Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 275

The Mighty Professor Coyne Launches Another Thunderbolt Against Heresy

Yesterday, I gently mocked the sort of person who scans the globe for somebody, anybody,  with whom he can pick an angry fight. Unable to find anyone who actually dares to say he is wrong, he lights on someone who says pacifically that he may be right, but then, again, just possibly, he may not be.  “That’s not good enough!” he roars, and so, across thousands of miles of vulture-haunted desert, lonesome mountains and tossing ocean, he despatches a furious denunciation, while all his disciples gather round the hem of his robe  and squeak ‘Yeah! Way to go, Jerry!’  and ‘Let the Stupid Heretic Have It!’.

 

Well, unable to identify himself as the target of this mild and good-humoured teasing, Professor Jerry Coyne, bless him,  has refuelled his heresy hunt and blasted me with a tremendous atheistical thunderbolt, if there can be such a thing. 

 

You can read it here (along with the touchingly sycophantic comments of the Professor’s worshippers, choirboys, acolytes, bell-tinklers and incense-swingers),   http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/peter-hitchens-responds-to-me-about-evolution-or-rather-doesnt-respond/

 

I imagine that some of the heresy-hunters who come here to denounce me will find this company congenial too, and am happy to introduce them to a club where they will be more than welcome.

 

I have , as I said yesterday, metaphorically crossed the street to avoid the Professor.  If he now crosses the street and follows me, I shall cross back to the other side, even if means I have to zig-zag metaphorically all the way home. As I am such an intellectual pygmy, he really shouldn’t worry so much about what I think. I wonder why he does.

 

I would point out that the title of the article ‘Peter Hitchens tries (and fails) to respond to me about evolution’ is a touch misleading. I have not tried, and will not try, to respond to the Professor, for the reasons many times stated. Not having tried, I can hardly be said to have failed. Professor Coyne shouldn't be too thrilled when I say that I suspect nobody ever wins any arguments against him.   

 

Professor Dawkins and Aliens

One or two readers noticed that I asked Professor Richard Dawkins(on Twitter) where he stood on the subject of aliens. This is why I asked.

I am told ( and my source is here ) http://darwinianfundamentalism.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/transcript-of-interview-of-richard.html

that the Professor said the following : ‘Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.’

 

And then:

 

‘And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.’

 

You can watch him say it. The key passage comes about two minutes 50 seconds into this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc (sorry about the sinister music).

 

(Note that Professor Dawkins, in a passage around five minutes into the interview (during a rejection of belief in the existence of any deity) says the existence of the Biblical God would be a ‘very unpleasant prospect’ which seems to me to introduce the question of desire and wish into the question of belief, where I think it is always to be found)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apologies accepted. Trespasses forgiven

I am pleased to say that both the people who wrote unpleasant items on Twitter about me last Saturday have got in touch and apologised fully and properly for their actions. I have forgiven them and will not take the matter further.

 

**A small note about forgiveness, since one contributor quoted the injunction in the Lord's Prayer to 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us'. He appeared to be suggesting that I should let the matter drop without any apology.

 

Well, I would never ask or expect to be forgiven by God or man for any action for which I was not sorry. I believe forgiveness, in every age except the current one, plainly and absolutely implies a desire to be forgiven on the part of the offender. It may be a free gift, but it must be sought.  And I am puzzled that the idea has grown up that one should forgive those who have no wish to be forgiven, and who continue to behave as they did before.

 

The scriptures seem quite clear on this:

'When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, that he hath committed, and doth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me'(Ezekiel, 18. 27)

'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselcves ,and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness' (1st Epistle of John, 1 ,8-9)

And of course, from the great parable of the Prodigal Son (I believe modern Bibles give it some other, banal, name, perhaps 'The Son with the Maxed-Out Credit Card' ):

'I will arise, and go to my Father and will say unto him 'Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son'. (Luke, 15, 18-19)

 

These, by the way, are all taken from the sentences to be read at the beginning of the Church of England's service of Morning Prayer, from the 1662 Prayer Book, which begins with a General Confession in which the worshipper has to say several pretty rude things about himself out loud.  They remind me of my remark that Atheists, unlike Christian believers, tend to be the ones with a high opinion of their own virtue. It's such a pity that so few people know, these days, what is supposed to go on in church (and that if they pluck up the courage to enter one, they find that the services have been stripped of both force and poetry).

 

 

Peace, Perfect Peace? Is the UK Peace Index right?

We have already discussed here the way in which crime *figures* may not accurately reflect the prevalence of *crime*. See here for a detailed analysis. http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/should-we-trust-official-crime-figures.html

 

I’d add to this the fact that a huge amount of acquisitive crime is now done through abuse of credit and debit cards, is never prosecuted or listed as crime, and of course involves no violence.

 

Then there is shoplifting, which has now more or less been reclassified into a civil tort, or indeed a tolerated risk of the modern form of retailing.

 

So you may guess that my response to the ‘UK Peace Index’ given great prominence by the BBC’s Mark Easton on Wednesday morning, was a little cautious. This was said to show that this country is undergoing a great period of crime reduction. Violence is said to be down (which, as my readers will know, means that recorded violence is down, a rather different thing).  But homicides are also said to be down. Now, surely that’s a hard figure, It must mean what it says. Well, up to a point.  These figures included Northern Ireland (generally such figures are only for England and Wales) where the British government’s surrender to terrorism has undoubtedly led to a reduction in homicides.

 

And , as the official publication on Homicide figures (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116483/hosb0212.pdf

 recently pointed out (p.15) :’ Caution is needed when looking at longer-term homicide trend figures, primarily because they are based on the year in which offences are recorded by the police rather than the year in which the incidents took place. For example, the 172 homicides attributed to Dr Harold Shipman as a result of Dame Janet Smith‟s inquiry took place over a long period of time but were all recorded by the police during 2002/03. Also, where several people are killed by the same principal suspect, the number of homicides counted is the total number of persons killed rather than the number of incidents. For example, the victims of the Cumbrian shootings on 2 June 2010 are counted as 12 homicides rather than one incident in the 2010/11 data.

Homicides increased steadily up to the early 2000s (the peak in 2002/03 includes the 172 homicides committed by Dr Harold Shipman).’

 

I was interested to see that its publication came a few hours before a report in the London Evening Standard that ‘ a schoolboy was fighting for his life today after being stabbed on a bus in an apparent ambush between warring pupils’ . The incident, on Tuesday was close to Highbury Grove School in Islington. The London Air Ambulance took the wounded boy to hospital. Let us pray fervently that he survives and recovers, and give thanks for the speed, skill, courage and strength of his rescuers. But of course if so, this horrible incident will not feature in the tally of homicides.

 

Nor, let us pray just as fervently, will the two teenagers stabbed in Tottenham, North London,  on Sunday morning around 2.00 a.m., one of whom was said on Monday to be seriously ill in hospital. I know of these because the Standard is, as it were, one of my local papers (the others are the Oxford Mail and Times) which bother to report such things , though national papers tend not to mention many of them.

For instance, on 22nd September 2012 I recorded ‘Last week, in my beautiful, civilised home town, Oxford, two men were jailed for attacking Kirk Smith in his home, in a petty, moronic robbery – of £20 and two phones. Abdul Adan, 21, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years (in reality he will serve half that) for stabbing Mr Smith four times, after first smashing his nose. Mr Smith’s wounds were appalling. They ‘bared his intestines’, as the court report puts it. Adan’s accomplice, Michael Edwards, 25, got three-and-a-half years, which of course he will not serve in full. Did these assailants care whether they killed him? Did they, in fact, fear the law at all? How many such crimes have been and will be committed in our supposedly civilised, liberal country this year? More than you think.’

 

Now, this is a very rapid response to the so-called UK Peace Index,  not least because I personally find it much harder to study computerised crime figures than I used to find it to study them in the government books in which they were more clearly and accessibly set out.

 

And I hope in time to return to this in more detail. But as well as the above, I would point out a few things that struck me quite forcefully in the report( http://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/UK-Peace-Index-2013-IEP-Report.pdf ) apart, that is, from its general social-democratic assumption that crime and disorder are the consequences of deprivation rather than of unrestrained evil, its reliance upon official figures, and on subjective surveys, and its anxiety to make supposedly comforting comparisons between peaceful Britain and the violent USA .

 

One is that its graphs of historical crime figures 1911-2012 (page 19) almost all show very steep upward climbs (they can hardly be called curves) until the introduction of ‘new crime recording procedures’, whereupon they all begin to show equally steep drops (the exception to this is burglary, which allegedly began to fall steeply before the introduction of the new methods, but my readers will be able to work that one out, too).  Another is to be found on pages 22 and 25, where a very interesting fact is shown. Referring to the Health Department’s figures for admissions on violent assaults, the report notes (p.22) that ‘Over the last four years the number of admissions has remained flat while police reported number of violent crimes has been decreasing’.  Well, what would you make of that, officer? A Health Service official (I am interested to see) notes that ‘"Our figures represent the more serious injuries inflicted by assault that require the patient to be admitted to hospital. They do not include those victims who are treated in A&E and not admitted." (this is to be found here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/article/2095/Hospital-admissions-for-common-forms-of-assault-fall-in-England )

Chart 23 on page 24 of the Peace report shows a similar startling mismatch between trends in these two sets of figures. There isa  slight fall in hospital admissions in recent years, but nothing like as sharp as the fall in the police records of violence. I feel the need to know more. It is also true that the report, optimistic as it is, does at least discuss (page 24) the possibility that some crimes may not be recorded. I had no hint of this from the BBC report I listened to on Radio 4 this morning.

 

But what really gets me is the astonishing shift in those graphs. Now, with a few breaks, I have lived in the same place for almost 50 years. I have read the local newspapers, talked to my neighbours,  been a generally aware person. And I would say that during that period there has been a slow but observable deterioration in behaviour – more drunkenness, more vandalism, more violence, more drug taking, more graffiti more aggression. This has been accompanied by a near-total disappearance of effective police patrolling and a large increase in official toleration of what would once have been considered unacceptable public behaviour. This has not happened in great leaps or bounds, but bit by bit, a bit worse one year, perhaps reined in the next, possibly affected by weather or chance to some extent.

 

Nothing substantial changed at the point (in the mid-1990s) at which the report’s graphs all show an almost melodramatic shift in the direction of the figures. For up, read down. Nothing except the arrival in office of the most unscrupulous and dishonest government in living memory, which so far as I can see is still in office.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's all Gone a Bit Platt

A brief response here to Mr Platt’s second indictment

As evidence of my supposedly ‘overbearing ’tone (also, as I recall, self-righteous and high-handed) Mr Platt proffers the following.

‘Delving into his (my) blog at random I find this from 6th February 2:48pm under “Stalingrad Revisited”: “Mr L’Eplattenier sets himself up as an intelligent contributor, and he can obviously write clear, literate English. Can he read it?” Or this from 11 July 2012 under “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”: “Welcome once again to the Peter Hitchens remedial school for people who don’t know how to argue. Your homework has been marked.” Well thank you, teacher! Further insight into how he views his readership may be gleaned from this, posted on 27 October 2010 under “The Great Depression”: “Only grown-ups, genuinely capable of changing their minds, are unafraid of the truth and willing to go where it leads them. They alone can argue properly. And there are very few of them, as we see here all the time.” Again he is the grown-up, lecturing naughty children. From the same post: “…anybody who thinks there is, is displaying not the lofty knowledge implied by Mr Smith's dismissive attitude, but a profound ignorance of scientific method.”’

 

PH : Is that it? I see nothing even slightly wrong in any of these moments and look back on them with undimmed pleasure.  Anybody who comes here to argue with me presumably doesn’t do so because he admires my emollient, empathetic style.  Such jibes are perfectly normal in the sort of debate I do all the time, and don’t in any way compare to the sort of thing I get from my critics, including declarations that I am stupid (unsupported by evidence because the writer feels no need to provide any, it being so evident to the writer) suggestions that I, rather than my late brother, should have died and ( as we have recently seen ) suggestions that I should be stabbed in the larynx by a fellow-passenger on a train.  Nor do they compare to the oafish, semi-literate and wholly unresponsive tripe which recently arrived here by the lorry-load, in reply to my latest posting on cannabis.

 

In fact, they don’t even fall into the same category. I am, as it happens,  a grown-up. Not only am I 61 years old. I have 36 years of experience as a specialist writer on national newspapers, not to mention five years living as a resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington. I have visited 57 countries on assignment. I have seen death, famine and the face of war, met the powerful, and undergone danger.

Most of this information is readily available on the web to anyone interested. I have written and had published five substantial books. I have, demonstrably, changed my own mind on many major issues and readily confess to (if you like) or boast of ( as I see it) having done so (a rarity in public life, as it happens).  On top of that,  I benefit from having been given my basic education in a period when this a far more serious business than it is now (and during which teachers would feel free to hurl a board-rubber at me if I didn’t pay attention, and good for them).

 

I am reasonably widely read, and do a fair amount of public speaking and debating against skilled and well-informed opponents. 

 

Frankly, these are the only reasons why anyone should read this blog at all. I see no reason for false modesty about any of the above. Anyone’s welcome to comment here, provided he obeys some very simple and just rules,  but if you fear a sharp answer, don’t invite one. In any case, most of my supposedly whimpering, hounded and downtrodden victims don’t even come here under their own names, so their humiliation (if it can be so described) is entirely private.

 

Mr Platt then moves on to what I believe is his real point. That is, he doesn’t like my religious views or the way in which I defend them.

 

Mr Platt says : ‘He is so used to being high-handed that he does so even when the subject under discussion is something he consistently demonstrates little understanding of. He cannot stop himself. He asks for examples of hounding his critics for responses. What about his refusal to respond to posts by Mr. Crosland on the grounds that Mr. Crosland long ago failed to reply to one of his e-mails?’

 

Well, this is a funny form of hounding, I must say. I thought hounding involved a relentless pursuit, rather than a reasonably polite attempt to avoid the society of someone whose company and conversation one does not enjoy. I have not found it profitable to engage in discussions with Mr ‘Crosland’ (not his real name) as he doesn’t in my view ( and we have had many, many encounetrs over the years) argue fairly or generously, and I have no obligation to carry on having exchanges with someone from whom I have decided I cannot learn, or from someone who constantly seeks to bring every argument back to the same King Charles’s Head.

 

This, by the way, is a literary reference to the unfortunate but loveable Mr Dick in ‘David Copperfield’, who could not address any subject without King Charles’s Head somehow finding its way into it. For Mr Crosland, his desire that everyone else should share his Godless convictions, and his Darwinist certainties, appears to me to be his King Charles’s Head. Why, if we began arguing about the Dock Labour Scheme, or Comprehensive Schools, or Lady Chatterley,  or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or Bretton Woods,  it would not be long before old Charles Darwin somehow came into it, and the fossil record. Most London clubs have one or two people like this, usually to be found in the bar, awaiting all comers for a knock-down discussion.  There is a name for them, but I forget what it is.

 

 

Mr Platt continues his excoriation of my behaviour:   ‘What about entitling a post “The Quieter Millican” in which he said: “the Professor has not yet addressed the points he so concisely set out”, prompting the professor to respond that 24 hours had not yet elapsed and calling for patience?’

 

To which I reply. Yes, and what about it? It was a play on words, a reference to a well-known book(twice filmed) called ‘The Quiet American’ .  Professor Millican’s name lent itself to such harmless jests (see also ‘the Millican Brief’ and ‘Millican, Begin Again’) which I regarded as harmless amusement, and a more interesting sort of headline than ‘Millican Replies – Part 3’. Professor Millican didn’t seem to mind.  

It is true that journalists, accustomed to deadlines,  tend to write faster than academics and are sometimes puzzled by how slowly non-journalists write.  But this hardly qualifies for the word ‘hounding’. My main response here is ‘don’t be silly’.

 

Mr Platt then gets to his real red meat.

I am asked for examples of points he has failed to respond to. Very recently Professor Jerry Coyne rebutted all the nonsense Mr. Hitchens had been posting about evolution, answering in detail all of his concerns about evidence, observations, the ability of the theory to make testable predictions, and so on. This *demands* a response!’

 

I must repeat here that my alleged ‘nonsense’ consists of saying that the theory of evolution by natural selection may be right. Professor Coyne, so far as I know, never came here to make his points. I tried, once or twice, to engage with him and his little society of admirers at his blog (which, unlike this one, appears to attract an entirely unanimous audience)  . But I received nothing but huffy abuse, and decided not to continue.  As I have said before, I think a basic generosity to opponents is essential in any serious debate.  I felt there was no such generosity there. No moral or other rule obliges me to tangle in discussion with people who despise me. Others have also drawn attention to Professor Coyne’s remarks about me and my late brother.  I have no duty to engage with people who behave in this way.

 

Mr Platt then shows that his apparent concern for courtesy is in fact nothing of the kind.

 

He declares : ‘Anyone having their life’s work in science contemptuously dismissed as a mere “cult” is fully entitled to be discourteous ‘.

This is actually wholly ridiculous. Professor Coyne does not personally own the theory of evolution by natural selection (about which I remain agnostic) , nor does he personally own the snide, dismissive, arrogant know-all cult of aggressive modern atheism which has adopted evolution by natural selection as its dogma and subjects any dissenters to heresy hunts .  Both these phenomena have many adherents and many leaders.  Even if he were their very embodiment, there is nothing personally abusive in attacking the ideas expressed by someone else. I have no knowledge of, and have never made any reference to,  Professor Coyne’s personal character nor to his family.  I assume that he is an intelligent, informed person.  I do not seek a quarrel of any kind with him.  I believe that he genuinely believes the theory he espouses to be true. I concede that he may be right.  But I do not think he (or anyone else) has established with certainty that it is demonstrably so.

 

What on earth is one to do about a person who goes out of his way to seek an argument with someone he has never met, and who has never voluntarily sought any contact with him, who concedes that he may be right? And how is one to respond if this mysterious uninvited , unprovoked assailant conducts his attack with bad-tempered scorn dripping from his every phrase?  In my case, it is as if an angry person,  of whom I know nothing , plants himself in the street in front of me and commences to lecture me crossly on my (undoubted) faults, saliva flying in all directions.  Here is what I do. I turn away.  I cross the street, and hope he does not follow me.

I would say that I did try, to begin with, to respond reasonably and peaceably, to what was being shouted at me. But the shouting simply intensified ( as it always does, whenever I discuss this subject, which is why I no longer do so, ever, and will not again) . So, as I say, I crossed the street.

Mr Platt continues ‘…and for Mr. Hitchens (who often tells us he has a thick skin) to use this as a convenient excuse to avoid further engagement smacks of someone desperate to avoid a bruising encounter which they know will once again result in their deep ignorance being exposed to the world for all to see.’

This is nothing to do with the thickness of my skin. It is to do with the futility of arguing with people who know they are right (but cannot actually prove it, and so get angrier and angrier and angrier with anyone who doubts them, hunting down such doubters with extraordinary zeal, for what they are really hunting are their own misgivings).   They know, deep down, that they cannot prove it, and loathe, above all, any reminder of this difficulty. This is because the theory,  which they hope above all things is right,  is important to them not because of its correctness, but because of the explanation  of the universe (comforting to them, dispiriting to me) that it provides.  That is why even my mild statement that the evolutionists ‘may be right’ brings swarms of hornet-like critics round my ears, from thousands of miles away. They can sniff my heresy across an entire salt ocean.  And they cannot bear that one tiny pocket of such heresy should exist. ‘What do you mean ‘may be’!!?’, they yell and screech. ‘Nothing short of ‘is’ will do!!! Submit!!! Submit!!! Recant!!! Sign!!!’ . By comparison, I am only too happy to share the planet with people who doubt my faith, which I freely acknowledge to be a belief and a choice.

As Don Maclean once sang, and as so few people seem to have understood , ‘I’d heard about people like me. But I’d never made the connection’.  The next song on that record (I seem to recall) began with the words  ‘Everybody loves me,  baby. What’s the matter with you?’

Mr Platt then tries to inveigle me into yet another evolution argument with the dogmatic rage-filled battalions of the Darwinist Cult’s heresy-hunting department.

Why, after all, would anyone not want to do that? Even so, he will have to be content, yet again, with my repeated statement that he may be right.

Before he admits that he had (as I well knew) misrepresented me in spirit by twisting my declaration of faith in God so long as the tiniest scrap of evidence for His existence could be found (which I here repeat)  into ‘there are certain things he would continue to believe no matter how hypothetically flimsy the evidence for them became’,  Mr Platt then ludicrously suggests that the drinking of coffee is to be compared with the use of mind-altering drugs.

It was when I read this twaddle, too silly to be worth countering,  that Mr Platt attained the category of background noise, with added lasagne, to which I fear he must now be assigned. I did give him the chance.

 

 

Draconian Prohibition Strikes Again

What did I tell you? On Saturday in London, an event took place which, even ten years ago, would have caused some problems for the police and the government. As only one national newspaper reported :’THOUSANDS of youngsters openly smoked cannabis in a central London park this weekend. As they lounged on the grass amid a fog of marijuana smoke, it resembled a scene from the Woodstock music festival. Up to 2,000 gathered in Hyde Park on Saturday to campaign for the legalisation of cannabis.  Groups of teenagers smoked what appeared to be cannabis joints as parents with young children played nearby. A handful of police officers made no obvious attempt to arrest anyone for drug offences.  Yesterday Scotland Yard said no arrests had been made in Hyde Park for possession of cannabis.’

 

The date, if written in the American style (4/20) has some mystical association for dope smokers which I once tracked down but then forgot, as it was so boring and trivial.  But the point is that, in the very centre of the capital, in an area which the police do actually patrol ( and where officers were, without doubt,  actually present), a criminal offence (Possession of a Class ‘B’ illegal drug, as classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971) appears to have been committed by a substantial number of people, in conditions of total publicity, not to mention near-total predictability, since it was announced and publicised, well in advance,  on Facebook, which the Police have learned to use and often take very seriously. And what do we find? After initial reports that there had been no arrests at all, it later transpired that there had in fact been a small number.

 

According to the BBC website, 14 ‘cannabis warnings’ were issued (these have no legal force and are not centrally recorded, nor were they ever enacted by Parliament, just invented by the police themselves as a way of doing nothing while appearing to do something) . Two (that’s two) people were arrested for cannabis possession and one for robbery.

 

The organisers claimed, perhaps exaggeratedly, that more than 10,000 people had attended (the contrasting Police figure was ‘far more than 200’, The DM report put it at 2,000). In any case the ‘London Cannabis Club’ ( a body previously unknown to me, but perhaps soon to open premises on St James’s or Pall Mall, with leather arm chairs and obsequious servants) reported ‘no problems or arrests, the police left us alone’.

 

A police spokesperson said extra officers had been put in place, saying that it was difficult to tell who was there to mark the event and who was just enjoying the sunshine.  He added: ‘Regardless of their reason for being in the park, anyone seen by officers openly smoking cannabis in Hyde Park or elsewhere in Westminster would be dealt with in the same way, either by means of a cannabis warning or an arrest.’

 

I think we get the picture, especially if we read the above words with the same care with which they were, presumably,  chosen.  

 

Now, this is not in any way news to me, or a surprise to me, or a surprise to any of my readers who have paid the faintest attention to what I have been saying for some years now. What happened is exactly what I would have expected to happen, as I so often say that the police have given up even bothering to make any serious effort to enforce the law against cannabis possession.  Why should they? The courts and the Crown Prosecution Service have no interest in pursuing such cases. Why waste time arresting people who will probably not be prosecuted, and , if they are, will not be meaningfully punished? Just don't embarrass the government by making it plain that the weakness comes from them. The politicians must be allowed to pretend that they are still 'tough'.

 

But it surely must be a surprise to  to all the other commentators and think tankers,   and many journalists, and of course basement-dwelling ‘comment warriors’ from the cannabis community (even now homing in on this article as part of their effort to stamp out the last flickering flames of dissent),  who perpetually inform me that there is a ‘war on drugs’, that it is comparable to ‘Prohibition’  and that it has failed.

 

And yet here’s the paradox. The story appeared in the Daily Mail, sister of my own Mail on Sunday,  both among the very few newspapers that have continued to be realistic about the cannabis matter, and which have not fallen in with the absurd position that ‘The War on Drugs Has failed – so therefore let us call it off’.

 

To such newspapers, the event is not a shock, and barely qualifies as news – which is by its nature surprising and out of step with the general perception of how things are as well as how they ought to be. But for all those newspapers and media which insist that we have a Draconian, Eliot Ness-style. Prohibitionary  ‘war on drugs’, surely such an event was a major shock, worthy of prominent treatment.  But they didn’t mention it.

 

Where were the mass arrests by zealous police, the weeping, innocent young people marched off to jail, flung brusquely into paddy wagons by inflexible law enforcers,  their bright futures thoughtlessly, wastefully ruined by cruel, ‘Draconian’ prosecution and inescapable criminal records?

 

As George Orwell used to say, the only proper response to such beliefs is the old English expression of disbelief ‘And then you wake up’.

 

 

Because, just as in the USA ( where the THC weed is all but legal in many states, under the ludicrous pretence that it is a medicine), no such thing happened, or could have happened. In which case, how do these great organs of news and information justify their claim that there is such a war?

 

They don’t. They are silent about it. And they get away with it.

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Andrew Platt's Reply

Mr Platt has replied at ength to my response to him ('Being for the Benefit of Mr Platt') . I thought it only fair to display his response with as much prominence as my original article had. I'll reply to it when I have time.

 

Mr Platt wrote:

 

I thank Mr. Hitchens for the Beatles reference. Coincidence, or has he
remembered that I am a fan? Unfortunately “For The Benefit” is perhaps
my least favourite “Sergeant Pepper” track, and given the support my
criticisms have attracted so far, “With A Little Help From My Friends”
might be more appropriate.
I am asked to provide “examples of the wicked things” he has done. Let
us not exaggerate please. I never used the word wicked. Anyone would
think I am accusing him of committing a terrorist atrocity. I am not.
Neither am I necessarily accusing him of resorting to personal abuse.
As for providing examples of his overbearing tone, which I did accuse
him of, I hardly know where to start.

Delving into his blog at random I
find this from 6th February 2:48pm under “Stalingrad Revisited”:
“Mr L’Eplattenier sets himself up as an intelligent contributor, and he
can obviously write clear, literate English. Can he read it?”
Or this from 11 July 2012 under “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”: “Welcome
once again to the Peter Hitchens remedial school for people who don’t
know how to argue. Your homework has been marked.”
Well thank you, teacher!
Further insight into how he views his readership may be gleaned from
this, posted on 27 October 2010 under “The Great Depression”: “Only
grown-ups, genuinely capable of changing their minds, are unafraid of
the truth and willing to go where it leads them. They alone can argue
properly. And there are very few of them, as we see here all the time.”
Again he is the grown-up, lecturing naughty children.
From the same post: “…anybody who thinks there is, is displaying not the
lofty knowledge implied by Mr Smith's dismissive attitude, but a
profound ignorance of scientific method.”
He is so used to being high-handed that he does so even when the subject
under discussion is something he consistently demonstrates little
understanding of. He cannot stop himself.
He asks for examples of hounding his critics for responses. What about
his refusal to respond to posts by Mr. Crosland on the grounds that Mr.
Crosland long ago failed to reply to one of his e-mails? What about
entitling a post “The Quieter Millican” in which he said: “the Professor
has not yet addressed the points he so concisely set out”, prompting
the professor to respond that 24 hours had not yet elapsed and calling
for patience?

 

I am asked for examples of points he has failed to respond to.
Very recently Professor Jerry Coyne rebutted all the nonsense Mr.
Hitchens had been posting about evolution, answering in detail all of
his concerns about evidence, observations, the ability of the theory to
make testable predictions, and so on. This *demands* a response! Anyone
having their life’s work in science contemptuously dismissed as a mere
“cult” is fully entitled to be discourteous and for Mr. Hitchens (who
often tells us he has a thick skin) to use this as a convenient excuse
to avoid further engagement smacks of someone desperate to avoid a
bruising encounter which they know will once again result in their deep
ignorance being exposed to the world for all to see.
A further example concerns this statement, made by our host on 2nd
November 2010: “Mr Crosland simply doesn't seem to understand that the
existence of fossils doesn't establish a relationship between those
fossils and similar organisms now living. He may believe there is such a
relationship. He may be correct. But he has yet to prove it.”
Most debates here go over the same ground repeatedly, but this was the
first time a challenge to the orthodox interpretation of fossils had
been made. I was eager to explore a new angle on this topic but alas,
despite my best efforts Mr. Hitchens could not be persuaded to return to
the thread.

Further examples needed? What about his interview with Decca Aitkenhead
in October 2012? Having opined that a stimulant that "severs the link
between hard work and reward" is immoral she perceptively pointed out
his caffeine habit. I have not seen a response beyond some bluster
(Coffee? Seriously?) and a moving of the goalposts from morality to
harm. If Mr. Hitchens would like to answer the perfectly valid point
about *morality* properly then I would very much like to hear it.
On the issue of whether he has ever changed his mind as a result of
postings to this blog Mr. Hitchens says he has not but asks, “Is it my
fault if nobody has turned up here with any arguments or facts that have
done so?”
To which I reply that there have been plenty of valid arguments and
facts presented here, a small number of which I refer to above. It is
most definitely his fault if he has such a closed mind that he has not
considered any of them properly. In particular, he ought to consider
that his continued futile, foolish and stubborn opposition to evolution
must make many readers seriously doubt whether they can trust his
writing on other subjects, which is a shame because he is undoubtedly
well-informed on a variety of topics.

 

The final thing I am asked to justify concerns this quote, made by our
host in reply to Professor Millican on 19th November 2012: “I have
already said that I would continue to believe in God if there were only
the tiniest scrap of evidence for his (sic) existence left. The odds
against could be as long as he cares to set them.”
If my interpretation of this is wrong then no doubt teacher – er, I
mean Mr. Hitchens – will correct me. I cannot see any other possible
interpretation beyond the one he objects to.

What 'decriminalise' really means is: We're giving junkies a drug den next door to you

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

It will not be long before your
home town has special places where drug abusers can poke or snort poison into
their bodies. These will be legal and paid for by you and me.

It is a stupid idea, of course.
People who take such drugs are selfish parasites in need of deterrence, not
patients in need of treatment.

The nicer we are to them, the
more of them there will be, as we have proved conclusively over the past four
decades.

But it is getting harder every
day to express this opinion, and soon it will be more or less impossible. The
British liberal establishment have decided to surrender to the powerful and
well-funded lobby that wants to ‘decriminalise’ drugs.

They use this clumsy word because
international treaties prevent us from actually legalising them. Instead, we
just reduce the penalties to nothing (or don’t enforce them) and make them
legal in all but name.

Before they can get away with
this loathsome scheme, they have to brainwash the public into accepting it.

That is why the unpopular
newspapers and the BBC have been giving favourable coverage to a plan for ‘drug
consumption rooms’ in Brighton. It is also why Portugal’s abandonment of
serious drug laws is constantly presented in a kindly light by the
establishment media.

 Many of you will have been
brainwashed yourselves. Do you know how many supposedly ‘conservative’
newspapers endorsed the decriminalisation of cannabis years ago?

It is amazing how many otherwise
sensible people have already been fooled into accepting the dud arguments for
relaxing the law against cannabis, one of the most dangerous drugs in
existence.

Your children, too, will have
been brainwashed at school – where they will have absorbed the moronic argument
that because alcohol and tobacco are legal, it is wrong to have laws against
dope.

Whenever I have the chance to
debate this subject properly, I almost always defeat the drug liberalisers.

But that’s the problem. The
debate has been shut down, because the liberals control it. Only one side is
allowed to be heard. TV and radio won’t let me talk about this. My recent book,
showing that the supposed ‘war on drugs’ was abandoned 40 years ago, and that
claims of stern ‘prohibition’ are propaganda drivel, was simply not reviewed by
most national papers or on the broadcast programmes that discuss such things.

It is not yet too late to stop
this process, but a great deal of vigilance will be needed to do so. Otherwise
you may wake up one day soon and find a building near you is being openly used
by junkies to inject themselves, with police approval.

This is all the warning you will
get.

Will
lovely Imogen's name strike the wrong chord?

One of the many joys of the fine
new film A Late Quartet (disgracefully hard to find in cinemas) is the lovely
and talented actress Imogen Poots. My only worry is this: will her career be
held back by her charming but unusual surname? Marilyn Monroe, for instance,
started life as Norma Mortenson, Jean Harlow was Harlean Carpenter, and Greta
Garbo was Greta Lovisa Gustafsson.

I got into North Korea by dancing
(very badly) with the lovely female staff of the North Korean consulate in
Shenyang, China. This was the final stage of a hilarious obstacle course of
cash payments and weird encounters. My mobile telephone, which I had to hand in
before entering the Hermit Kingdom, has never recovered and is still haunted,
doing things it ought not to.

I don’t claim, like the BBC’s
John Sweeney, to have uncovered any great new truths while there. My main
discovery was that a lot of North Koreans (and is it any wonder?) are
hopelessly drunk most of the time. I think we should all take this sad
country’s threats a lot less seriously. The picture of female soldiers tripping
along in high heels rather sums up the strange mixture of comedy and misery
involved.

Some weeks ago, on the BBC
Question Time programme, Lord Heseltine claimed before a large audience that I
had called young soldiers ‘stupid’. I had not done so, as the record shows.

I protested at the time. He did
not withdraw. I wrote to him explaining in detail why I would never have said
such a thing. I asked him, twice, to set the record straight. He has twice
declined.

Well, I would point out that his
headed writing paper takes care to mention that he is the Right Honourable Lord
Heseltine, and that he is a Companion of Honour, an order whose motto is ‘In
action faithful and in honour clear’. Well, is this behaviour faithful,
honourable – or clear? Or are these chivalric titles just baubles of no
account? How sad, if so. I still hope he will do the decent thing. It seems to
me to be a matter of honour.

How strange to see people
applauding at Lady Thatcher’s funeral. What odd, un-British behaviour. But how
enjoyable to see the police compelled to wear proper tunics, and to see the
Church of England forced to use the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of
the Bible, which it has spitefully stamped out in normal worship. But these
things were the last flickers of an older England, not a new beginning. Wait
and see what happens next time.

A nasty
outbreak of intolerance

The Left-wing media and their
internet allies continue to make much of the outbreak of measles in Swansea.

This seems to be turning into an
attack on free speech and on a free press. Particular rage is being directed
against conservative newspapers which gave prominence to claims – since
discredited – that the MMR vaccination was linked to autism.

The claims were originally
published  in The Lancet, a highly respected and  well-established
medical journal. It was perfectly reasonable for newspapers to take them
seriously.

The doubts were shared by Private
Eye, a far-from-conservative satirical magazine with a reputation for tough,
sceptical  investigative reporting. Whistleblowers are sometimes wrong but
often right.

Governments are often wrong, and
secretive about their mistakes. Who can be sure who is  correct on such
matters, at the time? What if the warnings had turned out to be justified?
Those who had sought to play them down would now look foolish. 

Beware of this nasty mixture of
intolerance mixed with hindsight. And as for the measles outbreak, if the NHS
had continued to offer the choice of single jabs to  worried parents,
rather than forcing them to choose between MMR or nothing, it is very likely
that this would have been avoided.

CAN’T TV programme-makers try a
bit harder to recreate the past? I lived in Oxford in the mid-Sixties, the
period in which ITV’s new detective drama Endeavour is supposed to be set.

I understand that the shabby,
tourist-free city of those days – with its steamy cattle-market, pungent
brewery and busy factories, cannot be recreated.

But nobody wrote the figure seven
in the continental style (with a horizontal line through the middle). Nobody
took ‘medication’ (it was called ‘medicine’), or said ‘there you go’. Women
didn’t wear pearls while pinning washing on the line. And the Vicar was the Rev
John Blenkinsop, or Mr Blenkinsop. He was never, ever Reverend Blenkinsop, a
stupid, ignorant Americanism nearly as bad as ‘bored of’, ‘can I get?’, and
‘train station’.

If
you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Strangers on a Train

This article will eventually get round to the nasty behaviour of two individuals on Twitter on Saturday evening. But first, I’ll explain why it seems to me to be interesting. Those of you who use Twitter, that strange form of communication, may have noticed that I refer to myself, there as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’. Amusingly, members of the Twitter mob (for that is all it is, an electronic mob) scold me for doing so.

 

If they had the sense of humour they always accuse me of not having, they might see that my use of the words was not wholly serious. But then again, I suppose they know little of history, propaganda or language. They don’t know that such phrases have actually been employed (quite seriously) in the newspapers, broadcasts and speeches of totalitarian states to describe deposed former rulers or other figures whom they wished to destroy or disparage. 

 

In my experience, when someone says that ‘x has no sense of humour’, it almost always means ‘x does not have the same sense of humour that I have’.

 

Now, I’m happy (for instance) not to share the sense of humour of the noisy football fan who, not long ago, wrecked my train journey by repeatedly (about every 45 seconds) cackling (in a surprisingly high-pitched way, for he was otherwise aggressively masculine), at his own jokes, joined by his companions, who may have been hoping that he would buy the next ten cans of Strongbow. Nothing else explains their exaggerated mirth.

 

There’s a strange belief, borne out by nothing, that laughter is necessarily a measure of happiness. In fact, if you don’t know the context, it is very hard to tell , in a  photograph of a laughing or weeping person, whether he is expressing woe or mirth.  It can be quite sinister (as when the emaciated, half-starved and tortured show-trial defendant's trousers fall round his ankes, in Costa Gavras's great but hard-to-find film'The Confession('L'Aveu')).

 

For many people, collective laughter (like that which so often greets the weary jests of Mayor Al Johnson at Tory rallies) is just a sign of belonging to a gang, and often of toadying subservience to the leader of that gang.

 

Listening to this can be a form of torture, if you’re not part of that gang, and not enraptured. I don’t like being part of any gang,  which is why I never watched ‘Yes, Minister’. Reading it, I find it quite funny and perceptive. But like a lot of people, I cannot bear canned laughter, telling me what I ought to think funny. Yet I know (and so do broadcasters) that others find canned mirth helpful to their enjoyment.  It is actually more interesting that some people like canned laughter, than that some people don’t. Perhaps this is another sign of the important distinction between introverts and extroverts, one of the deepest gulfs in human behaviour,  which is at last being discussed. For quite a lot of us introverts, your pleasure is our misery.

 

There is no balance here. Introvert pleasures, which tend (by their nature) to be private and quiet rather than noisy and publicly shared, cause no positive discomfort to anyone else. But crowds, spotting an outsider, are often displeased by his unwillingness to join in. In primitive societies, people like me are usually clubbed to death quite early on in our lives, having been marked down as outsiders, not to be trusted as members of The Gang or Tribe (This is more or less what happens in ‘Lord of the Flies’). We can only survive in quite complex civilisations. I'll leave it to you to decide if our increased chances of survival are a good thing. 

 

Conscious of this, I am quite careful to efface myself, my tastes and (above all) my plummy voice in certain circumstances. One of these is on evenings when my homebound train is taken over by large crowds of noisy football fans. There is, at present, no actual danger. But there isa sort of feeling that the normal rules don’t apply, and the sensible thing to do is to endure quietly until it is over. Don’t even try to enforce the rules in the quiet carriage ( an interesting reflection on our society is that there are always many fewer quiet carriages than there are noisy ones).

 

These people enjoy shouting, and loud tuneless singing, and when there are enough of them (and they tend to walk very heavily and aggressively up and down the train, to point out that they are now in charge) nobody can interfere with their pleasure, which is  probably a Human Right. Ticket validity takes a bit of a back seat, too. Very few ticket collectors come out of the little locked cubicles which are these days provided for them where the lavatories used to be, during these journeys.  Why would they come out? They’re not paid enough for such confrontations. I’m always filled with admiration for the few who do actually enforce the rules, men and women who could probably lead an infantry charge in battle.  I feel, too,  for the Buffet car staff, who just have to put up with it.  If things get seriously difficult, the train may stop for the Transport Police to get on. But all they do is apply collective punishment to the whole train, delaying hundreds of inoffensive passengers while they debate with the rowdies (in the knowledge that if they took any serious action, the CPS and the courts would let them down, a knowledge which the rowdies increasingly share).

 

Anyway, the other evening, it really wasn’t too bad. The football fans were shouting, and marching about, but there weren’t enough of them for critical mass and I had a pleasant journey, with a cup of tea and a biscuit, reading the vast acreage of the Saturday papers which I hadn’t got round to in the morning. How little I knew.

 

The following morning, I made one of my occasional checks on the Internet, which these days includes a dip into Twitter, This always reminds me of a long ago childhood boat-trip with a Devon fisherman, during a seaside holiday. Was it at Hope Cove, our favourite holiday spot of the time? I rather think so. He was visiting his lobster pots, a slow round in a rowing boat. Several were empty, but it was interesting and enjoyable (heartless as I then was) to haul one up to find an angry, clawed creature trapped within. 

 

And on Sunday morning, my Twitter lobster pots, often bulging with snappy comments remarking that  ‘Peter Hitchens is a ****’ or asking peevishly  ‘Why did the wrong Hitchens die?’  were not that full. Even the righteous crusaders, who seek to blame me for the measles outbreak, had gone quiet. They were not of course admitting that the NHS ‘MMR or nothing’ policy might have been at fault, but they were unable to counter my rather unanswerable point that this policy, if it was aimed at maximum immunisation, has demonstrably failed.

 

But what was this? A person, accompanying his post with what seemed to be a real name and a real photograph of a rather vain-looking, melodramatic person with a high collar and severe, swept-back hair (though for all I know it is a picture of someone else) , had written, around the time I was on my train:

 

‘I seem to be on the same train as Peter Hitchens. How many cheers do you think I’d get if I knocked him out mid-journey?’

 

There were a number of responses to this. One, from a person who also provided a picture of a smirking young man, which somehow seemed to me to have been taken in the back bedroom of his parents’ house, joined in with ‘Do something to his voice box. If you have a biro to hand that would be perfect’.  He used a pseudonym.

 

A couple of people had chided the original Tweeter, one saying he’d get more cheers if he threw himself on the tracks (Not very nice, but he’d raised the question of cheers and violence). Another said it wasn’t very heroic to threaten to assault a 60-year-old man ( 61, actually, but not yet wholly decrepit, all the same) . Then there was some discussion about how my putative assailant’s work might be affected, with him saying it was only an unpaid internship, so it didn’t matter.  

 

Well, I immediately got my Technical, Forensic and Legal Departments involved. So I have a screenshot of the original , and various other inquiries and actions are in train (sorry, no pun intended) . I also responded to the original Tweeter, asking him if it was an actual threat of violence, and if he had any idea of what he was saying.

 

Many hours later (It was a lovely Spring day) I checked back and found, not to my surprise, that my putative assailant’s bravado had melted into a lukewarm puddle. His swaggering Tweet had been deleted. He had sent messages claiming to have attempted to apologise to me, but I have not seen any sign of this. His whole account is now 'protected' which means I can't check back on this.  Nor has he responded to two messages from me asking if he has anything to say in his defence. The accompanying suggestion from the other person (in some ways even nastier, because so detailed, and because it was a direct and open incitement to severe violence against me), about the voicebox and the biro, was still on display.

 

 

Now, I disapprove of the police overreaction to some statements on Twitter, expressions of opinion and obviously unserious stuff born out of exasperation. And I am a forgiving person, if those who offend against me show any sign of genuine contrition. So I am as yet undecided as to how far I shall take this.

 

But I think that those who tell me off for describing myself light-heartedly as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’ might ask themselves a little about the extraordinary personalised loathing, mingled with assumed moral superiority,  which the self-righteous Left repeatedly express towards those who dissent from their view.  I ask them to imagine taking a peaceful train journey, and to find later that they had been sharing it with people thinking thoughts like these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being for the Benefit of Mr Platt

Mr Andrew Platt posted as follows on the previous thread. For the enjoyment and edification of readers,  and perhaps of Mr Platt as well, I thought I would reply in detail. I have interleaved my replies with his contribution, my words being in bold type.

 Mr Platt begins : Mr. Hitchens is always ready to accuse his critics of bad behaviour yet is just as guilty himself of the very same things. It is pure comedy for him to be pointing out contributors with a “high-handed, self-righteous and overbearing tone”. It is like Dean Martin accusing someone of being drunk! Anyone using such a tone here presumably learned it from the master.

 

**PH responds : Actually, most of the aggressive attacks come from people who are unfamiliar with this site, or who only care (or post)  about one subject. I think of Mr Jacubs, who accompanied his criticisms of my view of the Bomber offensive with repeated and aggressive assaults on my patriotism, etc, which he certainly had not learned from me and to which I did not respond in kind.  Mr Ward, Professor Coyne, various Darwinist fanatics, a fellow who runs a site devoted to criticising popular conservative newspapers, also spring to mind.  These people despise me and make no secret of it.  But Mr Platt must not mistake robust defence of a position for personal abuse. I’d be interested if he could provide examples of the wicked things he says I have done.

 

I confess freely to dealing harshly with one or two regular contributors, but only after I had tried and failed to engage with them reasonably.  In both cases I have made it pretty plain that I would be happy if they would go away. Both almost certainly won’t because other contributors here insist on encouraging them by replying to his posts.  Perhaps this is kind of them, but for myself I see no need to be kind to one of them - a person who thinks the National Socialist massacre of European Jews has been exaggerated, and who robustly defends the BNP. There are other communities in which he could find care.  He begged to be allowed to resume commenting here after he had been quite properly expelled, aftr a breach of the known rules which he was warned against. I agreed to let him return because he apologised for his original fault and it was only just to do so.  But he should feel free to vanish voluntarily at any time, if he doesn’t like what I say about him and Italian pasta dishes.

 

Another long ago wrote himself out of serious discussion by claiming that he wasn’t in control of his own logical process, but was prevented from considering various propositions by a mysterious unnamed force (perhaps it was Santa Claus, or a goblin, or a levitating teapot). This contributor simultaneously claimed to be entirely free of any belief in the supernatural. But he keeps on coming back, often with smirking little jibes at religious belief which he really has no business to make, under the circumstances.

 

There is a one very common problem among my critics, which is unresponsiveness. If I take the trouble to argue with someone, I expect the same in return, and the repeated avoidance of important points, as if I had never made them,  by someone who has anxiously sought debate, always strikes me as disappointing and frustrating.  I believe that, when I challenge contributors here, I do attempt to deal directly with what they say, in some detail. This leads to criticisms (of a kind which I shall probably receive now, for this) that I am wasting my time, or going on too long. But this blog is not like any other, and this is one of its features.   

 

 

Mr Platt continues : What is not comical is the way he hounds critics to reply to his points – often to an extraordinary degree – while at the same time failing to respond to awkward points his critics raise.

 

PH responds. I should be grateful for examples of  this alleged hounding. I keep no hounds, and can only mock those who disappear in mid-battle, as a distinguished former civil servant did after being given the hospitality of this site to state his views. This doesn’t seem to me to be a very fearsome sanction.

 

 Mr Platt resumes : I am not referring to some of the semi-literate ramblings found here, which anyone with sense would ignore, but valid points of fact or logic that would demand an answer in any balanced debate.

 

PH replies. Again, I should like examples. I won’t discuss theology because I know nothing about it, don’t pretend to know anything about it and am bored to distraction by it.  I never try to persuade anyone to become a religious believer, merely to point out that he or she has the choice of believing or not (even this statement of the obvious is met with puzzled rage in some quarters, but how one argues about that I have never been able to fathom) . I also *defend* the freedom of the intelligent person to be a religious believer, against the increasingly abusive intolerance of the new type of atheist. But my position is purely defensive. I do not say that atheism is an absurd belief, or an impossible belief, or a contemptible belief (though I do suggest that it has consequences, and that it seems likely to me that many of its adherents know this and choose it for that reason. This statement of the blindingly obvious also leads to angry attacks upon me, against which I sometimes defend myself).

 

 

I confess that I long ago declared that I would not enter into any more discussions of evolution by natural selection (sometimes I will make tangential references to it where absolutely necessary, but the main stem of the subject is one I will not again discuss here). This is because I concluded that most supporters of the theory are cultist believers in the grip of a powerful faith, and are moved to something close to rage by the mildest expression of doubt, which is all I ever do express.  Only total acquiescence will do, and then some. There is, simply, no point in debating with such people and I have given up. Otherwise, I can’t recall having done what Mr Platt alleges.

 

Mr Platt says :’Of course, as blog owner Mr. Hitchens quite rightly has the Dimbleby role, a parallel I draw deliberately since he has in the past felt compelled to complain about the treatment he receives on QT.’

 

PH says . I’m not sure I’d call it a complaint, exactly, just a description of the conditions under which I know I shall have to operate if I go on such programmes, which are demonstrably so , and which I accept as the necessary condition for appearing. I tend to find that my supporters and sympathisers are often much more worried by these conditions than I am.  My consistent complaint against the BBC (invariably misrepresented by my opponents as personal whingeing)  is of an institutional bias which it refuses to recognise. Obviously, it cannot be expected to correct this, any more than a person who can’t be persuaded he is short-sighted can be persuaded to go to the optician. He will continue to believe that he bumps into all those objects because they are not looking where they are going.

 

 

Mr Platt first quotes me  “A certain willingness to believe it possible that you may be mistaken, a willingness to learn from an opponent, and a generosity of spirit towards that opponent, are essential for any serious debate.”

 

And then asks ‘Can he point to a time when he may have been mistaken over any significant point, or better still a time when he changed his mind as a result of something posted here? Has he demonstrated a willingness to learn from an opponent?

 

PH replies , there are three questions here, perhaps four. I am sure I have acknowledged one or two factual mistakes where pointed out, but can’t instantly recall. Everyone makes factual errors from time to time. I am at the moment trying , through the Nottingham City Library, to get the details of the closures of the Nottinghamshire and Derby coal mines, because a contributor has said that I have wrongly attributed these to Lady Thatcher, who, he believes, was not in office  at the time.  If I find I was wrong, I will say so.  As for changing my mind, not so far.  But who knows the future?

I can demonstrate a capacity for changing my mind, but not necessarily here.  If I have done it before I can do it again, it is not like the long jump, where your powers fail as the years drag by.

But is it my fault if nobody has turned up here with any arguments or facts that have done so? I have to say that a 36-year (and continuing) remedial course at the University of Fleet Street, including specialist jobs in several important areas, a lot of foreign travel and two periods of residence abroad,  is a pretty good education in what’s what and what’s not. And past membership of a Marxist-Leninist organisation also gives me insights that few have had. But I don’t rule it out. I approach every serious opponent by examining and replying to his facts and his logic. I learn a lot from good opponents, and after such an encounter, am usually better at arguing my position than I was before. You can learn from an opponent without going over to his side.

 

There are, however, a  number of subjects where the question is not one of rightness or wrongness but of principle or of faith.  One simply disagrees about what is the better course to take, on the basis of moral precepts which are a matter of choice. This is so with the religious argument , the drug argument and the topic of sexual morality. To some extent it also affects debates on crime and punishment, on foreign intervention or immigration. All that debate can achieve is a clearer idea of what divides me from my opponents.  

 

 

Mr Platt says : He (that’s me) has had exchanges with some highly educated people recently, including two professors, but I have not seen any evidence he has learned anything from them at all. Neither did I detect any generosity of spirit towards Professor Millican, though perhaps I was just not looking hard enough.

 

PH responds : I reject this. I’m not sure who the other Professor is. If Professor Coyne is meant, he tends to use long-distance weapons, and I have explained why (having tried in the past and been met with teenage spite and discourtesy at his site) I won’t engage with him or his circus. As for Professor Millican, I think he was treated courteously and generously, given as much space as he desired,  to say what he liked. I happen to think that he got into a mess with probability (unwilling to concede that his idea of what was probable might be influenced by his desires, and unwilling to accept that probability cannot be extended into certainty, by its nature); and indeed with the universal religious problem, that he believes what he wishes to believe about God (as do I). If one party to the argument admits this, and the other doesn’t, things will be uneven.  I didn’t particularly seek an argument with him, because I foresaw this precise problem, but I answered him promptly and politely for as long as he remianed here.

  

Mr Platt says “Those afflicted often show this by acting and writing as if their opinions are facts.”

If a phenomenon supported by a huge weight of independently established evidence gathered over tens of decades, and which no observation has ever called into question, cannot be acknowledged as a fact then we might well ask in this context whether the word fact has any meaning.’

 

PH replies. Well, if no observation has ever established it, then the fact that no observation has ever called it into question doesn’t really make much difference. I think I know what he is driving at here, and if so, I think he has a bit of a cheek referring to ‘independently established evidence’ . Independently of what or whom?  As for ‘huge weight’,  it is not a scientific measure. There was a huge weight of evidence for the Ptolemaic geocentric  theory of the universe, gathered over many centuries, because so many people wanted to believe it . It happened to be wrong. So I think we can still just about cling to the word ‘fact’ in the stormy seas of uncertainty in which we are tossed about.

 

Mr Platt concludes (quoting me): “Facts and logic are useless weapons against such (often false) certainties.”

I know. See above. It becomes comical again when one considers that the same person claiming to respect facts and logic is someone who has openly admitted that there are certain things he would continue to believe no matter how hypothetically flimsy the evidence for them became.

Facts and logic indeed!

 

PH asks: I am glad he is finding comedy in our encounters. I am as well. Have I said or ’admitted’ ( lovely neutral word, that) ‘that there are certain things he (me) would continue to believe no matter how hypothetically flimsy the evidence for them became.’?

 

Or have I said something rather different, which Mr Platt has reconstructed and moulded into this shape, so as to suit himself? And what would Mr Platt call that, were it done to him?

 

Facts and logic, indeed.