I woke up on Monday at about 3pm, showered, dressed and went to a departmental colloquium on my campus, returned home and wasn't tired until about 7.30 Tuesday morning, when I went to bed.

I got up half an hour later for a day of lectures beginning at 9am, napped from 6.30pm to 7.20, and went to bed properly that evening at 9.30. I soon woke up Wednesday morning at 2.30am, had some supper/breakfast, then arrived very early on campus to finish off one short report and write another on Development, for the MEP I work for, and email them to him (I'd left the first on the campus network). I did this, went home for some lunch, then got the 1307 train from Wivenhoe to London Liverpool Street, napping for twenty minutes on the way. I did some shopping in the excellent bookshops around Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square (in one of which I saw the great Simon Heffer, by the way), then went to the aforementioned MEP's London office to chat with some staff about the general election.

I arrived late to the event I'd actually gone to London for yesterday: Richard Dawkins addressing the LSE at 6pm on whether evolution is predictable. It was packed, but I waited around for twenty-five minutes and was let in about a third of the way through when someone left, freeing up a seat for me. He spoke well, and with an enthusiasm endearing to anyone with a heart. Dawkins is a real intellectual hero of mine, who has influenced my views on social issues to the core. I regularly recommend his Selfish Gene to people, and once bought a copy for a very religious friend who is training to become a Friar, in the hope of moving him away from Creationism. Knowing Dawkins' retirement to be imminent, I wanted to be able to say I saw him speak while he was still around.

I wasn't disappointed, and I was particularly heartened to hear him strongly urge people to read into "evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology" amongst other sciences that investigate evolution's impact on modern man, when sceptical (or PC) questions about the rights and wrongs of such research were raised by some in the audience.

That said, one thing about the lecture did deflate me: he spoke in an engaging way throughout, but he came alive most of all when he had the opportunity to describe his scheme to relabel athiests 'brights' - adding that he would leave what it meant to be the opposite to the audience's imagination. I deeply appreciate the intellectual value of the sort of militant atheism of which Dawkins is the exemplar, and I'll be very sad when in a few months those who make his case will have to make sure they stay within the bounds of the 'incitement to religious hatred' laws. But there was something tangibly cruel about those few minutes, and it did confirm for me what I suppose his career has long suggested: at heart, for all his brilliance as a populariser of evolution, Dawkins is happiest of all when explaining how those religious folk are really rather dim.

I got back from London just before 11.30pm and was in bed three hours later. I'd slept another twenty minutes at most on the way back.

Why such a data-heavy prelude to a post about a Richard Dawkins lecture? Well, the eagle-eyed will have noticed I got less than eight hours of sleep in that sixty hour period, and something had to give.

It did. I was woken up by the doorbell this morning not long after half past nine, and still thoroughly shattered. I appeared to be the only one in, so I stumbled downstairs to answer it. My eyes wouldn't stay open properly, I was naked but for a short dressing gown, and though I didn't check, by past experience my thick, unbrushed hair was probably a mixture of Medusa and Marge Simpson. Almost the moment I opened the door, it was obvious even given my fatigue that my callers were Jehovah's Witnesses. I tottered back and forth a little, holding the side of the doorway for support, vacantly trying to focus on one or other of them.

And then the wonderful part. After all the times I've struggled in vain to get rid of Jehovah's Witnesses by stressing a pre-existing commitment to another faith, by promising to read the tract they were handing out as soon as they left - by any honest means less rude than simply slamming the front door - this pair looked me up and down, swiftly handed me their leaflet, and couldn't get away fast enough. Success! If you have the same problem, you now know just what you have to do.

I ran back upstairs and slept until 4.10pm.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Why rape conviction rates keep falling

The Telegraph reports that with rape convictions not rising to keep pace with accusations, the conviction rate for the crime is now at an all-time low. Either an awful lot of rapes are being committed, or an awful lot of potentially life-destroying false accusations are being made - probably both. Whichever way one looks at it, it's a depressing figure.

Now I would myself say that the general social climate is the most important factor here. But I've noticed that when it comes to these sorts of sexual issues, there are essentially two mindsets. There is the mindset which can ask whether a general life's motto of "If it feels good, do it", and a social attitude that casts no stigma on loveless promiscuity and in DumbJon's words treats as utter lunacy the idea that not acting on a sexual impulse might sometimes be a good idea, might be factors here. Those who ponder such questions might even, with Roger Scruton, consider the following:

Of course, if you think that nothing is at stake in our sexual relations besides pleasure, and that everything that happens between consenting adults is morally unimpeachable, then you will see nothing wrong with pornography.

But if you think in this way you will be hard pressed to understand the enormous value that people have placed on sexual love, the central role that it has played in their lives, or the fear and alarm with which they contemplate its desecration. You will fail to understand the torments of jealousy, the joy of requited love, or the sacrifices that are made for fidelity's sake. You will be hard pressed to explain why rape is a crime more serious than theft, why paedophilia is evil, why sexual harassment is more than just a nuisance, and why prostitution is degrading.

It would be interesting to hear an answer from those who do defend these attitudes. Unfortunately, there is the other mindset, which explodes in a mixture of rage and feigned mirth at the idea that treating sexual acts in this way might foster a climate where sexual crimes are treated less seriously. And it's a mindset that simply cannot consider these issues in a rational way. For them, consent is the only moral barrier, and the very idea that others once served to do good and to protect the vulnerable cannot compute. So I'll not write at length on this question.

What I will say is that the recommendations that always come out on these issues should be scrutinized with the greatest care. The move of recent years has been in one direction: to remove evidence from trials in the hope that this will enable more prosecutions. Preventing cross-questioning of those who make the accusations by defendants and stopping defence lawyers from casting doubt upon the character and credibility of the accusers may appear to establish that it is the defendant alone who is on trial. But in cases of crimes where almost invariably it is one person's word against another, the credibility of both these people is by definition a central issue.

By making it impossible for trials to cover such issues as the woman's character and sexual history, enormous doubts are automatically created in the jury's mind. The prosecution cannot any longer point to just how strong a character and a record for honesty in these matters she has and how unlikely it is that she really consented to the sexual act in question.

Women of all sexual behaviours are raped. But only women of a certain character would consent to sex and then lie about it later. When evidence on these matters is banned from trials, for the jury to distinguish between the two is much more difficult, and anyone making such accusations could potentially be the most malicious liar. And because, rightly, we have a system in this country where a person is innocent until proven guilty, making these doubts a permanent feature of rape trials can only benefit the defendant whose guilt would otherwise be much clearer.

It shouldn't be difficult to see why preventing the bringing of evidence forward in trials will reduce, not enhance, the quality of the verdicts juries reach. Unfortunately, the political correctness that dares not admit that a woman who has half a dozen sexual partners a month is more likely to have consented is now taking precedence over this fact in the minds of our legislators. The effect of this trend is not, and will not be, more guilty rapists convicted, but more guilty rapists walking free, because the credibility of their accusers could no longer be established.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
 

Diversity Studies and its students

This account of the contents of a seminar on "GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE" really has to be read to be believed. Almost every day in my own course in PPE, some professor or lecturer will make a cringeworthy crack against America or her President, and get half a dozen chuckles - not because it's funny, but because a few sheeple want to show their right-on convictions. But to imagine a lecture of nothing else besides this sort of brain-dead left-wing cant, I really had to read what they are actually like.

The term 'cult', used in the conclusion, really isn't much of an exaggeration. All the elements deprogrammers have to deal with are there, from the tortuous circular reasoning to the sneering at objectivity, evidence and logic necessary to shield such evidently absurd extremism from the real world.

I do wish I could remember where I read of what happens to people who complete their degrees in this sort of thing, because it is a useful supplement to such columns. Few will be surprised to hear that such graduates don't tend to be at all successful, however widely one chooses to define success. Just as Media Studies isn't the best choice even for someone who wants to enter journalism, Gender Studies, Black Studies and Queer Theory (yes, really!) don't even train one to be an effective race-baiting feminazi. Even feminist pressure groups and rabid green think tanks need people who can analyse statistics and make rational or scientific arguments. Three years of training in cliches and of indoctrination into a closed, circular system of thought immune to people who disagree with you is not a lot of use.

Those who take such courses end up thoroughly cheated. Overqualified for many of the positions they would otherwise have taken (if only in their own minds), and bearing a very burdensome chip on their shoulder, their career paths probably end up far more restricted than if they hadn't wasted their time and money. Obviously there will still be opportunities to lecture in the subject oneself one day, no doubt in an atmosphere of perennial resentment and condescension from serious academics. But I'd suspect most of them simply end up as militant shop stewards in public sector unions, as the sort of bureaucrats who come up with laws like those mentioned in the post below, or as third-rate teachers, where they can at least be the Kaiser of their own classroom, feebly trying to pass on their values to those who just want to learn about English Literature or History.

The march through our institutions goes on.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
 

Not so easyjet

The Adam Smith Institute has an almost poignant account of the sort of thing that happens when Brussels decides to stick its nose in. Its latest crazy directive will force huge fixed compensation claims on airlines who cancel flights, irrespective of the reason. Easyjet cannot reasonably be held responsible if your £10 flight to Paris is delayed by the weather, but it will now be forced to pay out compensation of more than seventeen times as much for every passenger who faces this situation.

As anyone who understands economic behaviour could have told the EU, the result will not be a wave of on time flights and happier, wealthier passengers, but a much higher ticket price to cover the costs of this compensation when it must be paid. The wonderfully inexpensive flights so many of us have all enjoyed - thanks only to daring innovators of the sort governments always seek to control and regulate - could soon come to an end.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Monday, February 21, 2005
 

A fly in the wine

The Guardian, never one to catch on fast to trends it dislikes, grudgingly acknowledges the disappearance (or perhaps the confirmed non-existence) of the female title 'Ms'. The reasons are given are sensible enough: that it hinders chances of finding a husband, that 'Miss' has echoes of youth, while 'Ms' has "lesbian undertones"*, and that people say "Miss" regardless (although I suspect that unless the speaker is happy to sound like a bluebottle - "Mizzzzzzz" - it's difficult to tell which was said, anyway). And even the conclusion, when one rather expects instead an angry rant against sell-outs, is refreshingly pragmatic and mature.

It's just something of a shame it had to be published the same day as this flat-earth nonsense.

* I am quoting the column, Scott and Robin! Whine to the Guardian, not me.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Saturday, February 19, 2005
 

Quote of the Day

"Science is 'cold,' and doesn't care what we think or wish for. (This is a point about science that many people simply cannot grasp. The opposite of science is not religion; the opposite of science is wishful thinking.)" - John Derbyshire

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Friday, February 18, 2005
 

Excellent

I've witnessed myself and have heard from other Tory activists that the Countryside Alliance is now proving to be a great help in election campaigns, simply by adding to the numbers on the ground who can leaflet and canvass for Conservative candidates.

With Theresa May today confirming today that the next Conservative government will make time for a government bill to relegalise fox hunting, I hope we will see more of this. Everyone who cares about hunting must now get involved in their local Conservative campaigns, and work as hard as they can for the party to get it returned to power. Their interests and the interests of the Conservative Party are as one. This may now be the only way - and is certainly the most likely way - that the shameful legislation that came into effect this weekend can now be reversed.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Thursday, February 17, 2005
 

HariWatch IV

Johann Hari said on the BBC's 'Question Time' just now that foreigners coming into this country make a net contribution to the rest of us of £2.5 billion "and don't let anyone tell you otherwise". I will now tell you otherwise.

This is wrong: Hari is confusing GDP with GDP per capita. The study he mentioned reports that the effect on national GDP is a rise of £2.5 billion. But the effect is on the overall economy, and those who come here are not excluded from the GDP figure. They share in that higher GDP. The net effect - the increase in GDP minus the share of that GDP they claim - is infinitesimal. They increase GDP - and then take almost all of that increase themselves - the per capita GDP scarcely affected.

The main economic effect of our current migration laws then is not on per capita GDP but on income distribution. We import low-skilled people whose addition to the labour supply forces down the wages of unskilled labour, often ensuring many of our own workers leave the labour force altogether.

A far better immigration policy would do the opposite. Instead of mass immigration, we could have lower and smarter immigration. If we chose to, we could have a reverse of the infamous Healey brain drain, where so many of Britain's brightest and best left the country never to return, by recognising the value of the best and most talented in the world and attracting them here with less punitive taxes. Because the greater labour supply this time would mean competition only for the already successful, income inequality would actually decrease, not increase.

Unlike Johann Hari, I don't see inequality of wealth as a bad thing in itself. But I do think that inequality should reflect genuine differences of ability and skill in meeting the needs and desires of others. It shouldn't - as it now does - reflect an immigration policy that disregards the government's first duty, which is to the people who already live here.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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A not so fitting tribute

Imagine yourself as a young American proudly finishing his naval traning, awaiting the chance finally to serve your country. It's not very PC, but privately you lust after the excitement of battle, and long to be the one who orders the sinking of that North Korean warship or who fires the cruise missile at an Iranian nuclear facility.

It is your job to help secure the world against its many threats, to be the muscle behind the moral agenda America is following, which you believe in completely. You represent America's strength, her capabilities, her power.

And then you get your first assignment: you'll be serving on board the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter.

Let no one say the Pentagon doesn't have a sense of humour.

UPDATE: Scott Ott reports:

Jimmy Carter is the first of the American Seahare-class subs, featuring a high-tech sonar system which alerts enemy forces to its presence and a safety device on the Nerf missiles which allows firing only after an enemy missile impact.

"This new generation of nuclear submarines is designed to use trust in our enemies as our first line of defense," said an unnamed Navy spokesman.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
 

Quote of the Day

"This debate only shows how much sections of the Left have just as much of a problem with evolution as some on the Christian Right." - Neil on this Crooked Timber thread.

I shall have more to say on this issue soon, but it turn out to be a defining feature of this decade that as science continues more and more to confirm traditional social norms and so many lasting conservative suspicions, the Left more and more makes a hasty retreat into just the same sort of camps of mysticism that Creationists of the Right have long erected.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Out of his depth in more ways than one

Stephen Pollard is now calling for Ken Livingstone to be drummed out of office. Following up on his ostentatious welcome to the Islamofascist cleric Qaradawi (and his claim that the criticism he received when he did proved the need to ban incitement to religious hatred), Livingstone told a Jewish reporter on the Evening Standard he was like a concentration camp guard for working for the newspaper group he does.

I wholly agree with Pollard, and it frustrates me that at a time when the Conservatives make up the largest party in the London Assembly and come first in the European Elections, we have been unable to stand a Mayoral candidate of the calibre of MEPs like Dr Charles Tannock and AMs like Angie Bray, ensuring Labour can hold on here.

Livingstone's obnoxious views are one thing, but his utter lack of responsibility in what verges on an international role show a man so influenced even in his advanced years by his adolescent Marxism that he simply cannot conduct himself in a professional role and show some responsibility.

Perhaps the most personally revealing thing Red Ken has said lately was his response to demands that he apologise to the journalist he slandered.

You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat you with respect and as if you're a useful part of society.

Now obviously the Daily Mail inspires a great deal of (mostly absurd) dislike. And that's fair enough. Certainly you wouldn't have to search this site long to find me criticising strongly the Guardian or BBC (on which Pollard also has a good post). But the notion that this sort of political disagreement takes away the requirements of personal decency and humanity maybe be the hallmark of a small, pitiable person. It's pathetic to think writing for a newspaper whose editorial line you can't abide somehow makes someone less of a human being. As John Hawkins said, when some were expressing pleasure at Strom Thurmond's death:

Life is bigger than politics folks. If you're so consumed with hatred for people you dislike politically that you can't even show respect for the dead, then maybe you should step back and try to get some perspective on what type of person you've become.

If you've reached that stage, Ken Livingstone is the sort of person you've become. There are plenty of these sorts around in British politics. But it's beneath London to have one of them as her Mayor.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Monday, February 14, 2005
 

Either the American justice system treats black people fairly or the liberal states are the most racist of all

"If you've seen anything of their conviction statistics for black people ..." one fellow student once began, as he explained to me that one could feel sure of America's inherent corruption and racism. It's difficult to be sure, but it's probably safe to assume he wasn't suggesting that if black people commit crimes it is racist that they be convicted of them. What he meant was that racism ensures a fantastically disproportionate number of black people are falsely blamed and wrongly imprisoned in the first place. You don't have to stray far to find examples of the same attitude across liberal opinion.

Well, numbers whizz Steve Sailer may thankfully have found one way of identifying who is to blame for this racism. Because different states vary in how strictly they sentence, and in the numbers and proportions of every ethnic group, one fair way to compare like with like is to compare the probability that a black person and a white person in that state will be in jail, and then use that ratio to compare to every other state. Most conveniently, Sailer has mapped the ratio of black to white imprisonment per capita against each of the American states.

Here is the result, ranging from light green, with a black man five times as likely - or less - to be imprisoned as a white man, to bright red, which means twenty times as likely or more. So in terms of liberal thinking, the greener the state, the less racist; the redder the state, the more racist.

Notice anything? It's not difficult to miss the fact that the blue states on America's electoral map are the reddest of states here. Every one of the seven unambigiously red states here went for Al Gore. Every one of them but Iowa went for John Kerry. The eighth piece of red, the District of Columbia, also went Democrat both times, giving Bush 9% of its vote in November. Notice by contrast how green so many of the Republican strongholds are.

Steve Sailer explains the overall national picture:

States with relatively high black vs. white imprisonment rates tended to vote for Kerry - the correlation [on a scale of -1.00 to +1.00] was a strong r = 0.62

In other words, the racism liberal Americans denounce for ensuring a disproportionate number of black people are jailed is by far the most common of all in ... liberal America!

Either the United States is fair and just when it comes to convicting and sentencing black defendants, or it is an extremely racist society in which the liberal states that have stuck with the Democrats in recent years through thick and thin are the greatest offenders. There's simply no other way the explanation of racism can be correct.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Friday, February 11, 2005
 

Books of 2004 (III)

I'd better get on with this. We're nearly halfway through February 2005 already.

The Darwin Wars - Andrew Brown
A good book, combining discussion of the science of modern evolutionary debate with the varying perspectives on its perceived philosophical and religious implications. I wish I could remember it better, but I do recall it varied in quality quite a bit. It's very much a journalistic account. In retrospect, I think personally I'd have liked to see a lot more on Dawkins-Gould controversy and on IQ and sociobiology, perhaps at the expense of the Dawkins-Midgley et al stuff.

On Democracy - Robert Dahl
Another one I barely remember (maybe I should do these reviews bi-annually), which I read for my politics course. Dahl sets out the necessary and sufficient conditions for democracy as he interprets them and looks to the future of democratic development. Perhaps I didn't enjoy it as much as I ought to have because it isn't party political enough, but my personal preferences in that area shouldn't dictate those of others. If you're interested in the general subject, and like to be able to emerge from a book with a few key points that help you understand the world a little better, you won't be disappointed.

Without Conscience - Robert D. Hare
I was motivated to read this book by James Hamilton's review, and I wasn't disappointed (indeed, his review covers so much of the book's contents it's an education in itself). A few percent of the population can justly be termed psychopaths. As Hare stresses, this doesn't mean they are axe-murderers: in psychology the term is virtually synonymous with what laymen understand 'sociopath' to mean. They often do become incredibly violent criminals, swindlers and cheats, or merciless corporate criminals, but it's their personal characteristics that lead them to be so. Hare outlines these characteristics with illuminating and compelling anecdotes, and overall tells you enough that you learn quite a bit about everyday human psychology for the 95%+ of the population that aren't psychopaths, too.

In terms of politics, its application is probably greatest in considering how such people ought to be dealt with, for it seems safe to assume their share of the criminal population in society, especially of those who commit the worst crimes, is significant enough to merit special consideration for them. As James Hamilton notes, the prospect of any protection for society against criminal psychopaths apart from execution or life-long imprisonment does not look good, simply because generally there seems no way to rehabilitate them.

The Xenophobes Guide to the Austrians - Louis James
Anyone who has read or thumbed through a bluffer's guide or xenophobe's guide in the past will know what to expect. This book is short, humourous (or tries to be, anyway) and covers just the basics, but does tend to give a good overview, overall. Obviously, it trades a great deal on national stereotypes, which will in itself prevent some taking it seriously. But I'm conservative enough to realise that the mere fact that something is a stereotype is hardly evidence that it is not generally true.

If you have a special interest in Austria, it's certainly worth a few quid. I can't imagine any other good reason to buy it, though.

The Age of Diminished Expectations - Paul Krugman
Certainly one of the better books I read in 2004. Krugman devotes a chapter to each of the major issues that seemed to deserve most attention when he wrote it. Inflation and Unemployment obviously retain their significance. The chapters on Japan and the Savings and Loan scandal less so. Nonetheless, the book has a deeply impressive series of essays on all of the issues it covers. As I think I said in my review last month of another book by the same author, Krugman has or had a great skill at popularising moderate, unideological economics. For this reason, his economic work, unlike his political writing, I'd recommend to anyone.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Thursday, February 10, 2005
 

Vote 2005

Veterans of PoliticalBetting.com and Anthony Wells, as well as others, may like to know that my fellow Nirj-employee Dan Hamilton has set up a new Vote 2005 forum, where the results of every individual parliamentary constituency can be predicted and debated.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Tuesday, February 08, 2005
 

Blair and Brown

National Review Online reports.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Monday, February 07, 2005
 

Are left and right still alright?

Tomorrow Professor Paul Whiteley is giving Essex's Government Departmental Lecture on prospects of the Lib Dems becoming the main opposition party of British politics. If - as is likely - the lecture is interesting enough, and if I have time, I will blog the lecture here.

What above all else has always made me doubt that this can occur is what Whiteley's colleague Anthony King said - to the vocal agreement of, I think, Andrew Marr - the night of the Hartlepool by-election: there is simply no room on the political spectrum for another left-of-centre party. Whatever modernisation Labour may have undergone in the last decade, it remains a party of expanding the size and role of the state and of recognisably left-of-centre stances on everything from asylum to Zimbabwe. If Prof. Whiteley's conclusion is affirmative, it will interesting to see how he answers this point. And if he concludes that the Liberals are not approaching the status of main opposition party, it will be interesting to see how much this argument features.

Anyway, one thing pondering the lecture did get me thinking about was the way in which the case was entirely contingent on the same left-right spectrum that is so regularly and fashionably denounced and ignored.

Yet from all I see and read from this country's leading politics department, talk of left and right seems universal and constant. One of my lecturers is doing a PhD in the exact numerically measurable (hopefully) degree to which European parties have moved left and right in response to each other. Anthony King's remarks above are entirely typical.

So can anyone tell me - perhaps Manchester University's Norm Geras or Nottingham University's Phil Cowley are reading this - is there any significant academic constituency for the view one constantly hears these days that left and right are part of a bye-gone era, that they have little relevance, or that they fail to capture too much that is important?

I realise that I'm not usually one to defer to intellectual elites, but I am asking here for Politics professors' views on elections, not on how to run a country. I don't think a university professor necessarily (or even probably) has any more sensible views on taxation or law and order than a taxi driver, but I do think that if his area of expertise is the study of elections, he is likely to be well worth listening to on these sorts of questions. In this case I am satisified that if academics have a strong consensus in favour of understanding the way votes and elections are won and lost in terms of left-right, then it is very likely that this consensus exists because elections really are very often won and lost in terms of left-right.

So can the view that left and right no longer matter, if they ever did, claim academic support and psephological evidence? Or is it merely the received wisdom of libertarian bloggers who don't like to admit how much they have in common with gay marriage-banning drug warriors, and Liberal Democrats who don't want to alert voters in Tory-held marginals to the fact that they are now to the left of Labour?

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Friday, February 04, 2005
 

Why partisanship fades

Matthew Yglesias notes the tendency of those on both sides of America's political divide straightforwardly to dislike the Presidents of opposing parties while they are in office, but to come in the following decades to find much to appreciate about them.

[For liberals] this tendency is probably most pronounced with regard to presidents Eisenhower and H.W. Bush, and then to a lesser extent with Nixon and Reagan while as far as I can tell Gerald Ford has generally failed to inspire strong feelings one way or the other. Upon further reflection, you see something rather similar with conservative intellectuals. Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy most notably all turn out to have hidden virtues that their conservative contemporaries were totally unaware of. Franklin Roosevelt is a more complicated but generally similar case. Certainly, almost no one on the mainstream right would today unleash the sort of vitriol against him that was commonplace at the time. Bill Clinton is probably too contemporary for this phenomenon to have worked its way through, but we're seeing the early signs of it already.

It's certainly something I have noticed, too. I remember reading in Margaret Thatcher's memoirs with surprise and some amusement that she was an admirer of Clement Attlee, whose dreadful legacy she helped obliterate. But then I realised myself that I admire Gladstone to the degree that I struggle to prefer Disraeli. I've no doubt it's a common phenomenon, and it certainly shows a distinct lack of empathy for ideological soulmates of earlier ages. It's as if Disraeli is urging fellow conservatives to get some fire in their bellies about the threat the Liberals pose, and their response is simply to shrug their shoulders and say that Gladstone is his problem: we have Tony Blair to worry about.

But while Matthew Yglesias appears rather mystified by why this happens, I think it's rather obvious, and hinted at in his post - as time passes, most of the emotional dislike anyone feels for contemporary opponents dissipates. One goes on disapproving of most of that Prime Minister or President's agenda, but without the intensity of the emotional effect of seeing on the news that person introducing policies one hates, of spending recent years pounding the streets campaigning against him and then seeing the election nonetheless go in his favour. The political disagreement becomes academic and factual with each passing year, as these memories fade and new rivals crop up to drain one's aggression.

Perhaps if we were all more reasonable, it is how we would feel about contemporary foes, too. But then politics would be immeasurably more dull if even in the heat of the moment it never became more exciting than the choice between Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson now seems.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Thursday, February 03, 2005
 

Mandela's misleading rhetoric

One of the great problems with fluffy, well-meaning rhetoric is that one's agreement with its conclusions makes one overly inclined to agree with the arguments given in support. Religious rhetoric is full of this sort of thing, and bad political rhetoric is, too.

Nelson Mandela's speech on poverty yesterday is exemplary of this tendency.

"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural," he said, standing in Trafalgar Square - where protesters had years earlier campaigned for his release from jail under the apartheid regime. "It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."

In the narrow sense in which a great deal could never happen without human action, this statement would be true. But the proposition that slavery or racial apartheid and segregation are somehow less "natural" than their alternatives doesn't long stand up long to historical scrutiny. Like despotism, they're not so much unnatural as the historical norm. Whether they are good things or not is of course a separate question - which is why Mandela's claims are so silly.

On poverty above all, what he says is the absolute reverse of the truth. Rhetoric like:

"[M]illions of people in the world's poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free. Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life."

... confirms the mentality of assuming that the decency and human dignity of a certain amount of wealth is natural, and that poverty is some sort of imposition.

But for poverty to exist requires no work at all, no external effort of any kind. Poverty is utterly natural. As Madsen Pirie notes: "It happens naturally when you do nothing. It is wealth that has causes."

It is wealth that is genuinely unnatural - even when won or inherited, always originating in effort and ability. To blame its absence on "prisons of poverty" and "injustice" is so standard as rhetoric about the poor that it is truly a cliche in the sense that Orwell condemned them - we say them, hear them and accept them without even thinking about them. "Poverty" and "injustice" have become almost synonyms.

But this fluffy rhetoric is dangerously misleading if it causes one to ignore the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and instead to focus on 'freeing' people from the 'prisons' and 'impositions' of poverty. Once one begins to see poverty rather than wealth as being made, it follows automatically that one will begin to see the external unmaking of poverty, the exogenous liberation from its impositions, as a necessary and indispensable part of securing the "justice" Nelson Mandela talks about.

From these backward premises, movement towards backward, counter-productive conclusions about the solution is inescapable. Mandela's rhetoric about ensuring "trade justice" (ie. something other than free and voluntary exchange, which would simply be "trade"), and even the state ownership of all industry, which his African National Congress long advocated, are symptoms of this trap - and of course the surest ways to prevent any development of wealth.

Wealth results from secure property rights, the division of labour, low taxation and regulations and the corresponding incentives to create and produce, markets and economies both national and international as free as possible - and then nothing more than hard, productive work. Poverty continues because of the absence of these things; or more likely and most pertinently in Africa's case, the conscious suppression of some or all of them. Leave it to Nelson Mandela to advocate more of the same as the answer - but understand how easily thoughtless agreement with his woolly rhetoric can lead others to do likewise.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Tuesday, February 01, 2005
 

Wrongful revisions

Perhaps it's something that as a Tory eurosceptic I should keep to myself, but at heart I am very pro-German. Quite apart from all the cultural reasons to be a Germanophile, as a self-conscious, rather socially wary type, I have some affinity with what since World War II has been a whole nation of such people.

But if Germany has changed greatly for the better since World War II because of its war guilt - and she has - I'm keen that the country retain an accurate memory of what it did in the former half of the twentieth century. Certainly shame about some areas of the past should be balanced by a great deal of pride in other areas, but revisionism about the Nazi era is not the right way to achieve the appropriate mix.

For this reason - and of course on grounds of respect for plain historical truth - it is important to support those Poles who are opposing Martin Schulz's commemorative motion to the European Parliament (where he heads the Party of European Socialists) in which no mention is made of Germany's role in the holocaust save for phrases like "the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland".

Foxy quotes the Polish efforts:

Mr. Schulz is trying to rewrite history and shift the blame from Germany for the annihilation of the Central European Jewish population to some unspecified Nazis. There is no trace, in his resolution, that it was the German III Reich, German National Socialists (Nazis), or Hitler's Germany that built the camps and exterminated innocent human beings.

...Why is it that 60 years after the fact, some members of this Parliament want to give a false account of the Holocaust and ignore the fact that many nations and groups of people were murdered alongside their Jewish neighbours, that it was in fact, National Socialist Germany that committed these great crimes against humanity and not some "extermination camp in Poland"?

The point about blaming "unspecified Nazis" for the action of a whole nation is particularly apt in the more general sense - and it needs to be heeded by many people outside Germany as well as inside.

Equally, and more disgracefully, it is crucial to be wary of another aspect of this revisionism, which so often seeks to blame "nationalism in Europe" for the such conflicts as the Second World War. In this case, the behaviour is even less forgivable, as it is so clearly intended to serve the political goal of presenting all European nation states as guilty - and the European Union as the solution. Charles Kennedy once said explicitly that the EU had been such a good thing because before it came into being, Europe had been torn apart by rivalries between nation states, as if no country could really be blamed any more than any other, and as if national sovereignty rather than national socialism were really responsible for plunging Europe into war.

German nationalism most certainly did have dire implications for millions of people. But the British nationalism, self-confidence and self-belief that Winston Churchill was able to summon saved Europe from this threat. It is no more accurate to blame World War II on 'nationalism' than on advanced armaments or the belief that victory was possible - yes, it's sad Germany possessed these things; but it's a damn good thing the Allies did, too.

There is certainly an argument to be made that the German inclination toward war with her neighbours was tempered in part by the structures and requirements of the European Community - though it is really only convincing when explained in the qualified, refined and multi-causal way that theorists such as Robert Cooper put it. But to suggest that Britain needed to be tempered in the same way is as historically false as it is politically suspect.

Yes, perhaps Germany may once have needed the European Union to help pacify her and so spare the rest of us much grief. But no, Britain never did.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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