Blogoir: April

Some titles and some writers draw you to read the texts concerned, as moths mesmerised by the bright flame flit to their doom.

Who is going to walk past Goodbye to the suburban porn star by Mark Steyn?

Not, methinks, you.

If only for his gallop through the Carry On films:

Carry On Nurse, Carry On Constable, Carry On Cowboy, Carry On Up The Khyber, and a couple of dozen others, all more or less exactly the same: a bunch of British comic actors, variously prune-faced, lumpy, dozy, camp or emaciated, would set off in improbable pursuit of curvy dolly birds but be stymied by ferocious martinets. Come to think of it, even the dolly birds were rather on the burly side: one recalls Joan Sims as Miss Allcock in Carry On Teacher.

And just don't ask about an early rabid highlight of the movie career of one Marilyn Chambers.

Armpits just aren't what they used to be.

Sigh.

The animation movie Wall-e depicts in stunning colours a silent abandoned Earth buried deep in towering human garbage, with only a perky little garbage-crushing robot plus a friendly cockroach moving about.

An environmentalist metaphor for human destructiveness!

Wrong.

BBC radio today carried a story about tinned food, mentioning in passing how the tins themselves are so much lighter and less wasteful now than in years past. How precisely did that happen, I wonder?

Thence on to this fascinating account of how Americans use many of the earth's materials far more sparingly as our wealth increases:

The idea that America's output of garbage rises ever skyward -- more trash, year by passing year -- has become one of the great unchallenged assumptions about how the world works ...

Daniel C. Walsh an adjunct professor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, believed it too, until he began poking through the musty records in the New York City Archives and stumbled on a long-unread paper trail that he said might be unique among big American cities: 100 years of painstakingly kept records about what New Yorkers threw away...

Pounds of trash per person peaked not in the prosperous 1990's, but in 1940...

The great trend of the 20th century, Dr. Walsh concluded, has been toward less garbage -- or at least lighter garbage -- because the economics demanded it and technology made it possible.

"There are very significant forces out there that are working to minimize the mass of the waste stream," he said. "The forces are strong and they're incredibly effective"...

... the most profound conclusion that emerged from the records, Dr. Walsh said, was not the historical nuggets, but the underlying engine that produced them. The big economic drivers of the 20th century ... all moved in one direction: toward less waste, not more...

"Everything relates to two principal factors -- one is reducing costs, making things lighter and easier to transport, and the other is making them more convenient to the consumer..."

Look at specific materials:

Going through its listing from "abrasives" to "zirconium" I selected the 32 minerals with the highest levels of consumption in metric tons, all over 100,000 in 1965 (omitting a few like "crushed rock" and "salt" which even the most rabid of greens won't allege we are depleting), and then compared the amounts of them consumed in 1965 and 2005.

Now, during those 40 years the GDP of the US multiplied to 3.444 times its 1965 level, and the US population grew by 52.6%, so GDP per capita consequently grew by 126% to 2.26 times its 1965 level -- the average American grew that much richer.

The consumption levels of the 32 minerals most-consumed changed thusly:

... Per dollar of GDP, all 32 of 32 declined in consumption. Total metric tons consumed of all the minerals combined fell by 9%. With GDP multiplying 3.44-fold at the same time, this means the per dollar of GDP consumption of these minerals fell by 74%, to only 26% of its previous level...

Separately HobbitManor tries to work out what area of the USA would be buried in garbage if all the garbage produced by the USA over 140 years under the most lavishly profligate assumptions was dumped in one place. He shows the answer on a Google map.

Don't trust them? Try the New York Times and this analysis of various Kuznets curves:

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850...

The article by John Tierney offers two sensible predictions which EU policy makers need to think about:

• There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...
• The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

For an amusing insight into the folly of supposedly serious people taking an opposite view, have a look at the list of fat-headed predictions about the state of the Earth in the year 2000 made back in 1970.

So when we read all those feverish articles in the Guardian about the need for 'less capitalism', we know that what they are calling for is an insane, radical slowing-down in the rate of innovation needed to develop all those light-touch new technologies which reduce the human footprint on the Planet.

Less Capitalism/Market = More Socialism = More Carbon = More Waste.

Now that that is established, can we start talking sense about all this please?

Via Samizdata, this Reuters piece describing how young French people are embittered by the system which makes employing people so expensive that employers take on new young staff only on temporary contracts:

"There's a war of generations and strong competition between the different age groups," he added.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, the unemployment rate for French workers aged between 15 and 24 was 21.2 percent, having steadily risen in the course of the year. This was three times the jobless rate for those aged from 25 to 49, which stood at 7.4 percent. For workers over 49, it was 5.2 percent.

With the French economy estimated to shrink by 1.2 percent in the first three months of this year, according to a Reuters poll, companies are likely to lay off more temporary staff and invest less in training.

Is the so-called European Social Model dividing the continental EU workforce into two segments? People effectively unsackable, and people whom no-one dare employ because if they are employed they become effectively unsackable?

In this gloom a ray of hope. Our deadly enemy the Working Time Directive is struggling:

Negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on revising the EU's rules on working time have collapsed, with both sides blaming the other...

The two sides were unable to reach agreement on whether or not to set a date for phasing out national opt-outs from the EU's 48-hour maximum working week and on whether the time that doctors and other workers spend on-call should be counted as working time.

... It is the first time since the Amsterdam treaty took effect in May 1999 that conciliation negotiations between the Parliament and Council have failed to reach a deal.

More:

Both the Czech presidency and the European Commission said that the failure to reach a deal would lead to a worse situation for workers in Europe. Špidla said that more member states were likely to apply opt-opts to the 48-hour week, thus weakening workers' protection. “The bigger the number of countries using the opt-out, the more difficult it will be to get rid of this exception in the future,” Nečas said. A total of 15 member states currently apply either total or sectoral opt-outs from the maximum 48-hour working week.

Great news that workers' protection in this sense is being weakened!

Because if one part of the workforce is 'protected' to the point where everyone else looking for a job is seriously disadvantaged, that protection is an expression not of Solidarity but of Greed and Stupidity. Which, one hears, we are all against now.

Back to Reuters for that grim situation in France, where this has compounded up for many years to worrying effect:

"There's an anger among the young that's even stronger than in May 1968,"Julien Bayou, who finished his studies five years ago and now runs a PR business, told Reuters during student protests earlier this month. "It's an entire age group that's being held in contempt."

Luckily there is still some British common sense talked in and around the European Parliament:

Philip Bushill-Matthews, a UK centre-right MEP, said however that Parliament's negotiators had chosen the wrong approach. “The socialist-dominated negotiating team interpreted their negotiating mandate from the Parliament very rigidly, and refused to accept compromises,” he said. “Parliament's ‘all or nothing' approach ensured that the result was nothing,” he added.

John Cridland, deputy director-general of the CBI, the UK employers' organisation, welcomed the breakdown of the talks. “Keeping the opt-out is a victory for common sense and is good for the UK economy,” he said.

On this one HMG have done well. Keep going.

Here is Bagehot at the Economist on why the Internet's role in UK politics is mainly destructive:

But it, and especially YouTube, are at least becoming an important destructive element in British politics, able as they are to cultivate that most poisonous and final of political responses: ridicule.

Take three recent YouTube appearances by Gordon Brown (all of which were also featured on "Have I Got News For You", a popular satirical game show, last week): there's the one of him not shaking the Downing Street policeman's hand; the one of his oddly self-cancelling apology over his henchman's abortive smear campaign; and of course the bizarre smiling self-inflicted humiliation of his flawed and now partly abandoned plan to reform MPs' expenses–an utterly cack-handed bid to reclaim a patch of high-ish moral ground, undone by its hurried amateurism as well as Mr Brown's disconcerting screen presence.

The point not mentioned here is that the UK voting system does not feature a direct Presidential vote for individuals across the country as do eg the USA and French systems. The Prime Minister is just one among many other MPs, who has to woo a local constituency.

Hence the sense of positive Obama-style excitement which comes from everyone across the country having a say in choosing the Top Person (and then an interest in supporting that person, for a while at least) is not there in the same way.

But everyone can join together in the negative excitement trying to bring down someone in power. See the Number Ten petition which is going to get daily more embarrassing for the Prime Minister as the numbers edge up in the months to come before it closes (32,523 votes this morning, up by 200 in the past 30 minutes...).

Likewise Euro-scepticism - the Internet is a space which exaggerates the role of those with energy and raucous wit and verve, which in the UK on the issue of the European Union tends to be the people who find something to dislike in it.

One general trend will be for politicians simply not to appear in any uncontrolled environment for fear of an inadvertent word or grimace or gesture being recorded by a passer-by on a telephone camera and being splashed over YouTube in seconds.

This is already part of the US scene in many respects. It works less well over here, as Prime Minister's Questions and other such traditions force people out into the open every week to answer tough questions. See one of my first ever postings last year on this very subject.

So 'control' can not succeed in the UK as much as its proponents might hope. A single viral YouTube video coming from nowhere can cause huge damage, as Dan Hannan's success has shown. Part of the Smeargate disaster for Labour lay in the 100% wrong idea that a 'controlled' Guido-style but Leftish site could be created to order (or indeed to Order-Order).

Which is why another trend will be a return to 'authenticity' - people who don't care about such 'control', who make a virtue of ignoring spin and any negative publicity and sell themselves warts and all. John Prescott an improbable e-trailblazer here?

Of course the real future lies with those who articulate a redefinition of government towards a new sense of partnership with the public. Most of modern government is based up on a Do what we tell you - or else approach recognisable by every despot down the ages. This is another reason for the EU's unpopularity -.its apparent intrusive bossiness is equalled only by its remoteness.

Surely the Internet allows a quite new vision to emerge at last?

Bring it on, Libertarians.

Lots on this subject. Some US conservative thoughts.

Newt Gingrich says President Obama is a huge success, in his own terms at least:

In just 100 days, President Obama has been devastatingly effective in moving forward swiftly the most radical, government-expanding agenda in American history.

At home, in everything from his economic policy to his energy policy to his just-announced science policy, President Obama has successfully moved the country from a traditional American model of entrepreneurship and private initiative to a European model of regulation and government control.

Phew. Who needed all that pushy American free enterprise stuff anyway?

And here is Dick Morris on Obama's Not So Stealthy Socialism.

Obama on the Holocaust - post-modern waffling which encourages the enemies of freedom?

And Obama the Orator - or not? Watch the video of the President just grinding to a painful halt when the teleprompter goes awry.

That last one reminded me of an anecdote about David Blunkett our former blind Home Secretary. He was (I was told by someone in his office) given a fancy new gizmo made in Sweden which allowed him to read his speeches with his fingers in Braille - a sort of teleprompter for blind politicians and others making public presentations.

Mr Blunkett walked on to the stage to begin his first speech using this thing and started to feel the letters with his fingers. He quickly grasped that somehow the device had not been configured properly and the text was in Swedish, not English.

So he improvised as he knew the subject, and no-one in the audience was ever the wiser.

So President Obama is not (yet?) perfect in every way.

But he has Momentum. The key to political success, howsoever defined.

Unlike our Prime Minister whose sense of direction these days is ... a tad less certain?

Recent media reports have it that my old FCO 'line manager' Nicola Brewer has stepped down as CEO of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to replace Paul Boateng as High Commissioner (Ambassador-equivalent in a Commonwealth country) to South Africa.

The credibility of this Independent report is wrecked by claims that Boateng is returning under a cloud after allegations that his wife had bullied domestic staff. This just can not be. She is said to be a former social worker and Labour councillor.

Yet maybe there is something in all this. The EHRC might have a vacancy for CEO and be looking for someone to replace N Brewer. The EHRC website is coy on this point as of this evening, listing Nicola as still in post and the job not available under Vacancies.

But I have applied anyway and, such being the urgency of the situation from an Equality and Human Rights point of view, not to mention the terse rigour of my application letter and CV, I was fast-tracked to a final interview this afternoon.

In the spirit of transparency I took in my pocket a neat little digital recorder, so I can share the conversation with you now.

EHRC Big Cheese:    Good morning, Charles. Good to see you here so promptly. (Titters uneasily) We all go by first names here as they are reassuring and less intimidating.

CC:    Yo Trev. A pleasure.

EHRC BC:    Now, what makes you so especially suited for this position?

CC:    I have played a personal role in delivering the end of apartheid, the end of Soviet Communism, the end of Milosevic, the arrest of war criminals across the Balkans and, according to Nicola Brewer when she wrote my appraisal, I myself was the Foreign Office's Diversity Target. So I know far more about the wickedness of oppression and racism, and about promoting sharp-end human rights and equality, than anyone else in this building, and indeed more than Nicola herself. What else do you want?

EHRC BC:    Er, yes. What would you plan to do about the victims of racism, colonialism and slavery? Reparations?

CC:    There is a case for active efforts to deal with all communities who have suffered those horrors in living memory. So I would push for that. We can't do everything, so at the risk of being selective or judgemental I would aim to focus ECHR help on the one large UK ethnic community who have suffered the most.

EHRC BC:    Sounds good! Bangladeshis? Tamils? Muslims? Palestinians? Sexual and other minorities within those very communities?

CC:    No. I mean Poles.

EHRC BC:    Huh?! Poles? What have they got to do with racism?

CC:    The family of every Pole alive today lost out one way or the other because of Hitler's racist ideology which classified Poles as untermenschen.

EHRC BC:     Well, be that as it may, they were never colonised.

CC:    On the contrary, Poland was a Russian/Soviet/German/Austrian colony for most of the past 200 years - far longer than any African territory held fleetingly by the UK. The negative effects are still there.

EHRC BC:    OK, OK. But slavery was all about Africa, so Poles do not qualify.

CC:    Wrong again. There are no African former slaves alive. But there are hundreds of thousands of Poles alive who were held in Nazi or Soviet labour camps as young people. If that is not slavery, what is?

EHRC BC:    Crikey! Why did Nicola not mention any of this? Was not she in the FCO too?

CC:    Good question. I once asked her whether the horrible situation I inherited in the Embassy in Warsaw was OK on discrimination grounds. Of the 45 or so local staff working in Embassy office jobs with computers on their desks (ie not the drivers, security or cleaners), only four or so were male. That pattern is repeated across most of our posts in that part of Europe. It is impossible to see that as anything other than blatant and arbitrary unfairness aimed at males (and transgenderistic men trapped in a woman's body until they had the op). An evil neo-apartheid based not on the colour of one's skin, but rather on whether one has or has not the benefit of bosoms.

EHRC BC:    That's appalling discrimination! What was the reply?

CC:    Nothing too specific, but I had a sense of 'Don't push your luck, soon-to-be-dead white male wiseguy'.

EHRC BC:    So what would you do as CEO?

CC:    I'd immediately get Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Lithuanians and all the rest of the central and eastern Europeans added to the ethnico-racial categories sent round in those HMG diversity questionnaires. They must not be marginalised and humiliated as at present. That might make all the questionnaires look stupid, leading to the total abolition of that way of looking at the discrimination problem. A risk we'd just have to take in the name of fairness.

EHRC BC:    Anything else?

CC:    I'd press for new legislation to encourage all possible so-called inter-racial adoptions. The idea that any one person has a unique culture, or the idea that a baby/child is a member of a given culture because of the colour of its skin, is revolting and idiotic. The faster the human race takes on a bland cappuccino tint, the faster we can 'eradicate racism' - a target of the EHRC I believe?

EHRC BC:    I've never heard this sort of thing before! Anything else?

CC:    I would get a new law passed which compelled all organisations across the UK to send to recycling all documents containing the expression Diversity Targets. Any organisation burning a pile of them on the front steps would be exempted from Carbon Emission targets in respect of that bonfire, as long as the bonfire of such papers was over six feet tall. Thereafter every organisation would be expected to recruit, employ and generally deal with its people on the basis solely of Fairness and Good Manners, both of which preclude such vulgar considerations as the way people look or talk or what their background is. Everyone treated on their merits. No more, no less. The savings would be monumental. But no-one would get a job in the public service without excellent spelling. One has to have a little positive discrimination on the margins, to keep everyone on their toes.

EHRC BC:    Look there's little point in continuing this discussion ...

CC:    Sorry, just to add that anyone attaching a notice to a wall or door by sellotape will receive a stern formal warning. Repeat performers face the sack. I will not tolerate facile discrimination between days of the week by such banalities as 'dress-down Fridays'. Everyone smart, every day. A detail. But an important detail.

EHRC BC:    ... as I want to say that you have the job! Congratulations! When can you start?

CC:    Excellent. Thanks. I'll need a pit-stop at the Gents and then to nip out to Jermyn Street to promote Islamic finance by buying some new organic Egyptian cotton shirts and socks. Say in about 90 minutes?

EHRC BC:    Magnificent. The cardboard box will be on its way to collect Nicola and her things from her penthouse suite of offices forthwith.

CC:    I should warn you that I'll slash the staff and budget of ECHR by 50% in the first year, to set a good example to the rest of Whitehall. OK if I accept a 60% pay cut for myself, down to just below the new 51+% tax rate? Just an aesthetic point, really. Not much sense in the government pretending to pay me one pound and then taking back more than half?

EHRC BC:    Not at all, although I am not sure that I share your scruples myself to quite that, er, radical extent.

CC:    Nema problema. I value Diversity. See you later...

* * * * *

And then ... I woke up.

It had all been a nightmare.

For some.

Can you have too much of a good thing?

In some instances, yes.

But not when it comes to my Oral Career History as recorded for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (part of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge).

Here is my entry.

It looks to be the first one recorded by a British diplomat born after 1950, and is listed after the contributions of many distinguished names in British diplomacy. Some of the material and the ideas (and jokes) expressed will be familiar to readers here. But not all.

I should note that I edited the first transcript to remove some mistakes and redundancies, but also to add various glosses and some other recollections. I did not change it to make it read like a written smooth text. It is a bit jerky and very much a transcript.

The text has some quite strong material at different points critical of what HMG did or how/why they did it, but it was all passed quickly by the FCO (who as agreed with the Archive get to have a look at the material before publication) without comment. So maybe not strong (or disloyal) enough? 

Anyway it offers a full 20,000 words of frank off-the-bat thoughts to mull over, with special reference to (of course) my life and times in the Balkans, South Africa, Russia and Poland plus various sections dealing with the way the FCO worked or works.

Here as a taster is a short extract from the final passage where I talk about my role in the downfall of Milosevic:

The latest BBRU tersely hosted by Matt Wardman is posted.

Various handy links, including this to the vividly designed Andrew Ian Dodge website which in turn links to a fatuous EU Quiz.

As Andrew points out, the eccentric questions are loaded in a trivially anti-libertarian way. Or is the EU not so trivially actually anti-libertarian? (No need to answer that one). The questions also preclude a huge range of options whiuch would involve plenty of European coordination but done rather via member states' structures. Sigh.

Back in the real world, see also an unconvincing feminist analysis of Wallace and Gromit. This piece seems to me to take the fact that this W&G film has a fat female baddy as proof of, eeek, stereotyping. But why can not some fat female people be baddies, in movies as in real life? Cruella De Vil was skinny if not emaciated, and smoked (horror) - was that a stereotype or not?

Oh - and a Budget Cockspiracy.

A posting by me earlier today about the Frank Lampard / James O'Brien story was just wrong in important respects, so I have deleted it. Thanks to those who so promptly let me know.

Apologies.

It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.
Johann von Goethe

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Update: Welcome readers from Mark Steyn and Deborah Gyapong.

This issue - can Western Civilisation be defended? - is aired a lot these days.

A big part of the answer lies in one's assessment of the value of that civilisation - and its intrinsic strength/resilience.

If you think that something is wrong-headed and decadent, you might be disinclined to defend it even if it has some strengths you quite like - the more so if you think that the forces lined against it are bound to prevail. 

Likewise even if you are the greatest champion of something, you might well not want to die defending it if you think the cause is hopeless. On the other hand, if you think that something is much stronger than it may currently look, you might argue that those clamouring for robust defensive moves are overdoing it and risk discrediting the cause.

Not to mention the argument that the Means and Ends both count - is it possible to defend civilisation using barbaric means (the T-word debate again)?

Hence Left v Conservative.

Left:  Western so-called 'liberal' civilisation is decadent, and where it is strong it is strong in bad Bushlike consumerist ways. It is not really worth defending in itself, and in any case is doomed. So better to just give up and join forces with the global masses who are likely to carry the day, many of whom happen to be Islamic. This will create a new less hedonistic order based on state-organised collectivist Cooperation, not destructive Individualism.

Conservative:  Western liberal civilisation is in fact strong because it and only it works in mobilising both human creativity and human restraint. The Islamic masses come from societies and their regimes which have failed on both counts, so offer us little of practical value. But there is now a significant nihilistic challenge to liberalism, which is best countered by abandoning the banal norms of so-called multiculturalism and championing once again core liberal values: tolerance and respect, based on no tolerance and no respect for those who denounce tolerance and respect.

These two core rival positions are spelled out in two long and well-argued pieces on the big-picture themes of Religion, Culture and Liberalism, one by Intellectual Leftist Terry Eagelton, the other by Intellectual Conservative Roger Scruton.

The Eagleton piece gets off to a lively start, as if Eagleton had been miraculously transformed into Mark Steyn:

Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all-and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can.

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

However, he and Mark probably diverge at this point:

If the British or American way of life really were to take on board the critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism made by many devout Muslims, Western civilization would most certainly be altered for the good.

Not much from Eagleton about the argument that the Islamic way of life needs to 'take on board' the critique of sexism, intolerance and fanaticism made by many sensible liberals, so that Islamic civilisation might 'most certainly' be altered for the good?

Eagleton ends some 4000 words later with yet more swipes at various writers whom he terms in a separate Guardian piece as Liberal Supremacists, and in a curious reductionist way asserts:

The only (sic) affirmation of humanity ultimately (sic) worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin.

Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.

There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

Hot dang! If only we had grasped earlier that these dogmatic doctrinaire people supporting Progress and those smart-ass Islamophobe intellectuals were the real problem!

Roger Scruton by contrast writes in a more elegant and generous way. He too starts well:

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law.

The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

And he ends strongly, again some 4000 words later:

Here is a fine article by Richard Fernandez on the T-word.

He takes up an article by Jeff Jacoby which points up the moral dilemmas in all this:

Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands of additional victims in California. What kind of conversation would we be having once it became known that the refusal to subject KSM to waterboarding had come at so steep a price? How many of those now blasting the Bush administration for allowing torture would be blasting it instead for not preventing a second bloodbath?

Fernandez makes the key point based on personal experience in the anti-Marcos movement that torture can be a very effective way of getting information from people:

...the probability is that torture works and for that reason its use constitutes a moral dilemma (emphasis added).

Plus he makes the point that all of us are capable of doing extraordinary things under extreme stress:

It is not often realized that the oath not to break under torture is very similar to Jacoby’s promise never to use coercion even as “a last and desperate option” against a brutal enemy. Fighting terrorism, like the promise never to break under duress, is a test of how much one can endure without crossing a line. And when fear and survival are stake, I am not sure at all what lines people won’t cross...

It is intellectually feasible to argue, as Jacoby did, that we ought not to use torture under any circumstances. In the same spirit, we could undertake not to employ Clinton-era “extraordinary rendition”, to which Guantanamo Bay was actually proposed as a more humane alternative; nor accept information from foreign intelligence agencies which use coercion as a method (any more than you would buy shoes made with child labor); and simply rely on such intelligence gathering methods as meet our moral standards and willingly endure the sacrifices implied. That would be a perfectly moral and consistent position.

But I am afraid that morality will shatter in the face of duress; that one day a biological weapon or a dirty nuke might be set off in one or a number of American cities and as the scale of the suffering and carnage becomes clear, that many — including the persons who are now so willing to sit in judgment of the persons who drafted the legal memos which guided Bush administration interrogation policy — will demand the authorities do something, anything, to put a stop to it...

There is one sense in which I unreservedly sympathize with Cheney’s request to reveal the “successes” of the coercive interrogation program: we ought to know all the facts before making up our minds about moral stances. We ought to look everything in the face. I find it curious that a society which thinks that the CIA’s destruction of the video record of the water boarding sessions is immoral can simultaneously maintain that showing the video of Daniel Pearl being beheaded is inflammatory or inappropriate. Let’s see it all.

Indeed.

And, thanks to the wonders of mobile telephone video technology, we can see the world's current champion torturers in busy action.

So, the usual question.

At what point do we use lethal force to stop them torturing us?

Poland, a serious country, is looking hard at treating Leftist and Rightist extremism equally, mulling over a new draft law which would ban the production of fascist and totalitarian propaganda so that it includes clothing and anything else that could carry an image related to an authoritarian system.

So, farewell then, t-shirts glorifying cool dude Marxist killers?

My guess is that it will fizzle out and be largely unenforceable and/or unenforced if it does creep on to the statute books.

Plus Poland could become a Loony Left magnet in Europe attracting useful idiots from all over the place to march through Warsaw wearing Communist t-shirts just to show how really clever they are. Does anyone in Poland need the traffic held up for that rubbish?

What does totalitarian propaganda look like? Every Marxist-leaning tome in every University in Poland? Could be quite a tall bonfire.

That said, the underlying and correct motivation here is to confirm the core philosphical proposition that the Two Vampires of Nazism and Communism deserve to be looked at as twin equivalent evils, a point hotly contested by today's Left-leaning intellectuals.

The Telegraph piece adds this:

... the Polish government hopes that tighter legislation will crack down on the trade in materials bearing Nazi emblems.

Markets in western Poland have profited from German neo-fascists buying Third-Reich memorabilia such as swastikas and pictures of Hitler that are prohibited under their own country's stringent regulations.

It is pretty rare if not almost impossible to come across Nazi or Communist 'memorabilia' in British junk-shops and car-boot sales, although kitschy Soviet Communist iconography is found in the top-end shopping arcades around Piccadilly in London, selling for high prices. A measure of just how successful the Red Vampire has been in numbing modern sensibility to evil and making mass murderer badges an elite fashion accessory.

On the other hand, in Poland the flea-markets I visited all had small stalls selling rusty relics of WW2, Nazi and Soviet badges and rusty revolvers and scraps of uniforms alike.

Why? Because of the sheer volume of this material found lying around in fields and old attics as a result of Poland's devastating WW2 and subsequent experience following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

So Poland has good reasons to insist that on the level of principle these two ideologies need to be equally reviled. The fact that in practice it is unlikely to happen is vexing but less significant.

Of course Tim Worstall applauds the general idea behind the Polish initiative but objects in principle to banning things. Maybe this is the best place to leave it?

Various bloggers are trying to crank up interest in an online No 10 petition politely asking the Prime Minister to resign.

Just over 6000 people have supported so far. Not bad - but also not so many, given the state of the country? Fear not. There is still lots of time for British citizens to add their names before the petition closes in October.

What struck my eye was the list of the petitioners themselves. The latest five first names are Harriett, Stephen, Chris, David and Allan. And so on. And on. And on. All classic English names.

Among the first 500 names listed are only a handful (five or so?) that might be said to reflect, hem, the 'diversity of modern Britain' (ie having some sort of Asian/Middle Eastern/African/Islamic/Latin American/European resonance).

Disraeli write Sybil, or The Two Nations back in 1845. The Wikipedia entry has this interesting list of the origins of the exporession: 

1. Plato writes in The Republic that each city contains two cities "warring with each other, one of the poor, the other of the rich."
2. 1805: Charles Hall writes, "The people in a civilised state may be divided into different orders; but for the purpose of investigating the manner in which they enjoy or are deprived of the requisites to support the health of their bodies and minds, they need only be divided into two classes, viz., the rich and the poor."
3. 1835: Alexis de Tocqueville writes of "two rival nations" (the rich and the poor).
4. 1841: William Channing writes, "In most large cities there may be said to be two nations, understanding as little of one another, having as little intercourse as if they lived in different lands."
5. 1845: Engels writes that the working class and the bourgeoisie are like "two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them."

Not sure that Engels was being politically correct on that last one. But maybe we need to add a few more possibilities?

I hitherto have not ventured very often on to the noisy battlefield of Torture and its diplomatic and political and moral ramifications. Although this posting about the unnoticed and permanently pained victims of terrorist violence says most of what I feel on the issue.

I have steered clear because everyone else appears to be opining furiously on the subject, none more than the breathless Craig Murray.

Plus it seems hard to say anything sensible on the subject when it is being used to make cheap party political points.

Partly again because so many of the people baying for 'action' against those who are said to have sanctioned torture seem to be expecting people faced with the personal and professional responsibility of grappling with appalling choices to live up to impossibly high standards, while they themselves turn a blind eye to regimes which have behaved far worse for far longer. The whole issue stinks of the vilest hypocrisy:

Hillary Clinton was seemingly much clearer, declaring that "As a matter of policy, [torture] cannot be American policy, period." But buried in this unequivocal statement is a lawyerly loophole, evident in the carefully constructed caveat, "as a matter of policy."

But still, she came close to standing her own previous position on its head. On an earlier occasion, she had held that there were "very rare" instances in which severe interrogation methods might be necessary and that the United States needs "lawful authority" to engage in them in cases involving an "imminent threat to millions of Americans."

Hillary's reversal here--and it is only a partial reversal--brings us back to the vicious circle. How would she know that the person she wants to torture has the knowledge she is seeking? And why authorize torture only when the lives of "millions of Americans" are at risk? What about thousands or hundreds or ten?

The line-drawing here is immensely difficult. If it were simple, we wouldn't be debating the question so fiercely. But what is galling is the sanctimony and the moral grandstanding of those who would ban harsh interrogation methods absolutely--except in those instances when they would authorize them themselves.

And it no longer seems to matter what 'torture' in fact is and how it is defined. Anything which upsets people enough to compel them to blurt things out seems to be classified as 'impermissible pressure amounting to torture' or somesuch.

Not to mention the fact that our MPs piously lambasting the government on the British record on this subject are sitting in a Parliament which relied on torture to excellent effect to find out all about the Gunpowder Plot.

Maybe above all because the debate is steered for cynical reasons away from the core issue.

Which is that there are running around out there violent obsessive people who for reasons unfathomable to the huge majority of people in the UK want to kill or maim British and 'Western' citizens in formidable numbers - to inflict massive and sustained pain themselves.

Plus these people are often hardened ideologues and well trained and supported in their anti-Wesatern fanaticism. Which means that if they are arrested they can summon to their aid a mini-army of lawyers and media-savvy NGOs hollering about their rights, plus they will (a) do everything possible to avoid letting on what they may have been up to while (b) lying noisily that they have been brutalised in captivity.

So, the Problem. How to get them to talk?

At one end of the spectrum is to break down their resistance by being friendly - somehow persuading them of the error of their ways, and then gently pointing out that they are now in a bad spot which can be improved if they cooperate. Slow; expensive; may or may not work.

At the other is being revoltingly cruel on a Saddam Hussein scale. Cheap, can be slow or fast depending on how sadistic the torturers were that day; may or may not work.

And in the middle is a vast swamp of uncertainty and no good answers.

All of which is a laborious way to urge you to read this modest and profound analysis of the subject:

Judging the justice of the Bush administration's policies on torture thus requires answering a single (extremely difficult) question: Was the administration right to believe that militant Islam posed (and perhaps still poses) an existential threat to the United States?

If the answer is yes, then its policies may very well have been justified and even demanded by the circumstances. If the answer is no, then its leading officials may well have been guilty of bending or breaking the law for no good reason -- most likely out of a combination of ignorance, fear, and paranoia.

So what's the answer? In the months following 9/11, I certainly thought another spectacular attack was imminent and seriously pondered the possibility of a nuclear detonation in New York City (where I worked, about two miles from Ground Zero) or Washington -- an event that would not only kill hundreds of thousands if not millions in an instant but also wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth and spark panic in cities around the world. Urban civilization itself seemed under threat.

Seven-and-a-half years later, such fears seem delusional, no doubt in large part because there have been no more attacks on the United States. Is that because the Bush administration's much-derided policies thwarted attacks that would have otherwise been carried out? Or is it because the threat was never as great as the administration feared it was?

The truth is that I have no idea. And neither does anyone else writing on the topic.

Which of course does nothing to deter the energetic and literate contributors to the extended discussion thread this little essay provokes. Read the essay at least, if only to see a thoughtful mind (Damon Linker) taking all this back to Aristotle.

One last point. The issue often gets debated in a debating-club way: "This House would not allow torture even if it was likely to produce information which could save many innocent lives."

Hence (as per that comment thread on the Linker piece) a lot of convoluted theorizing and empty conjecture over the possibility of reliable and operationally useful information ever emerging via torture.

In practice it does not mainly work that way. Whatever is said in detention by terrorist suspects (or even by terrorists who are known for sure to have planned to kill people but who might not end up being prosecuted for technicality reasons and so are formally 'innocent') has to be checked and cross-checked against all sorts of other information.

Which means that you may not get gobbets of 'information' in the form of "OK OK an attack is planned in Trafalgar Square next Wednesday" but instead wisps of truth in among many lies which help build up a reliable insight into what is happening within these networks and so cast light on what they might be up to so that they can be thwarted and many lives saved.

What does it all boil down to?

The UN Convention defines the core act of torture thus:

... any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted ...

It follows that any pain or suffering which is not 'severe' is not torture.

So let's influence the thinking of terrorist suspects not by being 'severe', but instead by doing and saying to them many creative things just short of 'severe', to make them see the advantage in cooperating more or less openly.

OK, everyone?

Many of you must have a lot of spare time on your hands these days, what with the Recession and all.

But more than plenty is whirring away in Brussels and wider European activities. How to join the excitement?

Here is a site Brussels Agenda which gives plenty of leads on what is coming up - easy to sort by policy area or location and so on:

Thousands of events on European Affairs issues are organised every month in Brussels. Beside the EU institutions, and their official agenda, today consultancies, industry associations, European economic or social networks, representative offices from national, regional or local governments, NGOs, in brief, any organisation representing an interest or sector, organise events to stimulate debates, and promote their activities or their projects. How many conferences or workshops have you lost in the past because you simply did not know about it?

Good question. Go for it.

The other day I heard a BBC Radio Five programme coyly playing the BBC broadcast of the moment back in 1975 when Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon.

The commentator hailed this success: "congratulations to the first Negro to win the competition".

It turns out that that success was not enough.

Arise, White Chick Protector of the Lowly Negro.

Phew.

Here is BBRU 218, collated by Redemption Blues.

This caught my eye. Feminist Suzi FemAcadem gives her robust thoughts on more HMG food and health nagging, but includes this line:

It should not be cheaper to go to Iceland and fill your freezer with frozen, processed foods than be able to buy fresh vegetables and lean meats/fish to cook for your family.

Ah. The tell-tale should.

Compare buying carrots in Iceland and a health-food shop.

In each case you are paying for, yes, carrots. But also for a small slice of the costs of growing, nourishing, picking, packaging, transporting, marketing those carrots, plus a small slice of the labour, rental and other costs of running the shop.

It follows that the cost of the actual carrots is a small part of what you are paying for. After all, growing carrots is a fairly primitive task - plant some in the garden and they may well grow, even if you forget about them.

So the price in Iceland probably should be different from the price in other shops, but whether it should be higher or lower depends on gazillions of other transactions now, and no political-ethical conclusion can be drawn from the trivial fact that it is different, be it higher or lower.

In any case, if feminists want men and women alike to work (if they choose to do so) they can not be surprised if those who do work have less time for shopping/cooking and other mundane household tasks, hence an inclination on their part to 'ration' the time spent doing so. So convenience shops like Iceland help make 'working families' a reality.

And is it not a bit of a middle-class stereotype to assume that frozen food is less nutritious that non-frozen food?

The strong case for Evolution (see Mr Noisy's The Blind Watchmaker) is that it explains how complexity can arise from seemingly unrelated actions and interactions.

The strong case for Markets is the same: only the myriad unrelenting quest for small advantages and new ideas creates the complexity needed for feminist and non-feminist BBRU bloggers alike to be spared from depending on growing their own carrots - and hoping that they are not rotten.

So how odd it is that many of those who insist on the 'progressive' truth of Evolution and rail against simplistic 'conservative' Religion are exactly the same people who rail against the complexity of Markets and call for the simplicity of Collectivist Socialism.

Some confusion here?

Or am I missing something?

Who is 'responsible' for what and when it comes to leaking emails written by others?

I previously jotted down some thoughts on this here, picking up some contrarian arguments from Brian Barder.

On his site the subject has rumbled on, with various readers baffled (as am I) by his argument that insofar as embarrassment and distress have been caused to various indviduals by Labour/Smeargate emails, the person mainly responsible for that has to be Guido who pushed these emails towards the national media.

Two Barder arguments made me chuckle.

First, that it was Guido who leaked the emails into the public domain (whereas of course Guido IS the public domain).

And (now) second, that  Mr Crawford’s position seems to me untenable because whoever leaked the e-mails to Mr Staines can’t have known what he would do with them, nor in particular whether anything he published on his blog or via the print media would actually identify by name those smeared by the accusations and imputations.

Common Law has devised various standards for ascribing responsibility for consequences to those who claim not to know what will happen when they do something stupid: see Recklessness and Negligence. 

Anyone with enough cynicism and emboldened determination to leak this stuff in the first place, who then throws petrol on the fire by choosing Guido of all people as a vehicle for doing so, has to be treated as someone who could reasonably be expected to have guessed that one way or the other the whole lot eventually could get one heck of a lot of publicity. 

In short, this is classic political application of Rylands v Fletcher (1868) which held that

We think that the true rule of law is, that the person who for his own purposes brings on his lands and collects and keeps there anything likely to do mischief if it escapes, must keep it at his peril, and, if he does not do so, is prima facie answerable for all the damage which is the natural consequence of its escape.

He can excuse himself by shewing that the escape was owing to the Plaintiff’s default; or perhaps, that the escape was the consequence of vis major, or the act of God; but as nothing of this sort exits here, it is unnecessary to inquire what excuse would be sufficient.

Exactly.

In this case the calamitous McBride brought on to his area of his publicly funded computer nasty material written by him with input from others, which was 'likely to do mischief if it escaped'.

He did not look after this material, and it escaped. So he and the other person(s) who decided to put this material into the public domain are answerable for all the damage which is the natural consequence of its escape.

The deep logic of this judgement is that it compels people at the top of the causation chain to bear particular responsibility for what happens to dangerous substances, or even natural substances which might cause damage to others if they escape.

Those top-of-the-chainers can avoid some or all liability if it is clear that they have acted properly and prudently, but others further down the chain have behaved negligently/improperly and caused the damage (the point Brian Barder in effect is seeking to establish). How exactly that works will depend on the facts of each case.

However, as the English legal maxim says "you must come to Equity with clean hands".

In the McBride case, their hands are thick in slime. There is no room or need for subtle hair-splitting analyses of responsibility. They just waste time and distract attention from the Point.

Which is that the sheer perniciousness of what McBride and others were scheming and the fact that they were doing so on official computers makes their personal and political responsibility for what happened thereafter quite overwhelming, whatever Guido and others further down the chain may have done for good (or indeed less good) motives to deploy this material.

My case rests, m'lud.

The United States' policy towards Cuba has failed.

So says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And she should be in a good position to know, as her husband presided over this failing policy for eight years.

Meanwhile equally ailing and failing Fidel Castro wants the USA to go even further:

Castro responded to the measures in an online column Monday night. The ailing former president wrote that the U.S. had announced the repeal of "several hateful restrictions," but had stopped short of real change.

"Of the blockade, which is the cruelest of measures, not a word was uttered," he wrote.

Thus officially endeth Castroism - if it has been 'cruel' on the part of the USA to deny Cuba some fruits of market economics, how cruel has it been of Castro to pile on the one-party socialism at home and make everything far worse for ordinary Cubans?

Maybe it will fall to a Democrat President to lift all the US measures against Cuba's communists, a Democrat President having imposed most of them in the first place.

In what sense has the former policy in fact failed?

It did not bring about a quick change of heart or regime in Cuba. But that has been obvious for decades. Thereafter it came to stand as a mainly symbolic US position, maintained for US domestic reasons. It must have been a resounding success, as neither Republicans nor Democrats did much other than tinker with it, despite (or because of?) its huge international unpopularity.

I have never seen any sense in this embargo. If there was any strong political logic in it while the USSR was playing geostrategic games, the end of Soviet rule left it looking anomalous if not ridiculous. Cuba is a tiny target for US foreign policy. Better to flood the place with international access/influence and thereby create internal Contradictions, which after all is what helped erode Soviet Communism.

The wider issues?

Boycotts and sanctions are almost always counter-productive (if what you want is reasonably likely and reasonably speedy regime change or at least regime-loosening), since they tend to strengthen the worst isolationist/criminal elements in the country concerned.

Plus as the Cuban case shows, once these measures are in place it gets tricky to find a good political moment to lift them without losing face. President Obama still has some Star Quality, so can get away with it.

Much better is to decide bluntly what you want to achieve - that leader/regime must come to an end or at least moderate his/its behaviour - then look carefully in the diplomatic tool-box to find the kit needed to increase the chances of that outcome happening.

See eg the EU's flailing around with Belarus. What was it aiming to achieve? Did the EU want to subvert the Lukashenko regime? Make life tough for Russia? Roll out 'European values' to Belarus? The EU never made its mind up.

After long years of crossly and confusingly avoiding any serious contact with the Belarus top leadership in general and President Lukashenko in particular, the European Union has just given up and lumbered off in favour of 'pragmatic engagement'. A perverse but probably not unwise EU response to Russia's Georgia adventures? And better no real policy than a phoney or incoherent one?

If you really want a total policy failure where Cuba is concerned, again look at EU policy.

Unable to take a view on the simple proposition "Cuba needs free and fair elections asap, and the EU will invest serious resources to help that happen", EU member states have squabbled inconclusively with each other and achieved nothing at all, other than appearing to many Cuban democrats to be too damned cosy with the communist regime - siding squarely with the past, not the future.

Finally, even if Americans can now expect to travel freely to Cuba, can Cubans likewise expect to be free to go to the USA?

Those Americans who do visit Cuba can heave a huge sigh of relief as they land in Havana. They will have left behind the odious inefficient US private health care system and if need arises can expect to benefit from the marvellous Cuban version.

Hurrah.

Assorted Crawfs are having a few days away from it all in the Algarve:

The Algarve. Think of the Algarve and you think of sunshine breaks and relaxing holidays. You imagine golden beaches on the coast of calm sea waters, sun-kissed tourists relaxing and sampling the delights that this wonderful region of Portugal has to offer.

Everywhere you go, you are surrounded by bright colours, from the golden sands, to the crystal clear waters, the clear blue skies, the vivid green grass, and the white-washed walls of the buildings in the Algarve's old towns.

The rain? No-one mentions the rain which washed away yesterday. Or what about the beyond excellent badness of the road-signs, absence of.

Anyway, there is an indoor pool out of the rain so I can practise standing on the bottom at the deep end (using the steps to prevent upward movement to the surface) and holding my breath for as long as possible.

In English we refer to this area of Portugal as 'the' Algarve. Some people also still take about 'the' Ukraine in referring to the current state Ukraine. Here is a handy gallop through some of the issues surrounding that 'the' when Ukraine is in a sentence.