Was the Utøya killer Anders Behring Breivik insane?

First, a confession. The Golden Latrine has a huge journalistic crush on Deborah Orr, she's one of the few columnists able to get inside a story and tease out its subtleties and absurdities. Hence my joy when I read this piece, from Thursday’s Guardian, where she makes the same point as me about Melanie Phillips not being to blame for being quoted in Utoya killer Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto.

But where our views massively diverge is when she then goes on to argue that Breivik is clearly mad, railing against what she calls “the widespread reluctance to characterise outrageous miscreants as insane.” As Orr puts it:

I'd suggest that all indiscriminate acts of murder are most profitably viewed as symptoms of mental illness, and that a more universal reluctance to describe attempts at mass-murder as "terrorism" might be an eminently sensible way to go in the future. Those who attempt to justify such acts, as logical or understandable? They seem pretty unstable to me themselves.”

But is this true? Does mass murder automatically equal insanity? I think in this case, I have reluctantly to declare myself one of what she calls the "unstable" ones. The 'you have to be mad to be capable of mass murder' thesis is certainly a convenient belief, but I'm not sure it's true. As Guy Walters persuasively argues in the New Statesman:

If you passionately believe you are right, and you feel you have no other method of obtaining your goal, then killing is a very logical thing to do. This is undoubtedly a normative form of human behaviour, as human beings have been killing each other for the "right reasons" for millennia. Many of us are repelled by the act of murder and, thankfully, we do not resort to it even if we believe the other side is wrong. But some do kill others to advance their interests, or to stymie those of others, especially if they believe that a greater threat is posed to society by not carrying out the killings.

Was every member of the IRA or ETA mad? Were these groups just clubs for the psychotic or psychopathic? Surely not. While for some it may have just been a convenient ideological excuse to blow people up, many members genuinely carried the belief that such action would further their legitimate political cause. The skill of Chris Morris's suicide bomber "comedy" Four Lions was in showing that most suicide bombers are just angry, confused teenagers, not psychopathic criminal masterminds.

Breivik's lawyer, Geir Lippestad, is clearly of Orr's persuasion, telling journalists that "This whole case indicated that he is insane," and refusing to represent him unless he undertook psychiatric evaluation. But so far the only evidence suggesting mental illness is Lippestad's claim that Breivik is a "very cold person". No hearing voices, no disordered thoughts, no hallucinations. By declaring that Breivik is automatically mad, we are letting human nature off the hook.

Mass murderers heart Melanie Phillips

While it’s difficult to find a silver lining to the mass murder of 76 human beings in Norway, it was hard to suppress a smirk at the news that killer Anders Behring Breivik had quoted Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips in his rambling manifesto.

Her initial response to this unnerving fact was to stress that Breivik had only quoted her twice in 1,500 pages - which is, let's face it, still not a great hit-rate.

But let’s be clear, there’s a world of difference between Breivik and Phillips. While her views might be repugnant, I think we can safely say that Melanie Phillips does not condone the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, even if they are card-carrying Labour Party members (now mass detention, that’s another story. No no, I jest.)

In fairness to Phillips, Breivik did also quote such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Orwell, and an author has no control over who reads their material. Was it J.D. Salinger's fault that the Catcher in the Rye "inspired" a psychotic Mark Chapman to kill John Lennon? Clearly not.

But the episode does serve to underline the danger of Phillips's intemperate words, her intolerance and hyperbole. She believes her tirades exist on some rarefied intellectual plane, and Keith Kahn-Harris may well be right when he says she is "polite company with a ready (if sometimes acidic) wit and a very sharp mind", but if you write incendiary words, there's always a chance they'll come back to bite you on the ass.

Phillips, a former Guardian staffer, seems to get much of the left foaming at the mouth, but the main emotion she evokes in me is sadness. I still remember reading this interview and thinking she sounded like the angriest, loneliest woman in the world.

Idiot Detector

It's way past the witching hour, but I felt obliged to share this. I'm praying for it be patented and rolled out sooner rather than later...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/microsoft-word-now-includes-squiggly-blue-line-to,19739/?utm_medium=promobar&utm_campaign=recirculation

Bettakultcha 8, 12th April 2011

Picture a good night out and an evening sat watching slideshows is not necessarily what springs to mind, conjuring up, as it does, images of The Mighty Boosh’s Howard Moon preparing yet another an interminable lecture on his fossil collection, or your dotty uncle insisting on showing you his neverending holiday snaps. Such trepidation would be entirely misplaced though. As Bettakultcha makes clear, slideshows are quite possibly the most fun it's possible to have with your clothes on.

The brain child of marketing director Richard Michie and professional speaker and artist Ivor Tymchak, Bettakultcha is based on a simple format: each speaker gets five minutes (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) on any topic they wish. It's become a bit of a word-of-mouth success and tonight around 300 people pack into the palatial surroundings of Leeds' Corn Exchange for a slice of slideshow action.

The talks are uniformly excellent, covering everything from the cystic fibrosis to the history of North Korea to pinhole cameras and the joys of Iceland (home of Bjork, rather than the budget supermarket). There's a handful that particularly lodge in the mind, including one by Martin Carter (AKA Maria Millionaire) about drag queens, complete with dramatic entrance down the staircase of the Corn Exchange (he later confides: "I did think 'Oh no, the floor’s laminated, I’m going to go arse-over-tit down these stairs!') and Jayne Rodgers' inspired reimagining of Star Wars as a perfectly-crafted Mills and Boon tale.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's Angela Whitlock's presentation "inspired" by creative thinking guru Edward de Bono declaration that no-one inspired him. She discussed her inspiration - her friend Dave, a man with lymphoma who was blanked by his hero Ian Botham and so renamed his tumour in Beefy's honour. It manages, in the short space of five minutes, to be both very moving and hysterically funny.

Such diversity is weaved into the design of Bettakultcha. As co-founder Richard tells me when I grab him at the end for a brief chat:

"I receive all the slides, and all I ever see is those slides. I have no idea what these people are going to say. So you look at the slides and start to juggle it and say “well, that one seems to fit with that one” and you try and pace between the serious things and what you think might be the more amusing things. The trouble is until they start speaking, I really don’t know. Sometimes it’s a happy accident, and sometimes it’s just a...[facial expression indicates a very much non-happy accident]. I think – or I like to hope – that we’ve got a nice balance between more energetic people and people who are a bit more nervous."


Drag queen Maria Millionaire, AKA Martin Carter. Thanks to Jon Eland (http://strawbleu.co.uk/) for the photo.

There is, however, one major rule: no pitches. As Richard explains, the Bettakultcha ethos is simple: "we want people to talk about their passions, what we don’t want is people turning up saying 'I sell cars' or 'this is my business'. Adds Ivor: "As soon as you start introducing this commercial, corporate-type element, people just want to switch off. I’ve seen it too often. There’s some ulterior motive – 'actually we want you to spend money on our product'. Bugger off."

There's one presentation that veers close to a pitch, but otherwise the speakers talk with passion and knowledge about their chosen subjects. As the evening draws to a close, three or four people get the chance to do some Bettakultcha freestyling over some random slides.

Bettakultcha has hit on a powerful formula, and it's so nice to come to event that brings together Leeds' alternative cultural community, or what Ivor calls "the arty, cultural, kind of eccentric people". Tonight, as well as Richard and Ivor, I meet the lovely Jess Haigh (AKA the Travelling Suitcase Library), Ellie Snare, Kirsty (the girl behind the brilliant Foldageddon) and, well, more nice people that it's possible to catalogue. As I grab the ravishing Maria Millionaire for a quick chat, he sums it up perfectly:

"It's one of those things that makes you think ‘Actually, Leeds is amazing’. Why isn’t there more things like this?” When people ask you what it is, it’s an evening of slide-shows, but it’s so much more than that. It’s one of those things where you need to get people to come here to understand it."

For more information, check out: http://bettakultcha.blogspot.com/


Bettakultcha co-founder Ivor. Thanks to Jon Eland (http://strawbleu.co.uk/) for the photo.

I'm late, I'm late, I'm very very late...

Browsing the net this week, I stumbled across this amazing mini-lecture on our changing perspective of time by Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, the mind behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.

Perhaps most interesting is Professor Zimbardo's thoughts on how technology is rewiring our brains, and why, as consequence, the traditional cirriculum of active teacher-passive pupil and rote learning is doomed to fail.

The killing fields of Cumbria

Twelve people have been confirmed dead so far today after the carnage wrought by gunman Derrick Bird in the Cumbrian seaside town of Whitehaven.

As is so often the case, news networks quickly rounded up a gaggle of acquaintances and friends, who to a man described him as "polite", "mild-mannered", "placid". His friends said he was "good craig", while his local ladylady declared he was a good egg.

How, then, do we broach this gap between the public persona and the bloody reality of events? The Guardian reports a man who knew Mr Bird telling Radio 4: ""I can't see how this piece fits into his jigsaw. It's just completely out of place."

Perhaps, scary though it is to admit, the truth is that we don't need to. Maybe it is quite possible to be a well-functioning citizen and a cold-blooded killer? Isn't that the basis of shows like Dexter, where we root for the serial murderer on the flimsy premise that he only, er, y'know, murders bad guys?

The Not So Big As You Imagined Society

One of the great fallacies/thought farts of this election has been Cameron's idea of the "Big Society", which basically translates as: "should you have any problems, it's not our fault, you're on your own kiddo."

This is politicians abdicating responsibility, giving up on The State. It harks back in the most transparent way to Thatcher, whose genius was to somehow convince the British electorate that, even after unemployment had reached 3 million, it wasn't the State's place to intervene.

And if you don't believe me, how about this from the Times, not usually the most Labour-friendly of papers:

"If the Conservatives get in, Osborne will be overseeing the biggest spending squeeze since 1945 as they engage in their traditional pastime of scaling back the welfare state. Over the decades, the main task of any Tory administration has been to come up with a new, euphemistic way of describing how it will scale back the welfare state. Cameron's pop is the coining of the phrase 'Big Society'. Big Society, charities and voluntary organisations will, apparently, step in and pick up the slack in areas where once the welfare state existed.

For anyone wondering if this might work, Cameron's former tutor at Oxford, Vernon Bognador, appeared to explain:

"That is the philosophy of the 19th century," he said, briskly. "What does 'Big Society' really mean? That if you become destitute the Salvation Army will step in? It doesn't work. That's why we invented the State."