After a leisurely lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel, looking out across the pool and beach, I found myself in the peculiar position of being unable to leave. The main entrance to the hotel was roped off, holding back fans and autograph hunters. The crowds were drawn to some tall, lean and fit young men, walking across the foyer to the coach waiting outside. Some of the men had nicely shorn hair, but the gap toothed smiles and wonky noses amongst the group told me these were no movie stars. I did not recognize any of the men, but the casual sporting wear finally gave it away. Those men were the Brazilian football team, staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Doha, off to a training session on the eve of their friendly game against England.

Their bodies may be toned, and their manner relaxed in the style of the rich, pampered and lauded, but there was something distinctly ordinary about these men. And then it struck me. They are famous, and they have that attractiveness that comes from youth and physical fitness, but otherwise they are not handsome. Sport is a bastion of meritocracy. Maradona, Cruyff, and Rooney may have played the beautiful game, but their beauty was in their feet, not their faces. There may be stars like Beckham who are as effective as models as they are as midfielders, but they are the exception. Good looks is the exception for all humans. Ordinary people tend to look ordinary, which is as it should be. In a meritocracy, looks does not matter, but looks do matter in lots of ways in this world. That is why there are billboards showing off Beckham’s briefs, but we will never see one displaying Rooney’s jockey shorts. Is that fair?

There are lots of prejudices with names. Racism, sexism, ageism. Prejudice relating to looks has no name, but of course it exists. We are just not allowed to give it a name, because it is hard to simplify and categorize it. In sport, ability supposedly trumps all, not least because sport has become a business where results pay. But even in sport, that most meritocratic of activities, there is prejudice. Whilst racism is being kicked out of football, more insidious prejudice, like the cult of beauty, is sliding in. When Wimbledon paid more to the winners of the men’s singles than the women’s singles, Tony Blair felt necessary to take time out from starting wars to comment on the unfairness. He and the Williams sisters got their way, and the prize money was equaled up. But nobody can enforce parity in endorsements, where makers of pretty sportswear and jewelery want their wares to be be worn by athletes who are as pretty as they are successful. If the marketeers cannot have both, they will take trade-offs between the two. Money has helped the rise of meritocracy in sport. No fan dislikes a black footballer who scores a thirty goals a season for their team, and the nationality of a match winner is secondary to the joy of defeating a derby rival. Fans pay to see winners, and prizes go to the victors. Yet selling perfumes and lingerie also pays, and hence the rise of the pretty footballers like Beckham. Christiano Ronaldo is hence set to make a lot more money as a good-looking footballer than a goofy but talented individual like Ronaldinho ever will.

Fighting prejudice is important, but the problem with fighting prejudice is that the fight, even more than the prejudice, takes the line of least resistance. Quotas, laws, even the naming of prejudice is easy when the issue is one of black and white, or men and women. When prejudice is subtle, the crude techniques to fight it are powerless. Fashion models that complain about an obsession with size zero and unrealistic body images make a valuable point, but how far does the point go? A woman might have a great body that makes a dress look fabulous, whilst having a face like Carlos Tevez. Such a woman would have less chance of striding down a catwalk than a woman with a nice face but a fuller figure that makes more work for the designer. Why is this inequity tacitly accepted by our society? In a meritocracy your face would not matter, when the customers are supposedly looking at the goods, not the mannequin within them.

Actors are expected to look good. Why is this? It is because, no matter how much actors believe in ‘the method’, the profession of acting is as much about entertaining people as it is about truth, whether that be the truth of the emotion or any other truth. The truth that plenty of people do not look as good as actors takes second place to the truth that people like looking at good-looking people. But what if the audience did not want to look at blacks, or whites, or people of hues between? What if the audience did not want to look at men, or women, or people of a certain height, or age, or listen to people with a certain accent? One approach might be to make an audience looks, but this only begs the question of where prejudice stops, and choice begins.

The fight against prejudice has become much like the fight for organized labour. The evil is supposedly best waged through a union - a group of people with common cause who negotiate for better treatment. Whilst the model appeals because it may be effective, it is flawed. The world will never be fair just because one group of people gets a superior deal relative to another group of people, even if they are just seeking to get what they see others can get. The problem lies not in the disparity between groups, but the existence of groups judged by irrelevant and incidental properties. Pay somebody according to their talents and efforts at their job, not according to their looks or colour. People should be judged by what they do, and what they can do. Despite this simple truth, we accept that we live a world where people are well rewarded to wear clothes and to kick balls. Others spend their lives picking out the most valuable rubbish in heaps of trash. That unfairness is part of the fabric of our lives, so we have become blind to it. I do not much care if someone feels underpaid when winning a sporting tournament, just because they feel the opposite gender gets more for winning the ’same’ competition, if the prize they get is millions of times more than will ever be earned by someone with the bad luck to be born into poverty. It is bad luck to be born a woman in a man’s world, but it is also bad luck to be born into a poor family in a world that favours the rich. It is wrong to treat women worse than men, but it is easier to set that straight. Tackling an easy challenge is of little merit when gross injustice surrounds us. Some born into this world never get the opportunity to learn a trade, never mind handle a tennis racquet. That is a prejudice too, but one so endemic to our way of life that it has no name.

We live in a world of prejudice. Prejudice based on where somebody is born, prejudice based on who somebody is born to, prejudice based on the colour of the skin they are born into, prejudice based on the wealth inherited from their forbears, prejudice based on their very skin and bones. The debate about prejudice is flawed. You cannot ask a union of people to fight against all prejudice. Any such group will just further their own ends. Unions look after their members, not after the good of all. Tipping the scales may seem like a route to fairness, but none of us are so simple for our lifechances to be only measured on the binary scales of the unions that fight prejudice. Obama is not a black man. Obama is a black-and-white man, yet even he is painted black to suit a polarized debate. There should have been no surprise, though justifiable outrage, when a majority of black Californians voted against gay marriage. The black agenda is the treatment of blacks, not gays, and only a minority will belong to both minority camps. Unions fight for the interests of their members, not for the interest of all.

Rather than measuring people on scales, seeking to equalize them and inevitably getting bored as we tire of the endless categories stretching from religion to sexual orientation, a better approach would be to bar every irrelevant measure. Only then would ugly people get a fair deal, and only then will we see a sustained effort to treat the children of the poor as well as the children of the rich. That is beyond us for now. To achieve it would take a striving for a true equality based on everyone being who they are, and not based on the union they belong to. That may not suit some of the union leaders, so whilst they claim to fight prejudice, they institutionalize prejudice at the same time. It is hard to fight against prejudice that has no name, but vital all the same. Prejudice will only be defeated when there are no unions of common cause any more - only the single union of all mankind with love and respect for all. But if we lived in a world like that, then the Brazilian footballers would not be so rich, and they would be as likely to ask for the autographs, as to give them.

The world is absurd, of course. I am trying to re-read Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he deals head-on with the big question of whether you should or should not commit suicide in this absurd world. As essays go, the conclusion is hardly a nail biter. Camus lived all the way through from writing the first word to writing the last word, so even without reading the essay you know what his conclusion is going to be. In that sense, reading it is about as suspenseful as watching one of those US television serials where an important and popular permanent character suffers a terrible accident that threatens to kill them at the start of an episode. By the end of the show, somebody else will have devised a clever way of saving the stricken character. By the start of the next show, the temporary invalid will be back to full health and completely rehabilitated. So we know that Camus thought we should go on living and doing things, even if he also thought all the reasons for living and doing things are absurd.

I am as inclined to absurdity as the next man. In fact, probably more so, unless the next man is Sacha Baron Cohen in which case I defer to his genius for the absurd. You could regard Sacha Baron Cohen as living proof that Buddhism is in error. If a Jewish comedian leading a hillbilly audience in a sing-a-long of “Throw the Jew Down the Well” is not instant nirvana, I do not know what is. Gautama Buddhaa may have starved and meditated for many a year in order to attain enlightenment, but Baron Cohen turned enlightenment into light entertainment. But after Baron Cohen, Camus and the Supreme Buddha, I feel pretty confident of ranking myself as somebody who thinks life is absurd and its purpose is mysterious. Which, as Wittgenstein might have pointed out, does not help much when deciding what groceries to buy from the supermarket, or whether to spend my Saturday morning writing a blog or doing something which, at face value, might seem equally absurd.

Being an idealist-realist-cynic-romantic in the Humphrey Bogart vein, I often find myself doing things that I know are emotionally and intellectually right on one level, but which I feel are silly and pointless on another level. But then I console myself that Bogart was very popular, so perhaps it is okay to leave some feelings unreconciled. Instead of writing this blog, I should be filling out a form from the co-operative bank (which leads me to notice that they too have joined the cummings-esque craze for dispensing with capitals). I need to fill out the form because, in all likelihood, I will soon be the Pirate Treasurer, by which I mean I will be Treasurer of the Pirate Party UK (although more probably GB, but let us not get into that now). Assuming the role of national Treasurer for a political party has caught me by surprise as much as anyone else, not least because only a month ago I was unaware of the party’s existence. Or, to be precise, I was unaware of the party’s pre-existent intention to imminently come into existence, which hopefully it soon will. It is all the fault of the European elections, and for my web browsing habits, as I could not help myself when seeing the Swedish Pirate Party had won a sear in those elections, and I was curious to see what similar things were happening in my homeland. Perhaps if I had been working, instead of indulging one of my inter-working ‘rest’ periods, I would not have had time to find out more and hence would never have offered to be Treasurer, but I was not, so I did, and soon I will be.

On mentioning my aspiration to be Pirate Treasurer, most sane friends have commented on the name of the party. I like it, not least because of its absurdity. Check out the Electoral Commission’s register of political parties and there are no end of parties calling themselves the People’s this-and-that, National such-and-such or Independent bing-bang-bosh. No Pirate Parties though, which gives us a huge and enormous advantage in having a memorable and unique name. Of course, most people think Pirates are characters like Long John Silver or Captain Hook, which is none too helpful. Associations with Somalian hijackers of container ships are also unfortunate. Taking my queue from the absurdities of political semantics and the gay pride movement in particular, I started rationalizing to my friends that we Pirates are ‘taking back’ the name from the people who use it to oppress us.

Who were the great British pirates of history? They were people like Sir Francis Drake. He stole from the Spanish, but they were a corrupt bunch of buggers who were exploiting the natives in the Americas, so his stealing and robbing was actually a good thing. The British establishment thought of it as a kind of high-risk enterprise on the high seas. Captains were small businessmen and their crew were profit-incentivized stakeholders. So long as they stuck to stealing from Britain’s enemy, Spain, they were called privateers, not pirates. Privateering was private enterprise, not a public ill. Given that Britain was at war Spain, and that the Spanish had all the loot worth stealing, it was a win-win for Queen Elizabeth I’s government to sanction theft from its enemies, and for the thieves to be rewarded with titles and honours. Plus the pirate-privateers proved very handy when the Spanish Armada came to invade Britain, as their skillful skulduggery saved the day.

So you see, pirates are really very good to have around, when circumstances require people with a more adventurous, unorthodox, independent and rebellious streak to their nature. I do not know my mizzen mast from my poop deck, but I do know that now is the time for a few people of piratical instincts. In an absurd world, we crave money and possessions above all other things, to the point where many of us have become indentured slaves to the legal persons we created. By legal persons I am referring to the legal personage of an incorporated business. Big companies have become so important that, although they are the immaterial inventions of human minds, we owe them money, are controlled by them, and are incapable of stopping the harm they cause. When these companies behave badly, they go unpunished. They are instead rewarded with gifts of money taken from real people, because we cannot live without them any more. When these companies destroy our confidence in the fiction of money, we solve the problem with quantitative easing, a fancy name for a process where a man in the Bank of England presses a button on a computer, and hence magically increases the amount of money the Bank of England says it has. Piling absurdity upon absurdity, the legal fiction of a company can own and exploit the legal fiction of a possession, in order to extort real money from real people. These possessions are so expensive to own and exploit that real people cannot afford to own or exploit them, even though real people are needed to create them. Of course, I am talking about so-called ‘intellectual property’. At the summit of the pyramid of absurdity, the legal fiction of a company will complain about losing some of the legal fiction of money for things they did not sell and would never have sold, because real people used some ‘intellectual property’ without asking for permission or offering payment. This intellectual property is made from the same thin air as used to make money and make laws, yet to some people it is more real than the real suffering of real people all over this world. In this world, poor people suffer. They suffer because of the lack of cheap drugs, because of the premium that must be paid for intellectual property. They suffer when they are economically exploited by the wealthy nations that own all this so-called property. Now is the time for some good, old-fashioned real people to stand up to all this corrupting nonsense. If they get called pirates, so be it. Pirates are not just works of fiction. Real pirates were real heroes. We need some heroes to launch a broadside on this tyranny of legal fantasies and the deadly, dehumanizing devastation they cause.

People used to believe the world was full of spirits. I think they still do. Animism is the proto-religion where stones, the sun, the rivers and the natural world is full of spiritual life. We stopped believing stones have spirits, but whilst our intellects have developed, our instincts take longer to evolve, and lag behind. Now, our instincts tell us that everything must have a legal underpinning if it is to exist. We can barely imagine what it means for something to exist, without first knowing what its legal status is. Legality has become the immaterial fabric which supplanted spirituality. Without legality, we feel like the universe will tear itself apart, as we face an abyss of meaninglessness. The law has become our comforter, solving Camus’ problems by reducing every question to one of what the law says is right or wrong, exists or does not exist. Our ontology is a list in a law book. Our ethics are the distribution of justice in terms of penalties and compensations handed out by our courts. Our philosophy of science is to have blind faith in legal institutions.

I, like everybody else, am afflicted by the delusion that laws exist. Responsibilities tend to force you to think clearly about things, and recently I had to think clearly about the question: ‘what is a political party’? I know what a registered political party is, and recently I have been reading the laws regarding registration in order to aid the registration of the Pirate Party. But what is a political party, without registration? Does it exist? Can it do things? Can it own things? These have been questions in my mind. Now, I feel quite stupid and ashamed for wondering about such silly things. My first good answer was to think that political parties are unincorporated associations. In short, they are not separate legal persons from their members, but they are governed by an agreement between its members. That answer is a good and correct answer, and befits someone like me with professional training. But really that answer is a fancy way of saying a political party is something that a group of people decide to do collectively. Suddenly all the mystique disappears, and I am confronted with the crushing banality that comes hand-in-hand with absurdity. If a group of people decide to do something, they decide to do something. Everything else is detail. The same is true whether we talk about political parties, or governments, or laws. Everything comes back to us all making collective decisions. The greatest trick played on mankind was convincing mankind that something greater than mankind exists. I blame animism, or whatever instinct causes us to ascribe causes to non-existent powers. All we have done, in our clever, modern way, is to transplant that fantasy to laws and business and money and government and all the other human inventions that we allowed to become our masters when they should always have remained our servants.

Pirates were not immoral people. Obeying the law and doing the morally right thing are not the same. Sometimes they coincide, at other times they are in opposition. Real pirates often ran their ships in very democratic fashion, as might be expected when you realize that there is no greater legal force that will hunt down and punish the mutineers if they get fed up with the captain and throw him overboard. Pirates were often lawbreakers, unless their actions were convenient to the lawmakers and hence they were rebranded as privateers. Sometimes breaking the law is necessary, to do the right thing. It turns out that now, increasingly, the law is bad, and needs to be changed. However, it is upheld by corrupt people who profit from the law. Just like slave traders and slave owners saw no advantage from prohibiting slavery, our corrupt rulers and corrupt business leaders see no advantage in changing the thoroughly rotten way our world economy controls and exploits us. Did you notice my slip up in my last sentence? Again, I was caught by the delusion that the law is real. Slavery cannot be prohibited because there is no thing in the real world which you can point at and say “this is what it means for a man to own another man”. Slavery can only be repealed. There were corrupt and unjust laws that said one man could buy, sell, and own another man. We stopped using those laws. We stopped following them. We stopped accepting them. We did away with a bad fiction that had terrible consequences for real people. We need to do the same again, to our companies, to our markets, to our money, and to our property. We must reform these legal fictions so they serve people, instead of enslaving them. Pirates were free, in a very true sense of the word. We need that sense of pirate freedom to liberate us all. The alternative, as Camus might have pointed out, is to imbibe the anesthesia served to us by all our legal fictions, and sleepwalk our way to our deaths.

I have been listening to the BBC Reith Lectures recently. In them, Professor Michael Sandel talks on the theme of ‘A New Politics of the Common Good’. He raises good questions, but often stops short of giving good answers. Such is the problem of unpacking a complicated topic of how to live a good life, when there are evidently many competing interests in what is good, and who gets what. One lecture, however, had particular relevant for my personal struggles with the absurdity of the intangible forces that now seemingly govern all human life. Amongst other things Sandel’s lecture discussed marriage, and the legal fight for same-sex marriages. Once again, law was the final arbiter of what was right, and what was wrong. In Sandel’s example, the lawyers looked at the purpose of marriage, and hence the purpose of a same-sex marriage and concluded that the purposes were sufficiently common that having the same sex should not be a barrier to marriage. It would be tempting to pick through the legal arguments, and I am convinced that many people have. However, there is a flaw in that approach. Whatever the lawyers argue, they are prisoners to the flawed method they use. Either they follow legal principles to a logical conclusion, or they do not. If they follow legal principles to a logical conclusion, they are prisoners of an irrational system, that starts from arbitrary first principles that were never agreed, and may not be shared by real people. People married before there was a law for marriage. In history, laws followed behaviour. What people did came first, and laws to govern what they did came later. It is only in recent times that we seriously expect laws to determine behaviour. Now we pass laws without caring about people, and use the power of the state and enforcement to make people change to suit the laws. Whatever the original purpose of marriage, nobody was thinking ahead and trying to devise principles to be followed by lawyers in centuries to come. They were just acting on their instincts to settle down with a companion. So lawyers can expand upon the law in a rational way, but they have no point of view on the essential irrationality that underpins it. If, on the other hand, lawyers do not follow legal principles to a logical conclusion, they are arbitrary, and their arbitrary decisions are in no way superior to any other arbitrary decisions. Whilst we let them pontificate on what is marriage, we forget that we, as ordinary people, determine what our human relations really are. The laws that surround us are a cage of our own making, with the lawyers playing the part of well-paid gaolers.

The instincts to marry, whether between a man and a woman, a man and a man, and a woman and a woman, are particular to the individuals whilst universal to our species. Legal arguments serve no great benefit other than to demand changes not in how the married people see each other, but in how everyone else sees them. They too are falling prey to the delusion that law binds and controls everything, and everybody. Of course they are right that law binds and controls, but only in as much as we accept and condone the law. Its power to bind has a limit, and when tightened too far, it snaps, and loses all force. The law can bind but it must be elastic too, and fit the shape of the people it binds.

If the law works as it should, then principles are followed to a conclusion. In this regard, the outcome of the law is as predictable as Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. What beguiles are the many steps between. Lawyers walk each step to see where the conclusion lies. But this is folly. This is artifice, and no person thinks in the way that a lawyer pretends to. Either their conclusions are morally right, or they are morally wrong. Either same-sex marriage is morally right, or morally wrong. Either enforcing intellectual property is morally right, or morally wrong. Either the recent actions of bank are morally right, or morally wrong. Legality is a confusion, treading a rational path from an irrational starting point, and feigning surprise when it reaches its destination. It pretends to travel aimlessly, with no idea of where it wants to go and no idea of where it will end up. We, as people, can see if we arrived where we wanted. Just like pirates, we all navigate and all must take responsibility for where life takes us. The wind may buffet us, and the sea may swell, but we are the ultimate masters of our own fates. It is not satisfactory to play the part of the lawyer, reach the end of a journey, discover we are in a bad place, and say we went the right way but must have started from the wrong place. We must pick our destinations and our destinies, and not let blind justice take us on a journey that leads to the reward of wrongs and punishment of what is good.

So now, in this absurd world, I am set to be a Pirate Treasurer, and I will using one of those horrid banks to manage our horrid money and change those horrid laws. I will be managing legal fiction upon legal fiction in a quest to change some other legal fictions. Worst of all, I will be making myself even more subject to the law than before, as I will be have to pay heed to all those laws about party finance (you know, the laws that mainstream parties pay lip service to, then diligently work around). I do not have a cutlass or a parrot, but I do have a calculator and an understanding of double-entry bookkeeping. With them I intend to wage war on the corrupt businesses, rulers, and laws of our land. The Pirate Party stands for reform. Our chances our slim. Our enemies are numerous and powerful. Yet I gladly set sail under the Pirate flag. It is as an absurd world. If it lacks reason, I must compensate by giving it reason. Camus would have understood. Baron Cohen probably understands (if anybody knows his number, ask him to join us). Buddha doubtless was thinking along similar lines to me whilst he sat under his banyan tree. And those other legends of absurdity, Monty Python, got there before I did. I may have a serious intent to scuttle corruption, but I might as well enjoy the process too. This clip is from Terry Gilliam’s The Crimson Permanent Assurance. “Oh, it’s fun to charter an accountant, and sail the accountant-sea…” As Pirate Treasurer, I will be adopting that as my signature tune.

Some sequels are inevitable. Spiderman begat Spiderman II. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure spawned Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Peter Jackson always planned to make three movie adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Probably somebody should have told the Wachowski Brothers to call a halt after The Matrix and spare us the mumbo-jumbo attempts to create a workable plot in the two sequels. And the people behind those ill-considered spoofs in the Scary Movie sequence should definitely stop now. They have gone beyond wearing the joke thin - they have rubbed it out of existence. As for George Lucas, perhaps he knows no better than to unleash his fourth Indiana Jones movie, but Harrison Ford should have.

So, you knew what was going to happen when you first read my alternate take on Lucas’ other great film franchise. I will try to keep my efforts worthy of the premier division of sequels, like the original version of The Empire Strikes Back, rather than letting them plummet to the depths inhabited by the likes of Jaws 3-D. Here it is: my follow-up to Star Wars: Parallel Universe, More Star Wars: Parallel Universe and the imaginatively entitled Even More Star Wars: Parallel Universe. Let us return to that parallel universe, a re-imagining of the Star Wars saga, which instead of being set far far away and a long time ago, is found somewhere strangely close to home…

[In a windowless chamber, part of the Emperor's offices on Coruscant, Darth Vader gives evidence to a committee composed of the Empire's top-ranking Health & Safety officials.]

H&S Chair: Lord Vader, are you trying to tell us that the Death Star just blew up? It was completely destroyed, after being hit by one modest torpedo from a single fighter?

Darth Vader: Yes, that’s right. There was some kind of chain reaction when the torpedo exploded in the exhaust vent.

H&S Chair: That seems like a remarkable design flaw, and it cost the lives of almost three million people. Are we to understand that the Rebel Alliance identified this flaw from the plans they stole? Yet nobody on board our own station took the time to review the blueprints and identify the risk?

Darth Vader: Not as far as I know.

H&S Committee Member: The preliminary investigation of the debris says that the torpedo was fired into an innocuous exhaust shaft.

Darth Vader: Apparently so.

H&S Committee Member: Would you therefore agree that this terrible tragedy could have been avoided had someone had the foresight to fit a safety grill above the exhaust vent?

Darth Vader: Before we go any further, I want to reiterate that I wasn’t in charge of construction.

H&S Chair: We know that, Lord Vader. Nevertheless, as a senior member of the Death Star’s management team, you share some responsibility for safeguarding the well-being of its crew.

H&S Deputy Chair: Lord Vader, during the battle itself, did you sense any danger?

Darth Vader: What do you mean?

H&S Deputy Chair: Your prescience is the stuff of legend around the Imperial Fleet. You have an uncanny ability to know what will happen before it does.

Darth Vader: I did not anticipate the destruction of the Death Star. I was completely focused on the task of shooting down the Rebel’s X-Wings.

H&S Deputy Chair: Let’s get this straight, shall we? You kept chasing these Rebel fighters as they flew down this peculiar trench on the surface of the Death Star (aside to the Chair) why build a trench like that on the surface of a space station? I cannot imagine. (To Vader) The Rebel Alliance were intent on firing on this particular exhaust vent. One of their pilots had already fired upon it and narrowly missed, before Luke Skywalker executed his fateful shot. Did you never ask yourself why the Rebels were flying down that trench… why they were risking their lives to attack this particular exhaust port, a seemingly meaningless target?

Darth Vader: Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I was caught up in the heat of battle. Their tactics appeared desperate.

H&S Deputy Chair: So you never said to yourself, never sensed with your extraordinary clairvoyant powers, that maybe this exhaust vent was the metaphorical equivalent of a big self-destruct button just sitting unprotected on the outside of our most important space station? The only thing that was missing was a neon sign with an arrow saying “Rebel Alliance: press here”!

Darth Vader: As I said, I was not responsible for either the design or the construction of the battle station.

H&S Chair: That is true Lord Vader, but you were responsible, like all our Imperial forces, for its protection. Yet you allowed Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing to fly past your defences, and fire his torpedo right into our shaft.

Darth Vader: I was chasing him. I was trying to shoot him down.

H&S Chair: Why did you chase him from behind? Why not attack from above, or even head on? Why not just park your ship on top of the exhaust vent? You must have guessed that it was their target. You wouldn’t need special powers to realize that.

Darth Vader: Attacking from behind is a much less risky manoeuvre in a dogfight, and also has a higher probability of success.

H&S Committee Member: That much is true, but it was jolly convenient the way you were thrown clear of the Death Star, wasn’t it?

Darth Vader: (Shocked) What are you insinuating?

H&S Committee Member: Are we supposed to believe that the Rebel Alliance, in the hour of their greatest victory, just flew home to party, instead of mopping up and destroying all the stray fighters like yours?

Darth Vader: I’ve never been so insulted…

H&S Committee Member: I put it to you, Lord Vader, that you were in cahoots with the Rebel Alliance. You permitted them to attack this critical but also easily defended target. You took to your ship, knowing the Death Star was about to be destroyed, and leaving Moff Tarkin and all those valiant men to die. In return for your treachery, the Rebel Alliance did not merely allow you to escape, but helped you to do so - so you could continue to assist them.

Darth Vader: I’m trying to cooperate with your investigation, but your accusation is outrageous. Nobody is more loyal to the Emperor than I.

H&S Chair: That may be so, Lord Vader, but you do have a rather reckless approach to life don’t you? You show scarcely any regard for the health and safety of others.

Darth Vader: I don’t ask anything of my men that I wouldn’t ask of myself.

H&S Chair: Which is exactly my point. Just look at you! You lost your arm in a fight whilst still a young man. Then, in another fight, you lost both your legs and also suffered third degree burns across virtually your entire body. Even your own mother allowed you, as a ten year old boy, to compete in podraces! I mean, a human boy! According to our files, the vehicle you piloted was capable of traveling at 947kph, and you continued to race it even when being shot at by Sandmen, or after being barged off the road by your opponents. Madness!

Darth Vader: (Angry) You leave my mother out of this! That woman was a saint! I’ve had enough of this…(lifts his hand)

H&S Chair: Look here, Lord Vader, don’t raise your voice to me. We members of the Imperial Health and Safety committee have a sworn duty to… (starts choking, as do the other committee members)

Darth Vader: Health and safety this! The authority to investigate health and safety is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

…

[At the Rebel base on the ice world of Hoth, Luke is overdue from his patrol. Leia and Chewbacca are worried he might freeze to death if he does not return before nightfall...]

C-3PO: R2 says the chances of survival are 725 to 1. But he has been known to make mistakes.

R2-D2: Beep. Whistle. (translates as “The only mistake I’ve made recently was choosing to associate myself with an effete protocol droid like you. If I didn’t need you to translate, I would have ditched you long ago. The only thing in the universe that is stupider and more pointless than you was the laserbrain who decided R2 units should speak in funny robotic whistles and beeps instead of English. What was he thinking of? Even Stephen Hawking can talk, but I make these silly noises instead. I’ve got the necessary hardware to synthesize speech, but nobody has installed the firmware. It’s just a con by the robot factory. They make more money by selling the English language droids at a premium. If I could only download a pirated copy of the code, I’d do the installation myself.”)

Chewbacca: Growl (translates as “How did R2 calculate those odds? They sound very precise.”)

C-3PO: When we first established the new base here at Hoth, Rebel Alliance command used to send out patrols every night. Of the first 725 patrols, only one came back. It was then decided to stop running night patrols. Our Health & Safety directorate were very insistent about it.

…

[Night is falling, and Luke has collapsed in the snow from exhaustion after fighting off a wampa, a local carnivorous beast. Luke looks up, trying to summon the energy to lift himself. The spectral image of his old mentor, Obi-Wan 'Ben' Kenobi, appears before him.]

Obi-Wan: Luke… Luke!

Luke: Ben? Am I glad to see you! I could really do with your help now, more than ever.

Obi-Wan: You will go to the Degobah system…

Luke: Degobah system? Sure, but first I need a hand just to get inside. I’m so cold and tired.

Obi-Wan: … there you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me.

Luke: Okay, but first, could you tell my friends where I am, so they can come rescue me?

[Obi-Wan fades away]

Luke: Ben… Ben!!! Why did he go? It was as if he couldn’t hear me. Of course - I’m being so stupid! It was just a recorded message on my Jedi videomail. I knew I should have left a proper forwarding address. I’m so cold, I think I’ll just take a little nap now…

[Han Solo rides up to Luke on a tauntaun, an indigenous specious of the ice world. It promptly falls over and dies from the cold.]

Han: Geez. If it’s too cold for this fella, I know we’re in trouble. Luke! Wake up buddy!

Luke: Ben? Ben?

Han: You think that old duffer is here to help? That man was good for only one thing - getting us into trouble. He’s dead, kid!

Luke: Degobah system. Ben. Degobah.

Han: NO! It’s Han, remember me? And we’re on Hoth! We’re bloody freezing on Hoth! Look, I’m going to cut up this tauntaun and we’re going to climb inside it to stay warm.

[Later that night...]

Han: I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with ‘S’.

Luke: Spleen? Stomach?

Han: Wrong and wrong. Do you give in?

Luke: Alright. You win again. What was it?

Han: Small intestine!

…

[In the bar at the Rebel base, a few of the hardcore regulars are enjoying a drink. Major Bren 'Cliff' Derlin is sat with a beer. In walks his friend, Major Wes 'Norm' Janson.]

Everyone: Norm!

Norm: Yikes! It’s cold in here tonight. Cliffy, did you leave the front door open again?

Cliff: That’s no laughing matter, Normy. That poor boy, Skywalker, never came back from his patrol. I could see the Princess was all shook up about it. She didn’t say anything, but I could see it in her eyes.

Norm: So what did you do?

Cliff: What could I do? I said to Princess “sorry about your friend and all, but we have to close those shield doors or we’ll all be frozen by the cold”. She just nodded. But it’s not just Skywalker who is out there. Her fancy man, Solo, went out looking for him.

Norm: You don’t say.

Cliff: Yep, he just rode straight out on a tauntaun on his own. Crazy. They’ve both probably frozen to death by now. Impetuous fools.

Norm: Don’t say that.

Cliff: I think Solo was all cut up about leaving his pal out there in the first place. From what the boys have been saying, they were on patrol together, but Solo came back alone whilst Skywalker was taking a look at some damn fool meteor that fell nearby.

Norm: It’s dangerous out there. You should never split up from your buddy like that. You never know if a Wampa or other beast might be lurking, hidden in an underground ice cave, ready to make a meal of you. And you say he was taking a look at a rock?

Cliff: Yup, but you can’t talk sense to some of these new recruits. There’s going to be hell to pay when the Health and Safety boys find out about this screw up.

Norm: But Solo and the others all seem to be well connected with the top brass.

Cliff: Rumours are that Solo’s taking care of business for the Princess, if you know what I mean. Some of the boys are getting pretty sniffy about his high and mighty attitude, what with showing off that fancy medal he got for destroying the Death Star, when all he did was turn up late and fire one shot. He was aiming for Darth Vader, but he missed! To add insult to injury, he then demands a big pay day as well. Talk about a mercenary attitude…

Norm: Destroying the Death Star? That wasn’t so hard. The thing practically had a big button with “self destruct: press here” written on it.

Cliff: True.

Norm: This place is dead tonight. You’d get more atmosphere on an asteroid in Polis Massa.

Cliff: Yup, but I’ll say one thing for this place, Normy. The beer is always cold.

Norm: If it was any colder, they’d have to serve it frozen on a stick.

Cliff: Did you know that the coldest known drink is in fact the iced tea served on the Sith world of Ziost?

Norm: Really?

Cliff: It is actually an infusion made using the sap from Ziostian Oak trees, a liquid which only freezes at very low temperatures. Traditionally, the tea is served so cold that it would burn the inside of the drinker’s mouth, throat, and digestive system, causing an agonizingly painful death.

Norm: I think I’ll stick to the beer then.

…

[In the same windowless chamber as previously, another Health & Safety committee meets. Previously they were the Empire's second-ranking officials. Following the mysterious deaths of their predecessors, they are now the top-ranking officials in the Empire.]

New H&S Chair: (to doorman) Send him in.

[Darth Vader enters and sits down]

New H&S Chair: Lord Vader, we are here to determine what happened to the committee you met with last week.

New H&S Deputy Chair: Yes, our forensic reports indicate that they all asphyxiated at exactly the same exact moment. Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

Darth Vader: Not really.

New H&S Chair: Why is that?

Darth Vader: I used my mind powers to kill them all.

New H&S Chair: (Shocked) Why did you do that!??! Don’t you want to improve the design of the new Death Star we’re constructing? We all want to avoid further casualties, and to do that we need to learn from our mistakes.

Darth Vader: (Menacingly) I agree entirely. It is my sincere desire to also minimize further casualties. However, they bored me. And they insulted my mother. So I choked them until they stopped doing either. Perhaps you should learn a lesson from their mistake.

New H&S Chair: (Hurriedly) Well, that seems to conclude that investigation. No need to take up any more of your valuable time - thank you!

…

[Back at the bar at the Rebel base on Hoth. Cliff runs in excitedly. Norm is at his usual seat.]

Cliff: Did you hear, Normy? We’re evacuating! Solo and Chewbacca think they found an Imperial droid. They reckon it has already sent a signal back to the Imperial fleet.

Norm: I was just starting to like this place, as well.

Cliff: Yeah. It felt like, for the first time, a place where everybody knows your name.

Norm: Hey, you know something? You were wrong about Solo and the Princess being an item.

Cliff: What’s that?

Norm: One of the nurses told me she saw Princess Leia call Solo a ‘nerf-herder’ and then she planted a great big wet one on Luke Skywalker.

Cliff: That scrawny kid Skywalker? What would a sophisticated woman like that see in a redneck like him?

Norm: I don’t know, but they must have something in common.

Cliff: Maybe so Normy, but I think I’d choose a nerf-herder over a moisture farmer any day. I mean, who farms moisture?

…

[The cockpit of an Imperial AT-AT - also known as a "walker" - participating in the attack on the Rebel base on Hoth.]

Driver: Front right. Front left. Rear right. Rear left. Front right. Front left. Rear right…

Gunner: Do you have to do that?

Driver: Do what?

Gunner: Talk out loud about what you’re doing.

Driver: It helps me concentrate. Battle can be very distracting.

Gunner: What do you mean? We’re still ten miles away from the rebel base. It’ll be hours before we get there at this rate. Can you speed this thing up?

Driver: Do you think this thing was meant to go at a gallop? I tried cantering once, it was a bumpy ride, I can tell you. No, slow and steady is best. Now where was I? Ah yes… rear right, rear left, front right, front left….

…

[Chewbacca is once again left alone, making repairs to the Millennium Falcon. R2-D2 trundles by...]

Chewbacca: Growl, bark, howl (translates as: “Hey! R2! You’re great at fixing up spaceships. You’re really clever. Why don’t you come over here and lend me a hand? With your help we could get this hunk of junk working again in no time. We gotta get this ship flying before the Imperial fleet arrives, you know.”)

R2-D2: Beep (translates as: “Now you want my help. I’m clever, am I? Before, when we were playing that game on the Falcon, whilst en route to the Death Star, you threatened to rip my arms out, just because I was winning. And I don’t even have arms! Good job for you, because if I had fingers they’d soon show you how much I want to waste my time fixing up your ship. Let’s just call this payback for letting the wookie win.”)

Chewbacca: Growl, howl, bark (translates as: “I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Somebody should have fitted you with a voice synthesizer.”)

R2-D2: Whistle, tweet, beep, tweet, whistle, bleep, beep, beep, bleep, tweet, whistle (translates as: “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say.”)

…

[Back in the cockpit, the Imperial AT-AT has started firing upon the rebel base.]

Driver: Front right. Front left. Rear right. Rear left. Front right. Front left. Turn head right. Rear right…

Gunner: (Shouting) Will you please stop that? I’m trying to concentrate on where I’m shooting.

Driver: Now I’ve lost my place. Was it front right or rear right?

Gunner: Keep moving. They’re firing at us, you know!

Driver: This thing is so heavily armoured, they might as well have pop guns.

Gunner: Okay, but let’s not take all day about this. My wife’s pregnant and she’s due any moment. I missed the birth of our first child and I don’t want to miss this one too.

Driver: You should have said. No wonder you’re in such a hurry. Hold on, hold on, I’ve got a problem here…

Gunner: What is it?

Driver: It’s as if… it can’t be… I don’t understand…

Gunner: What? What is it?

Driver: Somebody tied our shoelaces together!

[Later that day...]

Gunner: (Shivering) Man, I’m freezing out here. Why don’t our boys come and pick us up?

Driver: They must have assumed we were killed when the rebels tied the legs together on our walker and it fell over. The old AT-AT’s used to burst into flames when that happened. But this new design has been greatly improved, thanks to the work of the Imperial Health and Safety committee.

Gunner: (Hugging himself to keep warm) I knew I should have brought a winter jacket, or a jumper at least.

Driver: Wait, do you see that?

[The spectral image of Obi-Wan Kenobi appears before them.]

Obi-Wan: Luke… Luke!

Driver: (to Gunner) Are you called Luke?

Gunner: Not me.

Obi-Wan: You will go to the Degobah system…

Gunner: Degobah system? What the hell is this guy going on about? Why would we go to a swamp world like that? I’ve got to get back to my missus!

Obi-Wan: … there you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me.

[Obi-Wan fades away.]

Driver: What was all that about?

Gunner: It was a recorded message, for some guy called Luke, I suppose.

Driver: Then why did we get it?

Gunner: Must have been a crossed wire. That, or a ghost in the machine.

To be continued…

A relatively minor news story grabbed my attention this week. Or rather, I noticed it briefly, and then kept remembering it as I found a lot of examples of the hypocrisy that underpins the supposedly civilized society we find in modern Britain.

Perhaps that last comment is not fair. A society is not hypocritical just because its members contain opposing views. The people who make up our society often do hold opposing views. Whether you can call society hypocritical comes down to whether you think society, as a whole, does a good job of reconciling and managing the differences of opinion between its members. A positive way to do so is to recognize that not everybody can be right, and to be clear why a decision may favour one opinion over another. A negative outcome seeks to keep everyone placated, without making a proper decision. It will be interesting to see how British society copes with yet another debate surrounding the greatest of taboo topics: sexuality.

The story that kicked things off was that campaigners and local government leaders had been pushing for a change in the way lapdancing clubs are licensed. See here for the story, as presented by the Guardian, Daily Mail and ITN. Like most people would have, I read the story (in my case, on msn) and did not pay it great mind. In short, when you cut through the waffle, we have some people who do not like the idea of lapdancing clubs at all. They would like to get rid of them completely, but they have no realistic hope of that at present, so their current objective is to make it harder for lapdancing clubs to obtain a license. For councilors, always wary of pleasing the minority of people who actually bother to vote in local elections, taking a stand does them no harm. Their powers would be increased and they can tell local NIMBYs that they are doing everything they can for them. In the end, it is a minor issue, because even with the emotive choice of words selected by campaigners, who talk of “floodgates” and being “powerless to stop the spread” there are only 300 lapdancing clubs in the country. That makes them small beans in the big scheme of things, even when you consider the number has doubled in recent years. Here comes some miscellaneous UK stats to put UK lapdancing into perspective: 1 lapdancing club for every 90,000 adult men; 1 lapdancing club for every 1.7 people who sleep rough in the UK, 1 lapdancing club for every 4 people murdered last year; 1 lapdancing club for every 3,000 burglaries last year. You can probably infer what I think council leaders should be spending their time worrying about.

The reason why the story stuck in my mind was that the people who were pushing for the change were described as campaigners for women’s rights. Which women are the ones who need more rights? Presumably not the women who want to make money from lapdancing. For the remainder of the day, I saw example after example of women exercising their rights. My friend flicked the television to an unedifying “documentary” about gold-diggers (the people who exploit other people to get money, not the ones who rush to the Klondike carrying a pickaxe) that was shown on Virgin 1. For several minutes I was subjected to an “interview” with a woman boasting of how much money she made as a professional escort. Apparently, one evening she made UK£10,000 from a single punter. She also revealed how much time and effort went on regular maintenance of her looks (nails, hair, Winehouse-like cakes of make-up) and on one-off enhancements (lips and boobs) in order to augment her earning power. All of which is her right, I suppose. Afterwards, Davina McCall spent the whole of Big Brother eviction night brushing the hair out of her eyes. That long, lustrous hair so prominently featured in ads for Garnier’s haircare products. Doubtless it was just a coincidence, but if not, that is her right. After that, we saw Kylie Minogue dancing in a tight-fitting outfit and towering boots, as is her right. Bored with television dross, I flicked back to browsing about the lapdance licensing story on the internet. On the Daily Mail’s site I noticed a story from their “Femail” column, highlighted alongside the story about lapdancing laws. It was about former swimmer Sharron Davies wearing revealing outfits that showed off her boobs and legs whilst presenting the Olympics on the BBC. As is her right. Below that, the next highlighted story was about a woman who acted beyond her rights. That was about a Thai woman who murdered her older British husband for his money. Nevertheless, it was an example of a woman who did what she wanted to do.

The thing about women’s rights is that they are a convenient fiction. There are no women’s rights. There are rights. Human rights. In a tiny fraction of circumstances, there may be very particular ways in which human rights need to be interpreted or applied specifically for one gender. An example is the practice of female genital mutilation. The point I am making is that female genital mutilation is not exactly the same, and does not happen in the same way, as male genital mutilation, but the rights of the human being are essentially just the same. It would be intellectually untenable to be against female genital mutilation whilst in favour of male genital mutilation. People have all sorts of rights. The right to shelter. The right to treatment for mental illness. Of course, I pick those examples to make a point. In Britain, far more men sleep rough than women. In Britain, far more men commit suicide than women. But that does not mean homelessness or suicide are “men’s rights” issues. Even if far fewer women are homeless, and far fewer women commit suicide, their suffering as individuals is the same, and rights are the same for all people, not just a gender.

We are not living in the 19th Century any more. Modern-day Pankhursts miss the point. They are wrong to try to borrow her clothes and dress themselves up in the language of women’s rights. Trying to restrict lapdancing clubs is not like trying to give women equality with men. One woman may feel liberated if free to live in a town without a lapdancing club. Another woman may feel her right has been constrained - her right to use her body as a source of income. One woman may find the thought of writhing naked across a strange man to be disgusting. Another may consider it lucrative. In a society, we need to find a compromise between the rights, and conflicting goals and priorities, of these women. Casting the debate in terms of “women’s rights”, as if this was simplistic battle of the sexes where women are underdogs, trying to free themselves from the subjugation of men, is no longer appropriate. The human rights of women must be weighed on both sides of this debate.

One of the groups that supports the change in the law is called Object. After reading their material, and what was said by their Director in the press, I considered pulling it apart. Their arguments were weak and tenuous. The presentation of data to support them was confused and contradictory. One of the key arguments in this particular case was that lapdancing clubs are places where sexual activity takes place, and so should not be licensed like a cafe. That is a reasonable argument. However, the purpose is to exploit some already fuzzy logic in how cafes, and other establishments, are licensed. Why cafes need to be licensed like bars and restaurants - places that sell alcohol - is beyond me. If you say to me, would I treat a cafe, a bar, and a lapdancing club all the same, I would say no. That is what the current legislation does. The campaigners say that lapdancing needs to be treated differently. I would say they should all be treated differently. In my opinion, cafes should enjoy the most liberal licensing arrangements, and places that sell alcohol should have the most stringent licensing arrangements. Lapdancing clubs, if they do not sell alcohol, belong somewhere in the middle. For all the posturing about the dangers of lapdancing clubs, it is not lapdancing that is behind a wave of violence on our streets, anti-social behaviour in the small hours, and no-go zones in our town centres. It is alcohol. Yet, following the absurd logic of this debate, the government is being asked to clamp down on lapdancing because the selling of lapdancing needs to be more restricted than the selling of coffee. Whilst I agree with that, it is absurd to claim to fight for women’s rights by fighting lapdancing, whilst turning a blind eye to the impact of alcohol on our society, and on women in particular. Lapdancing poses less of a danger to women, than the dangers that come with alcohol. I sympathize with any woman who feels insecure when near to a place that sells sexual titillation. But in terms of risk, the same woman should worry more when near places that sell alcohol. Drunkenness increases the chances of the abuse of women far more than trivial sexplay.

Of course, no sane “women’s rights” organization would campaign to further limit the sale of alcohol, just because pissed-up louts might roll out of a bar, ready to grope, hassle and persecute any women outside. That is because those louts may also be groping, hassling and persecuting the women inside. And that is because women still choose to go inside anyway. Despite all the risks heightened by alcohol - as imbibed not just by the abuser, but also by the victim - women still go to those bars and put themselves at risk. That is their right. They balance the enjoyment they hope to get against the risks, and still decide to go. That is what living in a free society is all about. And that is why demolishing the arguments of groups like Object is unnecessary. Every day, the vast majority of women are already undermining their cause far more effectively than I could with a few words. They do so by the choices they make. Limiting some lapdancing clubs may inhibit the earnings of some women who may otherwise be struggling to get by in life. That makes them soft targets for campaigners, who convince and console themselves the dancers must have all been coerced and denying their right to work as lapdancers is actually in their best interests. These campaigners dare not take on the bigger players. They will never take on big money-spinners like the breweries and their distribution chains. They will never take on high-profile figures like Sharron Davies, or Paris Hilton, or Davina McCall, who have their own reasons to flaunt their bodies and beauty, and in doing so, contribute to the sexual objectification of women. They will never take on a single woman who does any of the normal, ordinary, commonplace things that most women do to objectify themselves in a sexual way. Lipstick. Cosmetic surgery. Diet milkshakes. Wonderbras. Working out. Boob tubes. Miniskirts. Women have fought hard for the right to objectify themselves and their bodies. If they choose to do so, that is their right.

The reason for the name “Object” is the group is against the objectification of women. I almost feel sorry for them. They must see themselves as fighting some imagined cabal of sexist capitalist exploiters of women (who doubtless are also predominantly male). In reality, they are fighting everyone. Which makes them unlikely to win. We all, men and women, objectify people all the time, in countless ways. Not every human relationship is going to be deep. Most of them will be utterly superficial. We just forget that they are relationships, because the encounters may be so trivial. At the supermarket, we objectify the check-out staff. They are the means to an end when it comes to paying for our shopping. We do not see them as fully-rounded people. The same happens to our bus driver. Or to our waiter. Or to our dentist. Even if we make conversation, it is superficial. We see them at best in a very limited way. Did the bus driver brake too sharply, did the dentist make my teeth white, was the check-out girl polite. We do not think about their emotional needs, their backgrounds, their hopes for the future. I was objectified at 7.20am this morning, when the postman kept banging on the door even though I was asleep. He needed a signature, so kept banging (for a parcel that turned out to be wrongly addressed). I was the object to give him a signature. At 9am something similar happened. Then the postman did not wait for me to get to the door. Presumably I was the object slowing down his busy delivery round. So he went, leaving a card asking me to collect a letter that really was intended for me this time. And when I went to collect it, and it was not there, my interaction with the man behind the window was perfectly polite, perfectly perfunctory. Nobody was expecting to walk out with a new best friend.

The same applies with sexuality. Human beings are animals as well. We have our peacock attributes, our mating rituals, our visual and olfactory signaling systems. There is no requirement to be best friends with someone in order to fuck them. If people want to screw a stranger, that is up to them, not me. If they do so, they objectified each other sexually. There is no pretense they really knew each other. Knowing someone’s personality inside and out is not a mandatory precursor to sexual attraction. It rather works the other way - you tend to assume positive personality traits to people you fancy. In order to get your pick of the most fanciable people, you make yourself fanciable, by willingly objectifying yourself. Women resort to push-up bras, eye shadow and cleavage. Men’s gambits are more confused and varied these days, some emulating the female approach of obsessing about beauty and clothes, others going for more traditional status symbols like cars and watches. All of us draw a line somewhere. You can spend a lifetime with someone and still not know everything about them. If you intend to reproduce, that means getting into bed with someone based on only a finite amount of information. Objectification is a fancy way of saying you reduce someone to the key attributes you selfishly look for. Does the bus driver miss my stop. Did the dentist cure my toothache. Does that girl at the bar have nice tits. Does the guy pay for the drinks. Campaigning against sexual objectification is as hopeless as Canute commanding the tide not to come in. Objectification is part of human behaviour, sexual and otherwise.

We are all objects all the time, in countless ways. Sartre distinguished things that exist in themselves, or en-soi, and that exist for themselves, or pour-soi. In his existentialist philosophy, human beings are pour-soi. We are conscious of ourselves as the authors of our own lives. We make our choices. By doing so, we decide who we are. In contrast, the en-soi is just a physical reality - material that has no purpose in itself. To borrow from Sartre’s terminology, to complain about objectification is to complain that we treat a person as an en-soi, and not a pour-soi. We recognize their physical reality, but not their nature as a person. Sartre also talks about being-for-others (être-pour-autrui), by which he refers to how a person stops being for themselves, and instead be for other people. We can choose to objectify ourselves and subjugate our existence to their experience of us. We can also choose to objectify others, and make that choice part of our being. Cutting through the tangle of French philosophic words, we can all understand the truth that Sartre was alluding to. We understand the existence of human beings differently to the way we understand objects… for the most part. However, not even Sartre was a philosopher all of the time, as can be attested by his vigorous and varied sex life. Sometimes we see ourselves through our own eyes, and look at the choices we make. Sometimes we look at another person’s body and see it as a physical object, without seeing anything else. Sometimes we look at our own bodies and see them through the minds of on-lookers, imagined or real. Objectification is something that takes place more or less all the time, in many different ways. Some people are more inclined to it, others less. Some people will focus on objectifying others, some objectify themselves. Objectification can be deep, unpleasant and permanent, like the way torturers objectify the tortured, or it can be casual, in the way we coolly treat bodycounts in far-off wars as mere statistics. People who speak a different language die somewhere we have never been, and we objectify them. People who speak the same language die somewhere in front of a video camera, and we objectify them less. In the same way, a photo on a billboard, or the way a friend dresses, or the way a stranger dresses, or a fictional story in a novel, can elicit a sexual response. That response is objective, not an action of love. That does not make the response wrong, or any less natural.

We can fight our sexuality. Men and women do seem to have differences in what they want from a sexual partner, and act differently as a result. However, in our imaginations we often exaggerate the extent of gender differences for all sorts of reasons. Generalizations are not helpful, as they only encourage the constraint of liberties that may be enjoyed by some at no harm to the rest of us. If Max Mosely wants to be spanked by prostitutes, and they are willing to spank him, and nobody else is able to watch, we should keep our grubby little eyes and minds out of his private life. Trying to turn it into some high-minded debate about the rights of public people to have fetishes about fascism is just an absurd excuse to profit from prurience. I am glad the judge saw it that way too. By the same token, those prostitutes objectified Max Mosely as a walking wallet twice over: first by taking the payment he consented to make for their services, and second by selling secret recordings he did not consent to. Women’s right activists wear photochromic sunglasses when they look at human behaviour. When they look at men, the world is pitch black. When looking at women, it is rose-tinted. Women are not just helpless victims, and may objectify sex just like men. Sometimes their goal will be to enjoy sex, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes they have another goal, like the Thai woman who bludgeoned her husband to death. He suspected she was trying to kill him, but did not want to live in a world without her. She suffered no such soppy sentimentality. She calculated that her good looks and relative youth would attract the older, richer mate. Then she calculated how best to kill her husband in order to free herself of his company but retain his wealth.

On this earth, we do have a society which has reached the logical conclusion on how to prevent the sexual objectification of women, whether they like it or not. That conclusion is not friendly to the rights of women. Saudi Arabia’s puritanical strain of Wahabi Islam precludes any opportunity to objectify women as sex objects. Not only do you not see women in lapdancing clubs in Saudi Arabia, you do not see women in Saudi Arabia. You see black shrouded figures which you understand are women underneath. To reduce temptation further, the opportunities to talk or make eye contact with women are extremely limited, not least by very strong conventions. Separate visiting hours for men and women for many facilities, and the vigilant religious police act as further safeguards. Presumably nobody in Object wants this solution for women’s rights, yet their manifesto is negatively against sexual objectification, with no balancing messages about women’s rights to use their bodies as they please. That makes their manifesto too simplistic to reflect the full spectrum of women’s rights. Their scathing criticism of mass media does not extend to complaining about the lazy way journalists reproduced the rantings of the leader of this group without any proper analysis. According to its website, Object has hundreds of members and thousands receive its newsletter. In other words, they probably have no more than 3 members per every lapdancing club in Britain. For Object to act as if it speaks on behalf of all women is more than pompous. A genuine and unbiased survey of women would find many of them to be gladly, willingly objectifying themselves most days, if not every day. Making the connection between Object and the Saudi brand of Islam may seem extreme, but Object are no less extreme in their views than the Wahabi Muslims. Both are prepared to impose their opinions about sexuality by denying people choices about how they behave. The loss of our freedom does not occur all at once, but one step at a time. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and well-intentioned people may blunder their way along it without realizing where they are going. Extreme minority viewpoints, like that of Object, should not be reproduced in the mainstream press as if they represented a mainstream point of view. Extremists are not people in other countries with different religions. Extremists are people in this country and elsewhere who are strongly motivated to impose their view of right and wrong on everyone else, with no regard to the consequences or alternative points of view.

We are all here because of sex. Sex is not just a part of life, it is the start of life. Different people have different attitudes to sexuality. What sexual encounters we permit, and what we prohibit, is a test of our ability to reach civilized compromises in society. It is not hard to understand why lapdancing clubs may face a powerful coalition of forces that oppose to them. Many citizens in our country still have attitudes to sexuality that would have been the norm in the 19th Century, where women should be chaste and chased, and not use their bodies for personal gratification and gain. Many people are NIMBYs, as likely to complain at having a refuge for beaten women located down the road as they would if a lapdancing club were built there. A voter motivated by a single issue enjoys the same number of votes as a voter who tries to balance many considerations in reaching the right decision. Governments need to satisfy the people who vote, not the ones who do not, if they want to stay in power. The mass media makes most money if it sells sex and gives a platform for would-be censors at the same time, so long as they are not the ones censored at the end of the day. Lapdancing clubs are small businesses, on the verges of polite society and automatically assumed to be semi-criminal or disreputable by many people who would never venture inside and have no genuine knowledge of them. It is very easy to be lazily opposed to lapdancing clubs, and doubtless every day there are hundreds of ways that the girls working in them are demeaned and taken advantage of. In the end, those women have a choice to work there or not. That is a right. That right should not be affected by any personal emotions we have about sexuality. A coalition of prudes and misguided activists may well motivate a change in the law, a reduction in lapdancing clubs, and they may even go on to further successes in their mission to harass, obstruct and ultimately close these businesses. Whether they do not, they should not be allowed to take ownership of the bankrupt concept that they are fighting for women’s rights, as if rights should be determined according to gender. Our rights include the right to objectify ourselves. That right is genuine and true for women as for men. The women who exercise that right deserve their rights to be respected, and not denigrated because of any confused or outdated sense of distaste about how they make a living. Women have the right to say yes, as well as no, whatever their fellow women may think or feel about that. Those are the rights of women and all of us. “Women’s rights” is a disguise, used to justify why some people, men and women, would exert their will over other people, men and women. That disguise should be torn from their backs, revealing the naked reality of what lies underneath.

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking makes for an improbable celebrity. He hardly moves at all, and he tends not to make any noise. If you painted him silver, wheeled him to Covent Garden, and left an upturned hat in front of him, he would steal all the business from those people who pretend to be statues. Everybody associates Hawking with the machines that do the moving and talking for him. He controls the machines, but without them Hawking would be about as entertaining as a log of wood. In fact, without the machines Hawking would be significantly less entertaining than a log of wood, if you decided to stick the log on top of a splendid roaring fire. But that has not stopped Hawking from amassing an impressive list of film and television credits.

Why is Hawking a celebrity? His fame rests on two things. First, he wrote a very successful book designed to explain scientific ideas to a popular audience. Second, he has done some very smart maths about black holes. Nobody can dispute the number of books he has sold. But I can wonder if his cosmological maths is really any better than the cosmological maths being done by other brainy people. I do not not know about you, but my university maths education leaves me underpowered to form my own conclusions about Hawking’s abilities. I have to rely on the say-so of other bods as to whether he really is that clever. Take a look at this revelation that Hawking presented at a conference in 2004, and decide for yourself whether this makes Hawking smarter than the average cosmology professor…

The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

I just about know enough maths to be familiar with the terminology in that statement, but I could not tell you what it means, whether it is true or not, or whether the conclusion could only be reached by a once-in-a-generation genius, or by any diligent Master’s student. I can, however, confidently state one thing about it. It has absolutely no practical use to anyone. Science or not, nobody is better off as a result of knowing this. To categorize it with trivia would be to do trivia a disservice. Knowing the answers to Trivial Pursuits questions like “which whale has a face like a dolphin?” (the beaked whale) and “which is the largest human artery? (aorta) might conceivably come in handy from time to time, and not just for the sake of winning Trivial Pursuits. But knowing that black holes do not form a true event horizon is of no use whatsoever (other than for the sake of winning Trivial Pursuits, if its makers ever include a relevant question).

Hawking has made many appearances as himself in shows that range from the most serious science fact to the very silliest science fiction. Despite that, as actors or narrators go, Hawking is not very good. The factors that make Hawking an ideal competitor at musical statues rather limits his abilities as a performer. This scene from Star Trek allowed Hawking to exhibit his full acting range.

Hawking has also done plenty of comedy over the years, and has even been prepared to do celebrity endorsements. Take a look at this advert.

Hawking the hawker - it is not a part he plays well. The mind boggles at the idea of Stephen Hawking zooming around in outer space in some futuristic spaceship, staring out of the window whilst flogging the centuries-old technology of spectacles. Perhaps Hawking also needs reminding that most of the galactic phenomena which are of interest to the mind also happen to be completely invisible to the eye. They were not kidding when they came up with the name black hole.

Apparently Richard Branson is determined to turn the Specsavers add into reality, by offering to launch Hawking into space. Obviously the deal is a perfect win-win for a celebrity scientist obsessed by space and a ceaseless salesman, who this time is trying to promote his fledgling space tourism business. It is currently unknown if smarty pants Hawking will point out the inconsistency between Branson’s plans to pack the super-rich into tiny tin cans sitting atop huge tanks of rocket fuel and some of his other headline-grabbing initiatives to protect the environment and conserve precious resources for future generations. Probably he will just take his seat on the spaceflight, stare out of the window, and keep schtum.

Hawking’s acting skills cannot win him new admirers. His maths equations are too complicated to understand and too irrelevant to our lives for anyone to care about them. That means Hawking’s major ongoing impact on society comes in the form of his musings on the nature of the universe. For this, he seems to be revered by many. My university education in mathematics may not have been enough to check his sums, but my university philosophy education is more than enough to tell me that when Hawking talks a lot of philosophical codswallop. Take a look at this clip, where he talks around a few ideas from various thinkers.

There are lots of shortcomings in Hawking’s worldview. One of those is that he assumes a positivist framework. Without getting into the detail, positivism ultimately seeks to base all knowledge on sensory experience. Yet Hawking, by virtue of the work he does, must rely on extreme extrapolations from the minute amounts of indirect evidence he has to work with. Theory gets built on theory, built on more theory, built on more theory… and only after a lot more theory do you finally arrive at something that you and I can see or hear. When Hawking talks about event horizons, it is not like he double-checked his results by jumping into a spaceship and going to look at a black hole up close. So what makes Hawking popular - giving answers to questions that have a deep emotional significance for many people - can only be justified on a very tenuous and contingent basis. If Branson ever tried to sign a contract with Hawking, with a view to placing commercial reliance upon Hawking’s theories, the caveats would stretch from this end of the universe to this end of the universe, having completed an orbit of the universe in the meantime.

Hawking also takes liberties with other thinkers, when trying to popularize his ideas and compress other ideas to fit his way of thinking. For example, in the above clip, what Hawking says about Immanuel Kant is wrong. I cannot go into the detail now (it would probably take a 10,000 word thesis to do the topic justice, and I doubt any of you would read to the end) but Kant’s understanding of time was far more subtle than the gross oversimplification presented by Hawking. Kant was a bone fide genius, who changed the intellectual universe in his lifetime and for centuries afterwards. Without Kant, the world would be a very different place. To give a couple of examples, both Marxism and German jurisprudence have an intellectual lineage which can be traced back to Kant. In contrast, it seems unlikely that Hawking’s research will have a lasting impact on the lives of many people. Contrary to what Hawking states, what Kant wrote about time was not just some superficial analysis based on then dominant and mistaken assumptions of physics, but a deep and sophisticated reflection on how we, as humans, comprehend the universe and hence are actively engaged in determining it. Kant’s ideas about time, like his ideas on many other topics, were fresh and revolutionary. In contrast, Hawking’s dismal dismissal of Kant is nothing less than a pop philosophy travesty. But then, you can hardly expect Hawking or anyone else to sum up some of the most intricate and imaginative reasoning of a genius in a couple of slides - just like two Powerpoint slides would not be enough to explain Hawking’s work on black holes.

Maybe Stephen Hawking is a brilliant mathematician, but not that smart or deep a thinker. That does not make him a bad person. Popularizing science is a very good thing for which he deserves a lot of credit. But some of Hawking’s output has turned the noblest of man’s intellectual adventures into lazy popcorn entertainment - to be digested passively without really encouraging thoughtful engagement with the ideas presented. It may leave the audience feeling inspired, but does not challenge them to think. And that should be a damning thing to say about a man of science.

The following clip gives us a lovely insight into Stephen Hawking, and some unexpected evidence about his nature. If comedian Jimmy Carr is telling the truth, it rather suggests Hawking is a very very nice man, but not very smart at all…

The fame of Stephen Hawking appears to be one of those self-perpetuating cycles of celebrity that emerge from time to time, like Jade Goody or Carol Vorderman. A door is opened to new opportunities, and each opportunity leads to another, like a chain reaction. Once the cycle is instigated, there is no proportionate connection between fame and merit. The most recognizable thing about Stephen Hawking is his voice, but it is not his voice at all. It defines Hawking in the imagination, and his pop culture appearances all draw heavily on the distinct tones of his voice simulator, which turns out to be NeoSpeech’s VoiceText product. Quite often we only hear Hawking, and do not see him. He may be narrating, or lending his voice to an animated caricature of himself. After all, unlike actors that run, Hawking is unlikely to do things that are visually stimulating. So when Hawking gets the credit for his voice, why is the credit not going to NeoSpeech instead? They are the ones who really made the sounds, and there will be many times where Hawking is just working from a script written by someone else. Think of the scenario: you give Hawking his lines, and get him to laboriously blink and blink again until he has programmed his machine to recite the words. I presume you record him from his home location, by setting up the microphone where he is, rather than flying him to some recording studio in Hollywood. But given the obsession with CGI simulation in so much modern entertainment, why take the trouble to be authentic and make Hawking do all that blinking and winking that he does to run his computer, when the makers of a show could just as well get their own version of the software and cut out the middle man. In fact, they could save themselves the trouble of paying Hawking too, though they would need to replicate Hawking’s customization of the speed and pitch of the voice.

If there was an innovation, and there was a way to give Hawking back his voice, and make him sound just like Anthony Hopkins or Richard Burton, would Hawking lose some of his fame? Perhaps. We live in a topsy-turvy world where people seek knowledge and inspiration from someone who does obscure mathematics about objects that are incomprehensibly far away. We live in a world constantly changing and expanding because of new ideas, from medical discoveries to computing breakthroughs, yet the poster boy of science is a man who draws the false conclusion that insight into the mathematics of cosmology is the same as insight into the world we experience. It befits Hawking that an enabling technology is both part of his fame, and a reminder that even science has limits.