It’s pointless to ask whether porn “caused” Mark Bridger to kill April Jones. All we can ever do, in these situations, is ask whether something makes something else more likely, statistically speaking. In this case, does porn make sexual violence more likely? The Guardian has decided, in startlingly emphatic style, that it does. Its leader,…
Month: May 2013
Captain Monbiot and the final war against sheep
Captain Monbiot placed his witch-hazel helmet on his head, and adjusted the hemp straps on his wicker breastplate. His battleaxe Gaia, fashioned from old aluminium cans, felt reassuringly heavy in his hands. He turned it over, admiring, as was his ritual before combat, the runes inscribed upon it: PREDATOR; COLD-BLOODED DAEMON; DISCIPLE OF ORION. And…
There changing they’re mind about correct spelling and good grammar at Oxford University
Something of a fuss earlier over the importance of speeling and rightly use of the grammars. Simon Horobin, a witless, pig-ignorant texting teenager – sorry, “professor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford”, it says here – says that grammar doesn’t matter, that spelling doesn’t matter, and that we can all spell words however we like….
Climate change: we’re not doomed quite yet
From Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph: New research suggesting that carbon dioxide affects the climate less than we believed gives us more time to reassess our strategy Have we been granted a reprieve in the battle against global warming? If research by Alexander Otto and colleagues at Oxford University is to be believed, the climate is less…
Treat the Woolwich attack like any other murder. Turning the killer into an anti-hero risks creating copycats
There was an act of terrorism in Woolwich yesterday. An act which will stay burned into the national consciousness for years. A horrific act, but an undeniably effective one. It wasn’t what you may think it was. It wasn’t the vicious murder of a man in south-east London by two young Islamists. It was the…
Stephen King has the wrong villain – it’s not the ebook
From Thursday’s Daily Telegraph: What have you got against ebooks, Stephen King? Or, rather more interestingly, what terrible, frightening thing happened in the past 13 years which has turned you against them? Mr King, the great horror (among other things) writer, has taken some time out from instilling a lifelong fear of clowns in his…
A response to Lord Tebbit, on the subject of gay marriage and lesbian queens
The internet is having one of its periodic spasms of outrage-hilarity over some comments my colleague Lord Tebbit made to The Guardian this morning. On the subject of gay marriage, he said: When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a…
It’s not ‘only banter’, it is a threat to civilisation
My Sunday Telegraph column: “There was a bit of banter which went too far,”said a Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council employee last week. What was the banter? Was it perhaps a slightly off-colour joke? An ungallant remark made to a female colleague? A spittle-flecked racist tirade? No: the “banter” was a manager sinking her…
Equality for aristocrats
Take a seat: what I am about to say might shock you. There have been grumblings, recently, that the British nobility is not the bastion of egalitarianism that we believed it to be. I know, it’s startling. But this week a small group of downtrodden aristocracy wrote to The Daily Telegraph, describing the system as…
Depressing: just nine per cent of Britons trust stats over our own experience (though most of us won’t believe that)
Fifty-eight per cent of Britons between 16 and 75 believe that if you flip a coin twice, the probability of getting two heads is 50 per cent. Fifty-four per cent of Britons are “fairly confident” in their ability to use data and numbers. If the Ipsos-Mori poll from which this is taken was accurate, it…
The eight worst sentences in Dan Brown’s Inferno
[ooyala id=”hweWhsYjqm8BkRulM_HHTOgLdYEn35-t” ] A few years ago, I wrote a piece called Dan Brown’s 20 Worst Sentences. Because I’m not all that good at this writing stuff myself, there were actually 21 of them, and they were phrases, not sentences. But nonetheless it amused a few people. Other people, though, were furious. A few of…
Commander Hadfield: a real-life space oddity
From Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph: Chris Hadfield, retiring commander of the International Space Station, is not just an unlikely pop star, he’s a spokesman for the cosmos, says Tom Chivers For there he is, sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing left to do. Or not much,…
Tom Chivers 