a fire in the night

There are few words and phrases to which revulsion is an almost instinctive reflex, where the idea behind the word or phrase is so repugnant that the reaction of most people is to avert their eyes and nervously change the subject. Although most concepts are capable of bearing more than one interpretation, of being evaluated from more than one point of view, some ideas are so far beyond the limits of basic human decency that outrage is the only acceptable human response.

Terrorism is one such word. It’s not a word that people want to hear; it’s not an activity that they want to hear about. It’s someone else’s problem. But there is a price to pay for drawing the curtains and pretending that you can shut out the world, because if you don’t understand a problem, then you cannot begin to understand how to solve it.

American presidents, who are in the best position to attempt such a solution, clearly do not try to shut out the world. They don’t need to. They can do very much whatever they want to do. Whatever they want to do in terms of direct action, that is. In terms of action that is designed to achieve a given end, the record is less impressive. The American military juggernaut may have squashed the al-Qaeda training camps and toppled the hated Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001, but this has done nothing to weaken support for al-Qaeda by the poor and oppressed throughout the Middle East. How could it? To combat terrorism, you first have to understand why it happens, which American leaders have singularly failed to do. This is not to excuse the use of random violence, in any circumstances. There is no excuse.

That is to say, there is no excuse from the comfort of our middle-class armchairs. But place yourself in the mind of a young Palestinian: late teens; limited education; no job prospects; surrounded by fanatical clerics. The Israeli Army plays its part in moulding the finished product as it brutalizes the populations of the West Bank and Gaza, tearing down the houses of suspected militants, targeting known militants for summary execution, and arresting whomsoever it pleases. The clerics wouldn’t have to try too hard to convince such a young man who their enemy was and—the next logical step—how best to fight back.

Thus far, I’ve not attempted to actually define terrorism. Most people believe that they can recognize the phenomenon when they see it. Surprisingly, however, a definition that satisfies all parties to the debate is more elusive than you might think. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11th September 2001 were clearly acts of terrorism, but this is an extreme case and so is easy to categorize. However, although terrorism may be easy to recognize in its most extreme manifestations, where the moral imperative behind the action is as abhorrent to the vast majority as the action itself, you will quickly become submerged in a morass of moral relativism and conflicting interpretations of the same event once you move away from the simple distinctions of those extremes.

At the opposite pole to the attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, precipitated the greatest war in the history of the human race to that time and could also be categorized as an act of terrorism, if we take terrorism to include the targeted murder of a public figure by members of a dissident group.

However, if we accept this partial definition, what are we to make of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Czech partisans in Prague in 1940? Few would fail to applaud such an action, even though in the event it cost the existence of the village of Lidice and its inhabitants. It is important to see the distinction between these two examples, because it illustrates the definitional quagmire that we are on the point of falling into. It is this: if we applaud the assassination of the Nazi gauleiter, then we are saying in effect that anything is permissible provided that the cause is just. But who defines the justice of a cause? The only moral position that one can take in such a situation is that nothing justifies murder, however acute the grievance, but then you would have to be prepared to die for such a belief. That takes a lot of doing, but as we are all learning to our cost, some are indeed prepared to do precisely that, even if it involves the death of hundreds of innocent bystanders.

an american tragedy

What is wrong with America?

It is now three weeks since the US presidential election, and more than two weeks since it became clear that Joe Biden had won, yet not only has the incumbent declined to concede defeat, he also continues to claim that he ‘won’, citing widespread fraud for his apparent loss. To anyone who has followed US politics during the past four years, such intransigence should not be a surprise, and neither should the widespread belief among his supporters that the election was ‘stolen’, echoing their hero’s preposterous claim. But why?

There are two distinct voting blocs who continue to support Donald Trump: right-wing working-class citizens and evangelical Christians, and both groups are predisposed to believe bullshit, which Trump spouts relentlessly, especially on climate change (“a Chinese hoax”) and the coronavirus pandemic (“drink bleach to kill the virus”).

I suspect that most people in the first group also believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, which postulates that a Satanist cabal of leading Democrats and Hollywood A-listers is running a child sex ring, and that Donald Trump is leading the fight against them. I can’t prove that this is nonsense, but I can say that if you do believe it, then you clearly have never heard of Occam’s razor.

The second group was notably anti-science well before Trump came along to reinforce their ignorance, reserving particular disdain for the theory of evolution. When I was a student in Manchester in the mid-1960s, I used to listen to Radio Caroline—a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship anchored in the Irish Sea—whenever I was back in my lodgings. As a pirate station, it broadcast on an unauthorized frequency, and in the evening it was progressively drowned out by the big commercial stations on the continent, such as Hilversum and Radio Luxembourg, that were broadcasting on nearby frequencies. Consequently, it used to close down for the day at 9pm, and because music reception was already poor by 8.30, it ran a 30-minute talk segment under the title The World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong.

To be honest, I’ve no idea why I kept listening, because Armstrong went on and on, and on about the theory of evolution, employing an almost endless stream of utterly specious arguments to demonstrate the falsity of this theory. At the time, I couldn’t understand what he had against evolution, which only an idiot would think was wrong, given the vast body of supporting evidence, but in retrospect I now understand the motive for his tirades. Armstrong was a fundamentalist Christian, someone who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true. And evolution directly contradicts the version of creation recorded in Genesis. It’s a garbled version that doesn’t bear close scrutiny:

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Bear in mind that God doesn’t create the source of the light (the Sun) until the fourth day of his labours. And day and night cannot exist without the Sun! This is the belief system of a primitive tribe of nomadic herdsmen living 6,000 years ago that has no validity in the twenty-first century.

As evidence of this fundamental animosity towards and general ignorance of science, I present the following four quotations, which I culled from a Christian website several years ago, although I can’t provide a detailed attribution because I made a note of them purely for amusement:

Some things cannot be explained by science. Take for example, rainbows. Rainbows are a mystery and you cannot touch them, just like God. Despite this fact, they are still there even though there is no scientific explanation for them.

Yes. DNA can never be proven. Evolutionists are obsessed with it because they always say “chimps share 97% DNA with modern man” etc. That’s great, however you would then need to prove DNA is real.

If evolution was real, humans and animals alike would not need reproductive organs.

Let me see you take hydrogen and oxygen to make water? God can. But the smartest man ever to live can’t.

The woeful ignorance on display here is appalling. Give me unlimited supplies of hydrogen and oxygen, and I will make as much water as you want. And I’m not God!

And what about the ultimate Trump bullshit? All his ‘make America great again’ and ‘America first’ rhetoric cannot disguise the fact that he is actively working against the admirable ideal of America as a shining city on a hill, as expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus, which was written in 1883 and inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

America may have been founded by disgruntled colonists, but it was built by immigrants, and it is now being destroyed by the descendants of those ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’.

At the beginning of this essay, I posed the question ‘what is wrong with America?’ This is my diagnosis. The first problem is with education, which, like healthcare, is seen in America as a money-making opportunity rather than a basic right. Consequently, if you can afford it, you send your children to a fee-paying private school, because America’s public schools are a disgrace. I would wager that the majority of Trump’s working-class supporters attended public schools, where they might have learned to read and write, and perform simple arithmetic, but they would not have learned how to construct an argument or how to separate fact from bullshit.

The second problem is with the constitution, in particular the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech is a noble ideal, but it is no accident that Fox News is banned in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, because it presents a biased, radical, right-wing take on events. But there are far worse outlets that are permitted under the first amendment. One America News Network (OANN) is now Donald Trump’s favourite news channel, mainly because he no longer considers Fox News sufficiently supportive. The problem is that people who watch these channels don’t watch any others, so their political views are constantly being reinforced in a perpetual echo chamber.

And what about Alex Jones’ Infowars channel, which focuses on promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon and the notion that the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012 was a stunt staged by actors? Of course, the conspiracy theorist-in-chief is Donald Trump himself, who regularly accuses an imaginary ‘deep state’ of trying to undermine him and his policies.

At the same time, Trump constantly berates news outlets of which he disapproves, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, which have the temerity to point out that many of his statements are false, as ‘fake news’. Following his lead, Trump supporters then complain that responsible news outlets like these should not be criticizing his gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic but should instead be focusing on his ‘accomplishments’, of which there are none.

There are no easy remedies for the malaise that afflicts America, but Joe Biden can make a start by appointing someone who actually understands education as secretary of education rather than the present holder of that office, whose only credentials for the job were that her family has made billions of dollars running fee-paying charter schools. Although it is probably a bridge too far, I would also tear up the constitution, because a genuine democracy doesn’t need one. The American constitution didn’t prevent a self-regarding, narcissistic demagogue from becoming president. And fundamental human rights don’t need to be enshrined on a piece of paper. They should simply be understood.

banana republics

I imagine that most people will have some idea of what constitutes a banana republic. Countries such as Zimbabwe, which was ruled by a geriatric dictator for decades, or Venezuela, which despite huge oil reserves has seen a mass exodus of its population following the misrule of an incompetent demagogue backed by the country’s military, or Guatemala, where violent street gangs dominate the social landscape. There may not be a hard and fast definition, but an element of misrule would form part of that definition.

This leads me to what may, at first glance, seem like a mere trivia question: what is the world’s largest banana republic? I nominate the United States of America! This may appear to be an utterly outrageous assertion, but take a closer look. The following table presents a hypothetical situation, but it is an attempt to explain what is happening with increasing frequency in states where the Republican Party controls the legislature:

In this hypothetical ‘state’, which returns ten members to the House of Representatives, there are 1,000 eligible voters, 600 of whom habitually vote for the Democratic Party and 400 for the Republican Party (first row). However, the way district boundaries have been drawn—and redrawn—78 Democratic voters have been located in each of four districts (second row). This leaves just 288 voters to be divided between six districts (48 per district), while there are 312 voters, 52 in each of the six districts, who will vote Republican (fourth row). The result is that the Republican Party has six representatives in Congress, while the Democratic Party has just four. And a map of the congressional districts looks like a colony of sea urchins on steroids. There’s a word for this: it’s called gerrymandering.

If this sounds outrageous, it is. But there’s more. Poor people are more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate, so polling stations are frequently located in places that are not easy to reach by people who don’t have a car. Also, in order to make it more difficult for poor people to vote, Republican-controlled states often require potential voters to produce ID such as a driving licence or passport, both of which poor people are disproportionately less likely to possess, before being allowed to cast their ballots.

And what about the most extreme form of ‘voter suppression’? Several Republican-controlled legislatures have recently approved the practice of combing through the electoral rolls and removing names that sound similar on the dubious grounds that they are probably the same person. This practice deliberately targets Black and Hispanic names, the bearers of which are more likely to vote for the Democratic Party. And there appears to be no oversight of this process.

Of course, it is perfectly reasonable to redraw district boundaries to reflect demographic changes, but to leave this task to politicians invites abuse. In the UK, such redrawing is the task of the Electoral Commission, a non-political body, although that doesn’t stop accusations of gerrymandering. However, such charges are without merit, because the changes involve moving constituency boundaries wholesale a few hundred metres in one direction or another, not being deliberately selective as is the case in the hypothetical scenario I’ve outlined above.

And I haven’t mentioned the most egregious aspect of American banana republicanism. Although it had never happened until 2016, the electoral college system was always an accident waiting to happen, because not all votes cast by the public have equal value—the number of electoral college votes wielded by a state is determined by the number of representatives it has in Congress, not by its population, and each state returns two senators, regardless of population. Thanks to this lop-sided system, a mountebank like Donald Trump becomes president despite obtaining three million fewer votes nationwide than his opponent.

I have no hesitation in labelling Donald Trump the worst president to hold that office during my lifetime. But don’t just take my word for it. In February 2018, the New York Times commissioned a poll of 170 US constitutional historians in which they were asked to assign a mark from 0 (failure) through 50 (average) to 100 (great) for all 44 American presidents. The average mark for Abraham Lincoln was 95 and for George Washington 93, while Donald Trump scored just 12, which placed him bottom of the list. Even Republican scholars placed him in the bottom five.

It’s easy to see why. Instead of owning up when he makes a mistake, which he does with alarming frequency (cf. the Central Park Five, or his insistence that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States—a requirement for anyone who wants the job), he invariably blames an imaginary ‘deep state’ conspiracy to unseat him, or laughs it off as ‘fake news’. From loudly denigrating war heroes such as John McCain to pardoning war criminals, from pardoning friends who have been duly convicted of criminal offences to actually offering pardons to the friends of potential campaign donors, from appointing members of his family to important jobs in the White House, despite their lacking both experience and qualifications, to appointing campaign donors with no prior diplomatic experience as ambassadors around the world while criticizing foreign service professionals who actually know what they’re doing, his oft-stated mantra of ‘America first’ should be restated as ‘me first’.

And if you think that he’s doing a great job, just ask him:

In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.

Speech to the 2018 United Nations General Assembly.

His administration has certainly succeeded in obliterating environmental and consumer protections, not to mention withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, but all these were driven by Trump’s deep hatred of his predecessor, who, incidentally, was placed eighth in the all-time list in the NYT survey I cited above with an average score of 71. And to describe any of these as accomplishments is downright laughable, which is the response he received from his audience at the UN when he made this ridiculous boast.

And I would also like to enquire: when is he actually doing his job? Sounding off incessantly on Twitter, where he plays the role of the classic playground bully, or watching Fox News for hours, or playing golf almost every weekend, doesn’t count. And neither does conducting campaign rallies for the 2020 election, which he has been doing since the early months of his presidency, something that no other president during my lifetime ever did. Some of these rallies have been truly disgusting. As an example, I would cite the time when he encouraged the crowd to chant ‘lock her up!’ about the poor woman who testified that Brett Kavanagh, Trump’s clearly unsuitable nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her when both were in high school.

Mention of the Supreme Court reminds me that the Republican Party refused to even consider Barack Obama’s nominee for the court, simply because it could. Now, in the current impeachment inquiry, Republicans are claiming that the president ‘did nothing wrong’, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Not only did he seek to gain a political advantage by pressuring Ukraine into investigating a political rival, he also compromised American security by withholding military aid, which would have been deployed against Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country. Some Republican lawmakers have even complained that none of the witnesses in the impeachment inquiry are elected officials, as if this somehow invalidates their testimony.

Vladimir Putin clearly knew what he was doing when he authorized interference in the 2016 election, which Trump has persistently and without evidence blamed on Ukraine. However, I’ve written previously that Vlad the Bad is a shrewd political operator, which Trump is not. Far from ‘making America great again’, he has been gradually turning the United States into an international pariah, which, after all, is the ultimate definition of a banana republic.

on democracy

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Winston Churchill.

People often remember a well-known quotation for the wrong reasons. A good example is Hamlet’s phrase: “More honour’d in the breach than the observance”. The modern interpretation, invariably by people who have little knowledge of Shakespeare and no understanding of the context in which the phrase is uttered, takes ‘honour’d’ merely to mean ‘obeyed’ or ‘observed’, and it is used as a rather pretentious way to describe a rule or ritual that is usually ignored. However, the original context makes it clear that Hamlet actually did consider it honourable not to follow a custom.

Churchill’s views on democracy have been similarly misrepresented. His best-known quote on the subject is frequently taken to be a backhanded compliment towards democracy, but it can also be seen as a cynical admission that democracy isn’t quite as good an idea as its proponents claim it to be. It has limitations, one of which was also pinpointed by Churchill:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Given that Churchill was a man who chose his words carefully, we can be sure that they mean what he intended them to mean, so it’s probably worth looking at ‘all the others that have been tried’. I’ll start by going back 10,000 years or so to the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, and the advantages accruing to human social groups who abandoned hunter-gathering for food production based on arable farming. The key advantage of such systems is that not everyone needs to be involved in food production, thus freeing some members of a social group to specialize in a range of other activities that will ultimately be beneficial to the development of that group, such as pottery, carpentry and, later, metallurgy.

This would have worked well in villages and small towns, although it would also have involved someone taking charge and making the decisions about who did what. With the rise of city-states in the Middle East, the Indus valley and China, this division of labour would have eventually given rise to a problem: irrigation agriculture means that a relatively small proportion of a population is required to produce food, so it would have become possible for some men to enter essentially useless occupations such as that of a priest, philosopher or soldier.

Another by-product of this move to cities supported by systematically organized agriculture was writing. The motive behind the development of all writing, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Babylonian cuneiform to Chinese characters, is the need to keep records, although it quickly became apparent to those in charge that this new invention could usefully be employed for self-aggrandisement. And writing also had another use: it separated those who could read and write, an educated elite, from those who could do neither of these things and were thus dependent on the elite for instructions. It should be noted that this state of affairs persisted in Europe until the Reformation: the Bible used by the Roman Catholic church was in Latin, which only the priest understood.

However, the crucial function of writing has been the ability to pass information on to succeeding generations. We can see how difficult this process can be if we examine a culture without writing, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, who did develop an elaborate system for passing on their knowledge. Unfortunately, this was lore relating only to survival in the hostile environment that they found themselves in. There was no room in such a system for knowledge that might transcend the situation of its progenitor, like Euclid’s geometry or the philosophy of Confucius.

Writing also gives us a record of who did what and when it happened. Of course, the further back we go the sketchier that picture becomes, but the paradigm for governance in the earliest civilizations seems to have been a more or less despotic monarchy backed up by military might. In fact, the very raison d’être of the early empires seems to have been warfare and conquest, and the most rapacious of these, the Roman Empire, in retrospect can be seen as little more than a gigantic extortion racket enforced by a huge standing army. This is why, in the end, it collapsed, bankrupt. However, echoes of this tradition continued well into the twentieth century, and we may yet find that the tradition is not extinct.

While writing propels the intellectual heart of a culture, it is through technology that a culture is usually judged to have advanced. From machines used to raise water to irrigate fields to the earliest uses of the wheel and the forging of weapons of war, the men whose job it was to make these objects would have, from practical experience, developed ways to improve the end-product. And, where there was a need, to make new products. It is my hunch that such innovations were far more frequent under ‘liberal’ regimes where practical men were left to get on with their jobs and saw a personal benefit in turning out better, more efficient products. However, despite the degree of personal freedom that this scenario implies, such a regime cannot be regarded as democratic in any modern sense. The concept and the word ‘democracy’ derive from Attic Greek, and they commemorate political arrangements in Athens in the fifth century BC, but these arrangements were not genuinely democratic, specifically because they excluded women, and fifth-century Athens, like other city-states of the time, was a slave-owning society.

At the same time, in China, a different political system was being developed. Its architect was Confucius. The Confucian system is a hierarchical system, with the emperor at the top of the pyramid and women at the bottom, but although this form of social organization bears a striking resemblance to mediæval feudalism in Europe, it is as ludicrous to suggest a connection here as it is to conclude that any modern ‘democracy’ has been influenced by Athens in the fifth century BC.

While feudalism can be regarded as the pinnacle of organization for a society that is based ultimately on agriculture, for those at the bottom of the pile, conditions were little different from outright slavery. Nominally, a serf could rely on the lord of the manor for protection, but it was a one-sided arrangement in which the serf had no say. And underpinning the entire system was religion: in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church had almost as much authority as the state, with separate courts in many countries to try ecclesiastical malefactors and its own system of taxation. The practice of giving one-tenth of one’s income to the church is still encouraged in the modern era by fundamentalist Protestant sects, which promote the giving of tithes as a religious duty.

For most of the period during which agriculture was the foundation of a society, there was a competing form of social organization, one that was constantly in conflict with settled agriculturalists. Nomads, especially the horsemen of Central Asia, didn’t have cities, towns and villages to protect, and they were frequently belligerent towards neighbouring civilizations. However, nomadism is ultimately a dead end: after his grandfather Genghis Khan had conquered much of China and Central Asia, Kubilai Khan completed the conquest of the former and settled down as emperor of a new dynasty. Descendants of another Mongol, Tamerlane, founded the Mughal Empire in northern India, while the Israelites forsook their wanderings to settle down in Canaan, although in this case they constructed an elaborate myth to explain how and to justify why they had done so given that 'the promised land' was only ’flowing with milk and honey' because someone else was already farming there.

Throughout this period, information continued to be disseminated by writing, a slow and laborious process where large amounts of information were involved. And it remained the case that few people could read what was being written, partly because the amount of written material available was small. This changed in 1439 with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. It is true that woodblock printing had been developed in China a thousand years earlier, but Gutenberg’s crucial innovation was the use of movable cast-metal type, which offered improved flexibility and the capability to turn out more printed material more quickly.

Printing turned out to be only the first event in a period of upheaval and change in Europe that took more than three centuries to unfold. The prime mover of these changes was Martin Luther, whose challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic church triggered the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty-Years War. Encouraging people to read the Bible for themselves in their own language rather than relying on the official interpretation provided by a priest may have seemed intellectually liberating, but during Luther’s lifetime, William Tyndale was burned at the stake for heresy, his ‘crime’ being to translate the Bible into English. Religion is essentially anti-democratic, because there is no room for individualism.

Of course, the previous statement begs a crucial question: what is democracy? In technical terms, democracy is rule by the demos, the people, but as I’ve already pointed out, the original demos excluded women and slaves. The interesting point here is that every country likes to pretend that its system of governance is democratic. Why else would the former East Germany style itself ‘the German Democratic Republic’, or North Korea pretend to be ‘the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’, when by any conceivable definition neither would qualify as a democracy?

The usual criteria for defining a democracy aren’t much more enlightening:

1. The ‘rule of law’: whatever laws a polity has chosen to enact, they apply to everybody.
2. An independent judiciary: judges must have no political allegiances.
3. A free press: it is of crucial importance that the news media is free to criticize the actions of political leaders.
4. A non-violent mechanism for removing political leaders, such as regular elections in which everyone over a specified age has a say in the outcome.

Most people would consider this list to be an adequate description/definition of a democracy, but in my opinion, there is one criterion that, if not met, disqualifies a country from any claim to belong to this club. A country may determine its leaders by majority vote, but that country is not a democracy unless it respects the right of its citizens to disagree without suffering persecution. Respect for the rights and opinions of minorities may be the crucial factor that defines whether a country is or is not a democracy.

Also, the ‘rule of law’ is a widely misunderstood concept. That no one is above the law, that the law applies to all, regardless of status, is the popularly understood definition of the concept. However, for it to be genuine, the rule of law requires much more than this. What, for example, is the role of the police in a society that aspires to be democratic? When Sir Robert Peel, as British home secretary, established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, he would have been aware that the move was deeply unpopular with large sections of London’s population, which is why the roles and duties of individual policemen were defined so closely in a policing model that came to be known as ‘policing by consent’.

The phrase ‘regular elections’ also comes with an important caveat. In the UK, for example, it’s possible for a political party to gain a huge majority in the House of Commons despite securing less than 40 percent of the votes cast in an election. This is the inevitable result of the so-called first-past-the-post system, which is egregiously anti-democratic. The USA has a similarly anti-democratic system in its electoral college, which has the bizarre effect of making the opinion of a rural voter worth twice that of a city-dweller. This is why, despite securing 3 million fewer votes in the last presidential election than his rival, Donald Trump came out on top.

The fact that Trump is a career criminal who belongs in prison isn’t relevant to the democracy debate, except that he appears to believe that US laws don’t apply to him. In addition, he has violated #2 by recommending a blatantly unsuitable candidate for the US Supreme Court, and #3 with his endless tirades against the mainstream news media as ‘fake news’. I predict that should he be convicted in the current impeachment saga—and he should be, on the evidence that I’ve seen—he will not go quietly, thus also violating #4. In other words, Trump is a demagogue, not a democrat.

He won’t be convicted though, because for this to happen two-thirds of the Senate has to vote in favour, and thanks to another anti-democratic feature of the US electoral system—that every state returns two senators, regardless of population—the Republican Party will always have enough senators to block any move to convict.

At this point, it should be obvious that democracy is a chimera. While some countries are not democratic by any conceivable yardstick—Russia and China are obvious examples—neither India nor Pakistan qualify according to the criteria that I outlined above, despite the former enjoying the label ‘the world’s largest democracy’. Try being a Muslim in a country run by Hindu nationalists! Or a Christian in Pakistan, where blasphemy is a capital offence. It’s the baleful anti-democratic influence of religion again.

However, it’s the attitude of ordinary citizens that ultimately determines a country’s ‘tendency’. The result of the Brexit referendum three years ago was a victory for xenophobia and intolerance, both of which are antithetical to democracy. There is no reason to believe that the ‘blood and soil’ nationalism that inspired the Leave vote and the election of Donald Trump will disappear anytime soon.

further reading
Democratic Deficit
Send in the Clowns

toad in a hole

There was an old toad called Nigel Farage,
Who couldn’t get his car out of the garage.
 He blamed the EU
 For this silly to-do,
Saying, “I’d rather have a cart than a carriage!”

the dunning–kruger effect

In 1999, two academics from Cornell University in the United States, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with the title ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’. The so-called Dunning–Kruger effect has since become an established trope in the field of psychology, although most people outside that field have probably never heard of it. However, the conclusions reached by this pair have never been more relevant.

The authors begin by relating the story of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed two banks in Pittsburgh on a single day in 1995 in broad daylight. He was arrested that evening, less than an hour after footage from surveillance cameras was broadcast on the local evening news. When police showed him that footage, Wheeler was incredulous.

“But I wore the juice!” he muttered.

Apparently, he was under the impression that smearing his face with lemon juice would render him invisible to video cameras. I think that I can guess what gave him this idea—lemon juice can be used as a primitive form of invisible ink—but to believe that it would render him invisible to video cameras betrays a level of ignorance that beggars belief.

The authors then make three points. The first two are probably uncontroversial: (1) in many areas of life, success depends on knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue; and (2) people differ in the knowledge and strategies that they apply in these situations. The third point, which is more likely to evoke skepticism, is that when people are incompetent in the strategies that they adopt to achieve success, they suffer a double blow: not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and therefore make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence deprives them of the ability to realize their mistakes. Or, as Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

One example used by Dunning and Kruger is the ability to determine whether a given sentence is grammatically correct. If a person’s knowledge of grammar is incomplete or incorrect, then such an assessment would be impossible. Another example is the widely reported ‘above average’ phenomenon: when people are asked to assess their ability in a given task, more than half of those polled rate themselves as ‘above average’, which is of course mathematically impossible. Both are perfect examples of what psychologists call ‘cognitive bias’.

The current relevance of this concept should now be obvious: the present occupant of the White House clearly thinks that he’s a genius when he is probably of below average intelligence. The fact he has stated that he is more likely to trust his ‘gut instinct’ than the opinion of an expert merely confirms that diagnosis. And the possible consequences of such arrogance are likely to be beyond his ability to comprehend.

For example, it is doubtful that he is aware of what happened the last time tariffs were imposed on goods imported into the USA on the draconian scale he has implemented. The Smoot–Hawley tariffs, named after the Utah senator and Oregon congressman who sponsored them, were signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in 1930. And while they may not have actually caused the Depression of the 1930s, they certainly made it much worse than it otherwise would have been.

There is also an echo of that period in the pre-Christmas turmoil on global stock markets; the Wall Street crash of 1929 didn’t cause the Depression either, but it was predicated on irresponsible speculation, and it did lead to a drying up of credit, thereby aggravating the economic situation at the time. So trade wars are a good thing, are they Mr Trump?

And because fools don’t understand nuance, this buffoon has decided to pull the 2,000 US troops currently in Syria out of the country on the grounds that Islamic State has been defeated (and he can take the credit). No it hasn’t! The kind of poisonous ideology espoused by these perverts may have suffered a military setback, but its attractiveness to a small minority of Muslims will take much longer to eradicate. And he is too stupid to realize that President Erdogan of Turkey is rubbing his hands at the chance to go after the Kurds in northeast Syria without interference from the USA. There is a moral aspect to this situation too: as President Macron of France has commented, albeit less crudely, you don’t shit on your allies.

There is another aspect of the Dunning–Kruger effect that I haven’t mentioned thus far: if a person is functionally incompetent, not only are they unable to recognize that failing in themselves; they fail to see it in other people too. Trump supporters: take note.

penrith strategic disaster plan

Penrith is currently being roiled by a document put out by the local council under the title ‘The Penrith Strategic Masterplan’. I haven’t spoken to anyone who is in favour of this ludicrous proposal, and there is already organized opposition. So there should be! This preposterous ‘plan’ involves building more than 5,000 new houses in the most environmentally sensitive area of the town. The map below, taken from the glossy booklet that was published by Eden District Council last month, outlines the plan.

The three orange areas will be ‘new villages’, and the broken red line will be a major new road through the area. The broken blue lines are labelled ‘improvements to existing roads’. The problem is that between these developments and the rest of Penrith there is a low sandstone hill. The natural vegetation here would have been heathland (heather and bilberry), but for all my lifetime there has been a commercial forest (the green area southwest of the centre of the map). In fact, the hill has been exploited for timber since the nineteenth century, as the following photo indicates:

And this is what it looks like now, as viewed from Castle Park:

The hill is known locally as ‘Penrith Beacon’, ‘Beacon Pike’ or simply ‘the Beacon’. The name derives from the centuries-old practice of lighting a bonfire on the top of the hill to warn the locals that another raiding party of cattle rustlers and sundry other scoundrels was on its way from southern Scotland to pillage the area. This practice, in turn, is now commemorated by the Beacon Tower, built in 1719:

The tower used to stand proud years ago, but it isn’t easy to spot now that the trees have matured (I added a red arrow on the photo above to indicate its position). When I first moved away from Penrith to work, I used to look out for the Beacon and its tower from the train window every time I came back. It was a comfortable reassurance that I was ‘almost home’. I suspect that I would not be alone in this feeling.

And the area around the summit of the hill has always been openly accessible. When I was growing up, ‘going up the Beacon’ was an adventure. And when the season was right, we used to go there to pick bleaberries, as I imagine thousands of others have done over the years. I still remember that it seemed to take thousands of these tiny berries to make a full-size pasty. I did wonder whether children still see the Beacon in this way, given the myriad distractions afforded by modern technology, but I attended a rally yesterday organized by a newly formed pressure group, Friends of Penrith Beacon. A 14-year-old girl told the assembled crowd of several hundred about her encounters with deer and other wildlife, building a den and other things that I recall from my own childhood.

Here are some photographs that I took during the rally:

There were five separate rallying points, from where protesters would converge on the churchyard of the local parish church. The first photo shows the arrival of the contingent that set off from the start of the access path up the Beacon; the second shows Mr Iain Dawson, chairman of Friends of Penrith Beacon, who spoke eloquently of the many flaws in the plan; and the third is a general view of the crowd.

I don’t propose to analyse the masterplan in minute detail, but I will point out some obvious causes for concern. The first is the effect on wildlife. Most of the area around Penrith is farmland, which is a hostile environment for most wildlife, but the Beacon is much more biodiverse. In addition to roe deer, there are foxes, badgers and squirrels, not to mention snakes and lizards. This plan will not merely be disruptive; the present ecosystem will be almost totally destroyed.

My next concern is that with all the new development, there will be a huge increase in paved areas and thus more run-off in wet weather. I hear that the intention is for both drainage and sewage to be piped through the town’s existing systems, which will not be able to cope—they are already close to capacity—so the risk of flooding in the centre of Penrith is likely to increase.

Not mentioned at all in the current plan is the likely fate of Cowraik Quarry, another adventure playground for local children, which is located to the east of the Beacon itself. Cowraik is a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) because of the excellent examples of dune bedding—Penrith sandstone is a desert sandstone—that are visible in some of the quarried faces.

It wasn’t until I looked closely at the map that I noticed two ‘roads’ through the forest that have been earmarked for ‘improvements’. These are not roads; they are forestry tracks! Improvements here will merely provide access to the most objectionable part of the proposed development, which I discuss next.

However, without doubt the most egregious proposal in the plan is indicated by the light green area on the map in the middle of the currently forested area. In the legend, this is identified as

Proposed Low Density Mixed Use Development Set Within Woodland Framework

In case you didn’t spot the verbal legerdemain being deployed here, this is simply code for ‘houses for rich people’. Presumably anything developed here will not be visible from Castle Park, but you won’t be able to avoid seeing whatever is built here if you go up the Beacon in the future. In fact, this development appears likely to encroach on what is and always has been (in my lifetime) a community resource: the open area around Beacon Tower.

I should say that having a strategic plan for the future is intrinsically a good idea. The booklet points out the steady decline in Penrith’s working-age population, which the council clearly hopes the masterplan will address. The booklet talks optimistically about attracting higher-paid jobs to Penrith but doesn’t say how this will be achieved. In fact, it may be impossible. There will always be opportunities for professionals—accountants, doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc.—but Penrith has and always has had a service economy. The masterplan discusses promoting Penrith as a regional distribution centre because of its transport links, but this doesn’t translate into ‘higher-paid jobs’. There are no high-tech industries here that might want to employ graduates. In fact, the only thing Penrith actually produces is scores of well-educated adolescents each year who go off to college or university and don’t come back. Of all the people who left Penrith to go to university from the local grammar school the same year I did, only two came back (I was able to work out a way to come back in 1989 after more than 20 years working in various places around the world). This is one of the reasons for the decline in the town’s working-age population, the other being that Penrith has become a popular location for people from other areas to retire to.

Quite apart from my rejection of this utterly crass plan on the grounds that I’ve outlined above, I foresee possibly decades of disruption in and around Penrith once construction begins in earnest. It must never be allowed to happen.

And I’ve avoided asking the most obvious question:

Who benefits?

Or, as Woodward and Bernstein were advised, follow the money.

american nightmare

So the American electorate has spoken, and to my mind it hasn’t just shot itself in the foot. To maintain the shooting analogy—and the president-elect is no supporter of gun control—that electorate has just performed a blowjob on a .44 Magnum, which, as ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan has pointed out, “is the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off”. Somebody wasn’t paying attention.

I am utterly incredulous that a self-declared sexual pervert, a blatant misogynist and an overt racist could take in so many people, but Donald Trump has clearly tapped into the rich lode of disillusion with the status quo that many Americans feel. I wonder whether he will remember Abraham Lincoln’s famous dictum:

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

speech delivered in Clinton, Illinois, on 8th September 1854.

Trump made quite a few wild promises in the run-up to the election, and some of these will be next to impossible to fulfill. Take his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border and to make Mexico pay for it. I imagine that a lot of people will have taken him at his word, but I wonder how many of them are aware that America couldn’t afford to build it, and even if it could, when asked to stump up the cash Mexico would simply tell him to get stuffed.

And what about his promise to deport the 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States? The US economy would collapse if he ever succeeded in that endeavour. There are millions of menial jobs in that economy that white Americans are simply not prepared to do, particularly in the agricultural sector. As for all the jobs that have been lost in the so-called ‘rust belt’, where Trump clearly had a huge amount of support, the unemployed blue-collar workers there will quickly become disgruntled when they see that they’ve been sold a pig in a poke. Manufacturers will always make their products where it is cheapest to do so, the upshot being that the jobs lost there are gone for ever.

As for his boast that he will best China in trade, I can only say that I’d like to see him try. He might make some headway if he were to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, but I would expect him to regard such a course of action with disdain. After all, he has claimed, in his book The Art of the Deal, that “I understand the Chinese mind”. It takes a peculiar species of arrogance to make such a claim, which I would never make, even though I’ve spent most of the last 43 years in Hong Kong. In fact, Trump is a geopolitical dunce who will be out-manoeuvred at every turn by the Chinese—and also by Vladimir Putin, about whom he has spoken so favourably. However, Putin is a shrewd political operator who will eat a President Trump for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Trump has also called for Muslims to be barred from the United States “until someone can figure out what the hell is going on”. I would have thought it obvious: what is going on is that a group with an extreme fundamentalist interpretation of Islam has set itself up in the vacuum created by his predecessor’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq 13 years ago and will do whatever it takes to spread their poisonous ideology throughout the world. And “bombing the hell out of IS” will not resolve the problem.

In fact, I would be surprised if Trump even understands the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, even though that difference is crucial to what is going on in the Middle East. So the West, collectively, supports Saudi Arabia, one of the most reactionary and repressive regimes on the planet, while demonizing Iran, which has good reason to hate America and distrust its motives. From the Anglo-American coup d’état in 1953 that toppled Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, to George W. Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002, which cemented hardliners in power and marginalized moderates in the Iranian regime—even though Iranian moderates had facilitated American entry into Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks—America has got it wrong with respect to Iran. And Donald Trump has said that he will tear up the recently concluded agreement with Iran on nuclear development, presumably to appease Israel. That would be a huge error of judgement.

We have already heard what Trump thinks of Mexicans (“rapists”), but he also plans to row back on the progress made by President Obama in normalizing US/Cuba relations, although whether this is because he hates Obama or whether this is merely because he despises Latinos—or both—is a moot point.

Of course, many will see the story of Donald Trump as the embodiment of the American dream—a self-made billionaire who made it all the way to the White House—but beyond the glitz and glamour it’s worth taking a much closer look. As a businessman, he filed for bankruptcy no fewer than four times, although he claims that this kind of procedure is common in business, and he was smart to do so. In other words, having run up massive debts, he was able to hide behind the law to avoid repaying those debts, while those to whom he owed money, including employees and small subcontractors, lost out. That doesn’t make you smart Mr Trump; it makes you a crook and a swindler.

As for the so-called American dream: I’m reminded of an email that my cousin Dave sent me a few years ago:

I sometimes think that Americans are particularly prone to a belief in the good intentions of their leaders because of their particularly idiotic belief in the ‘American Dream’, which I believe is the greatest control device and negative feedback cycle any political system ever created. Basically, anyone can make it in America. If you don’t then for a variety of reasons it’s your fault, and to bitch about the failure and the system demonstrates your weakness. And worse, it’s un-American.

Anyway, I’m not American, so I can close this diatribe by reminding you of one of my favourite words: schadenfreude, a mischievous delight in the misfortune of others. There was only one thing that Mr Trump got right in his entire election campaign: America is no longer great. And how ever hard he tries, he will not make it great again. America is in terminal decline, and it has just elected a carnival barker as its next president.

the apple tree needs shaking

In August 1985, I wrote to the South China Morning Post to express my outrage at the attempts to suppress democracy that were taking place in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the signing of the Joint Declaration between China and the UK. Following the pro-democracy protests in the territory in 2014, I tried to locate that letter the next time I was in the UK, without success. However, I did finally manage to find the letter this summer, and given the current crisis and the likely interference in Hong Kong’s affairs by the Chinese government, I reproduce it here.

*  *  *

If I say that Mr Chuan Kou is an enemy of democracy, it is because he has chosen to write in such a vague, cloudy style that I could have mistaken his meaning. Indeed, were it not for the fact that somewhere in a mass of undigested verbiage he was probably trying to say something important, I would not have spent several hours trying to excavate a meaning. Out of the jumble of clichés, mixed metaphors, non sequiturs and general absurdity, I can select only a few remarks for comment, and if I have taken these out of context and thereby misapprehended his intentions, perhaps Mr Chuan will enlighten me in due course.

In the first place, ‘one country, two systems’ is not a political innovation. It is a catchphrase. And like all catchphrases it has a fine sound but means little—or, rather, what meaning it does contain is deeply buried. It is worth taking a closer look. What are the two systems? Most people will probably feel, instinctively, that they are democracy and totalitarianism.

Now that it is 1985, it may be considered passé to quote George Orwell, but nobody has pinpointed the essentially schizophrenic mentality of totalitarianism with greater clarity. In Inside the Whale, he wrote that an adherent may be required to alter his fundamental convictions at a moment’s notice, on pain of damnation. “The unquestionable dogma of Monday becomes the damnable heresy of Tuesday….” And so it does. It has happened several times in China since 1949, and just because China is passing through a relatively liberal phase at present is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. In fact, democracy and totalitarianism are fundamentally incompatible.

Is it not more likely that the two systems are socialism and capitalism? This presents far fewer problems, because capitalism can flourish as well under fascism as it can under a democratic government. It is not simply that Taiwan and South Korea enjoy American military protection that has allowed them to remain independent for more than 30 years. The communists can bide their time, safe in the knowledge that whatever ideological re-education is necessary when the time comes, the eradication of democratic habits of thought will not be a serious problem.

With his references to “budding politicians and public affairs activists…jumping on the bandwagon”, and sinister threats, as in “Hong Kong people…showing with facts that they know how to behave”, Mr Chuan seems to mistake the silence of the majority for approval, while those who speak out are saboteurs, wreckers or meddlesome fools.

Mr Hilton Cheong-Leen, in a recent report covering his candidacy for the forthcoming Legco elections, talked about “consensus…the Chinese way”, which is another way of saying the same thing, reinforced by an appeal to Chinese nationalist sentiments and an implicit put-down of the confrontational politics of the West.

However, there are at least four possible reasons for the deafening silence with which Hong Kong people greet almost every major issue: (1) they approve of whatever is happening and feel that no further comment is needed; (2) they do not approve but feel that protest is pointless; (3) they do not care; and (4) they do not understand the issues involved.

Anyone who believes the first reason is also capable of believing that the current Umelco [unofficial members of the Executive and Legislative Councils] represents the broad mass of the people. Of the other three, the fourth is a strong contender. Coming from a society in which political consciousness is part of one’s way of life, I’m bound to say that the lack of political awareness in Hong Kong is appalling. However, my inclination is to attribute the quietism of Hong Kong’s people to a mixture of hopelessness, apathy and ignorance, the proportions varying from person to person.

The problem is this: how can this situation be reconciled with the establishment of democracy? The short answer is that it cannot. A passive population is a godsend to both the dictator and the revolutionary (and, it might be added, to the bureaucrat). Far from telling people to shut up Mr Chuan, I suggest that you encourage them to ask questions. Why is this happening? What will be the result? Who will benefit? And, most important of all: what can I do?

This brings the argument full circle, because one thing the average citizen can do is to query the utterances of public figures. Referring back to the story on Mr Cheong-Leen, I quote: “But I know when to stand up and be counted.” This sentence is meaningless. It is also too much of a cliché to be counted a neat piece of rhetoric, but to the politically innocent it is a fine-sounding statement, which is why it was made in the first place.

My natural instinct is to ask: when? A politician must be judged on his or her record, not on a vague statement of intent, and it is a fact that compared with his challenger, Mrs Elsie Elliott, Mr Cheong-Leen is not in the same universe. If the test of an honourable politician is someone who is not afraid to make enemies, even of those who are in a position to retaliate with some savagery, then Mrs Elliott may qualify as the only honourable politician in the territory.

And this brings me to another statement from the same story, an unattributed quote that I thought was quite irresponsibly placed near the top of the story. It was suggested that Mrs Elliott was too old and too radical to be an effective legislative councillor. This comment turns on the word ‘radical’, which in Hong Kong appears to have the connotations of a swear word. I can only say that far from being to her detriment, this is Mrs Elliott’s strong point: she has never been afraid to speak out on anything that she considers an injustice.

Imagine this: we could be on the edge of a historic watershed, the appearance of a legislative assembly that actually holds debates! The important point is not whether she is right or wrong. The freedom to disagree is crucial to the spirit of democracy. The key is that issues are discussed, which brings me back to Mr Chuan Kou.

If he really does believe that “a vociferous minority has churned up lots of idealistic but unrealistic claptrap”, then he does not believe in debate, and his later reference to Mao’s ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement, apparently self-contradictory, is in reality something of a giveaway. After all, the original of that reference was no more than a clever little trap to smoke out ‘unreliable’ elements in the Chinese Communist Party.

And Mr Chuan is certainly in distinguished company. Miss Maria Tam, for example, must be one of the most powerful opponents of democracy in Hong Kong. It should not be forgotten that she opposed direct elections to Legco on the grounds that it could throw up ‘unsuitable’ candidates. (For those who missed the earlier lesson in doublespeak, ‘unsuitable’ in this context means politically ‘unreliable’, which is itself a euphemism for having genuine popular support). And it was Miss Tam who played a major role in steamrolling the Powers and Privileges Bill through Legco recently. Pious protestations to the contrary, this had nothing to do with democracy; it was a vital step in the creation of a self-perpetuating oligarchy. It is to be counted a huge stroke of luck that enough people saw through this particular scam for it not to work.

Unfortunately, Hong Kong is going to need much more than luck if anything that even remotely resembles democracy is to appear before 1997. (We can take it as read that if not before, there is no chance after.) I do not begin to claim that I have all the answers, or even some of them, but if this letter forces people to think, then it will have served its purpose.

In the meantime, we should see that a catchphrase like ‘maintaining the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong’ is just that—a catchphrase, a rallying cry for those who have a vested interest in retaining the present system of patronage and privilege, and a subtle admonition that to speak out could mean shaking the apple tree. Well, I say shake the damned tree! Although it could turn out to be quite a shock when we discover just how much fruit is already rotten.

breaking wind

I don’t know how many Americans know this, but ‘trump’ is a genteel British English term for ‘fart’. Sound appropriate? The Republican candidate for US president, Donald Trump, is probably, by a considerable distance, the worst nominee for US president by one of the country’s main political parties in my lifetime. Yet his chances of winning the election on 8th November are not negligible, because his opponent is probably the worst Democratic nominee for president since her husband 20 years ago.

However, it is on Mr Fart that I want to concentrate. His attitude to women (and young girls) may be thoroughly disgusting; his calling his opponent ‘crooked’ may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black; his economic illiteracy may be lamentable; and his lack of understanding of geopolitics may be deplorable; but it his scientific credentials, or lack of them, that is the biggest cause for concern. Take his attitude to global warming:

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

Twitter, 6th November 2012.

This fatuous comment is on a par with his recent claim that Mexico has been ‘stealing American jobs’. No it hasn’t! Manufacturing in the USA is simply too expensive, and if he’d been in the business of making things instead of running hotels and casinos, he would probably have been the first to move his factories south of the border. However, the following tweets on climate mark him as a total ignoramus:

NBC News just called it the great freeze — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?

Twitter, 25th January 2014.

Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!

Twitter, 29th January 2014.

Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air — not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense.

Twitter, 29th January 2014.

I never had much time for former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, but she did have a science degree (chemistry), and I feel sure that she would have called him out on this outrageous line in bullshit. She would certainly have pointed out that the science is incontrovertible Mr Fart, but as she is no longer with us, allow me to explain instead.

First, I should point out that to describe the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a ‘greenhouse effect’ is misleading. It should instead be described as an enhanced greenhouse effect, because water vapour in the atmosphere also has a warming effect. In fact, were it not for the presence, throughout Earth’s history, of this water vapour in the atmosphere, the planet would be uninhabitable, because the global average temperature would be around –20 degrees Celsius.

The mechanism by which this warming effect is created is clearly understood. The shape of a molecule (of water, carbon dioxide, methane, etc.) means that it blocks radiation at most wavelengths, but it does allow radiation through in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This radiation then heats up the various surfaces of the planet, to a point where no more radiation can be absorbed and the surplus is re-radiated. But, and this is the crucial point, this re-radiated energy is at a longer wavelength, one that is blocked by the very molecules that allowed in the original shorter-wavelength radiation. This means, obviously, that more energy is entering the system than is disappearing back out into space, a fact that is confirmed by NASA’s monitoring satellites.

Now we come to the part that Mr Fart clearly cannot understand. More energy in the system means more turbulence, which in turn means more extremes of temperature and more violence in the weather. If the average global temperature is rising—and it is—then in addition to the places that are experiencing higher than usual temperatures and lower than usual rainfall, there will be places where temperatures are lower than usual and rainfall is higher. And as the planet warms up, these fluctuations will become more and more extreme, so that tropical cyclones, and the winter storms of more temperate latitudes, will be more intense, more violent, and more disruptive.

I’m not religious, but in appealing to American voters to reject this vile mountebank, I can think of nothing better than to quote the Old Testament:

The Philistines be upon thee, Samson.

Judges 16:20 (Authorized Version).

By which time, of course, it was too late.

goodbye-ee!

The British Labour Party is facing a serious existential crisis following the referendum on EU membership and its acrimonious aftermath. I am reminded immediately of the strife unleashed in the party by its drift leftwards in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which led to the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) by the so-called ‘gang of four’ in 1981. These four leading members of the party were especially angered by the decision to include unilateral nuclear disarmament and a desire to leave the European Economic Community (forerunner of the European Union (EU)) in the party’s manifesto for the next general election, which was described at the time as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.

Another similarity with the current situation is that both leaders emerged from the left wing of the party. But Michael Foot was trounced in the general election of 1983, and, based on what I’ve seen, I believe that a party led by Jeremy Corbyn has absolutely no chance of winning the next general election, whenever it is held. Despite having massive support among the party’s grassroots members, Corbyn has no obvious leadership qualities, and I’ve never known a political leader who was so utterly devoid of charisma.

Corbyn is clearly a man of principle—before becoming leader, he voted against the party line in the House of Commons hundreds of times—but I base my assessment of the man not on what he does but on what he says. For example, in November last year, he described the attacks in Paris by members of Daesh as ‘immoral’. He wasn’t wrong, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder why he chose to use such an insipid adjective when many stronger words were available to him (e.g. barbaric, heinous, horrendous). He was at it again in the recent referendum campaign, in which the only thing I heard him say in favour of remaining in the EU related to ‘protecting workers’ rights’. And his refusal to share a platform with Remain campaigners from other parties did not mark him as a man of principle; it merely made him look like an idiot. Overall, his contribution to the debate was decidedly wishy-washy, and his apparent lack of enthusiasm was a serious error of judgement.

He failed to grasp that the principal area of concern for most traditional Labour voters was immigration from other EU countries. And he appears not to have been aware that in neglecting this concern, he was effectively surrendering at least part of this vote to another party, one that was geared-up and ready to step in as the party of choice for working-class voters: the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Had Corbyn been prepared to make an effort to reassure such voters, it is likely that the UK, as a whole, would have voted to remain in the EU.

At first glance, it would appear that a right-wing party representing the working class is an anomaly, but there is a lesson from history here: Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts (i.e. Fascists) enjoyed considerable support in the East End of London—and probably in the poorer areas of other major cities—during the depression of the 1930s. UKIP may not be as overtly racist as the Blackshirts, who were, after all, modelled on the Blackshirts of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, but a strain of xenophobia is an integral part of the party’s ethos.

On the day following the referendum, I listened to Any Questions on BBC Radio 4. For anyone not familiar with this program, which has been running since 1948, it involves four leading politicians, who have been invited onto the show to answer questions from the audience while a chairman tries to maintain order. On this occasion, there was only ever going to be one topic of conversation: the result of the referendum. Naturally, two members of the panel had advocated remaining in the EU in the referendum campaign, while two had campaigned to leave. One of the latter was MEP Steven Woolfe, and from his very first contribution I thought I was listening to a member of the British National Party, a fringe organization that would have been better named the British Nazi Party. Woolfe continually hurled class-based insults at the other members of the panel, whom he characterized as middle-class and out of touch with the electorate. That would chime strongly with the attitudes of many of his target voters.

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Paul Nuttall, deputy leader of UKIP. At one point, after Nuttall had talked about targeting traditional Labour voters, the interviewer asked whether this meant moving the party to the left. Nuttall’s response was succinct—and disarmingly honest.

“Not at all,” he said.

So could it happen? Is the Labour Party on the point of fading into obscurity? There is historical precedent. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the old Liberal Party was the party of choice for working-class voters. And this continued into the twentieth century, but it was then slowly supplanted by the Labour Party, which had been formed in 1900. The last wholly Liberal government came to an end in 1915, although the last Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd-George, continued in office until 1922 as head of a wartime coalition. The party then faded into obscurity, returning only a handful of MPs in the second half of the twentieth century until its fortunes revived slightly following merger with the SDP in 1988.

There is another parallel with the present from the early days of the Labour Party. Its founder, Keir Hardy, suggested that Lithuanian migrant workers in Scottish coal mines had filthy habits, they ate garlic that they fried in oil filched from streetlamps, and they were carriers of the Black Death, comments that would have been more likely to chime with working-class voters of the time than visions of a socialist utopia, as it also seems to have done in the recent referendum.

The Labour Party formed a short-lived minority government in 1924 and another from 1929 to 1931, although it had to wait until 1945 to form a majority government. It last won a general election in 2005. However, the party does not have an automatic right to be either in government or the main opposition party. UKIP may have seemed like a single-issue party that has now achieved its raison d’être, but it is highly unlikely to disband, and I suspect that it is already drawing up its manifesto for the next general election, one that will appeal to working-class voters. It received around 4,000,000 votes in elections for the European Parliament in 2013, and it could easily double that total in the next general election if Jeremy Corbin remains leader of the Labour Party. These are worrying times.

collapso calypso

The European Union (EU) is a moribund organization and is probably now on the verge of collapse. It was once a good idea. The European Coal and Steel Community, formed in 1952, was clearly an attempt to repair the ravages of the Second World War by bringing former enemies into partnership, but its successor, the European Economic Community (EEC), formed in 1958 by the same six countries—Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany—under the terms of the Treaty of Rome, was more than this. It was intended to create a ‘common market’ in goods and services (hence the popular name for the EEC), and it worked. The economies of the six founder members of the EEC forged ahead of the rest of Europe.

However, by the time the first new members had joined the EEC—Denmark, Ireland and the UK in 1973—global economic headwinds such as the oil crisis of 1973 had reduced these initial advantages. Nevertheless, the system still worked, although it was starting to creak. Greece joined the EEC in 1981, yet less than seven years earlier, it had been a military dictatorship. Spain and Portugal joined in 1986; these too had been military dictatorships only a decade earlier. More pertinently, all three countries were peasant economies with limited levels of industrialization, so they were, inevitably, subsidized by the richer countries of northern Europe, although with a community of only twelve countries, this was seen as a positive move, designed to bring the three new entrants up to the same level of prosperity as the existing members.

The rot really set in with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, whereby the EEC became the EU, with its mantra of ‘ever closer union’. An economic bloc became a political entity. On this point, it is worth noting that the European Commission (EC), which should be the EU’s civil service, is in fact the EU’s executive arm. The current president of the EC, Jean-Claude Juncker, was prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013, while his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso, had previously been prime minister of Portugal (2002–4). The commissioners, who oversee the various departments within the EC, are also former politicians. It’s called riding the gravy train.

Three new countries joined in 1995: Austria, Finland and Sweden. One wonders why they waited so long before applying for membership. I must assume that their leaders didn’t anticipate what would happen next. It seemed like a good idea to admit former members of the Warsaw Pact. For citizens of these countries, having lived under the yoke of communism for decades, it must have seemed like liberation. Instead of being shot by border guards, they could now board a train or plane and travel to any other EU country. It was always going to happen that many of these citizens would want not only to visit but also to settle in one of the EU’s richer member countries.

Meanwhile, among the earlier tranche of members rescued from an unpleasant history, Greece is now, economically and politically, a basket case, while Spain has a youth unemployment rate of more than 50 percent. However, what made me think the EU was on the verge of collapsing was the sight of member states on the eastern border of the union closing their borders to keep out refugees from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. I don’t blame the governments of these countries for taking this step, because I have no experience of the threats from the east that the eastern edge of Europe has experienced for the past 2,000 years. I imagine that folk memories of these incursions were behind the decisions to close borders.

You will have guessed by this point that I’m not impressed by the EU. Policy is decided by politicians who have been appointed, not elected, and while it would have continued to work as a trade bloc, it has been a disaster as a political entity. However, my motive for voting for the UK to leave the EU tomorrow has nothing to do with the shortcomings I’ve discussed here. It is the prospect of further expansion. There are six countries in the Balkans that are not yet members of the EU, none of which are particularly prosperous, so they would need extensive support from the union’s richer members.

And then there is Turkey. The accession of Turkey is probably a long way in the future, and things may have changed by the time this happens, but as it stands I have no wish to be part of a political club, one of whose members routinely uses anti-terror legislation to jail journalists who criticize its government. Even worse, the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge—it’s illegal even to discuss the subject—the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians between 1915 and the early 1920s as genocide. It is estimated that 1.5 million Armenians were killed during this period, often in grossly inhuman ways. The excuse at the time—it is still trotted out now—was that the Armenians, being Christian, were ‘the enemy within’. If this were to be considered a reasonable excuse, Nazi apologists could use it to justify the Holocaust.

In fact, a similar thing is happening now. The Kurdish Peshmerga is probably the most effective fighting force against the monsters of Daesh, yet Turkey has been attacking it largely because it is also dealing with a Kurdish insurgency in the east of the country. The Kurds are the new enemy within, and they are revolting because they are not being treated by the central government with either dignity or respect. On the other hand, I could be persuaded to change my mind if Turkey were to get rid of the mountebank who is its president. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a megalomaniac who cannot stand criticism, who is anti-intellectual and who probably sees Christianity and Islam as mutually antagonistic. There is no place for such views in the modern world.

optimistic pessimism

I imagine that most people are familiar with the informal definition of optimists and pessimists: that an optimist would view a glass as half full, while a pessimist would consider the same glass to be half empty. However, I do wonder how many would give more than a cursory thought to this dichotomy, because if they did they would quickly realize that this a simplistic definition, possibly even an inaccurate or misleading representation of the two poles of what is in fact a continuum of attitudes towards a given situation.

Think about it. If an optimist assesses the glass in terms of its fullness, he or she is likely to be disappointed that it is only half full and not fuller, while a pessimist, who assesses the same glass and its contents in terms of its degree of emptiness, is likely to be pleased that there is still half a glassful remaining.

I was reminded of this question only the other morning, when Paula looked out of the window and remarked that she could see “half the hill”, referring to a prominent hill that we can see from our balcony (on a fine day). I felt bound to comment that this meant there was half the hill that we couldn’t see:

Notice that Paula’s comment was not so much an optimistic assertion as an idealistic one, while mine may have sounded pessimistic but was based on a realistic assessment of the situation. In fact, I would suggest that this is universally true: optimism is nothing more than another word for idealism, the mindset of the idle dreamer, while pessimism, although widely regarded as a negative attitude in popular culture, stems from a realistic appraisal of circumstances. Whether this is true as a general proposition, or I am simply trying to justify what others will deem unjustifiable, the weather was always more likely to deteriorate on that particular day than it was to improve, and guess who was correct:

In conclusion, I’d like to offer a contemporary take on the optimism/pessimism duality: an optimist is someone who hopes that Hillary Clinton will not win the US presidential election in November; a pessimist is someone who believes that Donald Trump will win that same election and become the next president of the United States.

hughie’s game

When I was a pupil at my local grammar school between 1957 and 1964, I did my best to dodge playing rugby, for reasons that I described in All Must Have Prizes. I was largely successful, and in four of those years I didn’t even set foot on a rugby pitch. However, I do recall one occasion, when I was in the sixth form, when my doctor’s note kept me off the rugby pitch, but it didn’t stop the games master, Brian McVey, sending me to walk around the senior cross-country course in the company of a friend, Hughie Taylor, who also had a doctor’s note.

The cross-country course was 7–8km long, but within 500 metres it passed under the main railway line, which was on an embankment, so even if Mr McVey had been keeping an eye on us with binoculars, he wouldn’t have been able to see what we were up to once we’d passed beyond this point. Naturally, we cut across the fields on the far side of the line to rejoin the course, thus cutting out 6–7km of needless walking.

We then had to pass some time idling about to avoid raising suspicions by returning to school too early, so we played a little game. After more than fifty years, I cannot recall the fine details of the game, but I do remember the general principles. One of us would start by saying “McVey is a …”. The other would respond by saying “McVey is a … and a …”. We probably used fairly offensive terms to describe our nemesis, but what precisely these were I no longer have any idea. However, we also used quite a few made-up words, and I can actually remember some of these, so I will use them to illustrate how the game was played:

Hughie: McVey is a peroot.
Me: McVey is a peroot and a prannock.
Hughie: McVey is a peroot and a prannock and a maroot.
Me: McVey is a peroot and a prannock and a maroot and a ….

And so on. The loser of the game was the first person to misremember the sequence as it grew longer, although who actually won this particular game I cannot now recall. In fact, we probably played the game several times anyway.

If you’ve read Memory Games and Memory Games #2, you will know that my previous suggested tests of memory are solo games, a kind of mental solitaire, so I thought that a competitive game was needed to provide some balance, and Hughie’s game could well provide some amusement in a social situation. It was originally a two-player game, and this is probably the optimum number, but there is no reason why more players couldn’t be involved, especially if the game is fuelled by alcohol. Smoking cannabis before a game probably isn’t a good idea.

Instead of using nouns to describe the object of derision, in this updated version of the game, I propose to use adjectives. Having watched from afar, with increasing dismay, the inexorable rise of an utter mountebank towards the US presidency, I have absolutely no hesitation in using this charlatan as an example of how the game might be played by four people:

1: Donald Trump is vain.
2: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant.
3: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted.
4: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude.
1: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude and pompous.
2: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude and pompous and bombastic.
3: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude and pompous and bombastic and obnoxious.
4: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude and pompous and bombastic and obnoxious and crass.
1: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude and pompous and bombastic and obnoxious and crass and ignorant.
2: Donald Trump is vain and arrogant and bigoted and rude and pompous and bombastic and obnoxious and crass and ignorant and boorish.

I could add a lot more words to this sequence, but this should be sufficient to illustrate how a game might pan out. If you try this game, you could incorporate an additional rule that bans the use of inaccurate descriptors, so that someone who said “Donald Trump is compassionate” can be challenged by his opponents. If the challenge is ruled to be valid, then that player is eliminated. In a multi-player game, the last to be eliminated becomes the winner.

I still run into Hughie (not literally) when I’m in the UK, because he’s often out walking his dog when I cycle through the village where he lives. I always stop for a chat, but I don’t think we’ve ever reminisced about that day we were both able to skive off playing rugby but were ‘punished’ for doing so. I shall have to remind him the next time I see him.

oink! oink!

In the wake of the indiscriminate atrocities carried out by murderous thugs in Paris a week ago, and the deliberate destruction of a Russian airliner in flight a few days before that, most people will now be aware of the organization that has claimed responsibility. However, I imagine that most people will be confused by the sheer number of different names that have been used to refer to that organization, so here is a brief summary.

The group calls itself khilāfa, or caliphate, which actually means that it claims spiritual and political leadership of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, a claim that the vast majority of those 1.6 billion rightly reject. In more conventional language, it is the Islamic State, or IS, which former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott refused to acknowledge on the grounds that it isn’t a state. The BBC always refers to the so-called Islamic State, which is a typically poor choice of words by the so-called guardian of the English language. If we were to go down that road, surely the correct formulation is self-styled Islamic State.

Then we have those confusing acronyms ISIS and ISIL. There aren’t many people now who would recognize the former as a reference to the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, so it does appear to make sense to describe it as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but it still begs the question of whether a gang of psychopaths deserves to be called a state. As for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, my first reaction would be to enquire whether anyone, if asked, would be able to point to the Levant on a map. And it does make me wonder, given the man’s apparent intelligence, whether US president Barack Obama has any idea what is going on when he refers to these psychotic murderers as ISIL.

On the other hand, Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, does get my wholehearted approval for constantly referring to these fanatics as Daesh, or DAIISH, which is an acronym for ‘al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham’. The main reason why this a good tag for a bunch of ill-educated barbarians is that the group itself doesn’t like it. Why? Because it sounds like dahes, which in Arabic means ‘one who sows discord’. For reasons that must be obvious, these nameless perverts have banned its use in the areas they control.

It seems to me that what is needed is a name that reflects the ideology of the group but doesn’t provide them with any credibility, and if you’ve read thus far, you will guess, correctly, that I have a suggestion. My proposed name reflects two things: the totally irrational notion in Islam that pigs are ‘unclean’ animals, and the obsession with sex and bodily functions that typifies religious zealots. This is the term that I will henceforward use to describe the delinquent hooligans who are currently terrorizing the Middle East:

Psychotic Islamic State Swine

…which allows me to say, without even attempting to be ironic: PISS off, you fucking schweinhunds.

Leader of the pack, Big Chief Running Dog.