repatriated's posterous

Why The Lib Dems are hated; A superhero parable

Note: for the purpose of this parable, I will be defining the labour party as good guys and the conservative party as bad guys.  If you disagree with this definition, as you have every right to, then I invite you to write your own parable of why you dislike the Lib Dems.

Imagine for a moment that you are Batman.

If you're anything like me, this isn't the first time you've imagined this.  You're a dark knight, patrolling the streets of Gotham, righting wrongs, saving kidnapped children, all while not wearing hockey pads.  I'll skip over the part about you being a rich white guy who uses the billions he makes from his corporations to fight street crime.

All right, so you're Batman.  In your world, there are people who are definitely your allies - Nightwing, Robin, Red Robin, Batgirl, Oracle (who may also be Batgirl depending on what they've done to continuity this week), Alfred, etc.  There are also people who are definitely your enemies - Joker, Penguin, Black Mask, Two-Face, Killer Croc, Clayface, etc.  Then, there are a spectrum of people inbetween.  There are plenty of people who fall into a broad grey area: Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, The Riddler, Azrael, etc.

Imagine for a moment there's another superhero who sometimes opposes you.  I'll pick Green Lantern because sometimes Green Lantern can be a bit moralizing and a bit silly.  He doesn't always agree with your methods, and you don't always agree with his, but on the broadest level you both want the same thing: a peaceful and ordered world where people don't live in fear of crime.

Now, imagine that The Joker has a terrible plot against Gotham.  He's going to release Joker gas in all of the hospitals simultaneously.  You're fighting as hard as you can to stop him when you find out that the joker has help.  Green Lantern has been helping him install the gas cannisters, and could probably stop the plot at any time, but hasn't.  When you confront him about it, he tells you that it's all OK - he's persuaded the Joker to use a less potent form of Joker gas, and to release it over a period of a week instead of all at once.

Here's a big question for you:

Who do you hate more in this situation: The Joker or Green Lantern?

 

We hold our friends, or our fellow travellers, to higher standards than our enemies.  We naturally expect that the people we oppose will do things that disgust us, because that's why we oppose them.  If someone who we respectfully disagree with but hold things in common with does something that goes against not just our principles but theirs, it's natural for this to outrage us.  The Joker is not betraying the side of justice by committing an attrocity because he's not on the side of justice.  If Green Lantern does so, he is opposing everything he claimed to stand for.  If he's doing it on purpose, he's a monster, and an enemy who was once sort of a friend is always hated more.  If he's doing it out of good intentions, he's a patsy, and will be thrown to the wolves as soon as he's outlived his usefulness.

And that's why my feelings against the Lib Dems run stronger than my feelings against the Tories.  I always knew the Tories were this bad, and to be honest they revel in it.  The Lib Dems want to commit a foul deed without getting the blood on their gleaming white raiments, and that's simply abhorrent.

Keeping it civil.

I have something to tell religious people.  Gather round for a bit, this won't take more than a few minutes of your time, but it's rather important.  Some of you already know this, and that's good, but some of you seem to need someone to point this out.  You're all here?  Right, here goes:

You don't own marriage.

I'll let you take a second so that can sink in.  I know some of you may think you did, and this is a shock.  I know some of you may not believe me, and that is your right, but the simple fact, as I just said, is as follows:

You don't own marriage.  At all.  In any way.

This isn't to say that you can't get married.  Of course you can, and I hope you're very happy.  This isn't to say you can't have beautiful and meaningful ceremonies that celebrate love and commitment in the sight of god.  By all means, sing hosannas and be joyful and may married bliss with you at all times.

But you don't own marriage.  It's not yours.

I don't own it either.  It's not yours.  It's not mine.

It's ours.

Marriage is, and has been for a long time, a civil ceremony.  For all the talk of "civil partnerships", that's what marriage is.  All we do by keeping certain couples who want to commit for life away from marriage is create a two tier recognition system.  There's a name for such a system: "separate but equal".  Go and look for that phrase on Wikipedia, I'll wait.  So, you have your civil ceremonies, which you unite with a religious ceremony, and nonreligious people have their civil ceremonies.  The fact that God is mentioned in your ceremony and not in mine is utterly irrelevant to whether or not it is a marriage.  The other thing that should be utterly irrelevant is the gender of the people involved in the ceremony.

This message doesn't seem to have been entirely driven home in the minds of fools like John Sentamu.  I should point out that I do not use the word "fool" lightly in this case.  I don't like to call someone a rude name or insult their intelligence just because they disagree with me, and I try not to get too "angry atheist" about things.  I like the Church of England on the whole, and I know a number of deeply lovely priests within the Church.  However, when I see someone make the statement that the state should not try to "dictate" what marriage is, I cannot help but think the person who makes it is a fool.  When you are an archbishop in an institution that was founded by the head of state to change the definition of marriage, such a statement is beyond silly.  For an example of how silly this is, fill in the blanks in the following statement:

"Henry VIII founded the Church of England in order that he be able to _______ Catherine of Aragon and _______ Anne Boleyn."

I don't have a problem with religious marriages.  I'll never have one, but I don't mind other people having them.  What I have a problem with is religious people trying to say what is and is not a marriage for anyone else.  Trying to argue that marriage is a religious institution and that gay people should only be allowed "civil partnerships" is exactly as silly as saying that funerals are religious ceremonies, so atheists should only be allowed "civil burials".

OK, is everyone clear on that?

Good, now run along and play.  But don't go too far, I may want a word with some of you about creationism later.

I don't want to buy the Queen a boat

I have nothing against the queen as a person.

She seems perfectly nice, moderately clever, and quite good at pretending she's interested in the social worker or plumber or girl guide who is pushed in front of her to exchange pleasantries.  As a figurehead of our country, she does a decent job most of the time, and looks suitably impressive in a nice gold hat holding a big gold stick.

However, I don't want to buy the queen a boat.

I'm not a fan of monarchy in general, figuring that in a democracy it's a bit strange for supreme executive power to be based on which vagina you fell out of and when.  If we are to have a monarchy, I'd prefer it to be both theoretically and practically powerless.  That said, if we're going to have a member of the saxe-coburg-gotha family wearing the shiny hat and having tea with Barack Obama, I'd rather it be her than most of her kids and most of her predecessors.  Her uncle in particular was ghastly.  Nothing reinforces my opinion that monarchy should be kept as far away from power as possible like that nasty little nazi sympathizing sod.  If we have to go with one of this particular clan, she'd the best of the bunch, and has a funny if horribly racist husband.

However, I don't want to buy the Queen a boat.

It's not just about the boat.  I understand that having a head of state involves a certain amount of pomp and circumstance.  I don't begrudge the Queen a nice house to live in, and while I didn't particularly want to pay for her grandson's wedding I don't necessarily object to there being a party for the Queen's diamond jubilee.  It's my parents' wedding anniversary this year, and while they won't be sailing a flotilla up the Thames they'll be having a nice party.  The problem comes with the people who were suggesting that we buy the Queen a boat, and with the other things happening at the same time.

We're living in the recovery period from a massive financial crisis.  We're too close to it at the moment to know how big this financial crisis was, but my strong suspicion is that this rivals most since the great depression, and the only reason why we haven't seen quite the horrible consequences that we saw in the Great Depression is that people give slightly more of a shit about each other than they did in the thirties.  The average Mail reader might think of a poor person as a scrounger, but they don't actually want that poor person to starve to death, or at least they won't admit to it any more.

The current government has decided that rather than trying to stimulate the economy, they're going to cut their way to evonomic viability.  An incredibly dumb strategy, but not the incredible dumbness I'm talking about here.

As a result, thousands of public sector workers have lost their jobs, and the number is likely higher than that being reported in the press, because as well as the people who are actually being made redundant you also have workers on short term contracts (many of whom have been in their jobs for years, on constantly renewed short term contracts for bastardly accountancy reasons).  These people aren't made redundant, they just find their contracts not being renewed.  Add to this the millions getting screwed over because of their pensions being changed, and you have huge amounts of money that used to pay for people to work for a living now not going into working and middle class hands.

Additionally, you have a lot of cuts in areas that used to help the most disadvantaged.  As well as cuts to the services used by those who are worst off (libraries, social services, etc), you also have cuts in the payments made to people who need that money most.  The Spartacus Report tells the story of the cuts to those living with disabilities, and it truly is one of the most unpleasant tales imaginable, with those least able to afford it paying the most.

Into this environment, a country of cuts, of services people depend on being slashed, of poverty hurting the vulnerable most of all, enter Michael Gove.  Even before this, Gove was a walking punchline.  I'm not going to dicuss his unfortunate appearance because there are much better reasons to dislike him, but from the moment he set foot in office he has been a laughing stock.  His suggestion that the nation now spend 60 million on a "gift" to the Queen could have been calculated as the worst thing to say, at the worst time, from the worst person.  Indeed, it was such a wrongheaded decision that it made me wonder for a moment if this was a return to the Tories' old trick of getting an unpopular politician to suggest a completely horrible policy, so a more popular one could introduce one that was merely bad and look like a man of compromise.  Indeed, the rolling back of this to instead be a boat paid for by corporate sponsors and charitable donations seems to be exactly that.

Whatever the truth of this, the whole situation was evidence to be of how wrongheaded the current government's view is of where cuts need to be made.  As a society, we have a duty to protect the culnerable.  If we need to make cuts or raise taxes, we have a responsibility to do it in ways that will hurt the fewest people the least amount.  Better, surely, to financially inconvenience a handful of businessmen by an amount they can easily pay than to take away the things that a neglected part of the population need to survive.  When we're in political straits dire enough that we quibble over scraps of dignity for the vulnerable, to suggest a multi million pound trinket for someone with a vast personal fortune is to say you don't give a fuck about the disadvantaged in a voice too loud to ignore.

And that's why I don't want to buy the Queen a boat.

Offensive behaviour

I'm not a big fan of Jesus and Mo.

It's just not my kind of thing.  I don't like the art much, I find the 4 panel setup/punchline format a little predictable, and I sometimes find it a bit strawmanny.  I'd rather read other things.

I deal with not liking Jesus and Mo very much by doing the following:

When I see links to Jesus and Mo comics, I don't click on them.

I don't go to the Jesus and Mo website and look at the comics there.

I remember not to buy the Jesus and Mo books.

It's a cunning system I'm sure you'll agree, and I employ it for a number of other things I don't much like such as Dan Brown books, the music of One Direction, the TV show Mrs Brown's Boys, the political opinions of Glenn Beck, and the comedy of Andy Parsons.  However, I'm specifically looking at Jesus and Mo for a specific reason.

There are some people out there who, like me, aren't very fond of this comic.  Indeed, they go further than me and find this comic to be deeply offensive to their religious beliefs.  That's fine by me, they're not my beliefs, but I believe that you have the right to be offended by anything you would like.  You also have the right to ask the people making it or distributing it to stop because you find it offensive.  You also have the right to boycott their products or services for not doing so, and encourage others to do the same.

What you do not have the right to do, no matter how offended you are, is to threaten people with physical violence.  What you do not have the right to do, no matter how offended you are, is to force people to stop saying or distributing the things that offend you.

I'm a big believer in the idea that freedom of expression includes freedom of response.  You can say whatever you like, and I'm free to think whatever I like about it.  I'm also free to respond in any legal manner I choose.  Freedom of speech is not freedom from the consequences of speech.  Unless of course those consequences break the law.

Over the last few weeks, there have been two incidents involving the Jesus and Mo comic, both of which I feel were handled poorly by the authorities.  First, UCL Atheist, Secularist, and Humanist society got in trouble for putting a Jesus and Mo comic on their facebook page.  The comic being up led to complaints by a muslim student group, and commentary from the Student Union that it would be "prudent" to take the cartoon down.  This was widely considered to be an attempt at censorship, and was criticized by huge numbers of people from Richard Dawkins on down.

One of those criticizing UCL's actions was noted teen skeptic Rhys Morgan.  Rhys decided to show solidarity with UCL ASH by posting the Jesus and Mohammed picture on his own facebook page.  The response to this from some of Rhys's fellow students at Cardiff High School was to call him a racist, use huge amounts of unpleasant language about him, and then threaten him with violence (including a threat to burn his house down) if he didn't take the image down.

Now, you might expect that in this case, school authorities would leap into action with a potentially explosive situation between two students, and they did.  This action took the form of... threatening to expel Rhys.

Yes, you read that right.  In response to Rhys Morgan being threatened with violence for displaying a picture from a comic book on his private facebook page, his school threatened him with expulsion.  They also spoke to the person threatening him, no record exists of what they said there.

In light of this entire lack of support, Rhys chose to take the image down.  I don't blame him, in similar circumstances I would probably have done the same.  The problem is that the circumstance existed in the first place.

I've heard several people say that putting up the picture in the first place was a dick move.  I hold no definite opinion about that.  Certainly, UCL ASH must have known the image would be offensive to muslims as it contained a depiction of Mohammed.  Certainly, Rhys must have known the same.  However, nobody is forcing anyone to look at ASH or Rhys's facebook pages.  Unfollowing people is quite an easy matter.

Even if we say that posting the comic was a dick move, that doesn't excuse the actions of the authorities in either case.  I absolutely concede that the muslim society at UCL were within their rights to ask that the comic be taken down.  They were within their rights to discuss it with ASH, and within their rights to protest its use.  Where their rights end is the implied threat of force from the students union.  In Rhys's case, I think the person who complained had every right to complain.  He even had the right to say the horrible and insulting things he did.  It didn't make him a nice person, but you don't have to be nice to be within your rights.  Where his rights ended was where he made threats of violence.  The school was also within their rights to try and mediate the situation.  However, threatening expulsion for someone's private expression goes beyond this and is an active infringement on Rhys's rights.

I can see why someone devoutly religious would find an image of a prophet offensive.  They have the right to be offended.  What I find offensive is trying to legally impose your personal tastes on others.  Whether it was nice or nasty to post the Jesus and Mo comic, in both cases the response to it was a rights violation.

an explosive attack on freedom of speech.

I want you to try and remember something for me.

Think back to a time in your life where you got angry with someone.  It might have been at school, it might have been when a sod in a skoda octavia cut you up in traffic, it might have been when a cyclist decided ten miles an hour down the middle of an A road was a sensible speed and place to be.  What I want you to remember is a time when one of the following phrases, or their equivalents, crossed your lips:

"I'll fucking kill you!"
"Get out of the road or I'll run you down!"
"If that arsehole doesn't turn his phone off I'll punch his teeth out"

Can you remember any?  I know I have.  My time at school could give several hundred of these examples.  Now, here's the follow up question:

Did you say any of these online?

Doesn't matter where.  A chatroom, an email, a comment on someone's blog.  If you made a statement of this kind, then according to Judge Jaqueline Davies, you just committed a crime.  Even if you did something as ludicrous and unbelievable as saying you were going to blow an airport "sky high" on Twitter, you've broken the law, and should be subject to the full force of a judicial system that honestly does a shockingly pisspoor job of even understanding the Internet.

Paul Chambers said something silly in a moment of anger.  He joked about blowing up an airport on Twitter.  The following things should be noted:

1) He did not have the ability or intention to blow up an airport.
2) The people at the airport who first saw the tweet thought it was a joke, and only reported it as a matter of procedure.
3) The initial investigating officer thought it was a joke, and only took it further as a matter of procedure.

Any reasonable person who understands what Twitter is and how it works would see that this was a silly joke from someone who was slightly ticked off.  The crucial words there are "Reasonable person who understands what twitter is."

Unfortunately, the English judiciary doesn't consist of reasonable people.  There's a stereotype of the elderly English judge asking in a creaky voice "Who is Gazza?" or not understanding what a sofa bed was, or asking "what is a website?".  It's a stereotype because it actually happens.  The three examples I just gave were real, with the out of touch fools in these cases being Justices Harman, Cripps, and Openshaw. Justice Aglionby had to ask what a Teletubby was.  And Justice Davies clearly doesn't understand what Twitter is and how it works.

This is a major problem with the justice system.  We are expecting judges to make decisions on complicated matters, complicated not because of the laws involved but because of the requirement that the judge understands recent developments in the real world.  When the judge doesn't, we get decisions based not on informed reasoning but on ignorance and prejudice.

In a stroke, Justice Davies has set a precedent that criminalizes speech, not if it is actually threatening, not if there is actual evidence of menace or intent, not if someone is threatened by it, but if an out of touch idiot decides that someone might read it as threatening.  As I write this, I have just found out that a conservative councillor has been arrested for an admittedly ignorant and offensive joke about stoning Yasmin Alibhai Brown. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/11/tory-councillor-tweet-yasmin-alibhai-brown-arrested

I consider Justice Davies comments to be threatening to free speech in this country.  I hope the authorities are taking appropriate action.

The subtle re-emergence of the workhouse

The recent plans by Iain Duncan Smith and the Conservative government (honestly the libdems play so little a part in actual policy decisions that to call it a coalition government would be obscenely generous) to introduce compulsory volunteer work for some of the the long term unemployed, have left me wondering a couple of things:
 
1) do the coalition government know what "volunteer" means?
2) is this a way of lowering the minimum wage by the back door?
 
Details of the idea are not finalized yet, so flying off the handle is not a good idea yet.  However, what is clear from what Smith and the conservative government have said is that there is a shift of focus in how unemployment is seen and handled in the UK.
 
I had many problems with the Labour government, but one thing I think they did quite well during their 13 years was develop paths out of unemployment.  Not everything they did worked, and a lot of what they did could have been handled better, but the philosophy and ideology of work and pensions was one of preparing people to return to the workplace.
 
These were different economic times, of course.  The UK underwent the longest period of sustained economic growth in its history, and the overall number of people unemployed was lower.  In other words, there actually was a jobs market, and it was reasonable to expect that if you were unemployed it wasn't forever.  There actually were, bluntly speaking, opportunities.
 
At the moment, we're buffeting from one recession and about to find out if it's a double dip.  Conservative cuts are about to add another half million people to the jobless total.  This means that the public sector is not hiring.  It also means that the private sector, which has stabilized its own layoffs, has a greater number of people to choose from when looking at applicants, and many of these people have very recent work experience.
 
To put it another way, if you are currently unemployed, your chances of getting employed again any time soon are significantly lower than they used to be.  There are less jobs available and more people going for them.
 
And it is at this moment that the government has decided to combat the "culture of joblessness".  Not, of course, by creating jobs.  They just laid off half a million people.  Not by increasing access to education and training.  They're in the process of hiking tuition fees.
 
No, the way to combat the culture of joblessness it to open your hymnals to conservative psalm number 4:  "Blame the poor for being poor".
 
Already we have the Daily Mail screaming about the "workshy" although to be honest the Daily Mail are always screaming about the "workshy".  We will I'm sure start getting all the usual anecdotes about fictional people on housing estates driving late model BMWs paid for by the council.  The right wing press has bin loads of these things ready to gush out whenever it becomes fashionable to blame the poor for being poor.
 
Smith's suggestion is for people who are long term unemployed to attend "mandatory work activity" for 30 hours a week for 4 weeks, in order to keep their benefits.  At the current unemployment rate of £64.30 a week, that works out to a wage of around £2.15 an hour.  I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone that's quite a bit below the minimum wage.  I'm sure that Iain Duncan Smith has companies lining up to get these indentured servants to perform menial tasks.  Supposedly charities and voluntary organizations will get these people too, but that's not really where the profit is.  More likely is that we'll see the unemployed used how prison labor was used in the US, as a way to get cheap grunt work done, with the corporate beneficiaries happy to owe the government a favour.
 
And will there be a job available at the end of this unpaid work?  Of course not.  If the company was willing to pay for an actual employee to do this, they'd have created a job rather than farming it out.
 
Ultimately, though, none of this is about the needs of the unemployed.  it's not about getting people off unemployment.  It's not even about lowering the cost of the welfare bill.
 
What it is, in its most pure and simple form, is a change in attitude.  We don't sympathize with poor people.  They're not unfortunates.  They're scroungers, workshy, lazy leeches.  Why should we care?  Never mind that we're in the aftermath of a financial crisis caused by the super-rich.  Never mind that the ranks of the unemployed are swelled with hardworking people caught in a tidal wave someone else caused.  Never mind that there but for the grace of god go all the daily mail readers.  At best, they will wave their hands and distinguish between the nice clean unemployed people with degrees from good families, and the murky sea of dole scum who they just know outnumber the nice ones.
 
Nobody, despite what headlines are claiming, is denying that there are people who game the system.  There always are.  There always will be.  There isn't a system you could devise that wouldn't have people exploiting it.  The problem with the conservative attitude in this circumstance is that it assumes that the most reprehensible examples of a group represent the whole group.  Assuming that the Mail's much trotted out welfare kings and queens are representative of the unemployed is as idiotic as assuming that Bernie Madoff represents everyone who works in finance.
 
The best way to combat the "culture of joblessness" is to create jobs.  The best way to reduce unemployment is to increase employment.  Smith's plan will do neither of these things, and it was never intended to.

the degradation of excellence

The recent announcement by the new conservative government that it is going to reduce the role of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (known colloquially as NICE) has been loudly applauded by pharmaceutical groups.
 
Of course it has.
 
It's not been applauded by them because they care about the tiny minority of patients who were denied an expensive treatment because it didn't deliver all that much quality of life for its pricetag, although I'm certain the pharmaceutical industry will be more than happy to provide these drugs at the ludicrous pricetag NICE refused.
 
Rather it's been applauded because it means one thing, and one rather sad thing:
 
The end of collective bargaining in the NHS.
 
Let me step back for a moment and explain essentially what NICE is and how it works.  Once upon a time, the national health service  bought medication in the following way: The trusts making up the NHS made decisions about whether a particular medication was affordable, and approached pharmaceutical companies independently to purchase these medications.  This probably represents a gross oversimplification of how it worked and I'll be happy to correct this if someone can tell me more.  This led occasionally to the situation of different treatments being available in one area and not another.  This became known as the "postcode lottery" and was highly criticised for the unevenness of service it afforded people.
 
Around 1999, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence was set up to essentially provide uniform availability of medication across the UK.  What medications were available, and what the NHS as a whole paid for them, was now decided by a special health authority.  There were two practical upshots of this:
 
1) The same treatments were, in general, available no matter which Trust was treating you
2) the NHS could bargain for drug prices as a whole rather than piecemeal.
 
The first result had several important impacts on patient care.  The advantage of even service, but also the disadvantage of certain treatments simply not being available on the NHS, or not available for particular conditions, because their cost was greater than the amount of benefit they gave.  This caused anger in certain patients groups and led to a lot of headlines protesting NICE having this power.  If you look up stories about NICE at the moment, most of the headlines will talk about NICE losing "The power to ban drugs".
 
The second result has arguably a much greater impact on patient care, but because it cannot be shown to be an impact on the care for a particular patient, it often gets ignored.  The collective bargaining power of NICE lowered the price of drugs in general.  It saved the NHS very large amounts of money.  It meant that the drug company was not talking to one trust with a few hundred patients for their medication, but talking to a national health service with thousands or millions of patients.  This gave NICE an awful lot of bargaining power.
 
We, as a country, have just lost this bargaining power.  The drug companies are celebrating because now, when they choose to ratchet up the cost of their product, they will be met by a divided, fragmented front of trusts, each of whom are making their own buying decisions.  There is no longer an incentive to the pharmaceutical companies to keep prices down.
 
Andrew Lansley at a stroke has increased healthcare costs, reduced NHS services, and brought about the real and horrible spectre of NHS rationing.  I wonder what the pharmaceutical industry did to scratch his back.
 
 

communities and individuals

You're about to set out on your morning commute.  You have a couple of choices on how you go.  You can jump in your car and drive to work, a drive that takes about 20 minutes when the roads are clear, less if you're a bit naughty with regard to the speed limit.  Alternatively, you can get the bus.  Now, the bus isn't bad, but it makes more stops than your car does, so it takes about half an hour to get there.  Which do you think is the better option for getting to work?

If you are thinking on the individual basis, the option that will get you there fastest is to take the car.  20 minutes is faster than 30, after all.  However, the undiscussed variable here is that you are a long way from being the only person making this choice.  There are hundreds of people trying to get to work, all of whom are choosing between the bus and the car, all of them thinking that the car will get them there quicker than the bus.  This means the road will be absolutely crammed with cars, and the journey that takes 20 minutes on an empty road now takes 40.

Here's where the counterintuitive part happens: from the level of the individual it is STILL advantageous to take your car rather than taking the bus, even though the action of individuals en masse taking their cars slows everyone's traffic down.  The car will still be a bit faster, even when the number of cars is causing a traffic jam.

This is as I'm sure you know hardly a new thought.  It's been called many things and is probably most famous as a variant of the tragedy of the commons.  You could also look at it as an application of the Nash Equilibrium, where each individual is doing what gives them the greatest advantage in the situation, or another way of describing the Spanish Prisoner

The problem and the paradox is that the best outcome for an individual in a situation is not the best outcome for everyone.  If everyone drives to work, it takes them 40 minutes to get there.  If everyone took the bus, it would take them 30.

What we see here is the difference between thinking on the level of the community, and thinking on the level of the individual.  What is best for a single person and what is best for people at large is not always the same thing.  It's not always different, but it's best to regard the two optimal levels as being Independent.

I lived in the US for 8 years.  There were many things I loved about living there, many of the people I regard as good and true friends, and a lot of things I'm missing since moving back to the UK 3 months ago.  I mean absolutely no insult to the wonderful people I know over there when I say that as a political entity the United States is strongly organized around the individual rather than the community.  There is no better example of this than the US attitude to healthcare.

When I try to explain how healthcare in the US works to people in the UK, the most common emotion I'm met by is incredulity.  It's possible that a large part of the reason for this is that I know a lot of people who work for the NHS, and also have a lot of friends who conform to the UK definition of socialist (It's probable that 95% of the people I know in the UK conform to the Tea Party definition of "socialist").  However, I think there may be a couple of more important reasons why people in the UK find the US so difficult to understand in this case.  For one, these are people living in the UK, which has a large, well funded, and generally well working nationalized health service (when people aren't trying to ruin it by castrating NICE).  People tend to accept the political status quo as normal, and plant centrism as being roughly how things currently are.  For another thing, the UK as a country, and Europe as a broader political community, are used to thinking on the level of the community, looking at what provides the best service for everyone.  To those who often think on a community level, it makes sense that the best way to provide something as ubiquitous and necessary as healthcare is to provide it like you provide law and order or national defense: treat it as a national issue that you buy for everybody.  To propose something like this in America is, essentially, anathema.

Let me provide a little more explanation here, as I'm not entirely sure how much of the recent US healthcare debate was covered in the UK or elsewhere in the world.  The original healthcare plan, the one that got referred to as marxism, communism, and every other left wing "ism" imaginable was essentially this: the government in each state sets up collective health insurance providers so that people who couldn't afford private healthcare would have a public option.  If someone proposed the same healthcare system in the UK, british political pundits would think of it as free market healthcare gone mad.  Nonetheless, this proposal was considered too drastic by the United States and was watered down yet further to nothing more than health care subsidies for the poor and a requirement that people get healthcare if they can afford it.  This still got called socialism.  The record didn't change.

Politics in the US is difficult to understand until you look at it from the level of the individual being paramount.  Every major political debate, from immigration to healthcare to taxes to financial regulation, revolves around individual liberty.  Not just what the individual gets or can do right now, but what the individual might be able to do if circumstances were different. This means you get ridiculous minor political celebrities like Joe The Plumber who rose to fame arguing against a tax proposal that would lower taxes for people who made his current salary, but slightly raise them for people who made as much money as he one day thought he would.  This means that you get movements like the Tea Party who argued, on a lower tax basis, against a financial stimulus package that drastically lowered their taxes.  There's very little stranger in politics than aspirational individualism.

I used to work for a public library in the US.  I lost my job there because of the indirect fallout of a financial crisis in large part caused by people looking at things on an individual rather than a community basis.  The very existence of a financial product as utterly ludicrous as the credit default swap is proof to me that the world financial system is built around the optimal outcome for the individual, not the community.  When it fell apart, the people thinking on the level of the community lost out just as much as everyone else.

These days, I work for the NHS.  Oh, and I walk to work.

Why I won't be talking much about religion

There are people who know me who would frown in disbelief at the title of this post. I have the habit of holding forth on a variety of subjects, and religion, organized religion in particular, is one of the areas that I do cover if the mood and the beer take me there.  I'm not fond of the habit of dressing up human irrationality as something special and claiming people can't insult it, whether that something special is a religion, a political movement, a nationality or essentially anything else that asks without reason to be shielded from criticism.  It's sort of a noble aim and I understand very well that I have my own sacred cows.  Emphasis not on the "sacred".

The problem is that religion is an easy target.  Not necessarily an undeserved target, but a blog that just pointed out that religions believed often silly and often irrational things would be as pointless as a politics blog that did nothing but point out that Nick Griffin was a nazi.  Everybody either already knows or wouldn't be convinced otherwise. (it should go without saying that I am not comparing religion to the british national party.  Sadly, as many of the things that "go without saying" need saying, let me be clear: I am not comparing any religion, or the concept of religion, to the BNP.  Except maybe scientology, but I'll get to that later).

It's much better and more intellectually rewarding to discuss the irrational and harmful things that people do, either as individuals or groups.  It all comes down to the somewhat utilitarian principle of looking at something and saying "What good does this do? What harm does this do?" and frankly religion is much too nebulous a concept to fit neatly into being one thing or another.

There's another, slightly more selfish reason for not talking much about religion.  I've always hated the stereotype of the "angry atheist".  I'd love to think it was a caricature made from whole cloth, the image of the self-satisfied super-rational atheist sneering at the superstitious dimwits.  Unfortunately, like all the most effective stereotypes, it has a kernel of truth in it.  The smug, condescending atheist is like the "loony left" council, the "politically incorrect" schoolteacher singing baa baa green sheep, and all the other ridiculous crap that the Daily Mail loves to discuss.  In other words, a massive distortion based on a minority.  One of the primary defense mechanisms of many peddlers of dishonest nonsense is to hide behind religion.   A group like the Church of Scientology (see, I told you I'd get back to them) loves to point at criticisms of their illegal activities, their harassment of those who want to leave, their outright swindling of the public and their practicing of medicine without a license, and scream "They're attacking our religion!".  Critics are accused of being bigots, of being intolerant of other religions.  They are in short being accused of irrational hatred, and if there is one area in which the skeptical community should not give up any ground at all, it's on the front of rationality.

Skeptics, in my opinion, shouldn't be criticizing a group purely for being religious.   Scientologists aren't a greedy and powerful criminal gang because L Ron Hubbard was their religious leader, they're a greedy and powerful criminal gang because L Ron Hubbard was a corrupt hack and a swindler.  The catholic priests who abused children are not made more evil by being catholic: what makes them evil is that they abused their power in order to molest children.  The evil fuckheads who flew a plane into a building in New York aren't more evil or more fuckheaded because they did it for a religion than if they had done it for the cause of marxism or nationalism or because they had all been dumped by their girlfriends on the same day.

I'm not religious and never have been.  This doesn't make me a bad or good person.  What makes me bad or good, in my opinion, is my actions.

Let's talk about action.

Frames of reference

It's a little over 3900 miles from my last bedroom to this one. Surprisingly little of that is land: if the british isles drifted across until it ran aground on Newfoundland, you could drive it in 24 hours if you floored it the whole way.

What this means is that when you travel from Cornelius NC to Cambridge England you do so by getting into a metal pod and watching Stuart Little 4 times while being served horrible food and having your knees crushed by the guy in the seat in front of you.  Commercial air travel has done an awful lot to change the world, but from the selfish point of view of the individual one of the most notable effects has been to completely fuck the human mind up when it comes to distances.

Human beings, in general, have difficulties in conceptualizing measurements beyond what we can quantify with our senses. Our main definitions for size, weight, speed and so forth are relative.  Things are slow, fast, heavy, light, big, small, loud, and quiet.  These things are in relation to the definition of normal we have, which is a definition we reached as bipedal apes bumbling across plains somewhere.  Our senses adapted to these circumstances for thousands of years: big is bigger than we expected, fast is quicker than we're prepared for, heavy is something we can't lift easily.  Something is far away if we can't walk there in a day or so.  I live in Cambridge, to my plains evolved senses, Peterborough is far.  London is really far.  North Carolina, separated from me by weeks of walking and an ocean I could never ever swim, is beyond far.  I don't have the frame of reference for it.

The fact that I can get from one of these points to the other in 8 hours while sitting down doesn't compute to my plains senses.  It's magic, or as near as dammit.  In fact, most of the technology I use on a daily basis is pretty much magic to me.  When I talk to family in North Carolina, I get annoyed because of a half second delay on the phone, even though my words are being carried so far it would take the sound five and a quarter hours to get there even if I could yell loud enough.  I accept that it works through magic boxes, because that's the only thing that fits into my frame of reference.

A big part of the fascination of science for me is that it attempts to broaden the frame of reference, and give people the tools to see outside of the little box they are used to.  Our knowledge of science expanded into the very big and the very small until what eludes us is in the realm of the massive and the tiny, the exceptionally long view and the wafer thin slice of a second.  Science is as fascinating as it is hard to think about.

A big part of the fascination of pseudosciences is that they purport to explain these really big and really small things, and do so in a way that makes sense without having to stretch our frame of reference all that much.  The explanations of things like homeopathy, intelligent design, scientology, and alternate therapies are often wonderful, often life affirming, and always within the frame of reference of the listener.  Only their implausibility, lack of accuracy, and lack of internal consistency prevent them from being very good explanations indeed.

I'm not a scientist, as is probably obvious by how hard I have to think about these things.  For most of my professional career, and essentially all of my academic career, I have worked in areas where the sciences were in the background.  English Literature, my first love, represented for me less of a stretching of the frame of reference, because literature is fundamentally about what humans think about human things.  This isn't to say that literature is an easy subject by any means, just that what you are interpreting and understanding are things that have been understood before.  Rarely, even with an astounding work of fiction, do you reach a moment where you observe something that no human being has ever observed, something that runs counter to everything you expect about how things work.

The great strength and great weakness of science is that it is explaining something that does not care in the slightest if its mysteries are intuitive, or even understandable.  This means its conclusions can baffle the layman, or seem entirely counter to what we might expect to be true.  It's fascinating that the world does not work how we think it should, but it can also be frustrating, and the frustration can lead people to easier to accept conclusions.

Broadening horizons, expanding your frame of reference, is a long journey.  Thankfully for most people there is no ocean between them and understanding, just a path that needs to be walked.