WiP on Truth

So here is a work in progress of what i'm doing at the min

Introduction

So I have an idea to study the concept of truth. I will do this by examining 14 pieces of text written by the following wonderful authors.

1. Joe Mott It’s Wayne’s world 10th April
2. David Cameron Libya’s Pathway to Peace 14th April
3. David Mitchell Tory toffs should be criticised for
their policies – not their
backgrounds 3rd April
4. Tim Harford Don’t blame the (mostly) efficient
N markets hypothesis 16th April
5. Charlie Brooker
6. Charlie Scheen
7. Lord Digby jones
8. Ben Goldacre
9. Barrac Obama
10. Ben Goldacre
11. Nick Griffin
12. Nick Clegg
13. Peter Griffin Can’t touch me
14. Joe Strummer Career Opportunities

I was thinking comparing just the third, last and second from last paragraph or verse/chorus (I got bored and added songs by Joe Strummer and Peter Griffin) but think first I will collect all the data and see if I can just write a brief summary of each piece. I’ll try to write down what points the author is trying to make, what their argument is and what their evidence is. This methodology is almost sure to change though. Maybe once I´m finished I´ll even try and share the results with the authors and see if they can give me any feedback.

For all of the authors I have taken their most recent pieces today (or at least the day I started writing this) being Saturday the 16th of April, apart from Peter Griffin and Joe Strummer where I have chosen my favourite songs they have done. For the sake of completion this version has the raw text version of all my data here if anybody wants to check.

1. Joe Mott – It’s Wayne’s world (2011)
SO Wayne Rooney swore at a camera – big bloomin’ deal.
It was naughty and didn’t look very pleasant but was it really worthy of him losing a deal with a sponsor and being denied the right to work? In principle, yes, but in reality, no.

You know I’m no fan of the overpaid, stroppy Rooney but we live in a society where politicians openly lie to our faces on a daily basis. And they go unpunished.

I’m not talking about Jim Devine’s expenses scam, I mean complete about-turns in policies. But more important than that, we live in a world that is no longer concerned with etiquette…and all that stuff.

Wayne’s way is THE way. Extreme anger, foul language and a complete lack of respect for anyone or anything is the culture we have created.

In towns and cities all over this country, people act inappropriately and then become violently in-censed when they are told to behave themselves.

I took the Doris to London’s Natural History Museum the other day – because I’m smooth like that – and we encountered a group of nine-year-old children who typified what we’ve become.

As we stood looking at an ants’ nest in a glass cabinet, two of these cherubs – wearing uniforms from posh schools – rushed over and pushed between us and the exhibit.

After a few seconds of being uncomfortably squashed against the glass, the child looked up and said “Excuse me”, confidently expecting two grown adults to move for her.

“I was here first,” was my missus’ reply.

I was too gobsmacked to say anything. Not as surprised as the youngster though. Wide-eyed with amazement, she stared at us, before moving away.

A minute later, another child ran up and – not pushing in – stated loudly: “I was here first.” The bloody cheek! Why have we allowed it to come to this?

We both swore we’d bring kids up properly if we had them – with manners. But then the truth struck me: that would be doing them a disservice.

A well-mannered child who didn’t push others out of the way and kick off the moment they were told “No” would simply be a victim.

A sheep in a field of wolves. My offspring shall take what they want and lash out when challenged, to ensure anyone who disagrees with them is left more shaken than a Japanese beach goer.

Of course we mustn’t really train our nippers to be brutal horrors but we have to prepare them for the real world. The “F” word no longer shocks anyone.

Gordon Ramsay made a TV career out of it. And Rooney is the true face of Britain today. Deal with it.
2. David Cameron - Libya’s Pathway to Peace (Cameron, Obama & Sarkozy 2011)
Together with our NATO allies and coalition partners, the United States, France and Britain have been united from the start in responding to the crisis in Libya, and we are united on what needs to happen in order to end it.
Even as we continue our military operations today to protect civilians in Libya, we are determined to look to the future. We are convinced that better times lie ahead for the people of Libya, and a pathway can be forged to achieve just that.
We must never forget the reasons why the international community was obliged to act in the first place. As Libya descended into chaos with Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi attacking his own people, the Arab League called for action. The Libyan opposition called for help. And the people of Libya looked to the world in their hour of need. In an historic resolution, the United Nations Security Council authorized all necessary measures to protect the people of Libya from the attacks upon them. By responding immediately, our countries, together with an international coalition, halted the advance of Qaddafi’s forces and prevented the bloodbath that he had promised to inflict upon the citizens of the besieged city of Benghazi.
Tens of thousands of lives have been protected. But the people of Libya are still suffering terrible horrors at Qaddafi’s hands each and every day. His rockets and shells rained down on defenseless civilians in Ajdabiya. The city of Misurata is enduring a medieval siege, as Qaddafi tries to strangle its population into submission. The evidence of disappearances and abuses grows daily.
Our duty and our mandate under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Qaddafi by force. But it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power. The International Criminal Court is rightly investigating the crimes committed against civilians and the grievous violations of international law. It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government. The brave citizens of those towns that have held out against forces that have been mercilessly targeting them would face a fearful vengeance if the world accepted such an arrangement. It would be an un-conscionable betrayal.
Furthermore, it would condemn Libya to being not only a pariah state, but a failed state too. Qadda-fi has promised to carry out terrorist attacks against civilian ships and airliners. And because he has lost the consent of his people any deal that leaves him in power would lead to further chaos and lawlessness. We know from bitter experience what that would mean. Neither Europe, the region, or the world can afford a new safe haven for extremists.
There is a pathway to peace that promises new hope for the people of Libya — a future without Qaddafi that preserves Libya’s integrity and sovereignty, and restores her economy and the prosper-ity and security of her people. This needs to begin with a genuine end to violence, marked by deeds not words. The regime has to pull back from the cities it is besieging, including Ajdabiya, Misurata and Zintan, and return to their barracks. However, so long as Qaddafi is in power, NATO must maintain its operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds. Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new generation of leaders. In order for that transition to succeed, Qaddafi must go and go for good. At that point, the United Nations and its members should help the Libyan people as they rebuild where Qaddafi has destroyed — to repair homes and hospitals, to restore basic utilities, and to assist Libyans as they develop the institutions to underpin a prosperous and open society.
This vision for the future of Libya has the support of a broad coalition of countries, including many from the Arab world. These countries came together in London on March 29 and founded a Contact Group which met this week in Doha to support a solution to the crisis that respects the will of the Libyan people.
Today, NATO and our partners are acting in the name of the United Nations with an unprecedented international legal mandate. But it will be the people of Libya, not the U.N., who choose their new constitution, elect their new leaders, and write the next chapter in their history.
Britain, France and the United States will not rest until the United Nations Security Council resolu-tions have been implemented and the Libyan people can choose their own future.
Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States. David Cameron is prime minister of Brit-ain and Nicolas Sarkozy is president of France.
3. David Mitchell – Tory toffs should be criticised for their policies – not for their backgrounds (2011)
A new series of Would I Lie to You?, a TV panel show on which I'm a team captain, has just been recorded. The other captain, Lee Mack, is similar to me in many ways: we're both comedians; we're about the same age; we write as well as perform; we have both acted in sketch shows and sitcoms as well as appearing in panel games; we're both team captains on Would I Lie to You?. But, for the comic purposes of the show, our differences are emphasised. Since Lee comes from Southport and has a Lancastrian accent and I'm a southerner who sounds vaguely RP, he's characterised as a woodbine-smoking Jarrow marcher whose whippet died of rickets and I'm Bertie Wooster but with a less burning sense of social injustice. We eat only tripe and swan respectively.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
Comic stereotyping is handy on shows like that. It means other panellists can tap into the audience's cultural assumptions about being "northern" or "posh", which is easier than searching for shared assumptions about our inconveniently specific personalities, and allows us either to play up to the stereotypes, to subvert them or to pretend to be irritated when Rob Brydon makes reference to them, before countering with a remark based on lazy stereotyping of the Welsh. (I'm half Welsh myself so I lose a little part of my soul every time I do that, but then getting a laugh can fill the most cavernous vacuums in the soul.)
This is all fine as a joke-generating technique. Everyone's taking it as well as dishing it out and, be-cause our primary aim is the shared one of making a comedy show, we can emphasise differences without being divisive. Problems only arise when people start to take stereotyping seriously: many a true word may be spoken in jest but there's also a lot of exaggeration and nonsense.
The government suffers from this. There are several men in the cabinet who've inherited money and been sent to expensive schools: toffs basically. That provides comic opportunities to take the piss out of them, and the handful of true words spoken in those many jests imply that ministers' wealthy backgrounds might make them act in the interests of money and privilege, not those of the people who voted for them, let alone the broader electorate. And that their privilege-skewed life experienc-es mean they won't know what Britain is really like if you're poor, so that, even if they have com-passionate instincts, they will never have been confronted by the injustices to provoke that compas-sion. So we joke about little Lord Fauntleroy sipping champagne in a cash-lined peasant-skin yacht, squeaking: "No more benefits!"
But it's wrong to infer from the jokes that being born into a rich family means you're a bad person or that judging politicians on their backgrounds rather than their actions is fair. That attitude leads to behaviour such as that exhibited by Labour in the Crewe and Nantwich byelection campaign of 2008. Labour activists targeted the wealth of the Tory candidate rather than anything he said, mocked him by dressing up in top hats and used the slogan: "Do you want a Tory con man or a Dunwoody?", referring to the fact that their candidate was the daughter of the late Gwyneth Dun-woody, the previous MP.
The hypocrisy of this call to heredity over riches is breathtaking. The justification for suspicion of the posh is the fear that their money or connections may give them unwarranted advantages. But that's not an accusation you're on safe ground making if you're the last MP's daughter.
I reckon it's OK to be snide about Tory poshness while complaining about the cuts, as long as you're clear that it's the cuts you think are unacceptable, not the poshness. But I'm slightly worried that some people are forgetting that distinction and, as someone who's often been called posh, that makes me nervous. So does a tweet I was sent last Saturday, the day of both the cuts protests and the Boat Race: "you and the Tristrams off to watch plummy cunts row today? [I wasn't.] A day for those with the means to help themselves."
I know it's unwise to take any individual remark from the internet seriously but, from what I can tell, this tweeter isn't alone in lazily associating the Boat Race, and indeed anything to do with Ox-bridge, with unaccountable privilege. As someone who went to Cambridge, this makes me feel sad – and a bit guilty that, for ease of comedy, I've allowed myself to be stereotyped as posher than I am, in a way that might allow people to assume that Cambridge is more of a bastion of privilege than it is.
I'm not denying that the average Oxbridge student is higher up the class system than the average citizen, but that doesn't make it right to characterise those universities as higher education equiva-lents of Eton and Harrow when they're state-funded institutions. They used to be free to anyone who achieved the required grades and, even now, they'll cost no more than many of their less eminent rivals. Publicly referring to their annual rowing race as if it's an aristocrats-only water fight only worsens the regrettable, and for many years diminishing, class imbalance within them. It will put off applicants who would both benefit from and benefit Oxbridge.
Our society is deeply divided. Occupying Fortnum & Mason, a luxury food shop flourishing despite austerity, is a neat way of illustrating that. Pointing out that some people chose to watch a student sporting fixture instead of protesting is not. Anyway, as a Tory newspaper noted with consternation, at least one of the Fortnum occupants, Adam Ramsay, is incredibly posh himself: his family have a castle. The paper implied that, because of his birth, his opposition to government cuts was hypocrit-ical – after all, everything's all right for him. In response he said: "I think people with all kinds of backgrounds are starting to see that these cuts threaten to undermine our economy and ruin people's lives."
That's the key. People's backgrounds, or our inaccurate assumptions about them, mustn't be used as a reason to ignore what they say – to dismiss them with: "Well, you would say that!" By disregard-ing people's views as merely a product of their upbringing, you also absolve them of responsibility for them. You make George Osborne's rich family excuse his policies – he doesn't know any better, so he would do that. Well, it's not an excuse, even if it might be a reason. And speculating about that is much less important than listening to his arguments and explaining why they're wrong.
4. Tim Harford – Don’t blame the (mostly) efficient market hypothesis (2011)
I’m going to defend the poor old efficient markets hypothesis. Somebody has to. It’s been getting quite a pounding since the credit crunch began. David Wighton of The Times commented in January 2009, “The theory was officially declared dead at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There were no mourners.” In June of that year, Roger Lowenstein wrote in The Washington Post, “The upside of the current Great Recession is that it could drive a stake through the heart of the academic nostrum known as the efficient-market hypothesis.” More recently, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of The Road from Ruin, have argued that the EMH was partly responsible for the crisis.
It’s probably worth pausing for a moment to recall what the EMH actually means. It’s not a Reaganite claim about the superiority of free markets over government intervention; it’s a far nar-rower and more technical claim about the price of liquid assets such as shares or corporate bonds. It is, nevertheless, hugely important.
The EMH has several forms. The weakest says that not only is past performance no guarantee of future performance, but nothing about the way a share’s price has bounced around in the past tells you anything about how it will move in the future. The strongest says that the market price is the correct price: that all privately and publicly available information that might be relevant to the value of a share is already reflected in today’s price. The weak form tells you not to listen to stock pickers who point to recently soaring shares. The strong form tells you not to bother doing any research into shares, because it cannot possibly do you any good.
In its strong form, the EMH cannot always be true. (How would the market become so efficient, since no rational participants would bother with research?) Perhaps it is never true, although as my colleague John Kay has pointed out, the difference between the EMH usually being true and always being true may be difference enough to explain the likes of Warren Buffett.
But did the EMH lead to the crisis? Not directly, for sure. The first thing the EMH would tell you is to be suspicious of bond salesmen who claim that structured subprime vehicles can offer high re-wards and almost no risk. I think it is telling that according to Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short, some savvy investors who wanted to bet against subprime mortgages hesitated to do so, for fear that they had missed a trick. They instinctively took the EMH seriously, and only bet heavily against subprime after they had met the subprime enthusiasts and concluded they really were as foolish in person as their strategies suggested. The EMH encourages scepticism, not gullibility, about sure-thing investments.
It is more defensible to suggest that the EMH worked wickedness indirectly, through the attitude of regulators. Matthew Bishop tells me that he sees three ways in which the EMH was responsible for the crisis. First, it seduced Alan Greenspan into believing either that bubbles never happened, or that if they did there was no hope that the Federal Reserve could spot them and intervene. Second, the EMH motivated “mark-to-market” accounting rules, which put banks in an impossible situation when prices for their assets evaporated. Third, the EMH encouraged the view that executives could not manipulate the share prices of their companies, so it was perfectly reasonable to use stock op-tions for executive pay. These are cogent points. Regulators, then, should be wary of the EMH.
Yet I remain convinced that the efficient markets hypothesis should be a lodestar for ordinary inves-tors. It suggests the following strategy: choose a range of shares or low-cost index trackers and in-vest in them gradually without trying to be too clever. If only a few more bankers had taken such advice seriously.




Peter Griffin – can´t touch me (Youtube 2011a) lyrics taken Metrolyrics (2011)

Aahhh Can't touch me, can't touch me
Just like the bad guy from Lethal Weapon 2
I've got diplomatic immunity, so Hammer you can't sue
I can write graffiti, even jaywalk in the street
I can riot, loot, not give a hoot, and touch your sister's teat
Can't touch me!
Can't touch me!
Can't touch me

Stop! Peter time
I'm a big shot, there's no doubt
Light a fire then pee it out
Don't like it, kiss my rump
Just for a minute, let's all do the bump
Can't touch me!
Yea do the Peter Griffin Bump
Can't touch me!

I'm Presidential Peter
Interns think I'm hot
Don't care if your handicapped
I'll still park in your spot
I've been around the world
From Hartford to Backbay
It's Peter, go Peter, MC Peter, yo Peter
Let's see Regis rap this way
Can't touch me!
(spoken) Except you, you can touch me.

Joe Strummer, Career Opportunities (youtube 2011b) lyrics taken from Lyricsdepot.com (2011)

The offered me the office, offered me the
shop
They said I'd better take anything they'd got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

I hate the army an' I hate the R.A.F.
I don't wanna go fighting in the tropical heat
I hate the civil service rules
And I won't open letter bombs for you

Bus driver....ambulance man....ticket inspector

They're gonna have to introduce conscription
They're gonna have to take away my prescription
If they wanna get me making toys
If they wanna get me, well, I got no choice

Careers
Careers
Careers

Ain't never gonna knock

References

Cameron, D., Obama, B. & Sarkozy, N. (2011) ‘Libya’s Pathway to Peace’ available from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15iht-edlibya15.html accessed [17 Apr 2011]

Harford, T. (2011) ‘Don’t blame the (mostly) efficient markets hypothesis’ available from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d51d6f5c-656d-11e0-b150-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Jms19AD7 accessed [17 Apr 2011]

Mitchell, D. (2011) ‘Tory toffs should be criticised for their policies - not their backgrounds’ available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/03/george-osborne-oxbridge-david-mitchell accessed [17 Apr 2011]

Mott, J. (2011) ‘Wrong end of the schtick’ available from http://www.dailystar.co.uk/posts/view/186564/Wrong-end-of-the-schtick/ accessed [17 Apr 2011]

Lyricsdepot 2011 ‘Career opportunities’ available from http://www.lyricsdepot.com/the-clash/career-opportunities.html accessed [16 Apr 2011]

Metrolyrics 2011 ‘Can’t touch me’ available from http://www.metrolyrics.com/cant-touch-me-lyrics-peter-griffin.html accessed [16 Apr 2011].

Youtube 2011a ‘Can’t touch me’ available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAzwgAUGzM8 accessed [16 Apr 2011]

Youtube 2011b ‘Career opportunities’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZOrkPIZ1JU accessed [16 Apr 2011]