The stuff about Disrael is even more mindboggling in context. It's page 62 and the full quote is as follows: "Inexplicably, Gladstone was a pro-Southerner while the Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli and his foreign secretary Lord John Russell opposed recognising the Confederacy throughout the War."
This manages to get key facts wrong about no fewer than four British Prime Ministers in 25 words(the invisible man in the sentence being Palmerston, who actually was PM until he died in October 1865).
First, Gladstone's "inexplicable" pro-southern sentiments. Yes: I suppose it's really inexplicable that the son of a slave-owner, born in Britain's second biggest slave-trade port, whose family money came largely from sugar plantations, whose maiden speech in the House of Commons had been opposition to the Emancipation Act of 1833 would have inclined more towards the Confederacy side of things in the Civil War.
Disraeli didn't become PM until 1868: he was, however, actually a Conservative, in a rare brush with historical accuracy given the context. Unlike the foreign secretary Lord John Russell, who was a Liberal, and in fact became Prime Minister himself in Oct 1865.
According to The Education of Henry Adams he believed at the time that Lord John Russell was pro-Confederacy and extremely surprised to discover from later papers and memoires that he'd been wrong.
Following on from Dave Bell@47, I think it's also fair to say that the Labour leadership insisted on having LGBT equality measures in the manifesto from at least the mid-80s despite them being the subject of considerable hostility including from within Party ranks as well as from the Tories and Lib-Dems (remember the Bermondsey bye-election? Ugh!)
Abi @40: hard to say what the Queen's attitude to homosexuality is likely to be. Her grandfather, famously, said, "I thought men like that shot themselves", her uncle had a string of affairs with both men and women throughout the 30s (or, as Simon Callow put it, "The Duke of Kent seems to have spent the decade permanently horizontal") and her mother is reputed to have yelled down the stairs to the servants' quarters, "Can't one of you old queens down there mix a drink for this old queen up here?".
Guthrie @39: if you don't see someone's possession of a PhD in 20th century history as relevant to the question of whether or not to bet money on that person being more ignorant of 20th century history than the general British public then I agree; the argument is pointless.
John Stanning @29: whatever your opinion of Gordon Brown, he does have a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh (and also, come to think of it, the security clearance that would get him access to all the Public Records Office archives about Bletchley that the rest of us won't get access to for another 30+ years). Suggesting that Brown "hardly knew who Turing was" when a 2002 poll of the general British public to name the Greatest Britons of All Time placed Turing at 21 (one below Alexander Fleming and two below Paul Macartney) seems to me to be placing animosity above reason.
#35: Nancy Leibovitz:
I agree the war on drugs would be unprofitable for a corporation, but the Opium Wars (aka the wars for drugs)were not undertaken for Government ends but to support the East India Company's profitable trade in opium in China, and Bayer pulled people off the aspirin project to work on its much more potentially valuable product Heroin(TM) so I wouldn't underestimate corporate power to do harm
Jacob Davies@470
Most of the offences in the Regulations are ones of strict liability, yes. With direct reference to the Amazon case, and the alleged reason for the cock-up, paragraph 30 provides that
"30.—(1) Anything done by a person in the course of his employment shall be treated for the purposes of these Regulations as done by the employer as well as by the person.
(2) Anything done by a person as agent for another shall be treated for the purposes of these Regulations as done by the principal as well as by the agent.
(3) It is immaterial for the purposes of this regulation whether an employer or principal knows about or approves of an act."
As to whether this should be the case, I'm generally inclined to say yes; where offences relate to discrimination and, in particular, the implementation of discriminatory systems are concerned, it would be fatally easy for people to get out of a claim of discrimination by saying that their actual intention was to do something else and the discriminatory effect was collateral damage. Obviously this policy question is often disputed, but it's how EU anti-discrimination has been formed.
albatross@472. I probably should have tried to wrap two points up in one comment without distinguishing them more clearly. The second half of my comment wasn't specifically directed to your anvil point, but to the wider issue of the (to me) puzzling claims which were made in the debate that Amazon as a private business was entitled to discriminate if it so chose (without necessarily asserting that this was what they were doing in this case).
Jacob Davies@465
There is a vast (and growing) group of criminal offences which are offences "of strict liability": that is, provided the actus reus of the offence is made out, no specific mens rea need be shown. Or to clarify, for the non-lawyer, provided you've done those acts which the statute specifies as constituting the crime, the state of mind with which you did them or the reason why you did them is completely and totally irrelevant. That is, you can be guilty of a criminal offence without even having to reach the negligence standard (failure to take such care as reasonable in the circumstances) though there may, in some criminal offences, be what is called the "due diligence" defence. This requires the person charged with the offence to prove they had taken reasonable steps to avoid committing the offence. This tends to come up with regard to things like selling alcohol to people under 18.
Many motoring offences are strict liability: for example; I'm still going to be pulled for speeding if it happened that my foot was absent-mindedly beating time to Bat out of Hell just as I passed the speed gun or if I'm rushing my dying granny to the hospital (though my chances of proceedings being brought in the latter case would be slender, and I'd have stonking plea in mitigation).
Where a particular sort of intention is required (negligence, recklessness or wilfulness) the statute states it.
albatross@460: And if a statistically significant number of the total anvils dropped land up on the same toes, time after time after time - well, perhaps the answer is investigation of the reasons why and toe-protection legislation to protect the feet of the vulnerable group.
In which case, incidentally, I was surprised more of the people whom I saw peddling the line in places like the bbc and the Guardian comments columns that Amazon, as a private entity, was entitled to do what it liked, weren't aware of the existenc of exactly such legislation, namely The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 . The relevant provisions are those dealing with discrimination based on sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services - services including the listing of books on Amazon, as a service offered to the publisher/author as well as to the would-be purchasers of books. And no - I'm not advocating that anyone should prosecute Amazon, but I am pointing out that since the criminal offence Amazon uk appeared to be committing does not require intent to be proven, then those complaining about it should not have to prove intent either.
Celia @427: go into Amazon and scroll down past product information until you get to "search for similar items by category". That's the most visible area where you can see the Amazon tagging system in operation.
I did my tests on amazon.co.uk because that's my local one and I used Dr Hall's works because I know she was affected.
If you look at "Outspoken Women" by Lesley Hall that does not have "Gay & lesbian" in the relevant categories. If you look at her "Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (European Culture & Society Series)" it does have the Gay & Lesbian>History>Gay tag. The latter was deranked, the former wasn't.
David Harmon@418: You and I are in violent agreement on this point (if anyone was in doubt). Stupidity most definitely does not get anyone off the hook. As a lawyer, I'd say a nice, quick definition of the tort of negligence for non-lawyers was "actionable stupidity".
The emphasis on looking for malice and asserting malice and claiming others have asserted malice seems to me something of a derailment tactic, frankly.
Jacob Davies@402: Can I ask why you attribute the importance you appear to do to "malicious intent"? As KeithS @397 points out, malice is a question of intentionality, and intentionality is notoriously hard to judge. If you look at actions instead, what you see is that some human person's action (unless you're positing HAL the Homophobic AI) produced a situation where all the material specifically metatagged as Gay and Lesbian together with other material in related categories eg Feminism, Transgender issues and so forth became deranked.
Why do I say, "All?" Well, look at the statement from Patty Smith. Bearing in mind that this statement - if Amazon have any brain at all - will have been gone over by PR gurus and lawyers before it hit the press, and every word in it can therefore be considered to have been thought about. Her statement runs: "It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica."
Not "limited to" Gay & Lesbian. But certainly "including" and, I would suggest, probably including all content with that tag. The Dear Author spreadsheets, showing how different editions of particular books (such as John Barrowman's autobiography, which according to Amazon is apparently too hot to handle in hardcover and A-OK in paperback)were affected or not depending on whether they had the crucial tag or not.
I'm working here, also, in the knowledge that among the books in the "Gay and Lesbian" category which lost their rankings were a number of academic works by a leading scholar in the field of sex, gender and social change. She was puzzled by the patchy delisting of her works. One of the ones delisted was a set textbook in a large number of UK undergraduate courses. One of the ones notdelisted included significant excepts of women writing about lesbian relationships. The first was tagged "Lesbian and Gay", the second was not.
John Amaechi seems to have expressed the point superbly in a recent interview: "Classifying LGBT content as adult reinforces the ridiculous idea that while straight lives are about family, children, love, commitment, houses, friends, pets, "sugar and spice and all things nice;" LGBT lives are only about sex, sex, sex, and a type of sex that is so awful that respectable people should be protected from it.
"Amazon's very thought process in initiating this cull of LGBT books has been juvenile and under-researched at best, or pandering and bigoted at worst."
That's the issue, not "malice". It's unthinking stupidity - the same sort of stupidity which caused a cop to pull over the clergyman who is now Archbishop of York in 2000, because for him "black guy in nice car = potential crime suspect" and "=/= Bishop". He may, or may not, have been acting with express "malice"- who can say? But his actions were influenced by his assumptions and preconceptions, and they, in turn, were infused with bigotry.
And, finally, why should any consumer have to wait for Amazon to be proven to have displayed "malice" - as you have repeatedly urged? If you go to a restaurant and you and all your party go down with food-poisoning, do you wait until it's been proven they deliberately employed Typhoid Mary before telling your friends, "Watch that place. There may be something dodgy about their kitchen hygiene"? And if you do avoid the restaurant and advise others to do so, why is it different with Amazon?
Daniel Boone @ 240
I wonder if there's a sort of etymological thing going on with the Chamomile? When I had chicken pox I was told to dab the blisters with calamine lotion (which a bit of Googling shows to be principally zinc oxide and of dubious efficacity) whereas Mrs Beeton, from the 1860s, swears by calomel (which was principally mercury) for all sorts of rashes and lesions, including teething rash in infants (!). Since so far as I can see nothing stops this itching perhaps there's just a kind of maternal folk wisdom that one waves something that sounds rather like calomel at it, and the child either ends up badly scarred or not.
Randolph @240
My point about the good old "bad old days" (by which I meant the 19th century) was that lack of understanding and inability to measure foetal development scientifically created a lot of grey areas specifically about when a woman could be said to be pregnant and when her actions could be interpreted as being intended to procure a miscarriage. Now, the time att which a woman is considered pregnant has been pushed earlier and earlier as scientific precision increases (indeed, given the stuff about women having to be considered, for medical purposes as "pre-pregnant" at all times, it seems likely to be pushed before conception in the next move) while the political impulse to treat all pregnant women as no longer possessing any formm of bodily autonomy (eg with regard to the food she eats, the jobs she undertakes and whether she has chemotherapy to save her life) has strengthened
In "the bad old days" pregnancy was presumed to start when the baby "quickened" i.e. kicked, towards the end of the first trimester.
In "the bad old days" pregnant and nursing mothers were prescribed Guinness to give them necessary iron.
In "the bad old days" juries assumed that just before and immediately after birth women should be given the benefit of the doubt about the sanity of their choices: i.e they should be presumed absent evidence to the contrary to have been intending to do the best for their baby, even if the details needed a bit of glossing.
I don't want to go back to the bad old days, but I'd be much happier then, than in the technologically advanced bad new days, honestly.
"Oh," said Hart, as he felt the curve of her breast through the thermal underwear.
Possibly one of the less ept sex scenes in the canon.
Sam Llewellyn, Great Circle. A thriller set on a round the World yacht race. Sex, sailing and skullduggery at 60 degrees South - unputdownable, even given the occasional blip (see above).
James MacDonald @27
It would have been his personality during first-class dinners, 10-14 April, that would have created the effect.
AU version:
Socialite, at dinner, New York City 20 April 1912:
"Oh, darlings, you can't imagine how ghastly it was during the first half of the voyage - we were on the Captain's table, and the extraordinary man literally didn't have anything to talk about except bread-fruit. Bread-fruit with breakfast, bread-fruit with luncheon, bread-fruit at dinner - darling, I nearly took my chances on leaping into Davy Jones's locker. But then, thank God, Jimmy came up with this scheme that was absolutely IT - two nights out from Queenstown he managed to bribe the radio officer to forge a whole heap of ice warnings, and then, of course, the Captain vanished off to the bridge for the rest of the voyage. Of course, the directors of the Line were furious because he insisted on us doing the last bit dead slow, while he peered gloomily into the murk with his binoculars - that's why we arrived so late, darlings - but at least we didn't actually have to eat with him."
Graydon @24
There's been a recent theory that sub-standard rivets were a contributory factor to the speed of the sinking, but even if the holes resulted from popped rivets, the inability to contain the water ingress once it started would have been contributed to by the fact that the "watertight" compartments weren't.
Ajay@22
Actually, precisely that did happen: one of the soldiers expressed dismay in learning Lightoller had been on the Titanic, until his sergeant said, "Shut up, son: if he came through that then he should do right for you."
My understanding is that Thomas Andrews' original design incorporated 68 triple stacked lifeboats, but that these were removed as a deliberate marketing choice by Bruce Ismay, against considerable protest from Andrews, on the basis that the sight of so many lifeboats would make the passengers feel unsafe. The original design would also have featured full height bulk-heads rather than the three-quarter height ones which allowed water to pass from stem to stern once a minimum of four watertight compartments had been breached, therefore making it mathematically certain that the boat would sink. Ismay's justification for the second design change was to "improve the passenger experience" by incorporating a ball room.
All of which leads me to feel that the moral of the whole experience is that every naval architect should have a hand-gun by his or her slope, and if a marketing executive ventures too close to the blueprints they should shoot them on sight.
Incidentally, Herbert Lightoller was the bridge officer who had gone off duty about 50 minutes before the collision. In his youth he'd survived a collision on a remote island when the captain ordered the boat to hit head on, on the grounds that this was likely to put the point of collision at the boat's point of maximum strength. Had the Titanic hit the iceberg head-on it almost certainly would not have sunk (because the watertight compartments would have concertinaed rather than the sides being breached, and it is unlikely that as many as four would have been breached) and some of the speculation about "what ifs" surrounds what would Lightoller have ordered had he had the bridge at the relevant time.
This seems to be the next stage: what happens when an author wishes to withdraw from being associated with Helix. "And I'd have rejected you if it hadn't been for your pesky positive discrimination".
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