Free Will and Risk Assessment

I haven't watched it yet, partly because I'm afraid to, but ITV ran a documentary on Monday commemorating the live TV tragedy which was the Nigel Benn-Gerald McClellan boxing match, which resulted in serious brain damage being suffered by the American fighter.

I have never wished to apologise for my enthusiasm for the noble art of self-defence but this bout, like the Eubank-Watson tragedy before it, leaves me with a profound sense of discomfort and a feeling of disjunction between love of the sport and its hideous consequences.  Indeed, the Benn-McClellan bout would have ranked as an all-time great bout without its sequelae - epic excitement served with epic horror.

For those who never saw the bout, Nigel Benn was, in the early 1990s, Britain's most exciting pugilist.  A never-say-die slugger, he was not as slick as Michael Watson, as strong as Chris Eubank nor a defensive genius like Herol Graham, but he was gutsy, aggressive, a pull-up-your-chair and wait-for-the-bell fighter.  Benn live on TV made for an enjoyable evening.

But there was a feeling this time that Benn was showing signs of wear and tear, and McClellan was the new man on the block.  A hard-hitting man who matched Benn for aggression, he had recently dethroned Julian Jackson, WBC Middleweight champ and possibly the hardest-hitting fighter of all time.  Benn was a huge underdog; one British sports writer said he was going to hide in his cupboard until told McClellan had returned to the USA.  Few rated Nigel's chances of upsetting his challenger.

When fight night came, and the opening bell rang, McClellan fired his big guns and knocked Benn clean out of the ring.  Benn was pushed back in with the benefit of a long count, and McClellan resumed the attack.

But Benn weathered the storm and came back, matching McClellan blow for blow, until the tired American returned to the corner at the end of the 9th round, blinking hard.

Blinking hard.  It didn't look right.  His corner didn't seem to notice, nor the ref, nor the ringside doctor, nor the ITV commentators.  But it looked bad to me, and I screamed at the TV for the referee to stop the fight.

It didn't work, of course.  Gerald came out for the tenth and the fight was stopped shortly after.  By this time he was suffering a brain haemorrhage which ultimately left him blind, deaf and paralysed.

He added the sorry roll-call of boxing's victims, McClellan and Watson, Rod Douglas and Young Ali and Goult and Anifowoshe and little Johnny Owen, suffering in oblivion under the hoots and catcalls of a Hispanic mob.  How can this be allowed?

Whether we like it or not, people are going to engage in activities which threaten life and limb.  Whether it's collapsing scrums in rugby, motorbike or car racing accidents, heading footballs or binge drinking or unsafe sex, all activities carry risk.  In boxing the risks are more obvious and more acute, but maybe this militates against selecting boxing for banishment and outlawry.  For no boxer can enter the ring ignorant of the dangers he may face.  The same cannot be said for people engaging in football or cricket or promiscuity.  Those are risks which can be ignored or of which we are collectively ignorant.

The only argument for outlawing dangerous sports or other activities is to protect the participants.  An important part of this is allowing people to consent to participate with the full facts in mind.  No sportsman has the risks more in mind than the boxer

The more dangerous the sport, then, the less need to ban them.  And this is the sophistry which leads me to defend the pugilist's right to practice his art.

Free Speech and the Trade Union Movement

One of the biggest problems with anti-defamation legislation is that, in attempting to cope with Lernaean nature of ideological bigotry, it tends to start off casting a wide net and ends in being abused by the politically interested to enforce censorship and to stifle freedom of expression. This is done not so much for the suppression of particular statements as it is to engender a climate of fear and to ensure compliance with some political stance or other.

This has been illustrated amply today by the Unison trade union, with their frankly bizarre over-reaction to petrol-head buffoon Jeremy Clarkson's voicing of an opinion that striking public workers should be dragged in front of their families and shot.

Let's break this down. Firstly, Clarkson is saying that he disagrees with the strike. Not a hugely unpopular stance, especially with those whose private pensions were pillaged a decade ago by Unison's buddies in the Labour government, and at present not voicing support for the left is not a criminal offence, however much the TUC may wish it to be.

Secondly, Clarkson was making the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people he disagrees with should be shot. Over the top, but it was a joke, and the political left have always made similar statements ("you'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes" etc).

But according to some witch-faced old harridan on BBC News at Lunchtime, that is 'incitement to hatred' and Unison is taking legal advice over it.

Clarkson has, probably under BBC pressure, issued an apology, which is kind of mission accomplished for the Marxists in the trade union movement. But Clarkson and others who feel the same way may wish to watch TV footage of union picket lines, student demonstrations and anti-capitalist sit-ins for evidence of signs saying "Eat the Rich!" or "Hang the bankers!" and dial 101 when they spot one. After all, despite what commies might think, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if a BBC journalist can be threatened with legal action for 'incitement to hatred', then why not a Unison shop steward, or a student, or a Tarquin or Cressida playing anarchists?

If someone slaps you round the face, you don't turn the other cheek, you smash his face in. Unison slapped Clarkson and the concept of freedom of expression today. Make the unions eat their teeth.

Now that's hatred.

The Plague Dogs

It's only taken me around three decades to get round to reading this coruscating polemic by Richard "Watership Down" Adams, but it matched for quality of writing and sheer rage his underestimated "fluffy bunnies plus militarism, war crimes and abuse of power epic.

The eponymous dogs are escapees from a Lake District research facility - fleeing, one from repeated immersion in a "drowning tank", the other driven mad by brain surgery, into a harsh autumnal wilderness, trying to be wild and finding it no kinder an existence that domestic life, and hunted by men bent on their destruction.

The urgency required in their annihilation is provoked by the loathsome Digby Driver, a 1970s tabloid journalist of the scummy ilk still familiar today, but interesting as a character in the same way as Smeagol or Severus Snape, who makes the connection between the escaping dogs and bio weapons research conducted at the same facility to turn two sheep killers into carriers of lethal contagions. Mismanagement of media, official inertia and the knee jerks of publicity-aware politicians escalate a minor problem normally solved by one farmer, an early start and a loaded shotgun into a nationwide outcry and a regional panic.

In the midst of this human activity, our dogs try and fail to make a life for themselves. Aided sometimes by a self-interested fox who deploys their abilities to their mutual advantage, at other times our dogs know that they need a human master to survive, but that to approach men means a resumption of their tortures, or worse. As their condition slips to desperate, one of the dogs, blaming himself for the death of his kindly master, loses his grip on reality due to the mutilation of his brain.

This is described in Adams' mercurial prose, which switches from venom-fanged invective, to deliberately patronising Edwardian travelogue pap to prose verse. After the dogs kill their first sheep, he delivers a paragraph of prose verse rhyme with a rhythm familiar to contemporary rap connoisseurs, a triumphal screed which would not sound out of place in the microphones of a Tupac Shakur or a Wu Tang Clan. All Hail MC Richard, straight outta Oxford!

All these styles fuel Adams' incendiary condemnations of politicians, journalists, vivisectionists and mankind in general as abusers of those over who we hold dominion. But do not make the mistake of assuming you know the whole of Adams' mind on these matters - he baits the hooks of his rage with fat worms of indignation, only for the barbs of our own hypocrisy to gouge the throat as the denouement approaches. The ending of the book is unexpected and maybe bizarre, and Adams uses absurdity as a device which may not perhaps be appropriate to the rest of the book. But this moving, at time horrific, tale is fast-paced, thought-provoking and will make the reader angry on occasion, as the author intended. As a story of innate dignity of the helpless in the face of appalling cruelty and life becoming a landslide, as Richey said, this is a classic.