Intellectual silliness

Capitalism has made people unable to judge themselves and others except in terms of their material possessions. That's why we're all so sexually repressed.

Perhaps it's true, perhaps it isn't, but it's not a convincing argument. In fact it's not really an argument at all, just a bald assertion without any explanation or supporting evidence and it certainly wouldn't be read out on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed – like the letter below was, which makes basically the same argument:

Sexual repression arose at the same time as the start of the objectification of the self, the discovery of the subject as object and thereby externalisation of the self in consumer goods driven by the needs of capitalism and commodification.

The sentence is garbled. Syntactically it falls apart after the first "and", and I'm not pointing that out to be pedantic. In this case, as in many others, sophistry and pseudo-intellectual posing seem to have been made to substitute for clearly discernable meaning and this sentence has been deliberately made unintelligible. If an idea is so simple that it can be summarised in fewer than fifty words, like this one, it's reasonable to assume that it's simple enough to be written in normal English prose, without detriment to the sense. Writing like that isn't clever: it can expose a lack of thought about the deeper meaning of one's arguments and it is designed to mystify the reader, which is the opposite of what good writing should do.

This sort of language is now almost universal in sociological and philosophical academic writing, and sadly literary criticism isn't very far behind. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language":

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

• The classicist Peter Jones made a similar point, and made it far better than me, here. It's well worth reading.

BBC News

Today I decided to watch the BBC Ten o'Clock News. I endured about ten minutes but the presenters' poor English was very distracting so I decided to turn to Radio 4 instead. The same thing happened last time I tried to watch the news and I wonder if it's because the people who used to write the (now slightly improved) BBC news website are now required to write the newsreaders' autocue.

The accuracy of spelling and grammar on the website may be getting a little better but the quality of the journalism is still very low. I've become so used to its lack of depth, factual inaccuracy and incompetent, inadvertent bias that I no longer care very much; however, I was a little disappointed to read this silly, hysterical story about Britain's most ludicrous laws. I can find no actual source for the story. Some of these "laws" are obvious hoaxes and others are very misleading. It's the first time I've known BBC News to print what it must be fully aware is a lie.

1. It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament - No it's not. Westminster is a royal palace. By custom, the body of anyone who dies there, unless a member of the royal family, is removed before the legal certification of death.

2. It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British king or queen's image upside-down - My best guess is that this story originates in a sensible Royal Mail regulation saying that stamps should be placed on the top right of an envelope with the Queen's head upright. Would a postal regulation speak of "treason"? Or perhaps the origin of this story is in the myth that it's illegal to deface images of the Queen. In fact it is (or was?) illegal to deface "coins of the realm" in certain ways. An act of 1861 makes it illegal to remove metal from a coin and then pass it on. The reason is obvious; a coin contained a regulation amount of a valuable metal and this sort of defacement is a form of fraud. It is also illegal to colour a coin to make its metal resemble gold or silver or to stamp words on a coin (perhaps to stop people using British coins as a base for their own coinage). So it's not really illegal to deface the image of the Queen on a coin; it's certainly not treason; and the law certainly doesn't apply to stamps.

3. It is illegal for a woman to be topless in Liverpool except as a clerk in a tropical fish store - A hoax: "...a spokesperson for Liverpool City Council told the Telegraph the "law" was a myth and had no basis in fact."

8. It is illegal not to tell the tax man anything you do not want him to know, but legal not to tell him information you do not mind him knowing - A very silly way of pointing out the obvious: that in most countries it's illegal to conceal certain information from the taxman (though not "anything that you do not want him to know" as the person who wrote this believes).

9. It is illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament wearing a suit of armour - Well, yes. Obviously. For the same reason that it's illegal to drive a tank into the Houses of Parliament.

10. It is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls of York, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow - No. It's not. No law in Britain allows people to kill each other in place of a trial. This has been circulating on the internet for years. Another variant of the myth is that it is legal to kill Welsh people in Chester. People usually add "after sunset" when they repeat such nonsense. There may well have been a law prescribing death (after proper trial) for any Scotsman in the city after dark. There may have been a proclamation "that no Welshman should enter the City before sunrise or tarry in it after sunset, under pain of decapitation" from the time of Henry VI. Of course any such law has been superseded, according to the principle of lex posterior derogat priori (that a later law prevails over an inconsistent earlier law). For one thing, capital punishment has been abolished in Britain.

It is illegal to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle in Alabama - Yes. Very sensibly. And in every other state and presumably in more or less every country in the world.

In Milan, it is a legal requirement to smile at all times, except during funerals or hospital visits - This comes straight off the internet, from the sorts of suspect sites that list 1, 2 and 3.

• A further note: After reading this story, I clicked the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page and wrote a message that suggested it was not a good idea to publish unverified factoids. The following (predictably ungrammatical) note now appears: "This is an amended version of an earlier story which included several examples of laws from the survey which we have been unable to verify, and these have been removed." Though the story about it being illegal to die in Parliament remains, it is given a strong health warning. Four of the above have been removed and readers are now told that it "could be regarded as an act of treason" to place a postage stamp upside down.