Year: 2010

Stephen Law offers us a video of the Permanent Secretary for Government Communications telling a bunch of people that communications are goods things and that he is goods at doings them. I watched a minute or two, which was enough to confirm me in my surmise that I didn’t want to watch more than that. Stephen explains why.

He has little to say, surely? Strip out the “successful behavioural outcomes”, “partnership”, “stakeholder”, “co-creation”, “we’re on a journey” jargon and rhetoric, and his message boils down to:

• The public used to be seen by Government as passive recipients of information, not as customers to engage with, which they now are, ‘cos of the internet, twitter, etc. Citizens can now provide feedback on services.

• There should be more effective working together between government departments.

• Government needs to apply psychological research if Government wants to affect behaviour, not just make ads saying: “stop smoking”, “eat less fat”, “do more exercise”, “get a job”, etc.

Now, surely, all of this is pretty trite and obvious, not cutting edge insight? Won’t everyone in the audience already know this? Most of us know it, surely. It’s platitudinous.

Yes but you need a highly-paid expert to say it so that…well so that he can earn his high pay. What else would you have him do? Teach philosophy?! Come now.

3. Much of what Tee says seems to serve primarily as a device for reminding us of how successful he has been. The talk is in large part a puff for himself and his career.

4. Is Tee himself a good communicator? I found this presentation dull, uninformative, and I suspect it’s unlikely to motivate his audience to do anything different. The one concrete bit of advice he gives them is: think of how your next communication might be tweeted.

As I say, Tee earns over £160,000 per year of taxpayer’s money (equivalent to, say, the combined salaries of three university professors). Maybe he’s very good at managing. But I’d say he’s a rather poor communicator and, on the basis of this performance, a bit light on ideas.

You might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

As is typical with coverage of this subject, the New York Times has to blame Lars Vilks just a little for doing that Motoon.

But the country’s prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, stopped short of connecting the bombs to an e-mail that a Swedish news organization received minutes before the blasts, which seemed to link the attacks to anger over anti-Islamic cartoons and the war in Afghanistan.

It wasn’t cartoons plural, it was one cartoon. And anti-Islamic? What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds sinister.

The e-mail’s reference to Mr. Vilks, a 64-year-old artist and free-speech activist, pointed to the deep anger in the Muslim world over his drawings of the prophet Muhammad in 2007.

“The” deep anger in “the” Muslim world – by which is meant, some Muslims were very angry, but what it sounds like is, all Muslims were very angry, and probably justifiably (“deep” tends to imply that).

It would be nice if journalists and editors could learn to be more careful about this. But they won’t.

Alice Dreger was at the American Anthropological Association meeting when it moved to kick science out.

Interestingly, it isn’t just that the AAA leadership is ditching science. They’re also trying to position the AAA as being primarily about “public understanding” of humankind. As Stu Plattner, who served for many years as Cultural Anthropology Program Director for NSF, observed in email exchanges, this looks like “another step in the conversion of Anthropology from a social science into an esoteric branch of journalism.” Yeah, but the kind of journalism that is much more concerned with editorials than factual reporting.

So not one but two giant steps away from genuine truth-seeking.

Presumably, in the AAA’s tradition, the promotion of the “public understanding of humankind” will include anything that is politically unoffensive to the AAA leadership, and nothing offensive. It’s safe to assume the AAA will not be promoting the public understanding of how human behaviors evolved, especially if those human behaviors are anything that might make some or all humans look violent, greedy, harmful to the environment, or (worst of all) sexually dimorphic.

Among the scientific anthropologists I talked to about this yesterday, pretty much to a one, they were unsurprised yet angry. The primatologist Sarah Hrdy (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote, “My reaction is one of dismay – actually, even more visceral and stronger than that – albeit not surprise.”

So they’re deciding whether to fight, or just give it up and leave.

In the messages flying back and forth, I was reminded why anthropologists refer to the annual conference as “the meetings,” plural: it’s because they go and meet with their own actual disciplinary types, in separate groups, so that the real scientists don’t have to deal too much with the fluff-head cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way of knowing.

Not all cultural anthropologists are fluff-heads, of course. You can usually tell the ones who are fluff-heads by their constant need to look like superheroes for oppressed peoples, and you can tell the non-fluff-heads by their attention to data. But the non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that actively denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing.

Wait, I have an idea – they could split, and the fluff-heads could all move to Women’s Studies departments. Meanwhile the non-fluff head WS people could move to departments that actually value data collection, though that could include history as well as scientific fields.

And we learn that the archbish of Canterbury isn’t as fond of the pope as we had been led to believe.

During his recent visit to Rome and meeting with the Pope –planned before the Pope urged disaffected Anglicans to convert to Catholicism— Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams challenged the position of the Catholic Church on ordination of women and made it clear that the Vatican should have consulted with him before reaching out to the Anglican community. Although Williams’ visit to Rome was cast as positive and reinforcing of ecumenical dialogue, it’s clear the wounds from this controversy will affect that dialogue negatively (at least for now) and are likely to cast a pall over the Pope’s planned state visit to England in 2010.

Too bad about that last part – it didn’t happen, at least not at official levels. There was plenty of pall in Trafalgar Square, but none emanating from the great and the good.

As for the Pope’s visit next year to England, Campbell said he now expected a chilly reception, especially from the Royal family – which was not a great supporter of ecumenical dialogue even before the crisis.

Right, that didn’t happen either. The Royal family all but adopted the stinking pope. Special People stick together.

I’m very ambivalent about WikiLeaks and especially about the diplomatic data dump, but I must say, the Vatican stuff is certainly worth having (and it’s not something the Vatican has any moral right to keep secret, either). The more we know about the inner workings of the Vatican, the better.

Requests for information from the 2009 Murphy commission into sexual and physical abuse by clergy “offended many in the Vatican” who felt that the Irish government had “failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations“, a cable says.

Typical Vatican, isn’t it? Not shock-horror and remorse about rape and physical violence by clergy, but “offense” at failure to “respect” Vatican “sovereignty.” It’s all about them, and it’s all about them not as perps but as offended dignitaries.

Ultimately, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (equivalent to a prime minister), wrote to the Irish embassy, ordering that any requests related to the investigation must come through diplomatic channels.

Typical. Not “Yes yes of course we’ll help you in every way we can”; on the contrary, “No no, how dare you, you have to go through diplomatic channels, we are a Sovereign Nation as well as Divine Intermediaries with God Himself.”

As usual with the Vatican, the reserves of disgust are quickly exhausted.