Economics, Politics and Public Policy

Bad Law - Paul Chambers, TwitterJokeTrial - Judge Made Law

2010-09-02T23:25:00.001+01:00

DISCLAIMER: NOTHING CONTAINED HEREIN SHOULD BE CONSTRUED AS LEGAL ADVICE, IT IS MERELY MY OPINION ON A PARTICULAR JUDGEMENT AND THE STATE OF ENGLISH LAW AT PRESENT. I AM NOT QUALIFIED TO PROVIDE ADVICE ON LEGAL MATTERS (Especially not UK law). IF YOU FEEL THAT ANY PARTICULAR PART OF THIS POST STRAYS TOO CLOSE TO LEGAL ADVICE PLEASE CONTACT ME @shabouwcaw AND I WILL REMOVE THAT SECTION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I was really interested when David Allen Green (@JackOfKent) started posting about the #twitterjoketrial. To me it seemed an anachronistic judgement that displayed both ignorance of the medium and of the law Paul Chambers was prosecuted under. For background do check out Davids blog, it really is excellent. The judgement can be found here and the details of his upcoming appeal are here

Public policy issues are often overlooked when articulating judgements, I think there has been a separation of powers misunderstanding here.

If you examine the burden created by the present judgement it is too onerous to be intention of the legislation. This is, in effect, the creation of a new scope and breath to the legislation that cannot possibly be in the interests of public policy.

Firstly, the law is obviously (by common sense and as a reasonable person would interpret it) intended for closed and monitored mechanisms of public communication, more akin to the traditional radio broadcaster or telephone network, where both input and output can be monitored easily and there is a recognised end user and intended target. (I will return to intentionality later)

The reason for this is purely public policy. In these closed systems there is relative inability to select away from this particular communication method if it should turn offensive or threatening. The personal or controlled nature of these technology (and the pernicious harms arising from the invasion of life using them) imputes a higher standard than mere free speech, which is the intended problem that this legislation is to fix.

Secondly, the burden placed on the courts, the police service and the public to carry out the duties placed on them by this judgement necessitates clear language to give them that burden. If the intention of the legislation was to create such a burden it would explicitly state that. The act makes no such explicit imperative. What imperative am I talking about?

There is a plethora of content on the internet that is offensive, malicious, intended to provoke hate, intended to provoke criminality and that is pornographic or in other ways “immoral”. Where appropriate the State has taken steps to criminalise such activities on the internet. However, if this judgement is allowed to stand it places a burden on the police to monitor and record all tweets that could full under the banner of being “malicious” and to press charges. Otherwise they are not doing their duty to uphold the law and leaving Twitter users to flout our legal rules with impunity.. Obviously had this been the intended consequence of this legislation it would be expressly stated. This is a ludicrous burden to place on the police and amounts to nothing more than judge made law in the manner of DPP v Shaw (1962) HL and an ex post facto re-jigging of the law for convenience.

“The vigour of [the] juristic and professional controversy [after Shaw's case] is a salutary reminder that ex post facto punishment is still a problem even in the legal order which was the progenitor of 'the rule of law' ” - Stone

Thirdly, examine the internet. Examine Twitter in particular. It is not akin to radio broadcasting, if anything it is the nearest thing to a conversation in a pub that technology has been able to replicate. There are two things that flow from this – the interpretation of the word “menacing” that is appropriate in this sphere and the end user/blue sky dichotomy.

Mr Justice Jonathan Bennett submits that in order to be “menacing” something must just be of an inherent “threatening” quality. I would politely disagree, using loitering as an analogy. The vague “threatening” quality of remaining in one area was seen as not sufficient to override the constitutional rights of citizens in Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41(1999) to stand around in any area of the United States. However, loitering with intent is still held to be constitutional. Why is that? Because merely looking scary is perfectly within your rights. In order for something to move beyond an acceptable subjective interpretation of “threat” - we examine the intention of the act that is being called “threatening” and see if it is to cause a threat that is unacceptable. The reason for the emergence of mens rea in the criminal law is to stop subjective misunderstandings taking shape in the legal system and convicting people of “threats” that were in fact completely innocuous. The public hysteria that surrounds so many aspects of the criminal law is just one reason for needing such protections. I would propose that in this instance the mere existence of the form of the tweet is not an inherent menace. The intention of the tweet must be considered when examining the menacing qualities of the communication, again for public policy reasons.

Lastly then, the difference between an end user and a blue sky based communication. In the case of menacing phone calls there is obviously an intended target and a pernicious harm to that person that they cannot opt out of. In the case of a menace transmitted by conventional television or radio there is a reduced ability to select away from this menace, to ignore it and to go about your business. This is the reason why there is an enhanced duty on people who operate and use these services to prevent against the transmission of content that may be construed as menacing. However in this instance, the point of Twitter is to communicate with a void. Tweets, other than @replies, are aimed at the cloud and not to any one particular person. They are intended to be read by any one of the rag tag bunch of people who follow you. It is as if Paul Chambers had written his message on a sheet of paper, put it in a bottle and let it drift out to sea. Should he be accountable for the emotions of the person who chances upon it and reads it? If a tweet falls in a forest, does it make a sound? What Paul Chambers is in reality being penalised for is not making the tweet, but for being unfortunate enough that a certain individual read it. This is hardly a fair basis on which to put forward criminal charges.

The final characteristic of the Internet, and Twitter in particular, is that content is easy to ignore or screen out. This is completely dissimilar to the types of communications that were intended to be covered by the act. The particular “menace” of this tweet is obviously understood by Bennett J to be the causing of externalities to those who read it, namely fear and unease. “The context is we live in a society where there are huge security concerns particularly in relation to airports and air travel.” However it is completely disingenuous to suggest that a tweet would bring about these reactions. If this was said on the radio or if Paul Chambers had rang Robin Hood airport to make the threat there would be a sufficient proximity between the general public and his act to say that any fear caused was his fault. It is also incredibly difficult to put distance between the chance of you encountering the tweet (should you not wish to) and yourself due to the limited number of radio stations or the fact that he is targeting your individual phone. But in the case of Twitter, you must take active steps to encounter the tweet. As I said earlier, it is like a conversation in a pub. If you were a particularly devout person, it would be remiss of you to scold someone for swearing if you were eavesdropping on their conversation, because had you not taken the step of listening in, you would not have overheard the swearing. That's not a perfect analogy, but it is close enough. In order to have encountered Paul Chambers tweet you would have to follow him, google him or google something sufficiently close to the content of the tweet and, in addition to that, choose to read that particular entry. Rather than being forced into the “menace” by factors beyond your control, you have taken active steps to encounter that menace. I don't think it is too much to ask that a certain spirit of caveat emptor should apply.

Bennett J has only succeeded in formalising the burden on twitter users into an unwieldy pseudo-journalistic code of conduct that he has not even had the grace to define. He has left the law regarding these “breaches” wide open with no clarification as to what defines an unacceptable tweet and what defines a menacing tweet. He has placed a ridiculous burden on law enforcement, used powers that do not exist within the legislative framework he is working in and created the worst kind of judge-made law. I leave you with a quote I think is pertinent.

“Some think that the law already goes too far, some that it does not go far enough. Parliament is the proper place, and I am firmly of opinion the only proper place, to settle that.”

Lord Reid, DPP v Shaw

Green Party Bully SME and YOU

2010-08-25T10:07:00.002+01:00

So Senator Dan Boyle, Eamon Ryan and the rest of the Green Party economic incompetents club have decided to keep pummeling SME like a small fat kid at lunch time. First they decided to implement a 5% PSO levy (more on that later) but now they have decided to add another ridiculous SME and small household targeting charge – the new system for commercial vehicle road tax.

In a climate where business is under more threat than it has been in a decade, they want to increase costs for small business owners, firstly to use electricity and secondly to own a van. They’re attempting to sell this as progressive Green policy. So if I use a van for personal use I either have to pay a fee or buy another vehicle. I have 2 problems with this. Firstly, it’s my damn property. If I want to drive it to the shops, that should be my prerogative. It’s not a loophole in the commercial tax system, it’s a recognition that commercial vehicles have a role outside of merely being workhorses. What they're doing is closing a “loophole” by ignoring a fact of life.

Secondly, how is this a Green policy? If it forces people to buy a car for normal use it achieves nothing other than more CO2 spewing tin cans wandering our streets, if people decide to pay the fine, it is more of an incentive to use the van as much as possible to get your moneys worth. There’s no logic here.

Speaking of lacking in logic, Eamon Ryan is back from his holliers today and jumped straight into dealing with the reporting of the 5% PSO levy. In their infinite wisdom, the Green Party spindoctors are emphasizing that this is not being introduced by the Green Party. It’s been around for years, we’re told, it’s just that that it was set to 0%. Well, Mr Ryan, just because it’s not new, doesn’t mean it’s not STUPID. Apparently the whole thing is caused by the energy companies not having enough revenue to cover their costs. Know what happens in normal industries when their revenues are too low? They make a loss. Christ, we’re pissing 33 billion into Anglo, surely the Government can come up with a mechanism of finding the money from somewhere else, without hitting households and SME owners AGAIN. Their taxation policy is cowardly and lacking in imagination. What will they do when they can’t hit the soft targets anymore? When they have dripped pensioners, public servants, small business owners and households dry? Will they finally man the fuck up and start coming up with a coherent policy to tackle the massive central government inefficiencies? Contemplate increasing corporation tax? Stop throwing money at the black holes that are Irish Nationwide and Anglo Irish Bank? I called them bullies at the start of this blog and I stand by that. But I wish they would stop taking my lunch money.

Mr Ryan had this to say to the Irish Independent

“With the recent introduction of the carbon tax and the likelihood of water charges on the horizon, the minister said he was concerned there was a perception that the Greens were seen as a party of tax.”

No, I think it’s safe to say, they’re seen as a party of morons.

“Refudiating” Tolerance - the Right and Park51

2010-08-19T22:06:00.003+01:00

I have in the past blogged about the apparent obliviousness of the American right towards the hypocritical manner in which it views the US Constitution – a document sacrosanct insofar as it supports their worldview and lifestyle, but one that can be conveniently ignored when it does not. Once again, this attitude has come to the fore in the explosion of controversy over what should have been a non-issue, nominally the construction of a community centre that will incorporate a mosque in the vicinity of ground zero.

This project, known as Park51, the Cordoba Initiative or the ground zero mosque, depending on who you listen to, has been at the centre of a political maelstrom that has been growing in scale for the last few weeks, and has got to the stage where Obama himself has felt the need to comment on the situation. But what exactly is this project, and what exactly is the opposition to it based on?

The names themselves are important. Calling Park51 the “ground zero mosque” is in and of itself a manipulation of the truth for two reasons. Firstly, while the building will incorporate a mosque, it is not the sole or even primary function of the project. The idea is to create a community centre run by moderate Muslims, headed up by an imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has worked in a diplomatic capacity and as a spokesman for moderate Islam under former President George W. Bush, and has a long and distinguished track record in improving relations and promoting positive engagement between the Muslim community and the rest of America.

The idea behind the centre is to help with interfaith dialogue and activities, as well as with a broader integration across religious lines in Manhattan on a community level. This includes and auditorium, a performance centre, art exhibition spaces, a restaurant and many other facilities, all designed and intended to be readily accessible to members of the public of any faith. The planned prayer space was also intended to be open to visitors. The thrust of the project was not to create an exclusively Muslim location, but to provide a service centre for the entire community of Manhattan, run by Muslims.

These are moderate, progressive people with a modern outlook, nothing at all like the fundamentalist lunatics the right have tried to paint them as sympathetic towards. The briefly favoured canard of the right about their support for Hamas has been categorically refuted, both by the organisers of the project themselves and by people close to Rauf – including Jewish journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, scarcely a man likely to cover for Hamas sympathisers.

It is worth remembering, in light of what the centre actually is and what it is actually intended to do, that the right-wing detractors initially described the project as a “mega mosque” – a reminder that many critics are perfectly happy to put hysteria and controversy ahead of facts and integrity when it comes to dealing with this issue. This is something that will become much clearer when this post examines the opposition to Park51.

The second reason that this name is inaccurate is that it implies that the centre is being built directly on the location where the twin towers were attacked and destroyed, allowing critics to accuse this of being some kind of triumphalist project to show Islamic dominance over America, or something along those lines. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, paranoiac, fear-mongering bullshit of the highest order. Regardless of the obviously non-threatening nature of the project, as elaborated on above, it is not being built on ground zero, but rather two blocks away – about 180 metres from where the twin towers stood. For those who say that is still too close, I can only ask what an acceptable distance is. Is there to be a certain defined radius from ground zero within which Islamic culture is forbidden?

Similarly, the name “Cordoba” has been seized upon by those with an extremely poor understanding of history, like Newt Gingrich as being a name reminiscent of the Muslim domination of Iberia, showing that this is a colonising project. This is utter nonsense. Cordoba was the cultural heart of Muslim Spain, and the name is chosen for that reason – it hearkens back to a great cultural boom, under a dynasty that was far more tolerant of Jews and Christians than the Christians of Iberia were to be of the Muslims and Jews under their rule, both at the time and in the aftermath of the reconquista. To suggest otherwise is an attempt to prey on fear and ignorance.

Also, significantly, the reason this location was chosen has very little to do with the apparent symbolic nature of the vicinity. The community centre is being built here, with its prayer space, because the site was already being used for that purpose – the building is already being used for this purpose, accommodating those unable to fit into a nearby mosque. To put it into very simple terms, since the place is currently serving as a prayer space, it makes perfect sense to integrate one into the Muslim-run community centre being constructed there.

Those jumping up and down, banging on about how this is a Muslim invasion and affront of some sort ignore that fact that Muslims have been praying there for years without causing any apparent harm or offense to the people of New York. Attempting to further integrate this with the broader community is not in any way negative – once again, the basic facts expose the irrational hatred, sheer ignorance or sinister opportunism of the opposition to the project.

And make no mistake, sinister opportunism is playing as big a part in this dispute as small minded bigotry is. Politico recently quoted a senior White House staffer as saying “When I start to view religious freedom through the prism of midterm elections, I’m just going to quit”, which is a fairly succinct analysis of why the Republican party, through the voices of several of its most prominent members has thrown its weight wholesale behind an inequitable, frothing campaign that essentially focuses around denying Muslims their first amendment rights on the basis of the fact that some people with an ignorant and warped view of events might get a bit offended.

This whole scandal was essentially kick started by Pamela Geller, a far-right islamophobic blogger, who genuinely believes, among other things, that Barack Obama is the biological son of Malcolm X, that Obama supported the 9/11 attackers, supports English and Dutch fascist groups, is convinced that the US census bureau is stalking her so the Democrats can fix the next election (yeah, I don’t get the logical leap there either), thinks Obama wants to put the Jews in a ghetto and believes the Dome of the Rock should be torn down – in short, we’re dealing with a raving, racist, politically extremist lunatic.

Geller was the one who used the phrase “mega mosque”. She was the one who falsely claimed it was being built on ground zero. She was the one, long before Palin, who declared this to be an affront to the American people. Her message resonated with a deeply bigoted, anti-government, islamophobic audience, who began to spew out anti-Muslim vitriol. This was picked up on, she began to be brought onto network news as a talking head on the issue, and evidently someone at the GOP HQ looked at this and thought “hey, we can ride this wave of anti-government sentiment for electoral gain, morals be damned”. It’s cynical and disgusting – and the hollowness and opportunism of the mainstream face of the movement becomes apparent when one looks at what the Republicans actually have said about the project.

Sarah Palin has, as well as famously calling for the project to be “refudiated”, has described it as a “provocation” and “stabbing at the hearts” of Americans. Newt Gingrich claimed that it shouldn’t be built as long as there were no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia and that it was “hostile to our civilisation”. Mike Huckabee called it “offensive”, Tim Pawlenty said it “degraded” and “disrespected” the “hallowed ground… sacred ground” of ground zero, Mitt Romney’s office claimed it would be used by extremists for recruiting purposes, and a whole bunch of other, less prominent members of the party have chipped in with statements of similar derangement and hatred.

These people are clearly not stupid. Anyone with even a modicum of sense and intelligence can look at their remarks and see why they are nonsense. To run over it briefly: Palin and Huckabee somehow assume a community centre is a “provocation”, in which case they are setting a frightfully low barrier, and by suggesting that the presence of Muslims in the vicinity of 9/11 is somehow offensive to them, they are effectively taking an appalling tack whereby they’re tarring all people of that faith as evil for the actions of some extremists. Gingrich is suggesting that the USA should sink to the level of an oppressive theocracy and deprive people of their basic constitutional right in order to prove some kind of point about tolerance, which is ironic and horrifying in equal measure, all while invoking a clash of civilisations. Pawlenty is calling an area full of strip clubs, gambling dens and other businesses of ill-repute hallowed; Muslims wishing to integrate and provide community services are somehow more of a desecration than this, and Romney is frankly being idiotic – what better fodder to give extremists than an indication that America really hates them and hates their religion and will even go so far as to undermine its own constitution to deprive them? Their ill-conceived arguments are those of populist cynics, preying on fear and ignorance, not ones of genuine conviction – compare, for example, the powerful speech in favour of the project by Michael Bloomberg, who unlike the aforementioned Republicans is actually from New York.

A large amount of this, when stripped of the bigoted invective and political meanderings, comes down to a very simple question – what is more important? The exercise of the basic first amendment rights of Muslims, or the right of people to be offended (or in the case of Palin et al., be offended on behalf of others, given that several of these “stabbed in the heart” 9/11 victims’ families have come out in favour of the project)? This simply isn’t a question. If you are so divorced from reality that the mere presence of Muslims is something that “offends” you, then your opinion is not only wrong, it is getting into very dangerous territory, where you threaten to make imagined threats and negative situations into a reality. In spite of this, some critics have tried to argue that while they are legally permitted to do it, the project organisers shouldn’t go ahead anyway as it isn’t the “right thing to do”. Is this so? What exactly are the effects of building such a community centre?

The answer is that there will be no negativity inherent in the building. The offensive part to so many people, the praying Muslims, already happens at that site. A move towards integration and the provision of facilities for the whole community cannot realistically or rationally be painted as a bad thing. What’s actually causing harm here is the virulent attacks on the community centre. The presence of Muslims practicing their faith is being painted as offensive. They are not part of America in the them-and-us narrative being created by the Republicans. They are separate, they are not on our side in all of this – they are tolerated to a point but their rights and desires are subservient to ours. All Muslims are collectively guilty for the actions of extremists. If I were a Muslim, I imagine I would find this to be pretty offensive.

The hatred and division that the right are accusing the eminent diplomat and peacemaker Rauf of fostering is in fact emanating from the right themselves. The entire thing is a hypocritical sham, that is doing damage to inter-community relations and pushing people into buying into a clash of civilisations narrative (remember Newt’s comments above?) whereby they must choose between being a Muslim and being American. In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush, for all of his flaws, did his best to ensure that this was not seen as a sin of Islam, as an act representative of Muslims everywhere. The hysterical response of the critics of the project have tossed this laudable point aside in their fury. This is a victory for division and for those who wish to bring down America, especially those within Islam – they can now point and say “look, they truly do despise us”. When the most moderate Muslims are treated like this, what else can we expect? The bigots and the oppositionalists may win a victory in the short term, politically, but the long term social ramifications, as well as the damage to America’s international image that come from this kind of behaviour will make them come to regret it.

To close, here’s a final thought. The movement against the centre places collective guilt on Muslims by arguing that they shouldn’t practice their religion near ground zero because that faith was the thing the 9/11 attacks claimed as the reason behind their horrendous actions. Timothy McVeigh claimed he was defending America when he attacked the Alfred P. Murrah federal building. Do Palin and company believe that all those who consider themselves patriots, no matter how far they are from McVeigh in all realistic senses, shouldn’t be allowed to express their patriotism with a certain radius of where that attack took place? Of course not – because such a suggestion wouldn’t be politically populistic, or fit into the worldview they are trying to foster. Until they do, they have no moral consistency and no basic principle. They are nothing but hypocrites, cynics and bigots.

Thoughts on the Energy Levy

2010-08-10T15:34:00.003+01:00

Just some quick thoughts on the new energy levy being introduced by the Government. Ronan Lyons posted an incredibly interesting blog post on the tiny harms it would do to FDI in Ireland. I agree with most of what he says. However, I have some problems with it that are unrelated to FDI, and then I am going to look at some of his assumptions.

The first of my problems is with the indigenous SME sector in Ireland. Is it insane of me to think that we should probably stop fetishising FDI and look at what is best for sustainable Irish jobs. The fact of life in the 21^st century (in, as Lyons concedes a massive services based economy) is that supply of services are incredibly footloose. FDI can up sticks and leave when things go bad. However, indigenous industry through normal bounds of rationality tends to stay in its country of origin, putting up with a larger hit to revenue before it offshores. The RTE article that Lyons links to in his post is almost half comprised of warnings from ISME about the harms to SMEs.

Secondly are households. Already hit by unemployment, interest rate hikes and falling wages they are now being milked to subsidise the failings of a semi-state company. Normal people should not be penalized more for the inability of the ESB to modernize or run its business effectively and competently. The ESB should be forced to reform and improve without taxpayer assistance, even if the introduction of “competition” has not yet managed to do this.

Thirdly then, what exactly is the subsidy for? It is to pay for energy security, in the form of subsidies to the peat industry and the creation of more windfarms and other sustainable energies. Firstly, why are we subsidizing the peat industry? Karl Deeter put it very succinctly in this tweet.

Peat subsidy (part of
PSO) is behind ESB price increase, here's an idea: Fuck off. stop digging up co2
reducers & subsidize something else

Peat bogs are very good at fixing CO2 in the atmosphere, due to plants and stuff that live in them. Instead we give subsidies to people to dig them up and burn them, releasing CO2. And this is a progressive “Green” policy? Madness. At the same time any thought of investing in nuclear technology is laughed at. While I have read that Ireland is too small to make investing in nuclear technology feasible, we could at least build a couple of interconnectors to the UK and, if we’re going to subsidise anything, part fund a nuclear reactor over there. One nuclear reactor could provide the energy needs for the whole country, cheaply (After the admittedly massive capital costs) and cleanly.

So lastly then, to things I didn’t agree with in Ronan Lyons post. He basically used an argument of relative irrelevance. That since energy costs are the 4^th most important factor in attracting FDI it doesn’t matter that they’re going up, since everything else is so high already. I don’t agree with him that getting upset about the harm to competitiveness of utilities hikes will distract from fixing the overpricing problems of the other 3. I don't think that just because land and labour are overpriced in Ireland it gives a free pass for the government to make utilities overpriced also. If anything it is more of an argument to not introduce the levy, since it is merely compounding the overpricing problem. He quite clearly argues that Ireland has a competitiveness problem particularly among the 3 more important factors Lyons identifies. That problem isn’t going to go away if it is compounded by a disregard for other factors (no matter how small).

Satire: Landmark Ruling

2010-08-05T10:44:00.002+01:00

4 August 2010

Sacramento, CA. In a landmark case, Justice William Kennelly has ruled that a ban on heterosexual marriage will not be repealed. Kennelly J made reference to the massive amount of male bias in the 223 year old document. Citing statements such as “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence as highly persuasive; as well as the 14th Amendments historic restriction of rights to “male citizens”. Commenting on a long history of patriarchy in interpretation and drafting of the Constitution, Justice Kennelly pointed to the 15th Amendment (passed in 1870) only granting the right to vote to men. He continued to argue that since the framers had so obviously meant to exclude women from all auspices of power and authority, they would obviously prohibit their inclusion in a structure that people argue is as integral to society as marriage. Kennelly J finished his judgment by stating that “from this day on, only marriage between 2 men can be said to be consistent with the wishes of the US constitution”. When questioned if he is also in favor of lesbian marriage, Justice Kennelly stated “Only if they’re hot”.
Straight-Marriage campaigners are complaining that the judgment relies on “anachronistic interpretations that do not apply in the modern world” as well as attacking what they see as Justice Kennelly’s “aggressive conservative agenda”.
LGBT campaigners were unavailable to comment.

Free the Weed or Ban the Woo

2010-08-03T15:00:00.003+01:00

Much shorter post than last time. Just a quick thought.

We ban headshops selling “legal highs” in Ireland because we don’t know what is in them and the owners are misleading as to their effects and efficacy.

Yet, all over Ireland people are free to purchase and consume alternative medicines of all sorts without a problem. Homeopaths and Chiropractors are free to operate out of any premises, purveyors of dubious Chinese medicine can claim to cure cancer in take-aways – and yet no action is taken. Where are the angry grannies ringing into Joe Duffy and threatening to burn down the Health Food shops?

These “medicines” and “treatments” are conclusively proven to be no better than placebo. We continue to allow these quacks to profit from exploiting the vulnerable. Why do we ban drugs and things that teenagers buy in headshops? To prevent someone making a stupid decision that could harm them now and remove choice in the future, to prevent against 3^rd party harms (like anti-social behaviour or stealing to feed the habit) and to stop them from becoming a drain on the state as they wallow in addiction and take millions of dollars to treat from complications. I’m going to examine each of these in turn.

Firstly, to stop people doing stupid stuff. Sometimes people make decisions that even by their own metrics are stupid. Subjectively stupid that they regret doing. So we stop them, as much as possible from doing stupid stuff that would have lasting consequences. We place restrictions on risky behaviour, we don’t let you cut your own arm off, we don’t let you consent to cannibalism or becoming a slave. Because down the line, this choice takes away future choices. The NHS in the UK recently released a report where it (and I’m paraphrasing) said “Homeopathy is of dubious scientific merit, but we will keep it anyway in the interest of patient choice”. The thing is, in this instance, like taking the first hit of crack cocaine, this is a choice we shouldn’t allow. Because when you have cancer and you choose homeopathy, it isn’t a choice that allows you a lot more choices.

Secondly, 3^rd party harms. In short, your friends and family have to watch you drink water instead of something that can actually help you. Then if by some random luck you spontaneously get cured, you become a walking anecdote for the success of these treatments, perpetuating the harm to other people. Those are two harms to other people of your choice to use CAM. I could think of more, but I digress.

Thirdly then, becoming a drain on the state. In instances where the state is funding CAM, it is already a drain on the state. The taxpayer is ultimately funding the ultimate white elephant, even more useless than an 80,000 seater football stadium in a one street town is funding millions for “doctors” to give people glasses of water. Secondly, if you don’t take real treatments and then get worse, the cost of treating you increases. So not only has the state paid for you to receive pretend medicine, it has now paid for you to get pretend medicine AND more real medicine than you would have needed had you got the good stuff in the first instance.

So what is my conclusion. CAM is just as harmful to choice and society as illegal narcotics. So either free the weed or ban this sick filth.

Borders n' Stuff - Let Immigrants In

2010-07-29T09:46:00.008+01:00

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different
results – Albert Einstein

This will be the first and only time I link to a socialist blog for a purpose other than ridicule. But this post is inspired by a post by Aidan Rowe over at http://redwriters1.blogspot.com/2010/07/fences-borders-and-dehumanization.html and the discussion I had with people about it. For once I agree with my Anarcho-Communist friend. Though for different reasons. I’m going to loosely stick them into 3 main headings; Moral, Economic and Cultural. I will try my best to be brief but this is going to be a long post (8 pages of A4 I’m afraid). I would also recommend reading “Immigrants – Your Country Needs Them” by Phillip Legrain for more detailed analysis of what I’m saying. I will link to World Bank reports later that are also useful.

Before I get onto the heavy stuff, a little history. Anti-immigration legislation is a relatively new phenomenon. The British had a absolute right to come to England for anyone who lived within the Commonwealth. This persisted until the 20th century, when laws were enacted to prevent German Jews from coming over to England. So the origins of immigration laws are shrouded in xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Other countries followed suit for a variety of reasons, mostly Mercantilist and ideological, as the concept of modern statehood became more defined. Mercantilism has since been shown to be bollocks economic policy and I hope to show why their labour protectionism is as illogical as their “beggar thy neighbour” policies.

Firstly, morality. By maintaining our current immigration policy we damn hundreds of people a year to suffocate in containers, be shot by border police or be exploited by unscrupulous employers once they get there. We have tried ever and ever more elaborate mechanisms to prevent people getting into our countries. As Matt Santos from the West Wing points out, the US government tripled the border patrol on the Mexican border, to no avail. East Germany constructed a massive wall with armed soldiers shooting people, and yet people got through. No country in the developed world is willing to go that far to deter people, so it is inevitable that people will get through. Perhaps it is time to try a different tactic. Because an action can’t possibly be moral when it creates such immoral outcomes. Hundreds of people die for negligible benefit every year. Is a vague sense of economic security (which is a fallacy in and of itself, as I will explain) worth these peoples lives, when it doesn’t even solve the problem and never will?

The second moral issue is the fact that we owe them. We built up our country through exploiting their resources, taking their gold, using them as slaves and generally treating them like crap. And we still owe them, because we haven’t stopped. Developed countries interfere in LDCs like Rwanda and the Congo, stirring up antipathy and strife so they can (in this particular example) exploit coltan reserves. You can’t say you have never oppressed an LDC, because coltan is an ingredient in mobile phone batteries. Anyone and everyone who owns a mobile phone has blood in their pockets.

Moreover, our trade policies continue to subjugate the developing world. We band together in rich country clubs like the EU and dump our excess on them, undercutting their development in a way that they cannot reciprocate. We use our clout to get better and better trade deals. The IMF in the 1980s gave out loans on the caveat that LDCs open themselves to the free international trade market and we plundered them mercilessly. Even countries like Germany with their export led economies are harming LDCs. Trade is a zero-sum game. You don’t just push your exports over the border and hope someone finds them. There has to be a buyer and a seller in every transaction. And by continuing to run massive trade surpluses, we crowd out the developing countries. So we owe them a duty to come over here and at least profit from some of the employment generated by their misfortune.

Secondly then, economics. Freeing up immigration will help us and it will help them. Before I go on to explain all the wonderful, world economy quadrupling effects that immigration would bring, I want to dispel some untruths – namely that our economy and services would not be able to cope, they will take all our jobs and our wages will be deflated.

Israel operates an absolute “right of return” for Jews all over the world. This is all fine and dandy unless it is 1989 and the Soviet Union is collapsing. Between 1990 and 1994 Israel accepted 1.4 million immigrants. This did put a short term strain on infrastructure and it did lower wages temporarily. But by 1997 all 1.4 million of these immigrants had been housed and wages had returned to their pre-1990 levels, adjusted for inflation. The economy even grew, due to the massive capital inflows caused by the surge in demand.

Secondly, the “DEY TUK AWR JAWBS” argument. Two problems with this, namely A. that there aren’t a constant fixed number of jobs in the economy at any one time and B. immigrants do different work to natives.

this is relatively intuitive. If economies were bounded by only having like 10000 jobs, every time someone had a baby they would be forcing someone into pensioner status 18 years later. Employment is cyclical governed by boom and bust cycles, just like other business cycles, not influenced by immigration.

A Mexican high school drop out is not competing with a Texan steelworker. Most unskilled immigrants have a low grasp of the language and because of that are consigned to the lowest forms of labour. So immigrants naturally gravitate towards jobs that natives don’t want to do. Even skilled workers (who would be directly competing for jobs) are a benefit, why do you think those are the kind of immigrants that Western Governments are actively seeking?

Ok then, on to the main constructive reasons as to why letting immigrants in would be good for the economy; benefits of globalization, benefits of transient workers and the changing age profile and economic needs of the first world.

So, I mentioned mercantilism earlier. It was bad. It favoured protectionism and tariffs to try and grow each countries economy at the expense of one another. But what it ignored was the laws of comparative advantage and also the ability that people being free to move their factors of production gives to compliment the production of goods and services. When free trade took over as the dominant force in orthodox economics and globalization was given free rein, the world economy grew faster than it ever has in human history; it has more than doubled since 1950.

So what effect would opening the border have? Some economists predict that the world economy would quadruple if labour was given the same mobility as other factors of production. The World Bank was not quite as optimistic, but thinks that it would lead to massive increase in global prosperity. In fact if you have any issues with migration, I would recommend reading all the PDFs on this page http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDECPROSPECTS/0,,contentMDK:21121930~menuPK:3145470~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64165026~theSitePK:476883,00.html

Since pretty much every single one of them explains a benefit of migration.

Onto the benefits of transient workers then. Basically, existing economies have unemployment because of structural deficiencies. Some jobs are for certain skilled individuals that we have not trained yet, some jobs are too unpopular with the natives or some jobs are in locations that there isn’t a high enough indigenous population to fill. Every job vacancy is a drain on the economy – the wages they would have received are not entering the economy and costing other people business. Migrants enable us to fill all these jobs – they can fill jobs like nurses or doctors, which we have not enough graduates to satisfy. They can take jobs cleaning streets or toilets, which Irish people turn their noses up at and they will gladly move to smaller towns and cities in search of work, not stay in Dublin, just because they are born there. And when they earn the wages in their new jobs, they spend them – boosting consumption and generating more jobs. Consumption that would not happen otherwise, as these jobs would remain unfilled.

Also, cheap services like childcare (lots of foreign nannies providing competition) enable natives such as career women and single mothers to go back to work in higher paid (relative to the immigrant) employment. One of the main reasons for voluntary redundancies resulting in long term unemployment presently is the high cost of childcare. (which bizarrely is still at pre-recession levels) By reducing or mitigating against these costs we can help facilitate a stronger economy.

Immigrants are also more likely to become entrepreneurs. Nigerians are statistically the highest ethnic group for starting their own businesses in Ireland. There are many reasons for this; Irish people being attracted to stable jobs in public services and academia, Irish people not having the drive due to being overly comfortable, the relative loss of earnings being lower if a Nigerian business fails or the business opportunities presented by catering to their fellow immigrants. New business is something we should be advocating and if Irish people won’t do it, perhaps letting our immigrants innovate for us is a positive step.

Diversity is also proven to boost productivity. Cities with a high level of ethnic diversity have a higher standard of living and production. Some of this is the availability of ethnic cuisine and services, as choice increases standards of living. But a lot of it is also the clash of ideas and backgrounds resulting in new better ideas. One of the reasons touted for Japans stagnation and deflation is its restrictive immigration policies and ethnic homogeneity. Cities like London and New York on the other hand are vibrant and highly productive. The diversity of the workforce also helps grow trading links. The growth of Taiwan as a microprocessor centre is due in part to the huge Taiwanese diaspora located in Silicon Valley. These kind of links are beneficial to both parties.

Finally then (on this topic) to the changing age profile of the Developed World. We’re getting older and our birth rate is falling. We need immigrants to just keep our economy ticking over. We need hundreds of thousands more than we presently let in, just to keep the EU in the same shape as it is today. Italy needs 650,000 immigrants a year to stop its economy plummeting by 2050. We need them to earn money to pay our pension, to act as doctors and nurses and to staff our care homes when we’re old and incontinent. The workforce to do all this is out there and willing, we just wont let them in because of our jingoistic attitude.

So now that I have covered all the selfish stuff about how we will be better off, I’m going to quickly chat about why it will help 3rd World Economies (more on this on the World Bank links earlier). After that I’m going to have a quick look at the benefits to culture then I will stop typing, I promise.

Going to look at the benefits under a controversial two headings; Remittances and Brain-drain.

Firstly remittances – wages in the Developed World are on average 14 times higher than those in the developing world. Immigrants generally send one sixth of their wages home in remittances. Some countries can have up to 40% of their economy based on the receipt of remittances (such as Poland until recently). The benefits of this are obvious – the increase in demand, increase in wealth within the economy and the ability to pay for things like education and healthcare that they would otherwise be unable to afford. Remittances also increase after natural disasters, as the diaspora send more to combat the increase in reliance. Facts from after the Haiti earthquake and the Boxing Day Tsunami back this up. These payments are also more reliable than the often ad-hoc employment offered in LDCs. The benefits of certain payments are explained quite well in The Economists article on conditional cash transfers. Some countries, like the Phillipines (again see the World Bank links for more details) have programs designed to maximize emigration and remittances to grow their economy, such is the benefit to the recipient country. Remittances take the best factors of foreign aid and microloans and then make them self perpetuating and targeted. As for any arguments regarding the use of remittances for consumer goods and television, television ownership is firstly proven to increase womens liberty and reduce domestic violence in LDCs, as well as increasing popular democratic involvement, and secondly, think for a second about the irony of the first world consumer like yourself critiquing what a poor African spends their 20 dollars on.

Secondly then to brain-drain. Yes, the best and the brightest will leave. Some of them at least. But that is not the end of the world. In a world without borders, it is easy to return to your country of origin. That is where your family is, your roots are. The best skilled people will go abroad, but figures show that most of them will return. Most illegal immigrants say that they would return to their country of origin if they could. Once they have saved enough to return they generally wish to. Most immigrants are unaccompanied males, who leave to earn money to put their kids through college and then wish to return home. Most immigrants to the US from Honduras that were surveyed expressed a wish to return home some day. When they do, they return with new skills picked up in the developed world, as well as the capital and resources to start projects and companies in the LDC as well as the ability to forge trade links with their former host country as I discussed earlier. So it is not all terrible, in fact it can often be beneficial to the native country. Again the Phillipines is an example of a country using brain drain to their advantage, purposely training doctors and nurses for “export”.

Lastly then to culture. No hard facts here, just an ideal. What is a national identity? How do you sum up what it means to be Irish? Catholic, Anti-Abortion, Rural, Farmer? Only one of those applies to me (and only insofar as I refuse to consider Waterford “urban”), The reality is that we share very little with our fellow compatriots, disagree with them on most things and only have a bond because we were randomly thrown on the same piece of rock with them. A respect for our differences and embracing other culture can only enrich us all. The ability to have a full Irish breakfast, Subway for lunch and a Chinese for dinner is something that most people would not have conceived of 50 years ago and it is something that is fundamentally enriching for all parties. We have to stop seeing foreigners as the enemy, invite them over here to be equal partners in our success and we will all benefit from the results.

Money and Politics - Getting the best for the job.

2010-07-27T10:57:00.005+01:00

It probably isn’t too controversial to complain about politicians wages. In these times of economic uncertainty it probably isn’t controversial to say that they should definitely be reduced. I’m going to talk firstly about why we shouldn’t pay them expenses (or at least reform the system). Then to the controversial bit, I’m going to talk about why we should consider not paying them at all. I’m going to use mostly an examination of incentive structures to examine that thesis.

So firstly, to expenses. In no other job do you receive an allowance to go to work. Extraordinary expenses, yes. Mundane expenses are expected to be covered by your salary. That’s why you’re paid one. The furor about Ivor Callely is made all the more ridiculous when you think, why exactly was he allowed to claim these expenses at all? They receive a handsome salary in the first instance; do they really need to have this topped up further? Not going to put a lot of analysis into this, just thought that it needs to be said.

Secondly then, what is it we desire in politicians? Intelligence, charm, wit, local issues at heart, ideologue, polite and goes to lots of funerals? I’m going to qualify my examination of what kind of politician is good by stating that I am in favour of a strong local government and I believe that many of the current “parish pump politics” carried out could easily be transferred to a strengthened local government. My conception of what makes a good politician is someone with ideals, cares about their locality but has an understanding of national concerns, who is representative of their electorate and flexible enough to do what is best for them. I would submit that most of the politicians operating today do not fit this description. We have on one extreme, Jackie Healy Rae who displays a frightening ignorance of elocution and matters out of Kerry. Let’s take him as the paragon of the regionalist. On the other hand, we have many senators who are completely out of touch with everyone. The talking shop of failed politicians all drawing salary from the public purse. Both of these are problems are due in part to the fact that politics is seen as a career and not a vocation. This will be the main crux of my third point.

As anyone who has read Freakonomics will know, incentives are strange and wonderful things. With the correct incentive structure you persuade people to conform, to jump through hoops or to brave untold perils. The arguments for the current wages of politicians are – 1. High wages attract the best, we would lose the smartest people to the private sector without them. 2. High wages prevent against corruption by making sure they have a high enough salary that any bribes will be less attractive. 3. It acts as a balance to enable poor people to enter politics and not be bankrupt by it. I will deal with each of those in turn.

Firstly, this “brain drain to the private sector argument”. I’m going to argue that money is not the correct incentive to use to attract the smartest people. Lets look at exactly what a politician receives now – a salary, expenses but more importantly power and influence. A pre-school in Tel Aviv brought in a charge for parents who picked up their kids late. Instead of dissuading latecomers, it allowed parents to rationalize their lateness, leading to a worsening of the problem. Even when the charges were removed this shift in social mores lead to the problem persisting. What this shows is that the standard model of how humans respond to incentives is not immediately obvious. People think in interesting and devious ways. MP wages in the UK are low and yet they have a plethora of talent that Ireland could only dream of. Why is this? The problem with the current conception of politics over here is that it is an alternative career move in many areas of Ireland.

With TD wages starting at €130,000 it’s also a quite lucrative career choice. Just like the parents in Tel Aviv, this view of it as a job has enabled politicians to rationalize their existence as one that is fundamentally self-serving, forgetting their primary duty as an elected public representative. Just like the parents thought, “$5 for an extra 15 minutes childminding, great!”, Irish politicians have become consumed with getting more for themselves. If everyone is trying to get as much as possible for themselves, does that mindset then easily transfer to doing the best for everyone? So what would be the effect of removing TD wages, or at least sharply reducing them?

We might see a mass exodus of the current political cadre. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing.) But who would take their place? A group of malcontents, cranks and morons? I doubt it. They wouldn’t get elected. The disincentive of public embarrassment and the incentive for better candidates, which I will explain shortly, would remove their ability to get votes or even to run. More than likely it would be a mixture between highly paid people with free time (so non-executive directors, academics and trust fund kids) mixed with people from lower socio-economic backgrounds that are legitimate activists – trade unionists, civil rights activists and outspoken local people. So not a massive difference from today.

One of the reasons for this is one of the reasons why capitalism has been such a resounding success – the backward bending supply of labour. Despite the disagreement of Environmentalists, Socialists and Anarchists, capitalism has enabled unprecedented environmental protection, living standards and activism. This is due to the ability of people to devote their free time to things they love, as well as the generation of tax revenue that can be spent on them.

Why is this the case? Well at low incomes, work is the most pressing priority. Each marginal addition of labour earns a high proportion more living standards. However as income levels rise, the marginal addition of labour has an opportunity cost of fun, which at this point increases living standard more than earning money (you have to have some time to spend all the piles of cash you earn). So as people earn more, they start to take free time. And what do they spend their free time on? Things they are passionate about. This isn’t a new idea (read Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) but this is what has allowed capitalism to let people devote time and energy campaigning for causes like environmentalism; which lead to the establishment of the EPA and other watchdogs. This kind of action is politics at its most desirable and we need to gear the conception of politics as a public service once again. Because throwing money is an incentive at its most infantile; conceptions, duty and social conditioning create the best incentives.

Secondly, this idea of cognitive surplus. People in the Developed World have so much free time and communication ability that increasingly they are not just passive consumers of information, news and policy – they create it. It turns out that if you give someone a lot of free time and an ability to reach people they immediately start to churn out original matter. Whether it be a LOLcat, this blog or crowdsourcing information like Ushahidi – people like to help other people, they like to create and they like to do it for free when given the chance. The modern world is often bemoaned for its loss of the local. By making politics more like the internet, ironically, we can recapture the essence of what politics should be.

Ok so, quickly to round up the other two – Bribe and Poor people.

Bribes – no matter how much you pay someone there will always be someone with resources that will pay more. Politicians have something that people will always be willing to pay for – hands on the wheel of power. This isn’t an argument to pay them more, it is an argument for more checks and balances on them.

Poor people – politicians as we have them today are mostly lawyers, academics and teachers. Hardly the poorest of people. Those who aren’t predominantly come from political dynasties or the middle class anyway. There is an endemic problem in Irish politics as it stands regarding the involvement of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This doesn’t solve that, but since the status quo doesn’t solve it either, I’m ok with that. Perhaps a grant to politicians below a certain income threshold would help them. I might be ok with that.

One last thought – I may have dismissed the constituency clinic and local issues concern a little lightly earlier. I think that it is possible to do these well and yet not receive pay for them. But I honestly believe that a lot of the constituency work can and should be left to local politicians. A politician in the Dail should not be interfering to get a Council to fix a broken window in a council house.

Prospering Cheaters: Luis Suárez and Incentive Structures

2010-07-03T22:44:00.005+01:00

NB: These views are purely my own and do not reflect the opinion of my colleague on this blog, who has his own different opinions on this kind of incident.

Over the years, football has seen more than its fair share of cheating, foul play and general rule breaking, quite a lot of it in crucial matches at a high level. From Maradona’s infamous Hand of God to Michael Owen’s dive against Argentina in 1998 to Stéphane Henchoz’s blatant handball on the line in the 2001 FA Cup final, there have been all kinds of game-changing, advantage gaining actions made in contravention of the rules that have gone un-noticed and unpunished. In these cases it is easy to know what to do – to say that the match officials failed to notice what was going on, failed to do their job properly and allowed themselves to be fooled by mendacious, cynical players.

This summer’s World Cup has scarcely been devoid of controversy in terms of this kind of behaviour. Even before it started, Thierry Henry’s handball in the qualifying play-off had caused a furore. In the competition itself, we have had the likes of Luis Fabiano scoring after a double handball, Tevez scoring while miles offside – which he has admitted to being aware of – and Manuel Neuer pretending Lampard’s shot didn’t cross the line. Yet on each of these occasions, the players gained advantage by the rules not being applied. They gambled on the referee getting it wrong. The incentives were based around not getting caught – if they had been, they would have suffered an overall loss, or at the very least, no gain.

However, a different problem arises when the rules are applied and the player who broke them still benefits. In this case, the incentives are such that to break the rules regardless of whether or not you yourself are caught and punished is, if a player is of a certain mentality, a decision that can be justified in pure cost/benefit terms. And this brings us to the most recent major controversy – that of Luis Suárez.

For those who don’t know, in the last minute of extra-time in the quarter-final game between Ghana and Uruguay, Uruguay striker Luis Suárez blocked an effort on goal that was definitely going in with his arms. He was sent off, but Ghana missed the resulting penalty and then proceeded to lose in a shoot out – effectively by his actions he kept Uruguay in the tie and allowed them to go on to win. His reaction to events shows that he didn’t regret what he did at all – claiming to have made “the save of the tournament” – and the sad thing is, why should he? Through his misbehaviour, a greater gain had been won, and that was all that mattered to him.

Obviously though, there’s more to this than Suárez himself. He engaged in an odious act of cheating, breaking the rules to his own benefit, and sending another team out of the competition. Ghana had a definite goal before his intervention, and were reduced to a penalty – merely a goal-scoring opportunity. This is the difference to if he had brought down a man while he was the last defender – in that case, the lost opportunity is replaced with another opportunity (around 75% of penalties are converted), and there is a rough level of equitability due to the indeterminate nature of what would have happened if the foul had not occurred. In this case, there was no indeterminacy. The ball was going in, it was illegally blocked and at the end of it all, Ghana ended up without a goal. When this is the scenario that arises, there is something very wrong.

There are two minor but important points I feel are worth addressing at this stage: firstly, some people are saying that it is Ghana’s own problem for missing the penalty. In a way, yes, this is true. However, the point is that they shouldn’t have been put in that scenario of reduced opportunity in the first place – without Suárez’s handball, there would have been a goal scored and the penalty issue would be completely and utterly moot.

Secondly, I don’t agree with the people calling for extra punishment for Suárez. Yes, he broke the rules, yes what he did was unfair and reprehensible and ultimately eliminated Ghana. However, the referee gave him the punishment laid down in the rules for what he did, and he should not be punished beyond what the rules said at the time that his piece of foul play occurred – anything else would be cheap politicking by FIFA and a deflection from what actually needs to happen here.

That thing that actually needs to happen is a look at the bigger picture, beyond this one incident in isolation and see what the problems are that lead to this kind of behaviour, and to make sure that deprivations of this nature do not happen again in future – including the flaws in the rules of the game that allow players to commit acts of this nature as a completely rational choice, albeit one considered reprehensible and abhorrent by the laws and, more importantly, spirit of the game.

All the inevitable excuse making that has occurred for Suárez’s actions, and the attempts by people to justify it within the context of the game miss one very crucial point – the purpose of the rules is not to make cheating a less preferred default option that can pay off in certain rare circumstances, but to eliminate it from the game altogether. If that is not possible, then the rules should be formatted in such a way that anyone who does break them should have their potential to benefit from doing so eliminated, or at the very least minimised as much as possible.

Furthermore, Suárez’s action is, as far as I’m concerned, completely in violation of the way the game is meant to be played. Some have defended him by claiming that it’s okay to do whatever you like as long as it helps your team to win the game (Suárez himself seems to be very much of that opinion, given his post-match comments). However, I don’t believe this is right at all. Firstly, on a basic level, how galling is it to lose a game because your opponent refused to play by the rules? Yes, all teams are guilty of this to some extent, but when it comes to as blatant a denial as this, of stopping what is a guaranteed goal, there has clearly been a violation above the normal level of petty gamesmanship that plagues football. Quite simply, if you don’t want to play by the rules, and are willing to cast them aside to this extent, you probably should be playing a different game.

In addition to this, it speaks of an astonishing level of disrespect to your fellow sportsmen, to your fellow competitors, when you engage in this kind of behaviour. Regardless of what they have done or what effort they may have put in, you are still willing to break the rules to deny them what otherwise was unavoidable, their victory and their moment of glory. At this point, it ceases to become about the game – you may have been beaten at it, but you go outside of the rules to alter the result, which is fundamentally unfair on your opponents and a disgrace to the sport, it renders the boundaries within which the game is supposed to be played moot and shows utter disrespect for the abilities and efforts of your opponents.

Simply put, the ability to accept defeat, and act like and adult and not a child about events that legitimately don’t go your way seems to be sorely lacking among players. The attitude of doing anything you can, even if it is illegal, to win is bad for the game – it more or less provides a rationale for excusing all kinds of dangerous or simply dishonest foul play. When the rules re-enforce this idea by allowing you, even if caught, to benefit from these kinds of actions, it’s fairly simple to observe that there is a problem.

We are told, both by people defending him and by the man himself, that anyone in Suárez’s position would have done exactly the same thing, done what is best for their team and by extension, in the long run, themselves. This is in a way both true and untrue. Plenty of players do, as outlined at the start of this post, engage in this behaviour, often with the stakes set much lower and the juncture of the match less crucial. However, the vast majority of players do not – every week, dozens of goals are scored around the world because players opt not to handle on the line, sometimes in situations as crucial as the one where Suárez did.

In the World Cup qualifier between the USA and Costa Rica, the Latin American team needed a win to go through and were leading 2-1 when, in the 95th minute, they conceded a goal from a corner that the player on the line could have easily blocked with his arm. Instead he swung his leg at it and, owing to the awkward height, missed, resulting in Costa Rica being pushed out of automatic qualification and into a playoff, which they lost – the victorious team from that tie was, coincidentally, Uruguay.

The stakes here were just as high and the player opted to obey the rules, even if that meant failure. Funnily enough, there was no outcry from the people of Costa Rica asking why he didn’t cheat and handle it and give his team at least a chance of keeping out the penalty. A choice in these scenarios definitely exists, and nobody would have pilloried Suárez for not being a cheat. The problem is that the laws as they stand create an incentive structure in these instances based entirely around the integrity of the individual player, and their mentality towards the rules.

The cost/benefit analysis of performing this kind of action essentially comes down to whether or not players feel that the value of obeying the rules and not cheating is sufficient to outweigh the potential material benefit to the team of breaking the rules – and when it comes down to this, one can understand how easy it is for a player to rationalise cheating. This is the fundamental issue with the rules as they stand over this kind of incident. The incentive structure needs to be re-balanced away from one that allows this kind of flagrant foul play to be a subjective rational choice, and make it an objectively irrational one.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day it’s not that simple to decide what the solution should be, even though it is in my mind fairly clear that something is quite seriously wrong. The status quo compensates the definite loss of a goal with the possibility of a goal – and this is not good enough. The kind of behaviour that leads to this scenario does need to be eliminated by ensuring that there is nothing to gain from doing it – and there is, as far as I can see, no good reason not to give changing the rules consideration. Exactly what the change should be, however, is the difficult part. One of the more interesting suggestions I that have seen is using a system similar to the penalty try in rugby - when a definite goal is denied by foul play of this nature, then the goal should be awarded regardless. It’s possibly not a perfect solution, and there are certainly difficulties with implementing it, but at the moment I can’t see a fairer alternative to recompense those who would otherwise be cheated into a position of disadvantage.

Time to do the (Childrens) Right thing?

2010-06-04T18:57:00.005+01:00

“The “Stranger Danger” program that was widely shown in public schools was the most damaging campaign ever in terms of child abduction. It taught children about the “scary man in the trench coat hiding behind the tree” instead of warning children that strangers are only a fraction of the offenders. Most people who hurt and abduct children are family members, teachers, neighbours, people they see every day.”

- Dr Spencer Reid, Criminal Minds Season 1 - “What Fresh Hell”

RTE ran a “damning” exposé of paedophile rings in Ireland, determined to show that the creeps are just a click away. Posing as a young child they proceeded to try and entice paedophiles into soliciting them for sex.

There are ethical and taste issues with such a practice (Just watch “To Catch a Predator” to see every single one of them) but while I personally found the show crass and distasteful (the quotations from the paedophiles in trying to solicit the “child” were particularly unnecessary and disturbing) my main issue is with the blatant scaremongering that the show was based on. Your children are probably least at risk, statistically, from the pervert behind a webcam. Who you really need to be wary of is the pervert teaching them history, the pervert who lives next door, the pervert who trains the football team or the pervert that you're married to.

You may say, this isn't a problem. We can at once warn parents about the dangers of predatory paedophiles and explain the warning signs of child abuse at home. Except we don't. We don't run the same type of dedicated program to shining light on child abuse by people in these situations. The whole paedophile priest fiasco typifies the Irish attitude to such circumstances. It took years and years for those abuses to come to light. And they were far more prevalent than instances of child grooming online.

And what if both the parents are abusive? What if they haven't the concerned mammies and daddies who look through their MSN chat logs and secretly check their bebo; like many internet safety advocates have trumpeted during the week since the program. What if it is the parents who are neglectful or sexually abusive? Well due to the disgraceful anachronism which is the Irish constitutional regard for children, many of them get away with it. Our constitution is a document that places a higher regard for the stability of the “family” than it does for the children being damaged within that unit. A relic of the days of strict Catholicism, children in Ireland can often be left in horribly abusive scenarios due to this ridiculous line of precedent. Even the reforms introduced after the Kilkenny Incest report in 1993 haven't stamped out the issue – as illustrated by the continuing appearance before the courts of issues of failure in the protection of children, many of which are based on the absence of adequate rights for minors.

But in the week following this Prime Time program, were the airwaves flooded by well spoken Bernardos officials, experts in Constitutional Law and people who work with the abused? No. The week immediately following was filled with under informed members of the general public terrified that their children were inches away from abduction and rape on Facebook. Has the campaign for children's rights ever gotten the level of attention that the Prime Time program managed to attract this week? Not once.

It is a sad day, when a much more moving, realistic and valuable story is left to one side for a cheap sensationalist dig at the Gardai for not catching the online predators. It's over a year since the Ryan report called for a referendum on children's rights. Surely it is time for a cheap sensationalist dig at the Government for not catching the real predators.

The Gaza Flotilla and the Declining Dignity of Protest

2010-06-03T17:13:00.002+01:00

There is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of the 700-odd people who set out on the recent aid flotilla to the Gaza strip did so with nothing but the best of intentions. These people saw human suffering and decided that this area of the world was, for whatever reason, most worthy of their attention, and went off to try and make a difference in whatever way they could.

As it is, they stumbled into a series of events that spiralled out of control, leaving ten people dead and dozens injured. It is, of course, deeply regrettable and very sad that these deaths and injuries were suffered, both among those on the flotilla and the members of the Israeli Defence Force, especially given that the whole fiasco was both eminently avoidable and depressingly predictable.

To provide some background, the initial intentions of both the majority of those within the fleet and the IDF were perfectly legitimate. As said above, people were trying to get aid to a region suffering a humanitarian crisis, the IDF were trying to prevent contraband material falling into the hands of an organisation whose primary goal is the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamist state.

The inspection of the boats should not have constituted a problem. It is easy to see why Israel feelt the need to search the boats, given that they planned on passing through Israeli controlled territory and given that weapons have repeatedly been smuggled into Gaza under the guise of being aid convoys in the past. Reasonable suspicion existed, therefore under international law it was legitimate to search the boat, regardless of it being outside of their territorial waters, though it would doubtlessly have been wiser to wait until the flotilla was within them. This has always been past policy with aid deliveries – stop them, inspect them for contraband, discard illegal goods and then distribute the rest to Gaza through appropriate channels.

Indeed, five of the six boats stopped when asked to by the Israelis and only on one of those five did some people refuse to fully co-operate. If that was what it took to get the aid delivered, they were willing to do so, even if it may not perhaps have been completely what they wanted. If they were victims of violence from the Israeli soldiers, it should rightfully be condemned. The flotilla had a dual purpose – delivering aid and protesting the blockade, and when push came to shove, the people on board needed to show what they prioritised, whether they were primarily pro-Gaza or anti-Israel, whether the aid getting through as quickly as possible mattered more, or whether making a show and a statement did. The vast majority of people prioritised the first.

Those on the sixth ship, the MV Mavi Marmara, evidently did not. This is where everything went wrong. The details have been rehashed elsewhere a thousand times, but in short, the Israeli soldiers who tried to board were assaulted by the supposed aid workers on the deck, things escalated, shots were fired and as a result the soldiers were authorised to use lethal force – and people were killed. Those who had set out to make an anti-Israeli statement and see how far they could push things had, in a twisted and tragic way, got what they wished for.

The IDF reacted in the face of provocation, of that there is no doubt, and it is easy to see how troops under threat would have reacted to put their own safety first and neutralise the threat facing them. The problem from the Israeli side is that the nature of the inspection was at best ill-advised and careless, as they did not expect or properly plan for what would happen if there was heavy resistance, not being armed with any kind of heavy crowd control equipment, and at worst stupid and unnecessary as they could have chosen an easier and safer way to deal with the boat, being better aware of what they would face when they boarded.

Either way, it certainly did absolutely nothing to further Israel’s cause. As such, the simple outrage of people over the killings is understandable. However, there is a problem both with how the ire of people is being directed and with what people appear to be considering to be legitimate forms of protest – that is to say, what is being seen as acceptable, and indeed preferable, methods when it comes to highlighting what you think is an injustice in society and attempting to draw attention to, and ultimately change that.

People have been trying to compare the members of the flotilla to the Freedom Riders in America who campaigned against segregation. Naturally, things here are not that simple. What we have in this instance is, as outlined above, two groups reacting differently. The former had dignity. They accepted a level of what they saw as injustice to achieve the greater good, and acted in such a way as to minimise potential harm coming to those around them. They were willing to make a sacrifice and suffer to an extent to get through what they wanted – these people have done essentially nothing wrong. Were they to suffer violence, it would be unwarranted, regardless of how right or wrong one may consider their beliefs to be.

But when we get to the second group, the analogy breaks down completely. Here we have, on the Marmara, a group whose first recourse when presented with the face of what they objected to was to break into violence. These were people who wanted to be hard men, who wanted to make a fuss and be as active as possible, consequences for their cause and others who support it be damned.

This kind of resistance – launching an assault on the objects of their hatred – is not in any way, shape or form dignified or constructive. It is as abhorrent as the use of force against peaceful protestors. If the Freedom Riders had gone around beating up policemen, you can be sure that they would be seen differently right now and would have received nowhere near the level of sympathy and eventual solidarity shown towards them by many of their contemporaries.

However, things suddenly seem different. Few meaningful attempts seem to be being made by the supporters of those involved in the flotilla to distance themselves from those who chose violence. They are being presented as having acted in as legitimate and positive a fashion as the people who chose not to engage in reckless, self-absorbed behaviour that put the lives of themselves and innocent people around them into very real danger.

This is an extraordinarily odd and hazardous attitude that not only denigrates those who act with dignity and put their cause above themselves, but encourages people to act in as bull-headed and violent a fashion as possible, and that going to the extremes, eschewing any attempt at dignified engagement, compromise or understanding is the best possible thing you can do for your cause, so much the better if you can get yourself martyred for it. A martyr is a tragic thing to be, and noble under certain circumstances – but to engineer things so you can create martyrs where there need be none, especially when those martyrs are innocent people who may not want to become so, who consider you their ally and comrade, is despicable. The Israeli soldiers may have been the ones who pulled the trigger, but the circumstances leading to the deaths of any innocent people on the flotilla were engineered elsewhere.

The fact that these people are somehow almost universally escaping condemnation, and are instead being mourned, sympathised with and even in some cases lionised, is a sad indication of how polarised and one-eyed people are becoming when they engage in public discourse on controversial issues. Condolences are being offered by the Irish to Turkey, a nation whose entire involvement in this is a result of a weak Prime Minister trying desperately to placate the Islamist wing of his party, who allowed the aid to be transported by an organisation with past ties to terrorist groups, without any thought being given as to whether or not those who are dead were innocent or were among those who brought violence upon themselves and others.

When we do this, when we allow this to happen, we fall into the trap of legitimising the extreme elements of a movement. The most damning item found on the Marmara was, as far as I’m concerned, not the contraband goods or the knives or the bullet-proof vests or even the rifle scopes. It was the flag of Hamas. Similarly, at the funerals of the Turkish activists, the flag of Hamas has been draped across their coffins. This should be unacceptable for any organisation who wish to be fighting for Palestinian freedom – Hamas are a repressive government, whose policies do more harm than good in Gaza. Indeed, right now, Hamas are refusing to take the aid from the flotilla into Gaza, presumably as a protest against Israel, once again putting the welfare of their citizens in a secondary role. Much like the extreme elements on the fleet, they have shown a clear disregard when it comes to putting innocent people in harm’s way if they think it will help their cause.

The people in this flotilla and supporting it should be aware of the presence of these extreme elements, and if they are not, once they become so aware they should distance themselves from them, not put aside morality in the name of solidarity. The sight of the Labour LGBT flag next to a Hamas one in the protest in Dublin is a great example of this – you should not tolerate marching side by side with the supporters of those whose disregard and disrespect for human dignity allowed innocents to be killed or wounded. What they are marching for is not what you are marching for. All that leads to is a win for the crazy elements on both sides; those legitimised by solidarity from moderates, and those who are able to condemn moderates due to their apparent association with extremists – all that results is further alienation of people and division of discourse towards the extremes, all this leads to is the risk of further undignified, reckless, violent protest and more innocents being hurt.

Praise those with lofty aims, by all means, but to paint all those on the flotilla as the same is wrong and dangerous. Israel acted stupidly, for sure, but that we condemn them and not those who selfishly endangered the lives of others, and betrayed their ulterior motives, is an unsettling turn of events. Remember that there was a group among them who set out to abuse and exploit the naïve among them and use them as a tool to further their own agenda. As tragic as the actual fact of the loss of life is, the self-interested cynicism that led to it is something that should not be forgotten, and the lack of public outcry, indeed, the apparent acceptance of these actions as a legitimate method of protest is something very worrying indeed.

Manufacturing Preferences: The Media as Manipulator

2010-05-27T02:52:00.000+01:00

It is a bizarre habit of human beings, and one that seems to repeat itself time and time again, that whenever we create something to act as a facilitator for our desires, it ends up shaping them. The slave becomes master and the technology, organisations or frameworks we create ultimately seek to become self perpetuating in order to maintain their relevance within the world through manipulating what it is that people want, rather than simply providing a service.

This spans across an almost universal set. On the basic level, something as simple as money, created to better allow economic interaction, became the basis for economies in and of itself. The internet, designed to allow us to access information, has become a bombard of advertisements and offers, trying to get people to purchase or engage in certain things. Facebook, recently, has been the centre of controversy over its sudden and overbearing attempts to pressure its user base into engaging with advertisers (and indeed, when people don’t respond to this, simply ripping away privacy protections – though that is a separate issue). More tellingly, even political parties have fallen into this paradigm, trying to lead electorates to follow their policies rather than trying hard to genuinely represent what people actually want.

However, where this attitude is most significant – and possibly most harmful – is within the sphere of the news media. When it comes down to the institutions that are supposed to be the distributors of information, entering into a paradigm of trying to manufacture opinions through the abuse of fact is something dangerous, deplorable, counterproductive and yet utterly, utterly ingrained within our society. Media has ceased to be, if it ever was, about the satiation of the desire of the public to be informed about the world and is now about the bottom line – how many copies you can sell, how many advertisements you can carry, how many people will pay to use your website and so on – essentially, the maximisation of revenue.

This is incredibly dangerous for the simple fact that more or less all information, regardless of the source, is in some way, shape or form, delivered to the public at large through the filter of some kind of media organisation.

This takes three forms – firstly, through the moulding of viewpoints of readership, secondly through affirmation of the biases they have created in or are already held by those they distribute information to and thirdly – and perhaps most sinisterly – through a system of news creation, whereby the media doesn’t report on or look into events, but actively causes them to happen so it has something large, flashy and scandalous to write about and sell their product with.

The first is the most obvious. Almost every news source – the exceptions being the state-owned ones in Britain and Ireland – have naked and obvious institutional biases that in general they make little attempt to hide, happily running articles designed to lionise those who support their agenda and demonise those who oppose it, prioritising “issue” stories over “event” ones that allow them to cast everything through a filter, coming out in favour of certain political parties and generally looking to tie negative events back towards whoever or whatever person, organisation, institution or cause they don’t like or want people to like.

The fact that this bias is clear insofar as opinion columns go doesn’t make it any less insidious, especially because it is also present in a big way in the supposedly factual reporting that media sources are supposed to engage in. This fusion of information and opinion is something worrying and insidious, as it encourages events to be seen in light of a certain worldview rather than be analysed by each individual, whereby conclusions are drawn for the audience rather that allowing them to draw their own. In this way, the primary goal becomes not to inform people of what is happening, but to use what is happening as a tool to make people think in a certain way and assume certain inferences to be true.

So why do media sources do this? It’s not for it’s own sake – news sources are not by default evil. Obviously, there is the issue of news sources trying to get their owner’s interests preserved, or viewpoints expanded. If you had the tool to make tens of thousands agree with your politics, it’s fairly natural that you would take it as that is probably going to benefit you in terms of social or political impact, as well as provide you with significant influence over events.

In addition to this, and this is the second form – the idea of re-enforcement and affirmation, which ensures people will keep reading and keep buying your product. Once people think a certain way, either through media sources or their own conclusions, it’s much easier to provide people with affirmation from what they perceive as an authoritative source than it is to suggest they are wrong about something, even when they are.

On a simple level, people like to be told they are right, especially by authority – it makes them feel as though they have significance. Similarly, people react poorly to authority sources telling them they are wrong and try to manipulate it mentally so that they are actually right and the authority wrong – see the deep resonation of the bizarre demonisation of “elitism” within American politics, which is increasingly creeping into Europe.

People are drawn to media sources that they seem to agree with. The biggest selling newspapers in Britain and Ireland are those who engage in populist reporting, telling people what they want to hear and setting things out in broad, un-nuanced terms. This is the tabloid media, where everything fits into three categories – right, wrong and tits. Treat your readers like utter cretins, tell them what they want to hear and tell them they are great, while pushing whatever your agenda is. The system is at its most naked and in-your-face here, but the same categorisation is essentially true of most media sources, where political bodies or causes are set up as being bogeymen, heroes or women – this is what shifts copy. Blast the EU, back Britian and throw in a few random pictures of Carla Bruni wherever France is mentioned and you essentially have the level of sophistication on display in the Sunday Times’ coverage of European affairs.

These first two issues are two sides of the same thing. Identify a demographic in line with your interests and appeal to their beliefs by re-enforcing them and encouraging them to harden, by painting them as absolutes and relevant to everything, that every event should be viewed in terms of them. The follow on from this is that when new issues arise, they can be integrated into this, and the readers who already trust you since you agree with them, will be much more open to suggestion on these issues. This is not to mention the huge significance of those beginning to encounter news media for the first time, like children growing up, seeing the world for the first time through specific lenses, and are thus more likely to fall into the cycle of affirmation outlined above.

This explains the uselessness of the so-called “independent media”, which like commercial media acts to confirm the pre-suppositions of a certain social group, and to spread the agenda of those behind the source, getting the influence and readership without necessarily profiting – though it shamefully claims to be above this level of exploitation which adds gross hypocrisy to the accusations that can be correctly levelled against it.

However, what truly exemplifies the manner in which the media has utterly abused its role and become an agent for change with agendas, self-entitlement and a general disregard for actually keeping people informed rather than pursuing its own ends is the third initial form, the habit of news manufacturing that so many sources seem more than happy to engage in. This comes in three main ways, all of which are reprehensible abuses of the position held by the media in society.

The first of these is hugely indicative in terms of the sense of undeserved entitlement felt by the media – and that is the tendency of media sources to use themselves as news and as part of the news story. How much is it we hear about the travails of specific journalists, reporters and analysts? How much coverage becomes about personalities, about what the person employed by the media will do next, rather than about the story they are supposedly covering? Sky News provides in Adam Boulton perhaps the best example of a supposed journalist who seems to dearly wish he was a talk show host. The message is clear – who cares what is happening?

What you should care about is what Boulton says about what is happening, and how he reacts to the individuals involved. And heaven forbid that he and his ilk are ever questioned – else they will be outraged as to why you are not co-operating with the great Boulton, and why you are trying to push him off centre stage. Similarly, I recall his colleague Kay Burley, who possesses similar desire for self-aggrandisment, physically assaulting a reporter who had the temerity to arrive ahead of her in a media scrum.

The reporting and coverage of the story become the story, the lengths to which the media go to cover a story is extensively reported on in the media itself, and if a challenge is made to that limelight-hogging, you can be sure that the response will not be pretty.

Secondly within the idea of news manufacturing is the actual creation of stories where there are none, often through what can only be described as entrapment. This is some kind of deformed progeny of investigative journalism that has somehow slithered into acceptability, whereby rather than actually looking into events that may be happening, it makes them happen. This is all kinds of morally questionable, not to mention that is has devastatingly negative effects on what were, until the media became involved, frequently legitimate organisations or causes.

In recent weeks, there have been two examples of this that received astonishing coverage, not just in the two papers responsible for them, but all across the media – the stings executed on Lord Triesman by the Mail on Sunday and on Sarah Ferguson by the News of the World. Ignoring the fact that these should by all rights be two utter non-stories, that people only care about because the media whipped them into a frenzy over them – that a minor lord expressed paranoid thoughts in what he thought was a private conversation and that a former royal is not very bright and desperate for cash (not to mention the implausibility of a scenario where anyone would be willing to pay £500,000 for an interview with Prince Andrew) – there are huge problems with both that apply to similar stories.

What on earth is there to suggest that Ferguson would ever have actually acted corruptly? Once the money was placed in front of her, at that particular juncture (bear in mind that she is hugely indebted, which the News of the World, exploitive as they are, can scarcely have been ignorant of), she did – but would the money have been there otherwise? Would she have acted in this way if not for the encouragement provided by the so-called journalist masquerading as a businessman? Would she act this way at a future point if her finances recover – which is unlikely if these scandals keep ruining her attempts to recover her reputation? All of these are unknowns, and it is reprehensible of the media to provoke action in this way. The only outcome of this has been her personal reputation being damaged – all to get a bit more publicity and sales for a tabloid rag. This is cynical and no more than the media taking advantage for their own ends, regardless of who gets hurt.

The Triesman incident is similarly unethical. Frankly, in private, Triesman can think the Russians and Spanish are bribing officials all he wants. He can think that the Russian World Cup bid is, in fact run by unicorns from the centre of the earth. None of it matters unless it actually affects how he performed his job as head of England’s World Cup bid – which it obviously was not doing, as if it had, there would have been genuine, not manufactured, controversy due to it affecting his interaction with FIFA and the other parties involved. We don’t even know he thought it genuinely, given the circumstances, what is to say it was not just an idle boast to impress and intrigue the younger woman he was talking to? Yet due to the media’s destructive determination to make stories where there are none, to follow otherwise innocent men until they trip up over the traps laid for them by the media, the whole World Cup bid may well have been ruined – this just to satisfy the vanity of those who run the newspaper and, once again, to shift some more copy, regardless of what is sacrificed in the process of doing so.

The media possess, as we can see here, very little ethical considerations beyond their own self-interest, and yet, due to what was mentioned in the first two forms, people look to them for moral guidance, which forms the third way in which media sources manufacture news. This was alluded to before in this post – this is through the active and overt attempts to shape public opinion. The media is more than willing to fling itself after any campaign that suits the agenda it pursues and that will gain it sales, regardless of the actual truth behind the campaign, or even the harm that may result from it.

Controversy generated by taking a side against the government or similar authority is the most simple and widespread way in which media sources try to do this, again with no concern for who gets hurt in the way. The amount of media sources, that out of this self-interest and out of sheer lazy journalism went and campaigned against the MMR jab is deeply indicative of this, in spite of the fact that this ultimately led to a significant rise in the number of cases of measles in Britain. To make it worse, in an act that would be funny were it not so depressing, many media sources have, in the aftermath of the Wakefield trial, turned around and shamelessly castigated all and sundry – except themselves – for being so suckered into the whole scam.

The media generates these campaigns so it has something to report on. It takes issues and makes them stories, makes facts suit them, gives them exclusive coverage so the audience care, so they turn to the source who have the big issue, who have the inside scoop. They are told to care about this and then through their actions give the media something to report on, which more people will now want to read about and will turn to that media source for. It’s an exploitative and manipulative cycle that effectively gives a tiny organisation incredible leverage over what happens in a country by being able to manipulate large portions of the population.

The worst example of just how scandalously cynically motivated the whole campaign thing is, how it is morally bankrupt and merely designed to lead to self-aggrandisement and what all of the behaviours mentioned in the article actually culminate in is the Daily Mail’s line on the cervical cancer immunisation scheme, utterly disgustingly campaigning for it’s introduction in Ireland and for it’s banning in Britain. Both stances cannot be right – one of those outcomes is going to lead to untold future harm for a significant amount of young girls, either through the increased risk of cancer or through the horrible side effects the Mail claimed. The welfare of these people, these vulnerable people who put their trust in journalists to inform them accurately, is being callously tossed aside, their trust spat upon, in order to stir up things a bit and cause a bit of a fuss so they can sell a few more issues of their newspaper. This is beyond disgusting. It’s a violation of ethics and humanity on a grand scale. This is the action of self-serving, power abusive scum – that being about the kindest thing they can be called – who pass judgement and attempt to dictate societal views on everyone else while escaping scrutiny for their own horrendously irresponsible and materially harmful actions.

I will close with the words of another, since I am having trouble finding my own after seriously considering the enormity of the above. In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote the following:

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.”

The fact that this statement is every bit as valid now as it was almost 120 years ago is, to say the least, a damning indictment of how the media has kept society in its thrall, allowing it to pursue its own self-interests, spread its own agenda, and manipulate political and social events with absolutely no meaningful accountability.

Delta Politics

2010-05-13T14:51:00.000+01:00

A conundrum that faces many household brands is the problem of becoming generic. Once use of a certain brand name becomes synonymous with an item then it cannot enforce copyright for that usage. Google valiantly try to get people to calling searching the web "using Google" instead of "googling it". The Xerox company has consigned itself to defeat in its bid to stop people referring to photocopying as Xeroxing. Any sort of SUV you see in Ireland is referred to as a Jeep.

The movement for change has hit a similar speedbump. The word change is a genericised brand now. The Tories trumpeted "Change" in the recent general election, but what do they mean? A different party in charge? That certainly is a change, but surely is implied in voting for the Tories. So it is an idea of making a tangible difference to every voters life. Presumably a positive change, since all the banners looked so sunny. But how real is change in politics? How do you provide a sense of difference that the voting public will acknowledge to help over come the strengthening "anti-politics" that is gripping everywhere.

What can we do to make politics better? Well, the little formula I posted at the top of the page may be a joke, but it is also a good explanation tool. The ideal political system to enact some form of change. Proportionality, incentives and desire.

As pointed out in a wonderful piece in the Irish Times[1] while there are continued complaints about issues such as the blasphemy law and, possibly more importantly, the rights of the child; there is a massive amount of political apathy towards pushing for changes. Why is this?

Well, I strongly believe it is a lack of accountability for decision making. This blog is supposed to have some public policy leanings and here is the first bit: We need create incentives for free voting. I would be in favour of a right of recall. Not just for politicians caught "with their hands in the till" but for politicians who vote along party lines for things that their constituency deems unconscionable. There was much made of Theresa May's voting record on gay rights (it's not good) but at least such a thing exists. In Ireland it seems that people don't ever stand up for what they believe in, content to obey the party whip. What is the point in proportional representation when it is just proportional and they forget about the representation? Keeping voting records of members of the Dail would be a big step forward, so you could see exactly what your local TDs were voting on your behalf. Yes, it's open to abuse, with racist constituencies holding their TD to ransom in order to extract xenophobic legislation, but I would have more faith in people than to think that would actually happen. Even if it did; that's democracy in action, no matter how base.

Free voting of politicians, with elected representatives doing what they think is right, rather than what the party tell them is a fundamental tenet of republican ideology. The founding fathers of the USA feared partisan entrenchment stagnating politics. Proportional representation is the means by which we get the representation the people want. Only through a combination of the two of these can we get a change that people want and not change for changes sake. The speed bumps that such developments will have stem from the growing anti-politics movement, symbolised by what is below the divide line in my pretend equation. Because such divisions could be harmful to the political system, if left to fester. I think steps need to be taken to increase the credibility of Irish politics.

It may be just a small change in politics, but hopefully if we do have change; we could have useful change in politics. And because the word change has lost all meaning in the modern world (and possibly in that last sentence), perhaps we could call it: Delta Politics.

Finally, on a related note:

Stephen Kinsella, a lecturer in Economics in UL, wrote a paper recently[2], which observed that often constitutional changes lead to suboptimal outcomes. I thought it was extremely interesting and reminded me of a quote from Mary Robinson when she was a senator, regarding Article 40.3.3:

"The basic flaw in this Amendment is that it is so uncertain in its scope and so potentially contradictory in its meaning and so potentially damaging to existing practices in the area of family planning and medical treatment…”

I think that Constitutional reform is something that should be handled with grave respect indeed.

___________________________________________

[1] Fiona De Londras - De Valera's Constitution continues to serve us well

[2] Stephen Kinsella - Does Ireland need constitutional reform?

The Paradox of the American Right

2010-05-12T21:07:00.000+01:00

The United States of America, by and large, is a deeply conservative country by European standards, even in the areas branded by the media as “liberal”. The nation tends to be inward looking, steeped in history and proud of its culture, proud of its success on the world stage and most of all, proud of the freedoms and liberties that are the founding principles of the nation. This is no bad thing in and of itself, but it has led to the creation of an unfortunate political dialogue within the United States, whereby one achieves victory not through rationality, but through using these principles as a weapon, trying to out-blindly-adhere to them more than your opponent without considering why or what they are.

This has become co-opted as the weapon of choice of the political right in America. Since, as I have said, American political discourse tends towards the conservative in general, I should clarify what I mean by “political right”. This is the reactionary, generically anti-government movement, once on the fringes of the Republican Party, that has in recent times been pushing itself to the fore through several different movements. This would include, for example, the extreme libertarian, anti-state but pro-business, religiously minded and essentially nationalist Tea Party and its poster girls Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, or the followers of the conspiracy-pushing, radically anti-liberal media demagogues Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. This by no means representative of the Republican Party as a whole, but groups with increasing influence in it, who are in a position to hold sway over the leadership.

The attitudes of these organisations and individuals should be simple – a return to basics, to the freedom, justice and equality they claim to be upholding, to the most basic ideals enshrined in the US Constitution. However, on a number of issues, their attempts to achieve this have taken an utterly paradoxical path, whereby in striking for what they claim to believe in, they are in fact taking retrograde steps, a fact that brings into question whether or not their motives are as pure, noble and representative of the true “will of the people” as they claim them to be.

Let us being with the issue of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Lest we forget, this basic founding principle of America states that:

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

There was a very recent incident where a book discussing teenage homosexuality was banned from a school library following a campaign by an organisation of Glenn Beck supporters,[1] on the basis that it was “obscene and inappropriate”, presumably due to the fact that it invited frank, potentially positive discussion of homosexuality and was thus did not suit their moral outlook.

Yet these groups are among the first people to cry foul and wave around the First Amendment as sacrosanct the moment something comes along that poses a threat to their own capacity to air their moral or political viewpoints – hence the opposition of these groups to the proposals to re-institute the Fairness Doctrine, or the attempts to create campaign finance reform that could potentially limit the potential of candidates to get their voices heard.

Indeed, the Tea Party organisation, and similar, rest their entire ability to do what they do – assemble in what is for the vast majority a peaceful protest, and air their grievances, legitimate or not – on the integrity of this Amendment. Yet they try to cling to their rock while at the same time trying to fling those with differing political opinions off of it.

Not only is this morally hypocritical, it is also a legally incorrect stance – an odd thing to say if these people truly were acting as defenders of the Constitution rather than of their own private morality. The Miller Test, which is used to define whether or not something is legally “obscene” and thus not subject to first amendment protection. To be “obscene”, the subject matter has to meet three requirements:

1. Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,

2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,

3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

The book in question, quite frankly, fulfills none of these criteria, so the campaign is wholly without merit in terms of the protection of the the Constitution from erosion – indeed, it is in and of itself and attempt to undermine the freedoms enjoyed by others under it.

To qoute Justice William Brennan’s judgement on the 1989 flag-burning trial, “if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.” This is doubtlessly a better idea than the message being sent with campaigns such as the one against this book, which is “it is obscene because I don’t like it”. The political right’s attempts to make the latter true, but only from their own perspective, is a disgraceful double-standard that betrays the paradoxical agenda at the heart of their movement.

This is not something that can be taken in isolation, either – it is symptomatic of a broader problem of double standards within the movement as regards general equality and rights. Whether it be the attempts at re-writing history in schools in Texas to promote and perpetuate a certain worldview, the shouting down of any opposition on populist talk-shows, or even the anti-Obama smear campaign based on his past association with left-leaning intellectuals, there is an increasing attitude that only certain ideas, ones that fall within the range of acceptable to this minority group, should be tolerated in society – which goes against the very core of the principles America is founded upon.

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[1] Thanks to Paddy Rooney (http://twitter.com/paddykr) for drawing my attention to this. Follow him on Twitter, he’s excellent.

Proportional Representation in the UK

2010-05-11T13:15:00.000+01:00

So as some of you already know, I've been running a simulation of what the outcome of the UK election just gone by would have been if, instead of using the First Past the Post system, it had been calculated using the d'Hondt List system.

I have done this on a regional rather than a national basis, mostly because this is how the British do it for the European election and I see no reason to change that. Other options were to do it nationally or county by county, but I considered both to be too time consuming, and I wanted to get this done while it was still highly relevant, rather than a week or so down the line, as well as the fact that I am in the middle of exams.

Regional vote % here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/election2010/results Click on regions to see the vote breakdown.

Current seats (a more accurate map than the BBC's): http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/2015/mapse.png

The regions are as follows: Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, North-East, Yorkshire & the Humber, North-West, East Midlands, Eastern, West Midlands, South-East, South-West and London.

Northern Ireland

Actual Seats: DUP 8, SF 5, SDLP 3, AP 1, Ind Un 1

d'Hondt: DUP 5, SF 5, SDLP 3, UCU 3, AP 1, Ind Un 1

Under d'Hondt, Northern Ireland's overall Unionist/Nationalist balance remains more or less unchanged. What it does do is redress in favour of the UCU, who failed to win any seats despite getting over 15% of the vote, more than double that of the Alliance Party. This more accurately reflects the SF/DUP balance - indeed, SF were marginally ahead in the popular vote. The two Independent Unionist candidates who did well, Hermon and Connor, would have had enough between them to gain one of them a seat, an list alliance that would to me make sense, the alternative being another SF seat.

Wales

Actual Seats: Lab 26, Con 8, LD 3, PC 3

d'Hondt: Lab 16, Con 11, Lib 8, PC 4, UKIP 1

In FPTP, Labour, in spite of losses, still won an overwhelming majority of Welsh seats with just over a third of the popular vote - a microcosm of the situation that frequently emerges in Westminster. The d'Hondt system rebalances this extensively, as it does for the significant under-representation of Tories and, to a greater extent, Lib Dems. Interestingly, the support for UKIP in the south is enough to scrape them a seat at the expense of a 5th one for Plaid. The outcome here is pretty much as close to proportional to the popular vote as possible.

Scotland

Actual Seats: Lab 41, LD 11, SNP 6, Con 1

d'Hondt: Lab 26, SNP 12, LD 11, Con 10

Like Wales, the biggest party - Labour - benefits disproportionately under FPTP. The SNP, who have the second biggest vote-share but suffer under the system double their number of seats, and there's a massive gain for the Tories, whose votes are not insignificant. The result under d'Hondt gives a better feel for the actual strength of support for the SNP within Scotland.

North-East

Actual Seats: Lab 25, Con 2, LD 2

d'Hondt: Lab 14, Con 7, LD 7, BNP 1

Labour dominate most urban constituencies, but their popular vote is around the combined Tory/Lib Dem total, rather than over six times greater than it - something that is again reflected by the d'Hondt figures. The BNP would also win a seat fairly comfortably in this region, and UKIP would only miss out on one by an extremely narrow margin.

Yorkshire & the Humber

Actual Seats: Lab 32, Con 18, LD 2

d'Hondt: Lab 19, Con 18, LD 13, BNP 2, UKIP 1

Labour hold a majority of seats here despite only being marginally ahead of the Tories in the popular vote. d'Hondt shows the source of that - Lib Dems being closed out in a lot of Labour seats, the Tory vote actually being reflected in the FPTP figures. This area is the heartland of the BNP and as such it is unsurprising to see them (and UKIP) claim a couple of seats.

North-West

Actual Seats: Lab 47, Con 22, LD 6

d'Hondt: Lab 31, Con 24, LD 17, UKIP 2, BNP 1

Not much different here to the previous two constituencies - a grossly inflated Labour majority due to FPTP, largely at the expense of the Lib Dems and the nationalist parties.

East Midlands

Actual Seats: Con 31, Lab 15

d'Hondt: Con 20, Lab 14, LD 10, UKIP 1, BNP 1

Bit of an FPTP travesty here - in spite of getting over 20% of the popular vote, an increase from last time, the Lib Dems failed to win a single seat in this region - indeed, they actually lost one. That is handily redressed by the d'Hondt system, as is the Tory false majority in the region. The BNP recieved a massive swing in this area, sextupling their vote since last time and as such would win a seat.

Eastern

Actual Seats: Con 52, LD 4, Lab 2

d'Hondt: Con 29, LD 14, Lab 12, UKIP 2, BNP 1

This area is hardcore Tory and Labour were as good as wiped out here with FPTP, though if it had been d'Hondt they would only have lost one of their seats from last time's FPTP results. This area also swung heavily towards the nationalist parties, which again would have been reflected through the d'Hondt system.

West Midlands

Actual Seats: Con 33, Lab 24, LD 2

d'Hondt: Con 25, Lab 19, LD 12, UKIP 2, BNP 1

The two big parties are both fairly over-represented in this area, which is fixed. Not much else interesting here to remark on other than that even if he had formed a list with every other independent candidate in the area, the Health Concern bloke from Wirral still would have lost his seat.

South-East

Actual Seats: Con 75, LD 4, Lab 4, Green 1

d'Hondt: Con 44, LD 23, Lab 13, UKIP 3, Green 1

Conservatives absolutely dominated this area under FPTP and still have a majority of seats under d'Hondt, though their gross over-representation would be eroded, mostly in favour of the Lib Dems. The Greens would comfortably still win a seat in the region, and UKIP would get three, the relatively high number due to the high-profile presence of Farage.

South-West

Actual Seats: Con 36, LD 15, Lab 4

d'Hondt: Con 24, LD 20, Lab 9, UKIP 2

d'Hondt far more accurately reflects the relative closeness of the Lib Dem and Tory votes in this region than FPTP does. Other than that it's the same story as it was in the north of England, just with all the parties swapping positions.

London

Actual Seats: Lab 38, Con 28, LD 7

d'Hondt: Lab 28, Con 26, Lib 16, UKIP 1, Green 1, BNP 1

Labour and Tories are actually very close in terms of vote share in the capital, hence the tightening of the gap between the two under d'Hondt. The three smaller parties gain a seat each due to having plenty of candidates doing relatively well - all three got over 1.5% of the total vote - but no one candidate doing well enough to win in a single region.

OVERALL

Actual Seats: Con 306, Lab 258, LD 57, DUP 8, SNP 6, SF 5, PC 3, SDLP 3, Green 1, AP 1, Ind Un 1

d'Hondt: Con 238, Lab 201, LD 151, UKIP 15, SNP 12, BNP 8, SF 5, DUP 5, PC 4, SDLP 3, UCU 3, Green 2, AP 1, Ind Un 1

The d'Hondt outcome is actually extremely close to being proportional to the popular vote, though the smaller parties still lose out a bit - however they do gain massively compared to FPTP - and the NI parties continue to benefit disproportionately. It is worth noting that these are FPTP figures - if a d'Hondt sytem were to be used, smaller parties would probably benefit accordingly, as there would be less pressure on finding and fielding candidates in all constituencies, and there would be less of an element of tactical voting to keep party X out of constituency Y.

Regardless, on the basis of this simulation I feel the UK could probably do a lot worse than go with d'Hondt.

All original material (c) 2010 Harry McEvansoneya - Any material relied upon is copyright of their respective owners.

EDIT: Was linked to the following on twitter - Graphical interpretation of a few forms of PR and the results under all of them. (cc) oledoe flic.kr/p/7ZrYpv

Actual UK results for comparison:

"Pure" proportional representation:

Spanish system:

German system:

d'Hondt system: (Based on Harry's workings)

Would like to thank @oledoe for these results. Follow him on Twitter if you like these graphs :)