An Open Letter to Boots

You may have heard recently that the Parliamentary Subcommittee on Science and Technology heard a panel of oral evidence about homeopathy. It’s a very good watch and I recommend it, even if just to see how subcommittees work (they ask some very good questions). You can watch it here on the House of Commons website, although it’s a bit fiddly with plugins and things, I had to try several times before it worked, and do bear in mind that the player takes a few seconds to load.

Anyway as a result of this, I understand that the Subcommittee will be recommending to the government that they stop funding homeopathy and that they do not make an exception for homeopathic products in terms of licencing.

One of the members of the panel was Paul Bennett from Boots, who stated basically that as long as people want the homeopathic remedies, Boots has no problem selling it. The Merseyside Skeptics Society has written an open letter to Boots which has already been picked up by Skepchicks and Richard Dawkins. I’m posting it here because I agree with it.

There is also more information about this case on the new blog A Glasgow Skeptic, which I’ll also be adding to my blogroll.

An Open Letter to Alliance Boots

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The Boots brand is synonymous with health care in the United Kingdom. Your website speaks proudly about your role as a health care provider and your commitment to deliver exceptional patient care. For many people, you are their first resource for medical advice; and their chosen dispensary for prescription and non-prescription medicines. The British public trusts Boots.

However, in evidence given recently to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, you admitted that you do not believe homeopathy to be efficacious. Despite this, homeopathic products are offered for sale in Boots pharmacies – many of them bearing the trusted Boots brand.

Not only is this two-hundred-year-old pseudo-therapy implausible, it is scientifically absurd. The purported mechanisms of action fly in the face of our understanding of chemistry, physics, pharmacology and physiology. As you are aware, the best and most rigorous scientific research concludes that homeopathy offers no therapeutic effect beyond placebo, but you continue to sell these products regardless because “customers believe they work”. Is this the standard you set for yourselves?

The majority of people do not have the time or inclination to check whether the scientific literature supports the claims of efficacy made by products such as homeopathy. We trust brands such as Boots to check the facts for us, to provide sound medical advice that is in our interest and supply only those products with a demonstrable medical benefit.

We don’t expect to find products on the shelf at our local pharmacy which do not work.

Not only are these products ineffective, they can also be dangerous. Patients may delay seeking proper medical assistance because they believe homeopathy can treat their condition. Until recently, the Boots website even went so far as to tell patients that “after taking a homeopathic medicine your symptoms may become slightly worse,” and that this is “a sign that the body’s natural energies have started to counteract the illness”. Advice such as this directly encourages patients to wait before seeking real medical attention, even when their condition deteriorates.

We call upon Boots to withdraw all homeopathic products from your shelves. You should not be involved in the sale of ineffective products, because your customers trust you to do what is right for their health. Surely you agree that your commitment to excellent patient care is better served by supplying only those products whose claims can be substantiated by rigorous scientific research? Or do you really believe that Boots should be in the business of selling placebos to the sick and the injured?

The support lent by Boots to this quack therapy contributes directly to its acceptance as a valid medical treatment by the British public, acceptance it does not warrant and support it does not deserve. Please do the right thing, and remove this bogus therapy from your shelves.

Yours sincerely,
Merseyside Skeptics Society

Should the BBC have hosted the BNP?

Before I start, because this won’t be too long, a few pieces of news in case you haven’t heard:

1. Last week, Simon Singh was given permission to appeal against the ruling on meaning in the case against the British Chiropractic Association. That means David Eady’s ruling on the meaning of the word ‘bogus’ might not stand. In a stunning display of stupidity, the BCA also accused Singh of attacking them maliciously on their website, which gives him the option of countersuing, which inimitable law expert Jack of Kent reckons will bring the case to an end. I hope that doesn’t happen except as a last resort. As always, check out Jack of Kent’s blog for more information.

2. Over at the Friendly Humanist, Tim’s wife Deena has recently given birth to their second child, a healthy boy named Javan Allan Mills. Congratulations Tim, I’m made up.

3. Last week the Daily Mail published a disgusting column by Jan Moir on the death of Steven Gately, which drew links between his homosexuality, his lifestyle, his death and the deaths of other gay celebrities, saying there was nothing natural about his death (I mean it can’t possibly have been, after all he was gay), even though that’s exactly what the coroner has found. Fortunately the British public aren’t as homophobic as she is, and a record number of over 22,000 people have complained to the press complaints commission about the article. We’ll see what comes of it.

Anyway onto the issue. Last Thursday the BBC’s Question Time, a show during which members of the public can put questions to member of a panel including public figures like politicians, featured Nick Griffin, the racist and homophobic leader of the British Nationalist Party. I’m not in the UK so I couldn’t watch it live on the web, having to rely on Youtube the next afternoon to find out how it went.

I understand from discussions in forums that there has been a fair bit of controversy over whether the BBC should have allowed Griffin to appear in the show. There have been protests outside BBC headquarters, and the main claim is that it gives a platform to extremist and offensive views, and may lead to a further rise in popularity for the BNP.

This question was brought up at the end of the show, and the opinion of some of the panelists was that in our democracy we enjoy freedom of speech and under that freedom, the BNP has a right to express its opinions and the BBC has the right to broadcast them. I agree. The thing about freedom of speech is that you can’t just choose what kinds of opinions can be expressed, you have to include things that the majority might find offensive. Otherwise it would just be a tyranny of the majority. Just as the BNP has a right to their opinions I have a right to point out why they are wrong and express my opinion too.

But of course it’s not that simple. Mainstream media outlets have to realise that they have a wide audience and they have to take responsibility for what they broadcast or publish, especially when some things are put across as fact or as a voice of authority. This is one of the reasons why I objected to Jan Moir’s article above, she claims that there was nothing natural about the death when there was, and her frankly disgusting views were given a veneer of respectability by their prominent position on the pages of a mainstream newspaper. It’s not good enough.

So, does that mean I don’t think the BBC should have allowed the BNP on TV? No. The show pulled no punches; where someone tried to chat shit or avoid the question, they were pulled up on it, whether it was that Tory with the weird accent, Jack Straw, or Nick Griffin. Admittedly it was Griffin more than anyone else, but that’s just because his views are so extreme, they needed pulling up more often than anyone else. That’s one of the reasons why I think his complaint that they changed the format will fail. The format consists of questions posed by the public. Clearly the public wanted to challenge Griffin on his views. Planting other questions on the postal strike against what the majority wanted to focus on would have been changing the format, so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He was shown to be the racist homophobic fool he is, despite his attempts to lie to the audience, so the BBC did not give his voice respectability and neither did they allow him to present his lies as facts. In that sense, I think they were quite responsible in their broadcasting.

We gets email!

So like I say I’m not having much luck finding humanisty stuff around here in Malaga. I did find a(nother) cool video by QualiaSoup which I think I’ll be blogging at some point, but here’s something a little closer to home. The Humanist Society at UoE regularly hold a prayer contest, which goes like this. The morning of the contest, a member of the society randomly generates a number, which goes into a sealed envelope. Noone else knows the number. Two other members of the society run the contest, getting people to choose a ‘god’ which could be anyone, and pray to this god for intervention whilst they roll the dice, trying to get as close as possible to the randomly generated, and unknown, number. Whoever wins, well then their God is obviously the one to pray to for divine intervention! Last year we also ran a parallel experiment using the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, where people had to guess the weight of a candle, the object being that none of the Gods were right, but the general guess of humanity was more or less on the money. Harmless, you might say.

Anyway so someone’s complained and I’m going to take their complaint apart piece by piece. I should mention that I haven’t actually sent this email back. You may call this two-faced but a response has already been sent from the society and I think it would be inappropriate to send another which probably says more or less the same thing but a bit more diplomatically. But if this person decides to read it here I’ll be happy to address any other complaints.

“okay.. this Wednesday at your freshers fair one of members decided to taunt the other religions at the fair by requesting four digit numbers and names of gods, then rolling a series of dice to prove that the peoples gods did not care.”

That’s not actually true, we don’t do this to taunt (in fact I don’t believe the members of the religious societies I know would even be bothered by it), there are indeed many other reasons why we do it. It demonstrates that the supernatural is difficult to quantify and measure, it makes people realise that there is more than one god out there on the market, it encourages people to question the world around them, it shows that if you’re going to make a claim about divine intervention, you should back it up with evidence. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates a sense of humour.

“This was a vague and frankly stupid attempt to taunt people of faith and to demonstrate your own faith as superior (and yes I mean faith in the same way that Richard Dawkins, the confessed atheist, has faith). It was
purely a random attempt to insult and aggravate and proved only that you were little, and did not understand your own cause.”

As I’ve said, we didn’t do this to taunt anyone. Humanists do not have faith. Please try to understand this, because it’s an argument that comes up time and time again. Faith is believing something without evidence. Humanism and atheism are not faith, they are simply a lack of belief in God (or that and more, in the case of humanism) since there is no evidence to demonstrate that there is one. There is no leap of faith involved. If we were to say “there definitely is no God”, then yes, that would be a faith position, because we couldn’t back that up with evidence, because you can’t prove the non-existence of an invisible being that seems determined not to be detected. But in the absense of evidence we maintain the neutral position of not believing until sufficient evidence is supplied. Google “Russell’s teapot” or “the invisible pink unicorn” for more information.

Yes, many of us are passionate about our lack of belief, but that is because we see the harm that religion often does to society and the way it affects the rational thinking of the population, as well as in some cases the public understanding of science, but this does not make it a faith position. Some even lean to the side that the evidence (such as the Problem of Evil), points to there not being a god, certainly not in the sense that the Abrahamic faiths tend to see it. But again, this is only going where the evidence takes us, there is no faith involved.

“As you claim to be humanist, a belief/devotion to the respect of humankind as a whole and one that accepts that people, even those of faith, should be approached with compassion, I would like to hear a public apology from your society for its members actions.”

I wonder if you actually heard any of our members directly insulting anyone else in the room? I was not present but it would be very out of character of any member of the society. What this experiment did was challenge an idea, the power of prayer, not an individual. Religion is an idea just like any other, it is not protected from criticism. We do not hold respect for any idea, not even our own, because if you can’t defend your ideas from criticism, then what’s the point in holding them in the first place? The only apology you will get is that we’re sorry you think independently-minded students need to be protected from our gentle questioning of an extraordinary claim such as the power of prayer.
“Should this not be forth-coming I shall label your society as obviously only intended to offend and shall report its actions to the student societies council (who ban societies based upon racist or discriminatory views) and the various humanist organisations across the UK and request that your society should be shut down.”

I fail to see how the experiment was discriminatory. Anyone who wished to take part was allowed to, and those who declined to (only 6 out of over a hundred) were not asked again. EUSA and the student societies council are well aware of our group and what we do, and I’m certain that any attempt to have the society shut down would result in failure. We comply with EUSA rules and enjoy the freedom of speech that being a member of a liberal democracy involves. The hypersensitivity of others is no reason to suppress freedom of speech.

Furthermore if you think this is sufficient justification to shut down a society, perhaps you should consider making a complaint about the majority of the religious societies, many of which explicitly state that anyone who doesn’t believe as they do will suffer for eternity. We do not take this seriously, although it is certainly much more offensive than what we were doing at the Fresher’s Fair.

“Before you ask.. I’m an agnostic (In the words of Old Harry’s Game an Atheist without courage in their conviction). However I have more respect for a Christian evangelist who believes he is trying to save my soul that an atheist who preaches just to taunt me because they believe they are right.”

Atheists who argue against religion do not do so because they believe they are right. They do it because they see the bad effects that holding religious belief can cause, some of which I have already mentioned. They do it simply to search for the truth, just as a scientist would publish a paper refuting the ideas of a well-respected theory. Ideas, as I have said, are not immune to criticism, they should invite it! I have little respect for someone who makes the claim that my soul is in danger, and then uses that claim to convince me of that same claim’s truth, without consideration for the evidence. If it held any sway with me then I would simply believe the faith which has the greatest penalty for disbelief. I would expect anyone to respect more someone who strives for the truth via science and evidence, than someone who gets their truth from an Iron Age text or a nice feeling in their stomach, for example. I also presume you would respect such a person more than someone who denies women their rights, or who discriminates against gay, lesbian and transsexual people, or who preaches to children that they are going to burn in hell unless they adopt a certain lifestyle?

Skepticamp 2009

We had an excellent night at the Edinburgh Skepticamp 2009. The two Alexes gave presentations on statistical fallacies and paranormal investigations, respectively, whilst someone I’d never met before called Terry spoke about how best to win over the believers, and I concentrated on alternative medicine with homoeopathy being the main focus.

It was the last Q&A section that started the most vigorous debate, where we were speaking about whether it would be easier to win over a fundamentalist or a moderate believer, with all of the speakers up on stage. One man stood up and asked the question “What’s wrong with being a believer?” to which someone on stage replied that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong (depending on what you mean by ‘wrong’), as long as it doesn’t affect other things. The man agreed, but continued with the sentence “it’s wrong for religionists to force their beliefs on others, just as it’s wrong for skepticism to be forced on others”.

This struck me as rather curious because he was comparing two very different things, religion being a set of dogmatic beliefs, and science and skepticism being a method best suited to acquiring the truth. So I said so and he replied that, for example, ‘evolutionism’ was a belief that we were forcing on others. Somehow then we got into a discussion about the evidence for evolution and established that although it’s not a fact, it’s about as close to a fact as we have in science. But this man maintained that since it is not a fact it should not be forced onto others.

I struggle to see what his point was. Was he seriously suggesting that it’s just as morally wrong to teach a child about evolution, with all the evidence in favour of it, as to teach the child about creationism which has no evidence for it whatsoever? It’s obviously more wrong to ‘force’ a lie onto someone than a truth, and although we can’t possibly know for sure whether something is true, that’s not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. We can put them in order of what is more likely to be true, based on the available evidence, and we do know that some claims cannot be true based on the current evidence.

But that’s missing the larger point that skeptics don’t force their beliefs on others! Skepticism is about criticising other people’s beliefs and claims, picking them apart and saying “this is unlikely to be true because A, B, C.” We may then propose another belief that is better supported by the evidence, but skeptics would be more than happy to defend their beliefs from critical argument, if only because at the end of the process we’ll be one step closer to the truth! It’s all about the free interchange of ideas, something that skepticism and science do well, because they are always changing, and something that dogmatic belief systems like religion do very badly, since they don’t change at all.

I’m reminded of this video that PZ Myers posted on Pharyngula this week of Wendy Wright from American Women Concerned for America or something. I only watched the first part because I’m short on time right now, but that’s enough to see that she’s asking for a ridiculously high level of evidence for evolution (her version of evidence is ‘if you can’t put it in my hand, it’s not evidence’), whilst allowing her own beliefs to slip completely under the skepticism radar. Take a look, here’s the first part and I’m sure you can find the rest of them.

Simon Singh Support Meeting

On Monday there was a meeting in London in support of Simon Singh in his libel case. We were hoping that he’d reveal whether he’s appealing or not, but unfortunately he and his lawyers have not decided yet, but it looks like he might be leaning that way. Anyway I wasn’t there so I’ll just post up some coverage here.

HT Martin at the Lay Scientist for that.

This is an editorial piece from the New Scientist.

Dave Gorman (who was seen speaking on the video above) has a blog post on the meeting and surrounding issues.

New Humanist has also covered the meeting in some depth.

There’s now a lot of internet coverage of this case and the surrounding issues of the broken English libel laws. A particularly good roundup of the response can be found over at God Knows What. I urge you to go and read up around the issue and if it angers you as much as it does me, write to your MP about it.

Climate Change Rally

2 new links on the blogroll today, the first is Richard Wiseman’s blog. He’s the Professor for the Public Understanding of Psychology at Hertfordshire University, and his blog is updated daily with psychological phenomena and a weekly puzzle. The second is the Edinburgh Skeptics blog, a blog from the group which organises the Skeptics in the Pub in Edinburgh.

Anyway so today after my exam early this afternoon I went to a Stop Climate Chaos rally at Holyrood. Here’s a few pictures. It was really well organised and well attended, with the aim of getting the Climate Change bill passed in the Scottish Parliament ahead of the Copenhagen conference. That looks likely, and I’m sure with such a huge dedicated support base, progress will be made. However, on my way home I went to the supermarket and decided to check where everything I bought was from, and what shocked me most was the vegetables! I’m trying to cut down how much meat I eat so I’m buying more (and more unusual) veg than I normally do to go into meals. But almost everything I could find was grown abroad, and not just in fairly nearby places, but places like Kenya, Peru, Egypt, Senegal and Thailand! This wasn’t very complicated stuff either, just babycorn, spring onions and different types of beans. Surely it’s possible to grow this stuff in the UK, or at least Europe, with it’s diverse climate? Unfortunately not much is in season at the moment, but here’s a chart showing what’s in season in Britain at different parts of the year. Hopefully the pictures won’t make this post too weird, I can never get them to work properly.

Religulous

Last night the Humanists went to watch Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary about religious belief. If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the trailer:

We all thoroughly enjoyed it and it was very funny. Actually a lot of the laughs weren’t even at the expense of religious belief. So for example when some truckers in a chapel put their hands on Bill to pray for him when he was leaving, he walked away and said “Hey! Where’s my wallet?”, and after a conversation about hallucination, he told the cannabis-worshipping Dutch guy that his hair was on fire, and he shat himself. Brilliant. Some of the  best parts were when someone said something stupid or ironic and he just sat in silence, like in the trailer where the senator for Arkansas says “well, you don’t need to take an IQ test to get into Congress”, or when Ken Ham said “Well, he is God. Are you God?” as if he’d won some big point, and Bill just shook his head and quietly said no.

Now I’ve heard a lot of people saying that it was biased, that it only dealt with the craziest beliefs, that it didn’t poke fun at atheists too (‘Schindler’s List’ didn’t show the Nazi side of the story either, so what?), and I agree! The whole thing was slanted against religious belief, it was obviously edited to make the people he was interviewing look more stupid, but it’s a comedy documentary about how ridiculous religious belief is! It’s kind of in the title! Besides, you can’t deny that some of the things those people said, no matter how they were edited or what context they were in, were ridiculously stupid. Things like “I’m gonna go up to heaven and come back on a white horse!”, or ‘No, it wasn’t in here, Mohammed kept the winged horse outside in the courtyard!’, or that the Messiah was going to come, raise people on the Mount of Olives from the dead, hop over a wall and go through the Golden Gates. WTF?!

Anyone out there, especially theists, I encourage you to go and see it. Maybe it’ll show you a glimpse of how ridiculous some of your beliefs seem to people on the other side of the fence, people who don’t just make some of their beliefs immune to scrutiny or evidence, just because it comes under the label of ‘religion’ or ‘faith’. Maybe you can laugh when he pokes fun at a different religion, but remember that they’ll be doing the same thing to you too.

At one point Bill seemed to be making the point that lots of religious people will happily laugh at beliefs like Mormonism and Scientology saying they’re stupid, but they need to take a look in the mirror! Compared to the daftness of their own religious beliefs, Mormonism and Scientology are only a tiny bit more stupid. I sketched a quick chart, hopefully it’ll come out ok.

(You may ask why I don’t think Islam is as stupid as the other Abrahamic religions. Well this isn’t exactly to scale, I think it’s less less stupid than Scientology is more stupid [if you can follow that], but at least we are more certain that Muhammed existed than we are Jesus did.)

So yeah, go see it.

The AHS Launch

I fully intended to write this as soon as I got back from London, but one thing and another have stacked up and I’m doing this to take a break from essaying. It’s a relief to write my own opinion on something I care about instead of just the opinion that will get me marks on something boring.

So on Thursday, Andre and I travelled down to London to represent the Humanist Society at the official launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies at Conway Hall, home of the Ethical Society. The AHS is the umbrella union we were talking about creating a year ago in order to share ideas and resources with all the other irreligious societies around the UK. We held the inaugural conference in David Hume Tower over the summer, and Stuart and Greg attended the second conference in Leeds. It was a superb venue, and one that the AHS will be able to use again for other big events in the future.

The launch itself was attended by such prominent figures such as Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee and Maryam Namazie. I already had Dawkins sign my copy of Unweaving the Rainbow at the Edinburgh Science Festival last year, but that’s who most of the others were really excited about. Instead I got a nice message in my copy of AC Grayling’s Against All Gods.

Each of the speakers gave really supportive messages of the idea for the AHS and encouraged us to work as an ideas factory for the movement as a whole. Dawkins also spoke about how evangelical religious organisations did not belong on university campuses as they poisoned minds and disrupted education. Perhaps more importantly, he said that the AHS would be well place to apply for funding from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Apparently this was a particularly difficult charity to set up, and at one point he needed to clarify to the government what benefits science and reason bring to society, as opposed to religious groups which have no problem.

In any case it was good to finally meet the people I’ve been corresponding with over the internet for some time. We’re thinking the next conference should be in Warwick, but we’ll see. Keep your eyes peeled for media coverage (although a lot of it has already passed – we got a 2 page spread in the Independent and a fair bit of coverage on BBC Radio). More information at:

http://www.ahsstudents.org.uk/
http://www.secularportal.com/
http://www.humanism.org.uk/meet-up/groups/student-groups/ahs

Be prepared for another post soon as I’ll crave procrastination and this is at least mildly useful.

Occupation update

Still here at George Square Theatre. At the moment we’re watching a film called Sands of Sorrow. It’s kind of boring so I thought I’d blog instead.

So today I spent most of the day outside speaking to non-student protestors. There’s a frustrating situation where the university is refusing to allow anyon who’s not a member of the university into the building. This means we have people showing up outside to show us support and join the occupation, realising they can’t do very much and moving on. It’s also freezing outside so people inside are reluctant to come out. That said we’ve had a core group of people coming to our stall outside to help us hand out flyers, and generally just to have a chat. I’ve been sitting outside each evening and the dedication of some people is astounding.

Last night after I blogged a group of musicians came and played us some brilliant original music, and then we had a really long meeting to discuss the university’s response, which they’d said was final. Again using the consensus decisionmaking process (something I’m really glad I’ve been introduced to), we decided that we’d done everything we could with this occupation, and acknowledged that we had achieved a lot of our aims. Those that we hadn’t achieved, or those that we thought we could achieve more with, it’s perhaps more feasible to act upon them through the normal channels, or through further demonstration in the future. For example the university thinks it would be unethical to “deny access” to graduate job opportunities at companies making arms used by Israel by banning them from careers fairs. Of course this argument doesn’t stand up at all, they’re not denying access, the access to the jobs is still there through normal channels. All banning them would do is stop the university indirectly condoning their actions. But we can better act against this by demonstrating at the careers fairs and working through EUSA. I think the majority of us knew it was time to leave.

Seeing as the university administration is not around during the weekend (particularly Melvyn Cornish and Tim O’Shea), we decided that we would leave on Monday morning before lectures start. In the meantime we’ve been using the space to try to mobilise more support, hold workshops, screen films and hold lectures, in order to keep momentum and create a group which is ready and willing to hold the university to account over what it’s agreed to do.

As part of this we held a demonstration outside the front of the building, attended by just short of 100 people in total. To start with, a choir called Protest in Harmony came and sang some protest songs. This was the best thing I’ve ever heard, with lyrics like [paraphrasing] “the Venezuelans sent the Israeli ambassador home, for its flagrant disregard of international rules” (which was apparently taken straight from a newspaper article), but set to choral, hymn-like music. It was phenomenal, and got a lot of people outside who probably wouldn’t have otherwise been arsed. Then the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign showed up (who have also been great, they’re obviously very used to speaking publicly and one of their members, Mick, has MC’d both of these demonstrations, which helped it go a lot smoother) and we got a demonstration going. Several people spoke out, and we got a lot of signatures on our petition.

So things are going well.

Still here…

So I stayed overnight and we briefly prepared our response to the negotiations with the university. I’ve had a couple of classes and I went back to the Chaplaincy to sell more chocolate for the DEC Gaza Appeal. Now that I’m back, I’ve been watching some of the protestors doing a workshop on resisting arrest. At first it was quite practical like going limp instead of tensing your muscles and trying to calm the situation, but then it kind of degenerated into deep breathing and saying words at different volumes, and all the time lots of hugging. Personally I think preparing for such an eventuality is a bit paranoid, but it was quite good entertainment.

One thing that is mildly annoying me is that other issues are getting sneaked into the agenda. A lot of these protestors are really really liberal and have more interests than just this, so during the negotiations, some of the demands are having other things added to them. For example, we stipulated in one demand that any aid getting transported to Gaza gets shipped because it’s better for the environment. Fair enough and I don’t think anyone here disagreed, but it’s not really what this is about, it shouldn’t be in the demands.

Another, perhaps better example, is that one of the demands was to disinvest in any company producing weapons that are being used in Israel. I fully supported that, but then during this morning’s discussion, points were raised that the demand should be to disinvest in all weapons research. Not only do I think this is totally unrealistic and will make the protestors seem juvenile, but I also don’t think it’s desirable. Weapons are necessary for war, and war is sometimes necessary, at least in the current global anarchic system. I do hope for a day when weapons will not be necessary and there will be world peace, but the way to reach world peace is not through getting rid of weapons. Weapons are merely the tools, war would still exist without them. But regardless of whether it’s a good thing or not, it’s nothing to do with us. This demonstration is against this conflict in Gaza, not all war, as if that would be achievable. This is not an anti-war demonstration in general. Of course the Socialist Workers have been slipping their own familiar rhetoric in too, but that’s fine, they’ve been great supporting us so far.

Consensus agreement is also becoming more difficult as we get into the finer points, particularly because people are coming and going all the time so if we review something we’ve discussed before, some people don’t know what we’re on about, and others disagree with something we’ve already put through the consensus system. It’s difficult because I’m in agreement with the broad message, but some things about the protest are so frustrating.

One thing that picked up morale a bit was that an Eden Springs van came to deliver water this morning, and as some of us rushed down to tell them to get lost, security did it for us! So far the security guys have been brilliant, they’ve had no problems with us getting in and out (although so far they’re only letting UoE students in), and they’ve all been really friendly.

We got some news today that an emergency SRC (Students Representative Council) meeting was called to discuss the issue by a very pro-Israel member of the committee, and that their intention was to release a EUSA statement against the demonstration. Adam Ramsay, Naomi Hunter and Guy Bromley came down a few minutes ago to let us know what’s going on, and the SRC did not agree on that statement. Instead Adam paraphrased the statement they will be releasing, and they’re not saying anything, basically.

I’ve no idea how long I’ll be here but I’ll be popping in for a few hours each day until it’s over. Here’s some more photographs.