"Vote Remain" In Terms Daily Mail Readers Could Understand

This idea comes from a nice lady on the internet by the name of Ruth McKay, who writes :

We needed a few tub thumping, fist waving, knee jerking bigots on our side, spreading fear and paranoia - people'd have listened to that. Our insistence on reason and facts (well, mostly) is the cause of this monstrous fiasco. Reason and facts?! I mean, honestly, you couldn't make it up. 

Well now there's an interesting idea. Can we redraft the Remain campaign in terms that Daily Mail readers will understand ? That is, nationalism must run rampant, a stench of xenophobia must permeate everything (occasionally flirting with abject racism) facts must be chosen selectively or not at all, ideology must always prevail, and anecdotes must always win over statistics. I find it bizarre that the Remain campaign was branded, "Project Fear" by the Leave group, even while they themselves painted foreigners as hordes of terrorist benefit cheats looking to steal our jobs. So fear of the mythical other must dominate over fear for ourselves. And there have to be occasional token gestures of moderation just so people can say, "obviously it's more complicated than simple racism", thus missing the point catastrophically.

Some ideas are just too perverse not to try, so here goes. I will focus on the three main issues of the real campaign : foreigners, sovereignty, and expense. But not necessarily in that order. Let us begin with a headline based on the excellent Daily Mail-omatic. It should go without saying, but for the love of all things holy don't bother to fact-check this. It is very deliberately a mixture of facts, bullshit, outright lies, and stuff I just plain made up of the top of my head.


As Westminster fat cats plan to hurt the decent, hard-working people of this country, we ask :

WILL LEAVING THE E.U. GIVE BRITAIN'S SWANS CANCER ?

Ministers are secretly plotting to take the U.K. OUT of Europe and plunge the economy into an "unprecedented" recession, the Mail can reveal.

Sources close to the Prime Minister confirmed that left-wing bureaucrats are determined to prevent the U.K. from receiving any of our hard-earned European cash and ending our special exemptions that give us unique power and influence on the Continent. The move is likely to cost the British economy tens of billions of pounds, take the nanny state to terrifying new levels, open the floodgates to illegal immigrants, and strike a crippling blow to British sovereignty, the Mail understands.

The political correctness of the Westminster establishment looks set to threaten our country as never before. Ministers are reported to believe that the U.K. is "stealing" billions of pounds each year from Europe, despite the fact that we are fully entitled to every penny of that hard-earned cash under clear regulations the British government imposed on Brussels. Europe willingly accepted economic integration as the price for our membership, but now Westminster cronies are using populist rhetoric to convince voters that our great country is nothing more than a European "parasite".

In yet another example of the loony left trying to have their cake and eat it, other ministers are reported to believe that the E.U. is a "luxury" that this, the world's fifth largest economy, supposedly cannot afford. While out-of-touch ministers bandy around figures for political point-scoring, the reality is that the £127.6 million per week that Britain takes from a grateful E.U. is essential for many hard-working British families - with most of those benefits going to the ordinary middle class. Indeed, even without accounting for the massive financial returns from E.U. membership, even our investment into Europe is far smaller than our expenditure on BEER. Once again, the so-called "facts" of the liberal experts are revealed to be paper-thin, while real people suffer as pawns in the statistical games of the bureaucrats.

In a demonstration of utter contempt for the British taxpayer, ministers have further argued that British sovereignty would, in defiance of all common sense, be somehow strengthened outside Europe. These Britain-hating liberals have no shame as they seek to withdraw our country from the world stage in the name of "European liberty".  They despise our political pre-eminence in Europe, with our unique relationship with the United States allowing us to act as a power broker for the world's economic superpowers. Our centuries-long ambition of governing Europe, which needs our guiding hand now more than ever, is threatened by our left-wing elites and a handful of snail-eating European desk jockeys. They are blind to the simple reality that Brexit would see us hand over control of the world's largest economic bloc to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Wellington would be spinning in his grave.

The worst lies of all told by the Leave camp concern immigration, which threatens the flow of willing European workers who would rightly prefer to see their taxes go to us rather than their own incompetent governments. Of course, we need a strong policy on immigration, but it's common sense that if we make immigration illegal, we will only have illegal immigrants. That sort of human swarm cannot be allowed to swamp our NHS and other proud public institutions. Instead we've got to keep encouraging the best and the brightest to come here and further strengthen our great country, leaving behind the dregs of society in the impoverished countries where they belong. After all, this time-honoured policy of divide and rule is what made Britain great.

We don't need "experts" to tell us that our country is stronger in Europe. Stronger politically, economically, and militarily. Our global reach is stronger than it has been in decades, and far from being mere puppets of Brussels, as the ostrich-like Euroskeptics would claim, if anything the situation is the other way around. This is a simple, common-sense truth the mainstream politicians would rather not talk about. Just visit an NHS hospital and see the wealth of foreign experience we've drawn to that great institution, or the huge numbers of foreign scientists at our universities - such is the sway we have over other nations.

An Independence Day, Nigel ? No sir ! That is something for lesser countries. We don't need to take our country back, because it is we who give other countries independence. It is we who govern nations that cannot govern themselves, not the other way around. No-one has taken our country from us in a thousand years, so vote Remain to keep us where we belong : a great country that others can only envy, neither ruling nor being ruled by Europe, but leading it into a bright, prosperous future where Britain wisely governs the nations of Europe. Let the French and the Germans and the rest be subject to us, not us be subject to them.

Absolutely Not

I posted this meme a few days ago. I did not expect it to be controversial. Not in the slightest.

Granted, it's an opinion, not a measurable fact. Point conceded. But, to those who think laws should be absolute, have you gone utterly barking batshit crazy ?

Now, normally I reserve the hyperbole-laden posts for sci-fi reviews, because most people are level-headed enough to understand that I don't actually think that Battlestar Galactic is going to usher in the next apocalypse or that I'd spit in the eye of anyone who enjoys Stargate Universe. Of course I don't, and I wouldn't. Under ordinary circumstances though, I generally try and make my philosophical commentaries fairly moderate, almost by definition.

These are not normal circumstances.

Let's see... not much sleep this week... worst political crisis in living memory... 22 hours of talks in 4 days that were mostly about topics I don't understand stuck in the same room without much ventilation... too much heat... yeah, moderation can go boil its frickin' head. Hence, I may say things which I do not really entirely agree with.

What is the purpose of the law ? To prevent crime by deterrent ? To punish for the sake of punishment ? To maintain order ? To enforce certain behaviours and discourage others ? To promote the values society aspires to ? To ensure justice ? Meh, who cares. It doesn't really matter, because it is self-evident that whatever the letter of the law, the spirit of the law is far more important. Interpreting the intent of the law is obviously not easy, but unless you think the law is some sort of monster that demands continual sacrifice, embracing the idea of absolute law is to embrace cruelty. And whatever the purpose of the law is, enforcing cruelty is not something I will ever, ever, ever support.

The original meme comes from a very good episode of Star Trek : The Next Generation that was executed in a really crappy way. In the episode in question, the Edo species have achieved an incredibly dull sort of utopia in which everyone is impossibly attractive and seems to spend most of their time having sex. It's an absurdly idyllic yet dull sort of existence, not dissimilar to the far more famous Eloi of H.G. Wells. Dullness aside, everyone appears to be at a Disney-esque level of happiness, only with more sex.

The reason for this gushingly Utopian existence is the Edo's incredibly simple laws, which are not only absolute but also absolutely extreme : anything deemed bad is illegal, and the penalty for any transgression is death. The episode revolves around everyone's most hated Star Trek character (Wesley Crusher) accidentally stepping on some flowers, which is of course illegal. For some reason the crew decide not to avail themselves of this excellent opportunity to rid themselves of this jumped-up little jerk but try and negotiate for his release. Unfortunately, Captain Picard's moral sermons are ultimately successful and we have to endure a full three more seasons of Wesley's extreme smugness.

In the Edo system, ignorance of the law is no defence. Even more absurdly, even accidentally breaking the law (i.e. by tripping up and stepping on flowers) doesn't make any difference. Which means that any visitors would have to fully acquaint themselves with all of the Edo's laws to avoid running the risk of death. In the episode, neither side make much effort to understand the other's laws, otherwise the crew of the Enterprise would surely have given the "planet of the very stupid people" a hell of a wide berth. It's obvious to anyone with a lick of sense that stepping on flowers isn't as bad as killing babies, so why would you expect the same punishment for both ?

One of my all-time favourite memes explains things rather well :

True, in the middle it can be hard to distinguish one colour from another. But it is not at all hard to distinguish red from blue, there are some things for which it's just damn blindingly obvious to anyone half-sane that red is different to blue, that some things are better than other things.

But in case even the absurdity of the Edo's laws isn't obvious to you, we can go one better. One could imagine a law which said nothing except that anyone who disobeyed that law should be exterminated. Would that be just ? Of course it wouldn't. Laws are not automatically just. Therefore, enforcing the laws absolutely does not automatically ensure justice or fairness. I can't make it any more obvious than that. Laws should be absolutely fair, but since we can't always agree on what fairness is, if you think they should be absolute then you have declared yourself morally omniscient. And that's very, very silly.

"Alright", you might say, "I can accept that these really extreme hypothetical cases*, the absolute law doesn't work. But I never meant that everyone who disagreed with me should be shot on sight. In reality, we just set different punishments for different crimes and we enforce that regardless."

* You didn't read the link about the UKIP candidate, did you ? You should.

Good try, but.... come on. If someone steals a loaf of bread from a rich* baker because they're starving and would otherwise die, does it really, really seem like justice to you to then make them pay a fine ? Even if their situation was forced upon them through no fault of their own ? What if they used to work in that very bakery but a new owner fired them because they wouldn't remove their tattoos or simply had a personality conflict ? Fining them would only keep them in the situation which drove them to poverty in the first place and is manifestly stupid.

* To my lasting dismay, people seem to continuously ignore the fact that the suffering of the rich is almost always far, far less than those at the bottom.

Or consider something more serious. Suppose our miscreant was routinely pickpocketing not to survive but just because they enjoyed the extra cash, occasionally straying into physical assault and burglary. This, on the face of it, is not a nice person.... but, what if they only do that because it's the only life they've ever known, if they've been brought up assuming this is correct way to live ? If such a person realises the error of their ways and shows genuine repentance, should you really treat them in exactly the same way as someone who shows no remorse and insults their victims in court ?

These are all, essentially, trolley problems. Yes, there are a few extreme cases in the real world where things are cut and dried, but the vast majority are far too complex for the law to make provision for all of them - without becoming so convoluted that no-one would be capable of understanding it. Not to mention various unintended consequences of laws being used for purposes for which they were never originally intended. Laws sometimes endure for centuries, others are fleeting.

Again, making laws absolute in any way is only sensible if you're omniscient, which, I'm sorry to say, you're not. The only reasonable question becomes not whether laws should be absolute, because that's just stupid, but how rigorously they should be enforced and what powers judges should be given over sentencing. Of course we must also guard against capricious judges making unfair decisions that favour those with power (laws have to be more than guidelines), but that is no reason for the wanton cruelty that moral absolutism would impose. What the hell gives you the right to just ignore any extenuating circumstances ? Nothing, that's what.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Brexit. I've made my case that we should try in some way to avoid actually doing this very stupid thing despite the result of the referendum. To recap, the arguments for the latter are as follows :

• The referendum was not legally binding, only advisory - so trying to apply legal absolutism in this case makes no sense anyway.
• The result will have far-reaching ramifications for decades to come, and should not be decided by a small minority (mainly of older voters who won't have to live with the consequences as long as the rest of us).
• The Leave campaign was based on lies. OK, political campaigns are often based on lies, but rarely are they of this magnitude or exposed this brazenly.
• Voting for a course of action which will objectively lead to harm makes as much sense as running a poll to decide if owls exist.
• Accordingly, an as-yet undetermined number of voters appear to have changed their minds, as well they should when presented with new evidence - the result may no longer reflect the will of the people at all, and should we really let such a major decision fall to such transient whims ?
• There are precedents for a such a move so it is not inconsistent with the established democratic process, even leaving aside that Parliament has every democratic right to ignore it. Like it or not, we don't have a direct democracy.

So far, all this has been met with by those who disagree is a scream of, "WILL OF THE PEOPLE ! WELCOME TO DEMOCRACY ! YOU DON'T GET TO CHANGE THE RESULT JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE IT !"

Firstly, when have you ever heard me previously saying, "I don't like this result, we should ignore it ?". Answer : you haven't, because I've never said that even when things happened that I didn't like. But there are some things which are for all intents and purposes objectively bad, and it's those I have a problem with. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what I like, we're not talking about The Force Awakens here. I'm not going to argue that aspect, just watch the goddamn news already.

And anyway, in our society we damn well do get provision to change results we don't like. We are free to protest for (almost) whatever course of action we want. You may not want a second referendum or a general election or for Parliament to ignore the result, but I do. I am free to campaign for these things just as you are free to campaign against me.

When did the right to protest become undemocratic, pray tell ?

Secondly, the points I made quite specifically address the "will of the people" thing. At best, we don't know if it's the will of the people or not. Currently the opinion polls - like just about everything else right now - are conflicted. True, at some point we do have to make a decision and stick to it, but isn't it prudent that this extremely important decision be made on the basis of a substantial majority, not a potentially transient minority ?

Thirdly, I know what a democracy is, thank you so very much, and I see absolutely no reason whatsoever why this non-binding vote has to be treated as an absurd absolute. "We must jump into the volcano, we voted for it !" No you bloody mustn't - or if you must, don't you dare drag me along with you. If you really believe that a group vote to jump into a volcano must be binding even though the rules said it wasn't binding, then you are an idiot and I despise you. Natural selection clearly has its work cut out for the foreseeable future.

The only counter argument to this has been that "you can't simplify democracy like that". Really ? Oh, I think you'll find that I can. Apart from the magnitude of it, what exactly is wrong with my analogy ? And why the hell can't I (supposedly) simplify democracy, but you're apparently allowed to reduce it to a batshit crazy absolute extreme in which any non-binding vote must be considered sacrosanct no matter the absurdity of the result ? Aaaaaarrrghhhh !

The Magna Carta should be held no more sacred than any other text. It is totally absurd to define your laws as absolute and inviolable by a document written in another era with circumstances its writers could not possibly foresee. Rather than guaranteeing freedoms, it could do the exact opposite. Only constant vigilance and self-examination have any chance of keeping society healthy.

The ideal democracy is not one in which everyone gets to vote on every issue. It's one which everyone gets to vote on every issue and is also an informed expert about everything. Plato's Republic took that idea further, postulating that only the experts at ruling should be allowed to rule. All of these notions can't and don't exist in the real world. Representative democracy is a sort of hybrid. Most decisions (but not all) require a vote, which are almost always done by people we choose to vote for us. Those representatives aren't necessarily experts, but we would hope that since it's their job to understand what's being voted on, they are at least more expert than the majority for most of the time.

Occasionally though, we do make choices which are far closer to direct democracy. The problem is that most people are neither informed nor experts. They're not even responsible - they even vote on entirely different issues to the one put before them, sometimes out of protest, sometimes out of pig-headedness. No system, not even democracy, can function if enough people decide not to play by its rules.

What can be done about this ? Well, we can stop having referendums since people just don't know how to handle them. If we want them back, I suggest gradually trialling them on much more local levels for minor decisions first, so that people accept that what they decide has, well, you know, actual freakin' consequences before we let them play with the big decisions. Then, we've got to reform the education system and, equally importantly, the way the media are regulated. We could also think about requiring qualifications for ministerial positions and addressing the fundamental purpose of work, so that people actually have time to research issues properly. We will not get a perfect solution, but we might get one a damn sight better than the one we've got.

In the meantime, if you want to stop Brexit, keep exercising your democratic right to protest. Keep signing petitions. Keep writing letters to your local representatives telling them to use their democratic right to veto the non-binding referendum result. Stall for time to delay Article 50. Keep reminding people that there is nothing, nothing, nothing remotely undemocratic whatsoever about people changing their minds. Direct democracy got us into this mess, representative democracy may yet get us out of it.

An Open Letter To My Local MP

EDIT : It was pointed out that this is a bit long so might not actually get read. A shorter version is below.

Dear Mr Williams,

I am writing to ask you to consider advocating in the House of Commons that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty should not be invoked by the current or future Prime Minister, without at least a full public consultation. I am an expatriate scientist currently living in the Czech Republic. Cardiff North was my home for 27 years and it remains my permanent residence. Cardiff University benefits directly and substantially from E.U. funding which may be impossible to replace in the event of Brexit, and scientists such as myself profit enormously from the freedom of movement provided by the E.U. Modern scientific practise would suffer immeasurably without this freedom. Thus, I have a vested personal and professional interest in preventing a Brexit.

It has become abundantly clear that many of the so-called "negative" warnings of the Remain camp were entirely accurate (for example the value of the pound has already dropped dramatically), while the Leave campaign consisted of outright lies (that immigration could be cut and that there would be an extra £350 million per week for the NHS) and vague, undefined promises that we could either find unspecified replacements for the E.U.'s many benefits, or simply renegotiate them from outside the E.U. The Leave camp themselves have admitted these mistakes, which were major parts of their campaign.

An e-petition has been created calling for a change in the rules of the referendum so that a second referendum would be required in the result of a narrow vote. Ironically the instigator of the petition was a Leave voter concerned that the Remain victory would be narrow and indecisive, but nonetheless it has now attracted over 3.3 million signatures at the time of writing. This makes it by far the most successful e-petition of the UK Parliament and represents about 10% of those who voted in the referendum. It is not clear how many of the signatories originally voted Remain and how many voted to leave but have since changed their minds, given the damage visibly being done to the UK following the vote. Therefore, the most sensible course of action is to (at the very least) delay implementation of Article 50 until a proper assessment of the situation can be made, possibly but not necessarily resulting in a second referendum.

It may be fairly argued that asking the public to vote repeatedly on an issue (or Parliament simply ignoring the result) because one side does not like the outcome is undemocratic. However, that is not necessarily the case, as I will try to argue.

First, the referendum was not legally binding and the result was very close. This is a decision of major importance with profound consequences that will last not for a few years as in a general election, but for decades. Membership of the E.U. is not something that can be routinely renegotiated on a whim, so the result ought to be decisive if we are to change course. It was a serious error that this was not included in the terms of the original referendum.

Second, the petition for a second referendum has already attracted more votes than the margin by which Leave won. If nothing else, some attempt should be made to estimate how many of those originally voted for Leave but have now changed their minds.

Third, it is clear that lies formed an important part of the Leave campaign, thus making the choice inherently undemocratic.

Fourth, voting for facts makes no sense. Politics may be a far more slippery arena than science, where opinion is more prevalent than fact, but even so it does not escape factual reality entirely. It is a demonstrable fact that leaving the E.U. is hurting the U.K., and no sane person votes for self-harm. Having been lied to and misinformed by the Leave campaigners, it is not undemocratic in the slightest to ask them to vote again (or even ignore the result) given the facts of the situation. By analogy, the American state of Indiana once almost voted to declare the value of pi to be exactly 3.2 - this would have been objectively wrong, but no-one would have complained about ignoring or repeating the vote in this case.

Fifth, this would not be entirely unprecedented. The Leave campaigners explicitly stated that they would continue to push for a second referendum in a result this close. Even more pertinently, the E.U. itself had Ireland conduct a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty after Ireland initially rejected it. Considering to hold a second vote in the event that people have changed their minds based on the evidence is not the slightest bit undemocratic. Rather, seeking to avoid the years of turmoil that Brexit would ensure is the only responsible course of action possible in our representative democracy.

With kind regards,

Rhys Taylor


UPDATE : Here's a somewhat shorter version that stands more chance of being read.

Dear Mr Williams,

I am writing to you, my local MP, to consider advocating with the rest of Parliament that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty not be invoked at the current time. I am an expat scientist originally from Cardiff currently living in the Czech Republic. Cardiff University benefits significantly from EU funding, and the scientific rewards of freedom of movement cannot be overstated. It is not known if or how these could be replaced in the event that Brexit actually occurs.

Furthermore, it has now become abundantly clear that many of the the so-called "negative" warnings of the Remain camp were entirely accurate (for example the value of the pound has already dropped dramatically), while the Leave campaign consisted of outright lies (that immigration could be cut and that there would be an extra £350 million per week for the NHS) and vague, undefined promises that we could either find unspecified replacements for the E.U.'s many benefits, or simply renegotiate them from outside the EU. The Leave camp themselves have admitted these mistakes, which were major parts of their campaign.

The fact that the damaging effects of Brexit are already being felt should give us pause to reconsider the marginal result of the referendum. An e-petition calling for a change in the rules has currently attracted over 3.5 million votes, far more than the margin by which the referendum was won. The damaging consequences are now objective facts, not predictions. The consequences of Brexit are too serious and too dangerous to allow the result to be determined by a small minority who were repeatedly misinformed throughout the campaign. As in science, so in politics : once new facts are known, it is not the slightest bit undemocratic to reconsider one's position.

Finally, this move to stall Article 50 with the possibility of a second vote is not unprecedented. Nigel Farage himself is on public record as stating that a result this narrow would require a second referendum. The EU even required Ireland to hold a second referendum after the Lisbon Treaty was initially rejected. All things considered, it seems prudent to at least hold a period of public consultation to determine if the mood of the Leave campaigners has shifted.

With kind regards,

Dr Rhys Taylor

Are There Hats ?

So Brexit is here, and it is easily the most depressing British political event in modern times. Will it bring about the next apocalypse, a plague of locusts and the end of civilisation ? No. But it is a seriously, historically, objectively bad thing. We are all of us going to suffer for this.

Nobody knows how badly the UK economy will suffer, but suffer it most certainly will. The sudden plunge of the pound (predicted by economists) was mostly market shock at us actually doing something so stupid, but the long-term effects are harder to foresee. How we will make up the £3.4 billion science shortfall (and yes, I place that of prime importance*, science is an important driver of social progress) is unknown. The 1707 Act of Union - one of the most successful political unions in world history, which ten years ago looked rock solid - looks unlikely to last much longer. The United Kingdom will dissolve and no longer be Great Britain, there will just be Britain - a wet, gloomy island home to some unimportant, disparate countries clinging to faded visions of past glories. We shunned openness with our neighbours and turned our back on the tolerant, inclusive society we have built over many decades. Worst of all, Nigel Farage - a demonstrably racist, xenophobic, bigoted idiot - is hero of the hour. That alone terrifies me.

* But if you insist that you want more, consider the effects to the financial sector, peace in Northern Ireland, the loss of job opportunities due to restrictions on freedom of movement, and basically all those benefits from joining the E.U. that are now under threat.

None of this is hyperbole or spin, it is simply reality. You might not like it - God knows I find it appalling - but it's true anyway.

Not that Britain hasn't suffered some pretty calamitous events before, only to eventually rise again. During the Viking invasions, England was reduced to merely Wessex before it saved itself from obliteration - only for the entire thing to then be conquered by Canute, and then his empire broke up on his death, temporarily restoring the Anglo-Saxon legacy. By the time of the Norman invasion England was the wealthiest country in Europe, and despite the carnage of Norman conquest, a century later British dominions stretched from the Pyrenees to Scotland. Most of that was lost during the disastrous reign of King John, but two hundred years later and Britain looked to be on the verge of winning the whole of France - only for Henry V to die at a young age. Thus began the chaos of the Wars of the Roses... and that's all centuries before the British Empire even began.

We have a long, rich, and complicated history. We endure. We have, indeed, suffered far worse than leaving the E.U., only to eventually emerge stronger than ever before, and we will likely do so again. A germ of hope can be seen in that the vote was split by age, with the youth strongly preferring to remain (it is no exaggeration to state that this decision has been inflicted on us by racist older people who won't have to live with the consequences of their decision nearly as long as those who didn't want to leave). The problem, of course, is in the "eventually". Things do not look likely to get better anytime soon.

The medieval chronicler Gerald of Wales put it thus :

For a sensible man ought to consider that Fortune’s favour is variable and her wheel is ever turning ... the Prince must take care, and always have imprinted on his mind the fact that although the merciful Creator ... is long-suffering and patient... He is likewise severe in executing punishment and vengeance upon the stubborn and wilful, and usually begins to exact that punishment here on earth.

Or in more secular terms things might not be apocalyptic and they may indeed one day improve, but you can't escape the consequences of your actions. Brexiteers have demanded they suffer no negative consequences for an action which everybody told them would have negative consequences. This is stupidity of the highest order. And it is stupidity, because despite a goddman overwhelmingly strong consensus from the experts that Brexit would be worse than staying in the E.U., we decided to do it anyway.

It wasn't even difficult - not in the slightest degree - to see that Brexit would be disastrous. It was crystal clear and obvious. The whole point of the E.U. is economic integration with its member states, but no-one put forward a remotely sensible plan for dealing with the aftermath of exit. "Oh, but we were a great power before the E.U." doesn't matter, because we are now dependent on the E.U. and they on us. Many things are complicated, but this isn't one of them. We didn't even have a plan to deal with the poll itself : it was non-binding (a much-overlooked fact) and no constraint was placed on how strong the result needed to be for change (a really, really stupid policy given the magnitude of the issue).

My predictions for the vote were wholly wrong. Generally, the only people who ever vote in E.U. elections in Britain are the ones who hate it, hence most of our MEPs are UKIP. Polls at the start of the campaign were well in favour of remain, so I was quite confident that the majority of Brits were not stupid enough to actively choose self-harm when it came to the push. My only worry was that the sheer disinterest in Europe would again act as a filter and only those passionately opposed to it would bother voting. I was wrong. I was quite sure that the large number of undecided voters would act conservatively, as they did at the Scottish referendum, and vote for a known quantity rather than taking a massive, incalculable leap into the dark. I was wrong about that too.

But the hardline element is one thing, and the less vocal majority quite another. No doubt the internet will be awash with many more excellent analyses than mine, but still I would like to offer a few thoughts on how so many people can have effectively decided that the Earth is flat.


Media Bias

First, there is a huge media bias in the UK newspapers. On the right, the Daily Mail, The Sun, the Daily Express, The Times and The Telegraph have a combined circulation of around 4.9 million. On the left, the Daily Mirror and The Guardian have a combined circulation of just 1 million. That only rises to about 1.3 million if you add the neutral The Independent and its shorter version, the i. And while the right-wing papers tend to be overtly political (the Daily Mail especially so, which runs essentially nothing but xenophobic headlines), on the left only The Guardian is really much of a political paper these days, with the Mirror tending to be mainly focused on celebrity boobs in bikinis (oddly, its website is rather better). Accounting for this, it would be entirely fair to say that the right wing political papers are about ten times more numerous than left wing or neutral ones.

Things are, however, considerably better for the left on television, with the ostensibly neutral but actually rather left-wing BBC News being by far and away the nation's most-watched news channel. Additionally, while Sky News are somewhat to the right, they are vastly more moderate than the terrifyingly racist liars at the Daily Mail. So media bias - if you give people constantly the wrong information they can't do anything but form the wrong conclusions, even if they're very intelligent - plays a role, but it can't be the only factor.

On the other hand, even the BBC has to report what politicians say - and large numbers of Tory politicians have been singing the same dreary song about immigration for years. For some reason that I am utterly unable to comprehend, they also gave significant air time to Nigel Farage even when he was a political no-hoper. Initially, Nigel made a lot less noise about foreigners and a lot more about Brussels bureaucracy, which is a lot nicer than talking about people being scared of Romanians. But it was insidious. As support grew, the BBC were then more obliged to report on UKIP, even as what they were saying increasing tended toward far-right propaganda. And that's something that should given anyone pause for thought - OK, people can say things without being locked up, but does that really oblige major networks to report what they said ?*

*And what they said is often also a lie, or a u-turn. Farage has been caught lying about the amount of money Brexit could save for the NHS and, with truly hideous distaste, that Brexit won without a shot being fired, barely a week after pro-E.U. M.P. Jo Cox was shot dead by a man shouting, "put Britain first !".

The upshot is that even the media most biased against xenophobia and the anti-E.U. lobby still had to report this, so people were still exposed to it more often than not. And you reap what you sow. A particularly pernicious fallacy has crept in that's even more damaging - the notion that anyone who disagrees with the right must be one of those on the "loony left", which exposes the great lie of the right that they are more tolerant than the left. They are not. Time and again those on the right call for for discriminatory policies against gays, transexuals, Muslims, and basically anyone who isn't a white Christian male age 25-45. No, not everyone on the right is like this (David Cameron deserves praise for his championship of gay marriage), but enough of them are. The idea that the left is more intolerant (even though it is, of course, very far from perfect) is just so much nonsense.

Unless we actively do something about this, it's only going to get worse. The moderating influence of Scotland will soon be lifted from England, which can only lead to more Tory governments. That can only make it easier to get away with right-wing bias.


Failures of the Left

Secondly, there has been a chronic failure of the left to properly address immigration. This started with Ed Milliband, who instead of championing the virtues of immigration decided to try and play the other side at their own game. This was a disaster, because no-one really believed that Labour either could or would enact a policy that restricted immigration. And I don't want that policy, I think it would be useless and divisive. I want Labour to welcome and stand up for minorities, not restrict their access.

Then again, we could have had the proper, grown-up debate about immigration that Nigel Farage "wanted" if he hadn't behaved like such an absolute tosser. If you want a sensible debate, you keep it entirely about population. That's all. You do not talk about foreign criminals or wealth or culture, because those things inevitably head south very quickly. As with all discrimination, you set one law for everyone and if people can't abide by it then tough on them. If that means their cultural values lead them to being criminalised, then they'd better learn to assimilate.

Corbyn's failure was different. While pro-immigration, he was (for no reason I could ever tell) remarkably lacklustre about the whole campaign. With just days to go he was talking about the removal of roaming charges and rating the E.U. as "7.5/10". OK, I'd probably give the E.U. about the same, but that's a pathetic way to run a campaign ! The value of freedom of movement - everything that Corbyn holds dear - cannot be overstated. As the leader of the opposition he should have been dancing from the rooftops about it, instead he just sort of quietly waved from behind a quite tall fence.


Anti-knowledge

Thirdly, and most importantly, expert concerns were brushed aside in a torrent of hate and fear. "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts" declared Michael Gove. Well, sorry people, but even in politics there are some facts, it's not all opinions. You can have whatever opinion you like on whatever subject you like, but that doesn't make it true. Voting on it doesn't make it true either. And just as in science, thinking you know better than the experts on fiscal or political policy is, well, arrogant and silly. You don't know how to do open heart surgery, why do you think you understand complex economic arrangements and political treaties ?

Inspired by Last Week Tonight in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Which is not to say that experts always get it right, because they don't. No-one can, that's impossible. But so many experts in so many different fields were saying that this was a bad idea, the whole notion that it would actually be a good idea ought to have been obviously wrong to everyone.

Democracy is a noble ideal. But it cannot function correctly when its citizens are misinformed and a culture of anti-knowledge exists (after the vote, searches for "What does it mean to leave the E.U. ?" soared, because apparently people hadn't thought to fact-check this beforehand). How can you really be making a free and rational choice if you're going to dismiss people who have spent far more time studying these complex issues than you, and if you weight opinions more heavily than facts ? What's the point of a democracy if people are allowed to pretend the Earth is flat ?

This is why people holding anti-science views makes me very angry, even when those views aren't actually harmful in and of themselves. Believing the Earth was created in six days doesn't make you evil. The problem is that when you allow utter bullshit (ranging from outright lies to ridiculously exaggerated levels of doubt) to replace hard, testable facts, you open the door to letting bullshit win everywhere. Encouraging the use of scientific method is not only about laboratory experiments, it is every bit about the political world as well. As Paul Kriwaczek put it  :

Social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind.

Listening to the experts does not mean that everyone will think the same way or even agree with the experts 100% of the time about everything (the "flaw of averages" means that practically no two people agree on 100% of the issues). It simply means that when there is a consensus as strong that of Brexit, there wouldn't have been a chance in hell that we would have voted for it, any more than if a major cartography company were to decide the Earth was flat all along.


Where do we go next ?

The central issue here has to come down to freedom of speech. The UK has laws against libel - saying falsehoods which are damaging to an individual's reputation - but it's far less clear when it comes to statements which don't affect individuals but are nonetheless objectively wrong. Is it time, perhaps, to consider some sort of regulation about this ? I am not proposing any specific solution, just that the media bias is clear and demonstrable and we have to find away to make things more objective than they are now.

This doesn't mean that I don't want people to publish opinions I disagree with. But, again, not everything is an opinion, and the proliferation of outright lies and bullshitting are leading us down an extremely dangerous road. Can you really have freedom without truth ? Journalists are supposed to be impartial, which is not the same as objective. Currently much of the British press doesn't seem to be even doing that; just about every single paper apart from The Independent feels more like a campaign leaflet, trying to push an agenda rather than reporting the facts and opinions in any sort of proper context.

How we regulate what happens when people clearly and wilfully publish lies, I don't know. Perhaps we should try to deal with this with direct laws, or maybe a subtler approach is needed. We could consider limiting how many media outlets any particular individual or corporation can be associated with. Then there are the even trickier issues of the media reporting the truth systematically without any larger statistical context, e.g. only reporting the crimes committed by immigrants rather than the benefits they bring. At the very least, we need to start thinking about regulating political advertising.

I do not know how we deal with all this, but I am convinced we need to discuss the current state of the media. It is absolutely abysmal, and without some sort of reform our democratic society is going to be in very serious trouble.

The long-term solution to all this is actually relatively straightforward : invest more in education, especially at the primary school level. Teach children statistical methods constantly from a very young age, they're not that hard and they equip them with many other skills essential for rational thinking. Teach them the humanities subjects properly : get them to analyse poetry and search for hidden meanings, help them discover how they're being manipulated. In science lessons, emphasise the experimental and observational approach and always explain how conclusions are reached - never reduce it to base facts. Read them The Apology starting at age seven, because among other things it teaches the worth of thinking, the importance of realising that you might be wrong and the unjustified but lawful killing by the state of a philosopher telling truths that no-one wanted to hear. Apply a universal basic income as soon as possible, so that people actually have time to consider the issues in detail rather than working themselves to death.

But in the short term, I have no idea where we go. We are in ghastly, uncharted waters. I signed the petition calling for a second referendum; at the time of writing it had over 2 million votes. I have no idea if we'll get another chance or even if this wouldn't just make things worse*, but we need to continue the message that this is a bad idea. The issues that people are concerned with won't go away even if we won the second vote - we've got to continue to persuade people to see reason. Some of their concerns are even legitimate, the E.U. is sometimes overbearing, making new members join the Euro is just plain bloody daft, and it desperately needs a clear, consensual goal of what its role in the world should be.

* While updating this article this had reach 2.9 million, which is sufficiently large that I start to wonder if this might do some good after all. While I stop short of committing myself to the need for a second referendum, two things should be noted : 1) Nigel Farage is on record of saying that there should be a second referendum in the event of a narrow win for Remain; 2) The E.U. itself made Ireland have a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty after it voted the "wrong" way. So this outcome, difficult as it would be, would be neither unprecedented nor against the E.U.'s style of democracy. And consider this : if an uninformed map-making institute did vote that the Earth was flat, would it not be perfectly sensible to ask them to vote again after they had correct information ?

Right now I'm angry, depressed, and scared for the future of my country. I don't know how bad things will get, but there is a very real possibility that we will diminish ourselves to a level we have not seen in generations. What scares me the most is the popularity of fascists and populists at a time of economic hardship. We've seen this before, and the prospect that they will continue to gain ground is something I find too awful to contemplate.

Whatever happens, eventually better times will return. But unless there's a political miracle I can't see the next ten or twenty years as being anything other than an unnecessarily bleak and dark chapter in our long history. We are breaking apart when we should be standing together. I hope that somehow, in defiance of all the evidence, I'm wrong about this, but right now I'm seeing precious little cause for optimism about the future.

So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel. - from the film, "Lawrence of Arabia".

Into Darkness (II) : Attack Of The Flying Snakes

Cosmological Models Are Lousy And I Don't Like Them

Last time we looked at the observational evidence for and against dark galaxies. But that post was boring, why did you bother wasting your time reading it ? This one is much better. Here we'll look at the latest theoretical evidence for galaxies which don't do the whole star-spangled thing because it's "too mainstream".

The standard model of cosmology is that most of the mass in the Universe is dark matter. Simulations predict that this can reproduce the very large structures we see - filaments of galaxies and voids where there's not much of anything - extremely well. But on smaller scales, they're about as successful as any character ever played by Sean Bean.

With the notable exception of Sharpe, obviously.

The problem is that the simulations predict about ten times as many galaxies as are actually observed. Now, because dark matter is so dominant - about ten times as much as the visible matter (gas and stars, normally known as baryonic matter) - the simulations only use dark matter. Clever mathematical recipes are used to work out how much visible matter each dark matter "halo" should contain. Since there's so much more dark matter, the baryonic matter shouldn't be able to affect it very much.

On the other hand, the physics of gas and stars is very much more complicated. Stars emit radiation and winds which pushes gas away and heats it up. Occasionally they explode and spew heavy elements back into the interstellar medium, which can help the gas cool and form more stars. Then there are active galactic nuclei caused by supermassive black holes, which can inject even more energy into the gas. Not to mention magnetic fields, different phases of the gas, etc.

So even though the the baryons probably can't affect the dark matter all that much, the amount of baryons each halo contains could be extremely complicated : i.e. we might have got that wrong. Maybe the reason we don't detect all those galaxies is because they've never gained enough gas to start forming (m)any stars.


Dark Galaxies... Or Just Cosmic Fluff ?

As we saw previously, there are some very intriguing candidate objects for these (nearly) starless galaxies. The major objection is that simulations have shown they could just be "tidal debris" - gas that's been ripped out of galaxies during interactions. In that case these gas clouds wouldn't solve one of the most important problems in contemporary cosmology at all : they'd just be uninteresting bits of hydrogen fluff, floating through the Universe feeling a bit foolish and causing no end of red-faced embarrassment for anyone claiming to have found a dark galaxy.

Which of these explanations if correct ? Given that solving a very important problem is generally defined to be a very important thing, remarkably there are only two studies showing how such hydrogen fluff could form. And neither of them do a very good job, either.

First, here's a reminder of the parameters of the clouds that might be dark galaxies :

• Gas mass of about 30 million times that of the Sun.
• No more than about 55,000 light years diameter (though they could be smaller).
• Line width (how fast they appear to be rotating, even if it's not actual rotation) of 100 - 170 km/s.
• At least 300,000 light years from the nearest other detectable gas.

Both studies I'll describe were prompted by one particular object, VIRGOHI21, which is broadly similar to the AGES clouds. The main difference is that it's part of a much larger hydrogen stream, which these clouds aren't - but see the previous post and also this for details.


Tidal Debris : Attempt No. 1

The first attempt was a simulation by Bekki et al. 2005. This publication was only a letter, which means it's just five pages long so doesn't have much in the way of details.  But what they did was to model two galaxies and bang them together. One galaxy was modelled properly (like this), the other used (essentially) a single particle just to approximate its gravity. Which is reasonable as computation time is a limited resource, but of course it would be better to model both galaxies properly.

The results of Bekki's simulation of two galaxies having an uncomfortably close encounter. Blue shows stars and pink shows gas.

At this point the whole scenario proposed breaks down miserably. They state they tried a "large number" of models, but don't say how many. They show a representative sample of those models which do produce isolated debris, but don't state what fraction of their models produce this debris. So we're told nothing as to how likely is is that tidal encounters can produce these sort of features. They don't quantify what happens to their modelled galaxy, but the figures make it appear to be pretty devastated. And bizarrely, they define "optically dark" to mean "anything that's fainter than the Magellanic clouds"*. The Magellanic Clouds are bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. Ummm.... ?

* They don't phrase it like this, nonetheless, it's what their statement means.

Perhaps worst of all, the debris they produce is huge - at least five times larger and more massive than our observed clouds. In fairness, at the time of that study the observations of VIRGOHI21 only had low spatial resolution, so it could have been much larger. Subsequent observations showed that it's very much smaller. So the Bekki scenario is now decisively ruled out. There are other problems with the paper but they're not worth mentioning.

Tidal Debris : Attempt No. 2

The second main effort was by Duc & Bournaud 2008. This is a much more detailed paper which attempts to reproduce VIRGOHI21 with great precision. By this time the high resolution observations of the object had been released, so they knew the size of the object. Their procedure was similar to that of Bekki - hurling two galaxies past each other, one with gas and one without.

Contrary to popular opinion, the results of Duc and Bekki are actually extremely similar. Which is not all that surprising considering they did essentially the same thing. While they do form a gas blob in the tail that has the right mass and is the right size, its velocity gradient is about three times smaller than VIRGOHI21 or the other clouds. There are some other questionable points too : their progenitor galaxy is incredibly gas rich with a very extended gas disc, meaning it has lots of gas that can be easily stripped, and it's significantly less massive than the real galaxy. It's at the very limit of what's permitted by the observations.

Or in other words they gave it the best chance possible, and still it failed.

Now, since VIRGOHI21 was, at the time, thought to be a really exceptional object, those latter points might be acceptable. A weird galaxy that produces a weird object. OK, fair enough. But now we know there are more such clouds, ones which don't have streams at all. Worse though is the failure of the Duc model to reproduce the velocity gradient - they very sneakily adjust the scales on their figures 2 and 6 (observation and simulation respectively), making it look as though they made something much more similar to the real VIRGOHI21 than they actually did.

The observation (left) and simulation (right) data as they appear in the Duc paper, on separate pages. Let's face it, the sharpness of the "kink" in the stream at VIROGHI21 isn't well-reproduced by this simulation even in this figure.

After correcting the figures to have the same scale, it's clear that the simulated VIRGOHI21 is even worse. There's absolutely nothing in the simulation that anyone in their right mind would mistake for a dark galaxy, which was the whole aim of the paper. Tsk tsk !

On the positive side, the Duc model does also produce a lot of gas north of VIRGOHI21. Very sensitive ALFALFA observations had detected this, which a third, far less well-known model of the system had failed to predict. This approach, by my PhD supervisor, had VIRGOHI21 as dark galaxy that came along and pulled out a long gas tail. This one was never published in a refereed journal, which is why I'm not going to go into any details.

So both major studies have failed to reproduce one of the most well-known dark galaxy candidates. The Duc model got pretty close, but that velocity width is a real show-stopper. You may not think that's such a big deal, but, as I shall show, you'd be wrong. It's a massive problem.

Which is not to say the Duc paper isn't important, because it is. It showed that the large-scale properties of the system could be reproduced in quite a simple way that didn't require a dark galaxy. It's completely understandable that people would assume the sharp kink is a mere detail. Understandable, but wrong.


I'd Like To Hear From Fictional Mathematician Ian "I Nearly Got Eaten By A Tyrannosaurus" Malcom At This Point

Not quite, Ian. Actually the weakness of the previous studies was that the authors never stopped to think if they would. That is, they came up with possible formation scenarios, but they never investigated how likely they were to really occur. Which was reasonable at the time (with just one weird object, it's perfectly fine to invoke a weird explanation), but with more such objects now known that needs to be addressed.

So what we did in the latest paper was to model the entire cluster, using an existing simulation. Not just two galaxies any more, but 400. Of course we couldn't model the gas in each galaxy because that would be far too computationally expensive, but now we could model the gravity far more accurately than the previous studies. Rather than dropping a gas-rich galaxy through the cluster, we dropped a gas stream.

"WHAT ?!?!" I hear you cry. "THAT'S F*£!@ING RIDICULOUS, YOU DOLT !"

I know, I know. If we wanted to do a proper comparison of the previous studies, we should have used a galaxy. Our scenario was even more ambitious though, because there's another mystery in the Virgo cluster : there aren't many long hydrogen streams there. Only four, in fact, plus a few much shorter ones. Simulations predict that such features ought to be very common - but they're actually extremely rare.

All known hydrogen streams in the Virgo cluster. Only the big ones are easily visible and labelled here - there are in fact four large streams in the cluster (HI1225+01 is probably a bit further away) plus another half-dozen or so very short streams.

So our idea was simple : maybe the long gas streams get broken up by interactions with all the galaxies. Maybe tearing up the stream produces fragments like the clouds that we see. Then we'd kill two birds with one stone and everyone would shout, "hurrah !".

Except the birds, obviously.

OK, big problem. The simulations which predict the existence of those streams are about something called ram pressure stripping. Now I have to disappoint you here, because that's nothing to do with forced bestiality at all.

Sorry. Anyway, galaxy clusters also contain hot, diffuse gas of their own. As galaxies move through it they should create a "ram pressure" which is strong enough to strip their own gas into long streams. Our simulations don't include this hot gas, which is not good. We really would like to include it, but it's much harder from a technical standpoint. Better to start simple and build in the more complicated physics gradually. And neither Bekki nor Duc included the hot gas, so there.

Simple simulation showing gas being ram-pressure stripped

from a galaxy.

But while in some ways our simulations weren't any better than the previous ones, in one very important respect we made a huge improvement. We didn't just drop one stream into the cluster, oh no. We dropped them in batches of 27, with each one at the corner or midpoint of a cube. Like this :

The grey spheres represent the other galaxies in the cluster. If you really want to you can watch a movie of this here, but it's quite dull, so don't.

We varied the starting mass, temperature, and distance of each batch of streams from the cluster centre. All told we ran something like 200 simulations or more. Then (unlike Duc) we converted the data into what we would detect with Arecibo so we could directly compare the simulations and observations.

To be clear, we didn't drop all 27 in at once. We dropped them in one at a time. The point is not to find out if there's some particular path through the cluster which produces fake dark galaxies, but to see how likely such objects are to occur by chance. And although we used a realistic model for the cluster gravity, we're still missing a lot of important physics - not only the intracluster gas but also heating and cooling, star formation... and of course the galaxy from which the gas stream originated. I suspect that most of these won't change the end result that much, though you'll have to read the paper for more details.

The most satisfying result from the whole shebang was that a lot of the streams look quite remarkably like snakes. The second most satisfying result was that the referee of the paper didn't object to the title.

ATTACK OF THE FLYING SNAKES !
... although I suppose that should really be falling snakes.

Life Finds A Way ?

Despite the many, many limitations, the results were remarkably decisive. The "tidal debris" idea fails miserably!

Yes, really ! We produced features just like those seen in Duc and Bekki easily - long features with shallow velocity gradients occur pretty nearly all the time. But clouds like the ones we observe in the real cluster ?

They just don't happen. Strictly speaking they happen 0.2% of the time, which means that "tidal debris" is a patently ridiculous mechanism to form all the clouds we see in the real cluster*. Don't believe me ? Watch the movies for yourself. Like Bekki, we made synthetic observations so we could accurately measure what we'd actually detect.

* Of course we're not claiming that tidal debris is never a good explanation - it's fine for larger clouds or ones with smaller velocity widths - just that it doesn't work for features like the ones we found.

White shows the particle data, red shows what we'd actually observe with Arecibo, and green shows the very isolated clouds similar to the weird ones we were trying to explain. Too difficult to see ? Have a look here.

There's more. We also tested the alternative idea that the clouds could be dark galaxies by dropping in galaxies containing gas but no stars. And again, you can watch the results for yourself.

See the full set of discs here.

Quite unlike the streams, nothing of any consequence happens to the discs. Even after being harassed by 400 galaxies for 5 billion years, they generally lose no more than half of their gas. To an AGES-class survey, they'd appear to do... well, nothing much. The gas density stays low too, so they wouldn't even form stars.

In fact it's even more of a dramatic win for dark galaxies. Last time we saw how one of the weirdest properties of the real clouds is not that they appear to be rotating rather fast, but that they're rotating faster than we'd expect based on their mass. It turns out that the dark galaxy models can explain this pretty well, whereas the tidal debris scenario just can't. In fact, if you consider clouds which not only have the correct line width but also the correct mass, that 0.2% drops to 0.0% ! Even the bits of tidal debris which do occasionally come close to matching the deviation only do so for about 50 million years, and then they typically disperse and become undetectable, whereas the dark galaxies remain with the correct high line width and detectable for the whole 5,000 million years of the simulation.

Though there are a couple of points to bear in mind. Firstly, the simulated debris at least moves in the right direction - it also has a higher line width than expected, just nowhere near high enough. Second the simulated dark galaxies don't agree perfectly with the real clouds - however, that's almost certainly because setting up a stable disc is hard. If we spent longer tweaking the initial conditions, we could get the simulated dark galaxies to be in much better agreement with the real clouds.

That, then, is that rarest of things : a sweeping and decisive victory for dark galaxies and a total defeat of the idea of tidal debris. But let's not get too cocky. Remember, our simulations don't include the intracluster gas, the gas in the streams is constrained to have the same temperature, none of the harassing galaxies have gas, and for our streams we didn't include the progenitor galaxies. These are all problems that do need to be addressed. However, the previous studies didn't include the intracluster gas, they kept its temperature constant, and their harassing galaxies were also gas free.

Since our results are often similar to the previous studies, that indicates that the lack of a parent galaxy probably isn't significant. For the first time we can quantify how likely the tidal debris theory is for clouds with high velocity widths : it isn't. That factor of three turns out to be a huge problem for the Duc and Bekki models - not the minor detail everyone seemed to think it was.


Mystery Solved ?

You might wonder why, if we'd got to the stage of dropping dark galaxies into the cluster, we didn't drop normal ones as well. That's surely the next logical step. The paper was 26 pages long at this point though - dangerously long, to the extent that people might not read it. And setting up a stable disc is not so easy, it isn't a matter of just tweaking the numbers of the discs we already used. So it's better to leave that to a second paper. It's tough to see it dramatically affecting the results though.

It's difficult to say how the other parameters would affect the results. The intracluster medium should, in my opinion, make the cloud's velocity widths if anything smaller. Any expansion velocity would be met with pressure acting to prevent it from expanding, slowing it down (though fluid effects are complicated and it's not always a good idea to guess what they'll do). Cooling of the gas has been shown to make a relatively small difference compared to harassment, so that probably won't change anything much either.

Smug as I am with this unexpectedly exciting result, the message I want to end on is rather different. Yes, we got a neat result. But we also know there are problems, and we should improve things accordingly. We're going to solve this one, dammit. But we're going to do it properly - not with hand-waving explanations that don't stand up to scrutiny. So far, the poo-poohed idea of dark galaxies is doing far better than the much more popular idea of "tidal debris". It's too important an issue to dismiss this with models that don't actually work and haven't been repeated. And we should always, always, always bear in mind that a model which works is not the same as a model which is correct.

Because humans are made of squishy neurons rather than silicon chips, belief occurs for both rational and irrational reasons. Scientists have irrational beliefs just as much as anyone else does. In this case, they've become so enamoured of the idea that the clouds could be tidal debris - which I think we've shown isn't even tenable anyway - that they've assumed that that's what they probably actually are. Yet the two situations are very different. Yes, I can run around naked hurling my own bodily fluids at people, but this doesn't mean I'm actually going to do it.

By the same token though, these results aren't enough to make me "believe" in dark galaxies. In fact if some masochist decided to whip me until I was forced to confess my preferred explanation (I dunno what kind of messed-up universe it would take for that to happen, but I'd like to avoid it), I'd probably still say "tidal debris". I couldn't give you a rational reason, but something about the idea of dark galaxies just doesn't smell right.

All we've really shown is that dark galaxies are more likely than was previously thought - nothing more, nothing less. It's a horrid cliché to end on, but often more research genuinely is needed. Given the dismissal of the alternative ideas thus far, if I can convince people that cheering, "tidal debriiiiiiis !" isn't a good enough explanation, I'll be happy.