Be careful with historical values

For some reason, I can’t seem to restrain myself from intervening in discussions of UK history being conducted by Americans. My contributions are not always appreciated.

It does seem to me, though, that there is a serious problem of the retrospective application of modern values to the past. The most recent example I came across was a debate over the succession to King Henry I, which resulted in a civil war between Henry’s daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen.


Many participants assume that Matilda was the rightful heir because she was Henry’s only surviving child and named as successor in Henry’s will, thus making Stephen a usurper. Sadly, things are not so simple. There are four principles of succession involved here., as well as other considerations:

1. Primogeniture was more Norman than Saxon;
2. Selection by council of the best man to defend the kingdom had put Harold Godwinson on the throne in the second half of the 11th century, while
3. Victory in battle had made The Conqueror himself king.
4. The power of a king to will the succession was disputed even as late as the 16th century.

There was precedent for a woman to rule (but not necessarily be crowned queen regnant) - most importantly, Aethelflaed of Mercia. However, war was a regular feature of life at the period and female war leaders were rare.


In short, we have to avoid the error of supposing that primogeniture was well enough established to be universally accepted in the early 12th century, and even more so that those who denied it were by definition rebels.

Whodunnit? Richard III, Henry VII or A N Other?

In all the ballyhoo surrounding the "discovery" of bequest of a "chain which was of Edward V" in the will of a distant relative of James Tyrell, there has been a great deal more heat (and impoliteness) than light.

To begin with, the mention of the chain has been known about for several years, and nobody made a fuss before. This is because it cannot offer conclusive evidence either way as to the fate of the Princes in The Tower.

It could have been a false attribution. If there are enough guaranteed pieces of the true cross to make several trees, why should this not be another fake relic?

It could have been taken from a body by a murderer. Murderers do sometimes take souvenirs, though these days at least they tend not to publish the fact.

Equally well, if the princes were smuggled abroad in mufti it would have been a serious giveaway to be found wearing royal jewellery or carrying the same in one’s luggage. To give it to one’s smuggler out of gratitude, or to hand it over to him for safe keeping, would have been the most natural thing in the world.

Ricardians and Henricans can bore each other to tears with this. The press can post as many lurid headlines as they like.

It can and does prove precisely nothing.

How to stimulate economic growth in the UK

 

1. Increase the payroll tax by £25 billion, ensuring employers need to shed workers.
2. Increase the minimum wage substantially, ensuring employers hesitate to hire new workers.
3. Increase job protection rights from day one of employment, meaning if a worker proves unsuitable he can’t be dismissed even though he is costing a firm money
4. Ban new oil and gas production.
5. Set the world a good example by an impossibly early arbitrary target for net zero, ensuring UK manufacturers’ costs are too high to be competitive.
6. Insist that car makers produce more electric vehicles than anyone wants to buy, ensuring closure of car factories
7. Introduce an inheritance tax that will eliminate family farms and ensure productive agricultural land all passes into the hands of financial institutions
8. Do the same for family businesses to ensure that they are also driven out and take all their capacity for innovation with them.
9. Impose a sales tax on private school fees, forcing some school closures, transfer of pupils to the state education system, loss of teachers’ jobs, loss of invisible exports (foreign pupils).
10. Describe all the above as a budget for growth.

After such an intensive stimulus package, you can act surprised and complain that you are not satisfied with the next set of growth figures.

Upon Which Foot is the Shoe?

The USA cannot be miserable at its own majority choice, can it? The Democrats are upset, but they can't, at the moment, claim to represent the USA. In fact, being disabused of the notion that they do represent the USA will, in the end, prove a good thing for some Democrats, as they are forced to recognize that they can't go on simply cancelling those who disagree, and must actually learn to talk to them.

The USA, at least, has the consolation of getting the president that the majority of voters wanted. That is, at least, a democratic choice.

For the time being, on this side of the Atlantic, we are contending with a freak result produced by a defective electoral system, with very little input from the people. (34% of the low turnout vote = supermajority).

I find myself irked by every mention of the word 'mandate' by a Labour minister. UK people certainly voted for change, in that they knew who they wanted to throw out, but who they wanted instead was obscure to say the least. What we are getting now is more partisan than popular.

But we had an opportunity to improve our voting system not that long ago, and we rejected it. It's too late to complain about the rules of the game, but we might take the opportunity to prevent repetitions of this travesty. We won't, of course, because the temporary beneficiaries of a broken system cannot envisage the day when the shoe may be on the other foot.

This is the price we pay for an adversarial party system. Julius Nyerere argued for a one-party state in Tanzania on the grounds that the country lacked the talent needed to waste some on opposition.

 
Loyal opposition, however, which holds the government to account without undermining the state, is an important check upon absolutism. But a loyal opposition has to show by argument why the government has erred, not just throw up its hands in horror.

Aesop's Fable #44: The Frogs Who Desired a King

Some people wonder why the frogs ever asked Zeus for a king in the first place. Were they not happy enough in their original free state? What was so bad about gambolling around in their pond with no-one to tell them what to do?

Most of the philosophers who have considered the state of nature concluded that it was a pretty rough and ready state of affairs, in which the strong preyed upon the weak and the weak had no redress because there was no system of justice. Rousseau, by contrast, imagined a noble savage who lived in tune with a natural world that he understood and in which he felt comfortable.

Well the frogs weren’t comfortable, or they would not have asked for someone to be in charge, who could act as a fount of justice.

Now, when Zeus threw a log into the pond, the frogs didn’t realise what they had been given. This was a nominal chief citizen, who wouldn’t actually do anything, but in the name of King Log, the frogs could have organised for themselves an elementary legal system to prevent bullying and exploitation, while in other respects remaining free. They could even have given the log a name: Emperor Claudius, for example, or perhaps Joe Biden.

But no, The frogs were not satisfied. A King ought to do things. A king ought to be able actively to improve the livelihood of the citizens. Well of course, who would not want that? Did no philosopher frog say, “Hang on a minute, chaps, the power to make moral choices may just as easily result in bad as in good?”

And so the frogs discarded King Log, who had been quite a good king, all things considered, and demanded a replacement. Zeus sent a water snake (or heron, in some versions) which began to devour the frogs.

The frogs complained to Zeus that this wasn’t the sort of king they’d wanted at all, but Zeus replied that they must live (or perhaps die) by the consequences of their own actions.

And Emperor Claudius was deposed and succeeded by Emperor Nero.

The Great Society

 

The day the greatness of a country is judged by the transient matter of who happens to in charge of its government will be a sad one for the world.

The capricious Fates may hand over a great country to administration by a lunatic, an incompetent, a hypocrite a fraud, a megalomaniac or a liar. A cult of personality may be built upon any of these shaky foundations, without elevating anything but the image of the leader in the eyes of the credulous.

We know, whenever we see a historically great country currently ruled by a grasping, mendacious inadequate, just which direction the appearance of greatness is flowing.

I find it preferable to remain within the parameters set by Plato. Anyone who would put himself forward for election is unworthy of being elected. The more a candidate desires election, the less suitable for office he is, until you reach someone who is so desperate for power that he should ideally be marooned on some uninhabited island where his arrogance can only damage himself.

Political leaders in general vary in talent on a scale ranging between slightly more intelligent than the desk at which they sit, to, at worst (as we used to say in Yorkshire), as bent as a nine bob note. (This in an era when the smallest currency note was ten shillings).

The quality of a country’s civilisation, society, openness to new thinking, preservation of civil and human rights without the need for compulsion or oppression, make a country great. Its achievements in arts, sciences, literature, philosophy, and the continuing quality of thought; its ability to educate without indoctrinating and disagree without enmity, make it great.

The greater a society is, the less it needs to tell all a sundry about its greatness.

A country cannot achieve greatness without agreement on, and commitment to, fundamental principles. You cannot achieve greatness by alienating a vast proportion of your domestic population. If you can only win an argument by force, suppressing all opposition, then you cannot win an argument.

Anyone who believes that the best way to establish the truth is to burn heretics is not great; he is a fool.

Editors - Angels or Devils?

When you encounter an editor for the first time, you (author) do not know what to expect. You let an editor get away with messing up your work because you want to be published. You know perfectly well that the story you wrote was better before the editor got his hands on it, but because you are afraid of not being published, you grin and bear it. No, it’s not you, it’s me. Sorry.

Then you will come across a fantastic editor who has ideas that can actually improve your work. There are some of these out there. At the very least, they will ask questions like, “Does the protagonist really have to be an Air Force reservist?” Hell, yeah!

At best, they will say, “Why does MacAndrew give the time-travellers his watch?” That was a brilliant question, as I instantly recognized, and my rewrite made the story publishable.

And then you may be unfortunate enough to encounter the editor who wishes he had written the story himself and proceeds to attempt to do so, line by line. By this time, we hope you have found enough spine to be able to say, “My name at the top; my words underneath. Write your own story.” Of course, you lose the sale. It depends on you whether you think it was worth it.

Ageing Wines

I think we should distinguish between changes in quality that occur naturally over time, even if a wine is correctly bottled and stored, and changes that occur because a wine is incorrectly bottled and / or stored. The former is meant to happen; the latter isn’t.

The initial reactive change after bottling is mostly due to the oxygen present in the headspace, which is the air between the wine and the cork. When that oxygen is used up, only very small amounts will be able to seep through a cork in a bottle that is stored correctly, on its side. Change will now be gradual.

More air will get in if a synthetic cork is used, which is why you don’t see such corks in expensive wines that are meant to be laid down for ageing.

None will get past a screw top, which is why you see screw tops on wines sold young which rely on retaining their initial fruitiness rather than being allowed to develop character by ageing.

“Gone bad” may, however, be the result of excessive ageing. I once laid down a case of an already very nice Vouvray (white) that was expected to be perfect in another four years. I then forgot, and left it eight. The result was considerably worse than I’d started with – vin très ordinaire indeed!

Had it been a half-decent red (the only kind I can afford) I might have got away with it because the best drinking age for these is significantly older than whites. It is however a matter of taste, since the character of the wine is changing all the time and you need to discover the character that you like best, or rely on experts to tell you what you ought to like best. Of course, if you don’t have a cellar, you can only buy the wine at an age when somebody else has decided it’s satisfactory for sale anyway.

If an old red looks brown it may well be on its way to vinegar, but it may still have value to people who like to look at old bottles rater than drink their contents.

Only marginally relevant, but single malt whisky is usually aged in the cask, not in the bottle. Hence when it is bottled, they stick on a label saying “12 years old” rather than “2012” because its still considered 12 years old, even if it takes you a couple of years to drink it. This is not to say it won’t change in the bottle, but that’s not meant to be the object of the exercise. If people find some Islay single malts undrinkable, it’s most likely because they bought a heavily-peated variety when they didn’t mean to. All such bottles should be donated to someone who is more likely to appreciate them.

Me, for instance.

"The Plot" by Nadine Dorries - A Review

I understand why Nadine Dorries’ book “The Plot”, an account of the machinations that removed two UK Prime Ministers from office without recourse to the electorate, should have received a poor overall average rating from reviewers.

We all think we know what happened to Boris Johnson. We think we know what happened to Liz Truss.

Many wanted to believe that Johnson was a liar who believed in one rule for others and another for himself, because they opposed his policy on Brexit and wanted to believe that made him a bad man. The mainstream media certainly made sure that every last ounce of bad publicity was squeezed out of Partygate.

Many believe that Truss crashed the economy, because the media told us so. That she contrived to do this while UK economic growth was topping the G7 in two out of three post-Brexit years can be quietly brushed under the carpet. The left assured us that the economy had been crashed and, unlike the right, they never lie.

So a book aiming to set the record straight is immediately faced with a wall of opposition from powerful people and from general perception. It’s surprising, in the circumstances, that it should make it into print at all.

Then, naturally, it will be read by a lot of people determined to pick holes in it, as well as downvoted by people who haven’t even read it. I mean, who wants to be told that they have been played for fools and that our cherished democracy can be twisted to achieve personal ends, no matter what the public wants?

I cannot claim an open mind. I always suspected that Johnson was brought down by Remainer desire for revenge on the man who personified Brexit. I couldn’t quite work out how they had done it, or how quite so many turkey-like Conservative MPs had been persuaded to vote for Christmas.

I did always think that the Partygate fuss was blown way out of proportion when Currygate was a more serious case of the same sort, and largely ignored. I never expected The Privileges Committee investigation to be unbiased, and was unsurprised when it wasn’t. What I didn’t grasp was that the media would swallow wholesale the nonsense being leaked from Downing Street, or that the leaks themselves were part of an orchestrated programme and not merely random.

“The Plot” makes no pretence of impartiality. Nadine was part of Team Boris, and proud of it. But she was a cabinet minister and in a position to know a great deal more than the average reader, as well as to see the frantic paddling beneath the surface that marked the apparently serene progress of the swan of state.

I found this book an enthralling read. For me, it supplied the missing pieces in a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.

No doubt others will dismiss it as just another conspiracy theory. And we all know that nine out of ten alleged conspiracies are really just SNAFUs.

On the other hand. We do have to remember that the tenth one really is a conspiracy. And it suits the interests of conspirators if everyone believes that the tenth was just a SNAFU, too.

What's the problem with the ECHR?

It probably gets boring being the European Court of Human Rights. 

I mean, it’s not as much fun as being the Chinese Court of Human Rights, is it? There just isn’t enough to do.

So you have to think of new human rights, such as the right to be protected against climate change, or the right to be put up in a five-star hotel if you are an illegal immigrant / economic migrant, but not if you are a homeless indigenous person. 

Before long, you’ve made yourself the government of Europe! Who knew it was so easy to take over from elected governments?

Wasn't Scottish independence supposed to be the price for Brexit? Why then did the SNP poll badly?

I think the first thing to grasp is that Brexit fundamentally altered the case for Scottish independence. You have to remember that Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, not for Scotland to remain alone if the rest of the UK left.

When both Scotland and the rest of the UK were in the EU, there would have been no customs border between the two, even after independence. After Brexit, for Scotland to rejoin the EU would have meant a customs border applicable to two thirds of Scottish trade.

It would also have precluded continuance of the UK Free Travel Area, since there is free movement of people inside the EU and the FTA would have negated any UK policy to control immigration. Obviously, the UK would not allow this. (Ireland was able to remain in the CTA because as an old EU member it was not obliged to join Schengen; new members are obliged to join).  In other words, Scots could no longer expect to move south freely in pursuit of economic opportunities.

New members of the EU (including Scotland) are also expected to have managed their own currency competently for two years and to commit to joining the Euro. As an old member, the UK had an exemption. Scotland has no currency of its own, nor any separate central bank. Using sterling as a foreign currency would be possible, but would not qualify Scotland for EU admission.

New members of the EU are expected to achieve a fiscal deficit target that Scotland would need about ten years of austerity to achieve, according to the Wilson Report. This would be particularly acute if the UK immediately cut off Barnett funding, stopped military expenditure in Scotland, and declined to continue the currency union, all of which would have been perfectly legitimate.

Thus, it was improbable that an independent Scotland could make a swift return to the EU, and independence would mean standing alone for at least a decade.

In spite of this, the SNP continued to agitate for independence and to neglect the day job of actually running an efficient devolved administration. The results eventually became too obvious to ignore.

Additionally, after the coalition with the Greens, the SNP began to pursue a whole agenda of politically correct policies which did not resonate with the Scottish electorate at large.

To this you have to add the impact of various scandals. The burdens accumulated until they could no longer be borne.

But I think you are wrong to see the Labour Party as pro-Brexit. Starmer was one who campaigned for a second referendum, and is still not trusted to not make unnecessary concessions to the EU in trade negotiations.

In short, Brexit did not figure highly in the list of reasons for voters abandoning the SNP.

The UK General Election

It does seem remarkable that 2019 was Labour’s worst GE since 1932 and interpreted as a public desire for a changed Labour Party. Getting even fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019 produces Labour’s best result ever and is interpreted as a mandate to implement change in the country.

I fear that Apathy is now the largest single party, polling better than 40%. Put that together with two thirds of those who did vote getting not only a government they didn’t vote for, but one with a huge majority, and overcoming the sense of powerless and disillusion among the electorate will be the hardest change that Labour has to make.

Will a Starmer government try to rejoin the EU?

I am among the first of those who would not trust Keir Starmer to put the interests of the UK before the rose-coloured spectacles view of the EU. He was a leader of those who sought a second referendum in defiance of the 2016 verdict of the people. He is, therefore, among those who know better than the people; in other words, no democrat.

There is a significant and influential body of thought that determinedly regards Brexit as a disaster, despite the absence of any evidence for that judgement. These people don’t need evidence; it would only tell them things they prefer not to know. It is enough, for them, that they wanted to stay in the EU and the people decided otherwise. They are resolutely blind to the facts: that the UK’s exports to the EU have already recovered to pre-Brexit levels, that the UK economy has grown faster than Germany since Brexit, and that we are attracting much of the foreign investment that might have been expected to flow to the EU, because we are less concerned to protect existing producers and their status quo methods from new technology and competition. In short, the effect of Brexit is too small to detect in the context of the aftermaths of Covid and Ukraine.

I suspect that Starmer might be emotionally akin to those recusants who still write tediously repetitive letters to The Times to explain (without evidence) that Brexit has failed, the editors who unaccountably continue to publish them, and those columnists who take the same view. I really only read this stuff to remind myself of the proverb about those who will not see. I really should change my newspaper, but I keep hoping they’ll grow out of this.

Fortunately, the facts will interpose between even the most rigid EU ideologue and the behaviour suggested by the questioner. There is, of course, no way back to the series of exemptions that had already made our position within the EU peripheral years before we decided to leave. The UK is now a third country, like any other, and would need to follow the protocol for new members.

The opinion polls that suggest there is majority public support for rejoining the EU take an enormous hit as soon as respondents are informed that joining as a new member means replacing the pound by the euro and accepting the EU’s ridiculous one-size-fits-all monetary policy.

The numbers take another hit when people are informed that free movement of people would be reinstituted.

And that the EU would be allowed to resume their destruction of British fish stocks.

And that we would have to undo all the bilateral and multilateral trade deals that we have achieved since Brexit and throw away the opportunities that they offer.

The UK would also have to reverse the repeal of 1,000 EU laws that it has already achieved and pass thousands of new ones that the EU has promulgated since we left. While leavers deplore the UK government’s lethargy in scrapping economically-damaging left-over EU legislation, from the EU’s point of view we have failed to keep up with their relentless passion for minutely-detailed regulation and bureaucracy and have become deplorably lax.

And do remember that the national veto has not existed in the vast bulk of policy areas since the Treaty of Lisbon, no matter what some EU enthusiasts seem to believe. If the EU passes a bad law, you still have to enact it unamended. In effect, our parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp.

But, of course, that means our mollycoddled politicians would be able to give up their pathetic attempts to think for themselves and resume the comfort blanket of blaming the EU for every badly-judged new rule instead. So we can’t say that nobody would benefit. The politicians would be paid to do nothing.

And you thought they were pretty good at that already? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

Identity Politics

 There is an unfortunate tendency in the UK to import social movements from the US, where society, and history, is very different.

Amongst these tendencies has been the substitution of identity politics for community politics. Instead of everyone uniting for the common good, this philosophy incites competitive victimhood amongst arbitrary groupings, focussing on what divides society (or can be made to divide it) rather than on what unites us. The foolish assumption is, that all people sharing a particular common characteristic are the same and have the same problems, needs and complaints.

The secondary, even more insidious, message is that non-members of the said arbitrary group have historically cherished enmity to its members and continue to discriminate against them today.

I cannot speak to the relevance of such thinking to The USA, though it seems to me that it can hardly be constructive anywhere. I do believe, however, that having crossed the Atlantic and found themselves largely irrelevant to British society, such movements have focussed on exaggerating any problems that can be found in order to justify their own continued existence.

Moreover, by taking the sort of public protest action that creates maximum annoyance and irritation to the uninvolved general public, they are succeeding in creating, by way of backlash, precisely the problems against which they supposedly protest.

I am reminded that, over a century ago, Booker T. Washington pointed out what one might today regard as the beginnings of the race relations industry. There were people, he said, who made it their business to complain about problems, but did not actually want them solved, because the problems provided them with influence and income as protesters.

An Election is Announced

(With acknowledgements to Sydney Carter's "Down Below".)


Well you’re working in the dark, when you vote
Not like walking in the park, when you vote
All the bastards lie to you
And you ‘ates ‘em through and through
And they won’t do nowt fer you, when you vote

Oh, they say that things will change, when you vote
Over policies wide-ranged, when you vote
But the fact is you’ll be caught
And your hopes will come to naught
And the only change is short, when you vote.

Oh, they say they’ll turn the page, when you vote
It’s the start of a new age, when you vote
But it’s goin’ to piss you off
When some new throats starts to quaff
And it’s new snouts in the trough, when you vote.

There ain't nobody to trust, when you vote
Cos the bleedin’ systems bust, when you vote
They’re supposed to work for you
But there ain’t one as ‘as a clue
And the truth cannot break through, when you vote.

But we’ll all just go along, and we’ll vote
By the nose be led 'eadlong, ‘til we vote
Then we find the bright new way
Looks a lot like yesterday
And the bastards get to stay, when you vote.

Ladies Day at Perth

It was Ladies' Day at Perth Races on Thursday. You might have been forgiven for thinking you had gatecrashed a Cambridge May Ball. Things have changed, evidently, since I last attended one of these events. 

 

A very high proportion of the gentlemen were wearing three-piece suits! 

 A very high proportion of the ladies were (almost) wearing cocktail dresses, and were well-provided with stiletto heels for walking on grass. I kid you not. 

 Me? Norfolk Jacket (aged about 57 years), Panama Hat (aged about 57 days). Nobody else wore anything resembling the former; two or three of the latter. 

O tempora! O mores! 

But there were some nice horses.

Pantsing Revisited

In the early days of aviation, the newly-invented aircraft had few, if any, instruments, and those they had were unreliable. Early aviators therefore followed the advice of horsemen, who had never had any instruments but their own bodies, and in particular their seat, from which to derive information about how well their horse was going. This meant “Flying by the seat of your trousers” or “pants” in US English meant using your own judgement about how your aircraft was flying.

In the early days of writing, authors had few guidelines except perhaps basic grammar. They wrote how they liked. There was no formula for success, so some succeeded and others didn’t, assuming we are to judge success by popularity.

The increasing popularity of literature as entertainment led to the serialisation of novels in monthly magazines, and authors were obliged to make each chapter interesting, but not necessarily to follow any structure. The crucial thing was never to miss a deadline for delivering an episode to the publisher. This meant paying attention to what was going on now, and letting future chapters take care of themselves.

Later, literature was subjected to analysis and structural forms were identified. Any story had to jump through a series of hoops in order to be considered good. You needed to know about hooks, character arcs, try / fail cycles, etc. You could go to college and be taught creative writing.

Now, some people consider that creativity cannot be taught. What you are learning on a course, they say, is mannerism. You are being asked to ape the modern masters of writing in the same way that the mannerist painters of the post-Renaissance era were taught to imitate the style of Titian or Raphael.

Such writers like to start a tale and see where it takes them, rather than planning out the whole story in advance and then writing it. Those who follow their own instincts are writing’s heirs to the old aviators who flew by the seat of their pants. They are vulgarly known as pantsters and their methods (or lack of method) is called pantsing.

And sometimes it works, and sometimes they come up with something that is highly original. And sometimes they get stuck and can’t even finish. A very few of them will make a major breakthrough. The majority will probably struggle to make money with any consistency, whereas those who follow the ‘rules’ will probably stand a better chance of a regular income. Even they can’t guarantee it, though.

The Prophets of Baal - Audiobook

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Audiobooks

What percentage of GDP should we be spending on defence?

This primitive form of budgeting is essentially targeting the wrong measurement because targeting the right measurement involves too much effort. Even so, differences in counting methods are going to make comparisons between countries unreliable. Not only will some countries classify a given item as defence expenditure, or as internal security, industrial support, technological research expenditure, or whatever according to taste or tradition, but some countries count GDP by output and others by expenditure. The latter inconsistency makes a big difference if governments pay for work that is not done, as happened during the pandemic. So people who advocate such targeting seem to believe that if we express an unreliable figure as a percentage of another unreliable figure, it somehow becomes meaningful at the margin when we are deciding whether a country has spent 1.9% or 2% of its GDP on defence.

Even if it were easy to calculate defence spending as a proportion of national income; what is difficult is to calculate the effectiveness of the spending. I seem to recall that The UK Ministry of Defence employs more administrators than armed forces. Meanwhile it has for decades had absurdly profligate procurement methods. There seem to be innumerable departments, all of which are entitled to demand that a particular piece of kit should be modified in this or that manner, in case of that or this eventuality, so that by the time the kit is actually delivered, several years late and many millions over budget, it has become an expensive jack of all trades, master of none, when it could have been on time, on budget and a master of one. Like the NHS, defence spending has become a sponge that soaks up all the money that is thrown at it whilst simultaneously contriving to produce less and less effective results.

Tactical defence today requires a lot of cheap kit that works all the time, not a little expensive kit that works some of the time when its hugely complicated folderols can be bothered. Consider the impact of drones upon modern warfare. Take a piece of kit that costs next to nothing and blow up something hideously expensive. Take a piece of kit that you can make in a week and blow up something that took several years to build. Figure out how you can get more ammunition when you fired off your entire reserves or sent them as aid to Ukraine. Take a little time to work out why migrants don’t find empty army barracks to be acceptable accommodation (after you’ve figured out why the barracks were empty in the first place). Find some way of noticing that if you can afford an aircraft carrier you need to be able to afford aircraft to sail on it, because it’s not much use without.

And, having done all that, you will be in a better state than if you had met a nominal percentage target for expenditure.

Dialogue in Film and TV

I like well written dialogue.

I like it even more when the actors put the stress in a sentence where the writer intended them to put it. I suppose this is really the fault of the director for letting the actors get away with mistakes. I frequently find myself articulating the interruptions that I feel the director should have made.

If I can remember several lines from the film, in most cases it means the dialogue was good, though in some unfortunate cases it means it was memorably bad.

I like it more still if I don’t need subtitles to tell what the cast are saying. The ability to enunciate is gradually disappearing, sadly, as acting is replaced by verisimilitude (a fashionable word for mumbling). I am not deaf, but I’d often be happier if the film was in French or Italian because the actors would be forced to enunciate better, and I’d have a better chance of understanding them. As a writer, though not yet of film scripts, sadly, I don’t like my work being mangled in the delivery.

One thing that we lack as writers is the ability to transmit our voices as sound. This means we have to communicate expression, stress, and intonation in other ways. Interestingly, one of the things I learned in preparing my audiobook, was that occasionally things that seem to work in text don’t work when you read aloud. I have great difficulty tolerating text-to-speech software, which I suppose does not help. And I can tolerate grammar software for missed commas, but I don’t want my voice standardised, thank you very much.

So, I think it’s an important part of our job to leave as little room for misunderstanding and confusion as possible.

"The Prophets of Baal" Audiobook Pending

 

I am happy to report that a major exercise to produce an author-narrated audiobook of "The Prophets of Baal" has been completed.

The recording worked out a tad short of nineteen hours for approximately 163,000 words. This averages about 143 words per minute, as delivered to the publisher, which I hope listeners will find a satisfactory storytelling speed.

This week, I have received confirmation that the recording passed quality control and the audiobook received approval for release to retailers. I understand that it may take a couple of weeks to become available, and I will let you know when it does.

In the unlikely event that anyone cannot wait to hear a sample of my reading style, you can always check out the recordings of Yorkshire poetry on my YouTube channel.

What do you say about people who use democratic freedom to end democracy? (Quora)

 

This is an old, and complex, question.

It is hard enough to define democracy. Even supporters of the democratic principle have been known to confuse it with the tyranny of the majority. Such a restricted democracy implies the freedom to agree with the majority but not to dissent from it, which is no true freedom at all.

A true democracy implies that freedoms of thought, speech, belief (religious or other), and so on pertain to all citizens and no-one has the right to constrain such freedoms except at the point where they harm, or impinge severely upon the rights of, another citizen or citizens. By such a criterion there exist today very few, if any, true democracies. 

The key requirement of a true democracy is tolerance. This is not an easy concept to explain, and far less easy to practice. It requires patience, understanding, and an acceptance that one is not necessarily always right. It requires one to overcome assorted logical fallacies, especially including ad hominem, and to concede that criticism may be valid, rather than to resort to bombast and abuse when one runs out of reasons. 

Relatively few people today even possess the capacity for reasoned discussion, as opposed to emotional argument. Many people believe in pursuing those of contrary opinion by vilification, harassment, restraint of trade, destruction of property and even physical injury or worse. These people have little or no respect for democracy, or indeed for any view except their own. Often they are monomaniac and incapable of contextualising their own particular passion. They declare themselves the law, the judge, the jury and the exactors of punishment. In short, these people are intolerant, not tolerant, and lack a fundamental grasp of what it means to live in a democracy. 

The problem with this, as has been pointed out by philosophers going back at least to Plato, is that in a conflict between tolerance and intolerance, the latter always wins. Plato believed that all democracies would end in tyranny, which is the worst form of government, because complete freedom of the individual implies legitimising action to restrict the freedom of others. 

Karl Popper is perhaps the best known of those who have discussed the paradox of tolerance. He concluded that a tolerant society could not tolerate intolerance without planting the seeds of its own destruction. Some have quite rightly argued that this makes a tolerant society intolerant (that is, of intolerance). However, that is why we call it a paradox. 

The problem is always going to be where to draw the line. The secretly intolerant, even those who profess themselves liberal, are always going to want the line drawn fairly tightly around their own point of view. The openly intolerant want to enforce their own point of view on everyone else. 

The best answer is a clear understanding of the concept of harm. Tolerance ends where significant harm to others begins. Significant harm does not include hurt feelings or taking offence. Significant harm does not include getting the worst of a rational argument, or being obliged to assert that rationality does not apply to questions where ones own beliefs are challenged. 

I have described above the extent to which some people today believe they are entitled to take the “right to protest”. Peaceful protest is no longer the norm. Intimidation (by behaviour, chanting, placards etc.) is common. The intolerant arrogate to themselves the right to threaten, damage property, disrupt legitimate activities of others, incite violence and so on. There exist no such rights in a free society, and these people are all ignorantly taking democracy down the road to destruction that Plato predicted. 

But those who exploit the tyranny of the majority in order to restrict the legitimate rights of others by law are no better. The fanciful declaration that anything contradicting fashionable moral orthodoxy is “hate speech” is an egregious example of legislative myopia that also cuts the foundations from under democracy. 

If a citizen today must self-censor the expression of his peaceful views because he fears retaliation, either by thugs or by the authorities (who either themselves practise or have yielded to thuggery), then he is not a citizen of a democracy.

History - An Agreed Fable?

Napoleon, of course, was living at the same time that the Romantic Movement was reinventing history and turning it into something literally fabulous.

In particular, in Scotland at this time, Sir Walter Scott was writing the Waverley Novels, in which assorted historical gangsters such as Rob Roy McGregor were turned into loveable Robin Hood style rogues, and the nasty, brutish and short lives of Highland clansmen became rural idylls with hills thrown in. A fictional 13th century Scotland that had never existed was called retrospectively into being and some Norman robber barons, including a murderer called Robert de Brus, (anglicised to Bruce), were reinvented as patriotic Scots.

At this time also, a Scottish industrialist invented the modern short kilt as a suitable garment for workers in the new factories, the army decided that this invention was a suitable uniform for soldiers and adopted it, and the idea that each clan had woven a different tartan into their great kilts or plaids, (a sort of long blanket that was wrapped around the waist and then up over the shoulder and which doubled as a daytime overcoat and night bedding), was invented as one of the first ever tourist scams. Nobody seemed to notice that the science of chemical dyes had been pushed back a few centuries in history to allow this phenomenon.

Now, this was all great fun, as long as it was only used to boost the economy and fool the Sassenachs. (Which by the way was the original Gaelic Highlander’s term for the Saxon (actually mainly Angle and Briton) lowlanders who lived south of Stirling, not in England), and who wouldn’t have been seen dead in Highland attire.) But like many tellers of tall tales, the romantics talked themselves into believing their own fiction. Today the attire that was never worn even north of the Highland Line in antiquity, or south of the Highland Line at all, has been adopted as the national costume, and even some people who live here think that William “Wallace” (anglicised name) went around in late 18th century clothing.

So, in terms of the politics of his age, Bonaparte was correct in describing history as an agreed fable. But when you teach fables in schools for a couple of centuries, they become accepted truth, and when Hollywood takes those fables and turns them into money making blockbusters that masquerade as the truth, there are, sadly, ramifications in the real world. People believe what they want to believe, don’t they?

Civility in Discourse

 A thing one learns in the course of teaching philosophy is that the first person to lose his temper loses the argument. In former days, it was the norm that disagreement did not require incivility and that eccentric viewpoints did not make you a bad person. (Thanks to Rod Steiger for the unforgettable ad lib in “No Way to Treat a Lady”.)

When I was at Oxford, we went to hear speakers of every viewpoint. You need to hear people first hand because you absolutely cannot rely on reported speech. (A certain authoress in my part of the world has recently discovered afresh that it doesn’t matter what you said, it matters what people say you said.)

The second reason to give everybody a hearing is that you can’t answer arguments that you haven’t heard, and in live debate, you need to be able to anticipate the arguments that will be used against you. People who respond to contrary viewpoints with anger are unable to learn anything at all, and are far more likely to tear society apart than to right perceived wrongs.

Writing for The Market

I sometimes decide, in the course of writing, that an emerging story is turning out to be the sort of story that such and such a publisher might like. That’s fine as long as I like it too.

In the early years of Flame Tree, I thought my views must be pretty much aligned with their senior editor. I have been known, as a result, to write or edit with Flame Tree in mind. I managed five Flame Tree anthologies, and would effectively have disqualified myself from WotF on Flame Tree alone, had I not also been securing a number of other pro publications at the same time, including three with AE. However, latterly, Flame Tree have been bringing in outside editors, so that now I can’t sell them a story to save my life.

This is not the place to digress into politics, but I did once stand for parliament, and I still believe that I stand more or where I always did, it’s just that no political party stands there any more. Not only could I not stand for election these days, I can scarcely find anyone to vote for.

It is always possible that I have taken to writing rubbish and lost the knack that I once had. But it is more likely, I feel, that fashion and conformism are enjoying a popularity boom. I sometimes wonder whether there is a correlation with the number of students taking the sort of creative writing courses that produce the opposite of creative writing.

I don’t know, because I never took a creative writing course, but I do know that in my days at Oxford, university professors would never have clubbed together to pronounce a public “excommunication” of a colleague for “heresy” in the way they did not long ago.

I rather fear that the frontier between education and indoctrination was crossed a long time ago. When I taught philosophy, I always said that I was not concerned with what my students concluded, but with how they concluded it. If they came to me with prejudices and went away with a capacity for reasoned justification, I used to consider my job done.

I’m sorry, but I have no wish to write more of the fashionable stuff that is already churned out to excess. And luckily, I can eat without having to do so. I acknowledge that this makes me fortunate.

I remember that Monet was reduced to painting still more water lilies so he could swap them for a car service, while Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his lifetime. And yes, I have made the pilgrimage to Arles.

Islamophobia, Liberalism and Epistemophobia (from Quora)

There are people who believe that criticising Islam is Islamophobia, but such people are not liberals.

Genuine liberals, following the precepts of J S Mill’s “On Liberty”, believe in free speech. The only constraint on free speech, for Mill, is where it would result in serious harm to an individual other than the speaker. By harm, he did not mean hurt feelings or taking offence. A fortiori, he would not have included the taking of vicarious offence on behalf of someone else. Liberalism recognises no right not to be offended. If it did, then, in many cases, it would be necessary to ban speaking the truth.

Any religion is a belief system, and although the adherents of a religion may hold that their particular belief system embodies the truth, they have absolutely no right to demand that other people should believe or behave likewise.

If a religion, for example, forbids the eating of pork, adherents of that religion have no right to demand that non-adherents should abstain from pork. It may, historically, have been the case that such abstinence was justified by the hygiene standards of the day; it is so no longer, and if the only justification is an outdated religious prohibition, then it would be quite unreasonable to expect non-adherents of that religion to practice it.

Now, in describing the above problem, it might be argued that I have criticised Islam. In fact, I have also criticised Judaism, and indeed any other religion which prohibits the consumption of particular foodstuffs on the basis of historic rules. Does that criticism make me Islamophobic? Obviously not. I am not giving vent to irrational fear or dislike, I am offering rational grounds for no longer pursuing what I consider to be archaic practices. The adherents of a religion do not have to abide by what I think, any more than I have to abide by what they think.
In today’s politically-correct environment, an awful lot of people are prone to demand what they call “respect” for their point of view, but they then fail to reciprocate by displaying respect for the contrary or differing views of others. A common method of displaying that disrespect is to burn flags or damage memorials which are valued, or assumed to be valued, by their opponents. But that way lies vendetta, not reconciliation. That way lies the opposite of respect.

The “…ist” words or “…phobia” words are regularly employed as a device for preventing or ending discussion. However, since those words are intended as pejorative, those who use them appear to be reasoning, “I may criticise or abuse others, but if people criticise me, I will condemn them for being prejudiced”.

In condemning reasoned criticism of religions, we are in danger of allowing the introduction of a blasphemy law by the back door. It is not hateful to criticise. It is not disrespectful to criticise. Indeed, if a religion advocates violence or socially harmful behaviour, it is, at least arguably, a citizen’s duty to criticise it.

We should remember that stifling of dissent is not only a tool of the totalitarian, but also a barrier to progress and innovation. This world is not perfect. Anyone who believes that there is no more truth to be revealed than has already been revealed, or that no research or discoveries should be allowed that might lead people to doubt what they think they know already, is someone whose mind is closed and who does not wish for knowledge.

Such a person is epistemophobic. An irrational fear of knowledge is more of a threat to human progress than is criticism of any religion.

More about Writing Classics

Quality and marketability are not necessarily the same thing. There are at least three types of publisher.

Probably most numerous are the “More of the Same” group, who have established what sells in their market segment and are content to supply their readers with variations on that theme. There are writers who are (perfectly reasonably, since they have to eat) happy to write within these established bounds. I take this group to include the politically correct, who like to praise each other for their conformity.

Then we have the “Anybody Famous” group, who will take (or have ghost-written) works by celebrities, regardless of literary merit, because the bulk of their marketing effort has already been done without expense.

But also we have those who will at least entertain the unusual and the original. Now, these guys need to be brave, because risk precedes reward, and by definition a large proportion of risks won’t pay off. Sad to say, one of the risks is being unable to stay in business. I’ve worked with a number of those, so I do hope I’m not a Jonah. But I do believe that this group is far more likely to make a worthwhile contribution to literature, and that is probably why they do it.

The Long, Slow Decline of the EU

I have commented before on the failings of the Euro as a currency.  I have also mentioned protectionist trading and politicised economics, but in addition, I think if you put together:

1. The capture of the Commission by the big business lobbies,
2. Regulation by process rather than by outcome,
3. The precautionary regulatory principle to stifle innovation,

you have a fairly good recipe for long term relative decline.

Not so much an economy as a museum, still popular, but in the process of becoming a quaint antiquity. A bit like Rome in the 5th century AD, complete with a gradually shrinking empire.

The Basic Principles of Teaching

In a formal classroom or seminar environment, proceed as follows:

1. Tell them what you are going to be telling them.

2. Tell them.

3. Tell them what you have just told them.

It helps, especially with beginner students, if you do not expect a multiplicity of outcomes from a single lesson. Depending on the complexity of the elements concerned, consider it a success if, at the end of the lesson, the class has absorbed three solid points.

Our lessons used to be forty minutes, minus a certain amount of initial disruption as the students arrived and got themselves organised, so that made 36 minutes / (3 x 3) points = 4 minutes per iteration of each point.

That was all subconscious as far as I was concerned. I used to take my cues from class reaction as to how well a point was going over, and extemporise when I felt a point needed more explanation. I learned at a very early stage that the detailed lesson planning required of you in teacher training college would get you precisely nowhere. As the man said, "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." Or as the other man said, "Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face."

Writing a Classic

 Classics require to be written without fear.

When I was first published professionally, I joined an online forum which had many useful features, but on which you would get demands for censorship as soon as you strayed into controversial territory. (Being English, I had very little idea of how immune to criticism certain issues were in the US). You would also get quite horrendously politically-correct offerings which, to me, were almost unreadable in their sanctimony.

I well remember receiving a criticism on a story I wrote about The Albigensian Crusade, informing me I was being offensive to Catholics. I remember thinking, if modern Catholics are offended by their own church’s history, it’s going to be difficult to write about some subjects at all.

Now, one thing we know about fashionable morality is that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. It also happens that modern identity politics is so destructive of social cohesion that either it, or society, cannot last long. In the former case, no one at all will want to read today’s politically-correct writing in two decades’ time; in the latter case, there’ll be no-one to read it anyway. Already half the population or more does not want to read what well-regarded writers of today are writing because they find it insufferably puritanical or intolerant.

Classics cannot be flavour of this month. Villains need to be nasty. Insoluble problems need to be stressful situations. People need to lose as well as win. The unspeakable needs to be spoken. Otherwise, we should give up writing and take up making blancmange.

What we, as writers, must resist is the temptation to self-censor because we fear the mob. Good writing may be loved by some, hated by others, but it is never bland.

What should aspiring writers know about self-publishing books in the UK?

I’m going to assume you actually mean self-publishing and not the vanity press. The latter is expensive, not well regarded in the trade, and I personally wouldn’t use it.

I am also going to assume that you have tried getting a literary agent or submitting your work directly to publishers and have enjoyed no success. This will certainly happen if your writing is not good, but it can also happen if it is not commercial and even if it is good but can’t get through the less than perfect filtration systems that publishers employ to shield their top people from the great mass of submissions that flood in. Remember, these days half the world’s population believe they can write.

The explosion of social media and internet facilities in the last couple of decades means, provided you are willing to do the formatting required by the particular form of publication you choose, that it is not a complicated matter to publish an e-book and only slightly more complicated to turn that e-book into a print-on-demand paperback.

There is no point in my setting out a detailed list of instructions since online firms such as Amazon and Smashwords already provide such guides, and you can also download free software to help you with the formatting.

It does help if you can get some impartial beta readers to look over your work before you do this. For the purposes of finding straightforward errors, wrong punctuation, and so on, it doesn’t matter too much if these are family and friends who will do the job for nothing. For the purpose of telling you that your work needs editing, you will probably find things are different. There are writing clubs that may help for nothing; there are of course professional editors whom you will have to pay. I personally got a lot of good advice from membership of an online club where members in good standing exchanged critiques with each other.

But getting your work self-published is the beginning of the process, not the end. It may be out there, but it is invisible. The half of the world that think they can write are self-publishing alongside the relatively few people who actually can, and your book is not likely to stand out in the crowd unless you make it.

Nobody is going to market it for you. If you don’t do your own marketing, it will be unlikely your book will sell in significant numbers. Marketing is considerably harder work than self-publishing, but that’s not what you asked about.

Who is benefitting the most from the Brexit chaos? (Quora)

Are you all sitty comfybold on your toileybox earlymordy? Goodly gumdrops swill beginification.

I personobly also finding much sardonifaction in ratiocinating aborderline nincompoopdom questiposers hereabovely. One of these upsidaisies will edgeup shaking loose remaigelling braincell and fal-folollop whoopsibuttercup over EUniversal translaming. Oh yes, deep joy.

Til then, neddle abiding more quasitellification supposiaskiform, sadly.

Is Labour's new 20% tax on private education too low? Should it be 40%? (Quora)

To begin with, the Labour policy (not yet implemented) is not for a new tax, it is for the removal of VAT exemption on those public schools which operate as charities. This is not all public schools. In 2022 the government stated that around half of public schools were registered as charities. Most of the remainder will be operating as regular businesses, allowed to make profits and already paying VAT.

Charities have no shareholders, do not pay dividends and therefore do not aim for profits. In any given year they may or may not generate a surplus of income over expenditure, but all they can do with a surplus, other than hold a reserve against a year in which they make a deficit, is either to reinvest in their own fabric or activities, or else enlarge their charitable activities by providing additional public benefits such as scholarships, assisted places or co-operation with state schools to assist the facilities of the latter.

Charities are required by law to provide these public benefits and may not exclude “the poor” from the receipt of them. Pretty much by definition, such benefits are not self-financing and are effectively subsidised by those customers paying full fees for their children’s education. It is therefore not unlikely that removal of charitable status from public schools would result in cutbacks of existing public-benefit provision.

Such reductions could result in the complete loss of these services, or could throw the burden of providing them on to the state. In either case, it would reduce the operating costs of the former charitable schools. Alternatively these schools might continue to provide charitable services despite not being recognised as charities, provided they have or can still generate the necessary funds, but it seems improbable that most would be in that position.

The elimination of extended charitable work might give some schools enough margin to absorb some of the newly-imposed VAT, rather than increasing fees by the full 20%. However, it seems inevitable that the net result would be a rise in fees.

I have seen no estimates by The Labour Party of the elasticity of demand that they attribute to this market. The most well known public schools, of ancient foundation and splendid fabric, may be what they are thinking of, but they are far from typical. A significant number of public schools already operate on the margin of the industry and will therefore go under. All their pupils will probably end up transferring to the state sector. The schools that survive will in many cases lose a proportion of their customers who are on the margin of being unable to afford the present fees and will not be able to afford the increases. Their children will also end up in the state sector.

Assuming class sizes in the state sector are not allowed to increase by any significant extent, this will oblige the state to enlarge the fabric of those existing schools that are already full (and sometimes already suffering from less than ideal levels of maintenance) as well as to hire a fair proportion of the teachers being shed by the public schools. (They don’t like doing this, as many teachers who have tried to return from public school employment to state school employment can testify. It is often assumed that in going where you can find work, you are really making some sort of political statement.)

As a result, firstly a significant proportion of the estimated tax yield will not be raised at all, that is, it will not be paid by those parents returning their children to the state sector (which they were already paying for through their regular tax bills, so they won’t need to make any additional contributions).

Secondly, it means that expenditure on the state education system will have to rise to accommodate additional numbers. It cannot all be devoted to increased quality; indeed, it may turn out to be a rather small amount that can be so purposed.

Further, I have seen no acknowledgement that separate legislation would be required in Scotland and would have to pass the Scottish parliament. If such legislation were possible, there would be no cross border distortions. If it were not possible, there are some good public schools in Scotland that might attract a lot more custom.

Moreover, education is a major invisible export for the UK. Reducing the size of an export industry is not usually considered one of the smarter political decisions.

TL: DR

It is seldom a good policy to kill geese that lay golden eggs.

Old Father Time

A phone? 

People consider themselves old because they once had an old phone? 

Hey, I remember when we had a washboard, a zinc tub and a mangle. Washing machines? Newfangled nonsense.

I remember when the house water supply was one cold tap in the kitchen. 

I remember when the toilet was outside the house. 

I remember when our neighbour had the only family car in the street. 

I remember going to school on a tramcar. 

And I remember when people were just people, and nobody bothered to identify as anything but one of the people, and nobody cared what else they happened to be.

What is the general response to Nikki Haley questioning Trump’s mental health? (Quora)

Oh come on, guys. Anyone could confuse Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley. Look how similar they are. I mean, they’re both women and both their names begin with N. How is anyone supposed to tell the difference?

So what if a presidential candidate has a mental aberration and complains (mentioning her name four times, according to CNN) about how Nikki Haley refused the offer of extra security for The Capitol before January 6th 2021? We should surely cut him some slack.

Even if Nikki Haley wasn’t in Washington or in office on the said date, let alone responsible for Capitol Security.

And even if Nancy Pelosi wasn’t responsible for Capitol security either.

And even if the said candidate does want his finger on the nuclear button.

I mean, we all make the odd mistake here and there, don’t we? No big deal.

And if Nikki Haley thinks (four) little slips of the tongue constitute an unreasonable attack on her, it just shows she really isn’t a good sport.

Why doesn't the UK send JK Rowling to jail already for transphobia? (Quora)

In those parts of the world where it is still legal to express an opinion differing from the prevailing orthodoxy, there seem, these days, to be an awful lot of people who wish it were not.

Probably because they are incapable of answering criticism with rational argument, they readily resort to abuse. A very common form of abuse is labelling your critic with some neologism, usually ending in “-ist” or “-phobic”. This is intended to put an end to uncomfortable debate, by effectively declaring that people to whom such labels are attached have no right to an opinion and should be socially ostracised. Sadly, there is a reason why those employing this tactic find debate uncomfortable.

Intolerance of dissent is self-reinforcing, since unused faculties are liable to atrophy. Those who persistently refuse to engage in rational debate, and who only converse with people who agree with them, will come in time to be unable to engage in rational debate. They will declare themselves to possess a truth, but if challenged to prove it, they will have no reasons, only feelings.

In this particular case, I suspect that a very large proportion of those expressing condemnation of JKR have never troubled to read her original (widely publicised and carefully chosen) words, but rely on second-hand reports from others. Sadly, many of those others will fall into the same irrational, name-calling category as themselves, and their reports will spread a great deal more heat than light.

As mentioned above, there are plenty of places where freedom of speech is already forbidden. Before we allow our society to be numbered among them, perhaps we ought to give a little more thought to whether we really want all dissent suppressed.

Or one of these days, the voice being silenced will be our own.

Opinion Polls and EU Membership

The British, like many others, have a tendency to fall for the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. That is, we tend to confuse A happening before B with A having caused B. Here’s the popular reasoning:

1. Fact: we left the EU.

2. Fact: we have subsequently suffered cost of living difficulties.

3. Conclusion, leaving the EU caused the cost of living problems.

Problem 1. Brexit did not cause either Covid or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These two added together did, for a while, make us look like one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.

Problem 2. The Eurozone economies fared even worse as a result of these problems, and none of them, by definition, had left the EU.

Problem 3. The EU responses to both Covid and Ukraine were a lot slower than the UK responses, and eventually they had to follow us, rather than vice versa.

Problem 4. The UK is increasingly attracting foreign investment that the EU’s over-regulatory system is driving away.

Better Conclusion: 

We are faster on our feet and more decisive as an independent nation. None of our current problems would have been eased by remaining in the EU. We would simply have added to the inevitable economic problems caused by world events beyond our control. How we proceed is now up to us to decide.

In Medieval Times, People were called Lance a Lot.

Humourless types might like to point out that the spelling Lancelot only dates to 1170 and the writing of Chrétien de Troyes. 

So the name was not used a lot in medieval times, and in any case the name is French and hence 'lot' would be pronounced 'low'. 

However, Chrétien gives so little detail of Lancelot's background that it has been suggested the Lancelot myth was already known to his readers before being incorporated into "The Matter of Britain." A popular view is a (perhaps reverse) Euhemerism of the Celtic god Lugh Lonbemnech.

I bet you always wanted to know that.

Prejudice and Fallacy (Quora)

Prejudice is built into the human psyche by circumstances, upbringing and education. As a result, we perceive to be true a variety of things that our own society is accustomed to credit or accept, and find it very hard to grasp that other societies have different belief systems. We tend to project our own attitudes, including value systems, on to strangers with different backgrounds, and assume they are perversely rejecting the obvious, when all they are really doing is looking at the world the way they were brought up to look at it.

To doubt the necessary truth or justice of one or more of your society’s accepted norms, requires considerable mental agility and effort. In many societies, it also demands courage, since dissent is harshly discouraged by those who derive power, or simply mental comfort, from the status quo.

The road to enlightenment starts with asking the right questions. A great many people won’t get this far.

Learning proceeds through enquiry, exploration, investigation and logical analysis. It is here that you encounter fallacies. Fallacies are logical errors, or mistakes in the reasoning process. Many people who get as far as the reasoning process will get no further because their reasoning is insufficiently rigorous. However, they may well persuade themselves, and others who are uncritical, that they have the answers they sought.

In the modern world, many believe in cancelling, or abusing rather than reasoning. They shut themselves up in echo chambers of like-minded individuals and won’t hear contrary views. As a result, when challenged by a rational objection, they cannot answer rationally. Being convinced of their own rightness, they have allowed their reasoning faculty to atrophy. They often resort to doubling down on their cancelling.

If you know what you are looking and listening for, you will find throughout any popular discussion forum, from Quora to the local pub, examples of the pathetic fallacy, affirmation of the consequent, argumentum ad misericordiam, straw man fallacy, correlation / causation confusion, ad hominem fallacy, appeals to authority, false dichotomy, and, of course, at least where I live, the eternally popular “No true Scotsman” fallacy.

All of them tend to generate more heat than light, which is why I was always taught that the first person to lose his temper loses the argument.

Was not expecting power flickers today

 

So wrote an American friend of mine on Facebook.

Okay, so I first read that as a Spoonerism. I thought she must live in an unusual climate, if she got flower pickers in January. 

Then I thought about it, read it right, and decided she must be accustomed to manual flickers, so power flickers would be an interesting novelty. (I did not know they had mechanised tiddlywinks in the US, but I suppose somebody has to spoil everything sooner or later). 

I thought I should point out that I am old enough to have driven cars that did not possess any kind of flickers, and in which even the wipers worked off engine pressure, so they slowed down when you drove uphill. 

Then, at about the fifth attempt, I figured out that she was referring to periodic interruptions of her electricity supply. 

Two nations divided by a common language, or what?