Banditry: The idle musings of John B

Eurovision is massive in Australia, probably more so than it is in much of Europe – despite the fact that there aren’t any Australian participants, we don’t get to vote, and it’s shown on time-delay. Which is odd.

Of course, its importance is symbolic. Eurovision was first shown in Australia in 1983, which was exactly the point when the first generation of Australian-born people of non-British descent (*) was in the ascendant (since from 1946-1973, migration policy had moved from ‘The Empire’ to ‘any country you like as long as you’re white-ish’).

Australia was shedding old stereotypes about national background, stiff-upper-lips and machismo, and forging its own identity with a nod to all the cultures from which the population was now derived. Combining row-of-tents campness with a near-total match to white Australians’ homelands, Eurovision couldn’t have worked better as a totem of the New Australia.

The White-ish Australia policy has now been dead for almost exactly as long as the British Australia policy had been in 1983, and again, the country has changed substantially and for the better for it. Sure, there are still plenty of bigots, but Asian cultures are now a massive part of the Australian mainstream.

It occurs to me that what we really need now, to cement and mark this, is some kind of massively campy event that somehow nods to both Australia’s multiple European heritages and the Asian heritage of New New Australians… Any ideas?

* yes, I know there have been Chinese and German Australians for almost as long as there’ve been white Australians and for much longer than there’s been a country of Australia. But mass migration was overwhelmingly from the British Isles until after World War II.

The first jetliner was Boeing’s square-windowed 707; it was grounded after a few months following tragic incidents which wiped out a fair proportion of elite Americans. The money flowing to De Havilland to create a civilian airliner progamme to promote their non-murderous plane trumped nationalist concerns.

Despite the fact that the 707 is a finer airliner than the Comet, nobody trusts it, and even Pan-Am and TWA are acquiring Comets. The fact that nobody had really understood pressurisation before Boeing’s painful lesson ensures that De Havilland’s planes became the narrow-body airliner to beat all airliners.

Fantasy world: #2: the first supersonic jetliner is Boeing’s supersonic 7NN7. While it made a bit of noise, the need to beat the Comet – because, despite the technical superiority of the Comet, the sheer cash of the US government and the fact that we all need to make up for America’s humiliation  has ensured that nonsense about ‘supersonic booms’ was defeated by the allegiances of the civilised world.

With its Rolls-Royce/Pratt & Whitney engines, it has been allowed to fly supersonic over all territories outside of the USSR. New York-London-Singapore-Sydney-Los Angeles-New York on Pan-Am was do-able in under a day. Fashionistas signed up, in the hope it would make them sexy and youthful. The conception that transatlantic flight takes more than 4 hours became ludicrous, like the concept of taking four days in a flying boat before WWII,

Inspired by the “send a letter to the Government of Ecuador” left-meme, here’s my letter to the Government of Ecuador:

Dear the Government of Ecuador. You’ve got a slightly disturbing Cuba-light personality cult going, and Julian Assange is an autistic pervert who I wouldn’t let within a hundred yards of any female friends or relations. Nonetheless, the Yanks are still probably mad enough to torture the hell out of the poor sod for the rest of his natural life for making them look silly, so saving him from that one is an excellent PR opportunity for yourselves. Best, John. PS, I love your song (*).

I’m sure this will address matters.

* this one, I mean.

List of significant winter sports and the teams who play them seriously who are from English-speaking countries

American Football (USA)
Australian Football (AUS)
Ice Hockey (CAN, USA)
Rugby League (AUS, GB[ENG],NZ)
Rugby Union (GB [ENG, IRE, SCO, WAL], NZ)
Soccer (GB [ENG,SCO,WAL,NI], IRE)

List of significant winter sports and the serious teams who play them seriously who are from non-English-speaking countries

Ice Hockey (SWE, NOR, FIN)
Rugby League (FRA)
Rugby Union (FRA)
Soccer (THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD, SERIOUSLY, THE ONLY FUCKING GAME, NO, ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE ARE WEIRD)

“[Great Blasket] island was inhabited until 1953, when the Irish government decided that it could no longer guarantee the safety of the remaining population. It was the home of three noted Irish writers: Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin” - some slightly ropy web slideshow.

It’s a fair call. There is absolutely no effing way I would consider myself safe if sharing a small island with three noted Irish writers. One, you could overpower. Two, you could feed them whiskey and song until the one killed the other. But three? Jaysus.

Relatedly, happy Bloomsday.

I wrote this piece about British national terms after my Cross-Cultural Communication lecturer asked me about the differences between different UK-ish groups. Anyone/everyone disagree?

The most important bit, and by far the most offensive to get wrong, is recognising that the non-English nations within the UK can never be called ‘England’. England, Scotland and Wales are Great Britain; Great Britain and Northern Ireland together are the UK; and citizens of the UK are referred to as British citizens (the word ‘Britain’ on its own doesn’t have a set meaning). If you call someone from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland ‘English’, they’ll be extremely cross. This is a particular problem for non-native English speakers, since many languages don’t discriminate between ‘British’ and ‘English’.

However, there are also plenty of ways of using technically correct forms that can cause confusion, and sometimes offence.

Most Scottish or Welsh people don’t mind being referred to as ‘British’, although most wouldn’t use that term to describe themselves. However, a Scottish or Welsh person with strong political nationalist views might take offence at it. In general, it’s best to describe someone who’s Scottish or Welsh as simply Scottish or Welsh, although a mixed group of people from England, Scotland and Wales can be referred to as British without offending anyone.

With Northern Irish people, there’s a Protestant/Catholic divide (in the sense of heritage/culture rather than actual religions). Most NI Protestants are happy to identify as British; most NI Catholics would be angry to be described as British, even when they’re in a group that also includes people from England, Scotland and Wales. You can’t even sidestep that one by using ‘Northern Irish’, as most Catholics would just describe themselves as ‘Irish’ (particularly as many Catholics born and resident in Northern Ireland choose to carry [Southern] Irish passports, since the Republic of Ireland grants citizenship to anyone born anywhere on the island of Ireland, and Irish citizenship gives you full residency and voting rights anywhere in the UK). Nor can you sidestep it by using ‘Irish’, because many Protestants would be offended to be described as ‘Irish’ rather than ‘Northern Irish’.

Whether a person born in England says they are ‘English’ or ‘British’ is dependent on several factors: whether they have mixed UK heritage, whether or not they’ve grown up in London (‘English’ tends to have more rural, village green-ish connotations, whereas ‘British’ is more urban and ethnically mixed), if they’re from an ethnic minority (black and Asian people in England generally refer to themselves as ‘black British’ and ‘Asian British’, because they don’t identify so well with the stereotype of English), and political affiliations (because of the connotations above, people who are more conservative are more likely to identify as English and vice versa, although this isn’t a hard and fast rule).

However, most people born in England won’t be offended by being called the term they don’t personally use (I’m not offended to be described as English, and my Tory friends aren’t offended to be described as British) – I think this is largely because England is traditionally the dominant nation/culture within the UK, and in most English people’s minds there isn’t much of a difference between English/British. The exceptions here would include a few extreme English nationalists (but a far smaller percentage of the population than in Scotland or Wales) if called British, and possibly a few people from ethnic minority groups if called English.

(the entirely crazy-old-man David Duff has rightly pointed out that in the spirit of the headline, the Welsh are Taffs. CHANGED)

I’ve always found halal slaughter less unpleasant than regular industrial animal slaughter. As anyone who’s ever cut themselves with a properly sharp blade knows, cutting yourself with a sharp blade doesn’t hurt at all until about a minute after the event, by which point the animal is already distinctly dead. You might prefer your animals to be shot in the head with a bolt-gun first; whatever floats your boat.

There’s no strong evidence to support either view – the only thing it’s fair to conclude is that it doesn’t make much difference [*], that both methods are almost entirely painless and instantaneous, and that slaughter is probably the least problematic aspect of the entire industrial meat supply chain from an animal welfare point of view.

Anyway. Apparently a sizeable proportion of the meat on sale in the UK is killed halal-style, along with nearly all frozen lamb imported from New Zealand (the latter because the Gulf is New Zealand’s largest meat export destination). Now, I can see that if you were some kind of hardcore religious type, you might be opposed to eating halal meat, because a prayer was said to the wrong imaginary sky fairy when it was killed and so your imaginary sky fairy might be cross. In which case, fair play to you – I disagree, but it makes sense in your worldview.

But much more baffling is this response from the National Secular Society:

We suspected that meat killed by the halal and kosher methods was being used for general consumption but we never imagined it was so widespread. It is disgraceful that ­people aren’t being told if the food they are being served is from meat that has not been stunned prior to slaughter

This is a witless quote, for two reasons.

The biggest is that the NSS spokesman’s “if” clause is wrong: 90% of halal meat sold in the UK is pre-stunned, including all NZ meat and all meat sold to supermarket chains and major foodservice companies – which is what the article in question is talking about. The only difference between this sort of ‘halal’ meat and non-halal meat is that it’s been killed by a chap who said a prayer when he cut the animal’s throat. If you object to that for any reason other than “I’m worried my god will punish me”, you are purely and simply a bigot.

But even boycotting the other 10% of halal meat, killed in the traditional style (you’re unlikely to find this on sale outside of dedicated halal butchers shops, takeaways and curry houses), is still jumping to silly conclusions about animal welfare based on your own personal sense of ‘ewww’.

If you are, genuinely, so concerned about animal welfare that a possible, unproven, small difference in possibilities of consciousness between stunned and unstunned slaughter affects your purchasing decisions, then you shouldn’t be eating randomly sourced meat in the first place – the suffering that industrially farmed animals undergo compared to compassionately farmed animals is several orders of magnitude greater than anything that happens in the slaughterhouse.

So unless you’re veggie, or you stick solely to meat that’s been produced under a recognised ‘compassion in farming’ certification scheme (or a local farm that you know follows the same principles, of course), then you should probably shut up about halal meat already. Otherwise, people might start to think that you’re just in the ‘bigot’ camp too…

[*] people have been known to argue against halal slaughter from an animal welfare point of view. However, these people tend to be arguing from prejudice, not evidence: there have been surprisingly few scientific studies done on the topic, not least because working out how much an animal has suffered during slaughter is pretty much impossible. The most comprehensive study, carried out in Germany, found that ritual slaughter was painless for sheep and calves. There is some evidence to suggest that cows, being large, take show some signs of brain activity (which doesn’t necessarily mean suffering or pain) when killed by halal/kosher slaughter – there is none to suggest the same for chickens or sheep. The Farm Animal Welfare Council report that’s usually quoted on the subject by anti-halal/kosher types ignores the evidence on either side in favour of proof-by-assertion, which is a distinctly poor show (paragraph 195).

Aussie blogger Melinda Tankard Reist has a rather misguided post on Hindustan Unilever’s controversial face-whitening Facebook app:

Playing on certain racial insecurities by telling dark skinned people that they can never really be beautiful – that’s what Unilever is doing… These products promote ethnocentric stereotypes about the superiority of white people.

Hmm. So in two sentences accusing Unilever of racism, she’s managed two rather irritating, patronising – and indeed, accidentally racist – mistakes.

The first is ‘non-white-European people don’t have opinions or make decisions’. So if Hindustan Unilever comes up with a marketing campaign, it must be because a white man in London told them to.

Great… except for the fact that Unilever’s Asian marketing operation is run by an Indian man in Mumbai, is locally devised and locally executed, and London doesn’t pre-approve campaigns.

The second is ‘the US-derived model of white-European versus everyone else is the only way to view prejudices and stereotypes based on skin colour’. So obviously if people in India are being told that lighter skin is better, that’s so they can be more like Europeans and less like Indians.

Great… except for the fact that the Indian preference for paler skin has absolutely cock-all to do with wanting to be European, and a great deal more to do with the fact that within India, long before the British invasion, the ruling castes have been paler-skinned than the workers (partly because they’re more likely to be of Persian descent, and partly because they don’t spend their time working in the hot sun).

Once you stop viewing non-European cultures through the prism of European race relations, playing on people’s desire to appear lighter is no worse than playing on their desire to appear less spotty or wrinkly. So if people from European cultures object to this campaign any more strongly than they’d object to a campaign for an anti-wrinkle cream, they’re basically telling Indians that they have to follow European values. Which is distinctly Not Cool.

From the Rodent:

It would’ve been wiser and more useful in military and diplomatic terms; more humane, productive and billions of pounds less expensive if the US and Britain had responded to 9/11 by crashing two planeloads of US marines into the centre of a randomly-chosen Afghan city at 700 mph and executing 300 randomly-chosen British squaddies by firing squad.

The latest insane euromyth, as faithfully invented by the Daily Mail, is that the EU is planning to ban the sale of eggs by the dozen or half-dozen. As usual, the Littlejohn Rule applies here: if the story sounds like something you “really couldn’t make up” (thanks, Mr Dale), then somebody doubtless has made it up.

The main thrust of the Daily Mail’s story is that under proposed EU legislation, it will be illegal to print “six eggs” on a box of six eggs. Instead, the quantity of eggage will have to be listed solely in kilogrammes. This is simply – and really really obviously – false, and if you believe it then you’re doubtless someone who’s checked whether the word ‘gullible’ is really in the dictionary.

Here’s the actual legislation, proposed by the European Parliament. The quote that the press have misunderstood (or, more likely, lied about) is:

1. The net quantity of a food shall be expressed, using litres, centilitres, millilitres, kilograms or grams, as appropriate:
(a) in units of liquid in the case of liquids within the meaning of Council Directive 85/339/EEC of 27 June 1985 on containers of liquids for human consumption ;
(b) in units of mass in the case of other products.

In other words, all food that is sold in the EU will need to list either its volume (for liquids) or its mass (for solids) in metric units on the pack. Note the absence of anything banning the use of other indicators on the pack, such as “number of eggs”, “mass in pounds”, “number of moles of hydrogen atoms in the packet”, etc. Anyone who wishes to do so can advertise any or all of the above, as long as the metric unit of volume or mass is clearly marked. See: a pint of milk.

So the more outlandish claim, that the legislation would ban the sale of eggs in packs labelled as ‘six’ or ’12′, is obvious, total nonsense.

The only thing substantiating the piece at all is the Mail’s quote from an unnamed source at the UK’s Food Standards Agency, “Retailers would not be allowed to put ‘Six eggs’ on the front of the box.“. Whether the Mail has grossly misquoted the FSA spokesman, or whether the FSA spokesman is an idiot, is not clear. Either way, the quote is wrong.

A more sensible criticism of the proposed rule comes from The Devil’s Knife – that the change would cost food packagers money for very little benefit, wasting everyone’s time and resources:

Well, I would imagine that selling a 500g box of eggs that does not, in fact, contain 500g of produce is illegal under Trading Standards. So now the egg producers are going to have to weigh each and every box, and stamp the exact weight on each box. Not only will they have to buy the stamping equipment (because you can bet your bottom dollar that just writing the weight on is not legal: they even have to stamp each individual egg now, for fuck’s sake) but it is also labour-intensive.

Well, this would be true, except that eggs are already graded by weight – e.g. a ‘large’ egg weighs 63-73g – which requires them to be weighed. And under EU labelling rules, positive errors are allowed on packaging, as are negative errors of 3% (for a package that weighs 300-500g, like six large eggs).

So if the new rules do come in, an egg producer who wished to comply with them at zero cost could just add ‘weight 385g’ to all their boxes of large eggs, and otherwise carry on as before.

Meanwhile, an egg producer who wanted to emphasise the fact that their large eggs were super-large could put the actual weight if they chose, based on the grading by weight that they would have done anyway. Obviously, this would require more complicated software for labelling; whether the producer views it as worthwhile or not depends on whether they reckon it’ll help them make money. Like, erm, most commercial decisions…

Update: John Harrison of Allotment.co.uk has helpfully clarified the (current and not planned to change) rules for small producers in comments:

It’s currently perfectly legal to engage in farm gate sales (or front door sales for backgarden chicken keepers) so long as you do not grade the eggs and provide a use-by date.

This means the box sold at the door of six eggs will be various sizes, which is actually quite useful when cooking. Some things a small egg is perfect for and you can hardly use ‘half a large egg’. The useby date is generally just a matter of adding 30 days to the laid date.

Home producers do not need to stamp the eggs etc. It’s when you supply shops etc that the weight of regulation comes in.