Moving on to what ? Fascism ?

I've read the much-awaited Sue Gray report in full. As you may imagine, I am not happy.

First let me start by mentioning a number of oddities about the report itself. By her own admission, it's incomplete :

Given the piecemeal manner in which events were brought to my attention, it is possible that events took place which were not the subject of investigation.

Which is understandable, but given the goal of only establishing a broad narrative of what happened and not assigning individual responsibility, does mean it's extremely limited. This would not be so bad were the independent investigation by the Metropolitan Police itself not subject to deep concerns about impartiality and transparency, e.g. by not naming who was fined and by only fining select individuals at the same events. This means there isn't all that much scope for accountability for those right at the heart of government :

It is not my role to make a judgment on whether or not the criminal law has been broken; my focus has been on establishing the nature and purpose of the events and whether those events were appropriate in light of the Government's own guidance.

I also find the relationship between the two investigations to be a bit suspicious. Gray says she didn't think it necessary or appropriate to investigate matters the police were dealing with, but doesn't say why. Surely two independent investigations are better than one ? And she provided materials to the police but this flow of information seems to have been only one-way. While there are legitimate grounds not to sieve every detail through a fine-tooth comb (and I agree with Gray that there is no need to release every photo examined*), this just seems far too weak. We should have the absolute right to know when those in government commit illegalities. It does not make any sense to me not to release the names.

* Total transparency would be a mistake. Insofar as one-on-one speech is concerned, I have some very strong sympathies for free speech absolutism. In private settings we should have the right to say things we don't really mean without being dragged over the coals, and we should not make private discussions public retroactively. It is only when we enter explicitly public, open venues that I would take a very different stance.

And yet, even given its highly limited scope and somewhat suspicious context (especially the meeting with Gray apparently initiated by Downing Street), the report itself to me still seems to be damning.

I will not do a line-by-line dissection of the report, there doesn't seem any need. But in the interests of fairness, I will say that a few events do seem to have been in broad agreement with government guidance. The presence of food and even alcohol is not what the controversy is about. Of course you're going to need to food at a long meeting, that is unavoidable. And if you want a glass of wine or a beer, I don't have a problem with that. Even if you take a moment to do some non-productive work activity, e.g. thanking colleagues, wishing them well if they're leaving, that sort of thing... that's basically an unavoidable necessity, in my view. Having a drink outside does not automatically constitute a garden party. A few minutes to thank colleagues does not transform a work meeting into a work event.

This, however, is to expose the ridiculousness of "beergate". Because it was never about whether people had food (even cake !) or drank alcohol. It was about whether they gathered together exclusively for socialising (in contravention of the rules) and whether they lied about it afterwards. It has very little to do with whether the events in question actually posed a significant public health risk, but with whether those at the top of government were a bunch of lying hypocritical scumbags. On what grounds should they be allowed to have shindigs when other people couldn't have funerals ? How could the Prime Minister possibly be confused about whether he was at a party or a work event ?

A few of the events in Gray's report do seem to fit into the non-productive work category. But the vast majority, including some the Prime Minister attended, don't. Some highlights :

..."would like to do speeches tomorrow when we have our drinks which aren't drinks"...

Helen MacNamara, Deputy Cabinet Secretary, attended for part of the evening and provided a karaoke machine which was set up in an adjoining office to the waiting room.

The event lasted for a number of hours. There was excessive alcohol consumption by some individuals. One individual was sick. There was a minor altercation between two other individuals.

The event broke up in stages with a few members of staff leaving from around 21.00 and the last member of staff, who stayed to tidy up, leaving at 03.13.

Alcohol and food was available in Downing Street and at Whitehall, supplied and paid for by staff attending. The quiz and prize-giving lasted approximately three and a half hours.

A small number of individuals (three or four) remained in the Pillared Room for a while longer and then went to the Private Office area, where they continued to drink alcohol until approximately 01.00.

There are plenty more like that in the report. The pattern is clear : most of the events were pre-planned, explicitly social events where the whole purpose was to drink alcohol and consume food, not to get any work done - sometimes until the small hours of the morning. Even if some of these were arranged in relation to colleagues leaving (and not exclusively social occasions like Christmas), this still goes well beyond the pale. Yes, you might normally have a special, outside-of-work hours evening for this, but you can't do this during a pandemic - you just can't. So forcing it in during work hours instead is really rubbing it in the noses of everyone who actually did follow the rules. Sorry, but in these situations, you have to limit yourself to a brief thank-you, maybe a present-giving : not a whole evening and a party, for crying out loud.

And sure, during work hours you need breaks. That's fine. But you don't organise social activities for those breaks. And that sometimes the messages show the attendees were actively trying to keep the events covid-safe only makes it worse : how could they possibly be aware of the dangers of the virus but not the rules around it ? How could it possibly not have occurred to them that these openly social events weren't in violation of rules to protect everyone from a virus that they themselves were in fact trying to avoid spreading ? That the Prime Minister himself says it "never occurred to him" I find deeply insulting.

Even if the BoJo had never attended any of the events, to my mind it would still be a resigning matter. He presided over a culture of excess at the heart of government during a prolonged national emergency. If he wasn't aware of what his own staff were up to, he would clearly be too incompetent for government himself. But he did attend. He knew, inevitably, that there were explicitly social events happening in his own house. And I see no other interpretation of his denial of this other than a barefaced lie, especially given that he routinely repeats factually incorrect statements in the House of Commons as a matter of course.

That the events took part at all is bad enough. We should expect better than hypocrisy from those running the country. That they repeatedly lied about the events afterwards, that the report shows they were aware of rule-breaking ("we seem to have gotten away with it") is truly damning. If we can't trust the Prime Minister of the country with such trivialities as cake, if he is either so incompetent that he doesn't realise that parties until the early hours of the morning were going on beneath his very nose, or felt so devoted to the need to socialise that he felt compelled to lie about them... how can we trust such a man with anything ?

And the icing on the cake... now we find out the Prime Minister is marking his own homework again, changing the ministerial code so he won't have to resign. That's an outrage. Telling us all to move on is, not for the first time, deplorable. This is openly fascistic : not actually fascism, but very definitely in that direction. If you allow the Prime Minister to lie and change the rules about removing ministers from office, where exactly do you draw the line ? Just what accountability to standards is there ? Doing it entirely by general election ? That is pure populism, and altogether too close to true fascism for comfort. I honestly don't care that the situation is worse in other countries : all of us deserve better. And it's only by complaining, by getting angry at the small things, that we prevent the political offences from becoming real, personal offences.

I've done enough rhetorical pieces against Boris that I've run out of things to say, so I'll conclude this one very simply : fuck you, sir. Fuck you.

Review : The Anglo-Saxons

Let's follow-up immediately on the last history post (about James Hawes The Shortest History of England) with a review of Marc Morris' The Anglo-Saxons.

Morris is one of my favourite history writers, and he's definitely on fine form with this one. For starters, I'm going to give him enormous brownie points for the absolutely superb, common-bloody-sense structure of the physical book itself. There are figures within the main text as well as photographic plates. Colour figures on the plates are cited in the text by number, instead of just throwing in a random assortment of related pictures like practically everyone else does. Maps are included at the start of each chapter, not randomly scattered without rhyme or reason (again, which is what everyone else does). And though the notes at the back do have some additional commentary as well as just pure references, these are few enough that there's no need to keep flicking back and forth. All this instantly makes the reading experience ten times more pleasant than most popular history books, which don't do any of this. Well done Marc, well done.

Personally, I would love to get Marc Morris and Francis Pryor to have a beer together. Their views are similar but different enough, and they're both just generally entertaining people, that there's no way it couldn't be an interesting conversation. Throughout the book, I kept wanting to re-read Pryor's Britain B.C. and Britain A.D. to examine their contrasting views properly. Unfortunately I don't have my copies of those here, so any comparisons I make will have to be done from memory.

Morris' biggest difference from Pryor is probably his views on the end of Roman Britain. Morris views this in traditionally cataclysmic style, not for nothing entitling the first chapter, "The Ruin of Britain" :

The archaeological record, previously so abundant, becomes almost undetectably thin.... within a generation the villas and towns of Roman Britain had been almost completely abandoned. The implication of this data is unavoidable : society had collapsed... huge numbers of people must have been on the move in search of food and shelter. People must have perished in huge numbers, through famine, disease and violence.

Pryor disagrees completely, pointing to the construction of large wooden buildings replacing the new-fangled stone monstrosities of Rome, as well as actual improvements in written Latin in some places. True, there was a seismic shift - a collapse, even - in government. But overall, the coming of the Romans didn't change things nearly as much as is popularly portrayed, with Britons having roads and sewers all of their own long before Rome did. And presumably some sort of national-scale "government", at least at times, as evidenced by Stonehenge. Celtic society was very different to Roman, but it would be an over-simplification to view it as necessarily less sophisticated. Rome hadn't introduced all that much that the Celts actually wanted or couldn't sustain for themselves if they did, so its departure, though sudden, needn't have been that much of a shock.

It would surely be a step too far to proclaim the departure of the legions as nothing of any import, still less that it might have been an actual good thing. The international reach of Rome, its efficient administration and record-keeping, was never imitated anywhere in the Celtic world. Still, perhaps it's not so outlandish for Pryor to hold to a view of the time as one more of unpleasant transition than true apocalypse.

Beyond this Pryor and Morris are in better agreement. Pryor argues that the Anglo-Saxon invasion flat-out never happened, with at most at handful of soldiers of raiders coming across from the continent. He, an archaeologist, views the historical record as prone to wild exaggeration by over-imaginative monks, with no archaeological evidence indicating any substantial change in the way that is seen with the Roman invasion. 

Morris, a historian, has a more compromising view. He doesn't subscribe to the wholesale replacement theory*, but thinks this may have happened in some areas, while in others there was a much more modest "elite transfer" - much more in line with Pryor's view that the transfer was primarily one of culture, not people. Overall, says Morris, the numbers of immigrants was indeed substantial, but it took decades and they never outnumbered, let alone replaced, the native Britons.

* And unlike Hawes, definitely doesn't think the sea is what enabled mass migration, thankfully.

So there we have a broad agreement between historian and archaeologist, but another disagreement arises immediately. Accepting that the Britons remained numerically superior, why was their culture replaced ? Pryor's answer is that their deepest values did endure and continue to this very day, but these are not the sort of bricks-and-mortar aspects of hard culture, which did indeed change. Morris' view is that the Romano-British culture was, frankly, shite (or at the very least in state of total disarray), so the Anglo-Saxons saw nothing worth keeping (Pryor would probably spin this as the wise native Britons deciding that they liked these new ideas and cunningly adopted them voluntarily). And whereas Pryor views Christianity as having survived the fall - sorry, end - of Roman Britain in a generally healthy state, Morris says it was confined, ironically enough, to the Celtic margins of Wales and Cornwall. It's a romantic, captivating view of a doomed society clinging to its last vestiges of its culture, set against the backdrops of Tintagel with a horde of hairy barbarians pounding at the gates, slowing fading into history, then legend, and finally myth.

Blimey ! But this seems rather extreme. I wouldn't like to venture if and how Pryor and Morris could reconcile their views, but it's difficult to believe it could be as dramatic as that.

From this point on though I believe Pryor and Morris would probably get along very well. In fact, they'd probably join forces to tackle James Hawes' North-South divide theory. This is never explicit in Morris' book and barely evident at all (even if one is looking) in the first few chapters, at the very most. Actually if anything Morris has quite the opposite view to Hawes in a couple of ways. First, for at least the early period of Anglo-Saxon Britain, it was Northumbria that was the dominant power, not the lowly southerners. Secondly, the rise of Wessex emerges as a story dependent in no small part on sheer blind luck.

This raises a bigger, more philosophical disagreement with Hawes. Whereas Hawes is looking for the big-picture reasons why history happened in the way it did, Morris is seemingly happier to ascribe the outcomes to pure happenstance. But actually, I think Morris has thought about this more deeply than Hawes. Rather than looking only for materialistic reasons driving history (which are important), he also considers the nature of different political structures. During the early phase dominated by rival warlords :

Power such as this, based on personal charisma and continuous military success, would always be volatile, and liable to challenge.

And later, after the heroic successes of Alfred and the stunning achievements (unfairly forgotten) of Athelstan :

War was avoided by a great council... but this development was clearly a blow to the notion that there was a single "kingdom of the English", and raised the prospect that Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria might once again go their separate ways.

For all their many successes, the dark age kings of Britain had failed to form a unified state in the way that Rome did. The problem of how to get disparate peoples to agree on such a system was one that wouldn't really be solved until the Norman Conquest. Until then it was largely - by no means entirely - a case of power based on strength and common consent in who the ruler was, not in any deeper, more ideological notion defining kingship.

Yet this failure should not disguise the enormously significant progress which did happen throughout this era. Morris may be a historian but he doesn't neglect the archaeology, noting that the two are contradictory when it comes to the development of early kings - the former claiming a much earlier development than the latter attests. We do see an early egalitarianism as Pryor claims, but there is also a rapid development of an elite in the late sixth century. 

We should also remember that enormous amounts of information have been lost, with even the colossal construction of Offa's Dyke now being something which is at best poorly understood. Morris favours an interesting conclusion : it was partly military, being too large to be against small-scale raiders, partly a sheer symbol of political power, and perhaps most interestingly it was partly racial. The grand narrative in Morris' work is one of the development of the concept of Englishness, being largely about a people, not a place. Hence the Dyke is built not against the Northumbrians or the peoples of Wessex, but a group who were much more distinctly foreign - the Welsh.

This development was slow and gradual. The early kingdoms didn't exactly see eye to eye, so proclaiming the notion of "Englishness" was not about fellowship and brotherhood, but more about a power-grab from Wessex. Of course, it was eventually successful - today the idea of Wessex as a regional power in its own right has completely vanished. It's the English who have power, and yes within that there is a north-south divide, but it's the whole of England which is set against the other nations of Britain, not individual segments.

The book is a large and enthralling read, and I will skip over the details. There is a subtle, ineffable change as the book progresses. It's hard to describe, but the early period of mead halls and Viking raids feels like a different world from the later period of monasteries and pan-national kingship. Without trying to describe the differences (or their causes) explicitly, they nonetheless come across. Full marks to Morris on that score.

Sometimes he is more explicit about cultural developments. For example, he notes how ideas about divine retribution developed in monasteries and only later spread into secular culture - they were not an inherent factor in the Christian faith. Likewise the development of Alfred's fortified burghs only later and accidentally led to technological progress and the spread of villages. And though he notes that the importance of the famous Wittans (that could in principle meritocratically dictate who was king, but in practise invariably selected the same family over and over again) was exaggerated, he does chart how restrictions came to be placed on royal power.

The final section of the book is perhaps its weakest, though to be fair this is covered much more in-depth in his other book The Norman Conquest. His chapters on Alfred and Athelstan are outstanding. He is careful to describe which of Alfred's achievements have been exaggerated or wrongly ascribed, but he nevertheless emerges as a figure truly deserving of his epithet . Here is a book both critical and engaging, not sacrificing narrative for the same of rigorous skepticism not the other way around :

The important and incontrovertible point remains that the scheme to turn Latin works into English was Alfred's own initiative. He selected the texts he thought were "most necessary for all men to know" and discussed their contents with the scholars... Without Alfred directing their labours, none of this would have happened.

Not all of Alfred's schemes were so successful... [his] ships were vaingloriously large affairs, and hence less effective than they might otherwise have been. When they were sent out to confront a small Danish fleet that same summer, all the king's new vessels ran aground.

He was clearly not the the superhero of Georgian and Victorian myth, [not] the founder of the Royal Navy, let alone "the most perfect character in history", as one nineteenth-century scholar hyperbolically insisted. But he was courageous, clever, innovative, pious, resolute, and far-sighted : qualities which, taken together, more than justify the later decision to honour him with the word "great".

As for Athelstan, I shall leave that for another post when I review Sarah Foot's Athelstan, which is to be honest pretty awful. Instead I shall close with another lengthy quote from Morris - I would have liked a longer, more general conclusion, but his summary is still excellent (I note also that he again agrees with Pryor in that feudalism, serfdom and slavery pre-date the Conquest). Factoring in the brownie points for a well-organised text, I'm giving this one 9/10.

Much of that England is now gone forever. The Anglo-Saxons never truly believed, as the Romans did, that they were building for eternity. Their timber halls and hunting lodges burned long ago, as their owners anticipated... With one or two notable exceptions, the physical legacy of the Anglo-Saxons in thin, their surviving monuments few.

A lot of what is often touted as the enduing legacy of the Anglo-Saxons proves on closer inspection to be mythological. The claim that they invented representative government because their kings held large assemblies ignores the fact that other rulers in contemporary Europe did the same. The belief that they were pioneering in their love of freedom requires us to forget that their nearest continental neighbours called themselves the Franks - that is, the free people. Their laws and legal concepts were mostly gone by the twelfth centuries, replaced with newly-drafter Norman ones. The notion that they considered themselves to be uniquely favoured by God has lately been discredited on the grounds that no surviving document actually claims that distinction on their behalf.

And yet, though their buildings are mostly gone, and their myths have been dispelled, a great deal of the Anglo-Saxon inheritance remains. The head of the English Church is still based at Canterbury... Westminster is [still] the political heart of the kingdom... The shires of England, though tinkered with, are essentially the same as they were at the time of their creation more than 1,000 years ago. Most English villages can boast that they are first mentioned in the Domesday book, but their names often indicate a history that began centuries earlier. The fact that so much remains is remarkable. Roman Britannia, despite the grandeur of its ruins, lasted barely 400 years, and was over by the mid-fifth century. England is still a work in progress. 

Review : The Shortest History

I saw James Hawes' The Shortest History of England in an airport bookshop. I almost picked it up there and then, but something stayed my hand so it took several more months before I finally read this.

It's an interesting little book, and not at all what I was expecting. It's not actually that short, and anyone claiming to have actually followed the tagline and read it in a day is certainly a liar. Would they do the additional tagline of remembering it for a lifetime ? Probably not. It's good, but it's not that good.

These descriptions plus the copious use of illustrations gave me the impression that this might be designed as an entertaining, humorous read. It isn't. It's light reading, and I suppose it's entertaining in that it's interesting, but it's not funny and isn't supposed to be. While the illustrations do look superficially like they're dumbing things down, I actually found them in the main to be very neat, concise ways of summarising important points in a memorable way. It's almost like reading a set of revision notes for a history exam.

Early on I was dismayed by a profoundly stupid remark that the sea enabled mass migration to Anglo-Saxon era Britain in a way that wasn't possible elsewhere due to the harshness of overland routes. This doesn't make any sense to me at all. Early sea travel was profoundly dangerous, whereas the mass land migrations of the Huns and other Asiatic tribes didn't seem all that problematic centuries earlier. I still have difficulty in wrapping my head around this whole weird notion.

But, with one or two other weird oddities here and there, this is an exception to the general trend. The book is a good history in itself, though necessarily thrifty with details. The real goal, though, is not to provide a history per se, but to give the reader a distilled set of conclusions the author has obviously spent a good deal more time formulating (citations litter the work like sand on the beach). Sometimes I wished it had been considerably longer, although, I did find that reading it quickly was advantageous. This is not a deep analytic history where you can pore over every page, but one that you should read rapidly to get swept along by the general current. Try and run it over with a fine-toothed comb and you'll have a nasty time of it.

Throughout, Hawes is keen to emphasise what in his view has made England unique - both in good and bad ways. Not all his conclusions are convincing and it would benefit a lot from a more detailed look at the other countries he occasionally contrasts England with - without these, the reader just has to take it all on trust. He also seems to fall victim to a sort-of mythical golden age fallacy, where we are currently in an inevitable era of decline and fall. Making the history deliberately short has some considerable virtues, but it also makes its sweeping, grand narrative feel rather less carefully considered than it ought to. 

And yet, while there are innumerable details one could quibble over, and no small number of which deserve to be shot down in flames (the practise of grave goods ending within a generation is scarcely credible, we still do this today !), this would be to do the work a disservice. Instead I will withhold excessive pedantry and concentrate on the major conclusions instead.

Colonialism is a running theme throughout the book. England was born itself as a Norman colony, which enabled a kind of meritocratic social mobility - at least for a while. While the native English were replaced wholesale as political powers, many were sill rich. Whereas previously the established system meant that everyone's place was assigned through genealogy, the desire for young pro-Norman English to stay rich meant there was now a route to reclaiming something of their family losses through marriage. The colonial system meant that the primary means of social stratification occurred not through birthright, but a sort of cultural meritocracy : learn French language and culture, and you too could join the new elite.

This led, according to Hawes, directly to Parliament. He says :

If England had been a normal country with its own ruling class, Edward [I] might have tried to tame the aristocracy by giving the peasants (who could be taxed more easily) rights over their own property. This is exactly what happened in France in this era. But Edward, as a French-speaking king, could hardly side with English-speaking peasants against his own, French-speaking nobility. So he admitted that he needed to negotiate - parley - with them.

There's an awful lot to unpack there, but Hawes doesn't, because then it wouldn't be the shortest history.

Hawes is also a bit schizophrenic when it comes to the importance of the English populace at large, at various times insisting their entire way of life was "dead", only for the English to come out on top of the current elites again a few pages later. It's a bit odd.

Similarly, in later years (the Roman-medieval period taking up a disproportionately small section of the book) this led to a meritocratic Empire on England's part. Since England's wealth came from taxing businessmen, this led to a virtuous circle in which the rich elites were those who taxed themselves : their wealth fuelling the state, which was represented by the businessmen themselves, who fed the taxes back into investments in business. And the meritocratic, colonial nature of England itself held firm. The language of Gibbon "wasn't anybody's natural language; it was the property of no ethnic group. It was something that you had to learn - that anybody could learn if they had the right sort of education."

As for the Empire, Hawes subscribes to the popular notion that it happened only because life in England was so bad that everyone was desperately trying to escape it. Which is a bit at odds with the notion of such a meritocratic state. It also feels somewhat besides the point to claim that the rulers were loyal to a fictitious vision of England and so by extension couldn't be considered to be truly nationalists. Or indeed when he goes on to claim that Brexit wasn't about racial attitudes but against a foreign elite imposing their will on the down-and-out English. He's not wrong in that that's what Farage et al. claimed (Hawes, I should stress, does not have any real sympathy for the Brexiteers), but it seems strange in the extreme to claim that this explicitly anti-foreigner attitude isn't racism.

Hawes other major theme - indeed the major theme of the book - is the north-south divide. In Hawes view, this is the dominating factor in British society since time immemorial. He has innumerable maps illustrating the clear differences between the north-south divide, but he makes his case too strongly. His view is one in which the south of England is just innately better than the north, and has always been clearly dominant. This, frankly, is just nonsense, which I'll have more to say about in the next post when I review a very different book (Marc Morris : The Anglo-Saxons).

What I think he's doing here is a little bit of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy : he cherry-picks maps that support the notion of a divide, and ignores any commonalities that exist or any trends which are more complex than this. It doesn't mean he's wrong to say there isn't a difference. It's just that he heavily overstates the case. Every aspect of modern culture and politics, he says, is inherently dominated by this. For example on the formation of the BBC :

The new BBC, founded in 1922, adopted RP and by 1926, 2.25 million licensed radios were pumping out the accent of the public schools across the land. Yet again, the ambitious of England were told : come, talk like us, and set yourself apart from your own folk.

And politics :

At the 1924 election, former Southern Liberal voters went Tory, and stayed there; former Northern Liberal voters went with Labour, and stayed there. This finally locked down the political North-South divide... The Conservatives were no longer facing off against a genuine rival English party. The opposition now was the Party of Outer Britain (Northern English + Celts) a.k.a. Labour. This hardened the age-old suspicion among Southerners that the North was somehow not properly English.

This is too much ! Of course it ignores any other demographic factors that could be at work : the Tories dominate not the south but the countryside in general; Labour's heartlands are not any particular latitudes but the cosmopolitan cities dominated by working people. And a historian should most definitely know better than to say that a mere century ago things were "finally locked down".

Up until this point, Hawes is overall optimistic about Britain in general (some notable exceptions aside). But now he paints a picture of nothing but decline and fall. The North-South divide forms a perfectly vicious circle of polarising politics, while financial bailouts from the Americans after WWII came with the price of necessitating such huge amounts of defence spending that we inevitably remained financially crippled and little more than an American satellite state.

As the world thaws, these islands will resume the course charted in 1885. Soon, the UK will end. No doubt it will happen as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Eastern Bloc in 1989. With luck, it will be peaceful. The English will emerge from the empires of their elites, to find themselves alone, wondering who they really are after all this time - and as divided as they were when the North-South split was first noted by Bede 1,300 years ago.

As taxes rise, as the rhetoric of levelling up yields to reality, as Brexit goes wrong - and it is going very wrong indeed in Ultster -... is it time to admit that England on its own has rarely, if ever, been a functioning nation-state ?

All of which feels understandably but ludicrously pessimistic, even cynical - and worse, the kind of cynical pessimism that'd curiously loved by every single generation that's ever lived. I don't buy it.

I commend the author for trying to paint a broad-brush picture of history and trying to get at the underlying causes of what happened. We need more books that try to do this, to connect small-scale events to big-picture patterns rather than simply giving us the raw facts. The book I'm currently reading, Sarah Foot's Athelstan, is a plodding scholarly tome that is essentially compromised of nothing but useless dates and events. Hawes' work is far, far better than that. 

But while his conclusions are provocative, and surely not wholly wrong, I have to consider this ultimately a failure. It would have been a lot stronger if he'd picked some cases which transcend the North-South divide and then explain exactly what causes this and therefore the general conditions under which we can expect to see North-South influences and when other factors ought to dominate. Likewise, it needs a lot more contrasting examples to illustrate exactly what was unique to England.

Finally, other historians definitely don't agree with Hawes' conclusions. No hint of an inherent North-South divide is event in Marc Morris; Francis Pryor argues that many British traditions date back even before the Romans, a period Hawes ignores completely. Full marks for effort, Hawes, but you need to show your working. 7/10 from me.

Antitheists have it backwards

I would suggest that this is a profound misunderstanding among the antitheists about if and how religion and stupidity are causally connected.

A stupid person may become religious, or they may not, but they will still be stupid. An intelligent person may or may not become religious, and they will still be intelligent. True, some beliefs are ideas that posses the mind, not ideas the mind possesses, but this is not true in and of the ideas themselves. They are a function at least as much of the person holding them. So yes, under some circumstances, some ideas can actually make you stupider, and some ideas (cough cough FLAT EARTH) it’s just not possible to hold without being an idiot. Believing in the literal truth of parts of many religious truths is insane. But assuming that all religious people believe in the literal truth of their texts is equally bonkers.

In short, the causal relation probably goes largely in the direction opposite to what’s assumed. People who are religious nutters would probably have just become some other type of nutter if there wasn’t a religion to follow.

Or perhaps, to refine this a little... it's not exactly that stupid people become religious or that religion makes you stupid. A stupid religious person will believe stupid religious things. An intelligent religious person will believe intelligent religious things. The stupid one may follow their beliefs rigidly and because they've been told they're correct, but equally, the intelligent one may believe what they do because they genuinely seem to them to be correct - they will understand not to apply them inflexibly or unquestionably.

There is also as a nice atheist take on Pascal’s Wager which boils down to : you can’t choose what to believe. Hence pretending to believe in God makes no sense. This is entirely fair. But surely by the same token, by what grounds should it therefore be acceptable to discriminate against the religious ? They no more choose to believe than they choose their skin colour. You could instead try treating people as individuals, examining what they actually do instead of what they say, and stop assuming they must adhere to a very childish view of what religion is supposed to be… my grandmother was a racist old bat who self-identified as a Christian but didn’t believe in an afterlife; my most valuable mentor in astronomy is a Catholic. People are, in short, complicated, and treating them as simple tends not to accomplish very much.

Or to finish with an unpopular opinion... it's not that there are so many religious idiots in America because religion has been allowed to freely dominate there, as opposed to secular Europe... it's because American culture in general promotes idiocy. Tendency towards religious nuttery is a consequence of a root cause, not the cause itself.

Review : Doctor Strange And The Limited Multiverse Of Mild Befuddlement

This a very preliminary review because I have to say I fell asleep during several parts of the film. I'll revisit this in due course. The following contains information about things that happen in the movie but no spoilers.

I generally do like Marvel movies but I have a particular fondness for Doctor Strange. I felt that its philosophical leanings were a lot more interesting than one can generally expect for a comic book movie and the artistry of the special effects reflected that very well. "Not everything makes sense. Not everything has to." Plus the humour and Benedict Cumberbatch fit together perfectly.

I also like Sam Raimi, with Drag Me to Hell being absolutely hilariously superb. So when everyone says that this is much more of a Sam Raimi than a Marvel movie, I had naturally high expectations.

Unfortunately I have to be somewhat of a lone voice - friends and critics alike tell me this is a a great movie, but I was rather disappointed. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I thought it could and should have been an awful lot better. There are some good moments, but nothing like the truly unhinged wildness I was expecting. Although the movie does go more Raimi as it goes on, for about two thirds at least it's very much mediocre Marvel with nothing very distinctive about it at all - it's rather humdrum. I'm forced to give it 6/10, maybe even 5/10 if I'm feeling harsh.

The first Doctor Strange was about as self-contained as a Marvel movie can be. This one really, really isn't. Fair enough that it expects you to have a working knowledge of the Marvel universe and to have seen at least the first Doctor Strange movie. Less reasonably, you also really need to have seen WandaVision, which I haven't. From the bits I have seen, it looked like a weird, experimental, extremely slow-burning piece which couldn't possibly be important in the grand scheme of things. And Wanda herself, to me at least, is never portrayed as a character of great importance despite being extremely powerful.

In this movie though, Wanda is crucial, and worse, has changed drastically from the last Avengers movie. This reasons for this are just not sufficiently well-explained for me to ever fully accept this - it keeps feeling very forced. Just being told the reason for the change is nowhere near as effective as having actually experienced that development, so just being asked to take it on faith isn't really good enough. So the whole main plot of the movie is left feeling extremely hollow.

It could be argued that the Marvel universe is now just too darn big. To follow future movies, viewers are also going to have watched not just the horde of movies but also the swelling plethora of TV series, and that's just too much for most of the audience. There's probably some merit in that but I am not convinced this is at all unavoidable. 

For instance here, you might remember that the end of the first movie sets up Mordo as an obvious future antagonist. This is referenced in the second film but this plotline just doesn't happen. To me that doesn't feel like a good narrative choice : you've given yourself an opening for a future self-contained villain but then ignored it. Now if you want to make a movie that's about Wanda instead, go full Wanda. Give her her own movie. Call it the Wanderverse or something. Don't merge it with Doctor Strange, who already has the next villain to fight... or at least, wait until the third film before you do that. Skipping the development from the end of the first film is almost like retconning. I can't think of any reason Mordo couldn't have been the villain for this piece while doing essentially the same plotline.

And if this movie might possibly have been better titled if it had had "Wanda" in it somewhere, it definitely shouldn't have been called the Multiverse of Madness. The existence of the multiverse is almost incidental to the plot, which is especially disappointing because Doctor Strange exploring the philosophical implications of a multiverse is something I would absolutely love to see. We don't get that. None of the character interactions depend on the existence of parallel realities in a way that couldn't otherwise have happened by some different mechanism*. As for madness, there's precious little of that. Rather than a gloriously anarchic ride through a myriad of different possibilities, we get a single, too fast sequence of seeing a few different worlds (admittedly quite nicely done about from being too rapid - not too short exactly, but too fast to see anything clearly) and that's about it. There's a lot of missed opportunities here... infinite, in fact.

* See the Pratchett/Baxter Long Earth series for a case where parallel realities are genuinely crucial to the plot.

I also felt that some of the effects sequences were unnecessary - yes, it's a Marvel movie, but even so, they should serve some purpose. It all feels a bit ad-hoc. And none of them had the artistic flair of the first movie - they're nice enough, but very generic.

This isn't to say the movie isn't without some moments of brilliance. I did enjoy the finale very much, but there needs to be much, much more like this in the rest of the film. Generally the pacing doesn't feel quite right, like the movie is focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time, introducing too much of the wrong things while neglecting what it's already got to work with.

Oh well. I guess my homework is to watch WandaVision and then re-watch this movie and not fall asleep. Apparently I missed some of the best bits, so maybe I'll yet change my mind about this completely. We'll see.

EDIT : I finally watched WandaVision (which, though a very slow burn, ultimately does ignite rather ferociously and is excellent) and re-watched Doctor Strange 2, so I have to revise my opinion considerably. DS2 is a good movie which I'll happily upgrade to 7-8/10. I still think it could have used Mordo instead of Wanda, and there's not as much use of the multiverse as there could have been. But it's fun, clever, spectacular, and develops nicely from WandaVision (see also Spider-Man : No Way Home, which is great, but definitely don't watch without WV first). 

But though it does deserve to be called "Multiverse of Madness", it doesn't have the mind-warping vibe that the first movie did. Doctor Strange felt like an accessible way to explore different concepts of reality, presenting the starkly (no pun intended) materialistic neurosurgeon in contrast with the idealistic (in the philosophical sense) mystics. DS2 doesn't really quite manage this. Yes, it's integral to the plot, but it doesn't really ever try to use it to get the viewer to question their own world view. What it does, it does well. I just think it could have done just that little bit more.

It's not the post office

I've mentioned many times previously that social media requires regulation. I've explained my position regarding the ideals of free speech often enough that I don't feel the need to do that again in any detail. Suffice to say that the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor is if anything too successful : real markets are full of people buying and selling utter crap. By itself, the market is just not a valid solution for optimising anything very much; with proper oversight, it's a different story. Nobody seriously believe in a totally free market. Nobody.

Today I just want to briefly cover a different angle from a recent discussion. Sometimes a counter-argument to regulation is made by way of comparison to more traditional media : TV, radio, telephone, the postal service, etc. We don't routinely eavesdrop on phone calls (at least, we're not supposed to), so why should social media be different ?

My previous answer has been that social media is just not fairly comparable to traditional media. I stand by this assertion : it offers mixed media, audience reach and participation, and longevity of content in a way so unique that it deserves to be treated as its own format. To compare it to a phone call is a bit like comparing a train to a horse : yes, you can use both of them to get around, but they're really not the same thing at all - even from just a transport perspective.

But it's not really very satisfactory to just point out that social media is different. After all, if we were asked why trains were important in the Industrial Revolution, we could hardly be content by saying "because they were better than horses". Far better to define the exact differences, the relevant rules that apply in all conditions to decide when regulation of content is legitimate. Otherwise we risk it becoming a special case, with the alleged need for monitoring being little better than "because I want to". If we can state the general rules, however, then no-one can accuse us of unfairness. 

And anyway, only pointing out that social media is different to other media is like saying that it's only the consequences which matter, i.e. that the ends justify the means. That's something I'd rather avoid.

Andreas Geisler's (yes, him again) suggestion in the discussion is that it's about promotion. Television and radio are clearly publishers, but the telephone and postal services are merely delivery agencies. They explicitly have no knowledge of the content they convey, or even anything of the sender and receiver besides names and addresses. This lack of knowledge is an explicit feature of the service, why we largely feel able to trust such services with confidential information. Without it, these services would be unusable. 

Additionally, but secondarily to this, they don't host content either. They don't store anything a minute longer than they need to deliver it. They don't make the content available to anyone besides the intended recipients. True, they don't actively prevent resharing content either, but their very nature makes this difficult enough to deter almost everyone besides the truly obsessed. The responsibility for what happens to the content they deliver lies entirely with the recipient : they themselves accept responsibility for delivery only - nothing else.

Compare this with television, radio, or book publishers. Those both generate, host, and disseminate content, and as such are definitely responsible for the content they distribute. As such they are subject to very different expectations and regulations.

What about social media ? Well, knowledge of the content posted is intrinsic to the business model, as is providing tools for resharing. You create the content, yes, but they facilitate both its delivery and availability. In stark contrast, the phone service would very much like you to talk to lots of people, and the postal service would be a lot happier if everyone started writing letters again, but they don't provide any direct means to keep you engaged. You don't want your phone company automatically interjecting when you're about to hang up with a voice saying, "did you also want to talk about the geopolitical situation in North Korea ?". It'd be like if the Matrix was real but run by Clippy.

Likewise if you hire a delivery van, they don't go out of their way to find you more stuff to move from point A to point B. That's just not what delivery companies are for. Nobody would want them to be like that, because it wouldn't work.

(There are plenty of specialist exceptions, e.g. delivering medical products, but we can probably safely ignore these here.)

And that basically is what social media outlets typically do. They actively recommend you particular communities, people, topics or other ways to find content you're interested in. Not even the worst cold callers will phone you up and give you a list of ten other people interested in donkeys because you happened to go to a farm zoo one morning, but that's quite a reasonable analogy for how social media works. What would be unbearable for the delivery sector is not merely desirable but to a large degree actually essential in the social media arena.

Incidentally, note how weird social media is compared to other outlets. TV is definitely a publisher, but it doesn't encourage resharing content. It likes you to promote references, yes - telling your friends about a good show boosts ratings, and TV likes that. But that's not sharing the content itself at all, any more than sharing the address of a museum is equivalent to giving everyone a physical copy of Tutankhamun's death mask. Nor does the phone service make it easy to record and reshare. One-off, user-initiated delivery is not just comparable to prolonged hosting and sharing within a wide community.

These basics hosting and sharing features are common to all the major social media outlets. And it's this intrinsic awareness of content which, it's suggested, is what makes them publishers. A choice is made based on content to form links between people. Indeed, creating and promoting a recommendation is itself a form of content creation and publishing.

And it's also a tacit endorsement of the content itself, if only to a limited degree. Just as a publisher authorising a cookbook doesn't have to think every meal is delicious but does have to ensure it won't actually poison anyone, so does a social media company recommending white supremacist groups to non-members bear some measure of responsibility for this. They're not wholly responsible for the content, but they can't be given carte blanche either. They didn't create the original content, but they do create recommendation links - which are essentially derivative works.

Crucially, this is by choice. No-one is forcing social media to exist, nor for it to recommend anything to anyone. Instant messaging services don't do this - they can still be fairly called delivery services. But in choosing to host, share, and recommend, social media companies make knowledge of content fundamental to their success. It's this aspect of choice which means that even if this is done algorithmically, their responsibility for this is at most only slightly diminished. This makes them publishers. Perhaps they are not 100% responsible for all content published on their site, but they are absolutely, 100% responsible for all content generated by themselves, even algorithmically.

To be fair, not all of it works the same way. There's no reason you can't have a system where the user alone is responsible for what they sign up to. You could in principle have a system where there are absolutely no recommendations whatever. Would this still be a publisher, or would it instead be reverting to a delivery agency ?

A better analogy here might be a bookshop. If the shop decides to label and organise the books to help with sales, they are responsible for the choices they make. They too are generating content (however limited) and making it available, i.e. they are themselves publishers. Even this can carry consequences, such as putting the Bible in the "history" section instead of the "religious studies" area.

But if the bookshop decides not to do this, to have a great big heap of books and allow anyone at all to come in and buy anything... that's probably not a publisher. It's also extremely stupid, like selling random items from an uncatalogued storage locker. What's this, an automatic rifle ? Sure ! A smallpox sample ? That'll be £3.50 sir, there you are... okay, such a shop would no longer be a publisher, but it would also be stupid and unworkable.

Yet the social media outlets I use are actually somewhat close to that. They don't provide any recommendation systems themselves, but let users set their own hashtags to label their own content for others to find. Needless to say, this is open to abuse, and using the wrong hashtags is one of the major annoyances. But actually it mostly works.

But does it alleviate the responsibility of the host ? At least partially this is surely the case. They did not create the hashtags the users generate, so cannot be directly or entirely culpable for that : they aren't publishing anything. If they have no control over who joins the service, then we might even extend this to a total mitigation of responsibility - just as a phone company cannot be held responsible if a terrorist uses a public phone, but could be if there was an order barring them from having a private telephone but they allowed an installation.

So there are still no good direct analogues for social media. But there are at least a variety of comparable situations we can use for broad guidance, which I think goes quite some way towards settling the question. Anything you generate and make available counts as publication, hence a service which recommends contacts is a publisher. If you don't, and don't set restrictions on who can join, you're probably closer to being a delivery agency.

The model of a purely user-driven service is a grey area. The wider question, of course, is whether this is a good idea. While we should have means-driven, not ends-drive, rules, we still should consider the consequences. This power to infinitely generate and duplicate multimedia content, to share it globally with strangers, to directly interact with people in prolonged, recorded conversations, is unprecedented. True, for now mainstream media still dominates most people's thinking. But we would be fools to assume this will last indefinitely, or to think that the regulations which we accept for more familiar delivery services are perfect analogies. Evading the label of "publisher" somehow feels hollow if it still allows for the viral spread of misinformation.

For now, the only conclusion here is that yes, social media services are indeed largely publishers, and at a minimum must accept responsibility for anything they themselves create in relation to user's own content. How much further we should take this I leave for now as an open question.

Review : Three Mile Island

You may recall that I'm a big fan of HBO's Chernobyl, so it seems only fair that I should give Netflix's own version a go.

Meltdown : Three Mile Island clearly tries to compete/not-compete by being a documentary rather than a drama. Ironically, given that Chernobyl was entirely at liberty to bend the facts, Three Mile Island falls short in the important regard of explaining what actually happened. It does not have Jared Harris explaining the technical details using a series of flash cards, which is a sequence it badly needs. But then, so does pretty much everything.

For this reason the first couple of episodes are honestly a bit lame. It just doesn't cover the technical details nearly well enough to explain what went wrong, which makes the focus on the humanitarian side of things feel strangely hollow. Their stories would have been a lot more powerful, not less, had they properly explained how the (arguably near) disaster happened. I do feel it would have worked better as a trilogy, cutting out a lot of baggage in the first two episodes and replacing it with some much-needed science.

But stick with it, because in the second two episodes the show is easily as good as anything Chernobyl has to offer.

While the first half covers the incident itself and the reactions of those involved (the townspeople, the government, the engineers), the second half branches out to cover the repair operation - and the truly Chernobyl-scale disaster that was avoided by only the narrowest of margins therein. The main focus shifts from the ordinary public to two prominent figures : one who is clearly unaware of how much of a colossally stupid tit he sounds like, and the other a more straightforward tragic-hero type.

Recently I postulated that maybe one reason for such poor decision-making in the Soviet era was due to its intensely hierarchical structure. When you can't have any discussions without consequences, when everything you do becomes accountable and have no choice but to rise or fall, you get a system where everyone punches downwards. In such a system, lying and self-interest are virtually one and the same. In contrast, a more egalitarian framework, where discussions with peers are largely consequence-free, allows far more respect for the truth, because most of the time no-one is punching anyone in any direction.

The second half of Three Mile Island thus presents an excellent counterpoint to Chernobyl. To oversimplify somewhat, the Soviet system gave the government far too much power. In capitalist America, the government did not have enough power - at least, not enough power independent of its corporate overlords. The unfettered drive for wealth inequality leads to corporations having no real, effective oversight. Indeed the show makes it clear that they actually murdered at lease one prominent anti-nuclear activist, that in this system profit comes before truth every time.

(It would be a very interesting study to compare if and how extreme wealth inequality leads not just to corruption but also the hierarchical structure characteristic of mismanagement, or if incompetence here occurs in a different structure.)

What makes the show at least feel like it has a high degree of credibility is that we hear from a wide variety of sources. When accusations of corruption are levelled, we get to hear the response from those in charge. Predictably, there responses are lame beyond belief, with the main respondent from the Nuclear Regulatory Council dismissing everything as "drama" for some reason. And you really have the urge to shout at the guy that he's being absolutely pathetically arrogant. It's the sort of "I'm sorry you were offended" non-apology that characterises the corrupt, just as murdering the messenger is all but openly admitting culpability.

Best of all, the main protagonist is avowedly to this day pro-nuclear. It's not the technology that's the problem, he says. It's the management structure, the profit motive. A nuclear industry run like this will never be viable.

I do have to wonder if this is a lesson that applies more generally. Honestly, transparency and accountability would have likely prevented the disaster in the first place. An independent system for monitoring the radiation release would have indicated just how bad things were, rather than - FFS ! - letting them mark their own homework by having the NRC trust the energy company's own reports. And it probably would have made this cheaper, by avoiding the need for the hugely expensive clean-up operations.

Likewise, American healthcare is preposterously expensive. I daresay that a free and fair competition does, under some circumstances, lead to lower costs for consumers. But it seems utterly mad that anyone is still insisting that the free market is always the answer. Ironically, sometimes it seems that it's profit that drives costs up, not down. 

It's not even that you can't have profits. You can. You can have a safe, profitable nuclear industry, for sure. But you can't have profit be the overriding motivation in any industry where the consequences of mistakes are people's lives.

Anyway, great show. 6/10 for the first two episodes, 9/10 for the second two. Well worth a watch.

Slaying the utility monsters

I've previously gone on something of a rant against utilitarianism, but since reading On Liberty (I will eventually finish that planned post series, I promise) I've become far more sympathetic. 

As I see it, neither liberalism nor utilitarianism provide a complete moral system, but both provide important parts of the whole. In particular, you can't treat moral actions as a linear sum : allowing the happiness of one to balance out the misery of the many is pretty much guaranteed to lead straight to hell. Rather, you have to actively seek first and foremost to minimise the suffering so that as few people as possible experience the smallest amount of suffering possible. Minimising suffering is the priority, over and above increasing happiness.

Furthermore, whatever action you take you have to justify everything by some independent criteria : you don't ever cause suffering for the explicit purpose of improving happiness, otherwise you're in cliché territory about the ends justifying the means. Your goals are to minimise suffering and maximise happiness (that seems a pretty safe set of goals for any would-be social engineering*), but you can't let your goals dictate what is just and fair. The two must be kept strictly independent. Furthermore, in a liberal system you should always seek to employ the smallest possible action that gives the greatest possible gain.

*Yeah, this is a simplification, but without simplifications we'll get nowhere.

On then to this post. I believe the above caveats should address most of the objections, e.g. :

Say you’re a surgeon. You have 5 patients who need organ transplants, plus 1 healthy patient who is compatible with the other 5. Should you murder the healthy patient so you can distribute his organs, thus saving 5 lives ?

Duuhhh, no ! This would be letting the goals dictate justice. And going around murdering people for their organs is so obviously wrong that I will have Words with anyone who thinks I need to explain why that's the case. Of course it's wrong. You know it, I know it, so let's not pretend otherwise. Never mind that like the Trolley Problem the details of the situation (which are here lacking) could profoundly change the moral problem being addressed, you just can't justify murder.

Most of the other examples are very similar : 

You have a tasty cookie that will produce harmless pleasure with no other effects. You can give it to either serial killer Ted Bundy, or the saintly Mother Teresa. Bundy enjoys cookies slightly more than Teresa. Should you therefore give it to Bundy?

Egads no. Why should I ever reward the evil ? First I must minimise suffering, which means punishing the evil, not giving them cookies. Good grief. Enjoyment alone cannot possibly directly equate with moral good.

There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can give pleasure to all these Nazis?

Pfft. Again, happiness does not equate with morality, that's plainly daft. And as I've said before, because they can't be mathematically quantified, you can't you linearly sum happiness and misery anyway. That's like trying to take the smell of rancid cheese and divide it by a sausage : it just doesn't make any sense at all. You've just lost Godwin's Law, methinks.

...because failing to save lives is just as wrong as actively killing...

This is bollocks, though, isn't it ? I mean yeah, if you see someone drowning and can throw them a lifebelt but actively choose not you, sure, you've basically murdered them. Choosing your life career based around what makes you happy instead of what saves the most lives isn't the same at all. In the former, you have a straightforward binary choice. In the latter, you have a whole slew of hypotheticals and a maddeningly complex optimisation problem : what exactly does save the most lives ? Being a doctor ? Being a politician out for healthcare reform ? 

I think again these things cannot be so easily quantified. And you cannot spend your entire life constantly worrying about other people because that's just not human and will inevitably lead to your own ruin. Sorry, but it's just not nearly as simple as choosing to become a medical doctor versus an athlete, because that's not how people work. And any moral framework must be constructed with respect to how real human beings actually function, rather than treating them as linear machines capable of any arbitrary action.

So yes, I agree with piece as far as that particular conception of utilitarianism goes : if we treat pleasure itself as moral good, and we seek to maximise this with no other concerns... absolutely, that is a catastrophically appalling idea. But I don't see any reason why we have to take this useless definition of "utilitarianism" to be the only possibly interpretation of it. It seems to me that there are far better, more worthy implementations which deserve consideration instead. 

Make it worth defending

One of my favourite quotes comes from someone about whom I otherwise know exactly nothing. When asked if Fermilab contributed to the defence of the United States, the founding director R. R. Wilson allegedly said :

No sir, I don’t believe so... Nothing at all. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending.

Given that a lot of the following rant is about lies, you might want to read both of those links, though the accuracy of that particular quote is not relevant. It's the principle that's important.

First we might briefly consider this rather nice piece from the Atlantic, which in brief summary says that Trump supporters believe the election was stolen because of vague feelings and intuitions that it should have been. They've been primed over many years to believe Trump and disbelieve anyone else. And like I’ve been saying for a while, the point of misinformation isn’t (usually) to convince but to confuse. Once you stop trusting facts, you fall back on gut instinct and emotion. While you can often and all too easily manipulate statistics toward whatever end you see fit, it is altogether harder to do this when it comes to the final binary choice : who got more votes ? At this level data cannot be bent or broken. Facts are facts. 

Feelings, however, are altogether more malleable. Sowing distrust ahead of time means that when you reach that final choice, the data no longer matters. Feelings are all that’s left : the election must have been stolen - so the unconscious thoughts go - because the alternative does not fit my intuition.

It's a nice article, but I do have one major critique :

These voters aren’t bad or unintelligent people.

Yes they are. They are a bunch of bigoted racist, filter-bubble-brained, idiotic, useless twats. I could go on, but I now turn my attention to my main target : the Tories.

Boris Johnson is a pathological liar. We already know this, but he insists on reminding us so often that one sometimes feels he's deliberately trying to one's nose in it. Much like Trump proclaiming he could shoot someone, Johnson's verbal equivalent of writing an apology in Comic Sans is damn close to saying it doesn't matter if he broke the law or not, he can do what he wants.

That Johnson attended parties is itself shameful. There's no way around this. The vast majority of people stuck rigidly to the rules despite having to make enormous sacrifices to do so. For some, staying inside and watching Netflix is hardly a burden, but for plenty of others, missing essential contact with loved ones is asking the Earth. If you wanted to go to the pub then it sucks to be you, but if you had to attend a funeral, or wanted to see your ill or elderly relatives, then this is altogether different. 

Tory claims that nurses and teachers were all indulging in similar parties is wrong every which way you look at it. It's wrong because it's factually untrue. It's wrong also because one illegal act doesn't justify someone's else's (I mean, good grief, do these people not have mothers ?!? This is parenting 101 !). It's just a plainly horrible thing to say : it doesn't matter that the Prime Minister broke the law because everybody else did too ? They bloody well didn't, because those laws were in place for a very good reason, you muppet. Not everyone's thought processes are such a bunch of bullshit, least of all nurses and teachers.

Then we have Johnson's claim that it never occurred to him he might be breaking the law. This is a farcically stupid thing to say, because his instructions were, for once, as clear as day. Everybody understood them. So for him to say that he and his cronies alone did not means that either he is at best monumentally incompetent or, worse, uncaring of the rules and their necessity. Either he's incredibly stupid or he's a liar. And these are not mutually exclusive conditions by any means - he could well be both. Stupid, malevolent or both, he clearly shouldn't be in charge anything at all.

In the end, though, the parties themselves are a secondary concern. Boris may have taken the definition of "political party" rather too literally, but there's no real chance that the events actually did contribute much to the spread of the coronavirus. What's actually dangerous is the lying. I need not summarise this because Boris lied at every turn. He lied when he said no rules were broken, he lied when he said he didn't know about the events, he lied when he said he didn't know he was at a party, he lies practically every time he turns up the Commons to fail to answer questions. He repeatedly refuses to correct the record on the most minor of issues. And in that classic behaviour of a liar, he continuously changes his story. It's just not credible to suggest that even Boris Johnson is so hapless that he's doing anything other than lying through his teeth. Being a buffoon doesn't automatically mean someone is nice.

Then we have the absurd and tiresomely predictable claims that we can't change leader during a war. Again, this is wrong every way you look at it. For starters, we're not at war, idiot ! One country we don't like is fighting another country which we do like. The only sense in which we're fighting is vicariously, by proxy. If you let this criteria prevent us from changing leader then we'll probably never be able to change leader again. Secondly, for God's sake, we changed Prime Minister during World War II. It's absurd to suggest that we can change leader during an actual, direct war but not during a remote, proxy conflict !

But this too is by-the-by. It's the lies that matter. Lies are how it all starts. Frank Herbert said that it's truth that comes closest to being the basis for all morality, and I think he was right. True, philosophically, establishing "truth" is hard, but we don't need to excogitate on the nature of reality in day-to-day politics. We all know the domain of sensory perception and evidence we're considering. We implicitly understand the applicant conditions of what's being asked, that by "Boris Johnson" we mean a collection of what we call atoms arranged in the repulsive shape of a blonde twerp, and by "party" we understand that a multitude of similar such badly-arranged atoms gathered for an explicitly social event. It doesn't matter that rigorously pinning down the precise definitions of even such things as "chairs" is remarkably difficult, because we know, at a deep, inexpressible, gut level, what it is we have to consider. We know what's relevant, even if a definition of "know" sometimes eludes us.

No, philosophy won't save Boris here. The only credible interpretation of the facts is that Boris Johnson wilfully and repeatedly misled Parliament because he wants to stay in power. Any other viewpoint is ridiculous.

It's been suggested that this doesn't matter because in other countries politicians are held to much lower standards. Well, fuck that. I say the fact that all these lies are over trivialities like cake are not excusable, but are exactly why Boris needs to be removed from office. How could you ever trust a man who goes to enormous lengths to evade and deceive over such petty details as to whether he had a slice of bloody cake or not ? How could you ever trust such a man to make the really big decisions ? No, war in Ukraine is not a justification for keeping such a twat in charge - it's the very opposite, a clear indication of an urgent need to kick him out. For all that Britain has done well with military support, it's been pretty pathetic on the humanitarian front, something a new leader could remedy but Boris and his racist foreign secretary surely won't.

Lies matter for two reasons. First, when you stop respecting the truth, you end up with Trumps. You end up with vile creatures like Priti Patel... here I must digress. There's no alternative to sending asylum seeks to Rwanda ? Are you fucking mad ?* You're saying that Rwanda has better facilities than us and there's nothing we can do about it ? What kind of idiot do you think I am ? I'll tell you an alternative : anything. Literally anything**. For God's sake, they're people crossing in small boats who are drowning out there. What the hell kind of threat do you think they pose ? What the hell are you so afraid of ? If it was up to me, I would simply let them all in. They're just people.

* I'm glad to see this idea being shot down in flames from many quarters, but I feel stronger language needs to be used. "Racist cunt" would be about right, but I'd be prepared to settle for "heartless bitch".
**Except possibly sending them to Russia. But sssh, don't give the evil witch ideas.

And to return to my point : ultimately, lies lead you to monsters like Putin.

Now I'm not saying Boris is comparable, though Patel might be. But once you start setting precedents like this you risk a very slippery slope. If breaking the law isn't a good reason to depose a Prime Minister, then just what is, exactly ? If the Prime Minister openly lying is acceptable, in what sense do we have a meaningful democracy ? None at all, it seems to me. None. He can just make up whatever excuse he likes about whatever he wants to do and the whole process of holding officials to account goes out the window. 

So yeah, today's Boris might hardly be someone who deliberately slaughters innocents (needless pandemic causalities aside, which are not the same), but this idea of accepting a proven liar in charge opens the door to things which are so very much worse tomorrow. Presuming that this won't happen is folly of the highest order. Without red lines for our leaders, we are setting them above the law. It is very hard to see how any democracy can survive such an eventuality. I'm not saying the country will instantly burst into flames - that's daft - but that road is an awful lot shorter than we might like to think. Our political system is too precious to take it for granted.

No, the cake doesn't matter. The parties aren't that important. The lies are what matters. To have a political system in which honesty is valued do much that even trivial lies are not excused is very much like Fermilab : it doesn't directly help us with defence, but by God it makes us worth defending. And to add something that R. R. Wilson probably wouldn't, but needs to be said : fuck you, Boris, you fascistic lying clown-faced imbecile. Go throw yourself down a well and rid us of your stupidity. Enough.

The Western square and the Russian tower

I'd just like to draw your attention to this old post on societal networks, which is relevant once again. Here I add some comments in light of the geopolitical situation.

In his 2018 book The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson described the different strengths and weaknesses of hierarchical, feudal societies and more free-form, network-structure market communities. What I keep thinking of is his description of how the strictly hierarchical Soviet Union appeared strong and stable to the outside world, but in the end it disintegrated extremely rapidly*. In part this may be because disagreement within a hierarchy is extremely problematic. Since information and commands can only flow linearly up and down, and there is not much sideways transfer of information, a single determined link that doesn’t obey the diktats (or finds out something that hierarchy just isn’t equipped to deal with) has to be dealt with incredibly harshly. In order for this particular type of network to function, disagreement has to be supressed, all too often with brute force. HBO’s Chernobyl does an excellent job of getting across a strong vibe of how the hierarchical structure created problems when dealing with the eponymous nuclear crisis.

* I never got around to blogging it, but in Huxely's Brave New World Revisited, the author was quite certain that the whole world would be Communist by about now.

For example, if your own advancement (or even just your ability to maintain your position) depends on the actions of your underlings, you have to make sure those underlings do what you tell them. This is true regardless of the organisational structure. But in a very strict hierarchy, being so linear in organisation your underlings have little or no access to anyone but yourself, so there’s a tendency to shout at them until they do whatever you yourself have been told to do by those above you in the hierarchy. The lack of sideways transfer (i.e. checks and balances between peers) means that one way or another you either get on with it or get out. Nobody’s giving you any reason to doubt your superiors. Nobody's able to question whether the orders are a good idea or not, because every relationship is one of power and control, not discussion and debate - there's no equality whatever. So it’s up to you and you alone to keep your underlings in their place. In essence, the system ensures that everybody’s continuously punching downwards.

At best, when disagreement occurs, the most efficient hierarchy can only change its goal very slowly - it takes a long time to propagate information throughout the whole structure, or even just to the top and back down again, especially if that information is unwanted. More likely, those in such a situation will simply remove the disagreement and replace any stubborn personnel with those who are more pliable, thus tending towards making more and more mistakes. The more strict the hierarchy, and the more complex the problems it has to overcome, the worse this will be. This may be why medieval feudalism was more successful, being not so strict as the Soviet version nor having problems as complex that needed to be solved (certainly nothing as complex as a nuclear reactor, at any rate). A comparison of medieval feudalism versus the hierarchies of modern dictatorships would be a fascinating study...

A flatter, more generic network structure, by contrast, is far more robust to disturbances*. Sideways transfers of information means that there are, in effect, continuous checks and balances - peers who are equal and have no authority over each other can much more freely discuss and argue without immediate consequence. This means that opinions can be much more easily re-evaluated in the face of contrary evidence. So in this organisation, just as you might now experience contrary information to what your superiors direct (for pure, flat networks are rare, most still have a degree of hierarchy), so too do your superiors themselves. Thus changing the goals becomes very much easier. Punching upwards is a lot less risky : not only because collectively the lower orders can more readily challenge the authority of the elites, but also because everyone is used to re-evaluation as a matter of course.

*I'm going to follow Ferguson and use "network" in this very loose sense. Obviously this is all strongly dependent on the network structure, as a hierarchy is itself a type of network.

Furthermore, a single stubborn rogue who disagrees with the status quo can be circumvented - there are alternative pathways by which any broad consensus can enact its goals, without needing to remove the problem. Disagreement can be comfortably tolerated, incorporated, and in the very best cases it is actively encouraged.

Indeed, a strong, robust consensus only arises because those who can disagree are able to voice dissent. Contrarians are valued because they’re not always wrong (except for the extreme cases, who are few enough that they can be neglected), nor inevitably fatal to any goals. Thus the network is able to formulate better goals in the first place, because it’s able to formulate more accurate conclusions as the basis for its goals. It draws on a much more diverse range of sources for its raw facts and can analyse them from a diverse set of perspectives and techniques. A consensus formed in such a way is incredibly powerful, and far less likely to make stupid errors than a hierarchical system.

Ferguson says that it takes a network to beat a network, and this seems extremely topical. The neo-Soviet Empire that is now Russia appears to be very hierarchical indeed, but not even a particularly efficient one. Its goals are stupid, its methods are stupid, its implementation is stupid, and it seems utterly unable to learn anything. It seems less like a pure feudal hierarchy and more of a series of disconnected, broken little sub-hierarchies with little or no overall coherency.

The opposing western powers, by contrast, form a highly complex network. They too have flaws. But while dissent within Russia simply cannot be allowed, within the west it’s something of an asset. True, it makes implementation of goals less than optimally efficient, and sometimes that even leaves it at a complete impasse. But the network learns. It considers alternatives. It doesn’t chuck anyone out just because they have one terrible suggestion - it keeps them around it case they have good ideas in the future. Even really extreme viewpoints can be considered because generally the numerically larger more moderate forces mitigate the worse excesses, and sometimes those extremists do turn out to be correct.

Of course, no network is ever a pure hierarchy nor a perfect ideal analytic system (we don’t even know what the latter really is). Most groups require a degree of hierarchy; a tendency towards groupthink through having too dense internal connections cannot ever be eliminated. But overall, the network vs. hierarchy analogy feels very apt. Not that this means Russia is necessarily prone to an imminent regime change, sadly, but it would go a long way towards explaining why the Russian government appears to be such a catastrophically absurd omnishambles. Essentially, it's filter bubbles on a grand scale... and Russia has fatally misunderstood liberalism. What appears as division and incompetence is only sometimes so. A lot of the time disagreements, however unpleasant they may be to experience, are actually a manifestation of the systems' greatest strength : considering alternatives, changing its mind, doubting, and above all, learning.