Andrew Hickey

In 2014, I signed up as an artist with Zazzle. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never really put in a lot of elbow grease onto that site as I vastly prefer Redbubble and Society6.

One of Zazzle’s terms is that they won’t pay royalties if the amount’s under $50. New rule: if a company accepts orders for smaller than they will pay in royalties, they are looking to make bank off the artists, not their customers.

The $23.58 of royalties I’ve accrued were earned in 2014 to 2016, and they still have that money. Then, to add insult to injury, they send the following missive today:

Zazzle’s marketplace has evolved so much since its inception, and now our User Agreement and Policies are evolving, too!

Starting on April 1, 2019, Zazzle will have a new User Agreement, and one of the new elements is a push for an even more involved, invested community! As part of this push, accounts that have been non-contributing (that is, haven’t either (1) published a public product, or (2) had a Referral Sale attributed to that account) for the previous 15 month period will be charged a “Non-Contributing Account Fee.” 

You are receiving this message because, unfortunately, we haven’t seen any new products or referrals from you in a long while! We really miss you and would much rather have you back, adding beautiful content to the Zazzle marketplace! So, before the last day of this month, if you upload a new product and publish it to the marketplace, or have a Referral Sale attributed to your account, your account will be deemed “contributing” again for the next 15 months, and you can ignore this message. 

If you’re not able to get your account to “contributing” status again before the last day of this month, we’ll charge the Non-Contributing Account Fee, according to the terms of the new User Agreement (which is posted here) on or around April 1st. For more details, you can also check out this help center article.

Thank You

So, I can give them my labor…or more of my money. How about neither? Just send my balance due via PayPal. You’ve enjoyed it long enough.

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Will Davies made a typically good point yesterday when he tweeted that the “impoverishment of the ‘sociological imagination’ over decades” has left people “people unable to speak critically of systemic problems, without personifying them”.

What we have today is a crude moralistic tribalism in which people divide simply into goodies and baddies. We see this in the “two minutes hate” against Shamima Begum – which is oblivious to the fact that one’s rights do not depend solely upon one’s moral character. We saw it in the silly debate about whether Churchill was a hero or villain, much of which effaced the fact that he was a complex character who happened to be exactly the type we needed in 1940. And we see it when lefties blame low pay upon greedy bosses and the financial crisis upon greedy bankers. I agree with Will that this mentality is also behind the rise of antisemitism on the left; antisemitism is the socialism of moralizing fools.

What such crude discourse misses is an aspect of the sociological imagination – the ability to see that society is shaped by structural forces which can cause outcomes to differ from the intentions and moral character of agents. It was this imagination – in fact, important insight – that Adam Smith was using when he wrote that “"it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

The converse can also be true. Marx thought that exploitation and low wages arise not from the greed of capitalists but from the forces of competition*:

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society…But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.

Chuck Prince, then boss of Citi, made a similar point in 2007 when he said:

When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. 

What he was driving at was that excessive risk-taking wasn’t caused so much by “greed” as by men responding to incentives: each individual bank had an incentive to gear up for fear of falling behind others.

Prince, Smith and Marx all agreed upon the key point for my purposes – which is that structure trumps agency, that social outcomes cannot be reduced to individual morality or character.

But is this true?

A good reason to suspect not is the existence of monopoly and monopsony. These relax competitive pressures and so give bosses room for agency, to offer better wages. Jeff Bezos would not become a pauper if Amazon gave its workers better pay and conditions.

Even here, though, structure isn’t wholly absent. When Amazon was a smaller company, higher costs and prices might well have attracted competition and thus hurt the company. Many ideas outlive their empirical base: it could be that Bezos’s desire to screw down wages is one of these.

Also, of course, firms’ ability to hold down wages and conditions is facilitated by weak aggregate demand. Is this a failure of agency – simple bad policy-making? Or is it instead structural – a result of capitalists’ political pressures upon governments?

What’s more interesting to me, though, are hybrid theories – ones which combine structure and agency. I’m thinking of two classes here, though there are no doubt more.

One is the role of social norms. These have structural origins but shape morality. We can think of the rise of neoliberalism as being in part a sign of an erosion of norms against rapacity, short-termism and rent-seeking: this is Jesse Norman’s theory in Adam Smith: what he thought and why it matters.

A second category are selection mechanisms. It’s very possible that bad character – psychopathy or narcissism – is selected for in at least some businesses, and that incompetent overconfident fanaticism is selected for in politics.  

There is, I think, a good debate to be had upon these issues. What is unacceptable to me, however, is a simple-minded attempt to blame social problems upon bad people. Such silly moralizing is a barrier both to understanding and changing the world.

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The Independent Group claims to value an “open, tolerant and respectful democratic society” and to oppose Brexit. It wills the ends, but not the means. It fails to see that Brexit and intolerance are the product of economic conditions, and is silent on what to do about those conditions. It looks therefore like a bunch of narcissists complaining that people are not like them whilst offering no real solutions.

As I’ve said many times, the key to understanding politics today is Ben Friedman’s book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, published in 2005. He shows that economic growth begets liberal attitudes and that stagnation breeds intolerance. Subsequent events vindicate him perfectly. As Thiemo Fetzer has shown, pro-Brexit attitudes are “strongly and causally associated with an individual’s or an area’s exposure to austerity.” In a separate vein, Nick Crafts has blamed Brexit upon the banking crisis.

In this sense, economic stagnation is the cause of Brexit and of the turn away from the liberal values the IG claims to espouse. And this stagnation is still with us. Only today the ONS reported that productivity fell last year: this means it has risen only 0.2% a year since 2007 compared to 2.3% per year in the thirty years before then. Because of this, real wages are still below their pre-crisis peak.

The IG, however, is silent about this. Its statement (pdf) makes no mention of austerity or stagnation. In fact, pretty much its only substantive reference to the economy is to government’s “responsibility to ensure the sound stewardship of taxpayer’s money”, which doesn’t inspire hope of a firm rejection of austerity.

It claims that our politics is “broken”, but is blind to the fact that capitalism is broken too, and that this is a major cause – perhaps the major cause – of our broken politics. Phil says the IG has “learned nothing, nothing since 2015.” I’d question only the year here: it seems it has learned nothing since 2008.

Now, you might reply that it’s unreasonable to expect a new political grouping to have detailed policies. True enough. The problem with the IG, though, isn’t that it doesn’t have solutions: it’s that it doesn’t even see a problem. There’s a good debate to be had about how far capitalist stagnation can be fixed by fiscal and monetary policy alone, and how far it needs institutional change too. The IG shows no sign of entering this debate, though.

At least one of its members has form here. Last year Chris Leslie wrote a paper, Centre Ground (pdf), which also largely ignored the financial crisis. I criticized him then for failing to see that the crisis necessitated a rethinking of the relationship between the state and the private sector. He shows no sign of learning this lesson: his claim to believe in “evidence-based” policy-making is a sign of astounding lack of self-awareness.

Herein, for me, lies the great virtue of Corbyn (perhaps his only virtue). He at least sees the problem, that the economy is broken and that the Left needs new policies for new times – just as Blair saw this a generation ago. The IG, by contrast, is stuck in a 1990s timewarp, unaware that the world has changed.

Granted, Corbyn might be right in the same way that a stopped clock is sometimes right. For me, this is unimportant. What matters is that we have something like the right policy ideas for our changed economic times. I can’t say how much the IG will affect politics. But I do know that whilst they have no awareness of our economic problem, they will be an intellectual irrelevance.

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Be descriptive and detailed, yet vague. For example:

“The transparent portal slid open and the creature, radially asymmetrical, used its ambulatory stalks to cross the threshold. The creature, covered in keratinous extrusions and small, dead plates, swiveled its perceptual array, hoisted on a third stalk, and used its electromagnetic sensors to locate what it was searching for: the anti-entropic chamber. It spotted the chamber and moved to it. Using yet a different stalk, which divided into smaller stalks at its terminus, the creature defeated the magnetic field employed to seal the chamber.

“Therein it found its prize: A pressurized cylinder of carbonic acid, mixed with bonded ethyl and hydroxyl groups. The stalk that defeated the chamber’s magnetic field acquired the cylinder and carefully manipulated it open. It placed the contents in a staging area, where cursorial perceptual tests were conducted, before conveying those contents to a connected cavity, designed to chemically process cylinder’s former cargo.

“There, in the humid dark, the desired reactions commenced.”

Shorter version:

“A person opened a sliding glass door, walked through, located the fridge, opened it, got out a beer and drank it.”

Thank you for coming to my writing workshop.

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The Good Place is the best show on television. I don't even see how there could be a debate at this stage. No other show combines such lofty ambitions with such graceful execution, such weighty themes with such a total lack of self-seriousness. It succeeds on every one of the many levels it operates on—as an uproariously funny comedy, as a touching relationship drama, as a thought-provoking

The New Yorker on trolley problems in self-driving cars

Both Di Fabio and Shariff agree that the advent of autonomous vehicles will force us to make our underlying moral calculations explicit. In twenty to fifty years, the majority of cars on the road will likely be driverless. If billions of machines are all programmed to make the same judgement call, it may be a lot more dangerous to cross the street as, say, an overweight man than as a fit woman. And, if companies decide to tweak the software to prioritize their customers over pedestrians, it may be more dangerous to be beside the road than on it. In a future dominated by driverless cars, moral texture will erode away in favor of a rigid ethical framework. Let’s hope we’re on the right side of the algorithm.

Psychology's trolley problem might have a problem (Slate).

[In an experiment where people were asked would push a button to they give an electric shock to one mouse to prevent five mice being given the shock]: [In conversation, t]wo-thirds of Bostyn’s subjects said yes, they would indeed press the button in this scenario... [in practice, a]bout five-sixths of these subjects pressed the actual button, suggesting they were more inclined to make that choice in real life than their fellow subjects were in hypotheticals. Moreover, people’s responses to the 10 trolleyology dilemmas they were given at the start of the experiment—whether they imagined that they’d push the fat man off the bridge and all that—did not meaningfully predict their choices with live mice. Those who had seemed to be more focused on the greater good in the hypotheticals did seem to press the real-life button more quickly, though, and they described themselves as being more comfortable with their decision afterward.

The Trolley Problem Will Tell You Nothing Useful About Morality (Current Affairs).

The trolley problem is repulsive, because it encourages people to think about playing God and choosing which people to kill. .... It warps human moral sensibilities, by encouraging us to think about isolated moments of individual choice rather than the context in which those choices occur. ... And it encourages a kind of fatalism, where everything you do will inevitably be a disaster and moral questions seem hard rather than easy.

There are plenty of moral questions we don’t discuss nearly enough: Is there a moral obligation to help refugees? Is being rich in a time of poverty justifiable? Do you have an obligation to speak out about sexual harassment? What should you do if you know someone is being abused but they explicitly ask you not to say or do anything about it? Are there any justifiable reasons for the existence of borders? Does capitalism unfairly exploit workers? Should you lie to protect an undocumented person? ... One of the hardest moral quandaries is in determining what our priorities should be: in a world filled with a million injustices, do you just pick one at random to address? It’s only because we spend so little time thinking about which questions probably matter more than others that anyone can think trolley problems are a comparably effective use of time.

Because I work adjacent to self-driving car research I get asked about the trolley problem from time to time, and these were three interesting articles about it. (The New Yorker one has less of an agenda and is the best). The trolley problem is the hypothetical question: you see a streetcar out of control and careering down the street to where it will kill five people; if you pull a switch you'll divert it to where it kills one person; should you do it?

Thought 1: although the trolley problem is presented as a philosophical problem, it's not actually one. It's a question in psychology. It doesn't explore anything interesting about morality -- obviously the right thing to do is to make the choice that serves the greater good, if that's clear, and in the example above the right choice is to kill fewer people; what it does is put you face to face with your own squeamishness about directly taking action that kills someone as opposed to avoiding taking action resulting in the deaths of others. It's not about the right thing to do, it's about your relationship with your own culpability. It's interesting here that, per the Slate article, people's answers to the question posed hypothetically reflect a greater bias against taking action if it makes you culpable compared to people's behavior in real life, where in general if the greater-good choice is clear people will make that choice.

Thought 2: moving the trolley problem to the self-driving car space doesn't make it any more interesting philosophically. Human drivers make these decisions under these circumstances, and not very often. Self-driving cars will get in these situations even less often, and will just be programmed to mirror the decisions humans make.

(Thought 2a: There is an interesting effect of this -- self-driving cars will amount to an enormous transfer of liability from the driver to the car maker, and to the end of individual driving insurance. This means that the whole cost of insurance for the car over its lifetime needs to be bundled into the cost of the car itself. This will create enormous incentives to make sure self-driving cars are actually safer than people-driven cars so that the cost will be competitive. Note of course that if with self-driving cars we see a move towards less car ownership, the increased insurance will be paid on the trips rather than the car and the fleet operator may pay claims out of operating expenses rather than having insurance, but the fundamental point is the same -- potential accidents are a cost that has to be paid for and if the individual driver doesn't pay that cost directly, it still needs to be paid somewhere in the system).

The New Yorker article in particular has slightly changed my mind on this.

Thought 3: If you move the decision as to who to hit to an algorithm that's centrally developed and rolled out across the whole fleet, then any issues with that algorithm could result in significant changes to outcomes, compared to what happens currently. Basically, right now, reactions to trolley problem-like situatons are individual and have a large random component. Some people run over grannies, some people run over kids. But if the computer decides that everyone should run over grannies, the world does look different. So it's worth taking time to develop an algorithm carefully and not just reflect exactly what the median driver would do. (Or it's worth having a large random element in the algorithm).

Thought 4: The inverse of thought 3. It could be that there's already an undesirable bias in how people behave. The New Yorker article shows people in high-inequaltiy countries happier to hit homeless people than businessmen, people in Latin American countries happier to kill fat people than people out exercising. Is it right for algorithms to embed these biases? (We've already seen cases where "AI" algorithms built to make hiring decisions have just embedded existing human prejudices to bring in white males for interview, and Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was recently subject to some hilarious mansplaining for pointing this out). In fact, German law, the only law in the world on the topic, which states “In the event of unavoidable accident situations, any distinction based on personal features (age, gender, physical or mental constitution) is strictly prohibited.” (hat tip again to the New Yorker article).

Overall, then, I'm thinking that the trolley problem in self-driving cars is a more interesting engineering problem than I'd previously thought.

However, I do question the level of attention that the trolley problem gets in the literature and in journalism. It depends on a very specific set of conditions, where there are no good choices but you nevertheless get to make a choice. How often does that really happen? As self-driving cars get better and better, won't it happen even less in the future than it does now? Have you ever read about an accident where someone says "I swerved to avoid the baby ducks even though I knew I'd hit that fat person"? Surely the point of self-driving cars is to make accidents so rare that what you happen to be programmed to do in the trolley scenario simply doesn't matter. As the (somewhat polemical) Current Affairs article puts it, "It’s only because we spend so little time thinking about which questions probably matter more than others that anyone can think trolley problems are a comparably effective use of time."

Maybe that's the real lesson of the trolley problem. If you want people to talk about your ideas, don't worry about whether the ideas are significant. Just try to make them sexy.

(PS -- Hello again Livejournal! Yes, I am posting here because it's virtually the same as making a private note.)

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I was impressed to see Ian Dunt say he was wrong to have supported Hugo Chavez. Everybody makes mistakes: the difference is that some people have the insight to see that they do and the integrity to admit it.

What’s striking in this context is just how many mistakes many leftists made in supporting Chavez: I’m speaking here of all leftists, not just Ian.

I don’t just mean the common errors of wishful thinking and the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” fallacy that results from the tribalism Ian decries.

What also happened was base rate neglect. Put it this way. Looking across history, what proportion of political leaders have been heroes? I doubt it’s been as high as even 1%: on the left, martyrs are more common than heroes. An application of Bayes’ theorem would therefore have told us that even if Chavez had possessed many of the characteristics of a heroic leader it would have been unlikely that he would have become one.

It is of course not just about Chavez that leftists have made this mistake. From Lenin through Che Guevara to Aung San Suu Kyi the left has done a Bonnie Tyler and held out for a hero  - who tuned out to be a disappointment.  

There is, however, another error at work here – a failure to grasp ground truth. The success or failure of a political project depends not upon its moral righteousness but upon whether material conditions on the ground permit it. You should not therefore have supported Chavez unless you had a good understanding of Venezuela’s economy and society. Which of course many leftists did not. Too many political partisans are too quick to adopt opinions without doing the necessary research – which is understandable as you can make a nice living writing opinion columns by doing so. (If you think this is a snark at Owen Jones alone you of course are wrong).

Heroes are scarce, but what is more common is the emergence of the right people in the right place: men (it’s usually men) of both virtues and vices who are in a position where their strengths are needed and their weaknesses are not decisive. Whether Chavez was such a man depended therefore on the precise circumstances of Venezuela’s political economy – something very few Brits were expert in.

Marxists, however, had good reason to be cautious about Venezuela. Marx thought the transition to socialism was most likely to occur not in middle-income nations but in advanced ones:

New superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

And in the German Ideology he wrote:

Development of productive forces...is an absolutely necessary practical premise [for communism] because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced.

Premature revolutions, he thought, would end in failure. This was one of his predictions he got right.

One reason for this is a paradox of inequality: vicious inequalities of the sort seen in much of Latin America make egalitarianism more desirable but also mean that it meets fiercer opposition. In an attempt to overcome this, leftist parties often become illiberal and hierarchical.

Another reason, though. Lies in a point made (pdf)  by Chad Jones. It’s that poorer societies tend to be more fragile. The failure of a particular industry or even single power plant or port can do horrible damage whereas wealthier societies are better networked and more resilient (except perhaps to banking crises!) This means policy failures are much more costly. There’s less room for error. Given that leftists – being human – are likely to make errors this means the chances of failure are high.

Leftists, then, were wrong to back Chavez. But of course, the mistakes here are not confined to them. The right and centre have made them too – for example in thinking that shock therapy in Russia would create a liberal market economy or that the overthrow of Saddam would create peaceful liberal democracy in Iraq. And the same mix of wishful thinking and hero worship that led leftists to support Chavez has led rightists and centrists to back countless corrupt “strong men”.

Yes, the left has been wrong. But many rightists who call them out on it are guilt of massive bad faith. As I said, everybody makes mistakes.

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8/ So the Government can't pass its deal

The Government can't negotiate a new deal

There is no Parliamentary support for No Deal

The Opposition can't force an election

The Tories can't call a Leadership challenge

Immovable object meets brick fucking wall pic.twitter.com/qL16HuqMDO

— James Graham (@mrJamesGraham) January 16, 2019

The train is hurtling down the track and the cliff edge of 11pm on 29 March 2019 approaches. The overwhelming majority of the House of Commons is unwilling to countenance no deal, but there is nothing approaching a majority on what they would in practice countenance. Different groups compete for power, some reaching for the brake and some arguing that we should speed up to get to 88mph to zap us back to 1955. No resolution is in sight and a terrible fate beckons.

What are the options? Britain can leave with no deal. It can sign up for a deal that has just been rejected by a majority of 230 MPs. It can try to negotiate something new, though the EU has consistently and repeatedly said that it won’t renegotiate. It can decide to remain in the EU. It can ask for extra time, which it might not get. Or it can revoke its notice to quit and do some further thinking that way. None of these options look anywhere near commanding a consensus.

Is there anything else?  There’s always something else. All you need is a little imagination. The problem essentially comes from the fixing of the deadline. Let’s work on that then.

The measurement of time has been under state control since the beginning of time, right up to the present day. Following the example of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the former president of Turkmenistan renamed the months, including one for himself and one for his mother. But I deplore his lack of ambition and think we should be raising our sights, just as the early Romans did. For what we are in urgent need of is an extra month.

There are 365 days in the year. We can reallocate these into thirteen 28 day months. (This leaves a day over and the challenge of leap years, but I’ll come back to that aspect.) The past convention of naming months after the political leader would not work, since we already have a May.  Perhaps the naming right could be auctioned in order to reduce the national debt. Amazon, for example, sounds suitably classical.

This has numerous advantages. For starters, calendars would never need to change. They can go from being throwaway items to luxury objects. Next up, if we make 1 January a Monday, paraskevidekatriaphobia will be a thing of the past. Every monthly paid worker would get a one-off 8.33% pay rise, helping to alleviate the long squeeze on wages growth at a stroke.

This leaves the question of the 365th day and leap days. This can be dealt with by adding intercalenary days, attached to no month and not being a day of the week. Britain doesn’t have enough Bank Holidays, so Meeks Days (like school inset days, I expect they will be known by the name of their creator) will serve yet another valuable function. Stick them – one, or two in a leap year – between June and July and we can hope for good weather and a day off for the Wimbledon final too.

What would this mean for Brexit? The timid might hope to buy another 28 days by inserting a new month between February and March, and hope that might be enough to sort things out. The observant will note that with each month having 28 days, the 29th of March becomes the twelfth of never. Brexit would not have been revoked or delayed. It would simply have been teleported safely into an alternate universe.

Now it might be argued, perhaps by those who have advocated that Britain should go into union with Australia Canada and New Zealand or by those who have advocated that the vote should be removed from the over 75s, that this idea is far too eccentric to be worthy of further attention. The time has come, however, to think laterally. What the country needs is more time. Parliament with its newly-rediscovered sovereignty should legislate to provide us with exactly that.

Alastair Meeks

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I really do want to talk about this scene, because I've NEVER seen anything like it before or since.


I love action movies. And I have plenty of movies where thin willowy River Tam does slender ballet moves as she gracefully carves up enemies in a skinny way. And that's nice? It has its place? But this isn't fight-ballet. It's not pretty waif-fu. Nor is it the polar opposite, the rarer Atomic Blonde "everyone gets their face smashed in, including the heroine" response to that trope. This is a different third thing.

Holtzmann is competent and fully in control in this scene (much like the waif-fu, less like the gritty inversion) but in a very SOLID way. She's not a man, but she's allowed to move like we let men move. She STRIDES. She takes LONG STEPS, the kind of long steps which really can't be taken in River Tam skirts. When she kneels, it's just a normal knee on the ground, not a pretty aerobic stretch that juts her boobs out.

STRIDE!

KNEEL!

MORE KNEEL!

She gets to have facial expressions. Grimaces. Not perfect still serenity (because facial expressions make girls "ugly") and not pain. Just the grimace of YAAARGH I'M USING A MUSCLE TO DO A THING. And she gets to celebrate and gloat after!! Women never get to do that? Because it'd make them less likable or less in control? They're supposed to be calm and quiet and like well yes obviously I was going to win.

It's the difference between this and that. And it's SUCH a big difference.



I'd say it's the difference between a female gaze and the male gaze.

The female gaze presents Holtzmann as a person first, and deeply sexually attractive second. The male gaze positions River as sexually attractive first, and a person... distantly second. I don't even see the utility of that pose River is doing; her foot is so extended that she can't put any weight on it. She'll have to bring it back in just to stand up.

That scene, the sheer UNIQUENESS of that scene, was what moved Ghostbusters from "great" to "one of the best" for me. The movie isn't perfect and I hope we get more and better and my "best" list continues to shine. I need more scenes like that. I spent a long time not realizing I'm queer because while I'm attracted to women, the "willowy River Tam is broken at you" character does nothing* for me.

(*I am really suspicious of guys who live for the "willowy River Tam is broken at you" character. The girl needs meds, counseling, and hot soup in her; not dick! Which are you hoping to provide, buddy? My internal reaction to "willowy River Tam is broken at you" is to brush her hair and to locate the one psychiatrist available in the 'verse.)

Honestly, one of Firefly's biggest failings is that the lady characters all pretty much stayed in their own Bechdel-failing corners and never banded together to cuddle River and counsel her and feed her hot soup.

While I have you here, read my favorite Firefly rant.

[Random Commenter] River’s fight scenes were amazing tho, the whole tone of the movie is better actually. Sometimes women that fight get hurt, a movie like Ghostbusters will never dare show that.

As noted in thread, that exists. A good example is Atomic Blonde and I enjoyed it very much. But I also enjoy movies where women can be effortlessly in control of the situation in ways reserved for men. (Also, the women in GB *do* get hurt in that fight? Just not Holtzmann.)

"Women who fight get hurt" is always a faintly threatening statement when coming from men, and it's one reason why we CAN'T just have WaifFu Versus Atomic Blonde. Because when it's a binary choice, then it reads like women are hurt as PUNISHMENT for not being waifs.

Waif-fu is fine. GrittyFight is fine. But if it's either/or, then they're positioned in opposition to each other, and the violence experienced in the latter looks like a punishment for not being the former. Ghostbusters, by taking the "effortless skill" from Waif-fu and combining it with "masculine moves" from GrittyFight, provides for a third option which is a vital addition to the genre.

In 1994 Stephen Young was convicted of a double murder. When it emerged that some jurors had used a Ouija board to inform their verdict, however, a retrial was ordered.

The philosophical (though not legal) justification for doing so has been described by Jason Brennan in his new book, When All Else Fails. He calls it the competence principle:

People have a right that certain types of high-stakes decisions be made by competent people, who make their decisions competently and in good faith. It is unjust, and violates a person’s rights, to forcibly deprive a citizen of life, liberty or property, or significantly harm her life prospects, as a result of decisions made by an incompetent decision-making body (p85).

Obviously, using a Ouija board to decide a man’s guilt is incompetent and thus unjust by this principle.

But here’s the thing. Brennan thinks the principle should apply not just to juries but to major policies as well:

Political decisions are presumed legitimate and authoritative only [my emphasis - CD] when produced by competent political bodies in a competent way and good faith.

If this is correct the Brexit referendum was illegitimate not (just) because it excluded big stakeholders, or was founded upon lies, or was bought with Russian money, but because the vote was taken by an incompetent electorate – one that was ill-informed, swayed by cognitive biases, or motivated by racism.

You might object that this is true only of some voters. Irrelevant. Only a minority of jurors in the Young case used the Ouija board.

Or you might think this is the sour grapes of a Remainer. Again, irrelevant. Young was convicted again at his retrial. The Ouija board jury got the decision right. But it’s not good enough to get it right. The competence principle says the decision must be taken in the right way.

Instead, the question is: is Brennan right? Does the competence principle actually hold?

Maybe not. In other cases of alleged incompetence by juries, law lords have refused appeals on the grounds that the need to preserve the secrecy of the jury room outweighs the competence principle. Likewise, maybe the principle is trumped in politics by another one – people’s right to participate. Claiming this, of course, requires reasons and not just assertions. Why should an idiot's right to a say trump other people's rights to liberty, prosperity or good government? It's not obvious to me, or to Brennan.

Even if you accept the competence principle however it does not follow at all that we should have a second referendum. There’s no reason to suppose this will be more honest or rational than the first.

Instead, the only chance of reconciling the competence principle with the right of participation (assuming one to exist, which Brennan denies) would be through some form of deliberative (pdf) democracy. This requires, among other things, tight rules on what evidence is admissible as well as safeguards against cognitive biases and inadmissible preferences.

It’s possible that such a device would deliver Brexit: as Matthew Goodwin says, people care about “identity, community. Belonging and tradition” as well as GDP. Or if you believe in a form of proceduralism then you’ll believe that the outcome of a truly good deliberative process will itself be legitimate.

It is of course obvious that our actually-existing media-political institutions are a trillion miles away from any ideal of deliberative democracy. This being so, the claims of both Leavers (“respect the will of the people”) and Remainers (“let’s have a second vote”) are both dubious. They beg the questions: why is the competence principle wrong? Why should we abide by decisions taken incompetently? The answer is by no means as obvious as small-minded partisans think it is.

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