In the Telegraph, Peter Whittle bemoans the failure to challenge anti-social behaviour:

Indeed. The suspicion of not being able to count on backup from others no less inconvenienced will tend to inhibit efforts to assert basic civility. I recall one particularly miserable train journey during which a group of four teenagers amused themselves by throwing trainers to each other, narrowly missing the heads of other passengers. When, inevitably, one of the shoes hit a woman in the face, no-one intervened. One of the teenagers laughed and mumbled “sorry,” and the trainer-throwing continued for another minute or so, albeit half-heartedly.

Nearby passengers made sure to direct their attention either downwards to their own shoes or to the woman who’d been struck, with sounds of muted and impotent sympathy, thus excusing themselves from a more direct confrontation. The four teenagers got off the train a minute or two later, by which time an air of self-loathing had spread among the two dozen remaining passengers like an embarrassing smell. It occurred to me that the number of people who could have intervened but didn’t actually worked against any single urge to do so. If two dozen people do nothing, conspicuously, there’s an awareness of a collective decision not to intervene, and a kind of moral inertia.

A more recent experience involved a much smaller number of onlookers, a much larger number of aggressors, and had very different results. I was standing at a bus stop during a mass exodus of secondary school kids late one afternoon. Two elderly women were huddled anxiously at the front of the queue, with me behind – the three of us surrounded by a disordered mass of teenagers that had spread in all directions. As the bus approached, the mass of teenagers surged forward, indifferent to the three people supposedly at the front of the queue. The intimidation was utterly casual. This, presumably, was how they behaved every day of the week.

In a rare moment of alpha male theatre, I blocked their path, faced down the nearest youth and bellowed a demand for order. A moment of total stillness followed. Caught unprepared, the mass of teenagers quickly backed off, silent and non-plussed. Evidently this was something for which no clever riposte had been rehearsed. The unexpected interlude allowed the elderly ladies to make appreciative noises and climb onboard without further harassment.

This is not the easiest thing to do successfully. The stare, body language and bellowing have to be calibrated just so. Too little force and mockery may ensue – from which there’s no recovery. This is, after all, a game of humiliation. You have to look as though you mean it absolutely. Those being bellowed at have to at least entertain the possibility that you may do them serious harm if they fail to comply. The risk of embarrassment has to be theirs and theirs alone. This requires a certain willingness to look like an escaped mental patient, at least temporarily. But looking utterly bonkers and socially incongruous is much easier to do if you’re not inhibited by a large group of other people conspicuously doing nothing.

40 years ago today, some hairless apes did a very daring and clever thing. Around half a billion other hairless apes watched it happen on TV. Such was the daring and cunning involved, and such was the uncertainty of the outcome, it’s worth reposting this. Here’s David Sington’s 2007 documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, in which the surviving Apollo crew members recount their remarkable, at times moving, experiences. There’s previously unseen mission footage, an excellent score by Philip Sheppard, and keep an eye out for Kennedy’s extraordinary speech, about 13:20 in.

Related: Freefall, Craters, Astronomical Odds.

Oliver Kamm on the inversions of being “progressive”:

Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism. When you encountered someone of professed left-of-centre opinions, you used to be able to draw broad but important, and generally reliable, inferences about what these entailed. They included, at a minimum, commitments to secularism, freedom of expression, individual liberty against collective authority, women’s rights, homosexual equality and the combating of xenophobia. Times have changed. Now these stances are unusual, even heterodox. […]

When, last year, suicide bombers attacked the Danish Embassy in Pakistan, killing six people and wounding more than 20, a Danish journalist writing for The Guardian commented that the attack was “of course, indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath.”

(For more on the Guardian journalist in question and his “of course, but” manoeuvre, see, for instance, this.)

The “of course, but” formulation is worse than a dreary cliché. It indicates a liberalism evacuated of content. Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances. […]

No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups.

Over at The Augean Stables, Richard Landes has some interesting commentary on my recent discussion with Stephen Hicks. Well worth reading.

Colliding Particles is a series of short films by Mike Paterson following a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider. The latest film, Problems, covers helium mishaps, staring at blackboards and the search for missing music.

Via Coudal.