Robin Wilton's esoterica

Either the interviewers at BBC Radio 4 are having a particularly strong week, or the Government's current proposals on anti-terror legislation are so flawed that getting a good interview out of it is as easy as dynamiting fish in a barrel. Today it was James Naughtie's turn, interviewing Tony Blair. First he challenged the PM to define terrorism, given that it's hard to prosecute someone for glorifying something if you don't know what that something is. Mr Blair didn't even break sweat over that one: "Terrorism is killing innocent civilians deliberately". He repeated that formula, and came back to it again, word for word, later in the interview. Personally I think that definition is problematic. First, there are the cases such as Yitzhak Shamir's Stern Gang, Yasser Arafat's PLO, Nelson Mandela's ANC and others, where individuals would have to be classified as terrorists but later end up as democratically elected leaders representing their constituents. Second, there are the cases where military action is undertaken in the full knowledge that it will result in civilian casualties. Bloody Sunday, Bosnia, Iraq and many other instances suggest that under Mr Blair's definition, most modern military action would have to be classified as terrorism. What kind of propaganda ammunition (no pun intended) does that give to radical extremists? Second, Naughtie turned to the knotty problem of 'glorifying terrorism'. On this, Mr Blair's response was that this definition is not simply meant to catch those people who say 'I can understand the motivation of people who turn to terrorist acts', even if he would "profoundly disagree" with their view; it's aimed at those who say that kind of thing to an impressionable audience who will then conclude that they should undertake terrorist acts. So the 'offence' here doesn't arise out of what I say - it arises out of the extent to which people who hear (or read) what I say are impressionable. That seems to me both illogical and a very dubious basis for legislation. (And yes, I am aware of Schenck v. United States). The third telling comment came when Mr Blair fell back on the old mantra that "every right comes with a corresponding responsibility". Superficially attractive, but also well-accepted to fall short of a useful principle. After all, a mark of a civilised society is surely the extent to which it grants rights without responsibilities; for instance, babies, children, the sick and the mentally ill frequently are accorded rights without being expected to bear commensurate responsibilities. So what has this got to do with quantum mechanics? Well, it seems to me that there's something 'quantum' going on here. I know that politicians are constantly under pressure to reduce everything to a sound-bite, no matter how complex the subject. In a quantum system, you can never know everything about a subatomic particle... you can know two out of three things about it (energy state, position, momentum, if I remember right*). It seems to me that when you put a politician on the radio, you can similarly have two out of three things: logical, consistent, succinct. (Let's not be over-rigorous and try and factor truthfulness in as well...). What we got today was consistent and succinct, but not logical. *Turns out I don't remember right... so it's a good thing my degree wasn't in Physics. See comments for corrections from Paul Madsen and Richard Veryard. Thank you, gents.