I thought this was particularly on the money:
This is why the culture war is in many ways the one that matters most, because everything else follows from it.
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“These anti-homeless spikes are brutal. We need to get rid of them”, writes Leah Borromeo in the Guardian.
Many comments ask whether Ms Borromeo, a journalist and filmmaker, has made her own doorstep – or her own bedroom – available to the homeless. It is an obvious question. This does not stop it being a good one. I would imagine her own bookshelves are well stocked with “tomes on the housing crisis, inequality, gentrification, place-hacking and poverty”, so she could offer the free use of these as an additional incentive to make her own property a “more inclusive space where misfortunes of circumstance such as homelessness aren’t banned.” On the other hand the capitalist vipers who own the Curtain Road premises probably regard the reading material left on their doorstep by Ms Borromeo and her preening chums (“The only good thing about living in austerity Britain is that through pushing us into a corner, the government and the money that controls it is unwittingly training up a generation of fighters. Some of us will kick and scream. Others will be by the ringside healing the wounded”) as a more effective deterrent than the spikes. OK, this woman is a poseur. She isn’t a healer of the wounded, she just plays one in her own mind. I would give her a little more respect if I learned that her good deeds to the homeless included volunteering at homeless shelters or accompanying those charity workers and street pastors who make the rounds of those places where rough sleepers go every night. Or if I thought that she had spent even a moment thinking about the plight of the shop owner who sees her sales plummet because customers don’t want to push past the dosser on the floor to enter, or the premises manager who has to clean up the urine and needles every morning. Yet it is possible to acknowledge the right of those put up these spikes to do so, and also have sympathy with the homeless. Ms Borromeo’s statement that “anyone, for any reason, could end up on the streets with no home” is the usual hyperbole (she need not worry about the chances of it happening to her), but it is true that things can go wrong for a person with surprising speed. There is probably at least one of your classmates from primary school who has lost everything, usually via drugs or alcohol. There are ways to help, but all of them have downsides. Homeless shelters, whether run by true charities or government funded, must themselves exclude some people. I would not be surprised or angered to learn that they make use of “access control” spikes themselves. If the shelters don’t exclude anyone – if they allow people to sleep there who are violent or predatory – then they destroy their own function as a refuge. The one sentence in Ms Borromeo’s article that rang true was “Sometimes you feel so unsafe where you are that sleeping on a ledge in east London comes across as the better option.” July 24th, 2015 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
James Bartholomew, on the malign effect, as he sees it, of UK education. My problem with this article is that it is inevitably selective and I wonder, for example, what would happen if you randomly selected a group of postgraduates from UK universities, now living abroad in countries such as India or Singapore, and polled them on their economic and political views. It seems from entirely anecdotal experience that most graduates, especially in the liberal arts, tilt left; I am not sure about the leanings in economics today – although I get the impression that the ideas of Milton Friedman, Hayek, von Mises et al are still seen as quite “extreme”. But there have, for example, been pro-market lecturers at places such as the London School of Economics, for all its socialist origins: Lionel Robbins and FA Hayek, to take two examples. Arthur Seldon, one of the original men at the pro-market Institute of Economic Affairs – an enormously influential think tank in its time – was educated at the LSE, and I know quite a few LSE alumni who are pro-market. So yes, during certain periods of UK history when socialism/collectivism was fashionable, the folk who came out of university often carried terrible ideas with them. Today, though, I think the problem is more about culture and philosophy. Post-modernism still exerts a big influence, for example, and the damage wrought is not always as easy to chart as with economics. Of course, these points lead us back to that thorny subject of the PPE (politics, economics and philosophy) degrees which several UK politicians possess. The PPE is very much an exam crafted to give a sort of rounded set of subjects that an administrator/political leader was expected to understand, and I have no firm views about this sort of degree – there is no reason why having one cannot be a very thorough form of degree at all. But studying a subject does not seem to correlate a lot to understanding – the current UK government is led by a man with a PPE and it wants to push up the UK national minimum wage, a form of economic illiteracy, if supposed political cunning. July 23rd, 2015 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Let me put it this way: There’s nothing wrong with The Donald except that he’s a dishonorable, disgusting, opportunistic cronyist blowhard who has no problem getting the State to do his dirty work if all else fails, and maybe even if it wouldn’t. Either a liar or someone whose opinion depends on how the wind’s blowing, or both. Given a choice between Shrill and The Donald, one would have to wear waders that come up to the armpits to make it into and out of the polling place. – Julie near Chicago July 23rd, 2015 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in many years. I tend to dip into chapters now and again but I only recently realised it was available on the Kindle, which made it convenient enough to be my daily read. As a result I am rediscovering the way various strands of the plot weave together so elegantly. I was also minded to dip into the large collection of supplementary material that is now available. I stumbled across this, from letter 52, written to his son on 29 November 1943:
I should have included this in my post about how language affects thought. And I am wondering to what extent reading Tolkien as a child led to my ending up here. And it has just occurred to me that I was introduced to The Hobbit by the same English teacher who lent me a copy of 1984 (which I did not return). July 23rd, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was somewhat surprised to learn about the possibility of taking complete control of a Jeep Cherokee using a laptop and a mobile phone. It seems as if the car makers have added software features to their cars without properly understanding how to make them secure. I work with embedded software that merely has to prevent movies from being copied. If the hacking methods described by Wired are accurate, there are some quite obvious precautions we take that the makers of Jeeps appear not to. I am glad not to be working on life or death software; I expect more from people who do. Nonetheless, this should all be fixed soon.
Free speech and free markets seem to be working, then. Which makes this seem unnecessary:
Meh. It sounds to me more like the government has come along after the problem is already being solved to take the credit. I suspect such a bill will end up protecting car makers from civil suits if they merely have to show they have complied with inevitably flawed regulations. July 22nd, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
So a guy who has in the past contributed funds to Barack Obama, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry is leading the… Republican… pack? 😀  July 22nd, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Singapore is the only place I know where you can meet someone who has an economics degree from Stanford, and have her tell you that she has a liberal arts background. I have been to Singapore several times, and love the place. July 21st, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Paul Johnson, writing in the Times about the minimum wage (“Why it’s a gamble to follow Ikea on higher pay”) talks some sense but puts the cart before the horse:
Of course French workers are productive. The people who would have been the least productive French workers aren’t workers at all. Thanks to the minimum wage they’re unemployed, except for a little light rioting. However Mr Johnson’s penultimate sentence cannot be faulted:
Everyone loves a feelgood story, and to increase the minimum wage feels so good. How vividly one imagines the joy of the hardworking night cleaner as he counts the extra in his meagre pay packet! In contrast, how dim and watery is the mental picture of the, um, potentially-but-not-actually hardworking unemployed person who might theoretically have benefited from a job at the till at a supermarket but now there’s an automated checkout machine instead. She’ll never know. The supermarket chain are not such fools as to announce that the reason for them scaling back their hiring plans is that they would rather not pay their employees any more. They will present automation purely as a benefit to the customer. The customers will continue to curse at the words “unexpected item in the bagging area” and moan about what a pity it is that they don’t have real human beings at the till like they used to, especially since that nice Mr Osborne put up their wages. An afterthought: Oh, and about that hardworking night cleaner… six months after he was interviewed by the BBC saying what a wonderful difference the extra pay would make to his life, he was let go. Nothing personal, but what with the rising wage bill, the only way for his employers to keep within budget was to cut the frequency of cleaning. The BBC were long gone. Warmhearted people continued to feel good about how companies were finally being made to pay a “decent living wage”. July 21st, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I recently had a clean-out of my home, and one of the things I chucked out was a small stack of recent and not-so-recent newspapers. Before binning them I took photos of their front pages, because front page photos, I find, can often make very evocative souvenirs. Plus, unlike the actual newspapers, they don’t clutter up my home. (Just my hard disc.) I also often take photos of front pages when I am out and about in London. Maybe (although I promise nothing) I’ll do one of those “a year in newspaper headlines” postings, come the end of the year. I haven’t gone through this latest clutch of front page photos properly yet. My camera always sees more than I do, until I really look at what I’ve got. But, I have already been smiling at this front page headline:
Someone’s having a laugh, right? I don’t think it’s just me. And the date above the newspaper headline …:
… tells me that one of the someones having a laugh is the Evening Standard. Nice one, gentlemen. Here, for those who care, is the story. July 21st, 2015 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
If the project itself would add value then it should be built, recession or no. And if it doesn’t add value then it shouldn’t be built, recession or no. There is no room left for the argument that it should be built because recession. – Tim Worstall, on the ASI blog writing “Keynesian infrastructure spending might not be the answer you know“ July 20th, 2015 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database, reports the New York Post.
So they want to push banks into making more loans to minorities who tend to lack good credit histories. What could possibly go wrong? When companies like Wonga encourage poor people to take out loans they cannot afford, it’s called loan sharking. As with my previous post, I first learned of this story via the Drudge Report, which seems particularly good at sniffing out and really making public stories of this type in which momentous developments were previously “made public” in a purely technical sense by bland official reports. “You will be assimilated” was the catchphrase of the Borg, a “collection of species that have been turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones in a hive mind called the Collective”, formerly thought to be fictional. July 19th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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