Sir Tony Blair - a defense

 There’s controversy over the knighthood for Tony Blair. I find such awards generally absurd, but I find it difficult to read many criticisms of Blair’s approach to Iraq. Saddam had committed genocide. That should have already been enough for his removal. While in power he was a tyrant who had a policy of horrific torture to suppress opposition. He had a record of using poison gas as a weapon of war. He was building one of the largest armies. I was supportive of the invasion and removal of Saddam for humanitarian reasons. Where things went terribly wrong was the aftermath, as a result of US policy about policing and military structures. That was not British policy. It was not Blair’s policy. It was disastrous, as there was a chaotic result with a huge death toll as a result of internecine conflicts. If there had not been these conflicts, If British advice regarding policing had been followed, the results could have been very different. It’s worth noting that the post-war occupation was not illegal, and was supported by the UN, which shows that UN support is no guarantee of a good outcome.

It could be argued that the invasion was, at the time, unnecessary, as UN weapons inspectors were on-site and so would have hindered any use if there weapons were present. But would these weapons inspectors have shut down the torture chambers, and allowed Iraqis to live without fear?

Calling Blair a “War Criminal” isn’t a helpful argument one way or another. In the 90s, with Blair in power, NATO bombed Serbia to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanians. This was illegal by international law. It was also necessary.

There are things I would fight for. Examples are the stopping of torture and genocide. I can’t morally support the idea of sovereignty in which a country itself has rights as that leaves citizens as the legal possessions of whoever is power, to torture and kill as desired.

We should be better than that.

Bad arguments against trans rights

“Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, said she felt Stock’s views on gender identity, including that people cannot change their biological sex, were probably “in step with the majority of the population”.”

 If you are going to oppose trans equality, it makes sense to have at least some idea of what you are opposing.  

Here are some relevant points:

1. Being trans is not about changing biological sex. Trans people aren’t asking for generic treatment to change their chromosomes.  

2. Gender identity is not always linked to biological sex, so it only confuses things to assume they are the same thing.

3. Insisting that people should look and act a certain way because of their biological sex is absurd. It’s trying to base morality on biology. 

4. Saying that views of the rights of a minority should be a certain way because of the beliefs of the majority is very dodgy. 

5. What matters is not biology, or views about biology, but minimising suffering.  The suffering of oppressed trans people can be considerable.

6. These “biological sex matters” arguments used to be used (and often still are) against the rights of gay people.  There’s a huge inconsistency in supporting equality for the LGBs but not the Ts.

7. Exactly the same arguments have been used about gay people - that their sexual attractions and activities are “unnatural” and “against biology”.  Use of these arguments against gay rights is in decline, so it’s frustrating to see them used against trans rights.

There may be arguments against full trans equality, but if there are they have to be better than those we have seen so far, as we see little but misinformation, misunderstandings and fallacies of biology and ethics.

We don't care

Boris Johnson had a party when he shouldn't.  We don't care.  The Metropolitan Police won't investigate, because they don't care.  Why should they?  Members of the government have broken most if not all the rules of parliamentary behaviour.  They don't care.  The Speaker of the House gets rather angry every now and then, and tells them off, but nothing serious happens.  He doesn't care. 

Members of the government have been handing out billions of pounds of contracts to family and friends.  We don't care.  It's just what they do.  We have been told by the popular press for decades that politicians are cheeky and think only of themselves and so it doesn't really matter does it?  It only shows nothing has changed.  What is a few tens of billions between friends?

We really showed we in the UK truly weren't bothered when Leave campaign promises were publicly thrown away the morning after the EU referendum in 2016.  "Hundreds of millions of pounds per week for the National Health Services freed up by leaving the EU?  Did we really promise that?  Well, we were a bit hasty."  All businesses were going to be fine because we clearly weren't going to leave the Single Market.  EU nationals in the UK were going to be fine and Brits living in the EU were going to be fine because freedom of movement for the nice people would remain.  Sorry - we made a mistake - none of those are true. But no-one cares.  Business investment collapses, and the future of our children are limited and no-one even bothers to mention it.

Later on, as more promises were ripped up, Boris Johnson's government lied to the Queen to justify trying to suspend Parliament to prevent votes on EU policy.  No-one cared.  It's only the Queen.  She clearly didn't care.  She could have kicked Johnson out of office or demanded that the Speaker of the House take action.  She didn't.  After all, why bother?

So we don't care.  And we aren't alone.  Trump plots to overthrow democracy.  The evidence is clear.  But there is no sign of the cops knocking at his door.  It's just too much trouble.  All that fuss.  The Russian involvement doesn't matter. Nothing happened.  Senior generals took precautions to prevent World War Three being started by Trump in one of his moods.  I'm sure they will do the same if he becomes president again, and all that fuss and anxiety about who wins elections will be at an end if Trump gets in again, so the US can live in a peaceful and stable dictatorship.  It will be so relaxing.

 I know we don't care.  It's simply not worth our time.  But, you know, just between us, I do occasionally have a fleeting thought - a wish - a desire: to be proved wrong.

A new Smalltalk

Java is amazing.  It's the most widely used programming language, and it deserves that.  Although the Java language isn't exciting, Java runtimes are awesome bits of technology, giving extremely good portability and very efficient multi-threading, memory management, and run-time optimisation.  This is why it is the platform of choice for so many languages, such as Scala, Groovy, and Clojure.

Smalltalk is the most productive and fun programming environment I have ever used.  It's a dynamic language, but the use of an 'image' (a live collection of objects) means that it's easy to do things that normally require a type system, such as refactoring and finding where classes and methods are used.

What could be better than to host Smalltalk on the Java platform?  Smalltalk would get all the advantages of Java's memory management and access to Java libraries.  It could also allow Smalltalk access to platforms such as Android and iOS. 

Smalltalk on the JVM has been tried before, but efforts have been rather incomplete - examples are Redline Smalltalk and JSqueak.  There hasn't been a full and efficient implementation. 

Smalltalk on the JVM could take advantage of the extremely efficient run-time optimisations that are even available for dynamic languages, via the 'invokedynamic' feature.  Such a Smalltalk could have pluggable GUI implementations allowing use of Swing or JavaFX, and the latter would allow Android and iOS ports from the same codebase.

So, I'm going to do this.  Primarily, I'm doing this because it will be fun and educational.  I want to learn more about Smalltalk and the JVM.  I want to be able to produce a Smalltalk that will run everywhere and is as reliable and fast as the JVM can make it.  Then, I want to have fun writing apps in Smalltalk again, after a break of decades.

The Mystery of Creation is Written in the Sky

When we think of creation we think of there needed to be a thing that creates and substance that is the building blocks of creation. "You can't get something from nothing" surely has to apply. When we think of mystery in science we think of the empty hearts of particle colliders where streams of particles with the energies of battleships at full-stream-ahead smash into each other and bully space into whispering the stories of new physics.

And yet, there is a place where mystery is everywhere and in everything we see. That place is the sky. Listening to the sky we hear the tepid hiss of microwaves, a gentle afterglow of the fires that formed all that is. The microwaves paint a celestial picture with the most delicate of watermarks, a pattern that has its origin in a subtle interplay of the strange and the unknown. The original canvas itself is a mystery. We see only the after-image. The canvas was an immaterial field which filled space. Unlike the electric or magnetic fields that build our technology, this field had no direction. It didn't go from there to here, it simply was where it was. Having no ends, it needed no origin. The field we call 'Higgs', responsible for the mass of particles, is the same: it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.

The unknown field was different from the Higgs. It had an effect on space. The field tried to compress space, to shrink everything down. In a paradox of relativity, Einstein showed that such a pressure would make gravity blow space up. That's what happened. Space raced apart in a huge expansion which we call "Inflation". As this happened, the field was slowly losing its strength. This wasn't because space was tearing it apart, but because the field was born with a limited life. After a short time the field vanished and as it died, it ripped into space and made all the particles of matter and energy needed for a universe.

In a mystery of physics, the unknown field is labelled not the "Inflation" field, but the "Inflaton" field. (Perhaps this the same reason that the US distorts "Aluminium"). The Inflation field is a mystery. We haven't seen it in our experiments. We may never see it there, as it lives and dies in environments where universes are born. But we see it's beautiful legacy in the microwaves that fill the sky.

The watermarks on the sky are the result of ripples in the Inflaton canvas. They are ripples because of quantum mechanics, as quantum mechanics says that everything everywhere always ripples! The ripples are huge because inflation expanded the canvas again and again and again. There are ripples within ripples within ripples as waves like the splashes of pebbles in a pond spread then slowed. The canvas stretched, more pebbles, more waves. On and on this went, until the canvas was larger than we can ever imagine. The universe we see was the tiniest speck on the cosmic canvas of inflation.

And so, we see the effects of the Inflation, physics beyond what we know, and we see the tiniest wobbles of quantum uncertainty exploded to a size where they form the pattern for a cosmos.

The strangeness isn't over. A universe expanding isn't like the world we know - such a universe takes the laws of physics and flushes them away. You can't get something from nothing in our world, but in an expanding universe, you can. You can get creation for real, without a creator. The energy that fuels the expansion need never run out. The expansion stopped because inflation died out, not because it ran out of fuel.

Strange too is the short life of inflation. The story is beautiful but un
-imaginably brief. All that life, all the rippling of the canvas, lasted only 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 of a second. The birth pangs of our universe were short.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps there is more than one canvas. Perhaps inflation slowed and stopped here, but not everywhere. Perhaps universes are painted in countless skies, and minds will always wonder at the quantum artistry revealed.

Online abuse is out of control?

There is a recent TED talk about how the online abuse of women has "spiralled out of control". I have great sympathy for anyone who has experienced online abuse, but there is no mystery as to why this abuse occurs and how to deal with it. Abuse occurs because there are extremely vile people online, and current social media gives these people almost unlimited access to abuse anyone. 

We realised the problem of abuse decades ago in the early 90s when the Internet changed from being used mainly by academics to accessible by the general public. To deal with this change social forums like usenet were set up with moderation. This worked pretty well. What went wrong was that new social media were launched with no barriers to entry and, by default, everyone being accessible by everyone else. 

The idea that such wide open systems would be free from bullying and harassment was hopelessly naive. Instead of using online abuse as evidence of how broken our societies are, campaigners should insist that the terrible design flaws in social media such as Twitter and Facebook are fixed.

Why panpsychism isn't a solution to the mystery of consciousness

I have been reading an article by my philosopher friend Russell Blackford on panpsychism.

I take a stronger position on panpsychism, which is that it is simply false: There is a fundamental logical mistake with panpsychism, assuming the acceptance of "causal closure", that the brain is physical and all events that take place in the brain have physical causes. If all events in the brain have physical causes then those events are solutions of equations which enumerate physical laws. This is true in principle, even though such solutions may be intractable. Those solutions, by definition, cannot contain terms which incorporate panpsychism, because, if they did, panpsychism would be part of the physics of the brain. Therefore, it's not logically possible that any assertion we make about panpsychism can be because of panpsychism. Whatever the supposed mystery of mind is, that mystery cannot have panpsychism as the answer.

There are more subtle arguments against panpsychism, but the lack of causal effect on the brain is, in my view, the strongest.