyone that he was serious about it – and how could he be, knowing the SNP were about to sweep Scotland promising free shortbread to all and sundry and damn the cost?

A centrist, muscular Labour could rebuild in England. If the SNP make a mess of Scotland, it will be from moving too far left, and a centrist Labour would be able to challenge them from the right. If the SNP don’t make a mess of Scotland, they will almost certainly lead it to independence within a decade. (But the former is more likely. This is a party with profound economic incompetence at its core.)

And what of the Liberal Democrats? Now more than ever before, there seems simply no reason for this party to exist. Its right-leaning voters have deserted them for the Conservatives. In this, Cameron’s detoxification has worked. Unless whoever replaces Cameron in 2020 is a raving lunatic, these voters will not return. And the Liberals’ left flank will never forgive its role in the Coalition. What’s left is a lost-looking rump.

Now, then, is the time for something to happen that should perhaps have happened back in the 1990s. Britain needs one centre-left party, not two. New Labour’s authoritarian leanings, the primary wedge between the parties, have ebbed away. There is no barrier now to a merger and, frankly, neither party has much left to lose.

Is this likely? I doubt it. But amidst the misery of this foul morning, I’m going to daydream about casting my vote in 2020 for the Liberal And Labour Party.

But I’m *totally* open to suggestions for a better name.

The Siliconian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in wireless gold,
Crying Media Company Vertically Integrated!
As all before them they willfully extirpated:
The Back of the Book and the Front and the Middle,
Until all that was left was digital piddle,
And Thought and Word lay dead and cold.

This poem went round the New Republic’s offices in the lead-up to the mass resignations late last year.

Look, Chris Hughes has clearly brought a philistinic hand to a once-important institution. I loved the New Republic when I was growing up.

But it’s also abundantly obvious that its internal culture was needlessly bookist, backward-looking and generally reprehensible.

In praise of Josua Topolsky, the world’s least boring tech journalist

A few years ago, bored one afternoon at work, I loaded up Engadget, a technology blog that was at the time one of the biggest sites on the web. I was something of a tech nerd, though not at the level that seems to have become normal for pretty much everyone nowadays. I browsed a few stories about Windows Mobile phones, Roombas, and who knows what other late-naughts tech atrocities.

Then I noticed Engadget had a podcast. I downloaded it and gave it a listen, expecting some dry tech talk that I’d switch off after fifteen minutes. Instead, I heard a surprisingly funny conversation that seemed to approach the slightly absurd topic of consumer gadgets with just the right balance of information and irreverence. At one point, Engadget’s then editor, Joshua Topolsky, describing BlackBerry’s disastrous Playbook tablet, said that the slightly sludgy, over-amimated user interface reminded him of ‘the ice level in a Mega Man game.’

I went home and downloaded a bunch of Engadget podcasts, and some emulation software to play Mega Man X. And I carried on listening to Topolsky, along with his co-presenters Nilay Patel and Paul Miller, for the next few years. Like many others, I followed them when they moved from Engadget to start a new site, The Verge, an effort that explicitly grew out of a podcast (originally called ‘This is my Next Podcast’, a gag on Topolsky’s tendency to call every new smartphone his ‘next phone’) to become the world’s most popular tech website. I started paying more attention than any reasonable person should to the latest gadget news, and to finding new and more efficient ways to, well, play Mega Man X. And it’s probably all thanks to – or the fault of – Topolsky and that off-the-cuff remark about the BlackBerry Playbook.

That says something about what makes Topolsky so unusual in the world of tech journalism – he’s genuinely funny, and skillfully occupies both the mindset of both the nerd and the ‘normal’ person – perfect for someone like me, whose interest in tech is only equalled by their awareness about how stupid a thing to be interested in it could be. Here was a guy who wasn’t going to spend his weekend installing custom versions of Android on his smartphone, but he had done so in the past, and he knew first hand how hellish an experience it could be. The ‘loser nerd with a bunch of horrible joysticks’, as he once described himself on The Verge’s podcast, grew up to be someone who took technology seriously in the right ways while knowing exactly how to resist the temptation to vanish down a rabbit-hole of nerd talk – and was enthusiastic about retro-nerd culture while maintaining a fair degree of hipster cultural savvy. No wonder he ended up as the first-ever tech correspondent on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and, now, the Tonight Show.

Since he left The Verge for Bloomberg last summer, I’ve listened to the podcast scrabble to adjust – first adopting a more serious, ‘tech talk’ tone, then reaching for joviality and ending up sounding forced. It’s still one of the better tech podcasts to listen to, but new host-and-site-editor Patel isn’t as funny as he’d like to be, and it shows. Topolsky, mostly doing mysterious behind-the-scenes work on some sort of new Bloomberg business portal, has been sorely missed. 

So it’s fantastic news that he seems to be launching a new tech podcast. Whether it’ll recapture the old Engadget/Verge podcast magic isn’t clear – Topolsky is funniest as the cool guy in the room, with nerdier guests to bounce off, and his attempts at more solo material haven’t worked all that well. But if he’s smart enough to choose the right guests or co-hosts, the Tomorrow Podcast might my witty, ever-so-slightly-hipster source for technology chatter for the next few years.

The best bit of George Michael’s barnstorming performance of “Somebody to Love” at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert? He lets the audience sing the big last note for him. In the midst of such a self-assured, appropriately theatrical performance, it’s a sudden, invigorating moment of self-erasure; a tribute to Freddie’s generosity of spirit and love of his fans as well as his talent, a wonderful embrace of the communal spirit that underpinned the power of Queen’s live shows.

“The road to nowhere near Wigan Pier”

The Economist’s Free Exchange blog:

Stripping away the hyperbole about Mr Osborne’s plans shows that in reality they only amount to a reduction to the levels of public spending seen in 2002-03 in real terms, or 2001-02 in real terms per capita. The government could, back then, clearly afford a welfare state, as it will be able to still do in 2020. That is not to deny that some of the cuts will hurt: for instance, if the health, education and foreign-aid budgets continue to be protected, spending on other departments may need to be cut by half. But there are more sensible—and progressive—targets for cuts that would spare these departments from a massacre,such as reducing state handouts for wealthy pensioners. Although Mr Osborne’s plans are tough, a return to Wigan pier they are clearly not.

This is probably true. But remember the state of public services in 2001 – before Labour started really stepping up investment? Not something the British people want to return to. Especially given that, with the NHS and DFID ringfenced, this equates to substantially less spending on all other services.

“Hashtag hate campaigns are leading us into the trap of censorship”

The Guardian:

I suspect the blurring of that line is related to the fever pitch of online discourse. The internet is so perpetually cross that it’s increasingly hard to make an impact with mere disapproval. In the outrage arms race, it’s tempting to go straight for the nuclear option. When Asian-American activist Suey Park was offended by a satirical skit on The Colbert Report in March, she started the hashtag #CancelColbert, despite neither wanting nor expecting the show to be cancelled. “#CancelColbert was never literal, but it was a way to say, ‘Hey, improve Colbert,’ knowing that trying to improve Colbert would never trend, knowing that it would never get heard,” she told Salon.

At least Park was honest, although it’s unclear how many people who joined the hashtag realised that it was calculated hyperbole. The other week supporters of #DropDunham, who wanted Planned Parenthood to sever ties with Lena Dunham over one passage in her memoir, seemed entirely sincere. The distance between “I hate this” and “This must be stopped” can be invisibly narrow.

Sometimes we exaggerate because we don’t understand things in detail. Sometimes, though, it’s just because no-one will pay attention if we don’t.

Behind the fence, the sea: inequality and Africa’s urban future

I’ve been an inequality sceptic. From the perspective of poverty reduction, discussion about the gap between the incomes of rich and poor can seem like a distraction from the income of the poor itself. If the incomes of the poor are rising, who cares how rich the rich are?

Now, though, I’m not so sure.

A few weeks ago I moved from Morogoro, a city of 300,000 people in an agricultural area of Tanzania, to Dar es Salaam, a sprawling and rapidly growing metropolis of several million. At first, I was pretty happy to make the transition: I was tired of eating at Morogoro’s four decent restaurants, shopping at its two decent supermarkets. After a year of mostly cooking with nothing but tomatoes, peppers, onions and carrots, I was looking forward to regaining access to a wider range of vegetables. I was looking forward to being able to go to the damn cinema.

And all of those things are great! And yet, I’m uncomfortable. The ‘nice’ bits of Dar are too damn nice. In Morogoro, the nicest restaurant served decent European food at in comfortable but basic surroundings, at prices which, while out of reach of many poor Tanzanians, seemed accessible to the middle class at least. In Dar es Salaam, the nicer restaurants serve fairly schmancey food at almost Western prices: expats routinely spend TSH 30,000 on a buffet all-you-can-eat breakfast, more than two days’ wages for a starting teacher in a government school.

In Morogoro, the nicest hotels were $50 or $60 a night, which by all accounts got you a decent bed, air conditioning, and a TV, but nothing fancy. The nicer hotels in Dar are five-star and cost hundreds of dollars per night. In Morogoro, if you wanted to swim, you’d go to one of these hotels and pay TSH 5,000 – about three dollars – to use their, slightly dirty, pool. Here, you pay TSH 15,000 to use the pool at the Golden Tulip.

Sitting in a bougey cafe yesterday eating a non-buffet – and delicious! – breakfast with a friend yesterday, I pondered why I was looking at Dar’s luxuries as problem and not a relief. Most expats here who’ve ever visited Morogoro say they couldn’t imagine living there. Couldn’t they see the problem with living such luxury in a country where millions live in extreme poverty?

Couldn’t my co-breakfasters see the fence that blocked our view of the sea but protected us from Dar’s (historically small, but rapidly growing) crime problem? Didn’t it bother them that the only actual Tanzanians in this restaurant were staff, that the clientele was entirely white (or in my case white-ish)?

Oh, I suddenly realised. I’m worried about inequality.

The poor in Dar es Salaam are probably better off than the poor in Morogoro. Yes, they have to deal with more problems, like flooding, and power cuts, and transport, and crime. But they have access to infinitely more opportunities for work and for business. Specialisation takes place here, business grow and take on people, money is made – so much so that young people are flocking here from all over Tanzania, people whose families have been tied to subsistence agriculture since, for all intents and purposes, the dawn of time.

But to be poor in Dar es Salaam is to be acutely aware that there are a large number of people in your city, many of whom don’t look like you and are not from your country, who live a lifestyle you can never even imagine obtaining. How can this not be corrosive to society, in the long run? How can this not undermine the construction of a viable body politic? Crime in Dar es Salaam is rising with alarming speed. Police corruption explains how the rise has been allowed to happen, but not what’s driving it in the first place. A prime suspect must surely be the rapid increase in inequality in Tanzania, particularly in urban areas, in recent years.

Let me be clear: economic growth in Dar is not ‘bypassing the poor’. Economic growth does appear to have reduced poverty significantly in Dar in recent years, even while poverty reduction in rural areas has been notably weak. Inequality is largely the result of the very economic liberalisation that enabled Tanzania to begin reducing poverty after decades of stagnation. The rich are getting richer, and the poor, in Dar at least, are getting richer too. From a strict economic perspective, development is working. Capitalism is working. It’s a win-win.

But sometimes the eye and the gut can conspire to show you something that economic data can’t. In a town like Morogoro, even though the poorest members might not ever eat at the better restaurant, they might at least aspire to work at it. There is some sense of commonality between residents, even including expats, some sense of shared space. It’s safe to walk around.

Maybe it’s just Dar’s sheer size that undermines this sense of social bond. But visiting predominantly Tanzanian, middle-class areas of Dar, it’s not clear that’s the case. People don’t huddle behind fences for safety, they eat out on the street. There’s a sense of community. Where that breaks down is where the rich are – businessmen with armed bodyguards, aid workers – both Tanzanian and expat – with giant SUVs guarded by well-tipped Masai. And let’s not forget that the level of inequality in Tanzania is far lower than in many other African (and Western) countries.

I’m not proposing anything, and I’m still not at all sure the inclusion of inequality in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals is a good idea. It may well be that the side-effects of any policy aimed at reducing inequality on growth are simply too large to accept.

But I see more clearly now that my old, airy dismissal of inequality as an issue simply won’t do. Even if growth is ‘reaching the poor’, it matters how rich the rich are. Imagining Dar es Salaam in twenty years as a Latin America-style dystopia, with increasingly informal settlements surrounding skyscrapers and luxury hotels, I realise now that it matters a great deal.

On the polarisation of politics

Unsophisticated political arguments tend to sound more extreme than more detailed ones. ‘Tax the rich’ sounds more left-wing than ‘raise the top rate of income tax to 60%’; but they’re not actually incompatible positions, the latter is simply one of the possible specific policy implementations of the former. And yet ‘tax the rich’ *sounds* like angry, unreconstructed socialism in a way the actual policy proposal doesn’t.

Ditto ‘cut immigration’ versus ‘reduce unskilled immigration’. The person saying the former probably means the latter, but one sounds angry and possibly a bit racist, and the other sounds technocratic and nuanced.

In particular, categorical statements sound more extreme – and often *are* more extreme, if you take them on face value – than statements with an element of quantity. And yet, categorical statements are far easier to make. ‘Stop immigration’ is clearly a more extreme position than ‘reduce immigration’. But someone who says ‘stop’ hasn’t necessarily thought carefully about reducing the number of migrants and rejected that in favour of a ban. That thought process may not have taken place.

In fact, many people aren’t really trying to make policy proposals at all, but are just pointing out problems. ‘Stop immigration’ often really means ‘there are too many unskilled immigrants in my town.’ Someone who says they want immigration ‘stopped’ might well be perfectly satisfied with a points system in practice, if it achieves what he really wants, which is fewer unskilled immigrants in their town.

We push people to lay out policy positions, in opinion polls and man-on-the-street interviews. And people feel, on Facebook and Twitter and when painting signs for rallies, an obligation to make normative statements rather than just positive ones.

So if you’re alarmed at how right-wing people seem these days – or how left-wing – remember that what they really feel is almost certainly less extreme than what they seem to be saying. That’s not deliberate exagerration on their part; it’s just the way language works.

Let’s talk about affirmative consent.

The conversation about this has been deeply depressing, with lots of side-issues and overinterpretations and very little analysis of the difficult details. But the details are where the devil resides, particularly here.

I complained to a friend earlier on Facebook that I’ve yet to find a single piece that clearly rebuts or debunks the idea that, under an affirmative consent (‘yes means yes’, which I think may be a misrepresentative name) standard, the following scenario is not rape: Man meets woman; man and woman flirt, talk, and later kiss; man and woman get into bed, still kissing; man starts to undress woman, kissing continues; intercourse begins, kissing continues. No words are spoken.

At no point is any explicit verbal consent asked for or offered; at no point is any objection or indication of doubt or second thoughts offered.

Under a negative ‘no means no’ conception of rape, this is transparently not rape. And thank goodness, because this is surely how a lot of sex takes place.

Under an affirmative consent standard, is this rape? Opponents of the standard say that, yes, it is. Some proponents of the law say that, yes, it is, but in practice there won’t be cases brought in these cases because why would a woman make a rape charge against someone who didn’t rape her? (This seems grotesquely naive.)

Other proponents of the standard say that, yes, the scenario above would be rape, and that’s a damn shame, but the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses makes this a risk worth taking. This is at least an intellectually honest position, but one I doubt many people would sign up to.

What I’ve yet to hear is anyone flat-out say that in under an affirmative consent standard, the above situation would not be rape. Maybe they’re not saying that because they think it’s obvious! But I don’t think so. I think they’re not saying it because they’re not sure it’s true.

Take, for example, this piece by Feministing editor-in-chief Maya Dusenbery. In it she tackles questions about the nature of affirmative consent posed by conservative blogger Michelle Goldberg. I’ve italicised some words that strike me as problematic.

“Do moans count as consent? How about a nod, or a smile, or meaningful eye contact? If a woman performs oral sex on a man without asking him first, and if he simply lies back and lets her, has she, by the law’s definition, assaulted him?

Answer: It depends. Here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive list of questions it may depend on: Do you know your partner well enough to know that a moan absolutely means, “Yes, God, please don’t stop”? Is the moaning a response to continuing some action or initiating a new activity without asking? Was the nod in answer to a verbal question like, “Do you want me to fuck you now?” or a clear non-verbal question indicated by, say, moving as if to go down on your partner and pausing to give them a questioning look? Are you sure your partner read the question right? Are you sure you read the answer right? Was the smile a response to: “Does that feel good?” Are any of these signals contradicted by other verbal or body language cues? Is this meaningful eye contact followed by, say, your partner removing all their clothes and lying back in bed and beckoning to you? Or is it followed by your partner just lying there passively? Is this your first time hooking up with this man or do you give him a blow job every night? Do you know him well enough to how he would non-verbally indicate he wasn’t into it? Had you been pressuring him to have sex and he’d expressed reluctance before you initiated the oral sex?

Now, I understand that Dusenbery was probably trying to produce a response that would convince critics of the law while not seeming inadequate to its ardent supporters. But this list of questions, while it may be a level of attentiveness we should all aspire to as lovers, seems insanely high as a requirement for avoiding rape. As far as I can see, Dusebnery is arguing:

• If a woman moans and the man doesn’t know her well enough to be 100% sure that moan means ‘keep going’, there’s not affirmative consent. The man must stop and check the woman means ‘keep going’. If he doesn’t, he’s committing rape.
• If a man goes down on a woman who he has not had sex with before, without giving her a questioning look, he is committing rape.
• If a woman goes down on a man who she has not had sex with before, without giving him a questioning look, she is committing rape.

Sorry, but this is fucking nuts. For one thing, this would mean I’ve committed rape several times by going down on men during sex without any attempt to verify their interest before the fact. (I once asked a one-night stand, cheekily, during sex: “Can you do me a favour? Can you suck my cock?” He replied quite earnestly, “How nice of you not to just grab my head and push it downwards.”

If there is an argument that makes affirmative consent make sense, it’s that made by Kate Harding in this Dame Magazine piece. What Harding argues – she doesn’t explain it very explicitly, but it’s there – is that what critics of affirmative consent does not necessarily mean affirmative prior consent. A man who goes down on a woman without checking with her first – or, to use her specific example, initiates anal sex without checking first – isn’t committing rape if, as soon as the woman indicates her displeasure, he stops.

This is definition of affirmative consent I could get behind – but it seems almost indistinguishable from the ‘negative’ definition of consent. Stopping when the woman indicates displeasure is pretty clearly compatible with ‘no means no’ and doesn’t require a standard of ‘yes means yes’. I suspect this is a more narrow definition of affirmative consent than most of its advocates support.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with large, vocal portions of the feminist movement advocating a standard which – as far as I can see – does criminalise extremely common forms of sexual activity which happen thousands of times each week without producing rape allegations. This is not a good position for the movement to be in, it is not one which will ever become mainstream, and it is not one that deserves to spread.

This is not to say that affirmative consent isn’t good sexual practice. Personally, the idea of stopping sex every five minutes to enquire, verbally or non-verbally, if your partner is ‘into it’ sounds wretched. But I can understand how you’d feel different.

But we’re not talking about what we want to teach men to do, what we want society’s norm for sexual practice to be; we’re talking about the standard that will be used to decide whether young men are guilty of rape. To set that standard as high as affirmative consent seems to set it just seems crazy to me.

On Amazon

Krugman:

In economics jargon, Amazon is not, at least so far, acting like a monopolist, a dominant seller with the power to raise prices. Instead, it is acting as a monopsonist, a dominant buyer with the power to push prices down.

There’s the rub. The anti-Amazon brigade love to emphasise – and probably exaggerate – Amazon’s monopoly position. But it’s not about the size of your monopoly, it’s what you do with it.

As Joe Nocera points out, “American antitrust law is simply not very concerned with the fate of competitors. What it cares about is whether harm is being done to consumers.” Amazon’s strength has, for the most part, benefited consumers. And yet publishers and Apple boosters can’t understand why people aren’t horrified at it.

Of course, to what extent the law should punish monopsony is an interesting question. The economic mantra that consumer choices perfectly reflect consumer’s deepest preferences is almost certainly wrong – we may shop at Tesco, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel some genuine sadness if small grocers are affected. And of course, monopsony power in the agricultural sector can have a negative effect on some of the world’s poorest farmers.

But while everyone can agree that a dominant player in any market using its position to raise prices is inefficient and wrong and should be stopped, a dominant player using its position to lower prices is, at least, less problematic – and much more difficult to safely regulate.

You’re going to read a lot of ‘analysis’ over the next few days about why Scotland voted against independence.

Economists will say it was worries about the currency. Righties will say it proves Scottish people love Britain and Britishness. Lefties will say it’s because the SNP failed to offer a ‘truly progressive vision’ for an independent Scotland, by which they mean taxes weren’t going to be high enough. Others will blame the pro-union bias of a corporate-owned media.

Remember: none of these people are going to have a fucking clue what they are talking about.

For us to truly understand the reasons will take detailed analysis of exit polls, which will take a few days to properly prepare. When it’s ready, it’ll probably get reported on page 12.

There’s so much wisdom packed into the (op-ed that became the) Sunscreen Song.

“The race is long and in the end it’s only with yourself” is now my go-to serenity mantra for when I read overachieving acquaintances’ bragging Facebook status updates.

On adulthood and ‘manhood’

A. O. Scott’s article on the death of adulthood posits that it’s been the tearing-down of traditionally patriarchal heirarchies that has somehow cast society into a state of permanent adolescence. But the article only scratches the surface of the way gender interferes with the way we think about adulthood and maturity.

As I noted earlier, our ideas of parenting are divided along gender lines, but dominated by the traditionally female role: we use ‘mothering’ to describe the parenting roles traditionally played by women, but we don’t us ‘fathering’ to mean the parental role traditionally played by men. To ‘father’ children literally means to be their biological father; it doesn’t mean to discipline them or be a role model or any of the things we stereotypically associate with male parents.

Our language surrounding childhood and adulthood suffers similarly from being excessively gendered. But the emphasis is reversed: ‘being a man’ is seen as synonymous with ‘being an adult’. Do girls tell each other to ‘woman up’ to face a difficult problem?

Years ago, when Bono made a remark about the album Pop being a ‘man’s album’, it was widely taken to be a gendered remark, suggesting there was some sort of macho swagger to the record. But a closer reading of his comments made it clear he didn’t mean ‘man’s album’ as opposed to ‘woman’s album’, but as opposed to ‘boy’s album.’

“I’ve come to like the word ‘pop’, Bono said. "It was always the skinny boys who called it rock ‘n’ roll. And now we’ve all grown up.”

The simple fact that this misinterpretation was possible demonstrates the extent of the problem.

How are we supposed to find a way to emphasise maturity, responsibility, independence, and other things we associate with adulthood, if we can’t do it without using uncomfortably gendered language? Obviously we have the word ‘adulthood,’ and that’s something. But ‘be an adult’ hardly has the power of ‘be a man’. ‘Adult up!’ sounds like something hectoring, worried granola-eaters lambast people for not saying.

‘Grown-up’ has picked up some cultural cachet, but that in itself seems a sign of our deepening immaturity: grown-ups are what children call adults.

So along with ‘mothering’, and ‘gay’ in the cultural sense, ‘man’ in the sense of ‘adult’ seems another word we need a less-gendered, non-jargony replacement for.

“Learning How to Exert Self-Control”

I’m obsessed with the ‘Marshmallow test’ and everything it teaches us.

Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table… When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it.

And my favourite:

In moments of emotional distress, imagine that you’re viewing yourself from outside, or consider what someone else would do in your place.

[New York Times]

On mothers and ‘mothering’

In a time when more and more men are fulfilling a traditional mother’s role in raising children, what the hell are we to do with our gendered parenting words? As a noun, mother might mean female parent. But ‘mothering’ means nurturing, caring, nourishing, and so on. I doubt that many ‘house-husbands’ would be comfortable being referred to as their childrens’ mother, but what they do is covered by the idea of ‘mothering’.

What to do? ‘Parenting’ doesn’t cut it. It’s too vague, covering everything from dressing childrens’ wounds to teaching them to fish. Some might argue that we don’t need two words to separate the more caring aspects of parenting from those that are more about example-setting and discipline. But I think in most non-traditional families with two parents, there’s still a divide between those two things. I think that divide is useful, and I wouldn’t want to see it undermined because we can’t come up with updated language.

(Note: I’m not defining the ‘father’ role by income-raising.)

I don’t know what to do about this. We can talk about a father mothering his children, but if we get to a stage where a significant number of children are primarily ‘mothered’ by their fathers, we’re clearly going to have to come up with a decent new word.

Wouldn’t it be great if a tech publication did a really good inside look at what the hell went wrong within Amazon – and within Jeff Bezos’ brain – when they designed the Fire Phone?

I don’t mean what’s wrong with it: that’s obvious. A company that’s won every market it’s entered by being cheaper tried to compete head-on with premium products. Nobody was ever going to pay the price of an iPhone 5S (now, of an iPhone 6!) for an Amazon phone. The brand is all wrong. Plus there’s the name – wouldn’t Kindle Phone have made more sense?

But all this is apparent, though that won’t stop plenty of people pointing it out and thinking that ‘explains’ the Fire Phone’s failure. It doesn’t. The real mystery is how Bezos came to make these mistakes in the first place.

Near as I can tell from public statements, the answer seems to be that Bezos has got it into his head he’s a real tech guru. He emphasized specs when he launched the Kindle Fire HDX, and gave it a horrible gadgety name.

I guess you could call it Apple Envy: Bezos wants to believe he’s cracked ‘user delight’ and can use what Amazon’s learned in interface design etc. (and that’s a lot) to build amazing devices. But people don’t go to Amazon for the clever hidden bits of site design that make you buy more stuff. They go because it’s cheap.

It’s practically Business 101: know your place in the market. Apple’s is premium; Samsung large-scale fast follower; Amazon’s is cheap ‘n’ cheerful with impressively integrated backend. How did Bezos forget this? How did his team not remind him? (That last is probably less of a mystery, given his famous micro-managing and temper.)

Now, of course, the Fire Phone is cheap. That’ll help. 

“So now generation rent becomes generation gardenless, too”

I was going to write something snarky on Twitter along the lines of: ‘Does the Guardian not realise how silly articles like this make it look?’ I mean, it’s one thing to devote pages of outrage to minor human rights violations that most people ignore: that can be annoying and feel very metropolitan and airy and bubble-y sometimes, but at least it could qualify as speaking truth to power on some level. But with the world appearing to fall slowly apart are we really supposed to give a fuck that people don’t have gardens?

But then I realised: there is a version of this piece that I could get behind. A piece where the frame was ‘More and more of us live in housing without gardens, but we probably shouldn’t, as gardens have all these health benefits.’ That would be fine! I wouldn’t agree, because parks, but it would be a perfectly legitimate article, the kind you see in serious(ish) publications like the Atlantic.

What makes this so obnoxious is that even the mundane matter of gardens is yoked to the Guardian’s crusade against the Coalition, capitalism, and the general awfulness of life in Cameron’s Britain. We’re invited to feel horror – horror! – at the thought of young people growing up without gardens. Never mind that they’re all probably too busy worrying about not being able to get a job to care, or that the thousands without housing should probably bother us more.

‘Young people don’t have gardens, but they should’ is a relatively light angle for a relatively light topic, a frame which says ‘yes, this is about the problems of a deeply affluent society, but that’s OK.’ Whereas ‘no gardens? Think of the children!’ reveals an astonishing lack of perspective which really undermines the Guardian’s more serious work about more serious matters.

OK, let’s talk about Guardians of the Galaxy

I keep reading about how Guardians of the Galaxy ‘works surprisingly well’ or ‘gets away with it’. And it does!

But I’m starting to think self-awareness – especially the fairly half-assed version of it presented by Guardians – really isn’t the path to merit some think it is. I’ll take a silly film that’s aware of its silliness over one that isn’t, but I’ll take a genuinely funny one over both. 

At least 22 Jump Street threw itself into self-mockery with enthusiasm – and actual jokes. Guardians had an awful lot of moments where I felt like I was supposed to laugh and think, ‘oh, it’s all so weird!’ The movie kept reminding us what a wacky bunch of aliens we were watching.

Were we, though? Let’s review. There were blue aliens, who looked like people, but blue. There were pink aliens, who looked like people, but pink. I think I saw some yellow aliens. And there were the Xandarians, whose fate we were supposed to care deeply about, who weren’t supposed to be humans but clearly were, presumably to enable us to care deeply about them. (I’d love to have hard Jon C. Reilly and Djimon Hounsou grousing in the bar after filming about how the hell they unded up here.)

If Marvel is going to ‘do space’, it’s going to have to remember something: making an exciting space world of properly alien-looking aliens is hard. George Lucas managed it, Star Trek has only occasionally.

This is fine! The talking tree and the racoon provide plenty of weirdness, if – seriously guys, this is important – they’re given genuinely funny lines to emphasise or comment on the weirdness. Or funny things to do, like – spoiler! – baby Groot dancing in a flowerpot over the end credits. The look on the little guy’s face almost made the film worthwhile all by itself. Make the toy, Disney, I’ll buy it.

But how many moments like that were there? Between the amount of storytelling and worldbuilding it had to do, there wasn’t that many actual jokes. A lot of the time it felt like the film didn’t quite understand what kind of humour it was aiming for. Quill beats up the guard who stole his walkman! Is that funny because Quill gives such a crap about his Walkman? Because if so, the movie shouldn’t work so hard to make us understand what the damn thing means to him. Or is it just supposed to be funny that he’s beating up an alien? If so, give us one with weird tentacles that can writhe about in an entertaining bloody way. Not just some blue dude.

Marvel’s world is normally so deeply cod-serious that any levity or self-awareness immediately seems like a breath of fresh air. That’s how Robert Downey Junior was able to elevate both Iron Man and Avengers simply with some ironic eyebrow work. But that sort of humour works best as a garnish on a plate of high-stakes action; I’m not sure it’s enough to carry a ‘team of losers’ through a whole franchise.

Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel were all great. There’s every reason Guardians of the Galaxy 2 will be great. They just need to get a genuinely funny script.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

I’ve never been quite comfortable with the adulation of the (white) rock world with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” The Band’s famous elegy for the poor footsoldiers of the Confederacy.

Yes, the group was mostly Canadian and, yes, their resident Southerner Levon Helm was much beloved by people who are unlikely to have tolerated racism, people like Bob Dylan (who the band played with) and Bruce Springsteen (who is said to have showed up at a near-bankrupt Helm’s house a few years back with a cheque for a million dollars). Joan Baez, that most impeccable liberal, recorded the song, for God’s sake.

And, yes, the civil war claimed the lives of millions of poor Southerners who truly believed they were fighting for their way of life, or state’s rights, or something, and who were probably very nice to the black people they knew – if, not being rich enough to own slaves, they knew any at all.

But still. To sit down, in the late 1960s, with the ink on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 not yet dry, and decide to write and record an elegy for the Old South? That doesn’t sit well with me; that doesn’t seem the act of someone who recognises the prevalence and evil of racism.

But I thought I should find out what an actual African-American thought, so I checked to see what Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America’s fiercest and most thoughtful writers about race, thought about it. And I found this piece from 2009.

I was thinking about the Richmond yesterday, and The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

For those who are unfamiliar, the song is a mournful ballad about the fall of Richmond and Petersburg. I’m told that it’s a great song, and I don’t so much doubt this, as I doubt my own magnanimity.

I’m reminded of one of my father’s favorite quotes, “The African’s right to be wrong is sacred.” Or Aaron McGruder’s line, “I reserve the right to be a nigger.” I can no more marvel at The Band then a Sioux can marvel at the cinematography of The Died With Their Boots On. I wouldn’t fault the man who could, but it’s not me My empathy is a resource to be rationed like all others. My right to be wrong is sacred. My right to be a nigger is reserved.

I started to play the song yesterday, and stopped myself. Again, I was angry. Again, another story about the blues of Pharaoh, and the people are invisible. The people are always invisible. “These motherfuckers,” I mumbled to myself. Kenyatta came in from work and caught me rambling. This is just what you want to hear after coming off the late-shift—your past-drunk spouse ranting about some group you’ve never heard of.

And again, I was tempered, and had to laugh.

The expectation that someone else will tell your story for you, will write your ballads for you, will reconcile your history for you, is foolish and vane. This isn’t about proprietorship—much of what I know of black history, I learned from white historians. It’s about the expectation that everyone will see the world the way you see it, and honor what you honor. The Band has their myths. I have mine.

He goes on to share an extract from the memoirs of Chaplain Garland H. White, a former slave and Union soldier, describing the joy he felt at being reunited with his mother at war’s – and slavery’s – end.

What am I to make of this? Coates is careful not to actually condemn the song, of course, and I do believe its intentions are, essentially, benign. Certainly to dismiss it as “the blues of Pharoah” is to ignore its class aspects: ‘Virgil Caine’, the song’s fictional narrator, ‘drove on the Danville train,’ he didn’t own a plantation. And one could argue there are many hand-wringing reminisces of slavery and few for the poor of the South, and this is a necessary corrective.

But race in America was an issue where you were either on the right side, or you weren’t, I think; and the unthinking enthusiasm with which this song seems revered still seems pretty problematic. I’m relieved to know I’m not the only one who feels this.

Don’t get me started on ‘Sweet Home Alabama’.

I’m a huge defender of interrupting. I get that some people find it unbearably rude and never justifiable. But when there’s a fast-moving, rich conversation or debate happening, does your right to finish your long, rambling sentence really trump everyone else’s right to keep things moving along?

The trick, of course, is to interrupt well. That means identifying the moment when the person has made the crux of their point and now they’re just adding unnecessary explanation.

As the youngest of three talkative children I’ve been interrupting as long as I’ve been talking, and I think I’m pretty good at it. But it’s difficult to explain exactly how you identify that moment when the wheat’s been delivered and you’re just getting chaff. Partly it’s following the actual logic of the sentence, listening out for cue phrases like ‘and anyway’ or ‘you know, it’s like’. (‘But’ is different. If there’s a caveat, I want to hear it, as it could help move a debate towards resolution.)

But I suspect there are phonetic clues as well, a retreat from urgency as the main payload of the sentence is delivered.

The point is this: when I interrupt you, it doesn’t mean I’m not listening to you. On the contrary, it means I’m paying enough attention that I can tell you’ve made your point. It’s better for everyone at that point if the conversation moves on. Who hasn’t had an evening ruined by someone who rambled on and monopolised the conversation without really saying anything?

But – and this is important! – if I interrupt someone and they don’t stop, and that note of determination creeps into their voice that says “I’m going to finish, you dick,” then I let it go, no matter how little of meaning they may be saying. Interrupting is often justified, but actually talking over someone rarely is.

“India brides leave husbands’ homes for lack of toilets”

This strikes me as quite a good test case of the advantages and limitations of the currently fashionable rights-focused school of development (cf. Duncan Green, Bill Easterly’s new book).

On the one hand, this is hugely impressive. The women should be commended for their bravery, and all that good Time magazine stuff.

But hands up anyone who thinks the millions of new modern toilets India needs will get built just because women are empowered to demand them? As opposed to, say, because people can afford them, or government provides them?

Growth first. Always. Until you hit about $15000 per capita, anyway: the level above which, as Martin Ravallion has noted, dollar-a-day poverty ‘basically disappears’.

 

Never believe development isn’t possible. I met an old guy today, small farmer, born before independence. His two oldest children are studying in China to be engineers. “They don’t even remember Swahili anymore!” he joked.

That may not be development as we recognise it, but it’s a vast increase in human potential over two generations. Isn’t that sort of the point?

When you visit a Tanzanian village for research you have to declare
yourself to officials. People will stop you if you don’t.

Not because it’s a police state, but because government is seen here as a legitimate authority with a natural role managing day-to-day events in the village.

This is not unusual in developing countries, of course, and maybe in any highly rural setting. Certainly there are villages in the US where
strangers would be politely asked who they are and why they’re there. But I doubt the thought would occur to anyone to order visitors to present themselves to the Mayor, y’know? Government has to insert itself into affairs.

We in the West call the authorities for protection or just to get something out of them. But there’s no sense it’s the community’s preference to keep them updated on what’s going on.

Let’s overthink nudity because I haven’t done that for a while

So I have this vague theory-slash-puzzle that’s been banging around in my head for some time and which I think it’s time to attempt to articulate. It concerns the circumstances under which men get naked together, and in which society allows/encourages them to.

Yes, this is a weird thing to think about. Deal.

There was lots of reporting recently of new charming photos from WW2 showing soldiers hanging out in the nude in various situations. They’re charming because the guys in them are so relaxed, so comfortable seeing and even touching each other, and the issue of sex couldn’t be further from their minds.

The traditional understanding of this is that as awareness of homosexuality rose in the years after World War 2, male comfort with homosocial nudity correspondingly decreased. That’s not all: explicit male-on-male expressions of love and affectionate physical contact also declined.

Now, there’s evidence that change is going into reverse. A new generation of young guys are, by all accounts, totally into touching each other and spooning, and tough-as-nails Marines are making each other uncomfortable by telling each other they love them on the battlefield.

So logically, if the postwar homophobic reduction in homosocial love and contact is going into reverse, resistance to homosocial nudity should be reversing as well.

But is it?

It’s true that young men these days are willing to look at Jason Segel’s penis for comedy purposes in a way that their dad’s generation maybe weren’t. But that’s pretty heavily signposted as comedy, at a time when more women are going to comedy films. But what about in actual social, guys-together situations?

My sense is that despite the huge decline in homophobia and huge increase in general male-on-male intimacy in recent years, homosocial nudity is actually still on the decline. 

Non-anecdotal evidence is hard to find, but for example, over the last ten years several London boroughs who provide sauna or turkish baths facilities have abolished nudity during single-sex sessions, much to the howls of a small community of users. Many leisure centres have replaced open showers with cubicles. The leisure centre in my home town was refurbished years ago and replaced its whole twin changing rooms with a co-ed ‘changing village’ consisting entirely of cubicles.

Interestingly, concern over homosexual activity remains a clear part of such decisions. One London borough, when asked about abolishing nude sauna hours, explicitly said they were concerned about cruising activities.

Imagine a straight twentysomething guy now, and his dad as a gruff, homophobic twentysomething guy in the early 80s. The son is probably way more comfortable kissing, cuddling and i-love-you-man-ing his male buddies than the dad was. But the dad probably took a bath, nude, with ten other guys every Saturday after football – and if he worked in a mine, probably every evening after his shift too. The son probably goes to the gym three times a week and goes home for a shower afterwards.

Are attitudes to homosocial nudity hardening, even as attitudes to homosocial intimacy are softening? What’s going on?

My theory is this: we’ve gone from a situation where being naked with people of the other sex was generally taboo, but being naked with people of your own sex was essentially required; to one where the difference between homosocial and heterosocial nudity is much smaller. A young guy is more free to see naked women, and be seen naked by women, than ever before: on TV, on the internet, in a Spencer Tunick painting, whatever. We’re moving in the direction of a German/Scandinavian relaxedness. 

But on the flipside, a young guy is far less likely to be required to be naked in front of other guys. A shy guy in the 1950s may not have loved getting naked in the shower with his colleagues after a shift down the mine shaft, but he didn’t have a choice, and norms evolved around that. The reduction in space for same-sex non-sexual nudity is in fact often simply the reduction in space which requires it. This is necessary in an increasingly diverse society, the obvious example being the influx into Western countries of people of religions which prohibit nudity.

To give another example: in the 1950s and before it was common for all-male schools to have nude swimming lessons. It’s possible to imagine a trendy lefty single-sex school today allowing nude swimming, but impossible to imagine one mandating it.

That’s not a bad thing in itself. Choice is good, and while it’s nice to look back at the innocent days of bros hanging out in the nude, it’s important to remember a lot of it was essentially imposed on the bros in question (you might be more disposed to swim naked if you don’t want to get wet the only remaining underwear you’ve got to last the next week, say).

Still, it would be a pity if today’s pro-gay, huggin’-&-kissin’ guys ended up no more comfortable getting their kit off in front of each other than their parents’ generation. After all, when you see a photo as lovely as this one, it’s hard not to feel like something’s been lost.

“Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google+”

First of all, that headline originally just came into Tumblr as ‘Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google,” which seemed a roundabout way of saying ‘sunsetting’ until I realised it’s just because that ‘+’ has never travelled well.

It’s not the only thing about G+ that never seemed well planned.

For the record, I think Google having a single ‘identity layer’ that travels around their services with you was a great idea. I think that pursuing the Facebook model of one-account-per-person, subsidiary-accounts-for-businesses and real-names-please was pretty much all a mistake. What if your business has its own Gmail address, making it pretty much inexorably tied to a different Google account? Google might have been better pursuing the Twitter approach: actively allow multiple accounts, allow any name, and encourage apps and services for switching account.

But, we are where we are. And Google’s done a pretty good job grafting G+ as an identity layer onto YouTube. So given that the core plus.google.com service seems a complete failure outside the nerd bubble, now’s the best possible time to focus on the ‘layer’ role and build up the various features as standalone properties.

More to the point, though: it just makes sense for photo tools to be separate from Plus. Plus is about sharing, after all, but what if I want to use Google’s nifty photo tools on a photo I have no intention of sharing?

Let’s just have Google Photos, with one-click sharing to your G+ account. I’d like to use Google’s photo tools to display some of my photos from Africa. I could tell people ‘view my photos on Google Photos.’ I’m definitely not telling people ‘view my photos on Google Plus.’

[Bloomberg]

At first when I heard about Argentina I thought, “here they go again.” There’s a school of economic thought that certain countries have a deep-seated tendency to get themselves into debt trouble, and Argentina sits near the top of that list.

But in fact, what’s happening seems much more a re-litigation of the 2002 default than anything new. It’s literally the same debt at issue, revived by vulture funds (perhaps ‘zombie funds’ would be more appropriate). The legal niceties of the matter escape me, but given that Argentina paid a heavy economic price for its last default, it hardly seems productive for them to be on the hook again for the same debt.

“Actress Sally Farmiloe dies aged 60”

My first ever interview in my short-lived career as a showbiz journalist was with Sally Farmiloe. It was my second week or something at the Daily Express. Lizzie said to me, “do you want to do an interview?” “Sure!” I replied, immediately quaking inside.

“Do you know who Sally Farmiloe is?” added Lizzie.

I didn’t! I was fucking up already! Was she some skinny new model? A singer? “No, sorry,” I mumbled.

“She’s an actress. She’s famous for shagging Jeffrey Archer in a car park.”

Good gravy, I thought to myself. What have I gotten myself into?

The ‘story’ was that ‘shagger Farmiloe’, as the deputy editor (who sent the story over) put it, was playing a nun (‘a NUN!’, as he styled it) in a new production of something or other at the Hampstead Theatre. I remember convincing myself it was totally worthwhile writing about this in a national newspaper, because at least it would mean some free publicity for an independent theatre.

Anyway, she was perfectly lovely, of course. She did at one point say ‘You’re not going to bang on about that Jeffrey Archer stuff, are you? It was so long ago.” But I could tell she knew the score. We chatted, about the play and her career (she was in Howard’s Way); she was funny, friendly, and I got the distinct impression she’d be great fun to down a few gin & tonics with.

When, a few weeks ago, I saw on the sidebar of some website that she was suffering from terminal cancer, I felt a very small but distinct kick in the stomach.

And now she’s gone. RIP, Shagger.

BBC News: Actress Sally Farmiloe dies aged 60