Arguing Catholicism with a Secular Atheist (intro)

Claude reflecting on his argument...

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In which I meet with my previous acquaintance, Claude, who transitioned from the PCF to the Catholic Church. He recently fell to arguing with his atheist brother-in-law, André, and was keen to share details of their colourful conversation. Read more below.

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First conversation: A Catholic in 21st Century Paris.

Second conversation: Arguing Catholicism with a Secular Atheist.

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Disruptive automation in the sex trade: part 2

In Part 1 we reviewed the recent introduction (in Dortmund, Barcelona, Paris, Gateshead, with planned expansion into London & New York) of 'brothels' populated by sex dolls. The shortcomings of a dumb, passive and inert RealDoll (wikipedia) are fairly well-known. It turns out to be very difficult to add limb mobility, subtly-choreographed movements and intimate vocal interactivity (a la chatbot) to the basic product - although of course people are working on it.

There is a halfway house.

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Klara used to work the sex lines. She'd lounge in her recliner in her shellsuit in her living room, headset on, daytime TV on mute. Her callers would describe their fantasies, ask intimate questions, pay premium rates. She would string them along, imagination no longer needed, brain in neutral, hackneyed words spilling out.

But now .. her employer had brought her a new business venture. She faced a computer screen, her hand around a joystick. Only the headset was familiar. On screen the life-sized doll lounged provocatively on a king size bed. There were several cameras high on the walls - she could view and zoom from any angle.

The doll was certainly inert although its silicone body, she had been told, would be warm to the touch. More relevantly, the doll had inconspicuous microphones in its ears and a small speaker hidden behind its nose. These were connected to Klara's headset.

Klara would never see the patron's face - some clever AI fuzzed it out - but she could see his body, the patterns of movement, hear what he said. Some of the punters had a fantasy in mind: all Klara had to do was play along, provide audible accompaniment. She was used to to that. In other cases the punters were naive and confused, or positively wanted suggestions. Here Klara was in charge and she enjoyed playing the dominatrix.

And then there were the cases where the customer wanted to play a little rough. Klara wasn't keen on those but she did have a panic button. The sound of the guard's voice interrupting over the internal speakers was a joy. Possibly followed by the guard himself. Other girls were not so queasy; there was some preselection, Klara knew.

Klara was quite aware that the dolls would get better. In future years she could imagine herself as the remote human driver of a self-driving car, there to handle what the onboard systems couldn't yet do. But redundancy wouldn't be an issue for a long time yet.

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One day, Klara was well into her shift when a new punter entered the room. She couldn't see his face of course but that body, those lithe movements .. were all too familiar.

He had said he would be away at a conference, but there, right in front of her eyes, ... !

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More: [Endgadget article (NSFW)]:  RealDoll's first sex robot took me to the uncanny valley.

Disruptive automation in the sex trade: part 1

This was all over the tabloids in January, when the establishment opened in Paris, but it only came to my attention this morning when the broadsheets carried the story (about attempts to close it down).

She seems rather .. quiet ..

From the BBC:

"Paris councillors are due to decide on the future of a business where clients are charged €89 ($109; £78) to spend an hour with a silicone sex doll, local media report. Communist councillors and feminist groups have been calling for the closure of Xdolls. Currently, Xdolls is registered as a games centre, but opponents argue it is effectively a brothel. Owning or operating a brothel is illegal in France.

Xdolls is located in an anonymous-looking flat in the French capital and opened last month. Clients are mainly men, though some couples also visit, owner Joachim Lousquy, who formerly managed e-cigarette shops, told Le Parisien newspaper. Xdolls has three rooms, each containing a silicone sex doll measuring about 1m45 (4ft 7in) and worth several thousand euros. Customers make their booking and payment online, and the exact address is kept secret. Not even the neighbours are aware of the nature of the business, Mr Lousquy says. ..

Lorraine Questiaux, lawyer and spokesperson for a Paris feminist association, says "that in France, every year, there are 86,000 women raped". "Xdolls is not a sex shop. It's a place that generates money and where you rape a woman," Ms Questiaux, who also wants the centre closed, adds."

Update: 23rd March. The enterprise has been approved by the Council of Paris.

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It's normal to see business productivity enhanced by increased automation. Admittedly the dolls seem to be far inferior in competence to human operatives but - as with all disruptive innovations - that will surely improve. Assuming no legal obstacles this would seem to be a growth industry, driving innovation by increasing effective demand.

I see the industry developing in two directions.*

At the bottom of the market the trend will be to maximise automation. You book on an app, your credit card gets you entry into a cubicle, you use the doll, you leave. An AI-camera checks to make sure you didn't break anything (they have your credit card details). A human cleaner** to prepare the next session - robots aren't yet good at dexterity.

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At the top of the market - for the middle-class consumer who needs euphemisms - I see a therapy centre. You make an appointment, you're greeted by a pleasant (human) receptionist-hostess and shown to an interview room where you engage with a smooth chatbot to determine your psychosexual profile.

You are then directed into a well-appointed room where you engage with the doll for your treatment. Afterwards you do a little post-encounter therapy back with the chatbot, perhaps over a drink, and you're done .. until the next session. Two employees on site: hostess and security guard/cleaner.**

The barriers to entry seem low and the business doesn't look a lot different to any other naturalistic, holistic, psychotherapeutic, new-age consultancy - from the outside. And it should only be a few years until the currently passive doll is upgraded into a fully-automated mobile and talkative sex therapist for an even better experience.

Next: Disruptive automation in the sex trade: part 2.

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* My examples are rather introverted. The collective sports/sales/stag/military markets could be served in conjunction with hotels, restaurants, pubs .. and the MoD.

** The guard/cleaner has a covert sideline in DNA samples for the police .. and journalists.

Diary: Paris

Paris for the final stage of the Tour de France, street wandering and atmosphere.

Sunday morning before Mass at Notre Dame

Map-checking at the Père Lachaise Cemetery

I had compiled a Père Lachaise list: painters, poets, musicians, politicians and the odd surrealist. We had a map - trouble is, Père Lachaise is dense with graves and without signposts. Probably there's a GPS app but I skipped the research. We found nothing but enjoyed the walk.

Neither Clare nor myself found any of our targets

The Pyramide du Louvre from the Tuileries Garden

 Sainte-Chapelle

Our hotel was the 123 Sébastopol - at 123, Boulevard de Sébastopol 75002 Paris. A smart hotel pioneering early gentrification of a shabby neighbourhood, ethnically mixed between sub-Saharan Africans, North Africans and poor ethnic-European French. The streets were pretty crowded and it was plainly not a tourist area. It was, however, close and walkable to central Paris.

And not without interest.

Two, three, many banlieues *

One of my favourite William Gibson quotes: 'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.'

And so to the Future of Europe.

In the Sunday Times today, Niall Ferguson writes an opinion piece:

"I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud François Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall.

Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “. . . In the hour of savage licence, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless. . .”

Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night?"

Ferguson then quotes extensively from Bryan Ward-Perkins' excellent book, 'The Fall of Rome'. (which I recently wrote about here).

"The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. “The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single generation."

Ferguson sees the parallels:

"Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.

The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from south Asia — but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands.

To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.

It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true that the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving communities."

And his conclusions?

“Romans before the fall”, wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”

Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency."

Ward-Perkins observed that the Roman Empire in the West could have collapsed four or five times in the preceding centuries. Simultaneous massed incursions at different edges of the empire would have defeated the Roman legions which were only about ten percent better than tooled-up barbarians (the Romans had better training, discipline and logistics).

The advanced capitalism of Western Europe is not going to be militarily smashed by Islamic fundamentalists. If it were absolutely necessary, if we were to put aside moral scruples and worries about collateral damage, the 'terrorists' could be annihilated any time we chose. But in any foreseeable circumstances, no popular sentiment or credible politician is going to sanction that.

No, we already know what a future Europe with millions of middle-eastern Muslim immigrants looks like. That future is already here, just currently unevenly distributed.

To see it, you only have to look in the banlieue suburbs of Paris and Brussels.

Such a great idea, to replicate those banlieues across Germany and the rest of the EU. **

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* Younger readers may not recognise the allusion to Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous 'Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams!' (1966).

** Bonus question. What real-world experiences would it take to alter the open-border, uncontrolled-immigration fantasies of The Economist and economists such as Bryan Caplan? Writers and thinkers who take care never to reside anywhere near the resulting ghettos.

Massacre in Paris

I can add nothing in factual terms over newspaper reports and a hundred rolling news channels (although channel surfing late last night I found France 24 best for actualités, and Fox News to consistently exaggerate - when they were not making stuff up).

What I would like to write about is implications. These events will tilt the balance of power from the liberal elite towards the securocrats. And what will the security establishment want?

• More real time integrated intelligent CCTV in major French cities
• Border controls (which undermine Schengen)
• An increased budget for HUMINT and technological surveillance.

I expect them to get much of what they ask for.

On the other stuff it's a harder call. Troops on the ground in Syria (as one pundit suggested)?

I'm not sure that this event, egregious though it is, is enough to reconstitute French/EU foreign policy in the Middle-East, such as it is.

An ode to an eclipse

We searched, but failed to find 

My father's old and tinted welding glass 

That deep-hued slab which warded off actinic flares 

In days now passed. 

The Somerset clouds came then, a shield

To aid our task.

Me: "Listen, the birds are singing. It's a second dawn chorus!"

Clare; "I can't hear anything .."

High-frequency hearing loss - such a filter against Nature.

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To descend even deeper into bathos, I sent my Passport renewal application off this morning post-eclipse. This involved an encounter with an authoritarian photo booth at the Post Office. Here's the result.

The author - not about to be incarcerated, I hasten to add!

I have to say that this doesn't correspond to my self-image, the 'inner me' at all. Why doesn't my inner 'David' manifest itself?

Michelangelo rather improves on the photo booth ...

Maybe it's the hair?

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Finally, this little nostalgia piece from a pre-Christmas visit to France in December 2012. A left bank bistro in the Parisian night ...

Some of us ate frogs' legs (taste a little like chicken - isn't that what you're meant to say?)

Last impressions of Paris

Here in the Eurostar departure lounge .. a chance for some final Parisian thoughts.

The cars in Paris - they're parked incredibly close, packed together with maybe three inches between them at the side of the road. How do they ever get out? How did they ever get in?

Warm air vents on the pavement, outside apartment blocks. Many are claimed by fifty-something homeless men, carefully guarding a bottle of cheap wine. How do you keep doing that, when the freezing rain is gently settling on the streets?

We ate out every evening and the food was occasionally fantastic, mostly ok but sometimes the meat was tough and fatty,  the salads had lost their crispness. The French are coasting and the brits have finally caught up.

Update: on the train now and it's first class on the return trip - wide seats and space for the legs. Let's get going and we'll use the last of our Euros in the refreshments carriage!

Later ... an innocent abroad. I was dispatched to the buffet car where I waited 20 minutes in a queue composed of French people who wanted complicated things and lots of them. Eventually I returned with a large tea, a hot chocolate and a muffin.

In my absence the magic of first class had exerted itself. My tray table was adorned with salmon and guacamole, spiced rice and a glistening apple confection. The complimentary first class meal was rounded off with wine. Confronted by incredibly competent and self-effacing waiters, I hid the muffin.

Impressionism at the Musee d'Orsay

Some think Impressionism is the chocolate-box art of the kitsch-loving nouveau middle-classes. Moi, I love it. Seeing original paintings - pieces I have only seen on computer screens and tv sets - by Cezanne, Pisarro, Sisley, Gauguin, van Gogh, Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec .. brings a special kind of emotional excitement. I could have stayed a lot longer.

In fact one is defendu from taking pictures in the museum. Clare retaliated by buying a number of posters and prints, some of which feature in the collage below. The museum also provides a fine view north of Sacre Coeur (pictured) and has a good cafe up on the fifth floor, abutting the old station clock (pictured).

English in Paris

Despite the best efforts of the Academie, English insidiously infiltrates the culture of Paris. Billboards shriek out "Etes-vous 4G ready?" (what happened to pret)? Business types are exhorted to "devenez un business leader!"  What happened to chef d'entreprise?

The most amusing thing is when English people meet other brits and, mistaking them for the French, engage with polite franglais. Yesterday we called the lift to go down to the street level of our hotel. The doors opened and in that special accent we love so much, the portly, fifty-something gentleman wearing a mac gave us a rueful smile and said "Je monte." He then climbed to the fifth floor as we waited for the ascenseur to come back down again. Quelle joie!

The Louvre

We entered the Louvre from the Rue de Rivoli and spent the next few hours wandering at random between paintings and sculptures. There are also classic Paris vistas from the upper storey windows - see pix below.

The Louvre gift shop was a disappointment. We had been hoping for some distinctive posters but it was the familiar few items led by the Mona Lisa - kitsch-art in fact. We hope for better at the Musee d'Orsay tomorrow.

Now back at the hotel for an afternoon rest (Clare shown snacking below). The hotel has given us free WiFi (from Orange), and amazingly this worked in the Louvre restaurant as well as at a cafe in the Ile de la Cite.

Frogs' Legs

Yesterday I mentioned our evening meal starter was cuisses des grenouilles, which I haven't had before. I guess I was expecting a pile of leg muscles, suitably cooked. Instead, as Clare shows in the picture, you get the recognisable lower half of the frog: in fact six or seven of them, with salad.

Ad they still have the - very brittle - bone inside, it's impossible to eat them with knife and fork. It's a case of pick them up and devour them .. sticky fingers!

The taste is bland, not a million kilometres from chicken, and it's wise not to dwell on the normal diet of the frog.

I write this at breakfast, using the hotel WiFi - onwards to the Louvre!

Eurostar; Latin Quarter

We're in a wintry Paris, conveyed by Eurostar. The process at St Pancras is more plane than train: there's the X-ray of luggage, the passport control and in our case the complete unpacking of our suitcase by Customs.

We ate out this evening in a restaurant (pictured with grocer's apostrophe) in the Latin Quarter, close to our hotel. My brother-in-law Gerry was in town with daughter Jane and we met up for the meal. Frog's legs were on the menu - Clare's seemed a bit skittish.

A frosting-over Paris is notable for drunks lying on the freezing pavement (seen going and still there coming back) and electric cars recharging from pavement-edge pedestals.