From Cory Doctorow via Publishers Weekly:

I’ve just seen a letter sent to an author who has published books under Hachette’s imprints in some territories and with Tor Books and its sister companies in other territories (Tor is part of Macmillan). The letter, signed by Little, Brown U.K. CEO Ursula Mackenzie, explains to the author that Hachette has “acquired exclusive publication rights in our territories from you in good faith,” but warns that in other territories, Tor’s no-DRM policy “will make it difficult for the rights granted to us to be properly protected.” Hachette’s proposed solution: that the author insist Tor use DRM on these titles. “We look forward to hearing what action you propose taking.”

The letter also contains language that will apparently be included in future Hachette imprint contracts, language that would require authors to “ensure that any of his or her licensees of rights in territories not licensed under this agreement” will use DRM.

It’s hard to say what’s more shocking to me: the temerity of Hachette to attempt to dictate terms to its rivals on the use of anti-customer technology, or the evidence-free insistence that DRM has some nexus with improving the commercial fortunes of writers and their publishers. Let’s just say that Hachette has balls the size of Mars if it thinks it can dictate what other publishers do with titles in territories where it has no rights.

. . . .

The truth is that anyone who wants to avail herself of a Hachette e-book title without paying for it will have no problem doing so. DRM doesn’t stop people who scan books, or retype books. DRM doesn’t stop people who download widely available cracks that can remove all the DRM from an entire e-book collection. And DRM doesn’t stop people who are inclined to download the DRM-free pirate editions. All DRM does is punish legitimate users who had the misfortune to be so honest that they paid for the book, rather than taking it.

Hachette’s letter claims, “Improvements in retailer systems and e-book platforms has led to more flexible DRM which grants the consumer” (this being the odious term the letter uses in place of “the reader”) “greater flexibility in their use of purchased files, such as the ability to share across multiple devices.”

Devices, perhaps. But not across multiple platforms. With the exception of the Kindle Reader app, or the Nook app, available in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, there is no way to read e-books across platforms. And recently, we got a reminder as to what happens when Apple decides that an app is eating into its profits: out it goes. Just last week, Apple stopped bundling the YouTube player with its devices as part of its ongoing war with Google.

. . . .

Readers aren’t stupid. When they discover that paying for books results in locked, crippled editions, and downloading for free (simply by typing the title and “free e-book” into Google or Pirate Bay) gets them the same book, minus the offensive restrictions, they start to put two and two together. After all, DRM is not a selling point. There’s no one who’s ever bought a book because it had DRM. No one has ever clicked onto Amazon saying, “I wonder if there’s any way I can buy a book that offers less than the books I’ve been buying all my life.” People buy DRM e-books because they have no choice, or because they don’t care about it, or because they don’t know it’s there. But DRM never leads to a sale.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to SMH for the tip.

I am off to London for the Social Liberal Forum conference tomorrow. I hope to interview a couple of Leading Liberal Democrats for this blog.

Thanks to Huffington Post and the power of the press release, I can already tell you what one of them is going to say.

Step forward Tim Farron, who will say:

"There is no political market for a centre right laissez faire liberal party amongst the British electorate, or for a party that sets itself up as the permanent see-saw coalition partner. 

"To aim to be either would be to neuter our movement and invite electoral annihilation on the same scale of our friends in the German FDP who chose a similar path. To follow the FDP example would be to abdicate responsibility for our economy."

He will add:

Politics should be about positive plans for a better Britain, not fear and loathing for one tribe or another. We should want the British people to choose the Liberal Democrats for what we are for, more than who we are against,"

AndIn his speech, it seems, he will call for his party to :

"stake out the case for comprehensive liberalism based on a true understanding of what creates and what prevents freedom". 

"Laws that prevent you worshipping as you choose, living with whom you choose, reading what you choose curtail your liberties no more and no less than the poverty, the ill health and the inadequate education that robs you of your choices," he will say. 

"Never mind economic liberalism versus social liberalism," he will add. "I demand that Liberals should defend our citizens from all of those threats... our new consensus must be based on a belief in active, can do government whose focus is on tackling the biggest challenges we face in the confident belief that we can overcome them." 

Farron will also call for the government to set a target for "every breadwinner to be paid a living wage by 2020" to stop the "scourge of in work poverty" 

That makes a lot of sense to me, but do I detect an attempt to construct the sort of 'from log cabin to White House' narrative that might be appealing in a future party leader?

For the Huffington Post tell us that Tim will

tell delegates about his personal life story of growing up in a terraced house in Lancashire with "no heating, no holidays" and attack the "appalling rhetoric of Miliband and Osborne – setting the shirkers against the striver".

That sounds familiar, but did receive free school dinners? You don't outprole me that easily.

Ahem.

Given the fact that 50% of the time this site has the top portion of The Pendragon Protocol, featuring a slice of the Union Jack, as its banner, and that the only review of the book so far (a generally pleasing and sympathetic one) has described Emma Barnes’ very lovely cover as “unfortunately and surely inadvertently Britain First-esque”, I should probably clarify for the nervously-disposed that the post immediately below this one, entitled “Nobody Expects the Islamic Caliphate”, is not in fact a neo-Nazi islamophobic rant, but merely a wry and humorous comment on the difficulty of keeping track of the changing political situation in the Middle East, when said situation unavoidably forms part of the background of your next book.

It should be very obvious from an actual reading of The Pendragon Protocol that I have no time at all for neo-Nazis, and considerable sympathy with ordinary Muslim-type people (though not particularly with murderous jihadist insurgents).

Thank you for your attention.

(This is the fourth in a series of posts looking in depth at issues from Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. Previous posts in the series are here: 1, 2, 3 and my original post on the book is here.)

As I mentioned in my original post on this, the one thing I found most refreshing about Russell’s of examination of liberalism was that it put power at the centre of his vision and not economics. A liberalism that’s focused on how to liberate people from unjust power is one that looks upon economics and economic policy as a means to achieve those liberal aims, not one that sees a certain arrangement of the economy as an end in itself. Russell argues that there’s been a general misunderstanding of the position of nineteenth century liberals, one that regards their ‘classical liberalism’ as one that centred around free trade and free markets, when instead these were merely tools to achieve a higher aim. He argues that liberalism does not have an enduring economic policy, but rather that whatever economic policy is favoured by liberals at any given time is one that’s determined by the principles of controlling power, ensuring pluralism and championing the underdog.

As Russell notes, this lack of an overarching economic philosophy within liberalism can be a strength and a weakness. It’s a strength because it allows liberalism to be defined as something that’s not just about the economy and the dull managerialism that characterises so much of modern politics. Political ideologies should be about more than just ‘how do we manage the economy?’ and instead about much wider issues of how people are enabled to live the life they choose. By centring political debate about the economy, and making it of prime importance above everything, we end up seeing everything else through the prism of work and money. We can see this most clearly in education, where we focus on giving people skills and fretting over whether school leavers or graduates are ready for the workplace, rather than how equipped they are to lead a fulfilling life. It’s this depressing ideology of workism that gives us ideas like the ‘global race’ where countries are seen as little more than economic teams competing to see who can work the hardest and consume the most things. Liberalism can define itself as so much more than the economy, and we weaken the appeal of it when we limit it to that realm.

However, it’s also a weakness, as best seen in the old phrase ‘if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.’ As Russell notes, liberals have been caught up in the prevailing economic orthodoxy of the times on several occasions, and have begun treating the economics as an end in themselves when they forget that they are meant to be a means. While this might be solvable by having a defined liberal economic philosophy, that would introduce new risks of ossification and irrelevance when the facts change and discredit that philosophy. It should be noted, however, that there is a difference between an economic policy and an economic philosophy – the first is to answer questions of what we should do, while the second is more about the principles of why we are doing what we do. Perhaps the answer here is that liberalism does not need an economic philosophy, as long as the other principles of liberalism are remembered and applied, so that economics is applied as a tool?

What we can construct from this is a message of liberalism as radicalism and doing things differently. It does seem to me that in the time since Russell wrote, there has been a change in British politics, where alternative visions have been gradually shut out of political conversation in favour of everyone accepting the current model, and merely tinkering around the edges of it. Twenty years ago, the Liberal Democrat manifesto was talking about things like land value taxation and citizens’ incomes, but radicalism now appears to mean nothing more than tweaking housing benefit rules or slight shifts in income tax thresholds.

There’s probably an interesting case study to be written in the history of political ideology about how land value taxation has waxed and waned in British liberal politics. As Russell notes, the idea of taxing land was entirely natural for liberals from the nineteenth century on, as they saw one of the fundamental roles of state power as breaking up monopolies to ensure fair competition, and land was the powerful distorting monopoly force of all. This was not just about the economic effect of monopolies, but about their power, and part of an overarching liberal vision of society, where unjust and unaccountable power in all spheres of life were confronted and tackled. Again, this was about economic policy not being an end in itself, but a means to bring about a liberal society.

This belief in economics as a means, not an end, is also why liberalism has been relaxed about the mixed economy, seeing no objection to the state having certain responsibilities, and indeed believing that the state is the better guardian of the public interest in certain areas. This is a use of both sides of power – breaking up monopolies and ensuring competition ensures people’s freedom from unaccountable power, while providing public services such as sewers, schools and libraries ensures that people have the freedom to live their lives in their way and not be ‘enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity’.

For me, this is a much more attractive vision of liberalism than merely trying to brand it as a split-the-difference form of managerialism. Too much of our current political discourse is centred on the idea that the economy has some sort of independent existence, that it’s become some vast creature with it’s own appetites, that our desires have to be sacrificed to in order to keep it fed. A liberal vision should promote a different view of the economy, as something we need to control and use in order to provide everyone with a good life, not leave it to the vagaries of the market (again, something that only exists because we deem it to).

That’s why we need to be remembering those old radical liberal proposals, not forgetting them and pretending they don’t exist because they’re not compatible with the current paradigm. Taxing wealth, especially land, to ensure that we can provide everyone with a basic income that gives them the freedom to live their life is something we should be championing as a truly liberal vision – we should be arguing for the system to change to suit the needs of the people, not for the people to have to change to meet the needs of the system.

Two important things happened in British politics this week: the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) Act was rushed through in a week, and David Cameron reshuffled the Conservative side of the Cabinet. Some have seen the timing of the Cabinet reshuffle as a deliberate attempt to divert the attention of the political press away from reporting what was going on in Parliament in favour of instead covering the soap opera of who was up, who was down and was out of Government, but as most political journalists prefer doing the latter to the former for the rest of the year, the reshuffle wasn’t strictly necessary to distract them from Parliament.

I’m not going to repeat all the arguments over DRIP, but I think it’s a bad law that’s been rushed through Parliament and will likely prove yet again that when you legislate at haste, you repent at leisure. I’m incredibly disappointed that Liberal Democrat MPs (with the exception of John Hemming and Adrian Sanders) not only voted for it, but argued for it so vehemently, but on top of those erros they’ve made a long term tactical error as well.

The reshuffle wasn’t just about David Cameron rearranging ministers, but about him clearing the ground for a major assault on human rights legislation by removing ministers who’d raised objections to it. It’s quite clear that the remaining months of this Parliament and the Tory campaign in next year’s general election are going to feature a strong campaign to make Britain more like Belarus by withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yes, our political culture has now become so debased that the Prime Minister believes there are votes to be had in promising to take rights away from you, while large sections of the press will cheer him on and demand that he take more.

The Liberal Democrat response to this should be to start a campaign in defence of human rights, and it’s a perfect opportunity for the party to reassert its credentials as a truly liberal campaigning party, making the case about why rights are important and how the ECHR comes directly from the British legal tradition. It’d be the perfect opportunity for the party to draw together all those elements of civil society who care about human rights and rebuild the party’s support in time for the general election, thus ensuring that there are a large number of Liberal Democrat MPs in the next Parliament to protect us from an ECHR withdrawal.

It would be a perfect opportunity, if the Parliamentary Party hadn’t spent the last week alienating exactly those people by supporting DRIP. Just when we might need to build a coalition across civil society in defence of people’s rights, we’ve shown those same people that we’re willing to roll over and compromise those rights and to not cause a fuss when they come under attack. When rebel Conservative (David Davis) and Labour (Tom Watson) MPs are willing to join with Caroline Lucas to try and amend DRIP, but no Liberal Democrat was there with them, it make the party look incredibly weak in what should be its naturally strongest area.

It’s clear now that our rights are going to come under even greater attack over the next twelve months and beyond, and someone is going to need to lead the fight to defend them. Liberal Democrats should be out there leading that fight and making the case, but our capitulation over DRIP means no one is going to take us seriously if we try.

Danny Alexander writes:

“As a Liberal Democrat I want everyone to have the opportunity to have a secure and decent home. 

“We brought in changes to how housing benefit is calculated in the social housing sector with the best of intentions. 

“However, a recent report shows people are having to cut back on household essentials despite the help offered through Discretionary Housing Payments. 

“Therefore, we have reviewed our position so only those already in the social rented sector who turn down suitable smaller homes will see a reduction in their benefit. These commitments will be in the Lib Dem manifesto and we will push for it as government policy right away. 

“This change, combined with a commitment to build 300,000 houses a year in the next Parliament, will build on the progress we have already made to address Britain’s housing problem.”

That sounds about right to me.

(This is the third in a series of posts looking in depth at issues from Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. Previous posts in the series are here: 1, 2 and my original post on the book is here.)

To start, a disclaimer. I’m a heterosexual white cis middle class man living in an advanced industrial economy, and as such I’m the beneficiary of more unearned privilege than perhaps 99% of the people who have ever lived, so it’s entirely possible that this post will include lots of inadvertent errors and omissions. There are things that, because of my position and experience, I do not and probably cannot understand, so please feel free to point out where I get things wrong so I can do better in the future.

In keeping with his previous chapters, Russell’s account of liberalism’s support for diversity takes a historical approach. For him, it begins with opposition to the power of the Church and its desire to force all to conform to doing things in one way only. He sees liberalism as defending ‘the rights of the under-privileged, whoever they may happen at that time to be.’ There is a subtle critique of this historical process running through the chapter, however, as he notes that there were many times when people were too busy congratulating themselves over one victory to note that there were many more battles left to fight. He notes, for instance, some of the sexism (both overt and subtle) that prevented the struggle for women’s suffrage being taken seriously for years, but then turns the issue around to note that there may well be subtle and unconscious biases that we hold and may be mocked for in the future.

This element of self-criticism is important, because I think it relates to a trend in contemporary liberalism. We can be very good at identifying oppression or discrimination, but we sometimes act as though merely identifying it is enough in itself to solve the problems it has caused. We’re eager to point out that we’ve spotted and apologised for the overt discrimination of the past, but we’re often reluctant to accept that the legacy of that discrimination still has effects, both overt and subtle, in the present. There is a tendency to think that because we are so much more enlightened than our predecessors that we must therefore have solved all the problems, ignoring the fact that our predecessors felt similarly, and our successors will no doubt think the same of us.

For Russell, diversity exists as a key liberal value because of liberalism’s commitment to pluralism. Diversity is about celebrating the difference between individuals, and recognising that is important to allow people to be different, and that society does not seek to limit them because of that difference. Russell points out that liberalism is concerned about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, but it’s important for us to acknowledge that merely saying that everyone has an equal opportunity does not make it so.

Liberalism wants to see everyone fulfil their potential, but their potential as they see it, not as what society defines for them. Diversity in liberalism is important because it recognises that no one has the right answer for how everyone should live, and it’s a mistake to try and force a way of life on people. It comes back to Russell’s initial point of how liberalism is about power, and freeing people from the use of power to oppress them. However, it’s also about recognising that their are many ways in which individuals can be oppressed and restricted by many different forms of power. It’s entirely appropriate for liberalism to want to use the power of the state to liberate individuals from those other powers, and not to just limit our championing of diversity to saying the state won’t oppress you, but you’re on your own if something else does.

There’s an important point to be made here about the importance of linking the theoretical and the practical, of making our commitment to diversity mean something in practice instead of just being good works. Russell points out that this is a long-standing issue – Liberals in the late nineteenth century were great champions of the working class, but in many cases were notably reluctant to promote and advance working-class candidates, which eventually led to the creation of the Labour Party. As I said earlier, there’s a tendency within liberalism to assume a rational process and that once we’ve identified a problem, everyone will accept that diagnosis and fix it. If that doesn’t happen, we can then get quite defensive and assert that it’s obviously not our fault that something’s going wrong because we’ve identified our problems and fixed them.

As I said at the beginning of the post, I’m aware that I’m striding into the issue carrying tons of privilege with me, and I don’t want to start using that position to decree solutions to other people’s problems. Indeed, deciding that we know how to solve other people’s problems – rather than listening to what they want, then helping them achieve it – may be one of the reasons those problems still exist. There can be a sense of noblesse oblige in the way we can haughtily lay down solutions and expect others to be grateful we’ve noticed their problems and are now going to solve them for them, no matter how much they might be capable of solving them for themselves if we let them.

I’m going to finish this post with one of my favourite quotes from Russell in this chapter about pluralism, which manages to perfectly capture a liberal principle about the freedom of individuals (which we’ll look at in a later post) and make me wonder about the circumstances in which he wrote the book:

What two young men of seventeen do in bed in private is nothing to do with me, but if they then play their stereo so loud that I cannot continue to write this book, that is something to do with me.

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July 16th, 2014: UPDATE: SHE IS SAYING "ECLECTIC SKILLSET" NOT "ELECTRIC SKILLET" YOU GUYS ARE CONSTANTLY THINKING ABOUT BREAKFAST, AREN'T YOU Hey guess what comes out today? Adventure Time #30! It features... ZINES :0 – Ryan

Judging by the number of links I’ve received, a lot of you are already familiar with this paper on consciousness and the claustrum. Or at least you’re familiar with the tsunami of popsci coverage it’s received.

For the rest of you, the tale goes something like this:  54-year old female epileptic, seizure-free for four years at the cost of her left hippocampus. Now that reprieve has expired; the seizures have returned, and a team of neurologists led by Mohamad Z. Koubeissi have sown electrodes throughout her head to get the lay of the land and figure out what to do next. One of those electrodes edges up against the claustrum, a filamentous tangle of neurons thought to play a role in coordinating crosstalk between different parts of the brain.

When Koubeissi et al juice that particular electrode with 14mA of current, consciousness stops.

At least, that’s the way a thousand newsfeeds put it. More precisely, the body stops moving. The voice, which has been repeating the word “house” as a kind of baseline metric of awareness, trails off after a few seconds. The fingers, which have been snapping rhythmically, grow motionless. The patient sits glassy-eyed, to all appearances unaware and insensate. Inside her skull, the frontal and parietal lobes fall into mindless synchrony; not the synchronized call-and response of the consciousness state, but a mirrored lockstep incompatible with the operation of the global workspace.

Kill the current and everything return to normal. The patient reanimates, with no recollection of what happened during the down time.

The press is calling it a breakthrough.  An off-switch for consciousness, never before discovered. The Daily Mail, CBS, a myriad others have weighed in on the findings (although most of them seem to have mainly siphoned the bullet points off the New Scientist article that got there first). “…only a matter of time when we can create computers and machines that also contain a form of consciousness,” opines the Washington Post. “Their accidental discovery could lead to a deeper understanding of … how conscious awareness arises,” Discovery.com chimes in.

They keep using that word. I don’t think it means what they think it means.

If I wanted to be glib I’d point out that a rock to the head serves as a perfectly effective off-switch for consciousness, and I’m pretty sure we stumbled across that result long before the latest issue of Epilepsy & Behavior hit the stands. It would admittedly be a cheap shot; after all, the claustrum effect is somewhat subtler. The victim didn’t keel over like a puppet with severed strings; she remained upright, eyes open, “awake but not conscious”.  That’s kind of cool.  And the claustrum’s involvement is nicely consistent with the whole Global Workspace model, the idea that consciousness somehow emerges from the integration of different brain processes talking to one another. It’s a good paper. The stats are solid, even conservative (although it would have been nice if they’d told us what those asterisks were supposed to represent in Fig. 1).

But closer to understanding “how conscious awareness arises”? I don’t think so.

What we have here is another neural correlate. Those are useful things to have, but all they tell us is that consciousness doesn’t manifest unless the machinery is ticking a certain way. They don’t get us any closer at all to the Hard Problem, which is: why does that particular flavor of ticking machinery wake up? When all those subcortical structures— the brain stem, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the ACG— start talking to the frontal lobes just so, why does it feel like this? It’s just computation, after all. Circuits in meat. Why does it feel like anything?

I don’t know if we’ll ever figure that one out.

I have other reservations. Prior to flipping the switch, Koubeissi et al got their patient to start repeating the word “house”, and to snap her fingers. They did this, we are told, to ensure that it really was consciousness that was being interrupted— that those milliamps hadn’t just induced some kind of motor paralysis that stilled the body even though the mind was active. K et al‘s reasoning was that paralysis would kick in instantly when the current hit; the fact that the speech and the finger-snaps trailed off gradually is supposed to take the paralysis confound off the table.

Yet there’s nothing in the paper to explain why this “off switch” couldn’t also activate instantaneously (once again, I cite my rock to the head). It seems a significant omission in the rationale, especially given that this “switch” has never been documented before. Besides, if the results had hailed from a conscious-but-paralyzed individual, wouldn’t she have been able to report as much after the fact?

Speaking of confounds, here’s another one. It wasn’t just “conscious awareness” that went down for the count; it was cognition.  The patient showed no response to stimuli during the vacant intervals; Koubessi’s team may not have induced unconsciousness so much as catatonia. (Interestingly, they also reported a “slowing of spontaneous respiratory movements” during the tereatment. This would seem to suggest that autonomic— i.e., nonconscious— processes were also affected. Unless the procedure itself was so stressful that the patient was breathing hard to begin with.)

Koubeissi et al unleashed a shotgun blast, insufficiently precise for high-resolution insights. This is no criticism; they weren’t performing a controlled experiment, just a routine diagnostic procedure that happened to yield valuable and unexpected results. But by that same token we should be careful about the conclusions we draw. (The fact that the patient’s brain was atypical— having lost half its hippocampus to a previous operation— has been dutifully noted in most of the coverage I’ve seen.)

What I’d really like to see would be a stimulus which shut down consciousness but left the cognitive and reactive circuits intact: a scenario in which the patient continued to repeat “house” while the current flowed,  until— still unconscious— she processed and accommodated a new request to start saying “yoga” instead. I’d like to see her wake up when the current stopped, look around, and ask in a puzzled voice, “Why am I saying yoga? I thought I was saying house.” Now that would tell us something.

What, you don’t think that’s realistic? You think consciousness and volition go hand in hand, that the body can’t parse the house-to-yoga transition without some little guy behind the eyes to make sense of it all?

I’ve got one word for you: sleepwalkers.

It’s possible to sleepwalk your way though a repeated series of sexual encounters with complete strangers (note to philanderers: don’t try this at home). It’s possible to drive across town and stab your  mother-in-law to death, unconscious the whole time.  “Homicidal somnabulism” is enough of a thing to warrant its own Wikipedia page.

So forget epileptics with pieces cut out of their brains. You want to find an off-switch for consciousness? Reserve the departmental MRI for the graveyard shift and put out ads for sleeping automatons. Some of them, short of spare cash, might just see the flyer some 3 a.m. and call you up.

Even if they don’t know they’re doing it.

MPs are continuing to abuse your liberties in the name of "crime" and "terrorism". They say that the law they are debating in the space of one day, because the previous 3 months were not long enough to discuss the wholesale recording of our movement online and over the phone, is the "right balance" between security and liberty.

This law, supposedly well balanced, says that every phone call you make, every website you visit, every person you talk to on Facebook, every person you text, every person you message on a dating site, every email you send and much, much more may be able to be required to be stored in a database for up to 12 months.

It also says that without a court or a judge ever hearing about it, a government minister can assign whoever they want to be able to query that data. The police and other security services are included by default, naturally, but it could be anyone that a cabinet minister believes (or is convinced to believe) deserves access to this kind of information about you.

It is law that is supposedly going to be ok because there will be "reviews" and "checks and balances". Naturally again, none of these exist within the law which will come first and be legally binding, while everything that comes after will merely be bureaucratic agreements and process that can be changed on a whim.

To every one of the hundreds of MPs that voted for the law, I would ask them to go back to their constituents and ask them this:

"Would you mind if someone followed you around every day, noted down who you talked to and what shops or offices you went in to, and then logged this in a database that would keep this information for access by anyone that the government wishes to give it to for 12 months? They wouldn't look at what you bought in the shop, but they would know the date and time you went there. They wouldn't know why you went to that other person's house, but they would know who was in there and who talked to who. They wouldn't know what you talked to the person in the pub about, but they would know how long you talked to them for and when. Is this something that is ok for us to do in order to help prevent crime?"

If they can't have a serious conversation about the removal of people's privacy in the "real world" then they have no right to discuss removing it in the "virtual world". It's time that these out of touch MPs stopped treating how we live our life as somehow permissibly scrutable because it's done in a method that is cost-effective to monitor, when the exact same action done "offline" would draw instant, and disgusting, parallels with some of the worst dictatorships in our history.

9/11 (Noun)

1) An inside job.
2) A litmus test for aspiring engineers to properly understand the melting points of steel girders. Ex: The last question on the Structural Engineering final involved proving that there was no way the towers could have fallen on 9/11 without additional explosives planted inside the buildings.

Agenda (Noun)

A type of plan utilized by sinister forces to ensure the success of their political programme. Ex: I don't watch Hollywood movies anymore because I don't want to be brainwashed by the feminist agenda.

America (Proper Noun)

A country in North America founded by God-fearing Christian atheists who believed in the absolute right of every citizen to carry any type of gun at all times and to voluntarily opt out of observing whichever laws they please.

Apology (Noun)

1) The admission that someone, somewhere, may in some small way have done something somewhat harmful to another person.
2) Admission of weakness.

Apologize (Verb)

The only unforgivable act.

Atheism (Noun)

1) The belief that there is no God.
2) The highest expression of the rational mind.

Atheist (Noun)

1) A person who practices atheism.
2) A person who believes that reason and rationalism should be the first and only tools used by sane minds to solve problems. Ex: I asked Ted why he didn't use deodorant and he said he was an atheist who didn't see any rational need to suppress his natural scent. He then sent me a link to an article about pheremones.

Benghazi (Noun)

1) A supposed attack on an American embassy in Libya on 9/11 2012.
2) Proof that the United States government is being run by fifth-columnists dedicated to the destruction of America.

Birth Control (Noun)

1) A group of medical procedures and medications for the purpose of preventing unintended pregnancy.
2) Something women pretend to take so they can entrap unwary men.

Breaking Bad (Noun)

1) A popular television program.
2) The story of a real man who overcomes personal weakness and feminist interference to provide for his family the best he can.

Capitalism (Noun)

The dominant economic and political ideology in the United States of America.

Capitalist (Noun)

A person who engages in capitalism. Ex: I am a capitalist because I make minimum wage at McDonalds.

Capitalist (Adj.)

Behavior generally intended to enable the amassing of large amounts of wealth by an increasingly concentrated minority of hereditary billionaires at the expense of everyone else. Ex: I believe in a fully capitalist Jesus.

Communism (Noun)

A system of government in which all personal liberty is extinguished by oppressive government forces, economic restrictions ensure that the bulk of the population is relegated to the status of a permanent underclass, and personal initiative is systematically discouraged.Communist governments are noted for their repressive state police apparatuses and the establishment of a corrupt permanent ruling class who use government primarily as a means of attaining personal wealth. There are no meaningful elections in Communist states because all decisions are made independent of any recourse to popular opinion.

Courtesy (Noun)

The act of being polite to you. Ex: I expect courtesy from everyone with whom I debate the definition of "rape" online.

Courteous (Adj.)

Behavior intended to indicate respectful obeisance toward those with superior intellect.

Democrat (Proper Noun)

A member of the American political party dedicated to the dismantling of the United States of America, and the institution of Communism and Sharia law.

Discrimination (Noun)

The practice of giving special treatment to women or minorities.

Drought (Noun)

Condition of artificial scarcity created by Democrat congress in order to support a bogus global warming agenda and put family farms out of business.

Empathy (Noun)

Syn: Weakness.

Equality (Noun)

A hypothetical future state in which all white men are enslaved under the rule of feminists, minorities, and homosexuals.

False Flag (Noun)

A distraction intended to obscure another more insidious objective. Ex: Rape accusations are often false flags intended to silence male voices and ruin promising careers.

Fedora (Noun)

Crown of righteousness and sign of wisdom. Worn only by the Elect.

Feminism (Noun)

An ideology that teaches that women are superior to men and than men must be forcibly suppressed through violence and political disenfranchisement.

Feminist (Noun)

A person who practices feminism. Ex: That feminist didn't want to have sex with me even though I've been her friend for six months and I've wasted all this time listening to her complain about Brad.

First Amendment (Noun)

1) An amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that ensures no person shall have their right to speech abridged by the federal government.
2) The right to say anything you want without fear of consequences.

Friendzone (None)

A limbo-like dimension, similar to Superman's Phantom Zone, to which innocent men who just want to have sex with women are banished. Ex: I don't understand why Carol put me in the friendzone, I brought her coffee every day for a month without her even asking me to!

Global Warming (Noun)

A hoax created by the Left with the goal of dismantling capitalism for the purpose of leaving America vulnerable to foreign invasion.

Gun (Noun)

1) The birthright of every American.
2) A potentially lethal weapon. Ex: I always carry my gun because I never know when I will be called upon to aid the coming insurrection against government tyranny and homosexuals.

Homosexual (Noun)

1) A person who engages in homosexuality.
2) Not me.

Homosexuality (Noun)

A form of behavior which must be eradicated lest it infect the innocent. Ex: I hate homosexuality so much I can't stop thinking about it. I think about homosexuality all the time. I have to stop homosexuality so I no longer have to think about big, muscular guys covered in oil thrashing around on a bed covered by satin sheets and lit by flickering candles.

Jesus (Proper Noun)

Ancient prophet who believed in free market ideology and the dismantling of big government. Ex: Although he is widely cited as a moral authority, Jesus' actual recorded words and teachings remain obscure.

Jonathan Franzen (Proper Noun)

The Great American Novelist.

Justice (Noun)

The implementation of the law. Ex: I may not personally like what Zimmerman did, but justice was nonetheless served.

Law (Noun)

Any exercise of force by the Federal Government against someone other than you. Ex: It is well within the law for police officers to implement Stop & Frisk policies in that neighborhood.

Libertarian (Noun)

An autocthonic and solitary entity who is unaffected by the actions of others and whose actions affect no one else.

Maker (Noun)

Syn: Job creator. Member of the creative class who are solely responsible for all productive innovation throughout history.

Man (Noun)

A member of an endangered species, often targeted by feminists for accusations of thoughtcrime.

Misandry (Noun)

The act of committing either psychological or physical abuse against the last disadvantaged minority.

MRA (Noun)

Acronym for Men's Rights Activist. A person dedicated to the idea that men are systematically abused and discriminated by and in need of protection against the overreaches of feminist culture. Ex: I became a MRA after seeing so many men go through the painful ordeal of being friendzoned.

Nice Guy (Noun)

1) A man who expects to receive sex in exchange for granting a woman the privilege of his friendship.
2) A man who is not mean or abusive or a liar like those other guys.

PC (Noun)

Acronym for Political Correctness. An ideology dedicated to restricting the First Amendment rights of men.

Police (Noun)

A class of outlaw against whom self-defense is illegal.

Pregnancy (Noun)

The necessary and completely unavoidable consequence of allowing a man to achieve his birthright.

Racism (Noun)

A category of behavior that officially ended on November 4th, 2008. Ex: The Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary because racism is over.

Rape (Noun)

A category of crime for which the only victims are men.

Republican (Proper Noun)

1) Member of a political party dedicated to compromising on every item of the Democrat agenda.
2) A once-proud institution corrupted by weakness on core principles. Ex: I used to be proud to be a Republican, until they rolled over and decided to rubber stamp Obama's communist agenda.

Reverse Racism (Noun)

The practice of making white people feel guilty for something they didn't even do.

Sex (Noun)

The birthright of every man.

Sexism (Noun)

A rationale offered by women to explain why they deserve special treatment. Ex: We have to let women be firefighters even though they're not physically capable of doing the job because they say it's sexism not to.

Sharia Law (Noun)

The legal system observed by practicing Muslims and based on the religious teachings of the Koran. Ex: Wake up, sheeple, Barack Hussein Obama is trying to impose Sharia law on the United States.

Sheeple (Noun)

Non-atheists. Ex: Wake up, sheeple, Benghazi was a false flag.

Silicon Valley (Proper Noun)

1) Business and research hub of the American technology industry.
2) Incubator for all the great ideas that are going to transform our lives in the 21st century. Ex: I made a lot of money in Silicon Valley by writing a new search algorithm that automatically reports any unusual searches to the federal government, while also managing to avoid paying taxes on income because I'm a Maker not a Taker.

Soccer (Noun)

A game popular in countries other than the US, as well as with small children not yet old enough to play real football, and women who have no other option.

Social Justice (Noun)

False flag rationale used to abridge First Amendment rights by citing special privileges for unfairly advantaged minority groups.

Sovereignty (Noun)

The right of every man to personally secede from a tyrannical government at his desire. Ex: I am exercising my sovereignty by refusing to pull over to the side of the road for ambulances.

Taker (Noun)

A member of the parasite class whose sole desire to is to drain wealth from private hands and into public coffers. Ex: I made a conscious decision not to work because I realized I could have a better standard of living on welfare and in Section 8 housing than I could by working at McDonalds. I guess I'm a taker.

Teachers (Plural Noun)

1) The least trustworthy and most duplicitous of all public employees, worthy only of your scorn and abuse.
2) The people who provide eight hours of free babysitting every day.

Tea Party(Noun)

1) Member of an activist political organization dedicated to the forceful implementation of conservative ideology.
2) True patriots who fight the tyrannical government to lower our all-time historically high tax rates. Ex: I support the Tea Party because I pay too much in taxes, just like my fathers and grandfathers who built this country.

TERF (Noun)

Feminists who hunt other feminists for sport.

Thoughtcrime (Noun)

A thought that is forcibly suppressed by feminists or other minorities because it expresses an commonsense truism not accepted by the PC police. Ex: I know the PC police are going to bust me for thoughtcrime, but I'm only saying what everyone else is thinking.

Tory (Proper Noun)

A member of Britain's ruling conservative party.

Tories (Plural Noun)

1) Plural of Tory.
2) British political party whose primary goal is to rape as many children as possible, and yet still retain the support of a large percentage of the electorate. Ex: I know the Tories are pro-pederasty, but what's their policy on immigration?

Transgender(Adj.)

A violent criminal who is determined to impose its strange and perverse lifestyle on you by force whether you like it or not. Ex: Transgender people present a clear danger to our American way of life.

Trilby (Noun)

A kind of hat often mistaken for a fedora.

Tumblr (Noun)

1) An online forum for enthusiasts of genre television shows and movies.
2) Where you keep your porn.

Tyranny (Noun)

Any exercise of force by the Federal Government against you. Ex: Because we live in a tyranny, I got a speeding ticket while a bunch of blacks and women were going a lot faster than me.

Weakness (Noun)

A vice practiced by other people, but not you.

A commissioned essay for Tiffany Korta

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Kenneth Clarke stood down today after a remarkable 42 years in front-bench politics.

If the Conservative Party had known its own best interests, he would have become its leader after the landslide defeat of 1997. Clarke would have busked it and kept the Tories' spirits up while they worked out how the hell they were going to fight back against Tony Blair and New Labour.

Instead, the party's members chose leaders whom they saw as true Thatcherites - William Hague and then Iain Duncan Smith. Eventually the MPs felt obliged to take control by nominating Michael Howard as the sole candidate for leader after the collapse of IDS.

The party began its recovery under Howard, but if Clarke, a figure far more likely to appeal to the wider public, had been made leader in 1997, that recovery would surely have come sooner.

And if Clarke had become leader, William Hague would have been spared the premature exposure that blighted his career. Without it, he might well have become prime minister by now.

I noted a couple of years ago that Straight White Male is the lowest difficulty setting in the game called life (in particular the Western civilization variant of it). This annoyed many a straight white male, who didn’t see his life as being particularly “easy.” Noting that “lowest difficulty” is not the same as “easy” did not assuage this agitation. And well, I can understand it: If you genuinely think your life sucks — and it may! — it may be hard to imagine that you still get advantages other folks don’t.

So maybe this will help: A 25-year study followed the experience of nearly 800 children in Baltimore, from first grade into adulthood. Half their families were low income, many with parents who had not finished high school; 40% of those low-income kids were white.

A couple of relevant points from the article:

Looking at where these children started in life and where they ended up, the study results are troubling but clear: At 28, hardly any of the children from a disadvantaged background, black or white, had finished college.

But even without the benefit of a college degree, whites, and white men especially, had vastly better employment outcomes. At every age, the white men experienced shorter spells of unemployment, were more likely to be working full-time and earned more.

And:

[T]he consequences have been especially dire for African-Americans. As young adults, African-American men had fared much worse than whites in the job market, even though they and their white counterparts had about the same levels of education and the whites reported higher rates of marijuana and heavy drug use and binge drinking…

Indeed, throughout the course of our study, it was clear that African- Americans face greater barriers to employment. Having an arrest record or failing to complete high school were less consequential for white men than for African-American men: 84% of whites without a high school degree were employed at 22; among African Americans, just 40% were.

And this is the point of the lowest difficulty setting metaphor. It isn’t that folks who are straight, and white, and male, can’t or don’t find themselves on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder. They can and do, and there’s no doubt that it sucks. But even then, they can catch some breaks that others — in this particular study, black men — don’t (or don’t catch as often).

Which is to say: Even as much as your life blows, straight white dude, the black dude in exactly the same situation is likely to have it worse. And not because of anything he (or you) did. Just because it’s the way things are.

This study applies specifically to Baltimore, it appears, and factors in Baltimore’s own history of racial and cultural biases. But I would not in the least be surprised if other studies in other major cities across the US (at least) cropped up similar data. Baltimore is not exactly unique in terms of its racial dynamics. Nor does it seem that the authors of the study would be surprised; the sales copy of the book the above article is based upon notes: “[Baltimore's] struggles with deindustrialization, white flight, and concentrated poverty were characteristic of most East Coast and Midwest manufacturing cities. The experience of Baltimore’s children who came of age during this era is mirrored in the experiences of urban children across the nation.”

Now, bear in mind that when I said “maybe this will help,” that I don’t actually expect the sort of straight white man who fervently believes that is life is harder than anyone else’s, harder than anyone else can possibly imagine, and that society is even now feasting upon his set-upon bones, will pause to consider the data above. For that sort of dude, mere data are not nearly enough in the face of certain belief. For everyone else, including the straight white males who aren’t already conflating their own personal unhappiness with society squishing straight white men in general like bugs, this might be useful.

(Here’s another take on the data, at Science Daily (but largely written, it appears, by Johns Hopkins’ PR folks). There’s more in the study than just the one aspect I’m highlighting here, all of which are pretty interesting.)

I went over to Scribd and discovered that several titles of mine were on the site without my permission, which gave me an opportunity to try out Scribd’s DMCA reporting form and process. I’m happy to say that Scribd seems to be doing a fine job on that score: The elapsed time from report to removal of the content was about ten minutes. That works for me.

However, one title of mine, The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, I haven’t requested to be taken down yet. It’s not up on the site by permission of the publisher, because among other things, the book is currently out of print and the rights have reverted to me. I certainly haven’t given permission for the book to be there, either.

But as noted, the book is currently out of print — there might be a few copies still in bookstores, but not enough to represent any major economic benefit to me at this point, and no more are going to be made. I retain the rights to the work and may eventually do something with the contents of the book, but at the moment I don’t really have any solid plans. Which means that although the text is there illegally (and I can have it taken down), at the same time it’s not actually doing me any economic harm to have it up there, either. It’s not stealing sales from me because as an out of print book there are no sales to steal.

And so my position on it is kinda: Meh. I took down the books of mine that are still in print; if you want them, please pay for them or borrow them from a friend or your local library, that what bookstores, libraries and friends are for. But the out of print ones? For now I’m content to leave them out there. If I ever do get around to doing something with the text I might change my mind. Or I might change my mind because I’m mercurial. Until then, though, if you see The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies on Scribd or anywhere else, have fun with it.

Jane Merrick reports in the Independent on Sunday that reports that Nick Clegg will not be conducting a reshuffle of Liberal Democrat ministers on Tuesday when David Cameron's reshuffles his team.

As part of a concerted effort by Lib Dems for a "conscious uncoupling" from the Conservatives, he will be holding his reshuffle just before the party conference in the autumn.

Merrick quotes an unnamed "Lib Dem Source":

"We are under no obligation to be bound to David Cameron's timetable. We have a party conference later this year and at that point we will set out who we will take into the general election."

So far, so good. But some of the detail in her article is distinctly odd.

First, she tells us that there has been speculation this week that Alistair Carmichael would be sacked as Secretary of State for Scotland to make way for Jo Swinson.

No doubt Jane Merrick is better connected than I am, but this makes little sense to me. All the speculation I have come across recently has been that Jo will take Ed Davey's place as Secretary of State for Energy.

The idea of dropping Alistair in the final weeks of the referendum campaign is bizarre. As Merrick says, "this would have been seized on by Alex Salmond and his supporters as an admission of failure".

It would also ignore the fact that Alistair is fast emerging as one of the party's most effective communicators both in the media and in the Commons.

Her report also tells us that "Mr Clegg is being urged by some allies to sack Business Secretary Vince Cable".

I don't know who these allies are, but I suspect they are the usual 12-year-old special advisers.

The usual complaint against Vince is that he sounds more like an independent economic commentator than a minister.

When these SpAds are older, they will realise what a precious gift that is.

That’s the system that they campaigned hard to retain in 2011

If current broad poll trends continue and some of the CON-Ukip shifters return then it is likely that my 8/1 bet that that Tories will win most votes but come second to LAB on seats will be a winner.

Broadly the 2010 LD switchers to LAB are staying relatively solid and the returnees could boost the CON aggregate national vote share as we get closer to polling day.

The chart above shows what happens to the GE2010 results if you divide national vote shares by the number of seats won. The second tab shows the %age of the seats won. So CON came out with 47% of seats on 36% of the UK vote is is far from being unfair if you think that aggregate national vote shares are relevant.

But the system we have is first past the post elections for individual MPs, not for parties or a PM, in each of the 650 seats. Nowhere does the relationship between national party aggregates come into the equation

That was the system that the Tories campaigned so hard to retain in the 2011 referendum and that’s the system that’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

The Tories had the chance during the 2010 coalition negotiations to opt for a fully proportional system but resisted it.

That’s fine but please no bleating if as a consequence of the UKIP surge GE2015 produces a result that appears to be unfair to the blues.

Mike Smithson

Ranked in top 33 most influential over 50s on Twitter

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(This is the first in a series of posts looking in depth at issues from Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. My original post on the book is here.)

“Liberalism is and remains largely about power.”

It feels rather apt to be writing this post on a day when the Government – with the consent of the Opposition – has announced it will be rushing through new laws to get around the fact that what it was doing before was ruled to be illegal. However, I want to write about this issue in more general terms rather than focus on the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill.

Putting power at the centre of his vision of liberalism is an interesting step for Russell to take, but one that fits entirely with the view of a historian, rather than a philosopher. Principle is important, but those principles cannot be divorced from the historical context in which they emerged and the circumstances that have kept them relevant since. In recent years, I’ve seen much debate by liberals on what the size of the state should be, but not a connected debate on how powerful it should be. There is an assumption amongst some that if one makes a state smaller in economic terms, it will automatically be less powerful, as though economics is the only thing that matters.

This view is countered by the the ideas that came from the New Right, captured perfectly in Andrew Gamble’s description of Thatcherism as being concerned with ‘the free economy and the strong state‘. The power of the state is not measured solely in what it can do for the economy, but in the myriad other ways it can effect people lives. For instance, one can see many on the right who advocate both for a small state and the return of the death penalty and for me, giving the state the power to determine who lives and dies is a much more fundamental ability to control than the percentage of GDP it uses.

The corollary to this is that liberalism is not anarchism or libertarianism, in that it recognises that that there are situations in which power needs to exist. This links in with Russell’s historical approach and an acceptance that power already exists, that we’re not in a tabula rasa where we can create whatever we wish to see from scratch. It’s a pragmatic position rather than an idealistic one, but it’s also about the application of principles to the situation at hand. Russell sets out the history of British liberalism as a series of small triumphs that have taken us far from the original starting point in service of the central principle of controlling power:

I do not believe that my ancestors intended (excluding hereditary peers from the Lords) when they set the Exclusion Bill in motion in 1679, yet it follows logically from the challenge they then launched to the principle of power based on birth. This is only one example of among many of the way an apparently simple general principle, if held firmly and as a central conviction, turns out to have all sorts of implications of which its founders were unaware.

The rationale for the control of power is that all power must rest on consent, and thus it flows upwards, given from the people to the state, rather than freedom being granted to the people by the state. This again goes back to the seventeenth century and the events and arguments there that motivated Locke to set out his treatises on government. Again, a simple principle leads to lots of unexpected ramifications over the centuries.

Russell (and liberalism generally) does not dispute the right of the state to exist, but does question the legitimacy of its actions if the executive power is concentrated in such a way to enable it to be abused. Democracy is a tool for creating a state that can be constrained, but democracy has to be seen as a continual process, rather than an occasional event – one cannot claim consent purely on having an election every four or five years if that state is free to do whatever it wishes between those votes. The question that is to be answered here is that if we agree that some power is necessary, how do we make it acceptable and controllable? Russell’s answer to this – in common with many other analyses over the years – is that Britain, at least, has not yet found an answer to this question, if indeed a permanent answer can be found. What may be acceptable limits for the state in one generation, may be seen as far too lax (or even too strict) to a future one.

The implications of this are more than simply asking what is the role of the state and how it can best carry out that role. To go back to the quote I began this post with, liberalism is not about the state, it is about power. When the building blocks of liberalism were first being laid down, the main powers were the state and the church, but we have seen lots of other sources of power emerge in the time since then. For liberalism, all power should be controllable and accountable, and this is where it diverts from the minimal state vision, for while it’s own power must be controlled, the state can and should have a role in making other forms of power accountable and controllable. Power in this sense does not necessarily have a tangible form either. Social and economic pressures beyond those of the state, the church or the corporation can oppress the individual and limit their freedom, and it is perhaps to fight those amorphous powers that we need to create some power greater than ourselves.

But a lot of that detail is for another time, as I plunge into more depths and examine the implications that flow from seeking to control power, but please feel free to continue the debate in the comments.

(This is the second in a series of posts looking in depth at issues from Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. The first post in the series is here and my original post on the book is here.

Russell uses his chapter on pluralism to discuss two issues for liberalism: the dispersal of power, and the celebration of diversity. While I understand how his historical view of the development of liberalism does link the two, tracing it from the challenge to the power of the Church and liberal support for Nonconformism, I’m going to give both issues separate posts to avoid confusion by conflating them too.

As a liberal principle, pluralism emerges quite naturally from the desire to control the power of the executive I discussed in the last post. If one wants to prevent a single source of power from coming to dominate all, then why not have a series of different powers at different levels? This idea of dispersing power may seem obvious to us now, but was a radical proposition in the time when monarchies were trying to make their power absolute.

The principle of consent is also important in developing a liberal pluralism, rather than a devolved feudalism. It is possible to separate power and still retain an absolutism, when that power is arranged by a strict territoriality and hierarchy. Each power could be absolute in it’s own small realm, but then subservient in the realm above it. The principle of consent required to create legitimate authority, however, means that all power in any realm relies on the participation of the people within it. The liberal vision of pluralism is not one single power dividing itself up and creating order on the way down, but a mass of power that begins with the people creating the power structures they wish from the ground up.

For me, this is a vital issue for British liberalism and one where we’ve dropped the ball and not paid it much attention. Our conception of power is that it belongs to the people and is consensually given to the state in order to achieve good things on behalf of everyone. However, the British state is still constructed on the basis that all power resides in the centre, and while it can be devolved to lesser bodies, they still remain under its control. If there’s one thing seven years in local government has taught me it’s that a local council is not regarded as a body created by the people of an area, but as an arm of the centralised state, expected to do what its told, with the only freedom being in areas where the Government can’t be bothered to act itself. ‘Localism’ is merely the ability to decided locally just how much you want to agree with the latest directive from DCLG, not the power to say no to diktats from the centre.

As Russell points out, this is directly contrary to the spirit in which local government developed in the UK. While it wasn’t democratised until the 19th century, British local corporations and boroughs were run by figures who came from the community they covered and were generally not imposed by the state upon those areas. A huge number of social reforms, especially in areas of sanitation and education were brought about by local governments acting on their own initiative in that golden era of municipal liberalism. This is still a pattern we see in countries with a federal structure, where local government takes the powers they feel they need, not sitting by and waiting for the government to give those powers to them. This creates a true pluralism of power based on consent, and one that I believe would provide a much more useful basis to review and reassert the powers and abilities of local government than a centrally-imposed localism.

Another important principle here, and one that’s not discussed as much as it was when Russell was writing, is that of subsidiarity: ‘a Russian egg model of political power, in which it is held in a series of containers, one inside another, ranging from the United Nations at one end down to the parish council or an individual family at the other.’ It’s an important part of pluralism, where we assert that it is not simply important that power is dispersed but that it is used at an appropriate level to perform the task required of it. This is again based on consent, where those over whom the power is exercised determine the level at which it should be exercised, not a mighty central power choosing where it hands its power down to. This does not have to symmetrical, either – and indeed, a true test of whether power is being dispersed in line with subsidiarity is the degree of asymmetry – for not all areas will want the exact same powers. One can see this in the original structures of local government in Britain, where different corporations and boroughs did different things, depending on what they saw as important, and still applies in the USA where can one see wildly different amounts of power available to different local governments within the same state, let alone across different states.

PLuralism and subsidiarity may not lead to an arrangement of power that appears ‘efficient’ to those wanting to see strict hierarchies of power, but by dispersing power based on individual consent, we create a much more liberal arrangement of power, based on consent and individual need, rather than the needs of the centralised state. This does not mean an end to governments, or a belief that everything can be done at one level, be it local or multinational, but that we need to be continually asking ourselves whether decisions are being made in the right place where they will be most effective. We control the power of the over-mighty executive by bringing power as close to the individual as necessary for it to be used efficiently, and in the next post I’ll look more at how pluralism promotes the power of the individual.

The other day I was watching an episode of The X-Files in which a dead guy came back to life in another man’s body. When he tried to tell his wife who he was, she didn’t believe him. I laughed, because this is a problem I will never have.

See, after watching some Buffy, Doctor Who, Star Trek, and other nerd shows, we have a system. A code phrase that only we know. If one of us is ever rejuvenated, aged, Freaky Fridayed, mind-swapped with a gorilla or dog, regenerated, cloned (technical definition), time-traveled, or so forth, we can instantly prove our identity to the other by saying this code phrase.

It also works the other way. In case of android duplicate, imperfect double, shape-shifting mutant/alien, Doppelganger, high-quality rubber face mask, illusion, and other situations it can be used to expose the fraud right away.

I’m surprised more couples don’t have such a code phrase. Every one I’ve talked to acted like this was new to them, but in how many TV and movie situations would it have solved the problem in an instant? Why wouldn’t you do it?

It’s not perfect. We don’t know enough about parallel dimensions to know if the code phrase is unique to this one. In some cases of body duplication memories may be preserved. It’s possible that one could be hypnotized against one’s will and still be able to access the code phrase. Clones are a big mess I’m not even prepared to deal with. Even with those limitations, I think the system is solid enough to recommend.

Don’t waste any time! You never know when an errant wish or malevolent gris-gris will put you in this situation! Talk to your partner and develop a top secret code phrase right now! Make it unusual so that it’s not easily guessed, but don’t make it too elaborate or you’ll have trouble scratching it into the dirt when you’re in your bear form.

Maybe you’ll never use it. Maybe you won’t be one of the statistics. But isn’t it better to have some kind of protection to keep from being an X-File yourself?

From an interview Nick Clegg gave to Henry Porter for the Observer in February 2011:

"I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

Previously in this series: How to tell if you’re in a Dorothy Parker story.

You are in a library that may not exist. You are having a terrible time.

It is unclear whether you have been writing the story, or the story has been writing you.

You visit the south of Argentina, where something terrible happens to you.

You are standing inside a sphere. Its center is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere. You are terrified.

Everyone around you is being murdered in a perfect Kabbalistic pattern.

A Scottish man sells you a book that ruins your life.

A red-haired woman tells you that you have always been a dead man.

You are lost in the desert. Your map is the desert itself.

You may have committed a murder. You’re not sure.

Everywhere you look, you see a sinister equilateral triangle.

A train conductor is rude to you, who was once a king in Babylon.

You are dreaming. You have never existed. You are being born. You are a thinly veiled version of Borges himself, and you have been dying for a thousand years.

A gaucho with a knife is laughing at you. There is blood on your saddle, but you have been in a hospital for the last four days. There is no saddle. Now it is you who is holding the knife, and no one is laughing.

You are standing in the middle of an empty city that is also the corpse of a tiger. There is one company in the entire world, and it does not exist, but it is watching you.

You may be a man, but then again you may be a mathematical thought experiment; it’s difficult to tell.

You die in a labyrinth.

Read more How To Tell If You Are In A Jorge Luis Borges Story at The Toast.

At dublab (“a non-profit web radio collective devoted to the growth of positive music, art and culture”), Carlos Niño interviews Van Dyke Parks. I would say that Van Dyke is in fine fettle, but doing so would require that I first look up fettle. So I will say instead that he is in rare form — expansive, generous, funny, wise. A sample: “I worked very hard to be anonymous. And I finally achieved that goal.” Maybe. But Van Dyke has many irons in the fire and still more waiting on deck.

I just mixed metaphors.

Post-interview, Van Dyke plays and sings “The Silver Swan” (Orlando Gibbons), “Home in Pasadena” (Harry Warren, Grant Clark, Edgar Leslie), and his own “The All Golden” and “Orange Crate Art.” You might recognize the final little phrase from the theme music for PBS’s This Old House : it’s a bit of “Louisiana Fairy Tale” (Mitchell Parish, Haven Gillespie, and Fred Coots). Eclectic? It’s all music, and it’s all good.

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)