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.

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.

The Dilbert mystery

I worked in a big insurance office when the first collections of Dilbert toons came out, back in the '90s. I became a major fan and introduced the strip to a few of my fellow low-cost, high-density work units,* who also loved it. I still think it's a pretty good description of the absurd reality of corporate life and office politics. I especially like the economy and integrity of the strips, the way the simple, minimalist, consistent line drawings reflect and reinforce the terse, laconic wit of the dialogue. Dilbert, with his blank, deadpan expression is the perfect delivery system for Adams' dry, wry one-liners.

I was also quite a fan of Scott Adams himself, whose career trajectory from downtrodden corporate drone to successful creative artist, living by his wit(s) was an inspiration. I loved the idea of taking all the frustrations and idiocies of working life and turning them, through creative alchemy, into entertainment and a profitable career. It's a perfect escape fantasy; one minute you live the circumscribed life of a lowly team player, faking enthusiasm for (or hiding your resentment at) every dumb idea and bullshit buzzword that oozes down the hierarchy, the next you're a licensed jester, gleefully spearing every new corporate inanity with your pen.

The great thing about being a licensed jester is that you can say what you damn well like and not give a fig for what it will do for your career prospects. It must be great, being able to fearlessly say whatever you damn well like, right?

Wrong, apparently, judging by the title of a recent post on the Dilbert blog, entitled I Miss Having Freedom of Speech. So what's the problem?

Today I wrote two blog posts about events in the news. That writing is some of my best work. You won't see either post. And for that you can thank Jezebel.com, Gawker.com, and Salon.com.

Unfortunately, both of my posts have content that could too easily be taken out of context by the bottom-feeding parts of the media and special interest groups looking to bolster their causes. Even my standard disclaimer wouldn't be enough in these two cases. My opinions in the two posts aren't the least bit offensive, but out of context they would look so. 

What is this potentially explosive content that might be distorted in order to discredit Scott? Too controversial to even hint at - he can't bring himself to mention the thing he was going to write about in his post and when people in the comments plead for a clue, he still ain't sayin' nuthin'. Scott's 'standard disclaimer', by the way, goes like this:

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

The tone of his recent post and the wording of his disclaimer, imply that he's had at least an e-sack full of hate mail and has quite possibly been subject to physical or litigious threats, on account of controversial subjects he's tackled the past.

Other sources suggest that he's waded into some controversial areas and has simply been forcefully disagreed with by people who thought his comments on specific topics were dumb, ignorant or patronising. The most notorious specific examples are:

I’ve been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? 

and

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

Taken at face value, these statements seem batshit. Even qualified by his standard disclaimer, they sound pretty bizarre. Maybe he did write these words, but didn't mean them, or was being satirical and meant the opposite of what he wrote, or was deliberately being provocative in order to flush sexist knuckle-draggers and creationist numbskulls into the open, or wanted to "start a conversation" on the issues. But  if you're going to say things like that, you'd better have a very good, specific explanation.

A boilerplate disclaimer that basically says 'I might mean what I'm going to say, or I might not, but I'm not going to tell you which and if you don't like what I say, it's probably your fault for being some kind of literal-minded idiot' triggers my usually-excellent bullshit filter every time. After all, he's an experienced satirical cartoonist who has, so far, been able to negotiate the ambiguity of giving voice to his outrageous or sarcastic characters without having to resort to a 'The views expressed in this cartoon do not necessarily represent the views of Scott Adams' disclaimer after every strip.

Here's a modest proposal. How about deciding whether your basic mode of writing involves saying what you really think, or something else, like being ironic or satirical, then having a more straightforward disclaimer if you feel that you might be misunderstood?

A specific example would be Chris Dillow, who blogs more or less what he thinks. If he's doing something slightly different he adds a 'Note for the hard of thinking' (e.g. 'if you believe in x, then y logically follows - by pointing this out, I don't necessarily mean that I believe in x'). Or there's Tom Pride, whose normal mode is satire. Sometimes he'll post about a real-life story that's so outrageous that it sounds like satire, in which case he'll add, 'not satire.' Simple.

Both blogs are written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view and both manage perfectly well with simple, comprehensible disclaimers, rather than a catch-all get-out-of-jail-free-card statement. If Scott Adams made his disclaimers a bit simpler, we might finally penetrate the mystery of what he really thinks about things like evolution, gender equality and the thing that must not be named because it's so controversial.


*The phrase "low-cost, high-density work unit" came from a descriptive label I found on the underside of one of the desks we worked at, but it could equally well have described  the Dilbert-esque existence of the millions of human resources who populate the little boxes on corporate org charts.

_____________________

Update - the subsidiary mystery of why Jezebel.com annoys Scott is no mystery (via). If you don't enjoy finding out that your idols have feet of clay (or at least weak ankles), it's been a bad day.

Going Galt in techno-Narnia

It's not just Texas rednecks who dream of seceding from the Union. Some of Silicon Valley's tech entrepreneurs also think this might be a thing:

Ultimately, the Stanford lecturer and co-founder of Counsyl, a genetics startup, thinks Silicon Valley could lead the charge in exiting en masse because, eventually, "they are going to try and blame the economy on Silicon Valley."
"We didn't securitize mortgages, order bailouts, start wars, or refuse to write movies or articles on this until too late," read one of Srinivasan's slides on where the blame lies and what the real problems are that are holding technology back.

cnet

True, Silicon Valley didn't securitize mortgages, or need bailing out, but it was a Randian bonfire of the regulations that were allegedly holding another industry back that got us to the point where some other smart people on Wall Street were empowered to do complex but stupid things with impunity. That experiment ended catastrophically, and I'm not convinced that creating more spaces where clever people can get on with making lots of money without government 'meddling' (AKA oversight) is anything but insanely risky, having seen what folk get up to when nobody's watching.

Ramji Srinivasan, who 'began his career with Morgan Stanley in New York City, where he helped raise $2.7B in equity capital for Google and authored over 100 investment reports for Internet companies with a collective market capitalization of $200B' has no excuse for not knowing where insufficient oversight can lead.

It's a shame that all this self-serving jargon about 'disruption' and 'floating tech incubators' makes Silicon Valley sound like Wall Street, because there are important differences. Most importantly, the innovation that comes out of Silicon Valley is real. Ask yourself  the question 'What is it that these hedge fund managers "do"?' and the answer seems to involve shuffling (virtual) small pieces of green paper:

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

If I ask myself what Silicon Valley does, the answer is right at the end of my nose fingertips, as I'm typing these words on one of its products (and connecting to you, dear reader, via a type of network developed by Big Government, using hypertext, as developed by a contractor working for a multi-national inter-governmental state-funded collaborative science project, which sums up why I think the binary opposition between the state and entrepreneurialism is a piece of village-idiot-grade oversimplification). Silicon Valley produces actual innovation, whereas many of the financial services industry's cleverest innovators (enabled, ironically, by Silicon Valley tech), have merely incubated complex, obscure methods of gaming the system, creaming off rents and screwing the customer.

Silicon Valley (with the life support provided by those bits of society Ramji Srinivasan imagines might be painlessly left behind in his techno-Narnia of free-floating incubators) may produce even more awesome and world-changing things in future. According to some, nothing less than a new Industrial Revolution, leading (eventually) to a post-scarcity world in which automated replicating machines make all the stuff people need from readily-available raw materials. Here's the BBC's James Burke on "life in 2100" (the vid's also on YouTube, but you have to put up with an ad). There's a moment in the video when a map appears, with demarcation lines for national borders. After a moment, the border lines fade away to symbolise the disappearance of states, presumably because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of a Star Trek Replicator must no longer be in want of a meddlesome government.

In Srinivasan's near-future dream, all the clever, creative people shrug off the burden of the state and the bondage of red tape in order to forge a brave new world where men are real men, women are real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. In Burke's further-off techno-utopia, people don't so much shrug off the state as let it wither away, Marx-style, as new means of production render it obsolete.

Srinivasan's dream sounds like a bit of a nightmare, both for the people who get left behind and screwed as rich corporations shrug off their tax liabilities and the regulations that protect the little people and for the corporations themselves (remember the cautionary tale of little Morgan Stanley who thought he was a big boy who could do whatever he liked, but when he started to get a bit silly and play in the traffic, it was Mommy State who saved him from getting squashed under the wheels of a bus).

Burke's world sounds like a far more pleasant destination, where there's no need for a government and its attendant bureaucracy to oversee the allocation of scarce resources, because ... d'oh! ... resources aren't scarce any more. And everybody lived happily ever after.

Which is kind of plausible, up to a point. If automation got close to the point where machines were able to supply all of a person's material wants then Replicators might do away with many functions of central and local government, who no longer need to tax 'n spend on your behalf, because you're now pretty much self-sufficient (bosses and the market in goods as we know it, have presumably also withered for the same reason).

Arthur C. Clarke, who predicted the Replicator as a far-future possibility back in the '60s, also thought it would 'disrupt' society in the true sense of the word  'A society based on the Replicator would be so completely different from ours that the present debate between Capitalism and Communism would become quite meaningless' (that 'debate between Capitalism and Communism' sounds pretty dated now. although I wouldn't bet against it coming back some time between now and the arrival of Replicator-world).

But I'm sceptical about the ultimate withering of the state, on two levels. Firstly, the 'state' that mainstream rightists/libertarians want to shrug off , is the big state, the one that kicked off when sovereign states started incrementally conceding rights and protections to ordinary citizens, the one that reached its apogee with the post-New Deal/post-war welfare states that fell out of political fashion as the 1970s turned into the ' 80s.

But there were states before that. Those states didn't do a lot for the ordinary citizen, but they had enough power to provide some protection from external attack and to dispense a sort of justice, funded by taxes from common folk. Of course, a lot of the taxes and tithes went to fund the lavish lifestyles and power struggles of the elite, but that was the price you paid for some degree of protection. I don't see many mainstream right libertarians wanting to dismantle this sort of state. Most mainstream welfare-haters are a bit more statist when it comes to maintaining a system of law that protects things like property rights, securing the borders and defending the state against terrorists and the rogue state du jour (see the Tea Party Nation's 2011 plan to stimulate the American economy by building more aircraft carriers, which The Economist wonderfully summed up as an adventure in cognitive dissonance).

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms. In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.

You don't have to be Steven Pinker to concede that a post-scarcity world would probably be a lot less violent and insecure than one where people are engaged in a struggle over scarce resources. But if there are still humans there will still be humans doing bad stuff. Even without the present drivers of injustice, exploitation and violence, there will probably always be people who, without some systems  to defend the weak and enforce some generally-agreed notion of justice, will do bad things, from psychological torture to murder. Although there would be far fewer motives to commit terrible acts, a Replicator society, the technology - if unregulated - would give even the tiniest minority of malicious individuals an enormous power to do harm.

From a jilted lover replicating a deadly weapon to take revenge on a runaway ex and his/her new squeeze to some fanatic or nihilist on a mission to destroy as many other humans as possible, with the help of a Replicator that can fabricate almost any type of infernal device a sick mind might imagine, there are plenty of reasons to suppose that the state or something very like it, might need to control what comes out of the Replicators.

These problems arise long before you arrive at Burke's 22nd Century Utopia. If the trend towards distributed manufacture of increasingly complex artifacts continues, some group of non-state fanatics could make the pulp thriller cliché of terrorists with nukes or bio-weapons a reality well before we get to Replicator world. It's not an original idea - weapons control is a big issue in Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel The Diamond Age.

Stephenson's Replicator society deals with the weapons problem in a way that seems to owe a lot to the right-libertarian ethos that runs through a certain strand of sci-fi (think Heinlein, or Niven and Pournelle) and the to the "good guys with guns versus an out-of-control criminal underclass" narrative popular with the National Rifle Association and its fans. In Stephenson's world you have a gated-community solution, where the stupid, violent proles only have access to public Replicators, loaded with crippleware to ensure they can only produce the harmless necessities of life, such as plates and mattresses.

Instead of the state having a monopoly on violence, justice (and the muscle needed to enforce justice) comes from the nice, clever, rich people who have gone Galt and organised themselves into 'tribes' or 'phyles' - self-governing anarcho-libertarian collectives. Tribe members, being nice, clever, rich people,* trust themselves to have access to Replicators that aren't feature-limited, so they can fabricate the firepower they need to suppress the occasional outrage perpetrated by any low-life criminal punk who manages to get hold of a piece of black-market weaponry from an illicit Replicator.

Which is all very well, provided you're born into the right caste, but if you've got any liking for a democracy, a society at ease with itself, equality of opportunity, or equality under the law, Stephenson's society sounds like even more of a nightmare than Srinivasan's near-term techno-Narnia. If you've got to control this stuff, I reckon it would be better done by something like a state, enforcing a set of necessary norms and rules that apply equally to everybody.

So, humans would probably be best off with at least a minimal state to disinterestedly enforce basic norms of civilised behaviour and prevent malicious use of technology. But we can leave all those nanny-state-ish rules and regulations, red tape and health and safety nonsense behind, right?

The trouble is, what looks like bureaucratic red tape from the entrepreneur's office looks a bit more sensible when your kid's just choked to death after playing with a toy that should have been better designed or at least had ' WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD. Unsuitable for children under 3 years' written in large, friendly letters on the box. Never mind weapons, if you are your own factory and can produce almost any device you fancy, the opportunities to accidentally kill or maim are legion. A lot of expertise, testing, thought, time and effort currently goes into making sure that the consumer goods you use don't maim or kill you, your loved ones, or innocent bystanders.

Some sort of standards and control would be needed - it might even come down to publicly-available replicators being feature-limited so they're unable to fabricate safety-critical parts or devices, as in Stephenson's world, although I reckon that the control of anything that has to conform to a particular standard is best left to a boring old bureaucracy, rather than to a self-appointed aristocracy of superior beings in the gated seclusion of Galt Towers.

Of course, there might be another way for those national borders to disappear - something like a World State, which might arise if people were more or less autonomous in terms of subsistence, but needed to be subject to laws enforcing basic norms of civilised behaviour and making sure that insanely dangerous and destructive things didn't come out somebody's Pandora's Box of a Replicator. If those basic concerns were the same across all societies, maybe one law and one state to rule them all?  Or supra-national agreements governing the city states or whatever polities people are living in in 2100 - I've no idea (except that I'm pretty sure they'll still be living under something more or less like a state).

Unless, that is, humans have wiped themselves out by then. If we assume distributed manufacture and the fact that (short of societal collapse), societies don't un-invent things, the airport thriller terrorists-with-nukes scenario gets more likely over the long term, then why would the trend stop there? Why imagine humans have already invented the most destructive things that can be invented? When nearly everybody can theoretically reproduce nearly anything that's ever been invented, there may come a day when vigilance really has to be eternal because it only takes one maniac and a doomsday device (or even a risky experiment that goes wrong) circumventing Replicator security to wipe the human race out.

Maybe that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox - intelligent life doesn't last, because any sufficiently advanced technology will become powerful enough to annihilate itself, by accident or design. And accidents always happen, eventually. Maybe we should all hope that even Burke's wonderful-looking techno-Utopia is just another unrealistic techno-Narnia, because such power would leave the human race just a whisker away from annihilation.

via


* I hope you can already see what's wrong with this picture, but in case you're a cup of coffee behind me, I've got two things to add:
a) What are the chances of a self-selecting group of 'superior' people really being your actual Übermenschen, as opposed to a bunch of people who just think they're superior to everybody else? Given the statistically impossible percentage of drivers whose self-assessed driving abilities are above average, I don't trust people to be objective when ranking themselves against others.
b) The Richard Cromwell effect. Even when somebody's flattering self-assessment is correct, well, some day they're going to retire or die and leave it to the next generation to carry on. Love him or loathe him, Oliver Cromwell made an impact. His son, and successor to the Lord Protectorship, didn't, and became a footnote in history. In theory, only the best rise to the top in a meritocracy. In reality, the best and the brightest love their kids, like almost everybody else, and try to ensure that they inherit the family firm, or get whatever other help they need to rise to the top, regardless of their ability, or the lack of it, shutting brighter kids from less privileged backgrounds out. Where 'there is no such thing as society ... There are individual men and women, and there are families,' it's not what you know but who you're born to that matters, which has always seemed more than a tad unfair to me.

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.

Very small, hexagonal, terror cells

David Anderson, who holds the post of “Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation”, has noticed this:

• this century, on average, five people per year have died in the UK as a result of terrorist attacks
• in 2010, five people in England and Wales died as a result of being attacked by bees, wasps or hornets

The official threat level has been reduced from "Amber" to "Yellow With Black Stripes."*


* yes, I know they’ve dropped colour coding in favour of some equally meaningless measure, but I couldn’t resist that one…

Are you a victim of mis-selling?

Have unscrupulous salespeople pressured you into signing up to an unsuitable single currency? Has this left you suffering from any of the following:

• high unemployment?
• education cuts?
• health cuts?
• welfare cuts?
• whopping taxes?
• unaffordable credit?
• loss of your employment rights?
• loss of your pension rights?
• loss of your economic sovereignty?
• social unrest? 
• loss of your democracy?

If any of these things have happened to you, then you may be a victim of mis-selling and you could be owed ££££££ €€€€€€!!!!!

But don’t worry - it may not be too late to claim compensation from the people who got you into this mess!

Only joking. Sorry, Europe, you’re screwed.

via

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?

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)

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Watch and learn

It's a bit late, but here's one of the most sensible, succinct comments anyone has made about the UK riots and their aftermath:

Norway loses 92 children and suggests more democracy; we lose 12 JD sports and some Nandos and demand the army and rubber bullets. 

Courtesy of an unknown tweeter. It's a pity that we Brits seem to have learned nothing from the Scandinavians, except how to consume their angsty crime fiction and flat pack furniture.

Via.

The womb of monsters?

Until today, the horrible crimes of Anders Behring Breivik hadn’t forced me to change any of my preconceptions about the world. Most of the terrorist atrocities carried out in the West and Middle East in recent years have been carried out by Islamist militants, so a lot of instapundits rushed out boilerplate articles like this one explaining why Al Qaeda hates Norway, and ended up looking foolish when the real perpetrator and his agenda were identified within hours.

My own first thought, when I heard about a bomb and a gunman on the rampage was that Islamist militants, like those who’d bombed London and Madrid and run amok with guns in Mumbai, were probably responsible. When I heard that this was the work of a homegrown crackpot with a different agenda, though, I didn’t have to do any particular agonizing reappraisal. My first guess was wrong, but I knew that the world has had many other types of murderous lunatics and terrorists with other agendas and backgrounds. Just think Timothy McVeigh, or the Tamil Tigers, or Aum Shinrikyo, or The Lord’s Resistance Army, or the Continuity IRA for starters.

Breivik didn’t challenge my preconceptions about terrorists and what seems to motivate them. In fact, he seemed quite typical of the breed. Although he identifies himself as an extreme anti-Islamist, there seem to be a lot of similarities between this self-styled defender of Western Christendom and the jihadists.

The ideology of Breivik  and of the Islamists is, as far as I can see, exclusively about the politics of identity. There is a perceived in-group, whether Western Christendom or the Islamic Ummah that is supposedly under threat from the Other in the shape of  immigrants, Muslims, Infidels, liberals or Zionists. The in-group is the only source of virtue, the Other is the source of all evil and corruption. Therefore the Other and anyone who “collaborates” with the Other must be destroyed in a zero-sum battle for survival.

Brevik has been described as a Christian conservative, but I don’t think this quite covers it. From his rambling manifesto ("2083: A European Dealaration of Independence") he sounds like a reactionary rather than a conservative. He’s not trying to conserve the status quo, because he thinks that society has already gone to hell in a handcart. His aim seems to be to go back to a lost supposed golden age before things went all liberal and muticultural.

His manifesto makes almost comically nostalgic references to the 1950s as an age when chaps wore hats and come home to a dinner cooked by a little woman who didn’t worry her pretty little head with thoughts of anything but childbearing and looking after her home and master, an age when men could have a good laugh at the expense of ethnic minorities and homosexuals without the politically correct brigade objecting to  their allegedly  hilarious banter. All this pipes and slippers tosh sits rather weirdly with stuff about the Knights Templar, an order of monastic warriors that was abolished in the Fourteenth Century and is relevant to precisely nothing in the modern world, except for Brevik’s fantasies and the plot of a Dan Brown novel.

Again, if you strip out the cultural specifics, what he seems to want echoes the Islamist militants’ agenda:

• A move back to a traditional, monocultural society. Check. 
• Keeping uppity women in their place (viz. the home). Check. 
• Disgust at a liberal society that judges gay people, like everybody else, by the content of their character, rather than by what they choose to  do in private with consenting adults. Check.
• Historically suspect fantasies about a semi-mythical lost  world of virtue in the conveniently distant past, involving either crusading Knights Templar or the Islamic Caliphate. Check. 
• Baffled by the concept of “live and let live.” Check.  
• Getting disproportionately angry about all of the above. Check.

Maryam Namazie, a long time campaigner against Islamist violence and oppression, also noticed the correspondences between Brevik and Islamist terrorists and made this  simple but  powerful statement  on her blog:

For those who constantly 'advise' me and us to work with all sorts against Sharia law and Islamism, this tragedy is a confirmation of why we must stand resolutely against both.

You cannot fight Islamism, a far-right regressive movement, without also fighting the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and fascist European far-Right.

They are two sides of the same coin.

They represent everything our world must not become...

There’s not a lot I’d add to that, except to point out that, unbearably tragic though Brevik’s actions must be for those involved, we’re not involved in some epic existential clash of cultures or War On Terror here. Brevik’s actions were inexcusable, devastating and shocking, but, the chances of being caught up in a terrorist attack  are still minuscule compared with the risk of  death  from such everyday tragedies as heart disease, cancer, accidental injury, road traffic accidents, suicide, fire, electrocution, flood, or falling off a ladder. There are no vast networks of terrorists in the West, just a tiny minority of, isolated individuals and loosely connected groupuscules. The rest of us, whatever our background, have far better things to do with our lives. That’s the last thing that Brevik and the Islamists have in common – they’d all like us to join their frightened little world, become terrified and suspicious of the Other and retreat into a paranoid tribal huddle, which would be the worst possible reaction to their actions.

So far, so unsurprising. Brevik  fits the template and is the very model of a modern murdering maniac. Nothing here to challenge what I thought I knew about the subject. One thing, though, has made me pause and re-examine a long held preconception.

Coincidentally, in Texas, they’ve just executed another home-grown ideological killer, Mark Stroman, who described himself as a ‘proud American.’  After the September 11th attacks, Stroman went on a vengeful gun spree, determined to kill Arabs. He blasted away at three random, blameless strangers, killing two and seriously injuring one. Not only were the people he attacked wholly unconnected with September 11th, but they weren’t even Arabs, (they all came from South Asia). Stroman was killed by lethal injection despite his surviving victim, Rais Bhuiyan (a Muslim Bangladeshi), having appealed for clemency.

In some ways, Stroman also fits the Brevik/Islamist xenophobic template, having lashed out at the alien Other in defence of his tribal identity - in this case as a ‘proud American.’ But there’s one difference between Stroman and Brevik that disturbs me and challenges one of my preconceptions. Stroman’s attacks are an example of the most outrageous bone-headed pig-ignorance possible. He didn’t know and wasn’t able to, or couldn’t be bothered to, find out why a small group of fanatics carried out the September 11th attacks. As far as he was concerned, the attackers were Arabs, and that was all he needed to know. It didn’t, apparently, occur to him to ask whether any other Arabs supported the attack, and, if so, were they a majority, or just a tiny minority. He never considered the possibility that most Arabs might be just ordinary folk, as unconnected to the attack as any ‘proud American.’ Having made the assumption that all Arabs were exactly the same and all were guilty, he wasn’t even able to establish that his victims were Arabs – dark-skinned and foreign-looking seems to have been good enough for him.

Stroman’s attack fits my preconception that one of the drivers of such attacks is ignorance, the womb of monsters. If he’d been better educated, had the first inkling of a clue that the world is a complex and diverse place, was able to actually identify a Middle Eastern country on a map and had the basic mental toolkit for distinguishing fact from opinion and weighing up evidence, he could never have sustained the level of muddle-headed misconception and rage needed to justify his actions in his own head. Or so I thought.

Brevik’s manifesto, however, challenges this particular preconception. It is, of course, barking mad, but it’s not ignorant. Among all the delusional fantasies about the imagined Muslim demographic threat, the Knghts Templar, the uniforms and medals pertaining to his fantasy order of  Justiciar Knights and a “Cultural Marxist” conspiracy, there are profiles of figures such as Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. There are citations and bibliographies and interminable  discussions of topics including historical revisionism, anti colonialism, the history of Islam, janissaries in the Ottoman Empire, the dhimmitude of Zorastrian community in Iran, the Crusades, eunuch slavery, the history of the Hindu Kush, the Armenian Genocide, the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, birth rates in different countries, feminism, the immigration policy of the British Labour Party, sociology, Hip-Hop and media ownership. He quotes from Tony Blair, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, The Koran, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, CIA reports, Nietzsche, Jay-Z, Yuri Bezmenov, (a ‘former KGB agent and expert on ideological subversion’) and Alexis de Tocqueville.

This is the bit that I found unexpected and truly worrying. Of course, being well-read is no guarantee that a person isn’t delusional or a psychopath, but I did have a belief, all things being equal, knowledge was better than ignorance and that exposure to a wide range of viewpoints, arguments and examples broadened the mind, sowed the seeds of doubt and questioning, and inoculated people against fanaticism. I was pretty confident that in a world where people like  Mark Stroman were exposed to diverse and challenging ideas and just knew more stuff, doubt and evidence would drain the swamp of irrational hate and fanaticism. It's clearly not quite that simple.

Ignorance is frightening, but not as terrifying as a mind that can be exposed to such a wide range of  knowledge and ideas, then twist the lot into one great mad mangled conspiracy pretzel. I hadn't relised until now how effective prejudice, obsession and cognitive bias can be at flattening the highest mountains of evidence. I think my world view just bumped into a reality checkpoint.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, Herr Kafka...

... now that you can 'breach an injunction innocently, by repeating information that one knows to be true but does not realise has been injuncted.'

Rumbled

A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.

From a list of "hateful things" in The Pillow Book of  Sei Shōnagon

That would make quite a good strapline for my blog. But I think I'll donate it to James Delingpole's blog, where it would look even more at home, after his richly-deserved public humiliation on Horizon.



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To paraphrase his fellow libertarian Chris Mounsey's no-holds-barred attempt to eviscerate the splendid Laurie Penny:

It is about time that people — by which I mean commissioning editors — realised that James Delingpole is not only a pig-ignorant self-serving nutcase, but also a bigoted, shallow lackwit living in a fantasy world in which an understanding of complex issues is not the result of diligent study and hard work, but of his magical ability to divine the unassailable truth, based on a combination of whatever happens to pop into his head, interpretations of interpretations, a complete lack of scientific expertise and not having the time to read peer-reviewed papers. 

Laurie Penny is still standing, dignity intact. The sneering, self-styled libertarians, in contrast are looking like pitiful bullies who like to dish it out, but can't take it. It's time to man up or shut up, boys.

India's actual shame

Raja Murthy writing in Asia Times Online thinks that the India's real Commonwealth Games shame isn't the less-than-spotless room or unfinished facilities, but in the wasted money in a country where the poor and needy are still very poor and very needy.

Well, anyone worried that the Commonwealth Games is a disastrous waste of money, should try this for size. Yes, India has started building a massive centralized database, holding the details of 1.2 billion people. Biometrics will, apparently, render the massive scheme foolproof. Making this dream / nightmare- a reality will be the responsibility of something called the Unique Identification Authority of India, headed by the founder of India's second-largest outsourcing company.

I haven't checked where the Unique Identification Authority is based but, personally, I think Calcutta would be an appropriate location for UIAI HQ. Wherever it is, the rest of the world will soon be able to watch in horror as billions of rupees are sucked into the new Black Hole of Calcutta (or wherever) until the whole juggernaut collapses under the sheer weight of its own stupidity. If anybody in India ever reads this, please go to the No2ID site to check out why this was a very, very bad idea in the UK and ask yourself why such a scheme would work any better in a vastly more populous country...

Aces High - Battle of Britain Day

It's still (just) Battle of Britain day, so I thought a few words about the top scoring Battle of Britain pilot are in order. For all the valiant efforts of British and Commonwealth airmen, the pilot who downed the most enemy planes in the battle was a Czech - Sergeant Josef František. 

František's achievements during one intense month of air combat with the RAF were all the more remarakable, considering that they followed a desperate journey across wartime Europe, fighting and fleeing the Nazi advance all the way.

František was born on 7 October 1914, in Otaslavice, Moravia.. He joined the Czechoslovak Air Force in 1934 and became a fighter pilot. After the German occupation in March 1939, he escaped to Poland and joined the Polish Air Force.

After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, he flew reconnaissance missions in an unarmed aircraft and attacked the Germans with hand grenades tossed from his plane. He was shot down, but was rescued by Polish aircrew who landed nearby.

When Poland collapsed, František's unit was ordered to withdraw with their remaining aircraft to Romania. František escaped from an internment camp in Romania and reached France via North Africa in October.

In France, František flew alongside escaped Polish pilots. He may have fought in  the Battle of France and may have shot down several German planes, but the records from that time are unclear, contradictory or lost (according to one theory, he may have temporarily been flying under an assumed name in order to protect his family from Gestapo persecution).

After the fall of France, in June, František fled to Britain, trained with the RAF and, in August 1940. joined No. 303 (Polish) Squadron flying Hawker Hurricanes from Northolt.

Although often reprimanded for being undisciplined (both in the air and on the ground), František was a skilled and determined pilot. Within the space of one month, between 2nd September and 30th September he destroyed 17 German aircraft and 1 probable (including 9 Messerschmidt Bf 109s).

Josef František died on 8 October 1940, when his Hurricane crashed in Surrey. The cause of the crash is unknown, although battle fatigue and / or an aerobatic manoeuvre that went wrong have been suggested.

There's more info on the Battle of Britain's top ace here.

Brendan O'Neill withdrawn after 'inexplicable' rant

The Catholic Church today sought to distance itself from controversial comments in the progressively radical "Spiked" e-zine, alleging that Britain resembled a Third World country marked by a new and aggressive atheism. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, described the comments as 'inexplicable'. At the last minute, Brendan O'Neill has withdrawn from the Papal visit. A Vatican press official insisted that O'Neill's absence was purely due to health problems.

In the bad old days, angry authoritarians who wanted to raise their blood pressure by reading incoherent rants about the state of the world had to make do with the thoughts of Richard Littlejohn and Jan Moir. This was all very well, but it did tend to make the reader look like an unstylish, beige-cardie-wearing middle-aged fuddy-duddy. Fortunately, with the new generation of  professional contrairans like Brendan O'Neill and Seamus Milne, a new demographic can now get that edgy, radical, free-thinking hipster look while still enjoying the comfort of blistering tirades against liberal free-thinkers and grovelling respect for reactionary and/or authoritarian institutions.

Burning books in 1989 and 2010

7th September 2010: an evangelical pastor plans to burn a few copies of the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11. Hilary Clinton is outraged by the book burners:

I am heartened by the clear, unequivocal condemnation of this disrespectful, disgraceful act that has come from American religious leaders of all faiths, from evangelical Christians to Jewish rabbis, as well as secular US leaders and opinion-makers.

14th January 1989: Salman Rushdie's book the "Satanic Verses" has upset some people. Ishtiaq Ahmed, of the Bradford Council of Mosques, takes part in the first book-burning of "The Satanic Verses" in Britain. He's satisfied with the result:

Finally they had made a statement. Finally that had found a way to express their anger and their frustration, their disgust, their emotions about this book

March 2nd 1989:  Just a couple of days after extremists have firebombed a couple of California bookstores selling "The Satanic Verses", British Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, is outraged,* (not by the book burning mob, or firebombing, or even the death threats to the author, but by the book itself):

We do understand that the book itself has been found deeply offensive by people of the Moslem faith. We can understand why it has been criticized. It is a book that is offensive in many other ways as well.**

To recap; burning books is like, really bad, right? Except when the book in question upsets somebody, when it's the book that's at fault. But what if Pastor Terry Jones' feelings are genuinely hurt by the Koran? What's more offensive, the contents of a book, or the act of setting fire to it? It's all very confusing. As David Mitchell (almost) said

There's altogether too much harping on respect and burning these days. If you can't respect something, you should burn it. If it's not burned, you should respect it.

In other words, just grow up, the lot of you. Especially the "outraged" politicians - it's not fair to expect much in the way of calm, rational thought from baying mobs, being egged on blockheaded evangelical pastors or mad Mullahs, but US Secretaries of State and British Foreign Secretaries ought to know better than to get involved with this politically expedient outrage nonsense. It's not only demeaning, but it encourages a tiny minority of angry half-wits to to think they can censor anything that upsets their particular view of the world and threaten everybody else's freedom of thought and expression with impunity.

* To be fair, the outrage of Geoffrey Howe wasn't a thing to be greatly feared - Dennis Healey found his wrath like being 'savaged by a dead sheep'.

**In this context its's also instructive to read some interesting contemporary statements about the Rushdie affair from former US President Jimmy Carter, the Vatican newspaper, the then Commonwealth Chief Rabbi and the ever-reliable US vice president J. Danforth Quayle (who hadn't read "The Satanic Verses" or, I suspect, any book without pictures) here.

Busybodies and peeping Toms

When I first mentioned The Fifth Column blog, I thought the title sounded, at best, ill-advised, but I didn't look much further - like the bizarre slogans featured in the Meaningless T-Shirts blog, the title in itself was enough  to attract mockery and derision.

I'm indebted to Meridian for actually looking at some of the Fifth Columnist's posts and discovering that 'the name is only about half as disturbing as some of the content'. He's not kidding. If you look at a T-shirt with a bizarre message, what you see is all you get. Look behind the strange title of this  "orthodox Catholic commentary on current events" and a whole wondrous world of wingnuttery is revealed.

The "Fifth Column" blog beats a meaningless T-shirt slogan in an obvious, quantitative way - you can cram way more freaking weirdness into a blog post than will fit onto the front of a T-shirt. "The Fifth Column" also does just what it says on the tin, commenting on current events, a qualitative difference that takes the barking insanity to a whole new level. I'd even say that the blog provides an instructive new perspective on current events, although not in the way the writer intends.

One of the most depressing things about current public debate and journalism is vicious, voyeuristic and irrelevant intrusion into the people's private lives. William Hague's private life is a topical example and there are a couple of posts by the Fifth Columnist that, while they aren't about this specific case - neatly illustrate the sort of prurience and prejudice that feeds this sort of gutter journalism.

I'm not a political supporter of William Hague - the best I could say about him is that his political views are a bit less objectionable than some of the headbangers further to the right of his party. As far as I'm concerned, his policies and political views are fair game - he's entitled to believe what he believes, and anybody who doesn't agree is entitled to lay into his ideas without pulling any punches. All good clean fun.

But, love him or loathe him, I see no reason to think that I have any right to know the details of his sex life. Neither does anybody else (except - if he's in a committed relationship - his partner and, under certain circumstances very close family). He would lose this right to privacy if his sexual activities extended to rape, sex with minors or some such sex crime, but there is absolutely no suggestion by anybody that he's done anything of the sort. So as it stands, I've got no right to know what sort of sex (if any) William Hague is having, or with whom. It seems like normal good manners to me - after all, if I started quizzing complete strangers on a train about whether they were having sex and, if so, with whom I would, quite rightly, be regarded as some sort of creepy perv.

This is where the prurience comes in. Reactionary moralists often complain loudly about how sex-obsessed liberal, secular society is. Yet it's often the most reactionary moralists who display the keenest interest in other people's sex lives. In a disturbing reversal of Elizabeth I's famous declaration that  'I have no desire to make windows into men's souls', these people seem frighteningly keen to make widows into other people's bedrooms.

This is where the Fifth Columnist provides a perfect illustration of the reactionary moralist's smut-obsessed mindset. Take a look at his angry public letter to somebody called Janet Smith discussing such burning questions as the morality or otherwise of anal foreplay and the looming menace of people who claim that the Easter candle is a phallic symbol. It's a bit more unguarded than anything a professional journalist would write and, as such, gives a frightening insight into what "morally conservative" gutter hacks and their devoted readers really think about for a lot of the time.

From prurience to prejudice, the other driver of the William Hague non-story. I don't know or care whether William Hague is straight, gay, bi or celibate. But some people do still think this matters and want to discriminate against gay people just for being gay. They think, wrongly or rightly that William Hague is in the closet and want to out him.

What we're witnessing here is an interesting stage in the power struggle between social liberals and authoritarian reactionaries. It's a struggle that the reactionaries, at least in Britain, are currently losing, although they're fighting every inch of the way.

Not very long ago, it was almost unheard of for a politician, to be openly gay - especially in the Conservative party. To succeed in such an atmosphere of prejudice, many went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their sexuality, even entering into "Potemkin marriages" to evade the ever-watchful eyes of the bigots and busybodies.  Of  course, living this kind of double life was precarious and the ritual humiliation of outed MPs by the bigots and busybodies in the party and the press was routine.

Eventually, a brave few came out of the closet. Alan Duncan was the first Tory MP to come out openly as gay and Iain Duncan Smith, to his great credit, supported him. It was a significant step forward; just a year before, old guard Tory Norman Tebbit endorsed had Iain Duncan Smith in the party leadership contest because he was a 'normal, family man with children'. "Normal" - it's an innocent-sounding little word, but when it gets used by the powerful as a weasel word to exclude and demean people who they just happen to have take a dislike to, it can be as nasty as it is small. I don't know whether Tebbit viewed Duncan Smith's acceptance of Alan Duncan's sexuality as a kick in the teeth, but if he did, I do hope it hurt.

Now that more MPs are openly gay and not therefore vulnerable to exposure and humiliation, the vindictive bullies who used to enjoy bringing them down have lost some of their power. Easy prey is becoming harder to find, so when they do think they scent blood in the water a feeding frenzy ensues. 

The Fifth Columnist also seems to be a tireless witch-hunter, always keen to sniff out anybody who doesn't come up to his standards of normality, although one of his most striking the posts targets religious, rather than sexual, unorthodoxy. There are interesting parallels, though. In the UK, authoritarian reactionaries seem to have it in for William Hague because they suspect or hope that his private life may be unorthodox. In the USA, the same sort of people suspect or hope that President Obama's religious life may not be orthodox. I don't know how many Americans believe that the President is a Muslim, but a Google "obama" and "muslim" and you'll get about 46 million hits. Quite a few of these hits will take you to sites refuting the suggestion, but that still leaves a hell of a lot of crazy conspiracy theorists who believe that he is. 

There are important differences between a person's sexuality and their religion. The most important of these is that a person's sexual orientation is an integral part of who they are, something they are born with, like their race, gender or personality. Sure, like personality, it can be tweaked a bit by societal pressure and life experiences, but whatever it is, it comes from within.

Religion is a system of ideas and beliefs about the nature of things, bundled up with a moral code of one sort or another, defined by some external authority. People may talk about Christian children or Muslim children or whatever, but there's no such animal in reality - there are only children born to parents who subscribe to this, that or the other set of beliefs.Children may like the religion of their parents, or under various degrees of societal or parental influence, pressure or intimidation, more or less grudgingly accept it, or may reject it in favour of an alternative religion or none (provided they are lucky enough to live in a society where such freedom of choice isn't punished harshly).

However, in the reactionary mind-set, this distinction is often reversed. Sexuality is sometimes seen by some reactionaries as a free choice made by an individual, who can either "choose" to be "normal" or "choose" to be abnormal and sinful. Those "choosing" sinful sexual unorthodoxy can be "cured" by the pressure, example and prayers of the faithful.

To reactionary often seem to see religion, by contrast, not as a free, rational choice about the nature of things or which moral code makes some sort of ethical sense, but as something innate and tribal.

For all these differences, the reactionary mind seems bent on rooting out and eradicating the "abnormal" and the unorthodox. Barack Obama, was the product of a racially mixed marriage, born to a father from Kenya. He had an Indonesian stepfather and went to school in Indonesia for a time. To the liberal mind, this makes him the exemplar of the American melting pot. To the reactionary, this makes him unorthodox and therefore suspect.

Not having (or wanting) a window into men's souls, I don't know what Barack Obama's religious views are. He apparently professes to be a devout Christian. This may be perfectly true, or he might be exaggerating the extent and depth of his beliefs, in order to fit in to the culture he inhabits. Just as it used to be important for an aspiring Tory MP to be seen as a 'normal family man' (or woman), there's still a lot of pressure on US politicians to be seen to be church-going Christians. Whether he sees the Evergreen Chapel simply as a "Potemkin Church" for public consumption, I neither know nor care.

Devoutly religious or not, Barack Obama's position on religion sounds a lot more in keeping with the founding fathers' vision of a country where church and state were separate and the free exercise of religion was written into the constitution, than the reactionary rantings of those who demand a display of Christian piety from anyone running for public office:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

The Fifth Columnist, of course, produces his obligatory "Is Obama is a Muslim?" post. Apparently, we can't afford to rule out the possibility of an enormous conspiracy to keep the president's religion a secret - after all, the Fifth Columnist muses, "they"  manged to keep the establishment of Social Security a secret for years (and there are apparently still people stupid enough to believe that Social Security is 'some sort of social insurance program' when rather than 'part of an enormous Ponzi scheme'). "They" manged to keep The Manhattan Project and the cracking of the Enigma code secret. The Nazis kept their euthanasia programme secret for a whole year. Therefore...

Massive conspiracies are common throughout history. All it takes is well-motivated people with the same mindset who see themselves as fighting a common enemy.

Click the link and read the whole thing - it would be hilarious, if the number of people who apparently believe this stuff wasn't so worryingly large.

I've found the Fifth Columnist quite useful - his language is more revealing than the sometimes slightly coy euphemisms and weaselly dog-whistle words used by the Jan Moirs and Richard Littlejohns of this world. His his strange obsessions and fantasies are delineated in loving detail, he is reasonably articulate, knows some history and obviously has considerable knowledge in his chosen field of expertise (although as that field is theology, that's rather like saying that somebody has an impressive grasp of conversational Klingon).

Now, whenever I'm tempted to give some reactionary motor-mouth the benefit of the doubt, I think of the glance the Fifth Columnist has given me into the reactionary mind when it isn't trying to be accommodationist and respectable. I think of the many changes that brave and committed people have made on the way to building a more liberal, democratic society, in which tolerance and freedom of thought and conscience actually matter. There's a long way still to go, but a glance into the strange, narrow, deeply disturbing mind of the social reactionary makes me grateful for what those people have already achieved.

Quote of the day

There's altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can't respect something, you should ban it. If it's not banned, you should respect it.

David Mitchell is spot on. Read the rest here. Via.