A couple of years ago investigators claimed that “Albert” was, in fact, a child named Douglas Merritte whose poor mother was renumerated with a pittance. This, as well as the inherent grimness of disturbing a child, reflected poorly on Watson’s experiment. Things get worse, though. A new paper suggests not merely that “Albert” wasn’t a typical child, and suffered from neurological defects, but that Watson should have been aware of this and, thus, was likely to have known (a) that his results were of no particular value and, of course, (b) that he was messing with head of a rather poorly infant.

One should grant that there’s a possibility of error here. Indeed, we’ve seen cases of researchers being targeted with downright fraudulent accusations of fraud, and mendacious accusations of maliciousness: Gould’s apparent smearing of George Morton, for example, or the whiffy campaign against Napoleon Chagnon. I say this not to cast any more doubt than is necessary over these recent findings – there’s no reason to believe it’s anything but fair – but to draw attention the fact that scientific progress is hampered by two different problems: (a) dishonest and sloppy claims and practices by scientists who’d like to promote their theories and (b) dishonest and sloppy claims and practices by scientists, and activists, who’d like to discredit other people’s theories.

Both phenomena demand recognition of the fact that science can’t be divorced from the prejudices of the lands it’s studied in or the personal inclinations of the people who study it. This seems too obvious to be worth stating but a crucial point to add, I think, and one we’re more likely to forget, is that these aren’t restricted to particular prejudices or inclinations. The unrighteous researchers could be trying to prove things we’d hate or like to be true. Another point is that while many areas of study fall beneath the mantle of “science” they’re more or less scientific. Psychology, for example, often straddles an uneasy line between hard science and plausible speculation. This – as was illuminated last year when Diederik Stapel was found to have committed academic fraud in “several dozen” publications – calls for a humble attitude towards our knowledge of such fields; acknowledgement that our beliefs may sometimes rest on less than stable grounds. (This is, of course, especially relevant in a world where hundreds of thousands are fed drugs that may or may not be at all effective.)

Nonetheless, and while I have no desire to be involved in any arguments where accusations of mixed loyalties are being hurled about because they sound as edifying as iced spam, I feel compelled to note that they’re neither inherently disgraceful or, well – wrong. People are just as or more devoted to other nations or people than the nation and people they live in and with. I’ve no doubt that’s true of some Jewish Americans. I’ve no doubt that’s true of some Arabic Americans. Hell, I’ve no doubt that’s true of some American Americans. Is that arguable? The irony is that people seem most dubious about the mention of this fact at a time when the idea of holding no particular loyalty to the nation of one’s residence or birth is at its least controversial. Lots of people think nationalism is a dirty word. If we accept the notion that some of our fellow citizens aren’t too invested in the wellbeing of our country it’s absurd to say it’s inconceivable that they’d care as or more deeply for another.

I’m not dense. I know that there’s a grim history of citizens facing horrendous treatment for supposed or suspected disloyalty: the Japanese in the United States, for example, or, yes, a lot of Jews at the hands of neo-Nazis. Yet in a world where different people are commingling and different nations are butting into eachother’s interests the notion of mixed loyalties is actually relevant. (A small example: according to leaked cables the government took up the cause of the beleagured Tamils as a lot of refugees were living in marginals.) To assume that somebody is more invested in the wellbeing of the people of their fathers than the people they reside among is unpleasant; reducing them to no more than the bare fact of their ethnicity and cultural heritage. To argue that they’re more invested in that people, or some part of that people, and to support that argument with substantive reasoning, however, can illustrate the simple fact that one’s heritage can, in fact, hold a powerful sway over one’s emotions. Or, indeed, that one’s idiosyncratic prejudices lead one to favour the cause of a nation that’s not one’s own. I’m sure there are Americans and Brits, born and bred, who nonetheless have somehow come to invest their feeling in, say, Chad.

Or, in which we subject songs about getting pissed to line-by-line analysis.

As I’ve said, it’s sad, really, that “emo” has become defined by the hordes of black-finger nailed and floppy-fringed self-pitying poseurs who fill the under 18s clubs and shopping malls up and down the length of Britain’s shores. Let’s continue our tour through the maligned backwaters of alternative rock with one of its exemplars: the rowdy and righteous punk three-piece Jawbreaker. In the twilight of the eighties and the nineties’ dawn, “emo”, inasmuch as any genre is an actually existing phenomena, represented the growing of awareness of American punks that they had other feelings as well as anger and other experiences than collective expressions of energy. Guy Picciotto, of Fugazi and Rites of Spring, disclaimed the “emo” tag not merely because, as with almost all tags, it’s a crude attempt to lump diverse units together under the pretence that they’re one phenomenon – which would, of course, have been extremely fair – but because punk was emotional: “what, like the Bad Brains weren’t emotional? What – they were robots or something?” Yeah, they were, but the groups eventually known as “emo” brought a more individualised perspective to their songs, which allowed for subtler, more sensitive expression.

Jawbreaker’s vocalist, Blake Schwarzenbach, was the finest poet among this intangible trend. Where others had assumed that fuzzy riffs, power chords and walloped drums were a platform fit for only throat-abusing rage, he offered stories that contained a slyly sensitive perspective on harsh living. “Chesterfield King” or “Kiss the Bottle” are as touching as songs about drinking, smoking, thinking and relating with toothless women in parking lots can be. “Boxcar” is the least pretentious tune to ever reference Kerouac. “Tour Song” is, perhaps, the only song about the hardships of being a musician that isn’t self-indulgent, whining drivel.

At the origins of “emo”, the music its practitioners devised expressed a range of feelings from the comic to the sad to the angry. Nowadays, the songs of tight-t-shirted and black-eye shadowed, tunelessly wailing tykes can be defined by one emotion: self-pity. It’s a shame. Genres might be largely bogus notions when they’re first conceived but, sometimes, they’re realised as a new generation of upstarts model themselves on the standards they think are ubiquitous. And the standards of the coming crop of novices are rubbish.

While I’m on the subject, Schwarzenbach’s lyrics are the kind often described as “honest”: downbeat; confessional; often involving alcohol. These can be really great or totally embarrassing and the line between the two of them is hard to pin down. As someone with too much free times, however, I’ve actually thought about this and I reckon it depends on achieving the correct balance of the particular and the universal. I was listening to a tune by Lucero – a more recent group who flavour noisy compositions with tinges of folk. Titled “Drink ‘Till We’re Gone”, it tells the classic tale of eternal alcoholism. It’s a good song, but towards the end the singer references “cheap beer and wine”. Yeah, it probably just fit the rhythm but it bugged me. If you were a dipsomaniac you wouldn’t think of “cheap beer” any more than a connoisseur would think of “expensive wine”. You’d know exactly what the cheapest brands are – and the minute differences in potency and price would be crucial enough to you that you’d never think in such broad terms. Punk is a genre noted for its grunginess. But the little things that matter.

…without God, it is easier to lose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements.

Well, okay, it’s an imperfect point. I don’t think that religions – be they true or false – have led believers to remember that their own times aren’t everything. Consider the history of apocalypticism. Or the habit of Christians at churches that I used to frequent of spying “revival” round every corner.

Yet the need for a humble perspective on our place in history is more crucial than it’s ever been, for the simple reason that we’re among the first generations who’ve gained the power to make their times, if not everything, uniquely consequential. In a matter of years – or, indeed, minutes – we can reshape populations; transform our environment and, of course, massacre eachother in unprecedented quantities. Many of the innovations that provoked such rapid technological, scientific and cultural change is and could be used in the service of bettering human lives. But their potential for harm is often just as great, and they’re so new to the e’er expanding human toolbox that it’s often hard to judge what their results will be. The last hundred years began to demonstrate how perilous this can be. From catastrophic wars to barmy economic policies to simple-minded cultural initiatives, wide-eyed ideologues have barreled down the road to Hell at an unparalleled speed. I don’t know if faith has to have anything to do with it, but concerted thought on the implications of human goals and how ambitious we could and should be is extremely relevant.

The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year.

The social implications of this are disturbing. There are, for example, lots of people who’ve been inspired to affirm the value of women – to affirm value of women as commodities, that is. Many poor girls are forced into arranged marriages or prostitution. It’s hardly surprising. After all, if there are millions of people who think women aren’t worth bearing there’s likely to be millions more who don’t they’re worth much once they’re alive. Meanwhile, there are millions of blokes who are beginning to find it more difficult to locate partners, and they could get a bit frustrated if it carries on.

Eberstatd doesn’t think the crisis will be solved by policy. The phenomenon is pronounced in countries with both harsh and liberal stances on reproductive freedom, and attempts by the state to curb such practices have failed. He mentions, however, that there’s an exception to the trend – that one country has stabilised its birth ratios. That country, he writes, is South Korea. He proposes that…

South Korea’s SRB reversal was influenced less by government policy than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and prizing daughters. In effect, this movement — drawing largely but by no means exclusively on the faith-based community — sparked a national conversation of conscience about the practice of female feticide. This conversation was instrumental in stigmatizing the practice, not altogether unlike the way in which nationwide conversations of conscience helped to stigmatize international slave-trading in other countries in earlier times. The best hope today in the global war against baby girls may be to carry this conversation of conscience to other lands.

A “nationwide conversation of conscience”? I hear you. It sounds nauseating. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to say “thank you” to whoever’s working behind a checkout, let alone start nattering with the entire population. And, yet, sometimes things that make us queasy have to be endured for the greater good. (Dental flossing, for example.) If there’s any truth to Eberstatd’s claim it’s actually quite inspiring. The abolition of slavery – though, yes, a question that demanded a greater shift in attitudes – followed decades of debate. What with the grave problems facing our society – the need to reduce our energy consumption, say – such conversations are, in lieu of dangerous authoritarianism, a necessity. And, of course, they can’t just take place on Guardian comment pages.

Oh, hang on. When I read further it becomes obvious that the advisers who’ve “admitted” to Libyan guilt – a misplaced term as, being opponents of Gaddafi, they’ve got nothing to “admit” – don’t offer a proof. In fact, they don’t provide us with an evidential sausage. We’re merely told that…

Shamis [an adviser to the interim government] said Libya’s payment of £1billion compensation to victims’ families in 2008 confirmed Gaddafi’s guilt.

When did vague interpretations of people’s motives become final, clinching proofs? When he gets to Megrahi things are even odder…

Mr Shamis added that Megrahi was involved in the bombing even if “he was only a small player”. He said: “Megrahi is an employee of Libyan security, there is no doubt about it – of external security. And if he was told to do something he would have done it.”

He did it because he would have done it if somebody else had done it. Thanks, Mr Shamis!

These guys have had months to pore over the documents Gaddafi and his cronies left behind, as well as to interrogate old employees of the regime, and this is all the evidence they’ve managed to compile? Vague conjecture any sod could have dreamed up in a moment? As I’ve said on many an occasion, and will say until the facts have been revealed, Gaddafi could have been the architect and Megrahi the executioner of the crime. Yet the evidence for these claims has yet to be produced. And it’s eerie how people continually ignore this, even as the facts they’re reporting demonstrate it.

The disinterest is quite bizarre. Even if we accept the charge against Megrahi  – for the sake of argument – we don’t know how he did it or who he did it with. Even if they’re right about the guilty party, then, they’ve shown no willingness to (a) investigate serious breaches of security and (b) find and prosecute men who are complicit in the deaths of hundreds of people. Are these not important things? Hell, even if it’s just to enlighten historians you’d think they could show a semblance of curiosity.

Ah well. Anybody heard from Moussa Koussa? No? Nor me. Wonder what he’s up to nowadays.

How about a parable? One can’t have too many parables. Imagine that on founding Australia the colonists decided that their people would be better off innocent to the threat of crocodiles. Aussies grew up unaware of the existence of the things. Sometime the discovery of the savaged corpses, and the glimpses of a large, reptilian beast within the swamps, would enlighten people as to the fact of — something. Some vicious beast they knew little of except that it existed.

Well, there would be uproar. Legends would spread about the place of creatures who grew every more ferocious with each retelling. Soon they’re claimed to be at least a hundred foot long, with teeth as big as axe blades and appetites that could only be sated once they’d eaten half of Queenslade. Some people may be too frightened to venture beyond their homes. Others may grow fat and rich off their claims of expert knowledge of the improbable beast. Any swimmer whose form isn’t obvious from the land is gunned down by neurotic vigilantes.

The point, o’ course, is that people are bound to act unreasonably towards things they’re unfamiliar with. They won’t know how to behave. So, if we raise people to trust institutions that aren’t all that trustworthy they won’t be prepared to deal with the latter fact when they discover it, and if we don’t teach them what that untrustworthiness entails and how it should be analysed they’ll do it wrongly. I’m not saying that’s the single cause of political kookiness but I’m sure a solid grounding in the facts of parapolitics, allied to some lessons on the nature and worth of diligent empiricism, would be more effective in countering it than sneering in the face of reality.

Indeed, as far as I can see the organised criminals are one of few demographics with a promising future. The Italian and Russian mafioso seem as powerful as ever. Mexican banditos could grow stronger if the “drug war” continues. From my unscholarly perspective – or, more bluntly, after reading Mischa Glenny’s fine, disturbing book McMafia – there seem to be new environments in which organised crime may thrive. Young, dysfunctional states of countries that have felt of the force of the “Arab Spring” have to be tempting prey for smart, ambitious gangsters with a taste for loose power and floating cash. As oil, minerals and other resources grow scarce people have a lot to gain from muscling in on discombobulated markets. The Internet provides ever more fertile stomping grounds.

Britain’s never had a gang culture of the sort that’s such a feature of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Krays, those mother-loving murderers, did their best to inspire one in the 1960s, and the thuggish rabbles of the football stands and fierce delinquents of the inner cities have left their mark, but the East End was downright idyllic when compared with Sicily or Moscow and the skinheads and hoodies are too dim and parochial to be a threat in that sense.

Yet I wonder if our society has become more vulnerable to organised crime. Multiculturalism – “the fact of…”, that is, not “the theory of…” – seems to provide fecund terrain for gangsters. From Israel to Eastern Europe to India tribal groups have bunched together to exploit the confused societies they find. What with unemployment, and extremely bad employment, facing a young, expectant and often dysfunctional generation there’s liable to be a lot of aimless, angry kids to be recruited. And is it just me who can visualise Tony Soprano and his concerned citizens moving in on fractured communities to take on work that cash-starved councils have abandoned? An example of the Big Society in action.

With that depressing speculation thrown out there – console yourself: my depressing speculations are generally way off – please indulge me while I chew over another coupl’a thoughts. I’ve also been reading John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra. As far as I can see, the Mafia is a great big, trumpeting elephant in the room of people who sneer at “conspiracy theorists”.  For generations few people were sure the thing even existed. “It is hard to realise how much was not known about the Mafia,” Dickie writes. People were only sure of the name, let alone the nature, of the Cosa Nostra in the 1980s. (Yeah – after Godfathers I and II had been released.) The success of organised crime has always depended on the willingness of its participants to remain silent; their efficiency in pulling off atrocities and longstanding criminal enterprises without leaving evidence of their involvement; their ability to penetrate all levels of the social strata. Basically, they engineer big conspiracies, and as far as I’m aware they’ve been pretty good at it. I’m sure they’re not the only ones.

One resource that gangsters seem to cherish is the affection in which they’re popularly held. The Mafia have been respected as much as they’ve been feared. Eastern European thugs are veritable folk heroes. Escobar, to some, was better known as a philanthropist than as a trafficker. Reggie Kray loved his Mum. Some such criminals are genuinely public-spirited; inconsistently, yeah, but genuinely nonetheless. On the other hand, their selective benevolence can be self-serving. Why frighten somebody into acquiescence if they’ll do your bidding freely? Friends can be more useful assets than subordinates; they’ll go beyond the call of duty. And, besides, if everyone dislikes you they might band together and realise they have no cause to help you against eachother. While the phenomenon of much-loved criminals has gained particular notoriety in the case of mobsters it’s true of any powerful institution. No dictator has been without admirers. Even Kim Jong-il was mourned. I suppose the lesson is that you won’t know a bad man from the fist they drive towards you; it might be a extended hand.

…doctrinal opposition towards [the Ahmadis] is being spearheaded by Khatme Nubawwat Academy, a British offshoot of a Pakistani group that is dedicated to confronting Ahmadi beliefs.

The group, whose name translates to “The Finality of the Prophet”, has close connections to the Pakistani establishment and met Pakistan’s high commissioner in the UK earlier this summer.

Akber Choudry, a spokesman for the group, marked Salman Taseer’s death by defending Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. (In fairness, he denounced the killing.) This seems relevant because a Pakistani newspaper, reporting on the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian who faces the death penalty in that unhappy nation, has claimed that the Academy has intervened to make sure the woman’s prosecution goes ahead…

Qari [Salam, the lawyer who filed the blasphemy charge], according to some of his close friends, was now thinking of not pursuing the case anymore and expressed his desire to some of his friends, only to find himself in a difficult situation when activists of a religious organisation ‘convinced’ him not to change his mind.

“We will chase her through hell … don’t worry about the money, hiring best lawyers,” Salam told The Express Tribune, quoting the son of Khatm-e-Nabuwat’s London chapter’s leader.

The leader’s son flew in to Nankana from London after hearing that Salam might not go to Lahore High Court (LHC) when the review petition against Aasia’s conviction is taken up.

…

Salam said Khatm-e-Nabuwat had hired Mustafa Chaudhry as counsel to fight his case in the higher court, and were ready to go to an extent to seek death for Aasia.

This should be investigated, and if it’s true the “son” should find the door slammed in his face when he tries to return. It’s dreadful enough that such persecution marks any country in the world. If it’s supported from within our proudly “modern” lands it’s a scandal.

[H/t - That Place.]