Buses, and the point of public services

The local County Council has had a major budget cut from central government. Part of dealing with this involves reducing or removing the subsidy they provide for certain services which would not be commercially viable.

While they say that this does not necessarily mean the service will be withdrawn, both of the major bus operators have said that they cannot afford to continue more than a few of the services without a subsidy.

Sunday services and evening services are facing the majority of the cuts, mainly in rural parts of the county.

There are two things related to this that I want to draw attention to, and they apply to all sorts of cuts that the government is making or requiring local councils to make.

Firstly, as reported in the local free paper:

About a fifth of all bus services in the county are not commercially viable. But the council believes more than 95% of bus passenger journeys would be largely or entirely unaffected by the cuts.

Obviously most passenger journeys are not going to be affected. Most journeys are made on busy routes, which don't need a subsidy. The point of public subsidy of bus routes - and indeed public funding of many things - is to make affordable services that would not be possible on a pure market model, but which are necessary to many people. To say that most journeys will be unaffected is true, but not relevant.

Lots of people who rely on the bus services to get about are going to find their movement restricted, and that leads on to the second point: cuts to public services have a knock-on effect on the private economy.

We're told by the government that public spending is preventing private spending. Well, in this case that's clearly not true - it's not as if there would be private operators on these routes without the public subsidy: the private operators have said so themselves.

But furthermore, this public subsidy helps private spending. Cut the evening services, and people won't be able to get into the urban centres of the county then - or won't be able to get out later without spending several times the cost of a bus ticket on taxi fares.

So people going into towns in the evening for the nightlife are a bit stuck, as are people who go into town to work in the pubs and clubs providing that nightlife, or in other evening shift jobs in shops where they clock off after 8pm when many services are being withdrawn or cut back. The local private economy takes a dip as a result.

They could get a car and travel that way, but that's a large cost to themselves so won't be practical for a lot of people who were relying on the buses before, and it also increases congestion and exacerbates the lack of parking in town centres, which makes things worse for everyone. And, of course, having got the car, they then don't need the bus to get around on weekday mornings and afternoons either, so that's fewer bus passengers, and perhaps some of the more borderline unsubsidised bus routes start to slip out of profit too.

Reduced private expenditure leads to reduced tax revenue, so the whole cycle starts again.

By supporting necessary but not commercially viable services, public funding helps both the public and private sector, both of which are likely to take severe damage in the next few years.

This is not the time for insubstantial opposition, Labour

The government proposals to reform Disability Living Allowance are extremely worrying. They've been strongly condemned by numerous disability rights groups and charities. There is a petition to Maria Miller MP, the government minister responsible for the consultation, asking for the proposals to be withdrawn, which you might be interested in signing.

What's also worrying is that Labour, as the main "opposition" party, doesn't seem to be doing much to actually oppose these changes. There have been a couple of ministerial statements about some of the details, but the broad proposal to reform DLA - and significantly reduce eligibility - seems to be being accepted by Labour, with Douglas Alexander MP (the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions) stating that:

Labour’s position is clear: we want to work with the government to reform Disability Living Allowance and introduce a new gateway as set out in the Budget.

I've written the following letter to my MP to try to get Labour to oppose the plans, or at least to find out why they aren't already doing so.

As usual, feel free to modify it for your own MP if you want, though this one more than most of my letters is very much written for a Labour MP, and would need considerable modification for tone to be suitable for a coalition MP.

You can write to your MP online using Write To Them.

Dear [MP]

The Department of Work and Pensions are currently running a consultation on the Disability Living Allowance, proposing to replace it with a "Personal Independence Payment". While the DLA system is flawed, the coalition government's proposals will make the situation even worse.

The proposal is based on flawed assumptions, claiming that the award of DLA discourages people from working. While there is a correlation between low employment and receiving DLA, this hardly implies causation. People with disabilities are both likely to receive DLA and less likely to be employed due to either the nature of their disabilities making many forms of employment impossible, and/or a refusal by employers to make the necessary adaptations and other discrimination in the workplace. Concluding from this that DLA contributes towards unemployment is absurd.

The consultation claims in paragraph 14 of Chapter 1 onwards that DLA is "not fit for purpose", but nowhere in the following paragraphs is it explained why. Instead, statements are made to imply this. Here, the real purpose of the reform becomes obvious. Paragraphs 14 and 15 note that receipt of DLA has expanded considerably since its introduction, but why this is a bad thing is not explained.

Their aim, as other public statements by government ministers have made clear, is to reduce the number of people receiving disability benefits. They have stated that one of the aims is to reduce the number of people claiming disability benefits by around 25%. They have put forward no evidence, however, that the people in this 25% - over half a million people in total - do not need the support that DLA provides. Meanwhile, the fraud rate for DLA is the lowest of any benefit.

We can therefore conclude that the people currently receiving DLA have a genuine need for it. To introduce a new scheme that would leave up to a quarter of them without the money they need to lead their lives is a cruel decision, made with thought only for the bottom line and not for the people who will be affected, many of whom will have to give up their jobs, or their homes, or their independence, if their DLA is removed.

This fits with the general pattern of this coalition government so far, cutting vital services not because it is necessary but because their ideology demands it. This proposal, targeting people with disabilities, is particularly insiduous, because of the increased barriers to participation in the democratic process, through lobbying or protest, that many of them face.

It is clear that they intend to make the assessment for the "Personal Independence Payment" considerably harsher than that for DLA, which itself has been criticised for being too restrictive in its criteria.

There are additional cut-backs in the document, such as the removal of mobility allowance for those in publicly-funded hospitals or care homes (but not from those rich enough to afford private treatment - a reverse means-test), or the inclusion of assistive technology in an assessment of eligibility when the benefit may be necessary to afford that equipment in the first place.

Could you state whether you will personally oppose any reforms to disability benefits which are intended to reduce eligibility and so leave hundreds of thousands unable to afford basic necessities, and whether the Labour party, as the main opposition to the coalition government, intends to present a united opposition to these plans?

Yours sincerely,
[me]

(I am, of course, indebted to sites such as Where's the Benefit?, The Broken of Britain and One Month Before Heartbreak for much of the information used when writing the letter)

Friday Links

• HarpyMarx: In defence of libraries
• [trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: Speech has consequences
• [trigger warning] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Let's Get This Straight
• s.e. smith: Small Business Owners Are Not the Enemy and What Does ‘Middle Class’ Even Mean?
• Renee at Womanist Musings: Was the Standoff on Yonge Street, an Exercise in Racial Profiling?
• Frances Moore Lappé at Yes! Magazine: The City that Ended Hunger
• [trigger warning] Jess McCabe at The F-Word: Police officer given two life sentences
• Reni Eddo-Lodge: The New Banter
• TransGriot: Nepal And India To Count Trans People In Their 2011 Censuses

Also, Fuck Yeah, Disingenuous Liberal (because of what the attitudes it criticises, some of the posts contain triggering language).

Principles and power, with diagrams.

Broadsnark's "The Power of Principle" is an excellent description of the trade between having principles and having power. If you haven't read it already, it's well worth reading.

I agree with that, but it's a strongly-debated point. After all, if the current government is doing lots of bad things, wouldn't it be good to have someone even slightly better in? The lesser of two evils, as the cliché goes. So why doesn't sacrificing principle for power work?

Here's my theory as to why things work out that way, with diagrams.

Some simplifications, and why they're okay

Okay, so let's start by making a big simplification: we'll just consider one political issue, and assume that it's one that strongly influences people's votes. In practice, the effect below tends to happen to lots of policies together, so it's not an important simplification - when you consider every issue at once, the same thing happens. The members of the electorate then have various opinions about what the solution to this issue looks like, which are distributed in some sort of distribution.

I've drawn this with "left" and "right" because I think the diagram is more readable that way than with "up" and "down". There's not necessarily any connection on this issue with the traditional left-wing and right-wing positions, though, and the argument I'm making will generalise to issues where the options can't be expressed on a linear scale¹, or indeed in Euclidean geometry.

Diagram 1: A distribution of opinion. Somewhere between normal, flat, and lumpy.

Exactly what the distribution looks like doesn't really matter. There are usually going to be more people around the middle than at the edges, and it's not going to be completely smooth - there'll be peaks here and there that represent popular solutions.

Let's also assume that in general people vote for political parties close to their own opinions where possible. There's plenty of room for misinformation about who actually supports what policy to creep in, but since both sides are trying it the net effect is going to be relatively minor.

Let's also assume a 2-party system with a non-proportional² electoral system that makes it very hard for a third party to break in anywhere, as we have in the UK (even with the rise of the Lib Dems) or in the USA. This is a fair assumption because it's what we have.

So, next picture: two of the big peaks of opinion distribution near the centre are occupied by the major political parties - the Oranges and the Carrots.

Diagram 2: Same as the first, but with the Orange party occupying the peak to the left of the centre, and the Carrot party occupying the peak to the right of it.

There's then a general election. The Orange party loses the election, and the Carrots party enters government.

Why running to the centre works in the short-term

This is the point where the "principles or power" argument comes in to play. Obviously, it's really bad for the Carrot party to be in power. There's no real hope of another party coming out of nowhere to save the day, at least not by next election, so to get the Carrots out, the Oranges have to get in. But the electorate has just been presented with the Oranges, and didn't like them - it preferred the Carrot policies³.

So, to "be more electable", the Oranges move their policy along a bit towards the centre.

Diagram 3: The Carrot party is still on the right peak, but the Oranges have moved their position into the valley between the two peaks.

At the next election, the centre point between the Orange policy and the Carrot policy is in a different place. The key swing voters in between the two parties are now going to cast their votes a bit differently, with the Oranges picking up more of their votes than before. They might lose a few votes from the left-most end of the distribution, too, but they can afford to: votes they lose from the left go to an inconsequential rival or abstentions. Votes they take from the right come off their major opponent's totals. They can afford to lose almost twice as many votes from the left as they gain from the right and still come out ahead.

For instance, if there are 100 voters in all, and 53 voted Carrot and 47 voted Orange, then by convincing 10 Carrot voters to vote Orange, the scores become 43-57. A 6 vote margin has been changed to a 14 vote margin in the other direction. If Orange loses 12 voters from their left as a result, they're still 2 votes ahead of the Carrots at 43-45, despite losing more voters than they gained.

So, by following this strategy, the Oranges are able to regain power at the next election.

So why doesn't everyone just end up in the centre?

Over in a formerly-smoke-filled but now nicely air-conditioned room at Carrot Headquarters, the party green-wigs need to decide on a strategy. They have two choices.

1. They can do what the Oranges did to them, and move closer to the centre, to try to retake power. There's not a lot of spare space to move into, though, without dropping this as an election issue at all, which won't actually do them much good. And you need to have some space to manouevre for the 2:1 multiplier you get from winning swing voters to actually be possible.
2. They can take a longer-term view, and move their own position to the right. That's probably closer to where they wanted it to be anyway, before an earlier pragmatic Carrot leader decided that on top of the peak was a good place to be.

Diagram 4: The Carrot party has also moved off its peak to the right, re-opening a wider gap between the two parties.

The Carrots pick option 2, and lose the next election too. There's probably some internal squabbles at this point, but they wait them out.

... and then, the plan pays off.

Because public opinion is not static. It's fluid, and on some issues it can change really quickly in the right circumstances. Like advertising, if you say something for long enough to enough people, some of them will listen, and change their minds. If a party states a particular policy, its supporters become more likely to support that policy.

Consider, for instance, at this YouGov poll (PDF) from December. On page 7, there's a question about whether short prison sentences or community sentences are more effective.

In general, imprisonment is the stereotypical Conservative policy. They have the reputation for being "tougher on crime". So it was in some ways an unexpected announcement of Conservative policy that they would want to go for community sentences. In the poll, though, Conservative voters split 36:44 in favour of community sentences.

Perhaps the stereotypes are wrong? Public opinion often isn't what it's claimed to be. Are the Conservatives playing to their base after all?

This time, though, there's something else at work: compare that poll to this other poll (PDF), also carried out by YouGov, only a month earlier.

In this poll, Conservative voters are split 57:35 against the use of community sentences. In a month, there has been a 30 point swing in Conservative voter opinion. Additionally, there has been a 19 point swing in general voter opinion (which includes the Conservatives). From being a policy that had the weight of public opinion against it - and think tanks warning the government away from it - it's now one that the public is roughly split on.

There are differences of question wording between the two polls, but these mainly consist of the later poll having a tiny neutral summary of the purported advantages of each choice (which I don't think is particularly significant), and the later poll attributing the community sentences policy to the current government (which may well be a significant wording difference, but one that strengthens my point if it is)

I don't think public opinion is quite that fluid on most issues - sentencing policy is in general not an issue of major importance to most voters - and in general that sort of change takes years or decades rather than weeks, but it definitely happens over time.

So, how does this affect the diagram?

Diagram 5: The distribution of public opinion has shifted, with the peaks moved towards the parties' new positions.

The next election, the Carrots win it, by about the same margin as they won the election back in Diagram 1.

So, the Oranges have to do something. It worked last time, so they move their policy off the peak, and closer to the Carrots.

After a couple of cycles of this, what happens is of course that the Oranges have ended up fairly close to where the Carrots were originally. At this point, the Carrots can start moving slowly back towards the Oranges, both picking up votes themselves, and trying to make the new consensus one that sticks so that they don't have to defend it in future. The result: the Carrots have spent a fair proportion of the time in power, the Oranges will be implementing their policies anyway while the Carrots are out of power, and the Carrots can direct their energies to winning the next argument.

It took a little more than a single election cycle, but the Carrots have most definitely - by sticking to their principles - won. This is why, as Broadsnark said:

The people whose power lasts are those whose power comes from their principles, not from selling their principles out. It’s not naive to think that people shouldn’t sell their principles to power. It’s naive to think that someone in power who has sold their principles can do us any good.

So, the Oranges have power - and are using it to implement Carrot policy. Whether they count this as a success depends entirely on whether they went into politics to get power or to advance their principles. Meanwhile, the people who liked the Oranges' initial policy are stuck out on their own, without any formal representation, and now have to work hard to draw the Oranges (and ideally the Carrots, too) back towards them.

I've given this example with political parties, but it really works for anyone trying to make a difference to anything - in the long term, the successful people are people who've convinced opinion to follow them.

What if the Carrots are really bad?

Some governments are so bad that even letting them be in power for one term is going to be disastrous, and it's worth paying a high price to keep them out. The problem with this argument is that you can't keep them out forever.

Governments in the UK lose an average of 3 points of popular vote between elections. Virtually none have actually gained popularity between elections. Sooner or later, the accumulated frustrations of the population are going to kick them out no matter how well they're doing.

The opposition will be back in power eventually and you can't stop this. It's not worth delaying it a few years if the cost is implementing their policies anyway.

There are in a democracy ways other than being the official opposition to make it politically unviable for the government to do something, anyway.

(This only applies if you trust the opposition to hold another fair election, of course, but if you don't there are bigger problems)

Wouldn't this just lead to no-one compromising on anything, and nothing getting done?

Maybe.

In practice, though, no. There's a major difference between compromising on what gets implemented now, and compromising on your underlying principles.

To illustrate this, say there are two issues (A and B), with three possible policies (A₀, A₁ and A₂, with A₁ being 'between' the other two policies, and similarly for B).

If A₂ is the current situation, a supporter of A₀ could team up and compromise with supporters of A₁ to get A₁. It's not what they actually want, but it's closer to it. And if between them they can make A₁ stick, then maybe in a few years it'll be possible to get mass support for moving to A₀.

This is a good compromise, and isn't inconsistent with having principles and keeping them.

Suppose, then, that this support of A₀ also supports B₀. The current situation is A₁ and B₁. A supporter of A₂ and B₀ offers to help with getting B₀ in exchange for help in getting A₂.

Assuming that A and B are both major issues - if A is "who pays for lunch?" and B is "should we invade Norway?", this doesn't hold - this is a bad compromise. To take it, the principle of A₀ will have to be sacrificed.

In between the two is an offer to support B₀ if you don't campaign for A₀ and accept A₁ as sufficient (assuming A₁ is currently true) - at least in public.

I think this is still generally a bad deal - both sides of the deal want (or at least, aren't opposed to) B₀ already. So you could probably get B₀ another way without giving up the possibility of A₀. There might be cases where it's worth taking, though, if B₀ is likely to be the sticky position, and so you can go back to working towards A₀ relatively quickly once B₀ is done.

The reason that the good compromises are good is that they don't stop you working on moving mass opinion towards your position. The reason the bad compromises are bad is that you have to shut up and contribute towards making things worse, which means that when you decide you've had enough, you've been digging your own hole for the last few years and have to fill that in first.

Only making good compromises means that political alliances on one issue aren't necessarily going to be the same as the political alliances on a different issue. There's nothing wrong with that, either, though it can take some getting used to.

Conclusion

The way to win, in the long-term, is to have principles, to stick to them, and to argue for them consistently and convincingly. There are plenty of situations where the short-term gain is from abandoning some principles to help others: beware.

Having short-term political power, in the way the default thinks of "political" and "power" is not necessarily useful, and may in some cases be actively counter-productive to principled success because the costs of getting it are too high.

Footnotes

¹ If I was better at drawing, there would be a picture of an opinion surface in two dimensions to demonstrate this. Please imagine your own.

² In a proportional system, the incentives are different, and the advantages to sticking to your principles are much clearer. It's the main reason that I want one.

³ Not necessarily true in a non-proportional system, but let's assume that like the UK and USA, the tendency is to expand differences in the popular vote, rather than reduce them. Elections where the winner of the most seats and the winner of the popular vote differ will result in a very different - and generally messier - political dynamic anyway.

Absolute or relative need?

The BBC are reporting that the proposed cuts to Disability Living Allowance could break the Human Rights Act. It's worth a try legally, though I doubt it'll work.

There's a quote from Maria Miller MP (Conservative, Basingstoke), the Minister for Disabled People at the end of the piece.

We are dealing here with a benefit which as I said is one of the largest benefits that's paid in the UK and that we need to make sure it's getting to the people who need it most.

"Need it most"? "Need it" would be a much better attitude to take to these benefits (and indeed benefits in general). Someone's need for additional cash to support themselves is not diminished just because some else has an even greater need.

Of course, given that there is a consensus between all major political parties that DLA is too easy to get - despite it already being refused to people with severe disabilities - there's not much hope here.

Much more information about the proposals and their flaws is at Where's the benefit.

Friday Links

• tigtog at Hoyden About Town: There’s enough normativity-policing in the world already, thanks
• Hangbitch: Disabling users
• Spark in Darkness: BBC, our existence does not have to be BALANCED by hatred.
• s.e. smith: [trigger warning] The face of exploitation and I Can’t Help Myself; It’s Innate
• DavidG at Where's the benefit?: The Devil is in The Details
• Restructure: White racism creates more sexism in the world.
• [trigger warning] The Curvature: Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Diary of a Goldfish: Bad Legs versus The Stairs

Where did that analogy come from?

There's been quite a lot of talk recently about how the various protest movements against the government that are springing up (well, it's doing lots to protest about) are "open source". Here's a Left Foot Forward post, for example.

As someone who's both organised protests and developed open source software, my reaction to the analogy is extreme bafflement.

The idea behind the analogy is that the "new protest movement" is open, transparent, decentralised and largely non-hierarchical, with everyone able to contribute in the ways that they are most suited to.

Which is fair enough. Legitimate ideals, and they seem to be reasonably effective in practice too, but the areas in which it's actually similar to open source software development projects are areas in which it's also similar to just about every other protest movement ever, so the analogy just doesn't work.

Open source software development is considerably more hierarchical than the stereotypes suggest. It has to be, if it's to actually develop useful software. For any complex piece of open source software - any of the big ones with widespread name recognition like Linux or Firefox, but much smaller ones too - there are a core set of leaders, who make most of the decisions about what the long-term aims of the project are, and all the decisions about which individual contributions go in to the project.

The advantage of open-source over closed-source is not that it doesn't have leaders and hierarchies, but that a popular rebellion against those leaders and hierarchies doesn't have to start from scratch when providing a replacement. Nevertheless, someone disagreeing with the current leadership will have a difficult and time-consuming task on a large project in getting enough supporters, hardware and hosting budgets, and so on, to make a "fork" of the project viable. Successful forks are extremely rare, though hypothetical ones are pretty commonplace.

But there are definitely leaders and a hierarchy, because once a software project gets complex, there is an intense need for quality control. Contributions that aren't up to the necessary standard, or which just aren't considered useful, don't get in.¹ That sounds much more like a "traditional" centralised protest movement to me.

Similarly while the outputs of an open source software project may be transparent, the process is not necessarily so. There can be a lot of "back room" discussion about controversial decisions.

As far as the actual similarities between open source software development and "open source" protests go, you'd be hard-pressed to run a protest without them.

• Everyone can contribute? Most protests work on that basis, since they want the numbers. The more common problem is that protests aren't selective enough and let in unrelated people who try to make the protest about something else.
• If you don't like the direction, "fork" it? No protest movement has yet, as far as I know, tried to patent the concept of protesting against a particular thing. This is automatic. Unlike with software, there's not months of dull and boring work to be done before you get back to something vaguely resembling the original if you start from scratch.
• Sharing of ideas/materials? Again, most protests don't try to trademark their slogans, or to threaten with copyright infringement people who modify their sample letters to MPs before sending them.
• Transparent output? By definition, yes. Once you've seen a protest you're at liberty to copy its methods or slogans for your own. As with open source software, though, you might not be aware of the tangled route it took to get to that finished state.

• "Many eyes make all bugs shallow"? A protest has no underlying "source code"² that one can inspect for bugs. The output of the protest is the original form. As with closed source books, where you don't need access to the original typesetting to spot the typos and layout errors, "bugs" in a protest are open to anyone to find regardless of the protest organisation.

  Transparent organisation can make the "bugs" obvious before "release", just as many bugs are found and fixed in development versions of software before they ever make it into a formal release, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be fixed.

  Meanwhile, just as allowing the public to help test planned releases is not limited to open-source software, being transparent about future protests and listening to suggestions and criticism is not something that non-hierarchical movements have a monopoly on.

Call it "decentralised", or "non-hierarchical", or "chaotic", or "anarchic", call it "crowd-sourced" if you must, but don't call it "open source" because it's not in any meaningful way similar to that (indeed, the social network tools used to organise most of the actions are largely corporate-owned and closed-source).

Footnotes

¹ The idea is that the hierarchy and the leaders are a meritocracy of sorts: if you do enough good work for the project you'll be invited to join them. The Geek Feminism blog has some good articles pointing out that - as with everything else - the definition of what counts as "good" and "work" is default-biased

"Democracy", however, is generally not something that open-source software projects use or need.

² The actual openness of the source is not a major factor for finding bugs in most projects. Just about all of the bugs reported for projects I've been involved in have come from users using the software who'd never read the source, not from people who happened to read the source and thought "hey, that'll never work". For any successful project, the proportion of its users who have the time, skill and energy to read the source for bugs is approximately zero.

Likewise, I've never found a bug by reading open source code. I've found bugs by using software and then been able to report them to the developers complete with a cause and a fix, in a few cases, and this is a useful advantage of open source software - especially those pieces of software such as system tools likely to be used by people who can program. More usually, despite in theory being able to read the source and provide a fix, I've just told them about the bug and let them get on with it.

But anyway, on this metric our Parliament is "open source": read the draft Bill, write in with a "bug fix", and the "developers" might well accept it before "release".

Friday Links

• Anna at FWD: “There’s a suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair”: BBC Interviews Jody McIntyre About His Assault By London Metropolitan Police Officers
• UK Polling Report: Will the cuts move opinion to the left?
• Paul Krugman: The SPECTRE of Inequality
• [trigger warning] Jill at Feministe: Oh right, Bradley Manning
• s.e. smith: Disrupting Perceptions About Atheism
• [trigger warning] eastsidekate at Shakesville: Statistics for rape apologists

Bad but common arguments for free speech absolutism

"Freedom of speech" is, of course, an extremely important right. It's not, however, necessarily the most important right, and like all rights, it is not absolute.

The documented harm that certain forms of speech can cause - especially dehumanisation and other forms of hate speech - is serious enough for me to believe that it is proportionate to restrict it in these cases. Whether that restriction best takes the form of a state ban or private actions in the form of boycotts, protests or other criticism, will obviously depend on the details. (You might not consider the latter form a restriction on free speech, because it isn't, but see the "exaggeration of scope" section below)

Arguments against restricting freedom of speech in this way tend to mostly be based on a few extremely flawed themes. ¹

The slippery slope

"If we criminalise a particular form of speech that we don't like, then we're giving power to the state to criminalise any form of speech it wants, and it won't always agree with us."

The first problem with this argument is that it can trivially be generalised to this argument.

"If we criminalise a particular form of behaviour, then we're giving power to the state to criminalise any form of behaviour it wants."

This is true, and there are various anarchist critiques of state power that are based around this (and I'm not addressing those here, because that's an entirely different argument - and a much more consistent one), but for non-anarchists, people who are quite happy for the state to criminalise murder or theft and apply a range of punishments for these crimes, but trust it not to extend this to criminalising "walking faster than 2 metres per second" or "owning a lettuce" or - more seriously - "being a member of the Opposition political party", there seems no real reason to treat speech with more cautiousness than physical actions.

The second problem is that the state already criminalises (or allows civil cases to be brought) for certain forms of speech and the vast majority of people are happy with this principle. Some examples:

• Conspiracy to commit a crime.
• Libel or slander (the UK laws do need a serious rewrite, but very few are arguing that it's a breach of free speech to have libel laws at all)
• Knowingly or recklessly giving false advice on certain legal or financial matters.
• Speaking via a megaphone between certain hours in residential areas.
• Misuse of emergency services numbers.

The principle that the government can and should restrict or forbid certain forms of speech is well-established even in so-called "liberal democracies". There doesn't seem to be a particular risk of slipping into a totalitarian dictatorship as a result. Therefore we should be able to discuss exactly which forms of speech should be restricted or forbidden by the state without "all of them" or "none of them" being the only possibilities.

I do think we need to be very cautious about enforcing restrictions on speech, but that doesn't make them automatically wrong.

The marquee inconsistency

One of the major usability complaints about scrolling text banners on the web - bear with me for a moment! - is that they're inconsistent about importance. As the poster there puts it:

What information do you have that is not important enough to have a place on the screen at all times, but is important enough that a person will wait until it appears again if they missed it?

Arguments against restriction of free speech seem to fall into a related inconsistency. Restriction of free speech, it's accurately said, is one of the ways in which governments suppress criticism. Exercise of (certain forms of) free speech is powerful because it keeps the state accountable to its citizens and residents.

Having established that "the pen is mightier than the sword" and other such cliches, that speech is powerful and can have massive real-world effects, the argument that particular forms of speech should not be forbidden, restricted, or even particularly considered carefully by their users, because they can't be causing real-world harm, doesn't make a lot of sense.

(The argument that the real-world harm being caused to people who aren't the debater is a price worth paying to have free speech for other purposes, I think is just a variation on the slippery slope theme above)

Naturally this only seems to apply to speech that hurts the non-privileged. The harm caused by speech that hurts the default is well recognised and such speech is discouraged by various methods.

Exaggerating the scope

There are various forms of restriction on speech. One can, with varying degrees of difficulty - and I make no claims that this list is comprehensive:

1. Forbid it magically and omnisciently.
2. Forbid it to the full extent of the state's actual enforcement powers.
3. Allow it under restricted circumstances but not more generally.
4. Allow it under general circumstances but not in particular restricted ones.
5. Allow it but with penalties for its use. (Non-state penalties, such as being boycotted, rather than actions via the civil or criminal law)
6. Allow it but with situational penalties for its use.
7. Allow it but disapprove of it.

It seems very popular to pretend that people suggesting options 5 to 7 are actually suggesting 2 (or somehow 1) and then argue against them on that basis, or to merge this with the slippery slope arguments and say "Well, you might only be recommending we disapprove of this, but that's the first step to throwing people in jail for it".

It's not an argument as such, but it seems a common overreaction to mild suggestions.

Footnote

¹ I'm not saying here there aren't good arguments against restrictions: I'm saying these aren't those arguments, and that they're commonly used enough to be worth noting.

Indiscriminate police violence

[trigger warning: especially for some of the links]

The recent anti-government protests in London were met with heavy violence from the police. Somehow, no-one has yet died as a result, though several people were beaten into unconsciousness and are lucky to still be alive.

The police and government claim that they made a proportionate response to violence from the protestors. As the links - let me repeat, may be very triggering - below show, though, this was clearly not the case. If you feel up to it, please read as many of the accounts as you can - what happened needs to be widely known:

• Laurie Penny at New Statesman: Inside the Parliament Square kettle.
• BBC News interview with Rachel Bergan, a 17-year old protestor
• Shiv Malik at The Guardian: Student fees protests: woman claims she was beaten by police
• Guardian: Police tactics at tuition fees protest questioned after further angry clashes
• Jody McIntyre: Week 76 – Student Protests, Part Three
• HarpyMarx: “You are not being kettled… but contained”…. and And then the kettling started….
• BBC News: London student 'struck by truncheon' has brain injury
• Press Gazette: Journalist Shiv Malik injured by police baton

One journalist struck with a baton and needing stitches while trying to report on the protests. Another physically removed from the scene to prevent her seeing what happened next. Someone dragged out of his wheelchair for being slightly too close to the police, and his friends prevented from helping him. Several people beaten into unconsciousness and concussion, at least one critically injured as a result, and the police then obstructing medical attention. Tens of protestors hospitalised, hundreds more - most of whom won't make the news - injured.

Smug Mr Cameron approving of all this police violence and praising their response, while describing the protestors as "feral". Dehumanise those you want dead, right?

I don't doubt that there were a minority of violent protestors throwing things at the police. It's also extremely clear from these reports that the police response was not directed at the violent protestors but at the nearest ones. In any other situation this would be clearly unacceptable. The justification seems to be that by being in the same protest as people who are being violent, you deserve whatever you get.

Of course, a lot of the violence only started when the protestors were being confined by the police. The descriptions from there make it clear that the confinement, the street imprisonment without access to food, water or toilets, had a definite effect on the mood of the protestors.

This will discourage some people, of course, from protesting further. That's, presumably, the idea. It will also make others more willing to come back and do more, be more determined not to silenced. The anti-government mood in this country is growing, and this sort of unjustifiable violent suppression of legitimate protest will only strengthen it.

From a pair of governing parties who got into power in part by outflanking Labour on civil liberties issues - which was a sadly easy task - it's not taken them too long to show their true beliefs.

This is only going to get worse. There will be more protests as the government's cuts start to take effect, and people see vital services removed, and the government will encourage more and harsher reactions from the police to "control" the protests. People will die before this is over, and we'll be told they had it coming, being at the same protest as someone who threw a brick.

How do you deal with a state that's so willing to use indiscriminate violence against its own?

A couple more links for further reading

• Enemies of Reason: The contempt for democracy
• Modus Dopens: Just the beginning

If you're in or near London and have free time and energy, Friends of Alfie Meadows, the Middlesex student nearly killed by the police, have organised a "Kettle the cops" protest against police violence for 1pm on Tuesday.

Friday Links

Not a happy week of links, unfortunately.

• [trigger warning] Renee at Womanist Musings: Today I Remember The Women of École Polytechnique
• [trigger warning] Autism and injustice – Stephen Neary
• The Hathor Legacy: See, this is why gender essentialism is essentially sexist
• s.e. smith: Unmasking the Foreclosure Crisis
• [trigger warning for both] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: The Apologist's Trap and "My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman."
• [trigger warning] Mindy at Hoyden About Town: You won’t be surprised to hear…
• urocyon: Disability and UK fuel poverty

Some more links follow - all potentially triggering - about the recent news that a founder of Wikileaks is facing potential extradition over charges of rape and other sexual violence. Also, many of them do not have comment moderation policies that disallow rape apologism.

• Kate Harding at Salon: The rush to smear Assange's rape accuser
• Modus Dopens: People who do good work can still be bastards
• Jill at Feministe: Naomi Wolf: Assange captured by the “dating police”
• Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian: Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women 'unfair and absurd'
• Laurie Penny at New Statesman: Tell me what a rapist looks like

Mathematical Morality

It seems that some people think that morality works on a numeric points basis - plus fifty points for donating to charity, minus ten points for queue-jumping, etc. - and then assess people or actions based on the perceived total score.

So, mathematical morality. There's three related applications of it that I've seen just in the last week, and they're all enraging and favourable to society's default people.

Heroes

There seems to be this need to elevate heroes, and to stand by them right or wrong, and to use mathematical morality to justify this.

And they either think "Oh, X has got a score of plus one million, there's no way they'd ever do anything significantly negative" or they think "Oh, X has got a score of plus one million, and they may have done this bad thing, but that's only minus a few thousand, so they're still plenty in credit."

And of course, having convinced themselves that their hero is incapable of wrongdoing, they'll dismiss out of hand, with the most convoluted contortions, the possibility that they might have, or that it matters if they did.

So the people who don't get to be official heroes - and of course being a default person makes it much easier to become one in the eyes of the default-centric world - end up discarded to defend the hero.

I'm/they're not an X-ist

This sort of mathematical morality is also, of course, the source for a lot of the common "not an X-ist" arguments that get passed around. It's slightly more sophisticated than heroic maths - only heroes get to have their total scores aggregated - in that it gives points in various sections.

So, for a white person, "has black friends and is polite to them" gets plus 100 points on the "racist/not a racist" scale (it should just be part of the "meets minimum standards of decent behaviour" score, anyway, but...). Using a racist slur, well, that's only minus 20 points on that scale. They're still at plus 80, so they're not a racist. Incidentally, these scales also have low standards - for white people, anti-racist activist starts at plus one, racist starts at minus ten thousand, everything in between is "not a racist".

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Even the most committed activist is going to slip up sometimes, if they're working in an area where they have at least some privilege. Their high positive score might mean that the initial reaction to them is different - a friendly notice, a starting belief that it was accidental, etc. - than it would be to someone with a history of dragging their privilege around everywhere.

What it doesn't mean is that they can cancel things out. Their previous good work doesn't mean that they don't need to make amends for this one time they slipped up. (They may also need to tell other privileged people who are trying to be helpful by claiming this on their behalf to shut up, while they're at it)

Nor can they cancel out the perception of their mistake by doing other good work later but leaving the mistake unamended for.

Ends justify the means

This mathematical morality also infects actions, by letting the end justify the means. So the goal - winning a victory for their political team and keeping the other side out - is worth plus ten thousand points to them. That means, to some people, that they can do nine thousand or so points worth of negative stuff, that they'd disapprove of if it were someone else (like their opponents) doing it, as means of achieving that end.

Their opponents, of course, aren't allowed to use any. Them winning is minus ten thousand on its own. Any negative things they do on their campaign just put them even more into moral debt.

So we see just about every form of discrimination being used as a tool, from people who are allegedly against it, and who'll try to justify or minimise the collateral harm they're causing, while criticising the other side for doing exactly the same thing for the same reasons.

Wiio's laws, and how privilege helps make them true

Viestintä yleensä epäonnistuu, paitsi sattumalta (Communication usually fails, except by accident)

Wiio's First Law

Wiio's Laws are unfortunately not generally well-known in English-speaking countries. Jukka Korpela provides an English translation of the laws and commentary on them, which is definitely worth reading.

I was reminded of them by some recent discussions, and so two related reasons for communication failure I want to highlight are privilege and "core assumptions".

Failure of communication due to privilege is commonplace, and the reason is probably sufficiently obvious to most readers that I won't spend much time on it. The nature of privilege is that it's difficult to notice when you have it, which makes it easy to assume everyone has it, which means that the usual pattern-recognition features of the brain go in the wrong direction.

This makes people immune to both anecdotal and systematic evidence. Anecdotal because the anecdotes, regardless of number, don't fit their personal experience, and so get written off as unusual occurrences rather than commonplace. Systematic because for any study you care to name, in any field beyond the highly obscure, there will be another study that contradicts it (and it doesn't matter if there's only a couple of contradictory studies to hundreds or thousands saying the same thing¹).

Core assumptions are more generally important, though. The connection between core assumptions and privilege are many. You could define privilege entirely as a core assumptions problem, though to do so would ignore that fact that the core assumptions a person holds are often a consequence of their privilege: the whole thing is self-reinforcing.

I'm using "core assumptions" to mean the assumptions about the way that the world works that are so fundamental to a person's way of thinking that they're not (always) aware that they're making them.

For instance, a common (and generally harmless) core assumption is that effect follows cause, and not the other way round. If I attempt to present an argument that relies at some point on the cause being after the effect, regardless of how much evidence I provide that this was apparently the case, then if you share that core assumption you won't accept my arguments. If I hold the core assumption that cause and effect can come in either order, I probably also will find it difficult to understand why you don't accept my arguments. I've given you plenty of evidence that X happened because Y then happened; the fact that you consider this inconceivable will not occur to me. Almost everyone has been in plenty of discussions where the other party appears to accept all the evidence you present and then come to a diametrically opposed conclusion from it.

It's very difficult to have an ultimately productive discussion with someone whose relevant core assumptions are not compatible with your own.

Core assumptions aren't necessarily harmful - common ones like the nature of cause and effect, in fact, are generally helpful to the majority of situations because they provide a common basis for discussing the world². The core assumptions linked to privilege, however, are harmful, because they make it difficult to get people to see the privilege.

Core assumptions aren't static - but if someone has a core assumption that is getting in the way of seeing privilege, it's very difficult to shift it. Conversely, if you can remove it, they might very quickly come the rest of the way into agreement on the basis of the evidence you've already provided.

So, the question is, how do you shift a core assumption? If you want to do this other than accidentally, the most important thing to do is to identify what the core assumption is. If you get this wrong, and argue against something that logically follows from the core assumption instead, then it will be an uphill struggle to get any evidence to stick.

Having identified it - and that's difficult in itself, because a person who doesn't consciously know they're making an assumption is unlikely to admit to it - you can then work directly on the assumption. Misidentifying it will often just lead to wasted effort.

(I'm writing this as applied to arguing against someone else's core assumption, but of course it applies without much modification to the extremely important task of identifying one's own privilege-influenced core assumptions so that you can stop assuming them and begin the long process of reconstructing your world view without them)

For instance, some people defending privilege will have the core assumption (and they might even be aware enough of it to state it explicitly):

"X and Y are different, and this explains differences in outcome without needing there to be discrimination"

There are studies carrying out controlled experiements to show that this isn't true, and discrimination is statistically visible across the population.

For other defenders of privilege, that won't be the core assumption. The core assumption will be "Y are inferior", and the assumption above will be a logical consequence of it. In that case the studies above will be useless. I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done to argue with such a plain assertion as a core assumption.

Footnotes

¹ It's not necessarily true that the massively greater volume of studies is correct, because the studies are themselves made by researchers with varying degrees of privilege, and this can let core assumptions of the entire field be entirely wrong but remain unchallenged even in the face of strong counter-evidence. (e.g. most research on the "obesity epidemic")

² There are of course plenty of core assumptions that are both extremely common and extremely harmful. "Gender is strictly binary and immutable", for instance. These core assumptions are very strongly self-reinforcing, because almost everyone acts as if it's completely and self-evidently true, which means most people never consider that it might not be (and dehumanisingly write-off any counter-examples).

Friday Links

• [trigger warning] Jess McCabe at The F-Word: Sent to jail for falsely retracting rape allegation
• Garland Grey at Tiger Beatdown: A Very Special Episode of Grey Areas: Privilege Denying Dude Edition
• Gwen at Sociological Images: Anti-Muslim Bias on the French Job Market
• HarpyMarx: UCL occupation press release on police tactics in central London
• Sharon Brennan at Where's the Benefit?: The Government Is Implicated In Creating Negative Attitudes To Disabled
• s.e. smith at FWD: Dear Web Developers: Stop Breaking Functionality and Calling it a ‘Feature’
• Spark in Darkness: World AIDS Day
• [trigger warning] Anna at FWD: Record of the Dead for November 2010
• [trigger warning] Ministry of Truth: Rape Statistics – What can we rely on?

Season's greetings

Season's Greetings! Early Northern-Hemisphere temperate winter to you all! I was expecting it to be January before there was any snow settling, so this has been a bit of a surprise.

There's almost a foot of snow fallen here, with more forecast overnight and later in the week. Other parts of the northeast are basically blocked off.

Heavy snow that settles to any sort of depth is a rarity in most parts of England and Wales, so the contingency plans for it are generally insufficient to keep all but a few main roads operating (because to do so would require spending money on buying, maintaining and storing lots of road-clearing equipment and supplies that would rarely be used). Unfortunately that means that when it does happen lots of people - not, in general, the default privileged ones - end up trapped in their homes.