Come back! We can campaign about trees together!

I've been critical before of political groups and movements whose entire platform basically boils down to "we're not the Conservatives". They avoid setting out principles as much as possible to attract a broad audience - "a united left", or whatever - which works fine right up until they actually try to do anything.

The result is usually a group which is run by and for default people, and often one viewing political power as an end rather than as a means.

I bring this up now because there was [content note: heterosexism, especially in comments] a fine example yesterday of the intellectual knots one can get oneself into when attempting to run a campaigning organisation without reference to any underlying principles¹.

Paraphrased:

The membership's desire to take action in favour² of non-default people was a clear but not unanimous majority. This was hard to interpret, so we resolved to only take late, ineffective and partial action on the subject.

Despite the considered ineffectuality of our response, approximately 0.1% of the recipients of our call to action found it too much for them, and delivered us a series of insults, or even cancelled their subscriptions. Please tell us what you think. Should we have made our action even weaker, or not done it at all?

We don't want to lose important people over this! Please come back... We can campaign about trees together. We won't do it again...

Another example of why I strongly prefer campaigns which both start from and stick with their principles, then.

Footnotes and rambling digressions

¹ Yes, I'm aware they claim to have underlying principles. Under both "defend fairness" and "protect rights" this one should have been fairly obvious (though see next footnote too).

² There is of course a principled argument that marriage - either in its current form as a concept or in all forms - is itself harmful, and therefore to extend it to more people is to go in completely the wrong direction; instead, heterosexual marriage should be abolished. I very much doubt any of the objections received were along those lines.

Certainly, I would agree that in so far as the state needs to have a means of registering relationships between individuals, the model of "marriage", even opened up so that it does not require particular genders of the participants, is massively insufficient. Relationships between more than two people, relationships which desire some but not all of the legal statuses attached to "marriage", and so on, are not well-served by the current set up. This should not be considered the end of the reform process, though with the exception of those religions which would like to run religious ceremonies for marriages, it probably will be for quite some time.

I can also envisage societies in which the "state" either has no need to register relationships at all, or does not exist in such a form that the concept even makes sense. At least some of these social models would, for me, also be preferable to the current system.

Nevertheless, I think even if the long-term plan is to get rid of the concept of state recognised marriage (and remember that this digression is irrelevant to the main post, where that clearly is not the long-term plan!), the current concept has so many flaws that refusing to fix them in the short term is the wrong approach.

(See also: Andy's Miscellany: Marriage Equality and Primogeniture for a different analysis)

Oh. The Greens have got a think tank.

When people talk about "providing a voice to future generations" the first thing I think of is the anti-choice lobby. Obviously this report from a Green think tank isn't that, but it's still more than a little bizarre.

And yes, I know, one doesn't have think tanks for the purpose of coming up with workable or sensible ideas, but I was hoping for better from the Green Party, as the closest we have in England to an electable left wing party, than to be encouraging this sort of thing.

If it had been some think tank for Labour or the Conservatives I'd probably just have laughed and ignored it: it's more disappointing when associated with a party I might want to vote for someday.

The basic idea is that there would be a panel of people forming a "third chamber" of the legislature, who...

[...] would have a power of veto over legislation that were likely to have substantial negative effects for society in the future, the right to review major administrative decisions which substantially affected future people and the power to initiate legislation to preserve the basic needs and interests of future people.

Right. Now, okay, there is a very definite conflict between the incentive to mainly act and plan for short-term successes that elective democracies have, and the need to make longer-term plans to have a sustainable society. Certainly, this is going to be a problem with pretty much any political system in which the faction "in charge" can change over a shorter timescale than that needed for long-term planning. (Of course, a political system in which the faction in charge can't change over short timescales has its own severe problems)

The proposed solution claims to address a weakness that despite democratic reforms, no present democracy considers the needs of future voters. So, this panel would guess what their needs might be and force legislation to be made accordingly.

Decision 1: road maintenance budgets should be cut. People in the future will all have flying cars.

How do we know that something will be a problem in the future? In general, we don't. A big hint is "is it a problem today". But if it's a problem today, then a system of government that did an adequate job of representing all currently-existing people would deal with it anyway.

Even assuming the panel have perfect access to and interpretation of all current human knowledge, their decisions are going to be based on "best guesses" about the future. Those guesses are going to be wrong at least as often than not.

And since the purpose of all legislation is its effect in the future (generations or years or days), why would the panel be significantly more likely to get "impact on the future" right than the existing legislative bodies?

The panel - and the report recognises this, though not for the reason I give - could not be elected. If it were, then we'd elect the Commons to make decisions, then we'd elect the Lords to disagree with those decisions, then we'd elect the "Guardians of the Future" (No, really, that's what they're called) to veto anything that gets past them.

So, instead, they'd be selected at random in a manner similar to jury service. It's a tempting idea - I've seen it suggested for House of Lords reform before - but it just wouldn't work. The suggestion is that anyone on the electoral register who doesn't tick the "I don't want to be a Guardian of the Future" box would be eligible for random selection. Once selected, they could opt-out at that stage, but if they didn't there would be a year of training followed by a multi-year term of office.

So, who's going to opt out (either on the register or when selected)?

1. People who are ineligible to register.
2. People who do not register.
3. People who have health conditions incompatible with an intensive multi-year commitment.
4. People who have caring commitments likewise incompatible (the report talks about subsidised or free caring services, but not everyone will want to take up that offer)
5. People who do not wish to be in an extremely public role likely to come under considerably more public scrutiny than the average MP gets.
6. People who don't really care about legislative politics.
7. People with low self-confidence in their own abilities.

And so on, and so on, and so on. See also s.e. smith's Civic Engagement: Only For the Wealthy! which inspired a lot of this section.

Notice that a major common factor of all of those groups is that they are also strongly under-represented in our current political system for much the same reasons, and that they are correlated with various lacks of privilege.

Not needing to campaign and sign up to a political party might help, but not much.

The number of Guardians would be relatively small (7 to 144 is the range suggested, with 12ish being preferred) - which means that to get a representative group would be very tricky. But then, that's not a particular aim. From Appendix B, which sets out selection:

For such demographically-based pre-sortitional selection would detract from the sense, already indicated above, in which this grandest of juries must represent the voiceless, a task for us all which is in important respects equally hard, one might venture, for any of us.

Well, yes, in the "predict the future" sense. And no, in the "interests of future people who are not like me" sense. Given that representing the "interests of people not like me" is - due to privilege - one of the major failings of our current political system, a lack of concern for the same failing in a body of significant political power is disturbing.

(Now, a footnote points out that if you select by certain demographics you can bias away from demographics not selected by - I've mentioned that problem before and it's especially serious for small groups)

There's a footnote referenced in the context of the length of the commitment which is also worrying.

⁴⁷ Given the vastly longer duration of the role, it would be necessary to provide the Guardians with some kind of salary. Probably this should simply be the salary they were getting in their regular job, plus generous (but not corruptly so!) expenses. Alternatively, all the Guardians could get the average national wage (as, arguably, MPs should, too). [...]

Emphasis mine. Spot the really obvious problem with that bit that significantly biases ability to be a "Guardian"... The alternative is not great either, but at least the bias it inserts is somewhat counter to current privilege.

So, okay, we have our randomly selected sample of people who will be protecting the future from the present. So, how will they decide what to do? This perfect access to the world's information won't make itself.

The Guardians would be supported both in their training and in their day to day roles as Guardians by a high- level and diverse support staff of administrators, facilitators and experts, including of course legal experts. It would be very important to stop this support staff serving the Guardians from becoming too powerful (as perhaps the civil service is too powerful in relation to government ministers, in Britain). Primarily, those serving the Guardians closely should consist literally of assistants, secretaries and administrative managers and facilitators, plus a cohort of top academic etc. advisors employed on retainers. The Guardians would have strong rights - including if necessary subpoena style rights, to call any and all further actors and experts that they wished to hear from, to help them in their deliberations.

Okay. With a very small number of Guardians, the chances of any of them being themselves an expert in a specifically-named field is small. If the selection was representative, most of them will have average mathematical and scientific knowledge. A year's training will not give them the knowledge to really tell which of two conflicting experts has the best theory. Is X safe or will it cause serious problems in 200 years? Who knows - the experts disagree, the Guardians don't have the expertise to assess the claims, and beware of experts anyway.

So ultimately they will pick the most persuasive expert. Who is probably themselves wrong.

The existing House of Commons is already perfectly capable of picking the wrong expert advice; it seems unlikely that some randomly-selected people would be significantly better. (And they need to be significantly better, not merely equal, or they're not actually helping)

That's if the Guardians can agree at all. They're randomly selected in part to avoid party political considerations. But it also means that they will have a broad spread of political views. So, how will they make decisions? By consensus.

They would be given training for example in consensus decision making, in a group with a common purpose.

Consensus decision making is really quite difficult between people with completely different core assumptions. So in practice most things would come down to a vote between different political factions. The factions might not be there already - political party membership is so rare that perhaps one of the Guardians might have it - but they'd form pretty rapidly.

See also: Tyranny of Structurelessness - even though this wouldn't be unstructured, it still applies: at least with the selection method for MPs there are so many big egos that they cancel out, whereas with a random selection a couple of charismatic big egoed people can end up very dominant.

In practice then we have a third chamber that will tend to always fall on the same side of political debates about whether a policy is a good idea or not. What side that is is selected randomly, but that doesn't really help. It also gives the "centrist" Guardians the most power as the "swing" voters - in a mini-representation of a marginal Parliamentary constituency, or a slightly enlarged version of the current US Supreme Court.

Perhaps their belief in a common objective would help. Perhaps not. There's a suggestion for their "oath of office":

"I promise to do my utmost to represent and uphold the basic needs of future people in the present. I will work to ensure that the future people of the United Kingdom are cared for by us all, and that nothing that we in the U.K. do hurts them or prevents them from being. I vow therefore to execute faithfully and to the very best of my abilities the office of Guardian for Future Generations."

Emphasis mine, again. Are you thinking "oath of allegiance to extremist anti-choice group?" I'm sure it's accidental, given the Green's general policies, but still! Especially given that the explicit point of this group is to prevent Parliament passing legislation that benefits currently-existing people at the perceived expense of potential future people, how do you stop the anti-choicers being all over that with "Look, it says right in your job description you have to ban abortion. You took an oath of office to that effect." (The draft wording is creepily anti-choice, but the group's purpose probably precludes anything without that flaw¹. At least it by doing so avoids the eugenicism that previous "protect the future" movements have had, though it does still allow for invading other countries to take their land for future UK generations)

Let's back up a bit to the start of my criticism. I said "How do we know that something will be a problem in the future? [...] A big hint is 'is it a problem today'."

The major problem with our existing system of government, in my opinion, is that it does not give a voice and sufficient consideration to the concerns of large groups of people, especially those who are far from being the default human. If we can't get a system of democracy that listens to real existing people and considers them to have equal humanity and worth - and that extends to "Well, this would be great for the UK, but really mess up the lives of a bunch of foreigners who aren't part of UK democracy." of course - do we really have any business trying to represent some hypothetical future people.

Conversely, if we actually took seriously the representation of people in all their interests - including, especially, those who won't become MPs themselves - would we need specific care about future generations? What thing could we possibly do that would not significantly harm a group of people in the short-term but would harm a group of people in the long-term?

Nuclear waste has been suggested as meeting that, but I don't think it does: we know nuclear waste is dangerous now, and either we store it properly in which case future generations are going to be fine - and will have better storage and reprocessing technology to make up for our inadequacies - or we don't store it properly and some current people in the short-term will get hurt (and we don't, and they are).

You don't need an appeal to the needs of future people to do this - an appeal to the needs of certain current people would be enough. If we can't care about those current people now, we have no business privileging the needs of our hypothetical future people above both them and their hypothetical future people.

I get the motivation - embedding good environmental decisions in government decision making is going to be necessary for us to survive. But all of the environmental problems facing us today are already having massive negative effects on currently existing people. If that's not enough for us to do something, what does it say about us if future existing people is? And we have structures that care about some currently existing people already - they just don't care about all of them. But that's not a problem with the democratic structures as much as with the people inhabiting them - and their privilege. Adding more people with the same sorts of privilege won't help matters.

Footnote

¹ Yes, I'm fully aware that this hypothetical anti-choicer's argument contains several major logical flaws. But it sounds superficially convincing if you loudly ignore those flaws.

Political strategy mistakes

So, as previously covered, Ed Miliband wants Conservative voters, but isn't willing to defect to the Tories to get them.

How's that working out for him?

According to YouGov polling, not well. The polling is mainly about the Lib Dems loss of voters, but there's a bit about the change from May 2010 vote to current voting intention.

According to the polling, 3% of those who voted Conservative in May 2010 would now vote Labour. Yes! Clearly the strategy of drifting rightwards is paying off!

Unfortunately, also according to the polling, 3% of those who voted Labour in 2010 would now vote Conservative. So allowing for margins of error, the net move from Conservative to Labour is indistinguishable from zero. Oh.

I can't say I'm entirely surprised. The second preference polling - back when AV was in the news - always gave extremely low proportions (around 5%) of Conservative or Labour voters who were willing to give their second preference to the "other side". Those voters are naturally also the most likely to transfer their first preference from one party to the other. And there's hardly any of them.

Similarly, page 5 onwards of the poll results gives "like/dislike" figures for each party, broken down by 2010 and current vote. Only around 10% of the 2010 or current voters for each party even slighty likes (6 or above out of 10) the other party. There's really not a lot of scope for persuasion there.

Now, the right wing of Labour will say, Blair won 3 elections by drifting rightwards. And this is somewhat true ... but, on the other hand:

1. Correlation is not causation. Pretty much any manifesto would have beaten Major's Conservatives in 1997, and given their disarray, 2001 as well.
2. Sooner or later, voters are going to decide that if they want Conservative policies, they might actually just as well vote for the Conservatives.
3. The Conservatives can tactically retreat and win by losing.
4. There's a major confusion between "position" and "rate of change of position" in the argument. Even if you accept that it's true that Labour moving to the right both caused their 1997-2005 wins and was a good position for Labour to be, that doesn't mean that a further move rightwards is still good strategy.
   For a sports analogy, football players in their 20s tend to perform better than football players in their teens. So, says the Labour election strategist, the team with players in their 50s will be even better.
5. The usual comparision is with Labour's terrible 1987 election performance. But the Conservative party have not moved so far to the left since then that there are no meaningful political positions between "nationalise everything" and "the Conservative manifesto".
   Meanwhile, there isn't a lot of viable space between the "current Conservative position" and the "current Labour position" on a lot of issues.

The polling figures

...but then, what about the polls? Lib Dem and Other support has been roughly constant, and the relative levels of Conservative and Labour support seem to go up and down as you'd expect from good and bad things for one party or the other hitting the news.

The thing that's forgotten there is that the headline polls exclude¹ "don't know" and "wouldn't vote".

Good or bad news for a party will probably cause some voters to prefer or drop it - but for or from "don't know", "wouldn't vote", or a minor party. When the impact of the news fades, then they might well drift back to their previous position. Because the polls are normalised, then this effect can look like one party is gaining at the direct expense of another - but, at least with the Conservatives and Labour, this is not actually happening on any detectable scale.

The relative positions of Conservatives and Labour have changed by roughly 10 points since the election, based on current polling. Essentially none of this net movement has been direct transfers. (Indeed, currently, both parties are doing better in percentage share terms than they did at the election itself)

Footnote

¹ Some polling companies instead attempt to reallocate these people instead, to improve the accuracy of their forecast. The overall effect is similar, though.

Beware of experts

Well, not so much "beware of experts" as "beware of definitions of experts".

It's fairly obvious that the way one recognises an "expert" in one field is not going to be the same that one recognises an "expert" in another field.

Obviously expertise and specialisation is a good thing. The problem is that identifying expertise in a field that you have little knowledge of is itself a tricky problem. So there are conventions as to what experts "look like" - some of those conventions are themselves directly rooted in privilege: they look like middle-aged middle-class white men - others are only indirectly so: academic experts tend to be found in research institutions because that's a major way that they become experts, but not everyone can get the chance to work at a research institution even if they have a strong aptitude in and interest for that particular field.

There are lots of problems with recognising expertise from the outside - a lot of my former posts on bad science reporting are caused by precisely that - and even on the inside experts will disagree with each other - but I think there's a particular issue in the way that academic expertise is identified and defined that matters.

This is: all science is basically statistical.

An expert in metallurgy is not an expert on every individual atom within a metal block (you need a different expert for the next block...) but on their statistical behaviour. An expert in economics is not tracking every penny separately but looking at the statistical movements of much larger sums of money over time. We recognise this.

An expert on psychology or health or other fields that consider the general behaviour of living creatures in particular conditions also only has statistical knowledge. We do not recognise this as much.

An atom of metal, or a penny, individually, may well not react in the overall way that a metallurgist or economist predicts that it will. This doesn't usually matter - the overall effect will still be what they predict. (And the individual variation between atoms or pennies is small)

When discussing people, however, a person not behaving in the way that the expert predicts is important. The expert's knowledge of the situation is statistical. They can tell that of 100 people, 90 will do a certain thing. The other 10 will not.

When attempts to predict are taken to the individual level they will regularly fail. The expert is an expert in general behaviour and situations. The individual is an expert in their own personal situation. So an individual's perception of their own situation - and what they should therefore do - should in general be treated as more reliable than the expert's¹.

What actually happens is that the median behaviour the expert has identified - and their identification of such can be quite incorrect through their own privilege issues, of course, but even if all of that is somehow avoided - tends to become regarded as correct and deviation as incorrect. (And, further, stay regarded as correct even if the median behaviour later changes)

It also gets to a point about the difference between a claim that "X is a problem" and "X is an [adjective] problem" - which often gets intentionally ignored.

To make a claim that a particular thing affects a particular proportion of people, or that its prevalence has been changing over time or space, or that a particular counter-measure is in/effective one needs to do a very carefully designed study, probably more than once. This is really difficult to do well.

To make a claim that a particular thing occurs at all, seriously affects those it occurs to, and therefore should be countered ... you need to listen to a few people. This is also really difficult to do well, especially for people with the "anecdote is not evidence" attitude that works well in particular scientific fields and for statistical research and works very badly when exported from there.

Unfortunately, that sort of person is likely to fit right in to an academic environment where they can become a socially-recognised expert, because our expert recognition is insufficient.

We need a separation in the way that society recognises experts between "experts in statistical behaviour of people" and "experts in individual behaviour of people".

Footnote

¹ The obvious exception is when the expert - who may in this context not be a socially-recognisable expert - has knowledge highly material to the individual's situation which they know the individual does not have. Of course, in most cases, not giving this information to the individual is intentionally forcing a mistake on their part.

The "insanity" defence

[trigger warning]

The news that the murderer of 77 people in Norway has been declared "insane" is not surprising. After all, he was white and not a believer in some scary foreign religion - if he was "sane" he wouldn't have done what he did.

The psychiatric report concluded

[...] he lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions"

Okay - this has probably been translated from the original Norweigian, and may well have lost some nuance, but let's break it down:

1. His beliefs about the nature of reality were inaccurate
2. His thoughts and actions were based on his beliefs about the nature of reality.

The second part of that is essentially what everyone does.

So the "insanity" must be concluded from the first part - that his beliefs about the nature of reality were inaccurate. But this is true to at least some extent of everyone, too.¹

Furthermore, plenty of people share his particular belief that there is a Muslim invasion of Europe planned and that our governments are complicit in it. Most of them do not commit mass murder as a result, however.

So: the Norweigian murderer has a commonly-shared mistaken belief, and chose highly illegal actions as a consequence. He therefore cannot be held - by "insanity" - to be criminally responsible for those actions.

Meanwhile, for less default-y terrorist suspects - black, Muslim, non-European, etc. - the idea that they could rationally decide to kill people (even if the decision was based on faulty premises) is completely accepted, and they're tried as criminals.

The idea of that form of "insanity"² being treated as in some way excusing him of responsibility is completely wrong.

Footnote

¹ For an entirely uncontroversial example that affects almost everyone: optical illusions. They're artefacts of millions of years of evolved visual processing where an "optimisation" that works most of the time gives the wrong result in a few cases.

² Using the definition of "mistaken belief about reality", anyone who had no reasonable way of knowing based on their perceptions that their action would have a particular criminal consequence should not be held criminally responsible³ - and most of our laws recognise this fact: there are exceedingly few "strict liability" laws.

³ I'm aware that, given what we know about rapists, many of them would be able to use this "defence" on the grounds that they are also deeply mistaken about the nature of reality. However, the precedent that people whose mistaken beliefs make them a general danger to society - highly rare among those considered "insane" by psychiatrists - may be separated from it for as long as those beliefs remain is well-established, and would have much the same effect. At any rate, if we get to the stage where accused rapists are advised by their lawyers to plead "not guilty due to insanity", we'll be at a stage where rape culture is generally considered a "mistaken belief" - and, minus the ablism in that sentiment, I'd be happy with that.

Loitering within tent

[trigger warning: state violence]

Why aren't the people in charge simply ignoring the Occupy movement? It's not obvious to me.

Petitions, protests, marches, letter-writing campaigns, voting - all can be and are largely ignored by elected politicians. A representative who is already sympathetic to their cause can use these things to be more forceful in Parliament. With consistent effort of this sort over many years, then the number of sympathetic representatives in Parliament can be grown and public opinion can be altered - but this is an extremely slow process and as, for instance, the blatant racism or heterosexism shown by some MPs today demonstrates, can be ignored at will by an unsympathetic representative.

The "ultimate sanction" of making them lose elections is only a statistical deterrent. A party may occasionally lose power temporarily - though that was going to happen anyway - but individual representatives in safe seats (and there are equivalents in almost all electoral systems) can stay in office as long as they want.

So, given that, what is it about Occupy that stops it being ignored. Look at it entirely from an abstract point of view - ignore the aims, just look at the methods.

• A protest march will, if it's large enough, block off multiple streets in a major city for several hours. Normal day-to-day life is disrupted over a large area. Then, everything returns to normal, and it gets pushed back in to the pile of previous marches.
• Occupy take an area of public space, put some tents up, and stay there. The vast majority of the city continues as normal - indeed, from a distance, it's not obviously there - and even nearby it's generally relatively straightforward to walk around them. Generally, far fewer people are participating at any one time, in any particular Occupy location, than would appear at any medium-sized protest march in the same city.

The only thing that makes it more "disruptive" than a protest march is the permanence in a public space. But alone, that's not particularly disruptive¹. They may be a reminder of something governments and the powerful don't like to be reminded of - but they should be an easily avoidable and ignorable reminder. The late Brian Haw camped outside Parliament for years without changing policy, and only really made the news on the (many) occasions where they tried to have him removed.

Likewise, while the Occupy movements are - to a greater or lesser extent - trying to develop alternatives to the established order, that they're doing so in a square in the rain, instead of on an internet forum or on a commune somewhere out of the way, shouldn't be particularly threatening. It's not as if people merely walking by are going to pick up the interesting details of that, as opposed to a few messages and slogans on signs.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if the governments and powerful had completely ignored Occupy Wall Street, giving non-committal platitudes about the right to protest and "they can stay if they want[, I don't care]" if anyone asked, then it would not have reached the numbers it has - across North America and Europe - and not have received anything like as much press coverage.

Occupy LSX has pretty much only been in the news since it started over disputes as to whether they should be "allowed" to stay there or forcibly removed. The reasons they're actually there are getting very little press coverage. If they'd been passively allowed to continue without interference, then they'd still be there, of course - but no-one who didn't physically go past them would have noticed.

Similarly, the recent attacks on Occupy Oakland - and now New York and Seattle, at least - and the slightly less aggressive ongoing policing and "health and safety" disruptions of the sites - may have deterred some people from attending ... but they've also kept the protests in the news, encouraged the protestors, often grown their numbers overall, and made them think that their strategy is working.

Gandhi's "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" statement has been repeated to the point of cliché about Occupy - but while their eventual victory (and what that might mean, anyway) is still nowhere near inevitable, they're larger in number and angrier as a result of governments and the powerful not being content to remain at the "ignore" stage.

So why try to repress them so much? It can't be the ideas alone. There's nothing new in their ideas (and that is not a criticism!) - and there's nothing new about a significant angry minority holding those ideas. The economic collapse has made more people receptive to those ideas, and the Occupy camps mean that (a few) more people hear about those ideas.

It also can't be about permission to hold those ideas and express them publicly. The only part unique to Occupy is "in a square" or "in a tent". Again, if ignored, they wouldn't be powerful there.

It can't be personal inconvenience or conscience. If the powerful had those, then plenty of other forms of protest would either be more rapidly effective, or more heavily restricted, or both.

It can't be about "health and safety" or other such concerns. The only health and safety potentially being affected is generally that of the people inside the Occupy camps - which they obviously don't care about. Yes, the protests may after legal argument be found to be breaking some technicality of the law. But probably most protest marches could after the fact be found to have done the same. It's largely irrelevant to whether they can be ignored, and it's more focus on enforcing every single law at once than ever gets applied anywhere else. Enforcing laws - and making up new laws to enforce - is a means, but it can't be the end in itself.

It shouldn't be about personal fear - hundreds of thousands of people in a square like Tahrir Square can be threatening to a government: that's enough people that if they did turn out to be armed revolutionaries they could do some serious damage to the government even if the police and army stayed loyal - and a sign of enough popular support that a dictator can't rely enough on their loyalty. So Egypt's government fell.

But a few hundred people? Maybe a few thousand at the biggest? That's not dangerous. They're not even particularly close to government buildings, or the offices of the truly powerful. Even if they were all armed to the teeth if they tried anything violent they would go down very quickly in the "fatally failed revolutionaries" list. And clearly if they were armed and shooting, the loyalty of the police and army is nowhere near weak enough yet in North America or Europe to end up defecting: the recent police assaults on Occupy should show they don't have a problem there.

So - there seems to be nothing to lose by simply ignoring Occupy like they ignore every other protest and fringe movement. And much more to lose by attacking them through the courts and through violence, thereby increasing anger and public sympathy. So why pick that strategy?

I really don't get it. What do the rich and powerful know that I don't that makes Occupy so specifically threatening to them that they're willing to take such disproportionate and panicked action to try - counter-productively - to stop them? What am I missing here?

Footnotes

¹ If the public space is "across a major motorway" or "in the middle of Oxford Street" or "right where you wanted to build a block of flats" or "in front of the gates of a military base", then it's definitely very disruptive. But that's not what Occupy is doing.

Occupy Ambivalence

I have very ambivalent thoughts about the Occupy Placename movements. On the one hand, they're highlighting that there are many areas in which the cosy political consensus does not have the support of the population, in a way that governments don't quite know how to respond to and can't entirely ignore. On the other hand, while the movements aren't likely to fall to party-political co-option, there's a definite problem with default-person co-option, Tyranny of Structurelessness, and so on. While some Occupy groups are trying to explicitly deal with these problems, some are very definitely not - and it makes their claim to be for "the 99%" rather dubious.

Part of the reason for the ambivalence, of course, is that there's no one Occupy movement - other than vague solidarity and similarity in some aims, and a global slogan and broad methodology, there's nothing to connect Occupy City A to Occupy City B. The actions and decisions of one don't directly affect the actions and decisions of another.

So the actions of one group can make me hopeful that this attempt at a revolution might really be a revolution - while the actions of another make me sure that it's just another attempt to reshuffle the people at the top (or as Melissa McEwan puts it, "[...] you're not staging a revolution: You're staging a change in management.")

Differences between the US and the UK

One of the questions regarding the UK protests has to be "why now?". The practical answer - that the US protests, themselves having at least some similarities in form to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions - have been successful and encouraged people elsewhere, isn't sufficient.

But the situation in the US and the UK is rather different. The recent news that the US median weekly wage for 2010 was $507, for instance. On hearing that, I needed context. So, I converted it to pounds, adjusted for the (small) purchasing power parity difference between the two nations, and then started comparing it with the ASHE results for the UK in the same year.

I live in the North East of England. It's a region that's been largely abandoned by successive governments, has high unemployment, high social deprivation, very little incoming investment, and wasn't in good shape even in the boom years. On a regional basis, it has the lowest median wage in the UK.

It also has a median wage - after currency conversions - around 10-15% higher than the US equivalent. Furthermore, the social safety net is more generous, and health care is both free and available.

The US as a whole is noticeably worse off than the worst bits of the UK. It's not surprising that the US is rising up in protest; nor is it surprising that it didn't before.

10% or 30% or 99%

The UK, meanwhile... there are some seriously deprived parts of the UK. But most of these have been hated by governments for years. The protests in the UK - their appearance at this time - aren't about those bits. They aren't about the consistent demonisation of disabled people that has been ongoing for decades. They aren't about the consistent racism and classism that set off riots in the 80s and riots this summer. They're - in many ways - about the worry on the part of the middle classes that they'll end up poor too.

The UK economy is heading into a severe mess, inflicted by the "expansionary austerity" beliefs of the government - and this is making the middle classes less secure. Not unreasonably, they're worried. But the people at the bottom of the classism pile, and the people seriously affected by other marginalisations, have been there for a long time, and failed by our governmental and economic power structures for a long time. People could have come out on the streets to criticise those structures any time in the last decade.

And part of it - part of it - is that just as you can't have a riot by yourself, you can't have much of a protest - the late Brian Haw excepted - by yourself. The success of the US protests gives some of the discontent in the UK the knowledge that they could do this and not be alone. That might be why the Occupy camps in the UK appeared, and stayed. But there have been protests before.

Who are the protests for? Are they for those who were never at the top of society but thought that if they followed the rules they could lead a comfortable mostly-privileged life, or for the rest of the 99% as well, who knew that they'd never get that far as things stood? Are the efforts of the very poor, disabled people, women and [trigger warning] rape victims and other generally marginalised groups to be heard when speaking for themselves considered a part of Occupy, or separate? The answer varies from camp to camp, and even within a camp, of course. But the general trend I'm reading about in the UK is not making me optimistic.

We know best, now rise up and revolt

Claiming to be representing the 99% is rather tricky. That's a lot of people, who, collectively, agree on absolutely nothing. While the wealth and power may be concentrated in a very small group - far smaller than "the 1%" - that doesn't mean that the rest are going to agree, even on the necessity of overturning the established order.

But the standard response to anyone disagreeing with the approach is to point out that they are in the 99% too. It reminds me a bit of the contempt for people who make the "wrong" voting decision that s.e. smith talks about in the context of the US urban/rural divide.

Why assume that everyone below a certain extremely high wealth level should agree on:

• The current system being unjust (when many of those protesting now didn't think so until it started obviously hurting them)
• The proposed solution being better

It can't be better for all of the 99%, even afterwards.

If the revolution makes a fair effort to dismantle all privilege, then many mostly-default people are going to take some steps down in relative social position. If they really dismantle capitalism, globally, and end inequality, then almost everyone in the UK and USA is going to take several steps downwards relatively, and probably a few in absolute terms too, at least in the short term.

But if it doesn't make that effort and succeed, why should people other than the mostly-default take part in risky, dangerous, and untested revolution to choose who rules them with contempt¹. We already have elections for that.

The assumption is the old socialist-lefty one that classism is so much bigger than every other form of oppression that if you end classism and capitalism the rest will just disappear. It might be necessary to end it, in practice - but it's nowhere near sufficient.

Ambivalence

So, yes, ambivalence. The Occupy movements are well-intentioned and in some cases well-implemented. The power structures they are fighting against are deadly and oppressive, and need to go. But there's a tension there between destroying the power structures and commandeering them - and I don't have confidence that those wishing to destroy them will be able to shape the movements.

They're not going away, for now, and the escalation of violent responses from some governments suggest a panic about where they could go next. But where do they go next? Their very existence is achieving something - but not yet enough. Where they go - and what they do - depends on why they want to do it. Which aspects of privilege do they want to defeat and which do they want to accept? Hopefully the answers will become obvious soon.

Footnote

¹ If the rulers are bad enough, the people can become desperate enough to believe that bringing in a new set of bad rulers on a tide of blood can't possibly make things worse. And often, they're right, especially in the short term. But it can hardly be said to be congruent with the original noble goals of the revolution.

Atheism and the kyriarchy

There have been quite a few high-profile incidents of racism and sexism among some atheist communities recently. These have been followed by the predictable pattern of soul-searching about what can be done to prevent them and get more people who aren't white men involved in atheism, countered by the predictable denial that there's any problem at all by the selectively skeptical.

Now, obviously any community that exists in this society is going to be vulnerable to reproducing this society's ideas of the default person, even if its aims are apparently unrelated to structural discrimination. Privilege is designed to be invisible to its owners, so without a concerted effort to work against it (and even then...), people will inevitably repeat dominant social values even if they don't want to.

But I think these particular atheist communities have more fundamental problems than that.

Firstly, what Tami said in the post linked above:

But there is a difference between seeking to use reason and making skepticism and reason an identity. The latter, I'm beginning to think, results not in injecting more reasonableness into public discourse, but less, as people who are invested in touting their own superior logic are rarely self-aware enough to spot and acknowledge the places where their thinking has been colored by bias. And make no mistake--no one is immune to the biases inherent in our society--not even the guy who calls himself a Skeptic and fancies himself the smartest person in the room.

Secondly, their aims are, by definition incompatible with the ending of kyriarchal systems of privilege.

Their rhetoric makes it very clear that they¹ wouldn't be satisfied with a society in which religious belief and lack of religious belief were treated as equal. They want to be above religion, with religious people the subject of disdain for their "irrational" and "obsolete" beliefs.

And there is the problem. They want to be on top of the heap. They dispute the construction of the heap - why are atheists not at the top of it² - but they don't object to its existence. It's no surprise therefore that debates over "what should the relative position of men and women in the heap be?" are frequent - the alternative answer of destroying the heap entirely is unthinkable.

All forms of oppression are so strongly entangled that it cannot be possible to eliminate one³ without attempting to eliminate all of them. By supporting and encouraging the existence of the heap, they make it impossible to eliminate the other parts of the heap they disagree with.

Footnote

¹ I've had to be fairly non-specific about exactly which atheist communities I'm referring to, because it's not as if there are official denominations of atheist. So the definition is going to have to be somewhat circular: "the sort of atheist I'm talking about is the sort of atheist who fits the description I give". But I hope nevertheless it's obvious enough that there are many atheists and atheist communities that are not like this, and who I'm not talking about here.

² How far down they are of course varies considerably by country and region, as well as many other factors. Trends suggest that they will get to the top of the heap and be the default eventually, at least in some places, just through weight of numbers.

³ That's not to say that I believe, ad absurdum, that all existing forms of oppression will end simultaneously or not at all. Clearly on some day in the distant future it may be that racism ends but some heterosexism continues, or vice versa. For now, however, all forms are so entangled that trying to end one (or a few) in isolation is doomed to failure.

Given the attempts by some of these atheists to, for instance, redefine religion as mental illness, I think they're more likely to increase the entanglements between oppressions than decrease them.

Riots and responsibility

[Trigger warning: violence, also applies to most of the links]

So, riots. Some other reading on the subject first:

• Hangbitching: Peckham Monday
• Camila Batmanghelidjh at the Independent: Caring costs – but so do riots
• Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: On UK Riots Part 1 and Part 2
• Andy's Miscellany: Thoughts on riots
• Left Outside: Even Rioters with Blackberrys can be Poor
• Kevin Sampson at the Guardian: Liverpool riots: I remember the buzz of mob mayhem from 1981

And for some idea of the general public response:

• This rapidly-growing petition to remove all benefits from rioters (presumably after they've been released from jail) is by far the most signed petition on the government's new petitions site.
• YouGov polling reports significant majorities in favour of major escalations of force against the riots, and 33% in favour of the use of live ammunition.

My own thoughts...

There are two things that the government needs to do. Immediately, it needs to restore an approximation of order to the affected cities. The people involved in the riots do need to be arrested and tried if possible. The government are taking this - after a shaky start - pretty seriously¹, with a large police presence in city centres at night, and rapid work to arrest the rioters during the day. The rioting isn't going to be completely over for a while - but provided nothing escalates it (see footnote¹ again) then normality should return fairly soon.

As soon as that is done, however, the government needs to do a much more important task - stop this happening again.

Riots could in theory break out at any time. There are nowhere near enough police across the country to stop this. If thousands of people decide at the same time that they want to make a point through violence, it's really difficult for the police to stop this happening.

Generally, they don't, however. Most of the time, people feel they have better choices available to them, or don't co-ordinate their attempts to riot.

The police can maintain a strong presence enough to stop these riots. They cannot maintain that presence indefinitely - already officers have been on duty for much longer than they should have been. Eventually they will need to stand down - and then, if nothing has changed, it will only be one more spark needed for more riots to start.

Unfortunately, the government seems to be determined not to change anything.

Its all too clear that we have a big problem with gangs in our country. For too long there has been a lack of focus and a complete lack of respect shown by these groups of thugs.

I am clear that they are in no way representative of the vast majority of young people in our country who despise them frankly as much as the rest of us do. But there are pockets of our society that are not just broken, but frankly sick.

When we see children as young as 12 and 13 looting and laughing, when we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear there are things that are badly wrong in our society.

For me the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing I have spoken about for years: it is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society.

People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences. Well they do have consequences.

We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line. Restoring a stronger sense of responsibility across our society in every town in every street in ever estate is something I am determined to do.

That's David Cameron PM (Conservative) there. But with all that talk about how people should "take responsibility", it could easily have been his Opposition counterpart, Ed Miliband MP (Labour). As the Guardian reports:

He said: "Then we have got to look into the causes, why people are going around doing this. And I think there are a complex number of causes."

He said he thought it was "partly about parental responsibility, partly about gangs and some of that culture".

Pretty similar thoughts from both. In summary, the causes of the riots are that "the rioters are scum, and their parents are scum, and their culture is scum, and we should punish the lot of them".

And with that level of shallow political analysis and responsibility-dodging from our political leadership, there are always going to be people who feel that society is giving them nothing.

Today's rioters can be dealt with. Arrested. Tried. Imprisoned. Tomorrow's rioters are still going to grow up in the same hopeless situations, being blamed by the politicians for being in those situations. And in a few years we'll arrest them too, because that's far easier than trying to figure out what the real underlying problems are and then fixing them. Far easier than treating people as actual people and listening to them and taking them seriously before they get so desperate they take to the streets to loot and destroy because that's all that's left. But no. They're scum, their families are scum, and they deserve what they get. Political consensus acheived, Parliament adjourned.

I think tomorrow's Parliamentary debate will be very reluctant to look "soft on crime" and consider why these riots might be happening. Why decades of social deprivation and institutional racism and cuts to what few bits of social safety net there were might be giving people nothing left to lose by rioting. I hope I'm wrong about that, but if I am it'll have to come from the backbenches.

Footnote

¹ Populist but dangerous and largely useless measures such as water cannon and plastic bullets aside, that is. Because they worked so well in Northern Ireland.

I'd happily never hear this again

There are of course many hate speech phrases and words I'd rather not have to hear again, but this one is a little more seemingly-innocuous: "Elections have consequences".

I'm seeing this phrase a lot at the moment - both in a UK context as the coalition government brings out terrible policy after terrible policy, and in the USA as State and House Republicans bring in ever-worse laws to eliminate anyone not like them.

Specifically I'm seeing the phrase used a lot by centre-lefties whose centre-left party was defeated in an election (for being generally not very effective) as a way to say "We told you so. Hopefully you'll make a better choice next time.".

It of course very nicely fits the centre-left (and general right) narrative of "personal responsibility" and seeking individual solutions to structural problems.

Firstly, it assumes the existence of a meaningful choice. For people whose interests do not align with the interests of the default people, while a left-wing party might be a little better on average, this is only on average. On many issues the choice is between "bad" and "terrible" on policy. On some, the choice is between "terrible" and "terrible, and they enjoy it".

Furthermore, the electoral system in both the UK and the USA severly restricts voters' choice of candidate. Electoral boundaries can render votes entirely irrelevant (and with the partisan boundary decisions that much of the USA has, this is even more likely) short of a tremendous swing in opinion. First-past-the-post voting makes it very difficult to have more than two locally-viable parties in any seat: three-way marginals are incredibly rare in the UK, and barring the occasional charismatic independent candidate, completely absent in the USA.

It's hard to vote for a decent candidate if there are literally none standing in your constituency. It's not always the best idea for minimisation of harm even if one is, if they're unlikely to actually win.

Throw in electoral fraud and it's quite possible that the voters collectively were fully aware of the consequences of electing a particular candidate, and if the votes had been counted properly that would have been clear. Similarly, polling station inaccessibility, or malfunctioning voting machines, or errors in the electoral roll, can prevent someone casting a vote that they should have been able to.

Elections might have consequences, but that's not the same thing as voters being able to do anything about them. Blaming the voters for the fact that the system often entirely disregards their votes is absurd.

Secondly, there's a serious information problem. In the 2010 general election I had great difficulty deciding who to vote for. I had a lot of advantages - many of them privilege-related - in getting information about the candidates - time to read manifestos thoroughly, time to look up previous voting records of their parties on issues that matter to me, enough knowledge of recent political history to be aware of what they weren't saying, and so on.

Even with that information I still wasn't entirely sure at the time whether I was voting the right way¹. The average voter is not going to have all that information - may not even be aware that the information exists, in some cases - and is often not going to have the free time to find it out. In theory, the press should help fill this information gap... in practice, of course, they're often more interested in extending it.

Where some of the most unpleasant policies of a government weren't even mentioned in their pre-election speeches and publicity, it's even less fair to blame the voters for not seeing it coming.

There are a lot of things that could be done - nationally, structurally - to reduce the voter information gap. Individual voters have very few options for doing the same.

Thirdly, it's such a smug statement that betrays the speaker's attitudes towards voters. "Well, you see, elections have consequences. Did you not realise that? Did you think that it was just an exercise in who could sort and count bits of paper faster?". Yes, quite obviously elections have consequences. That's why we have them. Voters², believe it or not, are actually quite aware of this. Mostly, it does not fill them with hope.

It's not as if smug political explainers are particularly good at predicting the real consequences of elections either (see also: "progressive majority").

Voters who have seen the speaker's party also fail to deliver while in power or usefully oppose while out of it will of course treat the statement with the contempt it deserves.

Footnote

¹ It's a testament to Miliband's recent direction as leader of the Labour party that I'm still not sure.

² In which I include people who could vote but choose not to. (For instance, on the grounds that they're aware that all possible consequences are really bad, and can't bring themselves to add legitimacy to any of them) Abstention is a legitimate decision.

Study shows researchers ignore structural issues

[trigger warning]

The BBC has yet another badly-researched story about "obesity". I'll skip over the unmentioned assumption that "obesity" is such a bad thing it needs to be prevented at all costs, and move on to places where the article fails even in its own terms.

Firstly, the article talks about how average calorie intake has increased significantly in the US since the 1970s. Naturally, because "obesity" is a personal problem with no structural issues whatsoever, the article completely omits that since the 1970s the USA's problems with perverse food-production subsdisies, "food deserts" and so on, in many places it's difficult or impossible to get foods other than the energy-dense ones, and more expensive even when they are available.

This is also something that does not really generalise to the majority of the UK, or other Western European countries, despite the claim in the article that "many of the factors causing the obesity epidemic there are mirrored in the UK".

The recommendations of the researchers - police what people individually eat, rather than making it easier for them to get nutritious food cheaply - are equally predictable.

Secondly, the article in a box-out includes a note that:

The recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 for women, and 2,500 for men (NHS Choices)

If we assume that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, and gender is the only factor that affects energy needs, metabolic rates, digestion efficiency, and so on - but does so with 100% predictive power (which is ridiculous, but is what the recommendation needs to be assumed) then that gives an average recommendation of 2,250 calories daily for each person.

Compare that with the figures from the article on US average - the article doesn't specify if it's mean or median - calorie intake:

• 1977-8: 1,803 calories
• 1994ish (implied): 2,145 calories
• 2003-6: 2,374 calories

So, comparing with the "recommended" average, we can see that it's only in the last decade or so that US residents have stopped being (on average) underfed.

The average hides a lot of rich/poor disparity, of course, and a lot of people in the US are still malnourished - my point is that even in terms of pretending these averages mean anything at all, the conclusion isn't the one that the rest of the article implies.

Of course, this is fairly typical of "anti-obesity" research and campaigning: set an unjustified target for calorie intake - and then claim it's bad when people get anywhere near it. "Pro-malnutrition" might be a better term for them: perhaps if they didn't have the privilege not to remember the effects of widespread malnutrition themselves, they'd think more carefully about what they were saying.

Equality is a left-wing issue? Not in practice.

"Left-wing" traditional politicians are very often insistent that they are the party of "social justice" - especially when compared with their "right-wing" counterparts, but I'm not sure they're actually fooling anyone except themselves.

Obviously there are traditional politicians here and there who have indeed also been great campaigners against privilege and discrimination - but they're very much the exception.

Certainly it is also true that, on average, in modern UK party politics, more advances have been made on equality matters when a "left-wing" party has had the balance of power, and there has been less progress and more regression when "right-wing" parties have had majorities.

I'm not claiming that's a coincidence, but nor do I think it happens because social justice matters are definitionally "left wing" issues.

Left and right

"Left-wing" and "right-wing" are of course simplifications, and "everyone knows" that they don't represent modern politics very well.

Except... depending on how you define politics, they mostly do. In the traditional default definition of politics - the sort of thing that appears in the Politics sections of the papers and news websites, the debates between political parties, the election campaigns and the scandals and so on - a single axis mostly works, at least for politicians and parties relatively near the "centre". Moving away from the centre towards the political fringes, the simplification breaks down - but it works well enough that it's still widely used.

So - what would it mean for equality to be a "left-wing" issue. None of the obvious meanings appear to be true.

It's certainly not the case that all or almost all left-wing traditional politicians are against privilege - many of them are happy to make use of privilege and prejudice to gain some transient political advantage.

Nor does it seem particularly plausible or useful to claim that the "ultimate" left-wing position (if one exists) is a social justice one. It erases the many "right-wing" people who are working for some or all aspects of equality while holding "right-wing" views in other areas, and it likewise conveniently ignores the rampant ablism, cissexism, fat-hatred, and so on present and unchallenged in many "far left" groups.

I've seen it stated as a definitional thing - equality activism is "left-wing", as is environmentalism, or socialism, or liberalism, or various other causes. In practice this seems to end up as defining "left-wing" as "not right-wing" which is utterly useless as a definition, especially when it's followed up with attempts to get the various "left-wing" ideologies to make bad compromises with each other because "they must work together to defeat the Tories".

As a statement of hope and expectation - "equality should be a left-wing issue" - it's hard to argue against; but then, why not equally "equality should be a right-wing issue"? I'll come back to this meaning of the statement below.

In practice, it's not

In practice, I don't see that equality activism does assume that equality is particularly a left-wing issue; while on average there may be more pushing for progress under left-wing governments and to avoid regression under right-wing ones, that's only an average. Our last "left-wing" government had an appalling record on many equality issues - disability rights, fat hatred, immigration, and many more. The approach to traditional politicians of all parties is generally to demand better of them, with very little hope that they'll already be doing enough.

Conversely even our¹ current "right-wing" government, while as bad or worse in many areas, has a few areas they're noticeably better - the parental leave proposals in their Modern Workplaces consultation are substantially better than Labour's were, for instance.

The expectation is that being critical of the government and campaigning strongly will be needed whoever is in charge.

The broader political landscape

Rather than imagining the political landscape as a line or a plane, imagine it as a crumpled ball of paper.

The traditional political affiliations can be drawn on one of the relatively flat bits, set out along a fuzzy line from 'left' to 'right'.

Some way round the paper ball, on a much crinklier bit, are the various areas of anti-oppression campaigning². As it happens, if you cross the outside of the shape, the distance is shorter to the 'left' end of the traditional political line than it is to the 'right' end - but there are plenty of routes across the jagged and folded surface, and some of them come out near the centre or right of the line.

And so it's a struggle to even get most of social justice considered as proper politics - which is to say traditional politics - which is to say the sort of politics which important default people discuss. It's not even, when looking down on the face of traditional politics, on the map. Equality issues get dismissed as "special interests" (collectively, the special interests of 99% of the population, but of course only 0% of the 'important' default population).

Until traditional politics considers the experiences and issues of non-default people to be of equal importance to the special interests of default people, I don't believe there can be any real claim by any traditional politicians to be "the party of" social justice and equality. The "left" may be marginally closer to making that consideration than the "right", but neither, for now, is anywhere near.

For now, most of them are still at best stuck in a compartmentalised mode of thinking where equality issues are separate to all other issues - and generally separate to each other. If it's not a special "thinking about equality" day - they don't.

What would need to change

The majority of people who I see in practice stating that equality is a left-wing issue are left-wing traditional politicians rather than equality campaigners. So, if I take them at their word and assume that they want equality to be a left-wing issue, what would they need to do to actually make it one?

There are basically three things I'd be looking for to show that a left-wing (or right-wing, for that matter) traditional political organisation was actually considering equality to be a core part of its ideology.

1. A recognition that there is so much overlap between various forms of discrimination that one cannot productively either consider them in isolation or only work against some of them.
2. A complete renouncement of dehumanisation of both opponents and scapegoats, instead focusing on ending the effects of privilege; and the necessary readjustment of policies and justifications for policies to achieve this.
3. Successful efforts made to have the officers of the organisation, at all levels (including candidates for public election, if applicable) be at least as representative of all under-privileged groups as the population as a whole.

At the moment I can't think of any major left-wing organisation which is even attempting to do all of those things; quite a few aren't even trying to do any of them.

Footnotes

¹ Certainly there are also right-wing parties and ideologies whose ideology is explictly the maintenance and extension of privilege and discrimination. However, just as not all left-wing parties are particularly good on equality, not all right-wing parties are irredeemably terrible.

² To save space, I'm not even going into the fact that many campaigners against one form of oppression see nothing wrong with and/or deny the existence of other forms - though it is reflected in traditional left-wing politicians who might (for instance) vote wholeheartedly for legislation against sexism while also expressing fat-hatred.

On Clarke's policy and comments

[trigger warning: rape, prison]

So, the big news recently is that Kenneth Clarke MP (Conservative, Rushcliffe, Minister for Justice) has made some comments about rape. As with a previous occasion, what he said was appalling, but it still wasn't particularly good even just considering what he meant.

The BBC has helpfully provided a transcript of the interview.

A bit of background: Clarke is considerably more liberal on punishment than the average Conservative, concentrating more on alternatives to prison. This has brought him into conflict with both his own party and with Labour, who generally support the "lock 'em up and try not to think too hard about what to do next" approach to sentencing.

At the moment, a suspect who pleads guilty can expect to have their sentence reduced by up to a third. Clarke proposed that this be increased to a possible reduction of a half, for all crimes.

Labour opposed this, and Clarke's junior minister, Crispin Blunt MP (Conservative, Reigate) gave rape victims as an example of people who would benefit from early guilty pleas. Sadiq Khan MP (Labour, Tooting) asked a follow-up question, which Clarke then answered.

The press reporting then concentrated on the effects on sentencing for rape, and Clarke gave the interview above.

He has since clarified that he thinks "all rape is a serious crime" and that he had made the "wrong choice of words" earlier.

So, two things:

On Clarke himself

He is not the best person for picking the right words, which is a political liability, though not a moral one. However, I think his problems regarding the treatment of rape cases go beyond that.

I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt that, intellectually, he gets that all rape is serious, that rape without additional violence is still serious, that rape within a relationship is serious, and so on. The problem is that he doesn't appear to instinctively understand this.

So, when he's under pressure - in an interview or in the Commons - and doesn't have the luxury of thinking it through, he says things that he wouldn't otherwise say.

I don't think he should be sacked as Minister for Justice over this - bad as his instinctive attitudes on this issue are, they're fairly typical for a privileged man who's spent their whole life soaking up rape culture, and so I have no confidence that anyone the coalition picks as a replacement would be any better. (Yes, there are people on the coalition benches who would be far better on this issue, but they're not likely to get the job if Clarke steps down)

I would, however, recommend that he does a lot more reading of the research on rape and rapists, until it starts to sink in at an instinctive level. It would - as well as the general benefits to society of having a Justice Minister who got this - make it less likely his verbal slip-ups would be in the pro-rape direction.

One of the exchanges in the transcript that hasn't yet been widely picked up on is this one:

Derbyshire (interviewer): Have you met women who've been raped?

Clarke: I've taken part in rape trials. I was a lawyer, sort of, yes I've met women who've been raped.

Derbyshire: And have you put this idea to women who've been raped?

Clarke: No I haven't put this idea to women who've been raped because I haven't met one recently. My experience of rape trials….

Now, the idea of halving sentences for guilty pleas has been around for a while. I can find news reports from late 2010 that talk about it as a policy proposal that had already been introduced by the coalition.

Quite evidently the chances that Clarke has met no women who have been raped since then are zero. He might not have sat down with anyone to ask "as a rape victim, how do you feel about this plan?" (though, one might think that asking the people a policy will supposedly benefit might be a good start) - but that's not quite the same thing. (Derbyshire's first question from the exchange isn't useful for much the same reason)

Intellectually, but not instinctively.¹

On the policy

It all comes down to the details, of course, but I think the policy in general is fairly good - and it would be a shame if it was lost because Blunt and Clarke can't keep their feet out of their respective mouths.

Prison - in contradiction to former MP Michael Howard (Conservative, Lords) and current MP Jack Straw (Labour, Blackburn) - does not work all that well. For crimes so severe that life imprisonment is appropriate for the protection of society, it's necessary.

For other crimes, society - those parts of society living outside the prison walls, at least - may be temporarily protected while the offender is in prison, but unless successful work is done on rehabilitation, that often stops when they're released again.

We don't know anything like as much about rehabilitation as we should - because it's been far easier for politicians to go for a populist "lock 'em up" approach. So keeping people on average in prison for less time, and using the significant savings to fund more and better rehabilitation programs, seems an excellent idea in general.

What about for rape?

From what we know about rapists, any rapist who actually gets caught has probably committed several rapes that most people don't know about. (Weinrott and Saylor's research, for instance, estimates an average of 10, though with significant variance). Numerous studies into undetected rapists have shown that they will readily admit to raping people - provided they're asked "did you do action X?" not "did you do action X which is rape?".

The likelihood of a released rapist reoffending is therefore almost certainly really high. Effective intervention and rehabilitation - given that we don't give most rapists a life sentence - would therefore significantly reduce the number of rapes. Letting a rapist out after two years, with effective rehabilitation so that they don't reoffend, is far better than letting them out after four years without that and having them continue their crimes (I'm assuming an average 8-year basic sentence, halved for general parole, halved again for an early guilty plea).

(Starting early on the rehabilitation might also prevent them committing more rapes while in prison, which is an aspect of the crime and punishment debate which gets swept under the carpet rather too often)

Can two years of prison costs, targeted on someone who entered a very early guilty plea and so is perhaps more likely to be reformable, deliver a highly effective rehabilitation programme? I've absolutely no idea. That's for government researchers to figure out, and as I said, it all comes down to the details.

It seems, to me, that if after doing that research it looks feasible, that it's got to be worth trying. We can't end rape by locking up all the rapists - there's just too many of them by several orders of magnitude. That's not to say that temporary imprisonment of the ones we catch won't help, but it can't solve the problem.

Prevention of rapes, by preventing people from becoming rapists, and convincing existing rapists to stop, is the only way that rape will stop being such a major problem. Imprisonment is a fairly ineffective way to convince rapists to stop - we need something better. If Labour and the Conservatives are going to unite behind a "tough on crime" populist stance every time alternatives are suggested, this won't happen soon.

Footnote

¹As an aside, this is yet another problem with having MPs and senior civil servants mainly come from the most multiply-privileged section of society (which is unsurprisingly also the section least likely to be raped). A government and civil service that more reflected who actually lives in society would notice these things before the public mistakes.

"Intellectually, but not instinctively" is the reason why well-meaning privileged allies are no substitute for people with lived experience, and that includes in Parliament. The counter-argument that MPs have to represent all their constituents really misses the difference. I've written about this before.

Kyriarchy for kids

Durham County Council has recently put out this press release, which was reprinted in the local free paper and probably elsewhere.

The search is on for young people in County Durham with an outstanding school attendance record.

Durham County Council is tracking down all final-year primary and secondary school pupils who have never taken a day off.

The council is planning a special celebration to reward young people with a 100 per cent attendance record at either primary or secondary school.

Maureen Clare, Durham County Council’s head of countywide services, said: “Never missing even half a day of primary or secondary school is a fantastic achievement and one we want to reward.”

Unauthorised absence from school is a problem, but there are serious problems with this plan.

[trigger warning]

Pupils spend six or seven years at primary school, and five (optionally seven) at secondary school. School is generally open 5 days a week, 39 weeks a year - so that's an unbroken absence record for over 900 days (primary) or over 750 days (secondary). This includes no absences for the various authorised reasons.

According to the Department for Education, there are just under 36,000 primary-age pupils in County Durham (so probably around 5,500 in their final year), and around 30,000 secondary age pupils (so probably around 6,000 in their final year). I suspect the odds of never missing a day are well over 1 in 12,000.

Managing this is a "fantastic achievement" only in the sense that winning the lottery is a "fantastic achievement". I very much doubt that they'll find anyone. I hope they don't find anyone. Rewarding someone for that combination of luck and privilege sends entirely the wrong message.

A partial list of children who - through no fault of their own - will not be getting the prize.

Health and disability

• Those who were seriously ill for at least one day out of several hundred. Even with a great immune system and full vaccinations that's going to be tricky to achieve. I don't know anyone who didn't miss at least a couple of days of school for general illness - stomach bugs, severe colds, etc.
• Similarly, anyone who's seriously injured. Break an arm? Tough. No prize for them unless they splint it with their school ruler and carry on. Break their arm while playing rugby for the school? Still tough.
• Disability or other condition requiring medical treatment, or making continuous school attendance difficult? Nope. No prize for you.

Yet again we have "being ill is immoral". The same attitude permeates government at all levels, and society in general, with well-documented effects.

Family situations

• Bereavement? Family member terminally ill? No taking time off to visit them in hospital or attend their funeral. They should have the decency to die at a weekend and so not harm productivity. Similarly for happier family occasions.
• Family moves in or out of the county? I suppose the Council might try to chase up attendance records from other education authorities, but I doubt it. In or out of the country? No chance. Similarly for people who were home-educated at any time - it's legal, and rightly so, but that doesn't mean the government likes it.
• Abusive family so they run away from home? Or get placed in care? Not conducive to a perfect attendance record. The Council is fully aware of this

Bullying and other peer abuse

• Bullied to the extent of needing time off to recover from injuries (physical or mental)? See above.
• So (justifiably) terrified of the bullying that they make up an illness to avoid going in, or are ill because they're so worried, or just don't go in without telling their parents¹, or their parents rightly refuse to send them in? No prize for them.
• Sexual violence? Still the victim's fault.

LGB kids, or fat kids, or neuroatypical kids, or really, any kid that doesn't conform to the exact social stereotype, tend to be even bigger targets for bullies, but it can and does happen to anyone and we somehow accept it as largely inevitable; there are no equivalents of Trades Unions to speak up for childrens' rights here, and children who go on strike in protest... well, that's an unauthorised absence.

Even worse, there's nothing in this section to stop the bullies themselves having a perfect attendance record and getting the prize. "Trample those beneath you to raise yourself up" is perhaps not the ethos schools should be trying to instil.

Miscellaneous bad luck

• The last couple of winters have been extremely harsh, with schools closed several days for snow. There will have been days when the school wasn't closed but children living in more isolated parts of the county will have been snowed in anyway. Didn't walk three miles through over a foot of snow? Tough.
• Foot and mouth outbreak causes your farm to be quarantined? As usual, that's no excuse - you should break the law and come in anyway.

The TUC were very critical of the employers who expected their staff to come in, at risk to their life, during the severe weather this winter. Again, apparently this is something that starts early.

Closing thoughts

There's nothing unusual about these proposals. The value of attendance - whether you should be there or not, whether you're productive there or not, whether your attendance causes more problems later or not - is insisted upon by many employers and starts off at school. The idea that people who are ill, or disabled, or victims of assault and bullying, are somehow morally and otherwise inferior, or brought it on themselves - it's an idea probably as old as humanity, but that doesn't make it right.

There's another bit of point-missing, too. The reason that Councils have a legal responsibility to provide education and to require attendance at some form of education, is for the benefit of the children, who will have better chances in life, on average, if they receive education.

The children who attended every day have already, by that logic, received their reward - an education - and don't need an extra reward. The children who were missing are surely the ones who need more attention and help. It's far easier to reward attendance - useful attendance or not - of course.

I've sent the following letter to the Council itself, and to my two local councillors.

I write regarding the scheme described in your April 28, 2011 press release "Search for 100 per cent school attendees".

I fully understand that unauthorised absences from school can be a serious problem, and one which the Council has a legal responsibility to deal with. However, I do not feel that this plan is an appropriate part of that strategy.

Not missing a single day - out of the several hundred that must be attended - is only a "fantastic achievement" in the same sense that a lottery win is a "fantastic achievement". Not only must the winning child - I will be very surprised if you find even one, given the odds - not have had any unauthorised absences, which is quite possible, but they must not also have had any authorised absences either.

Not needing any authorised absences is, however, largely a matter of luck. People get ill. Children, who generally have less well-developed immune systems than adults, get ill even more often. Getting through over 750 days of schooling without being ill even once requires a perfect immune system, which is largely a matter of genetic luck and other factors outside the child's control.

Children with disabilities, chronic health conditions, cancer, or other conditions requiring regular treatment would find it impossible - through no fault of their own - to win the prize being offered. Effectively the Council is declaring that the genetic luck of being in perfect health is "an achievement" - which implies that it is something that the children had a choice in and control over. That is not a pleasant implication.

While luck of birth is one factor the winner or winners of this prize will need, they also need other sorts of luck too. The County's schools all have anti-bullying strategies, but these strategies are not fully effective, and one reason for unauthorised absence can be an entirely justified fear of bullying. (Being bullied can also affect one's physical and mental health, causing authorised health-related absences)

LGBT children, children with disabilities - including learning difficulties or mental health conditions, and children who don't "fit in" for any other reason are more likely to be targets for bullies, again, through no fault of their own.

Not being bullied is not "an achievement" - rare as it is - and to treat it as such is to blame the victims of bullying for the bully's actions. Worse still, the bully could still attend every day and be eligible for the prize while their victims are not!

There are many other good reasons for absence too - a bereavement in the family, being snowed in during the winter's bad weather, road accidents, and many more - for which describing it as "an achievement" to have avoided them is wrong and extremely insensitive. Think of a pupil who had an otherwise "perfect" attendance record, but took a few days off when their father died to grieve and attend the funeral. How will they feel if they hear about this prize?

I understand why the Council wishes to encourage attendance at school, but this is very much the wrong way to go about it, and I urge you to withdraw the scheme.

Yours sincerely

[cim]

Footnote

¹ The only item on this list that actually counts on school records as unauthorised absence, I believe.

The misguided quest for ultimate simplicity

There's a big tendency for politicians especially to say that the simpler something is, the better. Simplicity, above all else, should be the consideration. If they're looking at being elected, a promise to cut red tape - the red tape has now been cut so many times that the next government will be buying special nano-scissors to separate it atom by atom - is inevitable.

Now, I'm not saying that simplicity is a bad thing as such. Any added complexity has to be justified, because the more complex a system is to understand, the fewer people will understand it, and the more likely it is that someone whose life, health, family or livelihood depends on understanding it won't be able to.

Generally this added complexity on average benefits default people - who are more likely to have the spare time, energy and resources to look into it - and harms less privileged people. Most people spend most of their time not interacting with any particular system. The more complex and unintuitive¹ it is, therefore, the harder it'll be to use when they have to.

The process for claiming benefits is designed to be complex to "catch fraud". What's not been acknowledged by government is that - almost by definition - real fraudsters are going to have more time to understand the forms, get the various bits of supporting paperwork together, and so on, than a person who actually needs the benefits and is trying to complete the form while also dealing with the situation that means they need the benefits in the first place.

At a commercial level, companies can offer a confusing range of choices to make it unlikely that their customers will pick the optimal one.

So, simplicity is good. But like a lot of things, not an absolute all-overriding good thing. Added complexity in the form of protective regulations can be helpful - equalities, health and safety, employment law, housing standards, etc. - and yes, it's more complex and costly² to run a business or build a house to those standards, but the benefits received in terms of people being alive, more productive and happier are usually worth the costs.

When mainstream politicians talk about "cutting red tape", though, they don't generally mean "simplifying the benefits process". Instead, they go for the regulations which are probably doing more good than harm to keep. But it's a populist stance, and it's generally supported by the press - whose owners and editors also have a dislike for regulations that prevent them maximising their short-term profit - so it's one of those rarely-questioned truths: "simplicity good, complexity bad".

I was reminded of this recently when some publicity for the coming referendum dropped through the door, for the No campaign. One of the pages had a comparison of the FPTP and AV systems - the FPTP system with a short three sentences describing it, the AV system with a full column of long paragraphs: all accurate, but written in a very expanded form. Above both, a description of why one should vote No for simplicity.

In the spirit of that - and since the No campaign is opposed to spending money on voting:

Which is simpler?

Dictatorship

Democracy

You do what I say.

We divide the country into a number of "constituencies" of approximately equal population size, attempting to make the boundaries between the constituencies follow natural borders, historical divisions, group similar settlements together, and so forth. These boundaries are then reviewed and revised at great expense every few years to account for population migration, new buildings, and so on. Within each constituency, all citizens aged 18 or over (almost all, anyway - see Appendix A for exceptions) will be placed on an electoral register to register their entitlement to vote in elections. Every five years, or sooner if the government wishes or if the government is unable to maintain the confidence of parliament, or later but at the earliest possible opportunity in the event of a major national emergency, parliament will be dissolved. There will then be an election by the following process, with an expected cost of around £100 million. Candidates will then be appointed on payment of a £500 deposit in each constituency, requiring at least ten signatures of residents of that constituency in support of their candidature. All eligible voters will be entitled to be a candidate if they can meet those requirements, and need not be registered within the constituency they are standing for election in. [several pages about postal votes, proxy votes, campaign funding regulations, campaign regulations, vote secrecy, vote security, payment rates for counting staff, the largely honorary role of the Returning Officer, avenues of appeal to the courts, etc. omitted at this stage] The winners of the elections then form the parliament. [several more pages about by-elections, forming of governments, etc. omitted.]

Footnotes

¹ A term that implies that things can be universally "intuitive" despite different people having different intuitions, based on their personal history, culture, neuro[a]typicality, learning, practice, and so on. Still, even if it's not possible for a system to be entirely intuitive, it can be designed so that it isn't needlessly obscure.

² Some types of accessible design are actually either cheaper or no more expensive than the "traditional" inaccessible forms, provided that they're planned for from the start. Fitting them into the design as an afterthought, or on to existing technology or buildings, on the other hand, can be very expensive.