Does fine talk win political street fights?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The great Natalie Solent at Samizdata says this:

We don’t want to make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, we want them to see the necessity of adopting ours. So we take the high road, but make a point of pointing out that this is ‘hate speech’, and that ‘free speech means tolerating hate speech like this’.

I agree with Natalie’s ultimate aims, but I’ve come to doubt the effectiveness of this sort of method, so I replied:

In theory that’s all fine. But how’s it working in real life? Not so well, huh? Leftists say what they want and lord it over us, while anyone right-wing, or even not sufficiently left-wing (like Danny Baker) get fed to the lions. Every day the ratchet gets tightened, and fine talk gets us nowhere.

 

There were plenty of principled people in the USSR who made fine speeches, and then they were taken into the forests and shot.

 

As for Jo Brand, she doesn’t even strike me as someone who would be appalled and repelled when the killing starts. I don’t imagine she’d ever instigate it, but I can see her cackling over it when heads start rolling.

As I’ve said many times, even the supposedly paranoid anti-Communist right doesn’t understand how ruthless, determined and insane the left is. History tells us that even the apparently nice, quiet and bookish intellectuals can’t wait to have you beaten to a pulp within days of them gaining power.

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 72

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2002-03

Summer break

Late July

Thursday

 

By the end of July, Ren and Wren have become coosters: worn-out libertines. So they take a few days break from their debauches to give their livers and their sore edea a rest. Wren with a W goes to visit some friends. Ren without a W goes to see Ken and Halberd in Ken’s flat to discuss progress on the Lucius project.

Ken with a K, and Halberd without a K, have been getting on with attempting to replicate some of Lucius’s work. Lucius thinks they’ve given up on doing that – he thinks they’ve gone back to doing their own studies – so he’s paying them no attention. He’s no longer using them to do analysis on his data.

Ken tells Ren what he has learned at a recent conference.

‘I was talking to this psychologist who’s now in clinical who told me that he left social psychology because the whole field is bullshit. When he was a graduate student he was trying to replicate all these studies that had impressive results, and he never could, no matter how careful he was. So he writes to all the people who did these experiments, asking for more details of what they did, and they all sent back detailed information. Very detailed. In most cases the experiment only works in certain conditions.’

‘By “works”, you mean getting the desired sexy, political result?’ says Ren.

‘Yeah,’ says Ken. ‘So there were instructions like, don’t do this test on a computer, it only works if the participants are using paper and a pencil. Or it doesn’t work if they use a pencil, it has to be a pen. Or the participants have to be given something else to do after reading the materials, for precisely two and a half minutes. If you make it any more than that, or any less, then you don’t get the result you want. And if you more or less people than some specific number in the group then it doesn’t work either. And there was… I’m trying to think of another one he mentioned…’

‘Didn’t you say there was something to do with the words used?’ says Halberd.

‘Oh yeah,’ says Ken. ‘On one experiment he was told that he had to use certain exact words when talking to the subjects. If you used other synonyms, even really close ones, then it didn’t happen.’

‘My favourite was the clothes,’ says Halberd. ‘On one experiment concerning behaviour in contexts where you are reflecting on your eventual death you only got the result you wanted if the experimenters wore black clothes and had a gloomy manner.’

‘Jesus, those sort of factors should discredit any experiment,’ says Ren. ‘Don’t the researchers understand that?’

‘Well, this guy did,’ said Ken, ‘that’s why he changed fields. But I don’t know if other researchers do.’

‘They don’t know much about science then,’ says Ren. ‘Or else they’re deliberately ignoring these issues because it that allows them to publish their propaganda in good journals and make a name for themselves.’

‘That’s a harsh interpretation,’ says Ken.

‘Is it any worse than the alternative?’ says Ren. ‘That these supposed top scientists don’t understand the basics of confirmation? Either way things are bad. Frankly, it’s just dishonest to claim that such-and-such is the case, when in fact that such-and-such only happens in certain carefully-contrived circumstances, which the experimenters have searched hard to find. “People are more X in an Y environment, but only if the environment is Y in the precise ways A, B, C, D and E. And it’s 3:37 on a Tuesday afternoon and it’s exactly twenty-seven degrees. At the very least you should make all this clear in your paper.’

‘But the journals don’t want that much detail,’ says Halberd. ‘And they don’t want such qualified conclusions. They want strong conclusions that are supposed to hold up generally. So if you put all that in your paper then it will probably get rejected. And then your career suffers.’

‘That’s basically an admission that for the sake of your career advancement you’re willing to publish highly misleading research. That doesn’t constitute any sort of defence.’

‘We know,’ says Ken. ‘You don’t have to tell us that it’s dishonest. We’re putting our careers on the line for the sake of honesty.’

‘I have to admire you guys for that,’ says Ren. ‘It’s very admirable. That sort of bravery isn’t very common in academia. Look at how Miles has dropped out of sight. He’s worried that he’ll get caught up in the blast. Or the fallout.’

‘If it all goes well then he’ll say he was part of it all along, won’t he?’ says Ken.

‘Yes. Mind you, he was part of it all along, to some extent. But it’s you guys doing most of the work.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Might be too late for your field’s credibility, though. I mean, if Professor Plum thinks it’s okay to publish a paper saying X on the basis of experiments he has done, even though X only appears in some particular circumstances, whereas not X appears in lots of other circumstances, then he’s just as entitled to publish a paper saying not X as he is saying X. But it’s X that he wants to support, because it supports some more general theory he likes, or it’s more PC, so he publishes the former paper, not the latter.’

‘It’s the same in principle,’ says Ken, ‘as those researchers who do ten studies, and nine don’t support X, but one does, so they publish that one.’

‘The “bottom drawer effect”,’ says Halberd.

‘And few people try to replicate these studies,’ says Ken. ‘No-one other than a few grad students starting our with some practise studies is much interested in replicating other people’s work. Especially if you try one and it doesn’t work. Then you just say, I’m not wasting my time trying to replicate someone else’s work. As soon as you get a license to do your own studies, then you want to make a name for yourself with your own stuff.’

‘And journals aren’t very interested in publishing replications,’ says Halberd. ‘Especially negative ones. So X stays as the accepted wisdom.’

‘Yeah, even if the author of the paper supporting X has sucked off the entire editorial board of World Science to get published,’ says Ren.

‘That’s, ah, putting it rather more colourfully than I would have,’ says Ken.

‘All the section editors want to see their sort of stuff confirmed,’ says Ren. ‘They might get tough with the stats, and so on, but are they asking the really important questions, like, how robust is this result? Do you have data which doesn’t support this conclusion?’

‘And if so, why isn’t that included in the overall data set?’ says Ken.

‘Does the supposed phenomena only appear if the circumstances are just right?’ says Ren. ‘We’re not doing physics or chemistry. If you can show, say, that the gravitational effect doesn’t hold in some circumstance, then that’s big news, regardless of how circumscribed that circumstance is. But this is research designed to show that the human mind works, for the most part, in some particular way. If it often doesn’t work in that way then your thesis is blown, or at least greatly weakened. Your conclusion may be something like “Men found to consistently undervalue woman’s contributions”, say, but really your conclusion should be something more like “In a certain limited, artificial set of circumstances, and only when they are suitably primed, men undervalued women’s contributions. Assuming, that is, that our somewhat tendentious interpretation of the data is correct”.’

‘Well, all that sort of thing is a different issue to whether Lucius is faking his data,’ says Ken. ‘That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on at the moment.’

‘But all of what you’ve just told me means that your attempts at replication are a bit pointless. They’re bound to fail, because even if Lucifer isn’t faking anything, it’s probably the case that you can’t replicate his work because you don’t know the exact right circumstances you need to have. These experimenters put an awful lot of time into finding just the right circumstances. You aren’t likely to stumble across those first time. As you’ve just said, people who want to replicate these sorts of results need to be told the secret combination of circumstances for it to work. Whether to use one word, and not a similar one, for example. So these replications are likely to fail even if Lucius has been honest all along.’

‘I see your point,’ says Ken. ‘You’re right. But it’s still worth doing them, it will help our case. If Lucius hasn’t specified the circumstances sufficiently then that’s his failing, not ours.’

‘Well,’ says Ren. ‘Maybe it’s worth finishing what you’ve started, but I wouldn’t spend much more time on the replication side of things. It’s the analysis that’s more important.’

But he knows as he says it that Ken and Halberd will waste their time pointlessly trying to replicate Lucius’s work. The replications are going to fail regardless of whether Lucius’s data is made up or real.

No, I will not just ignore what Jo Brand said

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There are  lot of libertarians on the internet at the moment saying ‘We have to have free speech, so leave Jo Brand alone, just as we should leave Danny Baker and Count Dankula alone. Stop being a right-wing snowflake, butt out, and let people say what they want’. (See, for example, most of Spiked’s tweets in the last few days)

To which I say: how’s that workin’ out for ya? Baker was sacked by the BBC. Dankula was convicted by a court. Brand, on the other hand, was defended by the BBC. So forgive me for noting that that this sort of response practically hands victory to the left. Right-wingers will be sacked and hounded out of polite society, whereas left-wingers can say whatever they want. (As I’ve said before, double standards may be the only weapon the left needs.)

It’s all very well saying, ‘But Baker shouldn’t have been sacked’. Of course he shouldn’t have been, but he was. And more like him will be sacked as the left continues to have a free hand, unopposed by the right. The left will use its advantage ruthlessly here. So saying nothing about Brand’s comments is about the worst thing you can do. We have to speak up.

Of course it’s too simplistic just to say she should be sacked without any qualification. We have to go Kurt Schlichter: “These are the new rules. You made them. You force us to live by them. Now you have to do the same. Don’t like the new rules? Well, either we bring back the old rules, and everyone gets to keep their jobs, or we apply the new rules to you as well. See? Those old rules aren’t looking so so bad now, are they?” The pressure must be kept up, otherwise we’ll be slaughtered.

Also, it’s not just about Jo Brand. It’s about the BBC, and the fact that we are continually forced to pay money to them to be insulted and unrepresented. I’ve had enough, and I’m not just going to stand back and say “No worries, it’s all just free speech, let her say what she wants”.

Update: The other thing that’s grating is that for years so many of us have been polite about Jo Brand. Oh yes, she’s wonderful, we’ve said, so funny, pretending that she’s a marvellous talent and a great representative of modern women, just so we don’t seem like an old-fashioned sexist dinosaur, when all along it’s been obvious to us that she’s an unfunny, bitter and rancid old political hack. No more of that. She’s shit, and she’s always been shit, and let us never pretend again.

She’s basically just a pub gossip, with the occasional mildly amusing crack about someone or something, but that’s about the extent of it. She’s the union rep that somehow never has to do any work, and is always in the pub smoking a fag and stirring up trouble in the firm that pays her bills.

And can you imagine if someone vaguely right-wing had said something similar about a favourite of the luvvies, like Jess Philips, or Chuku Ummunna? That person would probably be in jail now. They’d never be able to appear in public again. They probably would be attacked with acid.

Update 2: It also turns out that Brand is a rank hypocrite and political operator. She played a major part in Carol Thatcher’s sacking from The One Show. Another leftist who plays for keeps.

 

Quote of the Day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

From Jim in the comments (regarding the inordinate time taken these days to reopen roads after road accidents, and the excuse that this is partly because so many agencies are involved):

What you seem to have described is a lot of middle class people making work for each other, at the expense of the taxpayer, while actually achieving very little of positive good for society at large in return. All that work might result in what, the occasional prosecution? Who will then be given a slap on the wrists, and/or a whole lot more middle class work be created for probation and social workers. Who actually benefits from all this police and other agency ‘work’? Society as a whole, or the workers within the system?

 

Would society be better off if whenever there was an accident on the roads all the detritus were pushed to one side, the road reopened and everyone got on with their lives?

Common sense, or too strong? Thoughts?

When do the Cornish ask for slavery reparations from Africa?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Here’s one for those people who think slavery is all about white people enslaving black people:

For over 300 years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates (corsairs) from the coast of North Africa, based mainly in the ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Their number included not only North Africans but also English and Dutch privateers. Their aim was to capture slaves for the Arab slave markets in North Africa.

 

The Barbary pirates attacked and plundered not only those countries bordering the Mediterranean but as far north as the English Channel, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, with the western coast of England almost being raided at will.

 

Partly as a result of an inadequate naval deterrent, by the early 17th century the situation was so bad that an entry in the Calendar of State Papers in May 1625 stated, ‘The Turks are upon our coasts. They take ships only to take the men to make slaves of them.’

The slave-traders were so brazen that they even landed on English soil to steal people:

Barbary pirates raided on land as well as at sea. In August 1625 corsairs raided Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, capturing 60 men, women and children and taking them into slavery. In 1626 St Keverne was repeatedly attacked, and boats out of Looe, Penzance, Mousehole and other Cornish ports were boarded, their crews taken captive and the empty ships left to drift. It was feared that there were around 60 Barbary men-of-war prowling the Devon and Cornish coasts and attacks were now occurring almost daily

How many had they captured?

The situation was so bad that in December 1640 a Committee for Algiers was set up by Parliament to oversee the ransoming of captives. At that time it was reported that there were some 3,000 to 5,000 English people in captivity in Algiers. Charities were also set up to help ransom the captives and local fishing communities clubbed together to raise money to liberate their own.

I look forward to the African intelligentsia wringing their hands for decades over their shameful past of their continent, and considering how best to apologise.

WH Smith in York have a nasty little lefty on staff

Hector Drummond Posted on by

So someone I know well recently went to WH Smith while she was in York, and she bought a few books. One of them was Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life, which she bought out of interest, not because she’s any prior fan of his.

You might not be surprised to hear that the left-wing-looking guy behind the counter started giving her grief for buying it.

(Actually, you might be somewhat surprised, as it’s not some edgy independent bookseller but WH Smith, which around my way at least is usually staffed by middle-aged women who look like they’d be more interested in Delia Smith than Laurie Penny).

Have you read it, my friend asked in return? No, but I don’t need to, it’s alt-right fascism, was the reply (or something along those lines). You can’t really be telling people not to read it before you’ve read it, can you? Yes I can, it’s a bad book and he’s a bad man, was the gist of what he said. (I forget the further details of what she said he said, but that’s pretty much it. It was Orange Man Bad-level stuff.)

Independent bookshops have always been full of arses like this, but now it’s spread to the high street. As if the high prices WH Smith charge weren’t enough to stop me buying there – I spent a fortune just buying some basic school stationery recently – now there’s this.

You know what, WH Smith? I think I’ll just buy from the internet in future.

All the times police aren’t so keen to spend all night investigating a crime with a fine-tooth comb

Hector Drummond Posted on by

In comments yesterday I made this point in response to a defence of the huge amount of time police close roads for in order to investigate road traffic accidents:

 

 

Another thing to add is that police claims about having to investigate accidents to the nth degree infuriates people when police clearly couldn’t give a stuff about investigating a whole range of crimes – definite crimes, not possible crimes like road accidents – that greatly affect people.

Burglaries: Yawn, here’s a number.

Violent neighbours: Nothing we can do mate.

Eco protesters holding up traffic: We’ll join in.

Muslims acting in a threatening matter: Say that again and I’ll arrest you.

The local thug will beat me up if I give evidence against him: We’ll give him a talking to if he does.

My car was stolen: That’s a shame, hope you get it back.

My laptop was stolen, and look, here’s a picture of guy who stole it, he’s taking pictures with it and they’re uploading to the cloud, can you find him: No, and don’t go taking the law into your own hands.

Searching all night for the tell-tale skid mark

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The incredible length of time it takes to re-open roads after accidents in the UK is yet another way in which the ruling powers are completely disconnected from ordinary people. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for ages, and the time is now right, as Jeremy Clarkson has complained about it, and the ruling class, including The Telegraph, has tried to crush him for it.

Jeremy Clarkson has come under fire after complaining about the length of time it took the police to reopen a road following a fatal car accident.

 

The former Top Gear host, took to social media after he was held up in traffic following a crash in West London in the early hours of Friday morning …

 

Posting on Twitter the following day, Clarkson, who has regularly courted controversy, wrote: “Dear The Police, I know it was a nasty crash in Hammersmith last night but how can it take this  long to reopen the road?”

The Telegraph does it’s best to make Clarkson look unreasonable:

the comment sparked anger among serving police officers whose job it is to deal with the aftermath of fatal road traffic accidents, as well as members of the public.

 

One police officer hit back, posting: “Sorry you were delayed Jeremy Clarskon, perhaps you’d like to come with us and personally explain to the family of the deceased that we didn’t investigate the death of their loved one thoroughly because you wanted to get home? That their loss is a complete irrelevance to you?”

I’m not buying it. The police take far too long over these investigations. I think they’re playing at being TV cops, plus I bet there’s an enormous amount of bureaucracy and form-ticking that slow everything down enormously. I don’t believe the claim that the police can’t investigate any faster.

And in case you say, ‘How do you know?’, my suspicions were confirmed a few years ago when there was a minor accident near my house a few years ago. A drunk guy walked across the road without looking, and was hit by a car, and badly injured. The police came, and they closed the road, a fairly major artery for the city, for literally five hours while they piddled about playing at being super cops. I watched them from my upstairs window. They did very little, and occasionally they would pace about the road and look at it and take photos. Mainly they just kept the road blocked off. All for a case that was never very complex.

So I don’t believe that most of these long closures are really necessary. They cause a huge amount of disruption to people’s lives. You can’t just wave away the concerns of people who have lives to lead and make them wait in a mammoth traffic jam for five hours. There is a balance.

Detective Superintendent Andy Cox added: “Dear Jeremy Clarkson the nasty crash you mention resulted in a fatality. As lead Detective I require investigators to secure best evidence from a highly complex scene. It takes as long as necessary. We want roads moving but I hope you understand prioritise quality investigations.”

‘We want roads moving’. Easy to say, but is it really true? It’s clear to me that getting roads moving comes a distant second to investigating a crash. It’s like when the government says, ‘We’re not anti-car’. It’s easy to say, but behaviour reveals otherwise.

You’d also have to question whether the extra information gained by dragging the investigation on for hours and hours really adds much. Most of the evidence can be quickly gathered: photos of debris positions, photos of skid marks, and so on. Is searching for another two hours for a couple of pieces of windscreen glass that might, just might in one case in a thousand, reveal that driver X was to blame rather than driver Y, really worth it? Sure we want to have a good idea of who was at fault, but it’s not a murder case. It may be a manslaughter case, but how often is that going to be revealed by those extra hours?

Personally I think keeping the road closed for so long is yet another way in which the government advertises its dominance over us.

Update: Note that the Telegraph were too chicken to put a byline on this article, it’s just down as by ‘Telegraph Reporters’. And note also that it’s another piece put together mostly from someone trawling Twitter.

From the department of ‘How dumb?’

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Woman complains about a dating agency. The complaint is reasonable. The naivety, however, is astounding:

I spent £2,795 with a dating agency called Attractive Partners, which after five months has not found me any decent men.

 

I took the more expensive “headhunting” package because its excellent sales person told me there would be a better chance of matches.

 

I was told matchmakers actually go out and find a man for you by advertising in golf clubs and men’s magazines, but they never did this for me, the men just came from their database.

I find it hard to believe what I’m reading. They find a man for you by ‘advertising in gold clubs and men’s magazines’? The woman really believed this? How exactly did she think this would work? They’d put a picture of her at the back of a men’s magazine, saying ‘This lonely heart needs a man’? Wouldn’t that be humiliating, especially when all her friends find out?

And even if they really did that, what kind of man did she think she’d get that way? Did she really think that the best sort of man finds a woman by seeing an ad for her up on the noticeboard at the golf club?

The term ‘bespoke headhunting’ is used in the piece as something she was promised. But who could be dumb enough to believe that? How can an agency find a good man who isn’t already on their books? Would they gain access to high-powered executive conferences and show her picture to the businessmen? Or just give them a list of her turn-ons and turn-offs? ‘Hi there Mr Millionaire Businessman in An Expensive Suit, I know you probably already have a wife and three mistresses, but would you be interested in a serious relationship with a woman at our dating agency who likes long walks, films and cuddling, and whose turn-offs include animal cruelty, rudeness, and Tories. No? Okay, how about… I have to leave? But I’m just… All right, don’t call security, I’m going. I’ll just leave these cards with her phone number here on the desk, she’s a catch, this one’.

Update: Link to Telegraph article added now.

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 71

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2002-03

Summer break

Early July

Friday

 

Ren doesn’t come in to work until Friday afternoon. He goes to the departmental office to check his mail. The statue of George is still there, under a layer of clothes.

‘I thought George was going to be moved somewhere else now?’ he says to the departmental administrator, Wendoline.

Marble George has been living in the departmental office ever since it was delivered last year, and is currently used as a coat, scarf and hat stand.

‘We can’t get rid of it,’ Wendoline says. ‘Nobody wants to take it. Why don’t you have it in your office?’

‘Might freak the students out,’ mumbles Ren, hurrying off to his office. He’s not been in his office for long in when Compton knocks on his door.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Just taking a bit of a holiday after the end of term.’

‘A holiday? What about that book chapter you have to write?’

‘Oh, I have plenty of time left to finish that.’

‘Last week you were saying you didn’t know where you’d find the time to do it, seeing as you had to start from scratch.’

‘If I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’

‘Well, you’d better tell Orson now if you’re not going to do it, not in two months’ time. You don’t want to get a reputation for cunctativeness, do you?’

‘Er, I guess not. I’ll let him know early next week what my decision is.’

‘Last week you were desperate to do it. Now you seem very relaxed.’

‘And you seem very wound up.’

‘You haven’t been here. Have you been checking your e-mail?’

‘No. My dial-up’s not working at home. That’s why I’ve come in, to check my e-mail.’

‘My hard disk has been wiped.’

‘What? What happened? Has it failed?’

‘No. Not failed. Deliberately wiped.’

‘Jesus. Who by?’

‘That’s what we don’t know. Possibly Derek, or Huey, Dewey and Louis, but we don’t know’

‘Did it happen after the party then?’

‘Well, I came in on Monday to find that there was nothing left on the hard drive.’

‘Shit. Have you got backups?’

‘I do, I regularly back everything up onto Zip disks and CDs, so I’ve only lost a week’s work. But Jesus, somebody wiped my drive.’

‘Was it definitely wiped deliberately, and not just a drive failure?’

‘Yes, IT have checked it and they say it was given an extra thorough wipe. There’s nothing recoverable there at all.’

‘I can’t believe that anyone would stoop to this. So is there any evidence pointing to who did it?’

‘No. Just the weak circumstantial evidence that Derek was drunk and angry with me on Friday night. Also, Derek has a key to the main office, where he can get the spare key to my room. On the other hand, Derek is known to be no good with computers. This was someone who knew what they were doing. That points to Tom, who is very good with computers.’

‘You mean Dewey?’

‘Don’t know, the tall one with the glasses. But he has on his side the fact that he doesn’t have a key to the main office, so he couldn’t have got the key to my room. On the other hand, there have always been rumours that spare main office keys are floating around, so he may in actuality have one.’

‘So what’s happening? Is there going to be an investigation?’

‘Robot has questioned them all. They all deny it. End of investigation.’

‘No chance of the police being called in, I take it? Dusting for fingerprints?’

‘No chance. Even if we called them they wouldn’t come, not for this.’

‘What about Derek’s outburst on Friday? Has that come up?’

‘Grant has given him a bit of a telling off. I mean, Grant doesn’t like Derek, and he doesn’t at all approve of him shouting at his fellow departmental members, but that’s all he can muster. He knows that he doesn’t have the power to do anything stronger when all that happened on the surface is a drunken argument, so he’s not going to try. As I predicted, he’s treating it like a personal disagreement in our private lives, rather than political intimidation. He doesn’t approve of my politics any more than Derek does.’

‘Has Derek said anything to you?’

‘He made a breezy non-apology to me in front of a lot of other people on Tuesday, when he came in because Grant wanted to speak to him. Then he disappeared. He’s said nothing to me privately. Other than that appearance, no-one’s seen him here all week, not that that’s unusual at this time of year. He’s probably gone off to Paris again. He said the hard drive had nothing to do with him. Huey, Dewey and Louis are all lying low too. They deny it, too. I feel like Derek is trying to drive me out.’

‘Don’t you want to go anyway?’

‘I do, I’d love to get out of this swamp and go somewhere more fully analytic, and better, but I’m not going to be driven out by Derek. And I’m not sure I’d ever be appointed anywhere else now that it’s known that I’m a conservative.’

‘Don’t let him get to you. He doesn’t have that much influence these days. He’s burned his bridges with almost everyone.’

‘I’m not just talking about Derek. It’s the left in general. There’s a long-term witch-hunt steadily building up. It’s going to gradually ramp up now that all the old Conservative academics are retiring, and being replaced by leftists.’

‘I know, but that’s no reason to give up now. And you’ll outlast Derek.’

‘Hope so. Anyway, it’s back to the hard disk restoration project for now. See you later.’

Behaving like there’s no consequences encouraged by… a lack of consequences

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Telegraph football writer Paul Hayward can always be relied upon to pen a nauseating article, and he hasn’t let us down. He notes the awful behaviour of some England football fans abroad:

Dozens of fans stopped the cars of local residents trying to drive home to mock them; at least one supporter jumped on the roof of a moving vehicle before sliding off… After laying the ground in Dortmund and Amsterdam, where bikes were thrown in canals and mayhem enveloped the tourist areas

Okay, so we could either arrest the people responsible, or we could damage a whole bunch of players and fans for something they didn’t do. Hayward, of course, goes for the latter:

for England to stop playing abroad until a solution is found.

This is yet another curse of modern government. Fail to take any steps against the people doing something bad, and just curtail a more basic freedom of everyone else to try to stop it instead. Instead of locking up murderers for life, just ban guns and knives instead.

Hayward himself admits the real problem:

Foreign police forces are often reluctant to make mass arrests because of the bureaucratic burden it entails

I have great sympathy for the people in places that get smashed up by foreign hooligans, but I have much less sympathy for those places when it turns out that the cops just can’t bothered to arrest anyone because of the paperwork.

But would tougher policing work, you may ask? Er… it appears it would:

The sheer lack of consideration is well established as part of the English pathology. It was absent in Russia because this section of the travelling “support” were too scared of the Russian police to behave badly.

It seems Hayward’s article again provides the answer for us, without him realising it.

Research that shows that conservatives don’t feel safe on US campuses

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A guy called Jerry Zheng has done some actual research on what conservatives face on the modern US college campus. He interviewed 1500 students across 207 different US schools, and his results are here.

He found, amongst other things, that 55% of college conservatives don’t feel comfortable sharing their political views on campus, and a third of conservatives don’t even feel safe on campus:

The incident at UC Berkeley [an assault on a Conservative] isn’t unheard of. News of conservatives on college campuses getting attacked for their political views make the airwaves frequently enough to make conservatives think twice about exercising their freedom of speech.

 

When Allison Stanger, a professor at Middlebury College, was physically assaulted to the point where she had to wear a neck brace after her live discussion event, it warned conservatives that they are not safe.

 

It’s no surprise, then, that more than 1/3 of conservatives don’t feel safe on campus.

 

When sharing conservative views on campus can get you doxxed, stalked or even have death threats issued against you. It takes Herculean courage to be transparent about it on college campuses.

 

The Tiananmen massacre

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Communists are great people, aren’t they? Here’s a declassified cable from a British diplomat describing what happened (at least according to his sources) in Tiananmen Square in 1989:

5. FACT. ON ARRIVAL AT TIANANMEN TROOPS FROM SMR [Shenyang Military Region] HAD SEPARATED STUDENTS AND RESIDENTS. STUDENTS UNDERSTOOD THEY WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR TO LEAVE SQUARE BUT AFTER FIVE MINUTES APCS [armoured personnel carriers] ATTACKED. STUDENTS LINKED ARMS BUT WERE MOWN DOWN INCLUDING SOLDIERS. APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND TIME AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER. REMAINS INCINERATED AND THEN HOSED DOWN DRAINS.

 

The Spectator on the Brexit bus figure

Hector Drummond Posted on by

This was the Speccie’s article on the figure on the bus in 2017:

 

 

The £350m line on the Brexit bus was wrong.

The real figure is higher

The most regular attack-line used against leading Brexiteers is that they misled the public over how much money could be used to fund the NHS if Britain left the EU. Throughout the referendum campaign, Vote Leave said that we send £350 million a week to Brussels – a gross figure, applied before a rebate etc. But no one knew the real 2016 figure because the data is compiled in arrears. Only today do we have the data, published by the Office for National Statistics. Its figures show…

– Payment to Brussels, net of rebate and money returned to the UK: £9.4 billion a year, or £181 million a week.

– Payment to Brussels, net of rebate: £13.9 billion a year, or £267 million a week.

– Gross payment to Brussels: £18.9 billion a year, or £363 million a week.

As far as the average voter is concerned, £181 million and £350 million both sound like a lot of money. Either would get the point across, with the same force. So why did Boris use the gross figure, when the convention is to use the net figure? Simple: it drives the other side quite loopy. They threaten to sue. And as they explode with anger, the discussion turns to how much of British money is spent to the EU – a conversation subject that suits Brexiteers. This tactic worked so effectively in the referendum because their opponents rose to the bait every time.

Was the £350m figure misleading? Yes, if it was spoken of as the net figure. Would the lower figure have been fairer, and got the point across just as well? Of course. But it would not have been as effective as a campaigning tool, because it would have generated less fuss.

In elections, politicians frequently use valid-but-misleading figures, seeing if the other side will make a fuss and take the bait. It’s seen as rough and tumble of democracy: if one side misleads, the other side can call them liars and voters decide. In 2005, Gordon Brown falsely accused the Tories of planning to ‘cut’ £35 billion a year from services. Here’s the poster. A young Nick Robinson was at the poster launch, for ITV. and made his name by pointing out that this is a lie (rather than an exaggeration). The Tories were planning to increase spending, just not by as much as Labour. Brown thought that, given he thought he’d outspend the Tories by £35bn, he could then say they’d cut. To compound the lie, Labour said this was “the equivalent of sacking every nurse, every teacher and every doctor’ in the country. As Robinson said: “you can’t cut money that hasn’t been spent”.  But this is an election: a more competent Tory party could have exposed the lie. Interestingly, Blair used the Vote Leave logic: a row over a figure is good for hype. Blair later told Robinson that he was glad about the fuss, as it kept attention on the subject of Tory cuts.

No one accused Labour of winning that election due to that £35 billion figure, in the way that Vote Leave’s vanquished rivals bang on about the £350 million now. No one wrote ‘post truth’ books after that election. No one threatened to sue. It was a more grown-up age.

Is it valid to use a gross figure, the £350m figure, for EU payments in public debate? Of course. The UK is mandated to send that cash over: whether or not the rebate is applied at source is semantic. What happens is that we spend X, and our rebate is Y – giving us a net Z. But to say that we spend Z – ie, just give the net figure – would also be misleading as it disguises an important truth.

The UK does not control that ‘rebate’. It comes in forms of expenditure (farms, etc) that the UK cannot control. If you pay a guy £10 a week and he buys you £8 of things he thinks you need every week, how much are you paying him? £10 or £2? That’s what this boils down to. Both gross and net figures are valid. And while UK payments to the EU are obligatory, the rebate is a discretionary grant – as George Osborne once admitted.  So to talk about the net figure can be misleading. Any single sentence summary of this situation will not be the whole story. As is so often true in politics.

Gross figures are used all the time. Staff salaries are paid net of tax, yet everyone refers to their gross pay. And what about taxation? That is routinely referred to in gross terms: ie, what we pay in. The lower-paid half of the country gets all of its money back (and more) in public services. So their net contribution is negative (and rightly so). But people still talk about the sum that’s taken from them. Those who advocate lower taxes emphasise – as Boris does – control. That people spend their own money better on themselves than the government does on their behalf. So the gross figure is, obviously, the most relevant.

If the emphasis is on control – as the Vote Leave campaign was – then the gross figure matters arguably more than the net figure.

Boris Johnson used a trick, but a valid trick. Given potency by the other side’s behaviour. After various pressure, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority himself belatedly weighed in on the debate a few weeks ago, saying Boris was wrong to quote this figure. In his opinion. But it’s only one opinion.

Another opinion is as follows: that has wrong because the real gross figure is £363 million a week. Let’s see if Boris can be made to offer an apology.

Club World

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Conservatives’ current head-in-the-sand mentality reminds me a lot of what happens sometimes when people are in a club, and the club becomes so big and important in their lives that everything is measured against it, and success means doing well in the club. If you become president of the club, for example, then you consider that the pinnacle of your life, and you think you’re a great success — even if that club has ceased to matter to most other people in the outside world. The club is your milieu, and nothing outside it matters very much.

That’s the impression I get with the Conservative leadership candidates. It’s all about doing well within the world of the club, and very little to do with how that club is doing in the rest of the world. Even Rory Stewart’s walkabouts into ‘real world’ territory are all about positioning himself within the club.

(And the ‘club’ here isn’t even the Conservative Party in general. It doesn’t include the membership, and certainly not the voters. It’s the MPs, and the support staff. Even the civil service and the press lobby are more a part of this club than the party members.)

The only outside thing that can matter in such cases is if it’s a sports club, and you have this traditional rivalry with another club, a rivalry that outdoes everything else you do, and even if your club’s results have been tanking for a long time, it doesn’t matter if the other club is also tanking by just as much, or more. Glory is maintained because Yesterday’s Heroes United are still ahead of Yesterday’s Heroes City.

Consider, for example, this tweet after the EU elections from the chairman of the Conservative Party: