Seriously, 3 identical ads on one web page. Spring CM, what do you want from me?
Jan 112012
As if its appeals process weren’t bullshit enough already, the UK Border Agency has recently announced policies to make it even worse.
First, even more payment required:
People who want to appeal against a decision notice dated 19 December 2011 or later will need to pay a fee. The appeal fee will apply to most categories of visas and decisions.
It already costs hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds to apply for a UK visa or work permit in the first place, an obvious money-making scam the British government uses to supplement its “revenue”. Now, if a would-be immigrant feels he or she has received an unjust refusal, that person will have to pay the UKBA more for the privilege of watching it judge its own decisions. Or rather, lie about having judged its own decisions, glorying in shutting down appeals without even investigating the case or leaving a paper trail of so doing.
Who wants to bet with me that in 2012 we’ll see the number of dodgy visa refusals rise astronomically for the purpose of hoovering up these appeal fees?
Second, this catch-22:
Also, from 19 December people will need to lodge their appeals at the tribunal in the UK. We will no longer accept appeals at any of our overseas visa application centres.
So if you want to lodge an appeal against refusal of a visa to enter Britain, you have to lodge it…in Britain?
Good one, guys.
The UK Border Agency and Home Office are shining beacons of fascism. Seriously. And before anyone leaps in to accuse me of racism against the British and tell me to fuck off back to wherever—yes, I know it’s worse in the US, and no, I didn’t vote for them.
Somewhat strangely this year, I find myself in possession of a vote of higher value than normal. Allow me to elaborate:
- In 2008, the presidential popular vote in North Carolina was extremely close. Obama won the state’s electoral college votes by a margin of 0.32%, the equivalent of about 19,000 votes.
- The current US Senate has 51 Democrats and 47 Republicans. Of these, North Carolina supplies 1 Democrat and 1 Republican.
- The current US House of Representatives has 193 Democrats and 242 Republicans. Of these, North Carolina supplies 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans.
All of which means that, for the first time I can ever actually remember, North Carolina is an important swing state, where candidates are suddenly bothering to campaign—the Democrats have even chosen North Carolina’s biggest city to host their national convention this year. North Carolina might therefore just become a deciding factor in this year’s federal elections, and my vote, historically puny and pointless, this year carries some weight.
(Although not in the primaries, thanks to the NC General Assembly’s long-standing and well-attested tradition of constant gerrymandering.)
I thought I might bring this up for the purpose of drawing attention to a basic and amusing irony: I, suddenly possessed of an important vote, nevertheless don’t care; while many foreigners, possessed of no votes in the American elections at all, would give their eye-teeth to have it. What the United States political class does, so the argument goes, affects the world, so the world should have a vote. And yet it doesn’t, but I do.
And this is likely to be a dirty-fought and close-won election, in both legislative and executive branches.
I have therefore decided to offer my federal vote to one non-American person who gives a shit that is statistically significant from zero. I will vote the way you want in the presidential and congressional elections, whether it be for specific candidates or a straight-ticket party or not at all, or even spoil my ballot with amusing sayings. I stress that this is a gift, not a trade; I am conversant with North Carolina general statute 163-275 making it a class I felony to accept any thing of value whatsoever in return for my vote.
Therefore, any person who would like to take up this offer of mine must be scrupulously conspicuous in offering me no value for it at all; in fact, it might even be better if such persons were to cause me a loss of value somehow, for example by kicking me in the shins or making me buy them pints.
Takers in the comments, please.
Dec 122011
Just cut out the middleman and let rich people sponsor a poor person. There would be less waste in the long run, jobs for council workers (the OKCupids of wealth patronage!), and a powerful social impact.
After all, why give your money to charity when you can give it to your own impecunious client?
I mean, it worked for the Romans.
Dec 012011
So. This time last year, London was under a blanket of snow. That was weather, not climate change.
This time this year, London is positively balmy. I haven’t even busted out the winter coat. This is climate change, not weather.
What’s what, you climate change types?
I know that, y’know, climate change is all about melting ice caps and polar bears and stuff, not about what the temperature is in any given place in any given time.
But on the one hand, I’ve got this message that unseasonable cold is not indicative of global warming, because global “warming” can cause unseasonable cold due to cold meltwater effing up the Gulf Stream.
On the other hand, I’ve got this message that unseasonable warm is not indicative of climate change, because climate change doesn’t cause meltwater to eff up the Gulf Stream, due to some Pacific weather pattern…?
Look. Either global warming is effing the Gulf Stream and therefore causing massive freezes north of the Tropic of Cancer; or else global warming is heightening the Gulf Stream and causing crazy warm weather north of the Tropic of Cancer; I don’t care, just make up your minds for more than a year in advance.
And when you do, I’ll bust out the winter coat or else the flip-flops, and become a convert.
But until your weather/climate/Gulf Stream/meltwater/Pacific current makes consistent sense, I’ll continue to believe in “mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation.”
Mmkay?
Nov 222011
Some universities, such as London Metropolitan, have slashed more than 60 per cent of their courses, including philosophy, performing arts and history.
Much as I’m not in favour of direct state funding of university degrees, nor am I remotely in favour of the apparent belief, held by just about everyone in the western world, that the purpose of learning is to make one an economically viable unit.
‘Go to university so you can get a job and… pay taxes, god damn it!’
No, I’m sorry. That is not the purpose of knowledge, learning, or education, as far as I am concerned. It’s important to be ‘economically useful’ solely so that one can support oneself; whether this requires learning is a matter of circumstance.
It is particularly dreadful that the welfare state and the state funding of tertiary education, and the cost that involves to the taxpayer, has resulted in this pathetic narrative about education—learning how to think, process information, and make independent analyses—being reduced to the question of whether or not what you learn helps you get a job.
To the point where universities are axing degrees that accomplish precisely the goals a university degree should accomplish.
When the taxpayer doesn’t have to subsidise ‘economically non-viable units,’ one doesn’t have to be over-concerned with how people enlarge their brains and their understanding of humanity.
I would be interested to know what degree courses London Metropolitan University will be retaining. Presumably, given the jobs possessed by people I know, courses like ‘Working in the Public Sector’ and ‘How to Add No Value in Human Resources’?
But perhaps that’s uncharitable. I do know people doing productive work, who all seem to have degrees in, y’know, philosophy and history.
Or no degree at all—and have become complete humans all on their own, without the subsidy of the state, or the help of London Metropolitan ‘University.’
Jesus.
UPDATE: Okay, so I’m told that wasn’t the clearest post I’ve ever produced.
Here’s my deal.
Knowing various stuff and supporting oneself independently are separate things. State subsidy of knowing stuff, and state subsidy of those who can’t support themselves, have conflated these concepts.
You don’t always need to know some stuff in order to support yourself. Likewise, lots of people who do know some stuff can’t support themselves. (Cf. OccupyLSX.) The two do not need to be linked.
Axing history and philosophy degrees does not mean that university graduates will, therefore, be able to support themselves, even if they are paying £6k more for the privilege of studying. All it means is that a significant contingent of people will no longer know stuff to do with history or philosophy. Whether this assists in their economic viability is neither here nor there; what it does mean is that particular knowledge will be systematically lost.
Now, you can choose to assess the value of that knowledge economically, as everyone seems to be doing currently.
On the other hand, you can say, ‘Hey, people should be able to support themselves. Quite apart from that, at least some people should know some stuff about what it’s meant to be a human being up to this point. But being able to support oneself doesn’t mean one has to be completely focused on being able to support oneself.’
One of the greatest things about our society becoming ever wealthier is the growth of leisure (Cf. just about every blog post by Tim Worstall). Leisure is, essentially, the opportunity to think about what it means to be a human being. If we’ve reached the point where thinking about being a human is so devalued that we’re not even providing the opportunity to people willing to spend their money (i.e. leisure) on it, then we might as well all work ourselves into the grave right now.
Honestly, what good is having wealth and leisure time otherwise?
Disclaimer: I have two degrees in history. And yes, I work and pay taxes. The reason I got my job in the first place was, incidentally, due to blogging. Maybe universities should be offering that as a degree course.
I have Tim Worstall to thank for raising my blood pressure on this fine Sunday afternoon and distracting me from some work I’m supposed to be doing. His reaming of this article by Naomi Klein in The Nation is brief, but extensive enough to hint that she might be saying some stuff that I particularly hate.
There is a run-of-the-mill Left position, that revolves around general ideas of environment, equality, and government involvement that I can sort of tolerate, even if I don’t agree with it. And then there is the crap spouted by people like Naomi Klein, who seem to view themselves as the best thing since sliced Marx, and in that tradition of philosophising about a new world order. This group also includes Madeleine Bunting.
And if there’s one thing that really gets my goat, it’s assholes holding forth about overturning the current “narrative” and bringing about a completely new social and economic “paradigm.” Especially when it’s actually a really old one.
I’ll declare my interest and say this is partly because the current narrative isn’t so bad (for me), but there’s another facet, and that is the blind outrage I feel when someone talks about junking the collective effect of the individual, diffuse, organic behaviour of billions of people. You can’t get different results without changing the inputs, and the natural way to do this—making a case, hoping it’s reasonable, and watching it become a trend if it is—isn’t good enough for the Kleins and Buntings of this world. There will be no grass-roots, bottom-up behaviour change, even though this is how it has only and ever worked. No, instead we shall have planning. Lots and lots of planning.
And in the service of what, precisely? Why, a new paradigm that overturns capitalism and delivers an earthly paradise of low-carbon equality of wealth. The infuriating thing about this is reading how they propose to do it, and losing one’s temper about the fact that it makes no sense.
Let’s start with Klein’s thesis.
The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.
That would not be a “new civilisational paradigm” but a very old one: the one humans lived in for many thousands of years, the rhythms of their lives attuned acutely to the natural cycles of growth, rains, harvest, dormancy—or else growth, drought, famine, and death. Many people in the world still actually live this way, and not only does it suck, we in the first world acknowledge that it sucks because we call these people “poor” and try to help them not have to live attuned to the cycles of nature.
This is mainly because, while human intelligence might have its limits, inability to overcome the cycles of nature isn’t one of them.
Not that any of this really matters, because Klein doesn’t want to do this really, and nothing in her “planning” would achieve it, or is even designed to achieve it. Her six-point plan bears no resemblance to anything remotely “natural.”
It’s not even as sensible as my colleague’s ten-point plan for when he becomes dictator of India. That one starts like this:
1. Remove all restrictions on trade.
2. Legalise prostitution.
3. End all licensing laws.
4. Introduce the death penalty.
5. Put all corrupt people to death.
6. etc.
So let’s look at Klein’s plan. With the rhetorical crap stripped out, it goes like this.
1. Create a huge government deficit by building massive green infrastructure.
Yeah, okay. That’s just run-of-the-mill leftism, but we’ll come back to it.
2. Every community in the world to plan how it will stop using fossil fuels.
My favourite part of this is how collective lifestyle imposition is described as “participatory democracy.” I guess it doesn’t occur to Klein that people don’t require participatory democracy when they are free to make their own individual decisions. It’s only when some group is trying to force its shit on everyone else that the twin charade of “engagement” and “consultation” is invoked. Seriously, whenever you hear that you’re about to be consulted or engaged with, abandon all hope, because it means some decision about you has been made without you and you’re now about to be told what it is.
2a. This planning should focus on “collective priorities rather than corporate profitability.”
Somehow this is something to do with making sure those people whose current jobs are entwined with fossil fuels don’t end up left without a job.
This makes no sense. For one thing, there is nothing more capitalist than a job. A job is what you do to earn money (sometimes also known as capital), with which you buy the stuff you need to live. You can’t sweep away capitalism and keep jobs. It just doesn’t work. A job is not some kind of intrinsically good way of keeping oneself from growing bored with leisure. A job is work someone pays you to do. And jobs are not the same thing as work; this is why we don’t call hoovering and dusting “housejobs.”
Let’s also address the problem of “profitability.” You know, the one where “profit” is the positive difference between outgoings and incomings. You know, the one where that difference—that profit—is what the government takes a slice of (“tax”) to get its money to build lots of lovely infrastructure?
2b. Re-introduce labour-intensive agriculture in order to create jobs.
Labour-intensive agriculture is otherwise known as peasant farming, and peasant farming is not a job. It’s work. It’s the work one does not to have money with which to buy food, but to have food to eat. It’s back-breaking work that is harder than a job, less fun than a job, and less rewarding than a job. It is another old paradigm that we’ve actually spent some centuries now trying to get away from. We’re still trying to help third-world subsistence farmers get away from it. Returning to it is a shitty idea, and a really stupid plan for achieving a really stupid thing.
3. Rein in corporations’ ability to supply and burn fossil fuels.
That’s all well and good, but there’s nothing here about what happens to all of the other corporations where there’s no fuel. I work in a web software company. The other day, some builders over the road accidentally cut the power cable, and for two hours, the entire neighbourhood went dark. Our whole company was paralysed—no routers so no internet, no phones. Within ten minutes, the place was like something out of Boccaccio, with employees sitting in dark rooms telling stories about other power cuts they’d endured. Imagine that all over the world, and it’s only a matter of time before hundreds of millions of people start contemplating peasant farming as the only alternative to eating each other.
4. End non-local trade.
Wow, again, we’re back to the fucking Middle Ages. Thank you very much for coming to dinner, Ms Klein. Have a turnip. No, really, that’s all we’ve got. A turnip. We have to source our food locally, you see. Perhaps you would like a bit of the salted rat I’ve been saving up for our meat during the winter? What do you mean, that’s a protected species?
5. End “growth” in the first world.
Hey! You there! Yes, you with a good idea for streamlining this process! Stop it right now.
Either these people do not understand what growth is, or they don’t understand what humans are. Humans are problem-solving creatures. “Growth” is not using more resources to make more profit. “Growth” is solving problems. Often, it is solving the problem of “how do we do this thing with fewer resources?”
Klein obviously doesn’t understand this. To her, use of resources is to be minimised, except when the resource is human labour—use of that is to be maximised.
I mean, am I going crazy in the rare sunshine, or does anyone else see that we’re going backward here? The whole reason we use “stuff” is so that we don’t have to use people, because back when we had no “stuff,” we had things like 30-year lifespans from toiling in the fields, and slaves.
It’s like she’s saying we should use less stuff so that we can use more people, because it’s good for people to be used, because it means that they have work, and it’s good for people to have work, because it means that they’re not being underused.
It’s so recursive that she’s in danger of suggesting that jobs need humans in order to live.
6. Tax people and corporations.
We’re back to the whole “profitability” thing again. Now that we’ve spent some time using participatory democracy to make sure nobody cares about profit, and some more time ensuring that we stop using resources to make things, and still more time ensuring that no one makes money from using or supplying fossil fuels—where is the money, precisely, that the government’s going to take in tax? When everywhere is a co-op or a peasant farm, producing only what people need locally, where is the excess capacity that the government can take in tax?
This is the whole problem with this stupid obsession with the evils of profit. Profit is what the government taxes. Therefore, no profit, no tax. No tax, no government infrastructure projects or green subsidies or anything else the government is supposed to pay for because the private sector won’t do it because there’s no profit in it.
Jesus.
Klein sums up:
There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.
Yeah, okay. There’s nothing in your “plan” that didn’t come straight out of the playbook of 1381, only in 1381, the peasants were revolting because it was such a shitty fucking plan and they didn’t like living under it.
More to the point, it makes no sense. The whole point of this “new paradigm” is to stop climate change and, as an added bonus, improve equality and “participatory democracy.”
But go back to the first premise—climate change should be stopped—and take a moment to ask again why that is so. Climate change is bad because it will destroy our way of life. It will kill a bunch of people outright in floods and storms. It will reduce the land area we have to live on, and reduce how much food we can grow on it. It will make many of the natural resources we depend on unavailable. It will make miserable, cramped subsistence farmers of us all.
And the way we’re supposed to avert this disaster is… to do it to ourselves first? What a pile of complete nonsense.
As Klein herself admits, the dangers of climate change are being used as a pretext to re-order the entirety of human life according to the “progressive” plan of using up excess wealth in order to maximise human work.
That is the most backward, fucked-up, and human-hating plan ever dreamed up. Anyone who backs it has a perception of life on earth so diseased and warped that they’re barely recognisable as human beings themselves.
Sep 292011
Look at the way every person in this photograph is grinning, like film stars being mobbed by paparazzi on the red carpet, about subverting the will of the German people. If there is a hell, surely each of these belongs there.
Sep 112011
Alistair Darling, Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11, p. 269:
If I could increase gradually the rate of VAT to 19 or even 20 per cent, I could scrap the National Insurance increase. I could compensate low earners with a package of measures to negate the impact of the VAT increase. On top of that, I could surprise people by cutting both the basic rate of income tax and corporation tax in order to boost growth. I tried this out with Gordon, but was met with an emphatic no. I talked to both Peter and Ed Balls, trying to convince them that we needed something big if we were to come out of this with any momentum at all. While Peter this time had an open mind, Gordon and Ed remained implacably opposed to the VAT increase. There was nothing more I could do, so we stuck with the tax measures previously announced.
Two years later, and thanks to Brown and Balls, not only do we still have their increased NI and income taxes, we also have 20% VAT.
Thanks, guys. Thanks a fucking bunch.
Archbishop Cranmer has written a lot recently about the Dorries/Field amendment, which he describes thus:
…her modest proposal is that women should be offered independent counselling to give them a breathing space before proceeding with termination.
Ostensibly, the rationale behind giving women this choice is because abortion clinics, which provide counselling, are not independent. Cranmer even imputes that they have financial interest in counselling women to have abortions, even though they are not-for-profit institutions, because the government pays them per abortion carried out. Ergo, more abortions means more money for the clinics to…provide more abortions, I suppose.
He has also written disparagingly of Louise Mensch, who has proposed her own amendment to the amendment, to the effect that:
Mrs Mensch believes not only that women must be protected from the manifestly conflicted counselling services of BPAS and Marie Stopes International; they must also be shielded from faith groups who seek to spread their own ‘ideology’.
Faith-based pregnancy counselling does not operate under a financial conflict of interest, and is therefore independent. Cranmer would not appear to recognise that conflicts of interest need not be financial.
From what I can tell (though His Grace is free to correct me on this), the reason this ‘offering of choice’ has anything to do with legislation—when of course ‘choices’ do not need to be legislated for—is that public money is involved. The Dorries/Field amendment would prohibit abortion clinics from providing counselling to pregnant women and instead use public funds to pay for these women to have ‘independent’ counselling, with ‘independent’ bodies being defined as ‘anyone who doesn’t get paid to carry out abortions.’
This would include faith groups, presumably, because they don’t get paid to carry out abortions. Never mind that faith groups have an interest in pushing women not to have abortions. And never mind that paying faith groups to advise against abortion will, naturally, supply them with a financial conflict of interest, as they will now be given money by the government to continue urging pregnant women not to have abortions.
So here is my question for Archbishop Cranmer.
Why should government pass legislation to give taxpayers’ money to faith groups to supply pro-life arguments when pregnant women can, even now, get that same advice for free from any priest, vicar, imam, rabbi, street-corner preacher, church worker, or religious internet blogger—should they wish for that advice?
Why is Louise Mensch wrong to say that faith-based counselling is no more neutral than that provided by abortion clinics, and to object to funding counselling that is equally conflicted, but for different reasons?
Why should taxpayers’ money, if it is going to be spent in this endeavour at all, not be spent providing truly independent counselling by people and organisations that have no interest in either payment-per-abortion or saving souls?
Any why, if the Dorries/Field amendment is all about giving choice, rather than restricting it, is it continually justified in the newspapers and on your blog by the claim that it will reduce the number of abortions by 60,000? Where is the study, the proof, the methodology to show, as this number suggests, that 60,000 women or so are connived into having abortions they don’t really want because they are not availing themselves of government-subsidised advice they could nevertheless get for free?
Because that justification, it seems to me, has nothing to do with women’s welfare, but everything to do with the amendment’s apparent real objective, which is to stop women having so many abortions. It may not be obviously coercive in this regard, but it is nevertheless clear from the touting of this figure that it has nothing whatsoever to do with women’s welfare, and everything to do with using taxpayer cash to give more influence over pregnant women to pro-life, anti-abortion groups.
Austerity
The Free Dictionary: n. Reduced availability of goods, especially luxuries.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Reduction in the rate of growth of government spending that can lead to, among other things, the requirement for employees of government to contribute more to their pension funds.
Apathy
The Free Dictionary: n. Absence of interest in or enthusiasm for things generally considered interesting or moving.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Absence of interest in or enthusiasm for politics, attributable only to either philosophical defects in the subject or the use of a first-past-the-post system of voting within the subject’s country of residence.
Social justice
The Free Dictionary: ?
The Progressive Dictionary: n. The application of methods and policies that lead to the elimination of consumption, inequality, poverty, and other human problems, reputedly through employment in manufacturing.
Employment
The Free Dictionary: n. The act of exchanging labour in return for compensation.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. An elusive and undefined activity created by government which, when extended universally to the population, reduces inequality and poverty, but may contribute to consumption.
Revenue
The Free Dictionary: n. The money invoiced by a business enterprise in exchange for providing goods or services; the money paid to an investor from the profits of a business enterprise.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Tax.
Tax
The Free Dictionary: n. A compulsory fee levied by a government.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Revenue; the money paid to the government by its residents in exchange for the promise of a civilised society.
Manufacturing
The Free Dictionary: n. An industry in which mechanical power and machinery are employed.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. One of the few types of honest labour, the increase of which is the solution to all economic woe, involving a highly unionised workforce carrying out manual toil in the production of physical goods intended for consumption.
Inequality
The Free Dictionary: n. Social or economic disparity.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. The existence of wealthy individuals; the cause of every human problem.
In my two-and-a-half years’ worth of blogging, I have found myself forced to consider the writings, sayings, and policy papers of those whose politics are opposite, and antithetical, to my own. I delved into the pronouncements of the left and, in so doing, discovered that it has its own rhetorical world. But not only that: I discovered that, in large part, the left’s rhetorical world is everyone’s. Its pseudologisms and weasel words—its perniciously equivocal vocabulary and taxonomy—infect public life and the body politic. In the rhetorical world given us by the left, a thing is not a thing: every term has a second meaning, a connotation, an interpretation. Words bear more loads for the left than structural steel.
Not to say this practice isn’t also prevalent on the right, or indeed anywhere else. In-groups always have their own meta-language. But the left have made their meta-language the language everyone has to speak.
I’d like to free these words from their role as beasts of burden.
And so I present to you a new series of posts which I will call the Progressive Dictionary. Words, and the load the left makes them carry. I’ve got a big long list to be starting with, but feel free to suggest your own.
And for your delectation, I’m going to begin with my two favourites.
Consumption
The Free Dictionary: n. The using up of goods and services by consumer purchasing or in the production of other goods.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. The unnecessary and environmentally damaging using up of the earth’s scarce resources in the morally repugnant pursuit of conspicuous social status conferred by inequality.
Poverty
The Free Dictionary: n. Lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.
The Progressive Dictionary n. The unjust inability to engage in consumption (see above).
Hey everybody.
Even if you were inclined to vote for me, DON’T. For I see via Dick Puddlecote, this:
3. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents and based on UK politics are eligible. However, this does not mean blogs hosted outside the UK, or blogs with contributors who don’t live in the UK aren’t eligible.
I am not a UK resident. So don’t vote for me, or your ballot might be disqualified. Okay?
Fuck me, even fucking bullshit popularity polls appear to be run by the fascist anti-foreigner Home Office.
Aug 172011
Via @Athena_PR, this:
Nadine Dorries: We should shut down social media networking sites during a public disturbance
I don’t think I’ve written much about Nadine Dorries, but I’ve read the on-going rhetoric wars over her between Dizzy and Tim Ireland, and I know of the bogus ‘hand of God’ scandal. But I was willing to give her—and her party—the benefit of the doubt in some respects until I read this blog post—this blog post—condemning the very web-based social communication that the post itself embodies.
Let us consider: why would Nadine Dorries want to write a blog post for ConservativeHome? First, because it has a large audience to whom she can suck up. Second, because writing a blog post that reaches a large audience is easier than the hard slog of doorstepping, campaigning on the ground, and connecting in person with individuals. Third, because writing a blog post is a crap-ton easier than going on the media rounds, being interviewed by journalists who jealously (if inconsistently) guard speech privileges and who love nothing better than wrong-footing a politician.
So we’ve already identified a host of practical (if cynical) reasons why social media is good for Nadine Dorries.
But curiously, it is this same social media (ooooh, watch out) whose restriction she advocates via the medium of social media.
She says:
During 7/7, mobile networks were instantly closed down.
The justification for this, as I recall correctly, was to stop the overloading of networks, which would interfere with emergency response systems. Leaving aside whether or not that makes sense, what Nadine actually says is that:
The precedent to prevent those who present a threat to the safety of civilians from communicating with each other is already set, even though possibly not officially acknowledged by the intelligence services.
So, she acknowledges that the justification given at the time was a lie, and that the actual purpose was to stop ‘civilians from communicating with each other.’
What did it stop? More terrorist attacks, that had been planned and coordinated in advance by people meeting in person? Maybe. More likely, it stopped ‘civilians’ from contacting their loved ones to make sure they were safe, to find out where they were, to help each other, to advise each other, to mourn together, to make plans to meet up and feel the comfort of one another’s company. I’m not at all convinced that interrupting communications networks in the aftermath of disaster is a good response; nor do I believe that causing definite worry and pain to the innocent is negligible when compared to the possibility that further terrorists might be inconvenienced.
Presumably, however, Dorries does: deal with it, you civilians, it’s for your own good.
She carries on:
To compare the intention of a democratically elected, heavily scrutinised Government, to restrict social media use during a public disorder in this country, with the autocratic, secretive regimes of others such as Iran and China, is simply not a sustainable argument.
It is a sustainable argument, actually, when one isn’t tilting at straw men. The intention behind the shutting down of a speech channel by government, and the nature of that government, are immaterial. Whatever the intention or the government, the outcome is the same: a speech channel is shut down. Dorries should know, due to her Christian advocacy, that Christ is not concerned with the roots, but with the fruits. And as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I for one do not give a stuff about the government’s intentions, or its democratic legitimacy. What I am concerned with are the outcomes of its policies. It is possible for an autocrat to lead a blissful society. And it is possible for a democrat to preside over a dystopian one.
But hark! To Dorries, this sort of statement is not hypocrisy, for as she says of another suspiciously grassy figurine:
A peaceful demonstration, voicing a desire for freedom of speech, or free and fair elections in other countries cannot be compared to mass criminality or violent social disorder, which is what we saw take place here during the riots.
Allow me to deconstruct this for you in simple symbolic logic, if I can, for it makes little sense, but I’ll give it a go.
Oppressive regimes = bad.
Violent disorder = bad.
Social media = ?
Where are social media in this argument? Nowhere. What Dorries is saying is that condemning oppressive regimes whilst condemning disorder is not hypocrisy. Well, duh. In other news, comfort is good and pain is unpleasant, and the pope shits in the woods. What has this got to do with anything?
I think I would like Dorries better if she was prepared to talk the talk and walk the walk. If one is going to address the criticism that shutting down social media makes the British government no better than China or Iran, one should really go all out and just admit something along the lines of, ‘You know what? China and Iran have their problems, but this is one issue they have bang to rights. Having one or two things in common with them doesn’t make us fascists, too. After all, Hitler liked dogs and watercolours.’
She’d still be wrong, but at least she wouldn’t be a mealy-mouthed, lying, self-deluding, patronising hypocrite.
And there’s still more to come:
The argument put forward this morning by Andrew, on the Today programme, that a Twitter message may have saved a person in a burning house is false and unprovable. It just didn’t happen. What saved a person in a burning house was screaming out of a window.
Does anyone really think that an individual when sat in the middle of a burning building, would calmly remove a mobile phone from a jacket pocket, select Twitter and post a message which says ‘help, help’?
Well, maybe. I can’t speak for this Andrew chap. He strikes me as something of a dimwit. Of course nobody tweets ‘Help, help.’ But maybe what they tweet is, ‘Hey you guys, is there any rioting near Brixton station? I usually go home past it.’
And maybe what they get is, ‘Yes, there is: find a different way home or you might get hurt.’ So there you go: social media can prevent harm as easily as it can contribute to it.
Conversely, rather than saving lives, the overwhelming use of social media during the riots was seriously harmful. It disseminated information so quickly that it undoubtedly helped to spread the riots across a wider area. This resulted in the tragic loss of life in Birmingham and chaotic disruption in other major cities.
This is a total exaggeration. How many people were involved in the riots, vs how many uninvolved people were helping each other through social media channels? Given the numbers rioting were, you know, small in the grand scheme of the online population, I have to call bullshit on this one.
Especially when one considers the fact that, in the grand scheme of riots, this was pretty paltry. It sucks that people died, and that others’ livelihoods and homes were destroyed. But come on, they had way bigger riots than this in 1381 when barely anybody could write, let alone use Twitter. Social media didn’t facilitate widespread, destructive social upheaval. It partially facilitated shitty little riots, characterised mostly by looting, undertaken largely by people with criminal backgrounds.
You know what else social media facilitates? Widespread communication of condemnation of itself, by hypocritical assholes like Nadine Dorries. The tool that allows rioters to reach a wide audience of fellow rioters is the same tool that allows fascist scum like Nadine Dorries to reach a wide audience of fellow fascist scum. Funny, that. I guess social media can be used for good and evil. But just because Dorries is polluting the series of tubes with her authoritarian wickedness doesn’t mean I think the series of tubes should be switched off.
In proposing to close down social media networking sites when threatening public disorder starts to break out, this Government is acting responsibly in using such a measure as an exercise in damage limitation.
It’s also acting to disrupt a much wider-ranging exercise in damage prevention. Everything has a cost.
We must also remember that Twitter and Facebook were used to spread false rumours, to disrupt vital life saving services such as the Fire and Ambulance services…
Ooh, yet again, the justification that the emergency services need these networks to be clear in order to do their life-saving jobs. As Dorries has already admitted the falseness of that justification with respect to the closing of mobile networks on 7/7, it’s not a particularly effective piece of rhetoric here, but let’s return to something, shall we?
Does anyone really think that an individual when sat in the middle of a burning building, would calmly remove a mobile phone from a jacket pocket, select Twitter and post a message which says ‘help, help’?
Does anyone really think that emergency services personnel when sat in the middle of a riot zone, would calmly remove a mobile phone from a jacket pocket, select Twitter or Facebook, and check for a message which says ‘help, help’?
Finally:
To the Libertarians who are constantly arguing against the use of CCTV and the very temporary shutting down of social media when necessary, you have to ask yourself this. Is your political principle really more important that the families who lost sons, the shopkeepers who lost their business and the children who have been burnt out of their homes?
My answer: yes.
Because the failure to prevent rioting negatively affected a few thousands, while the failure to protect my principle negatively affects everyone on this planet. Don’t make Stalin’s mistake in thinking that a few thousand horrors is a tragedy, but a few billion is merely a statistic.
I think what bothers me the most here is not that Dorries believes these things, for I’m sure she’s not alone and I know a lot of people sympathise with her views. What really gets my goat is that she is a representative of the Government of this nation; and her well-paid advisors, her party’s well-paid advisors, and the Government’s well-paid advisors appear to have no objection to her advocacy, on a very popular and highly-read social media forum, of the shutting down of social media in technology-based, 21st-century Britain, all in the name of the possible prevention of criminal behaviour that is barely on a par with the kind of social disorder and criminal behaviour that persisted in eras when social media wasn’t even a gleam in your mother’s eye.
I can only assume, from this and from Cameron’s recent waffle, that the Conservative party endorses this kind of bullshit, and that its supporters and voters endorse it as well. And if this is what passes for democratically elected, heavily scrutinised, first-world, free-world governance, then I fear deeply for democracy, elections, scrutiny, and the civilised world.
Dorries notwithstanding, I’m extremely unlikely to support the Conservative party ever, but you entryists out there (and I know there are fuck-tons of you, because you’ve tried your entryism on me), take note: if you don’t stand up and condemn what Dorries and Cameron are saying, you will earn for yourselves many enemies. And if you, by your silence, permit Dorries, Cameron, and their ilk to follow through on this ragged rhetoric with actual policies, you will earn for yourselves so much implacable hatred that you will consider rock bands claiming they will dance when you die to be an expression of positive affection, and moan about how easy Thatcher had it.
Aug 172011
What do you mean, he’s not Richard Petty?
I would totally vote for Richard Petty. I think this nominative confusion, perfectly understandable in all American Southerners, is going to be the cause of a lot of awkwardness between now and November 2012…
Aug 172011
From the Telegraph via Tim Worstall:
Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were jailed for four years each for inciting the disorder on Facebook despite both being of previous good character.
From the same Telegraph article:
A fourth defendant, Linda Boyd, 31, who has 62 previous convictions, was given a 10 month jail term suspended for two years after she was caught trying to drag away a £500 haul of alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco.
I’m not sure I need to make this comment, but: what kind of justice is this when two people of previous good character receive lengthy custodial sentences for making remarks on Facebook, but a third person who has a long, long history of criminal behaviour is given a suspended sentence for being caught with stolen goods?
I understand that these were different courts with different judges in different regional jurisdictions, but there still seems to be a massive disparity in the interpretation of sentencing guidelines here.
It is outrageous that remarks on Facebook merit a longer, harsher jail sentence than some rapes and murders, let alone theft and looting.
But what is really outrageous is that making remarks on Facebook can be criminalised at all. Perhaps Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan can band together with Paul Chambers and his supporters to help stamp out this fascist British tendency toward criminalisation of speech.
Jul 292011
Even though I am, as this blog demonstrates, overtly political, one thing I have always tried to keep away from, as a general rule, is imputing political messages to music that isn’t overtly political. For one thing, it’s pretty difficult to know what was in the lyricist’s mind at the time of inspiration, and for another, openly attaching political significance to art can be extraordinarily divisive, whether it’s the audience or the artist doing it. (Let’s just say I lost some respect for J K Rowling when I discovered she’d given £1m to the Labour Party.) People are protective of their art as they are of their politics; to find that a revered artist has repellant views sometimes feels like betrayal.
One of our goals in creating Heaven Is Whenever (now, sadly, defunct) was to create a kind of haven for all of these political people we were connected to where they could engage with each other about something they could love together. Bringing politics into Heaven Is Whenever was verboten.
I was reminded of this today when I happened upon, through pathways measureless to man, this article at the National Review called, cringeingly, ‘Rockin’ the Right.’ What, the author asks, are the 50 best conservative rock songs? And then he proceeds to appropriate a bunch of songs for the American right wing, most of which are far from overtly political.
Now, if we’re talking about ‘Bloody Sunday’ or ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ as being political, that’s one thing.
But in this case, we’re talking about the following:
‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by the Beach Boys—Pro-marriage, yay, conservative! This song is a conservative rock anthem? What?
‘Heroes’ by David Bowie—East Berlin is bad, yay, conservative! Yeah, okay, if you ignore the fact that Bowie was dressing up like a Nazi during this era and going on stage in the persona of a fascist. Oh, wait…
‘Brick’ by Ben Folds Five—Anti-abortion, yay, conservative! I don’t think this dude has listened to the rest of the words to this song. Incidentally, I ran into Ben Folds once or twice while I was at university. Given this place is often referred to as ‘the People’s Republic of Carrboro,’ I can’t say I feel his lyrics were all that conservative in their intent.
‘The Battle of Evermore’ by Led Zeppelin—What? The basis for this judgment appears to be, solely, the line ‘The tyrant’s face is red.’ Therefore Robert Plant was against communism. Or something. Incidentally, I have actually met Robert Plant, who in his own words ‘doesn’t do it for the money.’
‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ by Aerosmith—Pro-guns, yay, conservative! I may be wrong, but isn’t this song about a girl who shoots her abusive father? Possibly there is more critique here of traditional family values?
‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Iron Maiden—Old poets, yay, conservative! Seriously, Coleridge was an opium addict. I’m pretty sure that songs based on poems based on opium dreams don’t have a place in the conservative heuristic.
It’s a shame he’s picked these as some of the top 50 conservative rock songs, because they really detract from the first four or so in the list, which I would say probably have some vaguely conservative message.
Yes, even ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ though certainly this does not begin to resemble what passes for conservatism in America. True story: I once had a student who wrote a phat term paper about this song. When I was teaching history in the US, I used to assign term papers on subjects of historical interest. Because I am not a fascist, I didn’t choose the topics for them.
(Why? Because I had a history teacher who did that to me when I was in school. He had these file cards with topics written on them, and he put them all face down on a table, swished them around, and made us pick one blind. Imagine my dismay when I turned over the card: ‘Pinochet? What the fuck is that?’ And this was in 1997 or so, when there was no internet to speak of and I couldn’t find a damn thing in the family set of World Book Encyclopedias from 1977. I had to trek all the way to the state fucking library and read newspapers on microfilm. Contrast this with my best friend, who picked ‘The Tudors.’ This deep injustice still haunts me.)
This one kid, he was not the brightest, but he loved music: proper music as well, not the Britney Spears and whatever that his classmates were listening to. He came to my office hours after I gave out the assignment, wanting to know what on earth he should do his paper on, because he didn’t really ‘get’ history. After some discussion, it came out that he was really into the Who, and into this one song.
‘Write about something to do with that,’ I suggested lamely.
Two months later, he handed in this masterpiece, all about the post-war consensus in Britain, the principle of democratic choice, and the long decline of Empire—as an exegesis of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ To this day, it is one of the two best pieces of work I have ever seen from a student.
(The other was a short video about the career of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. There is an unsubstantiated theory that Sulla disguised himself as a German to spy on the invading tribes in 104-103 BC. To depict this, the student playing Sulla turned his back to the camera for a moment, and turned around again wearing a Hitler moustache. This was his interpretation of ‘disguising oneself as a German.’ Hilarious.)
So yeah, I can seem some politics in some of these songs, sometimes even conservative politics.
Ultimately, however, I deplore this article and this idea. Much of the reason music is evocative is because each of us, as individual listeners, can read into it that which is meaningful to us. Appropriating music for political purposes (see also: Labour Party Conference, ‘Sit Down’) robs us of that meaning. When I listen to ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ I don’t want to think of the personal judgments of John J Miller at the National Review.
I want to think of that kid I taught who loved listening to the Who.
Jun 252011
Hands up all who agree with me that Akismet is the best comment-spam trapper ever. I wouldn’t even have pegged this as spam without interrogating the email address:
What a load of liberal claptrap! The reason economy has problems is because of the liberal elite Clinton machine turning an open, freedom loving market economy into a communist/socialist give away society that panders to the lay about, self-indulgent mongrols of lower humanity. I say get a job you bums! And leave the complexities of high finance to your superiors.
I guess I fail the Turing test.
Jun 252011
Normally I have lot of time for Cranmer, and it’s not that I disagree with the thrusts of this post generally, but this sentence flabbered my gast:
If the sanctity of the uterus is to be guarded and preserved, the profanity of the EUterus must be abated and bound. The uterus brings forth life; the EUterus is the harbinger of death.
The sanctity of the uterus?
The uterus is an incubator for humans. In its capacity as bringer-forth of life, it is a muscular organ which, in tandem with the vagina, pushes something alive through a very tiny space and into the exterior world.
It is no more sacred than my colon, which also pushes forth something alive through a very tiny space and into the exterior world.
I’m quite happy to accept the argument that a human being is categorically different from poop, but at no point do I accept that this theorem confers any kind of sanctity on my incubation organ. Especially when that organ more frequently brings forth biological waste than human beings.
The uterus doesn’t even provide the biological matter that becomes a human; that would be the ovary and the testicle, which supply the egg and the sperm. It’s not even the uterus where sperm and egg join to create the zygote: that would be the fallopian tube.
As long as people continue in this way to fly in the face of both sense and biological fact, the abortion debate will never reach any meaningful decision. And as long as people persist in sanctifying a single female reproductive organ above and beyond the sanctity of full female self-ownership, women will never achieve true liberty in this world, let alone before God, for whom these people purport to speak.
Women have, since the Neolithic era, been accorded propertarian status by men because they happen to be the sex who incubate future offspring, despite the fact that the uterus is simply the place where the offspring grows, while the offspring itself is generated by the equal participation of both sexes. The offspring, while it grows in the uterus, is without question parasitic: it is a separate living thing that leeches nutrients from its host. Bringing it forth from the uterus is statistically the most dangerous thing most women will ever do. Women must then sustain this life by breast-feeding, further depleting the body’s resources. The evolutionary reward for this risk and ruination of one’s body is the propagation of a 50% share of one’s genetic material for, hopefully, at least a single generation.
Men, of course, are uniquely qualified to comment on the sanctity of the uterus, since their part in the bringing forth of that most sacred of human life is to shoot a broad fusillade of genetic ammunition into a hostile environment and hope some of it hits the bullseye. They are then free to go about their usual business, unbothered by parasitical leeching, physical mutilation, or the necessity of contributing further to the sustenance of that life through the provision of yet further nutrients. A not insignificant proportion of the time, they don’t even contribute to the offspring through their labour or material resources.
So by all means, let us have men debating the ownership of others’ internal organs by resorting to spurious arguments about sanctity. I’m sure that will guarantee a sensible resolution to the question of abortion. Women will surely realise that the imputed holiness of their uteri means they have no right to seek the termination of physically ruinous processes, let alone achieve unquestioned ownership of their uteri in the same way they own their colons or spleens, which don’t happen to incubate humans.
Good grief.
If men with moral and religious conscience are so determined to prevent abortion, let them turn their engineering genius (which, we are assured, is much more prevalent in men than in women) to perfecting the artificial uterus. It won’t be as sacred as a real one, obviously, but it would be a lot more effective at stopping abortions than using legislation to declare state ownership of female body parts.
Jun 192011
Guest post by Trixy
We’re still fighting in Libya, still racking up the costs, still insisting we’re doing it to protect civilians and not for regime change. No, definitely not regime change, because that’s what Tony Blair did, the war monger, and this coalition is nothing like him, right?
Well, one thing’s for sure, and that’s that neither of them have or had a legal mandate from the United Nations Security Council to invade another country. Blair and his team may insist that they did, but for those of us who can, and who chose to, read the documents from the Security Council at that time, we know he was pulling a fast one. The US Ambassador John Negroponte insisted that UNSCRs 687 and 1441 were sufficient for war, and yet the Council were told by others that the latter was ‘not a smoking gun,’ and another resolution would be required before military action could legally occur.
UNSCR 1973 was for the protection of civilians and to maintain peace and security in the region. The latter is the reason that force can be used, under Chapter VII articles in the UN Charter. So is the bombing and killing of Gaddafi necessary to achieve this, without capture and a trial? Airstrikes destroy in a way that a crack team of soldiers performing a raid don’t. Sophisticated missiles can target but not so well as an SA80 MkII or an M16. So will Gaddafi find himself the victim of yet another airstrike in the name of supporting a group of his opponents whom we know nothing about, with whom senior figures in the Ministry of Defence are nervous of being involved? Will Gaddafi’s final moments be as a non-speaking extra in Pirates of the Caribbean: ‘The Naughty Dictator’ as his body is dumped into Davy Jones’ locker?
The details of what is going on and what will happen are being discussed in COBRA and the bowels of the MoD.
And what we’re hearing about now is Syria.
Hague has ruled out military action, yet the UK and France last week presented a draft UN resolution condemning Syria’s suppression of protests. China and Russia fear, understandably given recent history, that this is the first step towards yet more international intervention by the men in Disruptive Pattern Material. And certainly the calls for the end to violence must ring hollow in the ears of not only the Syrians, who see another group of civilians appearing worthy of ‘protection,’ but also those relatives of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre who had heard such platitudes before.
For whilst Mladic faces trial for genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity after 16 years of evading discovery, we are reminded of what peacekeeping forces not only allowed, but were forced to allow to happen. And we should remind ourselves of why the murder of 8000 Muslim men and boys occurred in this ‘safe area.’
The answer comes down to our rules of engagement, which did not permit the use of weapons to protect civilians. And Mladic and his men knew that, and thus made a mockery of any ‘peacekeeping’ which UN forces were supposed to be undertaking.
So what I am expecting from William Hague, if he does go back on his promise of no military intervention (something few would be surprised about if he did, I suspect), is fewer words and more action. It’s a tough call for the international community not to look like hypocrites, and if we know one thing about politicians, it’s that they value their reputations/egos very highly.
What we need, if we are going to shoulder the cost of more troop deployments and continue to view ourselves as being in the company of World Policemen, is more permissive rules of engagement. Otherwise Hague, Cameron and their successors are simply offering false hopes and empty posturing to a scared population. And we are wasting our money.
Of course, given MoD cuts, farcical procurement policy, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan, whether we should be getting involved in Syria is a question for another day. But another day soon.
From the Mail, I can confirm that this statement:
It is understood a neighbour or member of staff at the apartment block called police after the woman tearfully asked for help just after 1am
Is true. The call to the police was made not by the woman in question, but by the building concierge, who saw the state she was in. This can be confirmed with video evidence which apparently exists.
Jun 152011
Ann Coulter is probably one of the most hated political figures in the United States, just behind George Bush and just ahead of Rush Limbaugh. In her ideology she exudes what the Republican Party probably ought to be if it ever wants to be credible again, and is a bone fide conservative, and in her contempt for left-wingers she is inflammatory and scathing. She is therefore loathed by left and right.
I love reading her stuff. So do some surprising other people—’the right-wing Judy Garland‘ is not an accidental handle.
I love her even though she sometimes takes a shot at libertarians, as in her most recent column. And even though I love her, I’ve gotta fisk her.
She takes issue with Ron Paul for advocating that the government ‘get out of’ marriage but carry on with providing health and social care benefits for ‘children and the elderly’ because so many of them are currently ‘dependent on the government.’
In one sense I agree with her; I think Ron Paul is being a bit weird here in the context she points out. Marriage, says Coulter, is a contract on which many, many legal attributes depend. Adoption, child custody, health insurance, inheritance, medical proxy, etc etc. Fair enough.
On the other hand, she’s missing the point and tilting at a massive straw man. I can’t speak for Ron Paul, but I do know a good bit about what libertarians think, and that tends to go something like this:
Contracts, and the ability to enforce them, are a basic pillar of civilised society. In the absence of Rothbardian private justice, one of the legitimate functions of government is to arbitrate and enforce contracts. Marriage, whilst for many people religious in nature, is just a particular type of contract in the eyes of the state. It carries implicit agreements about child custody, insurance, inheritance, and so forth. There is nothing special about marriage that should make it any different to any other type of contract—in the eyes of the state.
Except that in the US, for some reason, there is a strange moral attribute to the marriage contract. Homosexuals cannot enter into this contract with each other. They are specifically and specially debarred, in a way that is utterly exceptional in a country that usually only refuses to recognise your right to contract if you are (a) a child, or (b) non compos mentis. There is nothing, even, to stop a gay person from marrying someone of the opposite sex. It’s only each other they can’t contract with in this way.
The state is not there to enshrine the religious or moral connotations of marriage; in fact it doesn’t do so for straight people at all. Straight people can contract marriage in front of the state without ever getting close enough to sniff a priest or a rabbi or an imam.
So why should gay people be denied this same legal status? The US government isn’t trying to pretend that gay people are as incapable of consenting to agreements as children or the mad; it isn’t trying to pretend that straight marriages always and everywhere carry a moral or religious weight. It’s either (a) bowing stupidly to pressures from people who would use the government to impose a moral sanction, or more worryingly (b) sees nothing wrong with making arbitrary exceptions to normal jurisprudence when it suits.
The exceptional treatment homosexuals receive in the context of this one contract is not only hypocritical and wrong, it is dangerous to the body politic.
I would guess that this sort of thing is really what Ron Paul is getting at.
However, obviously in Coulter’s mind he is some kind of pansy jackass for saying, essentially, ‘It’s not the state’s place to disbar consenting mindful adults from entering voluntarily into contracts with one another, but I don’t think at this stage I would eliminate Medicare and Social Security at a stroke, because it’s some old folks’ only income and some children’s only health insurance. I’d sort of prefer a different approach.’
The idea that Ron Paul is ‘pretending to be [a] Randian purist, but [is] perfectly comfortable issuing politically expedient answers’ is ridiculous. So is that idea that all libertarians are like that. I know a lot of libertarians but not many who even pretend to be Randian purists.
Furthermore, this?
I make the case that liberals, and never conservatives, appeal to irrational mobs to attain power. There is, I now recall, one group of people who look like conservatives, but also appeal to the mob. They’re called “libertarians.”
Is hilarious. The mob? Please. There is no irrational mob in this universe that finds libertarians appealing. There isn’t even such a thing as a libertarian mob. When libertarians gather together, they don’t chant slogans together or march in unison. At the Rally Against Debt, as large a gathering of libertarians as I personally have witnessed, someone tried to start the slogan-chanting thing. About 3 people joined in for a round, then got bored. The speakers, far from being cheered like messiahs, received polite applause. The closest thing to a mob was the three ‘anarchists’ (left-wingers) chanting in the pen, where the police had put them in case a fight started. They needn’t have worried. Libertarians don’t fight with left-wingers, they fight with each other. It’s the only ‘mob’ you’ll ever see where the crowd hears a rousing speech and says to one another, ‘You know, I’m not sure I agree with him. He misses Friedman’s point about the fact that…’ and then argues all the way to the pub, where they’d all much rather be anyway.
As much as I like Ann Coulter, she doesn’t seem to understand the libertarian perspective at all. And it’s a shame, not because I think she should agree, but because I think if she could be as accurately nasty about us as she is about left-wingers, her occasional potshots would be a lot more entertaining.
May 152011
Since Anna Raccoon’s initial shot across the bows of the LPUK a month ago, I have been following with interest the on-going responses—the publicly available ones, I should add. I am not a party member, nor have I ever been, so I am merely an interested observer, albeit one who has met many of the people involved in the party, including those who are part of this dispute.
A number of things stand out from this internecine dispute that have clearly made it difficult for some people to continue supporting the LPUK. Anna’s first post produced a fair few disappointed responses; these individuals were urged by the party leadership to reserve judgment until an investigation of Anna’s allegations was carried out.
That investigation has now taken place, and the chairman of the party has produced a report.
Anna made two significant accusations in her narrative:
(a) A loan made to LPUK at the request of Andrew Withers during his term as Treasurer was neither properly recorded nor paid back on time.
(b) Andrew Withers was able to make contact with the lender by asking Anna to identify the person from a list of LPUK members sharing the same name.
The first accusation casts doubt upon Andrew Withers’ management of the party’s finances; the second casts doubt on Andrew Withers’ commitment to privacy and data protection.
The chairman’s report, in Section 8, confirms that a loan was made to the LPUK, that the loan was not paid back on time, nor has the full balance yet been paid back, and that the loan ‘has not been recorded as well as it might.’
Furthermore, the report makes clear in Section 7 that the party’s accounts ‘are only now in the final stage of being handed over to the new Treasurer, four months after he should have taken up his duties’ and that ‘the Party’s financial control is not all it should be.’
Section 8 of the report also appears to confirm that Andrew Withers did share a part of the membership list with Anna.
The report concludes that, despite the confirmation of these accusations as valid, Andrew Withers did not act unlawfully. However, it does recommend that the party’s NCC consider the following actions, amongst others:
(1) To determine whether Andrew Withers did contravene privacy and data protection rules, and if so, decide upon what action to take.
(2) To determine what, if any, action should be taken to verify the integrity of the party’s accounts from previous years.
(3) To implement clear guidelines for the management of the party’s finances.
Further to this, the minutes of a meeting of the NCC on 8 May 2011 have been published. Andrew Withers was a participant in this meeting as stated in the minutes. Among other matters, the three recommendations above were discussed and the following decisions were reached:
(1) Andrew Withers did not contravene privacy or data protection rules.
(2) No action will be taken to verify the integrity of the party’s accounts in the immediate future.
(3) New guidelines for management of the party’s finances will be drawn up by, in part, Andrew Withers.
I confess that I am unable to understand the position of the NCC on these points, nor am I able to understand a number of other issues, which I will list below.
First, it is unclear from the chairman’s report exactly who was involved in the investigation of Anna Raccoon’s claims. The LPUK has a judicial committee whose purpose is to investigate and report on such matters, especially when the allegations of misconduct are levelled at a member of the NCC. Although I have looked around the LPUK website, I have not been able to find a list of the party’s officials or judicial committee. Perhaps the list is indeed there, but there is no sitemap, so I am unable to confirm this. In any event, the only name appearing on the chairman’s report is that of the chairman himself.
Second, it is unclear from the chairman’s report whether those investigating this matter ever had access to the full record of the party’s financial transactions. Whether they did or didn’t, the report’s admission that ‘the Party’s financial control is not all it should be’ and financial activity ‘has not been recorded as well as it might’ suggest that some audit or review, undertaken by someone not involved in this investigation, is advisable. That the NCC concluded this was ‘neither essential nor indeed possible’ therefore seems misguided, especially when other members have volunteered to undertake such an audit at their own expense.
Third, while there is nothing to suggest he was involved in the investigation of his alleged misconduct, Andrew Withers was obviously involved in the NCC’s deliberations over what action to take in light of the report’s findings. He was involved in the discussion about whether his own behaviour constituted a breach of privacy and data protection rules. He was involved in the discussion about whether his own management of the party’s finances should be independently audited. And he was one of the individuals deputed to prepare new financial guidelines for the party, despite it being his own activities as Treasurer that highlighted the need for such guidelines in the first place.
Regardless of whether or not he acted improperly, Andrew Withers’ participation in these matters seems highly inappropriate. Whatever his official standing within the party, and I am given to understand that despite temporarily standing aside from the role of Leader, he is still a member of the NCC, he could have recused himself as having a conflict of interest, and should have done so. Failing that, he should have been asked to do so by the other members of the NCC. Nothing in the minutes indicates that he was so asked. Furthermore, with the resignation of the new Treasurer, this office has now reverted to Andrew Withers in his capacity as Leader, putting the party’s financial records and activities back under his control.
It also appears that, despite the initial expectations of the party leadership, these two publications have not restored confidence among the party membership. To the contrary, at least two of the individuals involved in the investigation and subsequent NCC meeting have resigned their official positions within the party. Further concerns have been raised about the possible involvement of non-NCC members in NCC deliberations. Long-time members have published their intentions not to renew their membership. Further accusations have been levelled, and Anna Raccoon has claimed that ‘nobody except Andrew has yet set eyes on a full set of accounts.’
The chairman himself has stated that a ‘faction’ in control of the LPUK website blocked the publication of his report for some unspecified duration of time, and expressed that ‘the allegations about Andrew’s conduct as Party Leader cannot be substantiated.’ A Special General Meeting is being arranged. Insults have been exchanged and threats to contact the Electoral Commission have been levelled.
If Anna Raccoon is correct, and no one other than Andrew Withers has had full access to the party accounts, then the chairman’s investigation of her claims cannot have been either comprehensive or objective. The apparent inability of the NCC to determine whether the financial records are in order casts doubt upon their ability to discharge their legal duties, and brings into danger all of those individuals who have held legal responsibility for the party during the period when misconduct is alleged to have taken place. The admission that the party has not adequately controlled its finances raises more questions than it answers.
I hope, for the sake of all those who have contributed to the LPUK, and for the sake of those who wish to reassure themselves of libertarians’ commitment to transparency, honesty, and financial probity, a new judicial committee of uninvolved party members is elected at the SGM and undertakes a full inspection of the party’s financial matters and rules pertaining to privacy and data protection. I sincerely hope it finds that all is well.
As an interested observer, I really don’t have any right to comment on these things—but all of this information has been deliberately placed in the public domain, and as a libertarian I find that the LPUK and what it does reflects on me whether I’m a member or not. This has happened before, and I have stated my position, which still stands:
I do not hold the idea of a Libertarian Party in the UK in quite the same hopeful regard as John Demetriou. I support them in the ways that I can, I believe in them so far, I hope they win electoral success by the bucketload, and I would vote for them if I could. But if the LPUK fails, or splits into factions, or becomes associated with fringe nutjobs, I don’t believe it will necessarily set back the cause of libertarianism. For failure, factionalism, and fringe movements are exactly what has happened to the Libertarian Party in the US, and yet libertarianism as a politico-philosophical position is more popular and more successful there now than it has been in my lifetime.
In short, I want the LPUK to enjoy tremendous electoral success while maintaining their ideological integrity. But if they don’t, well… no biggie. Libertarianism abides.
I urge those who are disheartened by this affair not to become too discouraged, and not to abandon the cause of libertarianism in Britain because of it.
Let me be the first to admit that I don’t know Laurie Penny, nor have I ever met her.
I discovered tonight that she was an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford—at the same time that I was a student at Wadham.
I was not surprised to find this out, and I’ll tell you why.
Wadham is known for being the ‘left-wing’ college at Oxford. It famously hosts Queer Bop, originally a celebration of all types of sexuality, and the quad around the college bar is officially called Ho Chi Minh Quad. All Wadham bops, by college statute, conclude with the playing of ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by the Specials. Whilst I was in attendance, the Wadham SU banned Coca-Cola products from the college on ethical grounds and forbade the serving of beverages in glass receptacles, preferring biodegradable plastic on the assumption that it was more environmentally friendly.
I have read many of Laurie Penny’s columns. They read the way many conversations at Wadham sound. People who deploy the same language, the same ideas, and the same arguments are a dime a dozen at Wadham. There is a miasma of youthful optimism about the place, somewhat at odds with its transmission of privilege and its well-preserved Jacobean splendour. Laurie Penny appears to have Wadham in her veins in the same way some Americans bleed red, white, and blue.
The funny thing is, Wadham is known for a lot of other things too. Its Canadian law students. Its South African MBAs. Its British science students. Many of these people are Rhodes Scholars, entrepreneurs, and humanitarians. They take what they learn at Wadham and use it to help victims of human rights violations, disease-stricken populations in the poorest parts of the world, and small businessmen in chaotic nations who want to improve the standard of living in their communities.
Wadham also has its complement of true socialists who, although they come from middle-class backgrounds, would never blog (‘bourgeois’), would never write for the New Statesman (‘selling out’), and would never go straight from protesting with the so-called working class to hobnobbing with media personalities at champagne receptions. Sure, they read the Guardian (for the crosswords, mostly) and fix bruschetta for starters with eggplant casserole for the main course (when they can afford it, otherwise they eat beans), but they don’t pretend to be one with the down-trodden or think there is anything glamourous about smoking roll-ups. When they can afford it, they would rather have Gauloises.
Most of these people, of whatever degree, profession, or political persuasion, go quietly off to satisfy the demands of conscience, duty, and pleasure.
Laurie Penny, whatever her conscience may demand of her, certainly represents what Wadham College is. I’m not so sure she represents what Wadham College becomes. She has certainly worked very hard to communicate a message, but I don’t know if it’s the message she intended. Like many people from Wadham, she seems to want to improve the world in a certain way. But what she seems to do is reinforce the belief that privileged people from privileged educational backgrounds can, as long as they say the right things, engender trust among the lower classes whilst taking their place among the elite.
Laurie Penny is maybe 25 years old. She is the author of widely-circulated newspaper columns, and she is the subject of them. She is a student, a protester, a squatter, and a voice for those without a voice. She is a well-known name and represents a well-known point of view amongst the nation’s intelligentsia. She is one of them, and she is one of us. But stacked against everything else that comes out of Wadham College, what is Laurie Penny really doing?
She is travelling an extremely well-trodden road bearing the placard of thoroughly-explored philosophies. And the destination, reached so many times before, has benefitted no one except the travellers themselves.
Mar 132011
Because of what I do for a living, I have a pretty decent understanding not only of how the NHS has worked throughout the past couple of years, but also of how it is envisioned to work under the reforms now being discussed in the Commons.
And I do not see that these reforms amount to selling off the NHS piecemeal and having sick people dying in the streets.
What I see, primarily, is two things.
First, a step is being eliminated in the commissioning process with the abolition of the PCTs. This doesn’t mean that GPs themselves, with all of their other workload, will also be sending the commissioning paperwork to the secondary care providers; it means that the PCTs will be, in effect, split and absorbed into the newly-forming GP consortia. These consortia are groups of GPs who have voluntarily banded together because they share a geographical area or a particular patient demographic and thus have excellent collective knowledge of the populations whose health they deal with. These GP consortia are already consulting deeply with their PCTs and, from what I’ve heard, most plan to absorb not only the function but also many of the staff.
This restructuring, therefore, allows voluntary groups with similar knowledge to take responsibility for commissioning the healthcare appropriate to that knowledge and to those patients. This is a massive improvement on the PCTs, which are region-based and have no frontline exposure to the population and patient groups in their regions.
Second, all NHS trusts are being compelled to become, or join, foundation trusts. For those not familiar with foundation trusts, they are locally-established and locally-accountable, fiscally independent hospital or healthcare trusts. They are governed, ultimately, by a membership consisting of local people, and they are required to demonstrate the involvement of that membership in major decisions. This makes foundation trusts both more democratic and more responsive. Some of the best trusts in this country—such as Guy’s at St Thomas’s—are foundation trusts and have been since the Labour government brought in the concept.
Every other part of these reforms is incidental and, incidentally, is what seems to have the “Save the NHS” and “N4S” (Not 4 Sale) campaigners so worked up. OMG, there will no longer be a cap on private-patient income for foundation trusts! So what? FTs can’t make those kind of changes without the agreement of their membership. And if the membership wants the FT to take more private patients, who are you to stop them? OMG, care might be given by non-NHS providers! So what? GPs are not technically part of the NHS; neither are care homes, many mental health centres, many home carers, and so on. Provision doesn’t have to be done by NHS bodies, and there is no proof whatsoever that private providers will give a lower standard of care, or that NHS commissioners will choose the cheapest private providers at the expense of patient wellbeing.
In fact, lately there have been a lot of, erm, questions (let’s be nice about it) surrounding the quality of care the NHS itself provides, particularly when it comes to (a) old people and (b) hospital-acquired infections, and therefore I see no reason to cling so tightly to this idea that NHS provision is automatically a good, or better, circumstance for patients.
In the end, none of these reforms alter the vital fact that the NHS is still free at the point of use for everyone, which I believe was the object in the first place: that sick people would have access to care regardless of income. However the back-end management works, this salient fact will still be true, and there is good reason to believe that these reforms, particularly the commissioning reforms, will help to improve that care, as the people responsible for looking after these sick people will have a much better understanding of their patients’ needs, both individually and as part of a particular community, and thus be much able to direct both budget and resources where they are needed, instead of distributed evenly across the board without reference to patient and community health profiles.
Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance and prolific author and commentator on British politics and society, has written a novel of mayhem, adventure, and alternate history: The Churchill Memorandum.
I don’t know Sean Gabb personally, but I have read other works on his recommendation (notably those of Richard Blake), so when the review copy of his novel arrived, I dove into it with great anticipation and devoured it in one afternoon, taking assiduous notes between incredulous outbursts of ‘He just… did he really just do that? WTF?’ Anyone who has read the novel will probably recognise this frequent reaction.
Even though this was several weeks ago, I waited to publish this review because I had a feeling, which turned out to be correct, that the novel would be somewhat controversial. In that interval, Gabb has been accused of being, variously, anti-American and an English national socialist, all because in his novel the United States is a fascist horrorville and Hitler wasn’t a mass murderer. As an American myself, I’m rather more sensitive than others to whiffs of anti-Americanism, and I didn’t get any as I was reading. I certainly don’t think Gabb is an apologist for Hitler or the Nazis. And I suspect that to make these sort of assumptions about an author based on the characters or settings in his novels is to indulge in more than one cognitive bias.
Sometimes, a novel is just a novel.
Or, in this case, a crazy drug-trip into an alternate universe where Hitler dies in a car accident in 1939, the pound sterling is still sound money in 1959, and Winston Churchill ‘did nothing big after Gallipoli.’ Be thankful for this back-cover exposition, because you, the reader, are a genius. If you know nothing about Europe of the Second-World-War era, expect to spend half your reading time delving around the murkier recesses of La Wik.
Our hero is half-caste Anthony Markham, historian of the feeble sideshow that is Churchill in this universe and unwitting possessor of a document that numerous plotters, including Germans and Indians who smell persistently of curry, desperately want to get their hands on.
Why do I characterise the book as a crazy drug-trip when others have described it as ‘Hitchockian’ and ‘noirer than noir’ (which I’ll also buy)? It’s hard to say without giving too much away, but here are a few bullet points to whet the appetite, or bring smiles to the faces of those who have read it:
- Chekhov’s Buttcheek.
- Alan Greenspan is shot within hearing of a bunch of air commuters, and nobody bats an eye.
- CS Lewis as archbishop of Canterbury.
- Goering is giving nukes to the Jewish Free State.
- Having been framed for murder, our main character goes on the run—and promptly murders someone. Not even an important someone, so this doesn’t count as a spoiler.
- Who the hell is actually behind this convoluted plot, anyway?
- Michael Foot’s acid baths.
The importance of the titular document is wholly drowned in the gunfights, the multi-transport chases and escapes, the sheer insanity of staid types you once knew and loved such as Harold Macmillan—who, incidentally, tries to corral the main character just as said hero has been mistaken for a Labour Party candidate in a town hall meeting and is delivering a triumphant speech:
‘Brothers, let it never be said that the Labour Party was at all exclusive in its welcome to speakers. You’ve heard me put the socialist case for our national future. If you want to hear the other side, be aware that our Foreign Secretary—Harold Macmillan himself—is standing just outside this room, and is waiting to answer all your questions in person.’
Cue the mob.
Markham’s publisher’s daughter and a mysterious Major who doesn’t officially exist are also part of the dastardly plot, and Enoch Powell turns out to be the shadowy badass whom all the plotters fear.
Y’all, this book is further down the rabbit-hole than Alice, and I dearly wish that instead of a review wherein I praise the author for his audacity and imagination, I was publishing verbatim the notes I took. You would not believe this book.
That said, there are some deep author-avatar moments, and without doubt Gabb can create characters who are horrifyingly realistic. Markham, protagonist and first-person narrator, is a remarkably unsympathetic character, callous and cowardly by turns and buffeted along by events entirely out of his control. His attempts to take refuge in a sense of loyalty or duty to his country are constantly shown up as stupidity by people who possess neither, and his actions neither drive the plot nor resolve it. Much like real people, in fact, warts and all. And the realism is necessary in light of the fact that most of the other players stepped straight out of a Bond film.
More importantly, the more you hear from Markham, the more you realise that despite having access to his internal monologue, you do not know this guy at all. There is no mention of friends, family, background, previous life, or romantic involvements (apart from whoever gave him Chekhov’s Buttcheek.) His thoughts revolve around two things: nebulous politics and immediate circumstances. He’s like a random guy in a pub telling you a random story, and when you stagger out you’re none the wiser.
To me, this makes him possibly the most unreliable narrator in fiction. This is what really makes the novel worth reading, though of course it is exciting and inventive as well. But I feel compelled to draw your attention to the fact that the insanity all starts in chapter six, and when you remember what Markham does at the end of chapter five, well…
…that’s my theory. And I’m sticking to it.
Feb 202011
Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer today has written a fairly ridiculous article in which he complains that FPTP supporters spend too much of their time being negative about AV, and uses the second half of the article to be negative about supporters of FPTP.
But let’s pass over this lack of self-awareness and give him a bit of credit; he does lay out succinctly what are supposed to be the advantages of AV:
I do think it would be a fairer and more appropriate electoral system for contemporary Britain. It will be a worthwhile improvement if MPs have to gather some form of support from at least half of the voters. The parties will be impelled to engage with more parts of the country than just a minority of marginals and it will pay MPs to connect with more parts of their constituencies.
I’d like to address these points a bit more seriously than I did yesterday.
First: the claim that AV is more appropriate for contemporary Britain. By Rawnsley’s lights this may well be the case, but what is so different about contemporary Britain? If AV is appropriate now for the reasons he gives, it has always been appropriate, and FPTP is a bastard system that has always been unfair and unrepresentative. And if this is true of FPTP in Britain, it is true of FPTP everywhere and at all times. Rawnsley does not address why, then, most democratic countries use FPTP.
Second: that MPs will have to gather support from at least half the voters. This is probably right, for certain values of ‘support’ and ‘half.’ For one thing, nothing in AV necessitates that an MP will have the support of half the constituency electorate; only that s/he will have the support of half of those who actually voted. If we examine, for instance, the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election in January, we see that less than half of the electorate turned out. Already we are not going to have the majority of voters represented.
Furthermore, if we redistribute the votes from all but the top four parties (Lab, Lib, Con, UKIP) to Labour, for the sake of simplicity, their share of the votes cast goes from 42.1% to 49.3%—not enough to win under AV.
Now we have to play a little game. Which party would UKIP voters place as their second preference? Probably Conservative. If we distribute the UKIP votes to the Conservatives, our top three totals are as follows:
Labour: 49.3%
Lib Dem: 31.9%
Conservative: 18.6%
Still no majority. So we have to redistribute the Conservative votes to their second preferences, and the UKIP votes to their third preferences. I have a difficult time believing that either of these groups of voters would choose Labour as anything but their last wish, although some might have chosen parties already eliminated in earlier rounds. However, let us say that most of these votes would go to the Lib Dems next, so we’ll add another 15% to the Lib Dem share, giving us:
Labour: 49.3%
Lib Dem: 46.9%
Um, crap. We’re on our last two candidates. We’re certainly not going to start fiddling around with the second preferences of the Lib Dem voters, as that would be utterly absurd. But if we don’t, then we don’t have a candidate with at least 50.1% of the votes cast. So AV does not necessarily deliver MPs support from at least half the voters who voted.
Now obviously this is a rough and dirty calculation, that doesn’t take into account tactical voting. There may have been Conservatives who voted Lib Dem in the hope of keeping Labour out, as the Lib Dem candidate very nearly won in the general election. But that still doesn’t solve the problem that the Labour candidate, even if you very generously allow all of the smaller-party votes to them, would most likely not have achieved a 50.1% majority under AV. What happens in that case? A run-off, which would be less fair even than FPTP, since it would deny a good 50% of the voters to select a candidate they truly agreed with and thereby restrict voter choice even further? Who knows.
Third: the claim that AV would impel parties to engage with more of the country than just marginal constituencies. This, I fear, is a silly belief. Seats are ‘safe’ because a majority of the voters in those constituencies firmly and regularly support one party. Let us examine what is generally considered to be the safest seat in Britain: Bootle in Merseyside, which has been held by the Labour party since 1945. In that time, the Labour candidate has never won with less than 50% of the votes. The closest was in 1955, when the Labour candidate won with 52% of the vote. Since then, the Labour share has been well over 60%, once even as high as 83%. Other parties in Bootle simply do not have a chance, nor would they even under AV. This seat is not ‘safe’ because FPTP delivers a skewed result in which some people’s votes don’t count. This seat is ‘safe’ because the vast majority of voters there like Labour. And the fact that it’s ‘safe’ doesn’t appear to affect voter turnout; turnout in Bootle is no worse than anywhere else on average.
I’m not going to spend my whole afternoon trying to discover whether these facts are similar for all ‘safe’ seats, but I imagine they probably are. In which case, even under AV, I have a hard time believing Labour would bother directing its campaign effort at Bootle. Labour is in no danger whatsoever of being ousted from Bootle.
Parties will always campaign the hardest where they have to work the hardest to get elected, and I see no reason to think this would not also be the case under AV. It seems that the real complaint here is that parties don’t engage on a broad national level during election time, which is a pretty bizarre complaint if you ask me. A particular candidate need only bother engaging with the voters in his own constituency anyway; they’re the only ones who can vote for him. If his party as a whole focuses its campaign efforts elsewhere, that’s between him and his party, not between him and his voters. AV won’t solve this.
Fourth: AV will pay MPs to connect with more parts of their constituencies. If this is true, then MPs are damned stupid and there is simply no saving them. What candidate does not try to get the largest share of the vote possible? What candidate does not, already, try to increase his existing majority? In short, what candidate is not trying his damnedest to win? Show me this person. No, really: show me.
AV, therefore, is not a solution to minority majorities, safe seats, or MPs who don’t give a damn about the voters. It does not even make every vote ‘count,’ as there is still only one winner. At best, it is an opportunity for those who feel unrepresented by any major party to give their support to the candidate they dislike the least, and a chance to indicate that a vote for a party doesn’t necessarily equate with wholehearted support for that party.
But FPTP already permits people to send these signals. And send them the voters do. What, then, is the advantage of AV? That we would have a better way of quantifying these signals?
I mean, imagine how this would pan out. My MP is Chuka Umunna. Here is how he won:
Labour: 42.8%
Lib Dem: 35.8%
Conservative: 18.3%
All others: 3%
Let’s assume the Conservatives all give Lib Dem as their second preference (I have a hard time believing any real Conservative voter would choose Labour anything but last.) Under AV, it’s therefore possible that Chuka Umunna would have lost. But could anyone then claim that Chris Nicholson was supported by more than half the voters? No. A true statement would be that Umunna was supported by less than half the voters. Since the FPTP vote already delivers this message, there is no need for AV to send the signal. Another true statement would be that more than half the voters preferred someone other than Umunna. Again, we can see this from the FPTP vote. But why should this mean Nicholson deserves to win, when clearly more voters actively want Umunna than passively reject him? Those 42.8% of people who really want Labour are effectively disenfranchised by the fact that the Conservatives get to vote twice. How is this ‘fair’?
Or let’s examine it another way. Lots of people vote Lib Dem for tactical reasons—in the case of Streatham, probably as a vote against Labour. Under AV, the theory goes, people wouldn’t need to do this. Suppose a third of those Lib Dem votes were actually Conservatives in sheep’s clothing. Under AV, our first-preference result might look like this:
Labour: 42.8%
Conservatives: 30.1%
Lib Dem: 24%
All others: 3%
Let’s be generous and say that of those 24% of voters whose first preference is the Lib Dems, a third choose Labour second and two thirds choose the Conservatives. In which case Chuka Umunna wins, and AV delivers a result absolutely no different from FPTP: Chuka Umunna becomes MP for Streatham. Everything else an AV vote might tell us is academic.
If I studied the results from every constituency in the 2010 general election, I could probably show this again and again: AV would deliver an obviously unfair result, or one exactly the same as FPTP, or one where nobody manages to secure more than half of the votes. The more marginal the seat, the more likely an unfair or inconclusive result; the safer the seat, the less difference AV would make.
FPTP means that a candidate can win with less than half of the votes. Admittedly this is not great. But at least it means he was wanted by more voters than any other candidate was. At least it means every voter had exactly one vote of equal weight. Why should we reject this system for one in which some people’s half-hearted second preferences are held equal to others’ whole-hearted first, and may not even then deliver a conclusive result? That is not ‘fair’. That is the bastard system.
Feb 192011
I’ve decided that ‘electoral reform’ is an issue so utterly pointless in the modern British polity that it deserves me taking the piss.
For your pleasure and mine, I’m going to provide alternative answers to Yes2AV’s FAQs.
Q: How does AV work?
A: It destroys even the fig leaf political parties have to wear of possessing a consistent, unified ideology about how governing should take place, and instead replaces it with a system in which contradictory, populist vote-chasing sets of laughable ‘policies’ are constitutionally enshrined and pursued by all political parties at one and the same time.
Q: So what’s the point?
A: There is no point. You’ll still only get to vote every four years, and the Government will still do whatever the fuck it wants, manifestoes be damned.
Q: Isn’t that too confusing?
A: Only if you possess insufficient intelligence to observe that even under AV, your ‘fairer’ vote won’t necessarily deliver a candidate or Government of your choice.
Q: Isn’t it fair that the candidate with the most votes wins?
A: Nothing is fair when ‘fair’ is defined as ‘not losing, ever.’
Q: Doesn’t that mean that some people get two votes?
A: Yes. In fact, more than two; some people might get as many votes as n-1, where n is the number of candidates on the ballot paper. And even then, the candidate in second place still loses.
Q: Don’t you end up with the Least-Worst candidate?
A: You end up with a Labour or Lib Dem candidate. Whether you consider that ‘Least-Worst’ is up to you.
Q: Do I have to give a 2nd preference if I don’t have one?
A: Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time before all of this shit becomes compulsory in the name of ‘fairness.’
Q: Will my ballot change?
A: Yes. Right now the ballot is designed so that even the illiterate and innumerate can vote. Do you really think that a voting system that requires people to be able to count and write in actual numbers won’t result in a total re-design of the ballot to make it more accessible? Get real.
Q: Who uses AV?
A: Almost no other democratic country in the bloody world. The one that does—Australia—has had a hung Senate for 25 years. In its House of Representatives, the same two factions exchange control every couple of elections. But I guess this regularly alternating result, identical to what happens in the UK, is okay with the voters, since at least their votes were ‘fair.’ (UPDATE: Their votes were also compulsory.)
Q: Who benefits?
A: Whichever two of three main political parties are the most similar to each other.
Q: Who loses out?
A: Everybody else.
Q: Wouldn’t AV mean more hung Parliaments?
A: Probably. But surely that’s the idea? No winners = no losers = ‘fair.’
Q: Wouldn’t AV mean more tactical voting?
A: All voting is tactical. Get over it.
Q: What about the constituency link?
A: MPs who actually care about their constituents will do so whatever the electoral process. MPs who don’t, won’t. This is true even in marginal seats.
Q: Wouldn’t reform help minority parties like the BNP?
A: Of course not. Extremists don’t deserve ‘fair’ votes.
Q: Doesn’t the current system let us ‘kick the rascals out’?
A: Not really. But then, if Australia is any indication, neither will AV.
Q: Won’t election night take longer?
A: Yes. It will also be more susceptible to unintentionally spoilt ballots (“Hey, this one has two 1s! DOES NOT COMPUTE.’), mistakes (‘Are we on second preferences now, or third? I’ve been counting for 15 hours straight and I’m bleeding to death from paper cuts.’), and fraud (‘That 2 totally looks like a 1. Yay, another vote for Labour!’).
Q: Will AV boost turnout?
A: No. AV won’t make busy people less busy, apathetic people less apathetic, or disenfranchised foreigners, prisoners, and homeless people less disenfranchised.
Q: Will AV change things on the campaign trail?
A: Yes. Candidates will promise even more of the bland sameness than they do now. Good luck with your Hobson’s Choice.
Q: Why a referendum?
A: Because even though we elect representatives to make every other decision about our lives, our country, and our money, and this is considered right and proper in the case of (for instance) letting the people determine Britain’s role in the United States of Eurasia, whether we put Xs or numbers on a ballot paper every four years is way too important to be left up to those jokers. After all, this is the one instance in which the public choice problem is admitted to exist.
Q: Isn’t First-Past-the-Post a British tradition?
A: Yes. Which is why it MUST GO. You fucking racist.
Q: Do the public even care about voting reform?
A: No, which is why this referendum doesn’t require over 50% of the electorate to vote in it for it to count, and why it’s being held at the same time as notoriously low-turnout local elections. If the public really cared, as represented by their representatives, we’d get a special Referendum Holiday with voting booths on every street corner.
Q: Isn’t electoral reform just for Lib Dems?
A: No. It’s for Labour too.
Today’s episode has been brought to you by the colour There’sStillOnlyOneWinner and the letter GTFOverIt.
Feb 062011
Unlike DK, who thinks it all boils down to pointless questions of semantics, I have a great respect for philosophy. Perhaps too great, in that I have always understood its purpose to be the examination of stuff, any stuff, with the goal of reaching enlightenment, or just understanding, or even just theoretical solutions to theoretical thought-problems.
In simplest terms, I think the purpose of philosophy is to examine with intent to reveal, rather than obscure. If that means delving into pointless semantics, so be it. Words, after all, have meanings. And if it means spending a lot of time examining something and ultimately getting no further toward a conclusion than, ‘Well, I guess it sort of depends,’ I’m cool with that. Stuff has many facets, and people have many perspectives. Sometimes agreement can be reached, and sometimes it can’t. And when it can’t, that’s often more interesting, because then you can examine why, which hopefully leads to more enlightenment, or just understanding, or whatever.
So it pains me to read stuff like this from supposed champions of philosophy.
According to La Wik, Alain de Botton has had an elite education which, presumably, trained his mind in the ways of examining stuff, including a master’s degree in philosophy and an unfinished PhD in same. He is credited with making philosophy accessible to a wider audience, though not without some accompanying criticism.
I recognise that a first-rate education and some degrees is no guarantor of quality of thought, but I would have liked to hope these can permit a man’s thought to rise at least fractionally above that of the common herd.
But there is no point of view or argument in this article that I have not seen a hundred times before from all types of people, even from the keyboards of that most reviled and aphilosophical species, the blogger.
There’s the underlying theme of ‘people are so selfish, they actually think they have nothing to learn from the government about how to live!’
There’s the crass comparison with religious rules and taboos, observers of which ‘libertarians’ are said to pity often—a necessarily unfounded statement, and one that entirely fails to examine the question of consent.
There’s the assertion that the existence of advertising makes us unfree and mass consumption has turned us away from morality.
And then finally, there’s the blanket belief that ‘we’ (speak for yourself, Alain) lack the strength to resist temptation and could all do with reminders to be nice and act like good grown-ups.
We may begin to wish that someone could come along and save us from ourselves… Complete freedom can be a prison all of its own… It is not much fun, nor ultimately even very freeing, to be left alone to do entirely as one pleases.
To paraphrase a rather greater thinker than I: is this language which philosophy may properly speak?
Is it part and parcel of making philosophy accessible to the masses to obscure meaning with meaningless contradictions? Freedom can be a prison, indeed.
Is it the task of philosophy to perpetuate misconceptions such as equating libertarianism with absence of moral judgment, when in fact libertarianism contains very robust concepts of what constitutes right and wrong?
Perhaps so; I, after all, am a product of state education and have no degree in philosophy. Who am I to judge?
But all the same, I feel desperately sorry for the real philosophers out there, when the man popularising their discipline to the proles is a real-life version of Dr Floyd Ferris.
Jan 202011
It appears that the House of Representatives has voted to repeal last year’s bloated healthcare act and has put committees together to draft new legislation to replace it—without a timetable.
As you will know, the ‘without a timetable’ aspect is something I lean toward favouring, as I criticised the act heavily, in large part for this reason:
Obama and his Congress sure did fuck it up, didn’t they? Instead of doing thorough research, either before the election or after it, and determining the best possible way to ensure universal, affordable healthcare, they cobbled together a travesty of a bill, full of unrelated pork to get various hold-out politicians onside, that when all is said and done, could serve as an exemplar of what every rent-seeker (in this case, the insurance industry) hardly dares even to dream.
But this vote is not a repeal in itself, of course. That whole ‘checks and balances’ thing means that the repeal bill will have to go before the Senate and win passage there, and then go before… the president. And, typically:
Democratic leaders in the Senate have vowed to shelve the repeal bill, and President Obama has said he would veto repeal if it ever reached his desk.
‘Shelving’ essentially means that the Senate Majority Leader, one egregious Harry Reid, can simply refuse to put the House bill onto the Senate’s legislative timetable—more or less indefinitely, if he so chooses. And even if, by some miracle of organised crime, intimidation, and sweet sweet reason, Republicans get the bill put on the Senate timetable and manage to pass it there, Obama can employ a number of veto tactics depending on when over the course of the legislative session the bill is presented to him. (Although he is required to submit his reasons for vetoing in writing; I wonder what boilerplate he’d spew on that occasion?)
The Congress can override the veto, but only with a two-thirds majority vote in both houses. So that’s pretty unlikely unless the Tea Party start getting uppity again.
I’m pleased the Republicans in the House have taken this first step, and they have a backstop in the fact that the healthcare act is being challenged in a number of cases and has already been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. (That ruling is under appeal, naturally.)
But they won’t get anywhere in the absence of some serious pressure from the American people, and given how the sheeple are, and how blind the Democrats are to protest and demonstration when it’s against their policies, I think the actual repeal of this hideous act will not occur. It’s more likely to be struck down by the high court, and even that’s pretty pie-in-the-sky.
Still, I wonder if the Democrats will now begin to hyperaccuse themselves of being obstructive, partisan, and resistant to the expressed will of the demos. It’s hard to imagine anything that demonstrates those qualities more than:
Democratic leaders in the Senate have vowed to shelve the repeal bill, and President Obama has said he would veto repeal if it ever reached his desk.
UPDATE: Hmm, seems I forgot about those little things called states…
A comment on Clay Shirky’s piece in the Guardian entitled ‘Wikipedia—an unplanned miracle’ hath pleased me:
by any traditional view about how the world works, Wikipedia shouldn’t even exist
I can understand what you mean, if we replace “traditional” with “orthodox”, and I remember that this is The Guardian.
Elsewhere, the idea of emergent order, and its superiority to centrally planned order, has been commonplace for centuries, described by Smith, Hume, Bastiat, Hayek, etc.
This is an unplanned miracle, like “the market” deciding how much bread goes in the store.
Suspicious quotes around “the market”! Perfect.
But you have a point… no need to tax anyone, no need to order anyone to do anything. Mystifying, to be sure. Maybe worth further investigation?
Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free; even the servers and system administrators are funded through donations.
Actually the greatest writers on emergent order often wrote about the emergence of the Law, which is also (hopefully) not driven by money changing hands. A more recent example, almost contemporary with Wikipedia, is open source software.
People don’t always value only money; most people want respect and admiration, an many get it from their visible contributions to things regarded as socially valuable.
When a minority were very rich, they would make extravagant gestures like building whole hospitals, orphanages, colleges, etc. (obviously with a nice statue of the generous founder). These days large swathes of the middle classes have enough spare time and income to be a little bit philanthropic, leave their mark and feel good about themselves (and how others see them).
As people get better off, there is less and less need to order them to take care of their society. And people are getting better off. So the real mystery is not that something like wikipedia works, but that we don’t let other things work the same way.
I wonder if Clay Shirky, author of a book subtitled ‘The power of organising without organisations’, is really so blind he thinks his insights only apply to the internet, or if the suggestion this might be the case is the fault of some overly-zealous Guardian editors.
Jan 082011
Via Bishop Hill, I see that Nature magazine has taken to reporting utterly ludicrous “science” in its attempt to justify more utterly ludicrous science climate change alarmism.
Apparently we are supposed to believe that “dire climate warnings” are counterproductive because they undermine people’s belief that the world is fair and just. (Is that belief really sufficiently widespread to be undermine-able?)
The “evidence” for this is the following:
Half of the volunteers were asked to unscramble sentences such as “Somehow justice will always prevail”, whereas the others were given sentences such as “Often, justice will not prevail”. This activity primed them to have either a strong or weak belief in a just world. The participants then completed a survey that measured their scepticism over climate change, asking questions such as “How solid is the evidence that the earth is warming?” and requiring participants to rate their answers on a six-point scale, in which six was not at all solid and one very solid.
Next, participants watched two short global-warming warning videos created by the Environmental Defense Fund, a charity based in New York that campaigns on green issues…
Feinberg and Willer found that participants primed to have a stronger belief in a just world reported levels of scepticism that were 29% higher, and a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint that was 21% lower, than those primed to see the world as an unjust place. Their findings are reported in Psychological Science.
I freely admit I have no training whatsoever in psychology, but even I am canny enough to emit a Flat What in response to reading this.
Is this really what passes for scientific experiment in the field of psychology? An opinion-gathering exercise centred on a premise even the stupidest of volunteers could figure out over the course of participation?
I mean, say what you will about climate data computer models, but at least the data don’t know they’re being manipulated, or on what basis. But put any vaguely aware Western human in an experiment where the concepts of justice and climate change are juxtaposed, and that person is going to have a pretty good idea what is being investigated. And will adjust his or her behaviour or views accordingly.
The “scientists” didn’t even bother to acquire any basic survey data, e.g. “Tick the sentence that most closely matches your beliefs: The world is a fair and just place / The world is not a fair and just place”, just to get an idea of what sort of weight this concept holds in the population generally.
And it’s not even a question of whether the world has these attributes, as actually both fairness and justice are ethical ideals, the understanding and practice of which are primarily the reserve of human beings. The whole experiment pre-supposes a belief in choice ethics outwith the human experience, a world not pertaining to humans that somehow possesses actualised morality. Fate, if you will, or some force external to humans that has an awareness of choice.
As they would say on the internets, LOL WUT.
Perhaps some psychologists out there can explain to me how this experiment is in any way scientific or valid. I welcome correction.
But until then: comrades, if I were you I would cancel my subscription to Psychological Science.
Nov 152010
I didn’t start blogging until well after the 2008 US presidential election, so I haven’t got the documentary evidence to prove this, but I was one of the many who said at the time:
‘Well, y’know, Obama… I wish him well, I really do. It would be great if he got the nation back on its feet. Hell, it would be great if he could really do even half the shit he says he’s gonna do. But I’m sorry, this is total fantasy. The president has nothing like that kind of power, and it’s just not going to work.’
The number of people who popped up, then and later, to tell me I misunderstood the structure of my native body politic was staggering.
In fairness, Gary Younge wasn’t one of those. But it seems that Apollo has been startlingly generous toward me and those who shared my views, because Gary Younge is now saying the exact same thing.
Their mistake was to believe that transformational change was something you could impart to a higher power – the president – and then witness on CNN. The problem was not that many set their hopes too high but that rather than claim those hopes as their own they invested them in a single person – Obama – and in an utterly corrupted political culture.
The difference, of course, is that Younge attributes this ‘corrupt political culture’ to something rather different than what I was thinking. His analysis isn’t wrong, by any means, but…
A winner-takes-all voting system where both main parties are sustained by corporate financing, the congressional districts are openly gerrymandered and 40% of the upper chamber can block anything, is never going to be a benign vehicle for radical reform. Virtually every enduring progressive development in US politics since the war has been sparked either by massive mobilisations outside of electoral politics that have forced politicians to respond, or through the courts.
…are all of those really such bad things? I mean, bribing candidates electoral financing is a criminal clusterfuck, and gerry-mandering is so endemic its practically become an American trope. No argument from me that those are serious problems—not because they hinder radical change, but because they systematically and deliberately seek to reduce the human right of individual self governance.
But the fact that 40% of the American Senate can filibuster* a bill? There’s kind of a reason for that. It’s so that radical reformers can’t trample over the rights of the minority. I’m not going to say something here along the lines of ‘Surely Younge can’t think that’s a bad thing?’ because that would be a cheap rhetorical device. Of course he thinks that’s a bad thing, provided that minority disagrees with him.
And so we arrive, inevitably, at the ‘oh, poor Obama’ bit. Yes, Younge says the whole sordid business is partly Obama’s fault. Yes, his criticisms of Obama are all actually veiled compliments. Because y’see, President Obama is embedded in a sclerotic system that refuses to let him shine his light.
Strangely, when I make that same argument to my boss, he’s not impressed.
Oh, and P.S. Younge doesn’t forget the obligatory dig at the Tea Party, who while Obama ‘imitated radicalism,’ have managed to snow the American public by ‘affect[ing] anti-corporate populism.’
Blah fucking blah.
Truly, y’all, while it is certainly true that the pressures of work leave little energy for blogging, there is another reason my posting has fallen off: I’m sick to death of this ridiculous charade we all perpetrate on ourselves, that government and politics matter.
My god, the significance and gravitas with which politicians and their apologists invest their every fart, their every random, ‘radical’ idea for making us all better people! And with what lame naivete people lap that shit up.
Recently I was engaged in a debate via email with a good friend of mine, a committed left-winger with a bizarre hard-on for Margaret Thatcher. It was the kind of debate you have over and over with friends of the opposite political persuasion: it’s all been said before, you know you don’t agree, but nevertheless one party or the other believes that somehow, this time, someone’s mind is going to change. Here is what he said (quoted entirely without permission and with punctuation and spelling corrected):
Any political, social or religious value system that doesn’t have at its heart a concept of what a “good person” is and how to help people achieve it is pointless. People can disagree about what being a good person is, or that it’s wrong to coerce people to follow a particular lifestyle, but not to engage in the debate, or to say that you are somehow morally neutral while supporting policies that would totally impoverish millions of people and deny them real freedom of choice in their lives (except to either follow the ethical codes set down for them by the rich or starve) is simply hypocrisy. Also, you are interested in being a “good person,” you just don’t agree with [Monbiot's] definition of what that is. Only sociopaths have no interest in being a “good person”.
Have you ever heard such tiresome bollocks? Notice, first of all, the conflation of political with religious value systems. From an avowed atheist, that’s an interesting tactic. Second, observe the clear admission that there is no universal concept of what a good person is. Finally, witness the neat tactic of suggesting that, since only sociopaths share my view, and I am clearly not a sociopath, I cannot possibly mean it when I say I have no interest in being a ‘good person.’ (I do wish people had less of a tendency to engage in armchair psychology.)
And finally, see how he assumes that the point of it all is to make people good! All politics, all governance, all ideology, should have this aim! And it is a weighty aim, so all enterprise engaged in pursuing this aim is weighty enterprise, and not the pathetic game-playing of a bunch of meddling control-freaks who honestly, genuinely believe there is a desperate need for the ‘service’ they provide.
Bitch, please.
Sometimes it’s hard to be a libertarian and a historian, because nothing I know of in human history suggests we will ever not have government. At first we lacked it, but then we built it, because there was always some overpowering reason why a couple of dudes had to be in charge of shit. Whether it was coordinating the defence of the village or making sure people didn’t go to hell, there was always some realm of human activity that simply couldn’t be looked after by the voluntary, individual acts of the people concerned.
At least back in the day, those couple of dudes were honest about it: ‘I’m the best fighter, peasant, and if you don’t do what I say, I’ll do you.’
Now, the justifications are a lot more spurious. On the one hand, you have the politician, who starts with ‘I’ve consulted and studied and learned and listened, so vote for me,’ then moves to ‘Lots of people voted for me, so STFU,’ and ends with ‘I’ve got the bombs, motherfucker.’ Are any of these legitimate?
On the other hand, you’ve got the Chris Dillows of the world, who know an awful lot of stuff about human behaviour and this bias and that bias and that other bias also, but whose basic argument seems to boil down to ‘Rational action is imperfect, so the role of government is to insulate people from their own and others’ crappy choices.’
Well, you know what? That sucks. If we’re all irrational actors, what hope is there, even if we were governed by philosopher-kings? What’s going to protect me from their irrational actions?
And so, I say to you, my predictions about Obama have come true. This fact brings me little pleasure. Instead it deepens my cynicism. I don’t claim expertise in everything—in almost nothing, truth be told—but at least against all fucking odds I’ve acquired enough wisdom to know the virtue of humility, especially when it comes to telling other people how to live their lives and feeling massively important in doing so.
To all people like Gary Younge, Obama, every politician on earth, and everyone who helps embiggen their heads, I say with Jacopo Belbo, ma gavte la nata. Pull out your corks, you buffoons.
*No, they do not actually have to filibuster. It’s more of a ‘let’s not and say we did’ tactical deployment. A degraded holdover from the Roman Senate, which recognised the right of a speaker to speak until he was finished, and could not sit later than sunset. Cue Cato Uticensis, famous for being able to harangue the house in filibuster from early afternoon until the Senate was obliged to dissolve for the day. If Senators actually still had to do this, I predict we’d see a lot fewer filibusters.
