The last straw?

Whoever's idea this was, it sounds like a good one:

The European Commission has hinted the EU could ban single-use plastics after Michael Gove said there was “some concern” Europe may prevent the UK from outlawing plastic straws.

Frans Timmermans, vice president of the EU’s executive cabinet, told Mr Gove on Twitter: “One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. Maybe you can align with us?”

The Devil, as always, is in the detail. For example, would the wording of any ban include these?

I see a lot of these little plastic straws littering spaces where children get together. But they're not drinking straws.

Other brands are available

Yes, the straws aren't used for drinking, but for delivering a microdose of fizzy sherbet, before being thrown away.

I can see how these pocket money novelties would appeal to kids. I can also see that they don't meet the functional definition of a straw. Unless things like this are specifically mentioned in any legislation, these might be the "straws" that survive the great cull.

Debating the essential nature of the sherbet straw could keep the lawyers and philosophers as busy as the great Jaffa cake controversy of yore.

Boris Johnson to blame for the Skripal poisonings?

Oh, hi Boris Johnson's lawyers, how are you doing? No, I most certainly wasn't accusing your client of doing anything untoward - "just asking questions", as they say.

What do you mean Betteridge's Law is no defence in a case of libel?

OK, I would like to state, for the record, that I do not believe your client, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, capable of poisoning the Skripals. Assuming that the Skripals were the intended targets of the unknown poisoner (which I do), I believe that this attack was planned and carried out by professionals. If somebody had tasked a brilliant amateur like Boris Johnson with carrying out the hit, I believe that the targets would have escaped unscathed, although Boris would most likely have ended up accidentally poisoning half of the Salisbury Cathedral choir. He is Boris, after all, and getting into "hilarious" scrapes it what he does.

So what am I saying? I'm just floating the hypothesis that, if I belonged to the intelligence service of a hostile power and I was thinking about doing something shockingly illegal in the United Kingdom, I might look at the person appointed to the post of UK Foreign Secretary and think "These people cannot be serious - I'm totally not frightened of messing with them."

Whatever talents Boris Johnson may have - writing moderately amusing (if factually-challenged and occasionally racist) opinion pieces, quoting Cicero and saying "cripes" a lot when in character as an entertaining upper-class eccentric - it's obvious to even the dimmest observer that diplomacy, discretion and mastering his brief are not among them. His addiction to blurting out memorable sound bites at every possible opportunity, with no thought for the accuracy of what he says, or for who might be offended is as close to an anti-qualification for the post of Foreign Secretary as I can think of.

After all this time, it still beggars belief that Boris is the public face the UK presents to the world. Making him so implies contempt for the people the UK is dealing with. It's the equivalent of turning up late to your best friend's wedding half-cut and unshaven, wearing trackky bottoms and a mucky T-shirt. It implies a total lack of respect both for the occasion and for yourself. OK, a few people might have a laugh at the wacky funster throwing convention to the winds, but most of the people invested in the process will be rightly mortified.

And it makes the UK look weak. It implies a barely-keeping-it-together administration, too absorbed in the psychodrama of its own self-inflicted crisis to care about impressing the outside world. An administration that looks at a man who could, maybe, be allowed to make an ass of himself at, say, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport without doing too much damage and thinks "Let him play at being a world statesman for a bit - he's obviously going to shoot his mouth off at every opportunity and infuriate every nation on the planet, but right now we've got more important things to worry about than what the rest of the world thinks, like not having an actual punch-up round the Cabinet table."

Why wouldn't your hostile foreign power take one look at what we, as a country, are doing and assume that we're a bunch of powerless, clueless diplomatic pygmies who can be ignored and flouted with impunity? What would a careless bluffer like Boris do to protect a couple of foreigners, when he can't even look after the interest of UK nationals (your foot in mouth helped to double Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's sentence, Boris, but we're still waiting for you to get her out of that Iranian jail)?

Boris is the symptom of a national self-absorption that puts winning petty squabbles within the Westminster/UK press bubble ahead of presenting any semblance of credibility or competence to the outside world. It would be no wonder if some hostile power* thought "Is that the best you've got?" and proceeded to do as it damn well pleased. If so, some of the blame belongs to Theresa May for offering, and to Boris Johnson for accepting, an important job which, deep down, even he must have realised he would be terrible at.





*Probably Russia. Richard North overstates the doubts when he goes off on one about other people being idiots for jumping to that conclusion (to be fair, he usually blogs about Brexit, a target-rich environment for idiot hunters, so he's probably a bit trigger-happy). He makes great game of people for saying "Russia", when the nerve agent was originally developed in the Soviet Union (specifically, Uzbekistan).

Which is all very well, but Russia is the suspect with the obvious motive and probable means to attack the Skripals. OK, the nerve agent was developed in another former Soviet state, but let's do a fun WMD quiz. When the Soviet Union broke up, which of its constituent countries got all the nukes? Clue: it wasn't Uzbekistan. And which bit of the former Soviet Union do you think was most likely to get first dibs on any other nasty stuff that was hanging around? Clue: probably the same place that got all the nukes.

Of course it might be somebody else - the Uzbeks (why?), or surprisingly well-resourced non-state actors, or a false flag operation by MI5, in the hope of drumming up more counter-terrorism resources, or part of a US deep state anti-Trump plot , or Mossad, or Hilary Clinton while she was taking time off from running a paedophile ring out of a pizza joint ... if you want to jump down the rabbit hole into any of the above conspiracy wonderlands, be my guest, but it's still probably Russia.

__________________________

Update - if you thought I was exaggerating about those conspiracy theories, feast your eyes on this little beauty:

"MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom may be perceived as a plot to derail Brexit negotiations and use Russia’s alleged threat as a pretext to keep the country with the European Union, Richard Wood, a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), told Sputnik on Wednesday."

Wood told Sputnik that he thought the Skripal poisonings were "staged." I fought Poe's Law and the law won...

Bonus fact - "Sputnik" is Russian for "one on the same path (with someone)", or more succinctly, "fellow traveller."

Bonus bonus fact - Ukip's Richard Wood was - purely coincidentally - one of the delegates on a Moscow-sponsored jolly to Crimea last March. In a statement to Sputnik, Wood gushed:

"I wanted to see the situation in Crimea and I was absolutely delighted. I saw the people wanting to be a part of the Russian Federation. That is what came over to me strongly. I never heard of anybody saying that they have been put down, they were repressed or had difficulties with the Russian authorities. For a very long time now the West has had a very shortsighted policy towards Russia. When I was in Crimea, I have never seen a policeman on streets, I have never seen a soldier, no civil disorder, nothing of that sort," 

Make of that what you will...

Frankenstein's corporate monster

In recent years, the legal abomination of free speech rights for those artificial entities known as corporate persons has broken fee of its bounds and gone on a terrible rampage:

According to a recent study, corporations and their trade groups are behind nearly half of all free-speech cases these days. Businesses have used the freedom of speech to overturn laws requiring tobacco companies to put graphic warnings on cigarette packages, publicly held companies to disclosure of the use of conflict minerals, and food companies to notify consumers of genetically modified organisms.

If you don't agree that this is a monstrous perversion of laws intended to stop real humans being silenced by the powerful, I don't think we can ever be friends.

Having said that, it all started with the best of intentions. Just as Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein started off as a well-intentioned idealist, who wanted to free the human race from pain, suffering and death, the road to free speech for corporations was paved with good intentions, as Adam Winkler points out:

Huey Long was Trump before Trump. The fiery populist governor elected on the eve of the Great Depression had an aggressive agenda to make Louisiana great again—and little tolerance for dissent. Long set up a state board to censor newsreels and another to decide which newspapers would be allowed to print profitable government notices. When the student paper at Louisiana State University published an unflattering editorial about him, an outraged Long—referring to himself, as autocrats often do, in the third person—sent in the state police to seize copies, saying he wasn’t “going to stand for any students criticizing Huey Long.”

After Louisiana’s larger daily newspapers came out against him, “the Kingfish” declared war. “The daily newspapers have been against every progressive step in the state,” Long said, “and the only way for the people of Louisiana to get ahead is to stomp them flat.” To do so, in 1934 Long’s allies enacted a 2 percent tax on the advertising revenue of the state’s largest-circulation newspapers. Long said the tax “should be called a tax on lying, two cents per lie.”

Led by the Capital City Press, the publisher of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the newspaper companies challenged the advertising tax in court. They claimed the tax was an effort to silence those who questioned Long’s policies...

... In 1936, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspaper corporations and struck down Long’s advertising tax.

So the monster wasn't the dumbed-down Hollywood version, born bad because the mad scientist's lab assistant goofed up and accidentally gave it the brain from an evil dead person.* This is more like Mary Shelley's infinitely more nuanced, humane original, created good, but doomed by unforeseen consequences and the neglect of his creator.

So, if you're talking about the attempted censorship of media corporations, corporate free speech isn't necessarily such an abomination. But not every attack on media corporations' unfettered freedom to print whatever they damn well like, no matter who gets hurt, is as obviously pernicious as Long's attempt to silence critics. There is, for example the "Stop Funding Hate" campaign in the UK, which also seeks to hit media corporations where it hurts - an example, IMO, of where the corporate media are the bullies, not the bullied, and deserve all the pushback they get.

You could say it's a grey area, although that's more than you could reasonably say about, for instance, the free speech "right" of a non-media corporation, like a tobacco company, to apply as much unfiltered public relations spin as it likes, regardless of the costs to the rest of society. That's still monstrous.







*I really don't like the managerialist subtext of the incompetent menial screwing up in the James Whale version. In the book, Victor Frankenstein is completely responsible for both his own good intentions and for his flaws, so his fall is a real tragedy. In the film, Dr Frankenstein is kind of let off the moral hook by a dumb "honestly, you just can't get the staff"-type accident. This always seems like a cop-out to me.

Whataboutery for dummies

whataboutery

/ˌwɒtəˈbaʊtəri/

noun BRITISH

the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.

This is how a real expert does it:

"Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging at [indiscernible] – excuse me – what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?

... What about this? What about the fact that they came charging – they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do...

...As far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day. Wait a minute, I'm not finished. I'm not finished, fake news. That was a horrible day...

...I will tell you something. I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it. And you had, you had a group on one side that was bad. And you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now. You had a group – you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent."

A masterclass in mendacious obfuscation from one of the most practised bullshitters in the business. Often imitated, seldom equalled.

To show how it shouldn't be done, here's a bumbling amateur trying the same trick:

Brendan Cox, the husband of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox ... accused the 53-year-old MEP [Nigel Farage] of stoking tensions over a terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas market. Mr Farage had appeared to blame the attack on Angela Merkel, leading Mr Cox to claim he was "blaming politicians for the actions of extremists".

In response, Mr Farage said: "Yes, well of course he would know more about extremists than me, Mr Cox. He backs organisations like Hope Not Hate, who masquerade as being lovely and peaceful, but actually pursue violent and undemocratic means.”

These two things look the same, but there's an important difference. Donald Trump was able to get away with muddying the waters with a libellous smear, by libelling something vague and nebulous called the "alt-left", which can't sue him because it doesn't exist.

Donald Trump's #1 superfan made the elementary mistake of libelling the anti-fascists at HOPE Not Hate who, unfortunately for Farage, do exist and, thanks to 16,000 supporters who crowdfunded their legal costs, could sue him for the slur. Farage has now been forced to withdraw his claim that the group employed "violent and undemocratic means", while still trying to weasel his way out of admitting his climb-down.

Poor Nigel. He really hasn't got the hang of this libel business, has he? Sad.

We velcro meerkats to your eyeballs

Is the tongue-in-cheek brand awareness campaign lurking under the hashtag dontsayvelcro so annoyingly patronising that it can be written off as a failure?

Or is the annoyance a feature, not a bug, deliberately engineered to fix the brand in the public's awareness by being as unignorably irritating as those wretched advertising meerkats?

I'd like to believe that the numpties who came up with this rubbish have failed miserably, but deep in my cynical heart I think they've probably just suceeded in trolling us for fun and profit. And I guess my failure to ignore them just illustrated how it works.

Hims ancient and modern

After carelessly mowing down and killing a mother of two by speeding along a busy street on a non-road-legal track bike with no front brakes, 20 year old Charlie Alliston has been convicted of causing bodily harm by “wanton and furious driving.” The wording of the offence sounds ancient, almost quaint, but the words "wanton" and "furious" are surprisingly appropriate here. If Alliston had shown some hint of empathy, remorse, or responsibility for his actions, this could have been *just* another tragic accident. But, instead, what we got was a wanton outburst of entitled fury aimed squarely at his victim:

Following the crash, Alliston posted a comment on an online news article claiming he had shouted out "to get out of the way" but she "ignored me", looked back at her phone then "stopped dead" in his path.

He wrote: "I feel bad due to the seriousness of her injuries but I can put my hands up and say this is not my fault."

On an internet forum for fixed bike enthusiasts, he later described how he twice warned her to "get the f*** outta my way".

He wrote: "We collided pretty hard, our heads hit together, hers went into the floor and ricocheted into mine. It is a pretty serious incident so I won't bother saying oh she deserved it, it's her fault. Yes it is her fault but no she did not deserve it.

"Hopefully, it is a lesson learned on her behalf, it shouldn't have happened like it did but what more can I say."

He complained: "Everyone is quick to judge and help the so-called victim but not the other person in the situation, ie me. It all happened so fast and even at a slow speed there was nothing I could do. I just wish people would stop making judgments. It's not my fault people either think they are invincible or have zero respect for cyclists." 

My emphasis.

What could be more zeitgeisty than an entitled, self-pitying man-baby wantonly and furiously running down any female who dares to impede his royal progress? I'm irresistibly reminded of some of the things Tim Squirrell found scuttling around when he looked under the rock of an alt-right Reddit community for his recent "Taxonomy of trolls", especially in the specific sub- communities of mens' rights activists and anti-progressive gamers. He describes the latter as:

Closely related to the above [i.e. men’s rights activists], these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom they’re pretty sure major movie and game studios are “pandering” to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. You’re likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words “there are only two genders” constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, you’ll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.

• Most common words: SJW, snowflake, pandering, tumblr, feminist, triggering, GamerGate, virtue signalling 

 "Wanton and furious driving" may sound like a relic from a bygone age, but furious, self-obsessed male misfits yelling at everybody else to "get the f*** out of my way!" are, sadly, as much a product of the modern world as the latest video game release.

Appeal to authority

I'm hoping that UK-based cold callers will be deterred by a change in the law, making company directors personally liable for fines of up to half a million pounds for breaching the regulations intended to stop people being pestered with unwanted sales calls. Sadly, I expect that the pests will soon rise to the challenge of getting round the new rules.

Having said that, I'll probably never again come across another telesales racket more perfect than the people who cold called the unwary, promising to help them get rid of cold calls (for a fee). What the folk who made cold calls selling a cold call blocking service were doing was skimming a fee off unwary punters who didn't realise that there was a free service out there (in this case, the Telephone Preference Service).

Less paradoxical forms of this type of skimming are available. Somebody might, for example, ring you, suggesting that you might be paying too much Council Tax, due to your home having been placed in the wrong Council Tax band, and offering to check this, potentially SAVING YOU £££££!

The right thing to say at this point is that you can check your own band "in 10 minutes, at no cost" and appeal directly to your local Valuation Office Agency (VOA) if you think that your banding is wrong. If your appeal is rejected, but you still think your banding is incorrect, you can take your appeal further, to the appropriate tribunal.

It's all there on the relevant .gov.uk site, which is pretty clear and understandable (government websites get a lot of criticism - sometimes with good reason - but this particular one tells you what you need to know and I can't see much to moan about).

The wrong thing to do is to express any interest in the cold caller's service.

The wrongest thing to do is to give the cold caller your credit/bank card details. Not unless you want to receive a letter like this:

"Dear [your name here]

Claimers UK processed your payment of £65 for the administration fee but unfortunately  this transaction had been charged back by your bank informing us that you haven't authorised or participated in this transaction.
All our sales lines are recorded and we have evidence of you verbally agreeing to this transaction there for [sic] you are bound by the terms and conditions.

Shore claims have completed and finished [sic - how do "completed" and "finished" not mean the same thing?] your checks in regard to getting your council tax lowered.
But have not been paid for the work that has been carried out.

Please look up terms and conditions 2.4 on your policy paper work that was sent to you.

To arrange payment of this account please call us on 08448009426 or alternatively send in a cheque of [sic] the full amount of £65 to:
Claimers UK LTD, 7 Dukes Court, Bognor Road, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8FX.

If payment is not received by [insert deadline] we may recommend to Shore claims ltd that they commence legal  proceedings to recover the full outstanding balance. These actions may incur additional costs for which you may be held liable. 
Please do not underestimate the seriousness of this matter.

Yours sincerely,

[illegible scribble]

Account Manager
Claimers UK Ltd"

Devon and Cornwall Police issued a statement earlier in the year, warning people against such scams (specifically naming Claimers UK Ltd), and asking for individuals to report any offences to Action Fraud by calling 0300 1232040, or visiting www.actionfraud.police.uk.

I'm guessing that the people behind this operation are hoping that the person prospect who picks up the phone is elderly, trusting and not very confident about, or interested in, this newfangled Internet and therefore unlikely to discover, within a couple of clicks, that you can investigate this for yourself for free and go directly to the relevant authority to appeal, if you think there's a problem with your banding. In this case an appeal to (your local) authority isn't a logical fallacy - so long as you do the appealing yourself and don't outsource the process to some cold-calling skimmer.

Not that people from the generations that are used to finding stuff out with an Internet search should be too smug, as the skimmers are lurking on the Net, too. Up until quite recently, people who were in a hurry to renew their passports might have inadvertently clicked on a site with the same look and feel as the official .gov.uk passport renewal site, which actually belonged to a private company which skimmed off an admin fee for processing your passport request and forwarding it on to the correct authorities. It looks as if they've cracked down on that particular trick recently (when I googled "passport renewal" just now, the official site came up as the first search result - in the past, operators of lookalike sites have used SEO jiggery-pokery to make their sites appear above the official one in the search results), but it still pays to be wary.
 

There lived a certain man ...

... in Russia long ago (although any similarity to an actual person, living or dead, is purely coincidental). I had to put that last bit in for legal reasons, which Duncan Fyfe will now explain:

Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it ...

 ... For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.

I'm sure you feel better for knowing that. I know I did. You probably know what's coming next and, assuming you're any kind of right-thinking person, you'll feel better for that, too...

Obeying the law is no defence

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.

David Cameron (via Chris Bertram / the Graun)

If he thinks that we can't go on like this, how would he like things to be? Something like this, I guess:

Therefore we will become an actively intolerant society, interfering in the lives of law-abiding citizens whenever we see fit.

I've never had any time for Cameron's views on political economy, but at least I gave him credit for the reasonable belief that the state shouldn't interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens who aren't causing harm and, furthermore, that the laws themselves should be changed when they limit people's freedom for no coherent reason.

I'm sure he'd say that the people on his little list are causing harm. If that's really the case, he should do what he did with equal marriage - change the law. If he could make the case that same-sex marriage harmed nobody, so the law had no business interfering with it, he should be able to do the converse and put forward a reasoned argument that specific activity x, which is currently legal, causes harm, so it's the law's business to control it.

Others might, or might not, agree that activity x should be banned, but at least the issues could be debated openly and the rules made clear. Instead, Cameron seems to be suggesting a system where obeying the law of the land is no defence - so long as somebody in authority doesn't like the look of you, you can be spied on, detained, censored, "disrupted" or otherwise interfered with, with impunity.

Dave must be suffering from a severe attack of cognitive dissonance, trying to square the idea of Conservative respect for individual liberty and the rule of law with this kind of arbitrary, statist authoritarianism. But that's nothing to the amount of doublethink it'll take for our new justice secretary get behind the Conservative project to extend the state's coercive powers, unchecked by reference to anything as fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned as the rule of law, after his high-profile campaign, as education secretary, to instill respect for our ancient liberties in every schoolchild:

The rule of law is what Conservatives in particular were brought up to believe in, a bit of the imperial history (Magna Carta, Blackstone, Dicey; etc) that Michael Gove will soon be making all little Englanders learn by rote.

Now children, I want to hear all of you recite clause 29 of  Magna Carta: 'No Freeman* shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.'


*Yes, I know it's sexist - don't blame me, blame the 13th Century.

Harry Potter and the prisoner of Jersey

The most interesting historical parallel of my week came from the barrister Harry Potter,* who presents the BBC documentary series, The Strange Case of the Law. He was talking about the fallout from Oliver Cromwell's unsuccessful attempt to try the Leveller, John Lilburne, for sedition in 1649.

Lilburne had mounted his own defence with great skill and had managed to get himself acquitted, much to Cromwell's annoyance. To spare itself the embarrassment of further legal defeats, Cromwell's government had Lilburne seized and whisked away to the extra-territorial stronghold of Mount Orgueil Castle in Jersey, where legal niceties like habeas corpus didn't apply, leading Potter to call Jersey 'Oliver Cromwell's Guantánamo Bay.'

It's an interesting parallel, given the current disclosures about the CIA's use of extraordinary rendition  to circumvent legal protections (along with the absence of disclosure about alleged British complicity).

Then and now, the rule of law matters and sneakily moving the goalposts to get the result you want is an abuse of that important principle, whether the state is offshoring torture or re-defining criminal suspects, or prisoners of war as "unlawful combatants" in order to do things like holding them  incommunicado, indefinitely and denying them access to counsel.

I'm left wondering whether this sort of authoritarianism by stealth is the sort of gambit which particularly appeals to would-be tyrants working in relatively open societies with rhetorical, or theoretical committments to liberty, who are made uncomfortable by the scrutiny that such openness brings. The Land of the Free has its First Amendment and the English Commonwealth styled itself a champion of liberty and was born in the wake of a national upheaval which had seen the collapse of censorship and an explosion of cheap pamphlets voicing all sorts of heterodox opinions.

Maybe some form of out-of-sight-out-of-mind external rendition is the way to go for authoritarians governing relatively open societies, who can't just clamp down directly, unlike autocrats with no pretentions to liberty, who could be sure that people who knew what was good for them wouldn't make too much fuss about other people being locked up the Lubyanka, the Špilberk or Carabanchel and had no need of a Guantánamo, or Devil's Island, with internal exile to Siberia just a few days away by unheated cattle truck.

Extra-territorial rendition from from a society  that claims to be free and open is a form of hypocrisy, which you might see as a sort of back-handed compliment to the freedoms that The War Against Terror is ostensibly being fought to uphold (although I'm guessing that this thought didn't come as much of a comfort to Liburne in his damp prison cell on Jersey, or to the recipients of enhanced interrogation techniques in their far-off legal black holes). As one cheese-eating surrender monkey steadfast ally in The War Against Terror once more or less wrote, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.



*I almost feel as if I should apologise for the title of this blog post - I couldn't resist, but the poor guy must be sick to the back teeth with all the lame wizardry gags he must have had to put up with to ever since J K Rowling linked his perfectly ordinary name with young adult fiction's biggest ever mega-brand.

Thoughtcrime must not go unpunished

Universities and colleges may, equally, encounter high performing employees who, although academically brilliant, have the potential to damage their employer’s brand. This could be through outspoken opinion or general insubordination. Irrespective of how potentially valuable these employees may be to their institutions, the reality is that, in consistently accepting unacceptable behaviour, institutions may be setting dangerous precedents to other employees that such conduct will be accommodated. From a risk perspective, it is also much harder to justify a dismissal, or other sanction, if similar conduct has gone unpunished before.

As much as employers may hope that unacceptable behaviour from key employees will be curbed without sanction, in reality the problems will persist, needing to be addressed further down the line. It remains to be seen whether Suarez is right when he says that he will never bite another player again, but he has made similar statements before. 

David Browne, writing on law firm SGH Martineau's corporate blog, as quoted here.

You heard that right - according to today's managerialist ideology, the 'insubordination' of daring to have independent opinions that that don't fit in with your employers' carefully-curated corporate brand image is a bizarre, pathological aberration, just like footballer Luis Suarez's weird compulsion to keep biting opposing players.

Remember that the employees Browne's talking about here are valued, capable ones in reasonably high-status occupations, working in institutions which ostensibly nurture enquiry, debate and questioning. Imagine what it's like for people who work in the sort of places where 'we don't pay you to think.' Browne just validated Nick Cohen's sobering observation that 'the moment you enter your place of work, you no longer reside within a governed democracy, but instead are enslaved to a systematic dictatorship.'

In a less screwed-up world, David Browne, would be in massive trouble with his bosses for irreparably damaging his firm's brand* in the minds of all reasonable people by blogging this astonishing attack on freedom of speech on the firm's website. After all, a reasonable reader would conclude that any firm which endorsed such views, must have a sinister, authoritarian, bullying ethos and would have no qualms about advising bosses to use legal threats and sackings to punish thoughtcrime.

In the topsy-turvey times we live in, Browne was able to get away with merely 'clarifying' his comments in response to the justified twitterstorm that his horrific blogpost provoked. A key passage of the "clarified" post reads thusly:

This [brand-damaging behaviour] could be through outspoken opinions (where these fall outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely) or general insubordination, e.g. a failure to comply with the reasonable requests of an employer, or other behaviour such as bullying or harassment of colleagues.

So, there you have it - you can open your mouth, but if you upset your bosses, they and their corporate lawyers might be alert for anything that might be construed to fall 'outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely' and won't hesitate to use it to get you sacked (see "chilling effect"). Plus you get a lecture on bullying and harassment from more powerful people who think it's fine to push uppity subordinates out of a job for daring to speak out of line.

Thank you for sharing your opinions and clarifications, Mr Browne. They have been duly noted. Now bite me, weasel boy.



*You owe me for one broken irony meter, Browne.

Helmsley's Law and Ecclestone's corollary

'Only the little people pay taxes.'

Leona Helmsley

And sometimes not even the little people. Allegedly.

British Justice. The envy of the world?

Nigel Evans, MP, was happy to sacrifice affordable access to justice on the altar of austerity, until it affected him personally. So far it's a simple story of hypocrisy, but there may be a wider and more subtle form of cognitive bias going on here, too.

I'm thinking of the lingering impression that our system of justice is, if not the envy of the world, at least basically decent. It's a mindset that makes even people who aren't Nigel Evans feel some shock at the idea of a person who's been found innocent being financially ruined by massive legal bills.

The World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index 2014 (.pdf here) tries to assign an overall rank to various countries' legal systems, based on their performance against nine criteria.* By these measures, the United Kingdom ranks 13th, below Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Austria, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Canada and Japan. 13th place isn't hopelessly embarrassing, but it still indicates that even foreigners might have a few things to teach us.

I don't take the WJP's index at face value - two points spring immediately to mind. Firstly and obviously, English law, which applies in England and Wales, differs from Northern Ireland law and differs even more from Scots law, so I don't know where the UK's individual constituent countries would sit in the league table if their scores were disaggregated.

Secondly and more importantly, one of the criteria used in the WJP's Rule of Law Index was 'People can access and afford civil justice.' Nigel Evans was an acquitted defendant in criminal trial, who found that he could access, but couldn't afford, criminal justice. The affordability of criminal justice doesn't seem to have been a factor in compiling in the Rule of Law Index.

But, even if the exact rankings and criteria are arguable, the default assumption that that our justice system is the envy of the world looks pretty questionable. Even columnists writing for the jingoistic Spectator are shaken:

Despite the criminal legal aid bill plummeting over the last seven years, Grayling intends to cut it even more, driving out the talented, specialised independent Bar and replacing it with cheaper options, such as G4s, Serco and Cooperative law ... So much for British Justice. The envy of the world? Not unless you live in Russia or Zimbabwe. And if Grayling has his way it will be far, far worse. The sooner he sets sail on the Maria Celeste the better.

To be fair, our plummeting legal aid budget is still pretty massive, but you can spend a lot of money on something and still end up with a second-rate system that excludes a lot of people - just look at the US health care system.


*Constraints on government powers, the absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, criminal justice and informal justice.

Mugged by reality

MP Nigel Evans, who was cleared of rape and sexual assault on Thursday, has said the Crown Prosecution Service should pay his £130,000 legal bill.

So: Tory MPs happily vote to remove right of defendants to recover costs, and are then upset when Nigel Evans cannot recover his legal fees.
— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) April 13, 2014

You have to feel sorry for poor Nigel. When he agreed with Chris that "we" simply can't afford Britain's £2bn legal aid bill, how was he to know that it was going to affect him, personally? Clearly, when he got behind the slogan that "we" need to tighten our belts, it should have been understood that "we", in this context, meant "somebody else."

A legal bill that swallows up somebody else's life savings is a regrettable consequence of the tough, but necessary, decisions that have to be taken in these difficult times. One that wipes out my life savings is an outrage about which Something Must Be Done. I've heard about another group of people who experience the world in this way:

When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala. The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain.

But when participants imagined pain to others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. Moreover, psychopaths showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain.

Science Daily

Or maybe, if you're feeling more charitable, a liberal is simply a conservative who's been mugged by reality.

Debtor to the human species

On July 17, 1762, His Majesty Peter III, by the grace of God, Emperor and Autocrat of Russia, was assassinated. The murder was probably abetted by his wife, Catherine (who was subsequently declared empress), in collusion with her lover, Count Alexei Orloff, a strapping Guards officer with a duelling scar and an inordinate fondness for chickens.*

Having your husband murdered for pleasure and profit is pretty bad but, as one contemporary pointed out, the slaughter resulting from more conventional approaches to the continuation of politics by other means was vastly greater:

...these monarchs and heroes would shudder, if they saw a bill drawn upon them thus : —

Queen of Hungary, debtor to the human species..	Millions
King of Prussia..................................................	ditto
King of France, by his stewards..........................	do.
King of Spain....................................................	Many thousands, ditto.
Prince Ferdinand, a private gentleman.................	Some thousands
Czarina..............................................................	Only her own husband.
	______________
Total	Half Europe.

Horace Walpole Letters

As a loyal beneficiary of the Hanoverian establishment, Walpole wasn't likely to add George III's name to his butcher's bill of murderous monarchs and abominable aristocrats. Even if such a seditious thought about his sovereign had occurred to him, Horace would have been well advised to keep it to himself, or risk becoming as unpopular with the authorities of his day as Private Bradley Manning is with today's movers and shakers.

Speaking of whom, it's worth putting Manning's actions into the same sort of context as Catherine's. Putting lives at risk with an indiscriminate data dump is bad, but there are worse crimes.

No, I'm not just thinking of the impunity enjoyed by the notorious war criminal, Dick Cheney, or the leniency shown towards his muppet, Scooter, although if intention counts for anything, ordering torture, or maliciously leaking state secrets in order to damage someone who revealed a politically inconvenient truth** are more blameworthy than carelessly leaking secrets in a sincere, if reckless, attempt to expose officially-sanctioned wrongdoing. The nature of power has changed since the days of Catherine The Great, but not so much that the law punishes a wealthy, well-connected individual who betrays state secrets in the same way as a private soldier accused of the same crime. In theory, Justice is supposedly blind, but in practice, only selectively so.

I was thinking of people who work for a perfectly legal industry that kills far more people than could conceivably have been put in harm's way by Manning's leaks. One that's chalked up more premature, preventable deaths than Al Qaeda, or the Taliban, or all the wars and operations allegedly fought in order to contain them (including the one in that country where Al Qaeda didn't exist at the time):

 The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing nearly six million people a year. More than five million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while more than 600 000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. Approximately one person dies every six seconds due to tobacco, accounting for one in 10 adult deaths. Up to half of current users will eventually die of a tobacco-related disease. 

Six million dead.

Every year.

Leaking state secrets that might put lives at risk is bad. Being a lobbyist for an industry that knowingly kills half its customers victims - more deaths per year than any conflict since the Second World War - well, that's reckless disregard for human life on an unimaginably bigger scale.

If you leak, they lock you in jail and throw away the key.

As a successful lobbyist for Death, you become a rich and well-respected member of society, an adviser to governments. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you evil's banal face, Lynton Crosby, debtor to the human species.

Politics should be a battle of ideas, not personalities. But I'm prepared to make an exception when one of the personalities involved builds a career on such psychopathic disregard for human life.  If any politician wants to get all ad hominem and point-scory on this malignant tumour in human form, that's fine by me, so long it helps keep his damn dirty, nicotine-stained paws off a health service struggling to keep his victims alive.

*Orloff's love of chickens was more credibly attested and less lascivious in nature than Catherine's alleged love of horses. Mind you, you can see why this breed of chicken would appeal to the aristocracy. They've got quite a lot in common ("Rare, Will go broody, Good mothers, Some strains excellent layers, Hardy in all temperature ranges ... Hard to source good stock ... some strains are very inbred").

**corrected from 'political opponent', which doesn't quite cover it.

Does what happens in Florida stay in Florida?

What the verdict [George Zimmerman being acquitted of murder or manslaughter, after shooting the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin] says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime. But this curious result says as much about Florida's judicial and legislative sensibilities as it does about Zimmerman's conduct that night. This verdict would not have occurred in every state. It might not even have occurred in any other state. But it occurred here, a tragic confluence that leaves a young man's untimely death unrequited under state law. Don't like it? Lobby to change Florida's laws.

 Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic

So, just another of those dumb laws from the Internet "funny" pages gone bad?

But the verdict has broader political salience. Trayvon Martin seems to have presented no credible threat to anybody as he walked home, minding his own business, but he ended up dead because some trigger-happy curtain-twitcher in a gated community decided he looked suspicious. We live in an age where the political agenda seems to be dominated by Zimmerman-style paranoia.

Where there is no vision, the people perish worry unduly about immigrants, scroungers, teenage mums, criminals and terrorists, and share their fears with market researchers. The market researchers pass their findings up to the political party machines and the leaders duly assure the fretful public that they are listening to their concerns and announce plans to get "tough" with the scapegoat du jour (being too scared of doing some really tough thing, like treating the voters as adults and using argument and evidence to refute groundless panic).

Letting the wrong target have it with both barrels might seem tough (on the innocent victims) and unjust but, as the victims of such witch hunts tend to be politically powerless, nobody minds (at least nobody powerful enough to fight back).

In this instance, Florida's Laws seem horribly, perhaps uniquely, unjust. But vigilante politicians punishing the innocent on the basis of perceptions, rather than facts is, sadly, far from unique, and not just in Florida.

Supping with the Devil

Don't drink fake vodka that could kill you or make you go blind and if you know of anybody who's supplying this illegal, toxic muck, shop them to the police; it might save somebody's life and being nicked is no more than these criminal entrepreneurs deserve.

It's quite a simple good guys / bad guys story. Think about into the legal, but scarcely less harmful, tobacco industry and things get a lot more complicated. The industry continues to invest the profits from harming its customers into advertising, where it's still legal, lobbying, misinformation, moving to less regulated markets, sockpuppetry and fighting any form of restriction every inch of the way, with just the occasional tactical retreat. Operating on the right side of the law, the industry has a lot more freedom to market its product, to openly (if discreetly) influence movers and to shakers and recruit potential consumers than a criminal enterprise producing dangerous knock-off booze or selling illicit drugs.

On the whole, I think it's best to have regulated drug production on the right side of the law. The tobacco barons might be worse than socially useless, but at least they don't generally add the victims of turf war shoot-outs to their tally of avoidable casualties, or create violent, lawless ghettos where society can't protect ordinary citizens, or generate armies of desperate addicts, reduced to robbery, mugging or prostitution to feed their habit.

Looking at the reality of big tobacco is still a sobering experience for people like me who favour a relatively liberal harm reduction approach to drugs over that good versus evil fairy tale called The War Against Drugs. To make licencing and control work, policymakers would have to deal with people who don't mind harming their fellow creatures for profit. And somehow, restrict and tax their activities to the extent that they do the minimum amount of harm, yet not so much that it's not worth trading legally and substantial numbers of suppliers are driven back underground and trade illegally, like the knock-off vodka merchants.

That, I think, is why we're stuck with so much inefficient and punitive anti-drug legislation. Introducing a controlled market in drugs, calibrated to cause the minimum harm seems like the best way to go, but a portion of the benefits would inevitably be neutralised by the drug suppliers bending every rule in the book to translate some of their profits into barely legal ways of promoting their product and growing their market.  People would die, making the policymakers who did deals with ruthless and socially irresponsible suppliers look weak and compromised. And saying what you're for and against in stark black and white terms, rather than dealing in the precise shade of grey that yields the least worst solution in the real world, just sounds so much more sincere and satisfying.

It's easy to be angry at the irrationality and injustice of it all, but damn near impossible to imagine how to effectively sell harm reduction in a way that will trump the emotional appeal of going after the bad guys.

Beats as it sweeps as it cleans

Some people have been making unfortunate claims that the UK's intelligence services were complicit in the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects who were detained and tortured overseas. The Foreign Secretary is concerned. 'The very making of these allegations undermined Britain's standing in the world as a country that upholds international law and abhors torture'.

Lessons have been learned. According to the BBC, there are plans to restrict what can be said about the security services in open court so, if abuses like the ones being alleged were to ever happen in future, the public need never know.

James Dyson secured Britain's standing as a world leader in bagless vacuum cleaner technology. Good to know that we also maintain our lead in sweeping potentially embarrassing information under the carpet. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

The devil woman wants to know...

... if you've been involved in an accident that wasn't your fault.

 Oh, hang on, those are specs on her head.

Top advertising tip for ambulance-chasing lawyers. Subliminal satanic imagery rarely inspires trust, except among Faustian dabblers in the dark arts, who are probably playing for bigger stakes than a few grand for their dodgy whiplash claim. And don't ever ask your clients to sign up using a red pen...

Spotted on the back of the Thomson Local directory for Milton Keynes.

This is why I care (and why you should too)

 Having just welcomed the coalition's move to put equal civil marriage for same-sex couples onto the political agenda, this piece is too damn good not to share. Required reading for anybody who might be consulted on this issue:

I've had people ask why I am so vocal about the issue of LGBT equality. Why is a heterosexual, married father so concerned with what gay people can or can't do? I don't have a dog in this fight, do I?

I find those kinds of questions to be puzzling (and telling), as if we should value the rights of one group of humans over any other group, or only be concerned with the welfare of a group to which we belong. As Elie Wiesel said, "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

So, anyway, this is why I care (and why you should too)

via