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“The answer to our woes, is a devolved English Parliament. Let the four constituent nations go their own separate way. let Scotland have independence, let Salmond have his way. Lets the Welsh & the Welsh and Northern Irish go. We moan on this site about the Internal Aid department, well how about we look a bit closer to home. England again has voted overwhelming Conservative, except this morning we are still governed by a party that is led and draws its legitimacy from the huge client state that is Scotland. All the usual suspects will whitter on about the unfairness of the FpTP system, whilst ignoring the biggest unfairness of all.”
Written by a character called Paul B, over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog.
I happen increasingly to agree. While I yield to no-one in my admiration for much of what Scotland has brought to Britain and to the wider world – this book is a wonderful description – the brutal fact is that Scotland is now exerting an outrageously one-sided, and disproportionate, influence on British affairs. Its politicians have carefully natured a client state in the big cities such as Glasgow, where a huge proportion of the locals subsist on state benefits. If, as the Coffee House commenter suggests, we were to make it possible for Scotland to operate as an independent nation, then the Scottish Labour Party machine, a profoundly corrupt one and similar to the Chicago Democrat machine that gave the US Barack Obama would no longer exert its malign influence on England’s affairs.
It is time to cut Scotland loose, both for its interest, and more to the point, for those who want to see the back of the Scottish Labour Party and its arm-lock on UK affairs for the past decade and a half.
In the meantime, I suspect that the international bond market is going to have the casting vote on what happens next after this inconclusive election.
I always go to the polls. I dutifully scrawl some libertarian slogan on the ballot. Some vote-counter reads it, puts my paper in the “spoiled” pile, and – who knows? – maybe has their life changed by a Damascene conversion to the cause of liberty, years later.
A pitiful exercise? Perhaps. But I could not bear to stay away and be thought apathetic.
I have given up trying to make my nearest and dearest understand. She says I am opting out – or sitting on the fence – or I think I don’t make a difference.
I try to explain that my vote makes precisely as much difference as hers: namely, infinitesimally more than zero. Her vote and mine are symbolic acts.
My explanation is useless too.
Suppose there were a “None of the above” box on our ballot papers? Should I use it? Or would that be validating the whole rotten system? Do those who stay right away and watch the movie channel making a more valid protest?
Abstaining even from a “None of the above” box would be an act of exquisite hyper-rejection. Hmmm … attractive.
An hour after the polls closed, and the BBC has tortured its exit poll to death. They keep on talking it down, because they can’t believe that the LIb Dems can really have lost seats, as the exit poll says.
A single election result is in. A rock-solid Labour majority has been slightly dented by the Conservative swing. Vernon Bogdanor extrapolates it to say that the Conservatives will get an overall majority.
The limited pleasure of the election broadcast will fade soon. I enjoyed the first few minutes as the BBC’s ludicrously garish setup battled with good old-fashioned gremlins. One panel of a giant bar graph of the projected seats vanished for several minutes. Michael Gove’s artificially rejuvenated mug loomed at us while his mike failed utterly. Jeremy Paxman bellowed at an interviewee as if he could make him respond faster that way, for all the world as if he’d never encountered satellite delay before.
Mariella Frostrup thinks it’s terrible that we’re all in (strangely pronounced) thrall to the markets, and what a pity we haven’t invented a better and more humane way to manage our finances. Watching her say that makes me want to go to bed, and not in a good way.
Oh bloody hell. Jeremy Vine is knocking down huge trains of CGI dominoes for some reason. Generations yet unborn will injure themselves laughing at the Beeb’s presentation tonight.
It’s conceivable, although I promise nothing, that I may do some of this “live blogging” thing, come the early hours of tomorrow morning. It depends on my mood at the time, and on such things as computer availability, dongle workability and so forth and so on.
Somehow I doubt that Perry de Havilland will be hanging on every result. And oh look, he just said it again, see immediately below!
So, if none of us here manage it, but if you nevertheless hunger for this kind of thing, how about paying attention this this guy?
If I can keep my eyes open I intend to stay up most of the night and blog about the incoming results.
In particular (and at risk of sounding disturbingly anal) I intend to monitor the fate of those candidates who voted for and against the smoking ban. (Yes, really.)
I shall be looking out for some preferred candidates including Philip Davies, Greg Knight, Robert Halfon, Annesley Abercorn (Conservative), Kate Hoey (Labour), Lembit Opik (Lib Dem), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Martin Cullip (Libertarian), Old Holborn (Independent) and one or two others.
I shall also be passing comment on the election coverage, much of which will be viewed through the bottom of a glass, darkly.
Well, if it’s your kind of thing, he says he’s going to start around 10 pm. Maybe Perry might even want to give it a glance. He and Simon Clark of Taking Liberties, who wrote the words quoted above and to whom thanks for the email alerting me to this, do seem to be on the same wavelength.
Benedict Brogan wrote a Telegraph article called “Election 2010: a bracing reminder of the price we pay for political freedom“, in which he notes the cost to Britain’s young soldiers in Afghanistan in juxtaposition with the scenes of election tumult.
Well I can think of several arguably good reasons for western troops to be fighting in Afghanistan but I sure hate to think of anyone dying for political freedom… freedom, sure… but that qualifying word in front does rather change things. Politics is what we call the struggle to control the means of collective coercion. It may be a process we cannot avoid but it is, at best, a necessary evil… and most of the time it is just evil without the necessary.
Freedom is essential and worth fighting for… but anyone who died to defend political anything died for all the wrong reasons. What does ‘political freedom’ even mean in Britain? The right to vote who gets to rape you?
Britain’s political system is not something to get all misty eyed about because most politics has nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom” but rather forcing people to do things they would rather not do. It is for the most part about people using the proxy violence of the state to take things they want and punish people they do not like far more often than it is about dealing with the genuine collective threats of plague, disorder and war.
And as for this being an ‘extraordinary’ election, as the linked article claims, I cannot recall one where it mattered less which of the largely interchangeable plonkers on offer gets into Number 10. All that will change is which of set of rapacious thugs says who gets snout space at Westminster’s trough filled with other people’s money. But of course many will vote Tory on the ‘lesser evil’ principle and no doubt act surprised when Cameron more or less does all the things he has said he will do to prop up the intrusive regulatory welfare state. People voting for an ever so slightly lesser evil (and quite possibly not even that) will get exactly what they vote for… another evil government. Nice one, guys.
Today is the day that nothing important really changes.
Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they’ll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication.
And they are still bashing ahead with this policy, as I serendipitously discovered when I got home last night and was browsing through an internet site called Weird Asia News. Mostly this site features weird headlines concerning weird stories like: Papuan Police Recruits with an Enlarged Penis Denied Job; and: Britons Suffer Chemical Burns From Chinese Sofas, which I suppose I ought to care about more than I do what with me having bought a sofa myself not that long ago; and: South Koreans Revolutionize iPhone Market with Sausage Meat Stylus, the last one being a lot less interesting than it sounds. But in among such drollery is to be found this report, entitled Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown, about how they are even now, still – well, as of last month anyway – enforcing this exercise in national suicide.
A 20-day campaign was begun on 7 April to sterilize 9,559 adults in Puning county, which with a population of 2.24 million is the most populous area of Guangdong Province. On 12 April local officials said they had already achieved about half their goal.
Doctors have been working 20 hour days to complete the massive round of surgeries. Local officials are so determined to reach their target they have been detaining relatives of those who resist the operation, potentially in violation of Chinese law.
Some 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions around the county and forced to listen to lectures about the one-child policy while their relatives refuse to submit to the surgery.
At Perry’s, conversation later ensued about why they unleashed this madness. What were they thinking? What are they still thinking?
My guess was that this began as a classic communist response to shortages. Communism always causes shortages. Faced with their shortages, the Chinese Communists figured that if they could only reduce the number of people suffering from these shortages, the shortages would go away. If that’s right, then, as Perry said, this was another of those Fixed Quantity fallacies in action. Also a classic case of a doomed attempt at economic calculation under Socialism.
My further guess now is that this has become a pissing contest between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, with the government now being too bloody stubborn to back down. If they give up on this policy now, that will suggest either (a) that it was wrong for them to have persisted with this for so long, and maybe even wrong for them to have done it at all; or else (b) that they no longer have the power – the balls, you might say – to enforce such arrangements.
I have heard it suggested that it is simply that the Chinese government fears the Chinese people and wants to thin the numbers down. When this policy got started, the Chinese government was much more completely in charge than it is said to be now. But if that is the thinking, why impose a policy that results in millions of sex-starved men wandering around? That’s not going to keep the peace.
Guido Fawkes wryly notes that the Financial Times, which for a long time has backed Labour in its editorial pages, and for a long time taken a ploddingly, predictably, wrong-headed stance on many issues (such as joining the euro), has now come out for the Tories.
Of course, the FT, like the Economist – which has also backed Cameron – is a purveyor of conventional wisdom, so it may be that a centrist, social democratic paper like the FT feels fairly comfortable in backing a party that has not shown any considerably conservative political views. But as Guido says, there may be another reason in that the FT has seen some of its readers die off or defect to other, more robustly pro-market, publications. If the latter is the case, then that is an admirable lesson to be learnt: if you want to see how a product has to change in the face of consumer trends, look at the business media.
I seldom read the Independent, but today the blogosphere lead me to this story, about an Indy journalist, Jerome Taylor, who got beaten up for the crime of investigating electoral fraud in East London.
I also learned something that I did not know, about the art of being beaten up:
As their fists and feet slammed into me, all I could think about was some advice a friend had given me. She’s a paramedic and has dealt with countless victims of assault. “Whatever you do don’t get knocked to the ground,” she once said. “Blows on the floor are much more dangerous.” …
I never knew that, but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Punched in the face is not good, but you really don’t want to be kicked in the kidneys. Presumably Taylor managed to remain standing. It reminds me of an old Elton John song that I have always quite liked.
Luckily for Taylor, he was saved from further punishment by a nearby onlooker who intervened, which was enough for the beaters-up to go away, two of them “into the candidate’s house”.
Good bit of journalism, that last bit. Your face is a mess, but you still clock the vital fact about your attackers. I hope (a) that Jerome Taylor’s career prospects improve as a result of his ordeal, and (b) that both the barbarians who did this and the barbaric puppeteers they were doing it for live more miserable and complicated and dysfunctional lives from now on.
Raedwald, the blogger who lead me to this story, says that it was “naivety or foolishness ” that got Taylor into this fracas. Maybe so, but that strikes me as a bit harsh under the circumstances. Isn’t trying to learn the truth about things, sometimes naively and foolishly, going where people who already know it all are too wise to venture, what journalism is all about?
Also, was that Good Samaritan onlooker who chased away the villains also perhaps being rather naïve and rather foolish? Again, maybe yes, but it’s a good thing he did what he did.
I am fairly seriously prosopagnosic. That may be why I am so skeptical about identification in general, but the research into the condition is beginning to militate quite strongly against the presuppositions many people in the law-and-order business make about the utility of photo-ID.
The BBC has an interesting radio programme on how bad people are at facial-recognition, here:
Health Check
The points in this that I suggest are important for policy are:
1. Most people are not in fact very good at matching strangers to their photographs. People tend to be much better at recognising people they know than people they do not know, and mistakenly generalise what you could call ‘Easy Matching’ from their experience with their familiars. This is not a mistake you would make if, like me, you find recognising people you know hard.
Looking at someone’s ‘photo-ID’ on a one-off occasion will ordinarily be hit-and-miss, unless you are one of the rare people the radio programme calls “super-recognisers”.
2. A significant number of people (the programme suggests 3%) are sufficiently bad that it handicaps them in everyday life, but generally they do not realise it. I was 30 before I understood I had a problem, though I can recall incidents back to 6 or 7 years old that are examples. Yet officialdom assumes that anyone can recognise others from pictures, to the degree suggested by the false Easy Matching supposition. There is no testing of passport control staff, police, security guards, bar-staff… anyone, who is expected to do the matching.
Yet 3% or thereabouts not only are ordinarily useless at it but are being put to an impossible task. They may well compensate intuitively by responding to other behavioural or bodily clues that have nothing to do with facial features—the Clever Hans syndrome. I know I do. But I was not always aware that is what I was doing, or that I was different in that respect from other people.
Some Hypotheses:
Photo-ID for age-checking is rather like voice-stress or polygraph “fraud detection”. There is no real evidence for its accuracy, yet the story that it ‘obviously’ works is so plausible to so many, that few even question it. There is a massive confirmation bias, and it is probably not acting as more than an intimidatory deterrent.
Software facial-recognition is thought of as pretty bad for the purpose that it is put to (fact) – but it may well be better than 90%+ of people under the same circumstances of matching strangers in large numbers, and infinitely better than the small fraction of checkers who, unknown to themselves and their employers, are getting it wrong almost all the time. Criticisms of the technology are often as based in the mistaken Easy Matching idea as support for it. Both sides of that argument assume people are better than machines. But in practice ID-ing travellers and drinkers doesn’t do a lot. It is an imposition and a cost on everyone, but the attitudes struck in security theatre do not stop competent imposture.
Flash and dash is close to useless, but there’s a huge industry of ID badges built on it. The false assumption is that replacing a doorkeeper who knows everyone (and in most cases will therefore recognise them quite well), with picture-passes that ‘anyone can check’, is more efficient and more secure. Quite the reverse. But look at the reception area in any large firm and what to you see? Picture passes with RFID tracking of the pass and bored temps concerned that you display a badge properly, operating on the assumption that your badge is you.
(Technology keeps ever more track of those tokens, however. So, as long as you are compliant, regardless of the fact that linking ID with people does not work, ID does work as surveillance.)
There is now in the system a prejudice and an interest in not facing (ha!) these ideas. Everything in fact tends towards dismissing them. The authoritarian mindset is particularly prone to confirmation bias (Cf. the catastrophic DNA database arguments), and Clever Hans will sucker them every time. The most modern fashions in government are close to superstition.
The $146 billion bailout package approved this weekend for Greece is advertised as a move to “stop the worst crisis in the [euro]’s 11-year history,” but it is having exactly the opposite effect.
…
So you have politicians defying the will of the voters to pour more water into a leaky bucket; transnational economic planners destroying a currency in order to save it; markets responding to those actions with predictable horror; and the few recipients of all the largesse too dumb to say “Thank you.” This is apparently what EU stability looks like.
– The start and the finish (I recommend the stuff in between as well) of a piece by Tim Cavanaugh about the Greek Bailout
The non-mainstream anti-Obama media in the USA have been describing this Gulf of Mexico oil spill as, potentially, Obama’s Katrina. President Obama has, they say, been too slow in responding.
I dissent. Not about the reality of it all. Maybe Obama has indeed responded too slowly. About that, I don’t know. I would only say that just because he has been taking his time about making big speeches about it doesn’t mean he hasn’t kept abreast of it.
No, my dissent concerns the political significance of all this. I think this disaster could be the making of the Obama presidency, in much the same way that the Oklahoma bomb rescued President Clinton at a time when he was staring the ignominy of a one-term presidency in the face. As I said in this posting here, and as others have explained in greater detail, the Oklahoma bombing enabled Clinton to completely change the political narrative in the USA and to put the Republicans on the back foot – which was why no seriously good Republican candidate was even willing to stand against Clinton when Clinton was trying to get re-elected and why the bloke they did pick made such a confused mess of his campaign.
I think this oil spill could be about to do the same kind of thing for President Obama. → Continue reading: Why the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be a double catastrophe
The notion that it is the state’s business how fat people are is grotesque but we can thank athlete James Cracknell for giving us a superb example of why it does not matter a tinker’s damn which of the three clowns actually ends up in Downing Street:
Tories have what it takes to tackle obesity. The Conservatives have a sporting solution to Britain’s ticking health time bomb, says James Cracknell
The same relentless statist chipping away at civil society will happen regardless, egged on by countless busy bodies like James Cracknell.
Mind.your.own.business.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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