Good news for the Republican Party today with McCain's announcement that Sarah Palin would be his running mate. Palin is one of few candidates who could help to shore up the conservative base and also appeal to independents and undecided voters. The other person who could have covered both these bases is Bobby Jindal, but unfortunately the unhealthy obsession with race that this presidential race (haha) has generated would have meant that a Jindal pick would have looked like a gimmick and a blatant attempt to neutralize the romance Obama's candidature carries by virtue of his minority status.

Listening to the Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt shows this evening the level of respect and enthusiasm that the choice of Palin has aroused in the Republican base seems quite remarkable. Some of this stems from the fact that she gave birth to and cares for a young child with Down's Syndrome, a child that in most cases would have been aborted. Five children, all with funny names: Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper & Trig. She also hunts moose, likes fishing, and is a former state high school basketball champion and beauty queen.

Her speech today had a section thanking Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton, as well as a discussion on breaking through glass ceilings. Cute. Clinton must be gnashing her teeth.

My position for the coming year has now been pretty much sorted out. From October I will be a bye-fellow of Fitzwilliam College and a lecturer in economics for Fitzwilliam and Downing colleges. Of course, the PhD is still progressing.

Just cracked open a copy of a new magazine going by the name of "Total Politics". It promises to be "one of the few places to take a positive approach to campaigning, political processes, ideas, and political lifestyles."

Puke.

Dani Rodrik comments here on data reproduced in a book by Larry Bartels'. Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen also discuss it here and here.

It centres around this graph.

My initial reaction to this is - so what? To me this looks like a classic case of being fooled by randomness.

Firstly, is it surprising that presidents of one party have had average higher income growth while in power? No, it is guaranteed to be true.

Secondly, if income growth is heavily correlated across quintiles it is no surprise if statement (1) extends to each quintile considered separately.

Taken from Zombietime.

Rowan Williams set out to discuss:

the social meanings of anti-religious language or behaviour

which is interesting. The first mistake he makes is where he describes a tension:

The liberal concern for the rights of minorities has been in tension with the liberal commitment to free speech 

where he confuses the traditional liberal concern that minorities should have the same rights as every other person with the modern 'liberal' (i.e. socialist) concern that minorities should have extra rights on top of those that everyone else has. He does however make a good point that

discourse focused on rights can lead us into unmanageable conflicts if it is isolated from other considerations about the foundations of law.

This is absolutely correct, and is the reason why I would argue that we are better arguing about what the proper limits to behaviour are, rather than using the language of rights. He makes the point that

For some – and this is especially true for believers from outside the European or North Atlantic setting – religious belief and practice is a marker of shared identity, accepted not as a matter of individual choice but as a given to which allegiance is due in virtue of the intrinsic claims of the sacred. 

This is true but does not suggest how we should set our laws in these islands. The Archbishop writes that we show a "lack of imagination" in failing to recognize the real hurt experienced by people when their religion is criticized. I think the vast majority of people do recognize this hurt, but think that causing such hurt should not be against the law. It also, in falling back on the blame-the-West paradigm by accusing us of having a lack of imagination, fails to recognize the flip side of the coin - that those who hold these religious beliefs which are a marker of their shared identity show a lack of imagination in assuming that enforced respect for their beliefs should extend to everyone everywhere.

Spectres of colonialism, 'Orientalism', and, once again, anti-Semitism are roused when this insensibility to the otherness of the religious other goes unquestioned.  And behind this is the nagging problem of what happens to a culture in which, systematically, nothing is sacred. 

There is an irony here in that the Archbishop accuses others of 'orientalism' when it is he who has just been writing that we should apply different standards of discourse and different expectations of behaviour when dealing with those from other, more sensitive cultures. I do not understand the reference to colonialism either: widespread cultural interest in 'the other' was greater at the time of exploration  and colonialism than it is now.

it is one thing to say that someone may be deeply and dangerously wrong, even to say it with anger, and another to say or imply that if someone is wrong it is because they are infantile, wilfully blind or perverse. 

Then why, pray tell, do these people of whom you speak hold such crazy views? I can think of few ways in which someone can be known to be "deeply and dangerously wrong" without being perverse, wilfully blind (eg. partisan) or stupid. Clearly the information which shows he is wrong is out there otherwise we wouldn't know how "deeply and dangerously wrong" he is.

He then gives a clue about the deeply distant place he comes from compared to most people:

Similarly, we have left behind the era when it was unproblematic to make fun of other races or nationalities.

No we have NOT. I make fun of my girlfriend all the time for such reasons and she does so to me as well. What's more, my friends, who come from many different races and nationalities do so as well. These aren't BNP voters, many of them are PhD students. They are entirely comfortable with superficial differences between people, and they are entirely comfortable with making fun of such differences.

He then makes the good point that:

what is legally permissible is not necessarily thereby made desirable, acceptable or, simply, good. 

but misses the corollary that what is not desirable should not necessarily be legally impermissible. I think the Archbishop hovers here around the issue of how morals should be about more than just legislation, and that too much legislation is an effective outsourcing of people's morality to the government. However, he doesn't quite see the wood for the trees.

Towards the end of his speech he makes an argument that "context is all". He argues that the law should take into account the position of someone who is the target of abusive speech. He says the law should grant special protection to those without access to "the dominant discourse and means of communication in one's society". This is a position based on group rights that should be despised by any good liberal. That an identical criticism should be legal when directed against, say Christians or Muslims, but illegal when directed against Scientologists or Raelians is an outrageous and ridiculous suggestion. The Archbishop clearly disagrees with the liberal precept that the law should be blind.

The full speech is available here:

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1561

 

It strikes me from watching the youtube videos linked to on the previous post that they perfectly illustrate the extended childhood that Mark Steyn has suggested people enjoy nowadays.

Now as Richard Warman was born in 1968 and the video was shot in 2001 we know that Warman was about 33 years old when the video was shot.

Now at the age of 33.....

Évariste Galois had laid the foundations of a major area of algebra and been dead over a decade.

Mozart had already composed 41 symphonies.

Edmund Hillary conquered Everest.

Napoleon Bonaparte had completed major reforms of the French government (no easy matter as any French politician will tell you).

Richard Warman was planning to have a custard pie thrown at David Icke.

Sad. Very sad indeed.

This is so flippin' hilarious.

You've heard of David Icke yep? The guy who thinks the world is ruled by lizards? Richard Warman carried out a campaign to deny Mr Icke outlets for his dangerous views.....

Includes the great quote: "I've got no evidence that this guy's a holocaust denier but the kind of things he says indicate to me that it's the kind of views he might well hold."

i.e. if you believe the Queen of England is a shape shifting lizard you are likely to be a holocaust denier. Quite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ROs7n17Yg
(the campness of the narrator is also pretty funny)

And then Richard Warman attacks David Icke with a cream pie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4eh3Utwf84

A look at some reporting by 'experts':

http://sandbox.blog-city.com/gaza_buried_in_flour.htm

A good Speyside dram to drink while you work. A very airy nose so you stay alert and up to the tasks ahead. An unusually unified taste without water a - watered down amontillado sherry taste with very little kick. It has been described as tasting of rhubarb and I'm inclined to agree (having had  a large bowl of rhubarb for tea I'm in a good position to comment). Water doesn't change much, just making most of the already present flavours blander, so don't add water to this one.

The distillery was founded in 1894 & the name apparently derives from "Lhanmorgund" which means "place of the holy man". The taste of the malt suits this name -  the type of dram you can imagine a priest or thinker drinking.

Strange article from Yale Daily News, reproduced courtesy of the freerepublic:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1958216/posts

I really need to sort this page out. Shouldn't allow teaching to eat into my time so much.

Following polling indicating a loss of trust in the Labour brand, the Labour Party has indicated its intention to change its name to the Conversative Party. Sources close to the prime minister suggest that the decision was made following a slew of polls where Labour placed second to the older and more established Conservative Party. "It wasn't possible to change our name to the Conservative Party because of copyright reasons" our source said, "but Conversatives indicates our intention to hold a conversation with the people and communities of Britain". This latest move follows a series of key strategic moves by the Labour Party which include the introduction of a unified border police at points of entry to the UK and an increased focus on national identity. In coming weeks Labour is likely to attack the Tories on two fronts, showing Tory proposals to cut inheritance tax to be uncosted and unworkable while simultaneously proposing their own cuts in inheritance tax. In the words of our source: "All of our proposals will have been carefully costed, you couldn't just make it up".

Also in the news, Gordon Brown expanded on his reasons for not calling an election this autumn. "I want the country to see my vision" said the blind-in-one-eye, partially-sighted-in-the-other-eye prime minister. "My new vision is fundamentally different to the old one. If my vision had been the same as the vision we were elected on in 2005 then, perhaps, we would have an election. But as my vision is now different, there is now no need for an election."

John Humphrys to Vint Cerf this morning during a discussion on internet censorship regulation:

Suppressing is one word, regulating is a different word but means that same doesn't it? And nobody objects to regulation. In this context. Do they? Should they?

 

The new statue of Nelson Mandela in parliament square is testament to the lack of imagination of the political classes.

I agree that there is much to be commended in Mandela's approach to reconciliation within South Africa. However I do question whether this hero of another country should be the first name on the tips of British tongues when they consider who to honour.

If we are to honour foreigners so, I would suggest Vaclav Havel. I wonder what Ken Livingstone and his kind would think of that.

For anyone who doesn't know what the Serious Crime Bill is, it's an interesting little bill which started in the Lords and is currently making its way through the House of Commons. The bill would allow the High Court to issue Serious Crime Prevention Orders. According to the legislation such orders could restrict who a person associates with, where he works, whether he can sell his property and the locations to which he is allowed to travel. A breach of such an order could result in up to 5 years imprisonment.

What I find interesting is the way in which legislators are excusing the (tyrannical) powers conferred according to the letter of this bill by arguing that the courts will interpret the bill in some other way than is suggested by the wording contained in the bill itself.

   more »

The Guardian newspaper is selling merchandise carrying the message that Tony Blair is going to hell. Tasteful.

http://www.guardianoffers.co.uk/mall/productpage.cfm/Guardian/GNL000010/89505

....but a wedding to go to on the 'morrow and then to the USA soon after. Listening to the Guardian's podcasts from Hizb-ut-Tahrir - such cheery chappies. 

"Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we've got to keep generating it or the lights go out." - Wayne LaPierre.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke .

All good stuff, but it does mean that to maintain freedom, liberty and good mojo in society we need hardy battlers to keep fighting for the cause. They aren't fighting for themselves and could probably have a happier, funner life just letting other people get on with it.

Other people gain as much freedom from one man's fight for freedom as he does, and are in the majority of cases are not likely to be particularly grateful. In fact, many will complain incessantly, some will form lobby groups to fight for less freedom and intellectuals and media will belittle his 'unworkable' ideas. At the end of his life he is likely to have made a tiny difference to the overall scheme of things and is likely to be viewed as a bit of a bore by many of those who have benefited from his efforts.

Do people deserve freedom then? If a majority will not fight for it should a tiny minority keep doing so to their detriment? Should a believer be a martyr? The neverending nature of the cause mentioned in the quotations above suggests we then need a neverending stream of martyrs..... is this what we want talented people to make of themselves?

An endless line of martyrs is not a very appealing prospect: for a start it does not fit into the heroic narrative in the same way that a single person martyred in a struggle for permanent change does. Rather it is redolent of a machine feeding on a infinite supply of human flesh, flesh fueling an unwinnable struggle.

It's possible to quote Camus in partial refutation of this:

Je laisse Sisyphe au bas de la montagne! On retrouve toujours son fardeau. Mais Sisyphe enseigne la fidélité supérieure qui nie les dieux et soulève les rochers. .... Cet univers désormais sans maître ne lui parait ni stérile ni futile. ... La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. (Translation at bottom of page here)

The problem is an important part of Camus' arguments is the essential parity between tasks without ultimate success, in a way a parity achieved through the tasks' lack of ultimate meaning. I very much doubt any champions of liberty viewing the task they are engaged in as unimportant when compared to other things. One to ponder.

Here is the offensive content that sparked the Clare College Mohammed cartoons controversy (hat tip: Pub Philosopher).

For what it's worth I think it's a pretty funny satirical take on the rioting following the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in the Danish newspaper jyllands posten. Some people seem to have problem with the implied 'rapist' comparisons but as the people being compared to the rapists are violent rioters, I don't have too much of a gripe with that.

...that it implies that there are people working in government: our government, of the United Kingdom who believe sincerely that it is better for some people to have jobs than others, depending on their skin colour.

Here is the story, which involves Tory candidate Louise Bagshawe being told in a letter that employment is being shifted from Corby to Leicester because "93.7 per cent of the population of Corby are white British, compared to 59.6 per cent in Leicester".

Perhaps we can look forward to a league table of the government's preferred skin tones. I'll get it started:

Preferred #1: Hispanic brown
#2: Oriental yellow
#3: Scottish pink
#4: Senegalese black
#5: Riviera bronze
#6: Blackpool orange
#7.............

This report is the craziest thing I've seen for a while.

Does the Muslim Council of Britain really think that co-educational swimming, physical education and school overnight trips (eg. to see Shakespeare plays in London or Stratford) should be banned at all schools with muslim pupils?

Do they really think that dancing should be banned in schools? That sex education should be restricted? That guys shouldn't have to use communal showers following a rugby or football practice?

I quote from the report:

"Some schools may have policies for children to shower at school after sports activities. These arrangements sometimes take the form of naked communal showering, which involves profound indignity."

I beg your pardon. Communal showering involves profound indignity does it? I thought it was just a way so that several people could get washed quickly in little space.

Furthermore (excuse the lengthy quote):

It is part of Muslim etiquette for people of the same gender to shake hands and greet each other with the words ‘assalaam-u-alaikum’ (peace be upon you). This is considered to be a religious obligation. Muslim pupils may greet Muslim adults and others with a handshake even within the school environment, and this should not be interpreted as children being over-friendly with teachers.

As most Muslims do not usually shake hands with a member of the opposite sex, staff need to be aware that some pupils and parents may exhibit reluctance or even refuse to do this, for example, at prize-giving ceremonies. This should not be interpreted as offensive, as it is not intended to be so.

So we are meant to consider it acceptable for muslim teachers to shake hands with muslim pupils but not to do so with others. It also appears that a woman is not to be slighted if a pupil refuses to shake her hand. Do these people not realise that in our culture this is a slight whether they like it or not. It is a comment through gesture on their beliefs on the position of women in society which to a woman professional could hardly be interpreted as anything other than a slight.

Nothing, not a word in the report suggests that muslims should adapt or change to suit the society they live in. The MCB are meant to speak for moderate muslims. If this is the case, I am very worried. I would respond, however, with a simple message: if you don't want to live in a liberal society, if you want to live somewhere where your weird sexual obsessions and fetishes about touching and not touching and seeing people naked are implemented then leave: go to Saudia Arabia.

 

 

 

You pay people to have an agenda and, guess what, they have an agenda.

Have you noted the ridiculous Unicef report that has just come out? Apparently children in Italy and Spain and places are much happier than children in the UK, US or France, which is strange as the Italian and Spanish children are more likely than not to be only children, which isn't the case in the other three countries. Perhaps only children are happier, although I doubt it.

More likely is the bunch of activist folks have chosen their statistical indicators so that they naturally give low birth rate welfare swamps an advantage. One stat they use is "teenage pregnancy". They use this as an indicator of low child wellbeing. Unsurprisingly enough teenage pregnancy is higher in places where pregnancy at all ages is higher, i.e. if you live in a society where people still have kids rather than extra botox, teenagers are also more likely to have kids.

So their conclusions are.... more social democratic policies of the kind that have so damaged many modern economies and societies.

Unicef should be scrapped.

I see that the government is trailing plans to increase the school leaving age to 18.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2543473,00.html

Clearly under the impression that they are doing such a good job of turning out well-kept, articulate, literate, numerate, polite 16 year olds the government has decided that it would be best for all concerned if they held on to children for two more years as their wards.

Alan Johnson, our esteemed Secretary of State for Education says:

"It should be as unacceptable to see a 16-year- old working, with no training, no education,......"

Woah, hold on a minute, no education? But what have they been doing for the 11 years of compulsory education they've already had, Mr. Johnson? What are you planning on doing for the extra two years that you clearly agree you've failed to do in the previous 11?

Meanwhile, the Times leader writers:

"There are signs that a new range of vocational diplomas being developed with extensive industry involvement may at last create a supply of suitably trained recruits to meet the demands of a modern economy."

Oh I see, so that's what's happening. There are signs that this new range of diplomas will meet the demands of a modern economy, whatever that means. I guess they mean "meet the demands of a few favoured industrial sectors who someone determines are most in need of skilled staff".

Note that the Times justifies the idea not by reference to what 16 year olds want to do, but to the needs of other people. There is a name for forcing people to undertake tasks for the benefit of others: slavery. Government also claims that those coerced into the extra two years of compulsory education would benefit from it. This argument was, of course, also used by supporters of negro slavery.

"...the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro's providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve."-George Fitzhugh, The Universal Law of Slavery

Is this really the best idea they can come up with to resuscitate the flaccid, barely breathing, cadaverous body of the English & Welsh education system?

There has been fair bit of discussion in the US media of late about the tensions between social conservatism and fiscal conservatism. It strikes me that neither of these have much to do with conservatism at all.

Social conservatism in the States has become less about managing slow and orderly adjustments to regulations governing contentious issues and even less about maintaining the status quo. It is rather a movement focused on opposition to whatever some religious elements of the US population oppose. The issues it picks to fight can be good ones (reversal of the unconstitutional Roe vs. Wade ruling on abortion) or bad ones (demands for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage), but they are fought and argued on moral criteria that have little to do with small c conservatism.

Fiscal and small government conservatism is about maintaining balanced budgets (conservative in a prudent sense) but also about slashing the size of a bloated and overmighty government. In this sense it shares more with classical liberalism than with traditional conservatism.

That government in the USA remains conservative in its projects and its outcomes is due to constitutionally imposed checks and balances on the power vested in any single element of the administrative and legislative structure.

That government in certain other countries remains conservative despite lacking the checks and balances of the USA is probably due to a natural caution among the elites, who feel secure and are thus not tempted by radical populism.

Iraq at the moment is under the control of the US executive branch of government which is by necessity not subject to the full range of checks and balances that affect it when it comes to domestic policy. But without these checks there is no cautiously pragmatic organizational conservatism of the type that is found elsewhere. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the occupation of Iraq has been disastrously managed.

When I look at one of the guys who lives with me, I worry. He rarely eats anything other than Chinese food made from ingredients shipped over from China or from the Chinese shop. He rarely initiates a conversation with non-Chinese. When he did decide to be exciting and eat a pizza he made a point of eating it with chopsticks, tearing it apart and stuffing it into his mouth, to make a point to me and my other flatmate that knives and forks are unnecessary and pointless when one has such a superior tool at one's disposal. He is a misogynist: frequently enchanting the lady of the house with delightfully blunt statements such as "ha! - women know nothing".

What's more, God has seen fit to grant this man supernatural powers of hearing. At 11pm last night he appears at my door asking me to turn my music down as it keeping him from sleeping. Playing was....Chopin's nocturnes. "When is one meant to play a nocturne?" I wondered as he stood at my bedroom doorway in his ridiculous pyjamas - pyjama shirt tucked in and trousers pulled up almost to his chest, making his vicious hamster-like complaining face, looking very much like Holly Golightly's landlord in "Breakfast at Tiffany's".

This man is insufferable. What's more, he is married. Some crazy woman (currently in China) has seen fit to marry him. If a hyper-nationalist misogynist is hot property on the marriage market in China it makes me wonder what the rest of the young men are like. Maybe they are alright. Maybe it's just that being a Oriento-supremacist gets you dates in China. I sure as hell hope so.

Thought I'd put my views on Dylan to here, so that he no longer fights under the banner of Peter Andre (see thread below).

I also love 'don't think twice its alright'. Much stronger than most songs about loss, and an unorthodox form of loss (for a song) at that (as in that the leaving isn't the loss but the loss is causing the leaving). Written for people who don't think in cliches.

I've always found something slightly comedic about 'it's a hard rain etc.'. Do you know the guy on Oxford Street who always says to 'be a winner not a sinner'? (the one they eventually gave an ASBO to). Well, I can imagine him approaching someone and singing the chorus to 'it's a hard rain etc.' with its escalating levels of loudness and slightly insane fall off at the end.

Just listened to the Manchester electric Judas 'Like a Rolling Stone'. Makes me wonder if we aren't missing something in the way of shared literary references in pop culture. Everyone used to know at least some of the bible, now everyone knows....what? 'Friends' maybe, but how do you work "how you doin'?" into a song (except perhaps if it was 'pick up lines' by Ugly Duckling)?

First of the month - rabbits!

Last night I was elected to a committee in my college which deals with various things of, about and related to graduate students. Shortly afterwards I was approached by someone who told me that "being on the MCR committee is not about politics" and some other similar stuff. I think this is because I mentioned my political experience in my manifesto, and, as is only decent, also mentioned the party I am with.

Of course, had I wanted to make my political activities my priority I would certainly not have moved to Cambridge, but remained on the sunny South Bank and gone to LSE. But this isn't the interesting point. The interesting point is that it is almost unimaginable that if someone had had experience as, say, the campaigns officer of a local chapter of Greenpeace, that they would be told that "the MCR committee is not about saving whales." Somehow, the fact that I choose to spend my free time trying to improve the lives of people makes me inherently weird in the eyes of some.

The fact is that although saving whales, flat taxes, congestion charges and such things are tangential to many aspects of our lives, a political worldview is such an integral (though mutable) aspect of someone's lives as to make a request to ignore it completely and utterly futile. It is perverse that in a modern environment where 'being true to yourself' is one of the ultimate virtues and where being true to yourself is often interpreted as acting in accordance with some quasi-Marxist rubbish about your sexuality or race, that acting consistently in accordance with some beliefs can be perceived as wrong.

While living in South London I learned an insult which is used by Caribbeans against Africans from time to time. It goes something along the lines of:

"Well your ancestors were too stupid to even be sold into slavery."

The insult that sometimes flows the other way is:

"Your ancestors were so dumb that my ancestors sold them as slaves."

Which leads to a serious point. I awoke this morning to a lady going by the name of Esther Stanford arguing for the payment of reparations to the descendents of slaves, in which case the aforementioned Afro-Carib arguments could add some meat to their bones. The Caribbeans could sue for reparations from the Africans who sold them into slavery.

It seems obvious to me that the major beneficiaries of the slave trade alive today are the descendants of the slaves themselves, many who live in advanced western societies, or at least island colonies which are more advanced and arguably more pleasant to inhabit than Africa itself. Were it not for the slave trade, many of these people would have a fraction of the wealth, health and access to goods and services which they enjoy today.

Were the former slaves alive today, I would be wholly in favour of their pursuing reparations from individuals who had wronged them through the legal system. However, they are not alive today and to even suggest compensating their descendants who have benefited enormously from their ancestors' suffering would be perverse in the extreme.

there should be "consequences" from saying Islam is "wicked and evil".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6137722.stm

....according to Lord Falconer and Gordon Brown. But what if one really did think that it was wicked and evil? It seems it doesn't matter in the eyes of our government who have swallowed whole the idea that the law exists to propagate and privilege their own opinions.

In the interests of intellectual consistency I imagine they would also support the jailing of Richard Dawkins for comments such as these:

"To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns"

"Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end."

"an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion......is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States"

I suspect the only thing to do if our govt. starts to promulgate even more ridiculous incitement to hatred laws is to print lots of 'offensive' t-shirts and keep wearing them time and again to gain martyrs to the cause. What fuss.

According to today's Times the government is to 'toughen rape laws.' Apparently the justification is that:

 'fewer than 6% of rape allegations result in successful convictions'.

which for some reason is clearly unacceptable. Although the article states that the Criminal Bar Association are opposed to the suggested changes it also states that they prefer other measures to

'improve conviction rates for rape'

which suggests they accept the logic of the government's complaint.

Why don't they just save money and 'improve' conviction rates up to 100% by scrapping trials I wonder? Unless maybe they claim that the number of convictions percentage wise should be somewhere above 6% but below 100%. Of course they have no evidence for any such assertion that is not present and used by the CPS and courts when deciding whether to go to trial and whether the accused is guilty. One would expect the 'beyond reasonable doubt' criterion in the English legal system to result in fewer convictions than there are crimes, but this is the same whether the crime is rape, robbery or murder.

Effectively under the new proposals, a woman cannot be deemed give consent to sexual activity if she is too past some unspecified level of inebriation, which the man concerned has to judge at the time, and a jury may have to judge later. Effectively when judging whether a woman is consenting to sex, a man must no longer content himself with any external signs of consent ('give it to me big boy' etc.) but has to look inside the mind of the woman concerned to find out just how drunk she is.

Note that this is a big change from how the law stands at the moment. Currently whether a woman is too drunk to give consent is judged by her actions, i.e. if she does not or cannot say 'yes' or ask for sex then consent is not given. Under the new rules she could do all of these things and still be legally 'raped' because she is deemed too drunk to make a rational decision.

In Peter Andre's new autobiography he speaks of a time when he had one of his best nights of passion of his life with his wife Jordan in the stables. He writes that the next day Jordan could not remember the sex at all. So from Peter Andre's point of view he was making love to the woman he loved, knowing she had been drinking, but clearly not how drunk she was (not drunk enough to prevent 'steamy' exploits). From the proposed law's point of view she was clearly very drunk (as judged from her total memory loss after the event) and as such might not have been in a fit state to give consent. Peter Andre did not know that. He couldn't know that without giving her a breathalyzer test. Under the proposed new law is he a rapist?

 

Having been here a week, I'm quite taken with the restful nature of this town. Maybe it's what I need after 5 years in Ken Livingstone's crazy-fast fiefdom. Hopefully I can do some good work here. Have got a desk on the top floor of the economics department with a rather pretty view of Selwyn College. Also my desk is next to those of two other first year PhD micro-heads which can only be a good thing.

Glossary for non-economist:
Micro-head: Contrary to popular belief the meaning of this is neither related to phrenology nor to preservation techniques formerly  employed in Papua New Guinea. Rather it refers to practitioners of microeconomics.

A small but useful tweak to the examination system.   more »

First point:

People are continually confusing what they think is right with what governments should do. Just because I don't approve of something it doesn't mean I think it should be prohibited by law (eg. people yawning in public places without shielding their mouth from view with their hand).

Second point:

Even though I don't think something should be illegal, there is no reason why I shouldn't try to convince others to comply with my beliefs (eg. I can and will say to people: "that looks disgusting, put your hand over your mouth when you yawn").

Third point:

This is how society works. Otherwise people would always be annoying one another. Stating a preference is one way of conveying information to others about your beliefs. If Jack Straw beliefs that women wearing the niqab is wrong then he can say so. No one suggests that those who think women should wear the niqab should be silenced from saying so. It follows that if the first of these bits of communication is socially unacceptable and the other isn't we have an asymmetry and society is indirectly supporting the wearing of the niqab.

So well done Jack.

If you wish to deprive people of many years of their liberty, you should have a damn good reason for it. The current education system in the UK fails to provide that reason.   more »

Islam needs a backrub. Or a footbath. Or anger counselling. Maybe it could do with all three. Whatever your remedy, Islam is clearly suffering from frustration of some kind. Frustration which causes large chunks of Arab and other Muslim populations to erupt in righteous anger when confronted with such egregious insults as    more »

After 5 years of having no online presence I've decided to return. Hopefully some of my ideas and writing will find a receptive and critical audience. This at least is the intention; one can but try.