Maybe that was too long.

Short form: Dutchmen are going to be taller than Americans because they've got the genes for it. Until recently they didn't get enough to eat to reach their maximum height. Now they do.

OK, I'll try again. There are two, and only two, factors which account for human stature.

a) your genes, and
b) nutrition, over the course of several generations.

That is, given optimum nutrition (including maternal nutrition during pregnancy) different geographic groups will differ in final height outcomes.

Hence, other things being equal, Americans are likely to be shorter than Swedes or other Nordic types for the exactly the same reason that they're less likely to have blond hair: their genes.

Swedes will be taller than Italians given equal diets.

Swedes will also be taller than Englishmen, but not by as much.

The English will be slightly taller than the Welsh.

The Irish will be about the same height as the English.

Follow me so far? I'm excluding recent immigrants in all these cases, of course.

Once you've got an optimum number of calories from animal products, you achieve the maximum height your genes will allow, over the course of a couple of generations.

Then you stop. The upward curve in heights levels off. No matter what you feed people, they're not going to average 8 feet tall.

Americans achieved modern heigh outcomes earlier than other groups because they got modern standards of nutrition earlier; and at that time, they were also largely derived from a gene pool (British) which tended to produce tall individuals (though not as tall as, say, Scandinavians).

Americans have been at roughly their modern heights since the 18th century. George Washington's native-born white Southern soldiers were around the same height as their many-times-great-grandsons enlisting today.

At that time, Americans were unusually tall. As other groups got to eat better, and in particular to eat more meat, they started to catch up to Americans in height.

And of course non-British, non-North European immigrants altered the average genetic potential for maximum height downward, particularly from the 1880's on, when southern and eastern Europeans and people from the Balkans and the Middle East started entering the US in very large numbers.

Once dietary differences are no longer a significant factor, Americans can be expected to be taller than some European nationalities and shorter than others because Americans are _a mix of various European, African and other non-European groups genetically_.

OK? Native Swedes, when equally well-fed, will be taller than the American average because of their _genes_, got it?

Scandinavians have more potential height for the environmental factors (diet, nutritional stress) to unlock.

(Last time I looked, the average male Swede was about 2.5 inches taller than the average male American.)

Americans are not of exclusively North European descent. They do not on average have the _genetic potential_ to achieve average heights equal to those of equally well-nourished North Europeans.

-- it's painfully obvious you're not reading what I'm posting, so it's sort of pointless to show that the article doesn't mean what you think it means.

Just concentrate on one piece then - show how

"In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising."

is explained by a reference to late-19th and early-20th-century immigrants to America.

"A pity for your case, then, that the BBC article shows this happening mainly in the 20th century, despite the deprivation of WWII in Europe."

-- it's painfully obvious you're not reading what I'm posting, so it's sort of pointless to show that the article doesn't mean what you think it means.

Edited by author 07-18-2005 11:22 PM
-- temper, temper, temper. I was referring to late-19th and early-20th-century immigrants, Italians and Greeks and so forth. They're considerably shorter than Dutchmen, you know.

A pity for your case, then, that the BBC article shows this happening mainly in the 20th century, despite the deprivation of WWII in Europe.

And European has also received immigrants from such places as Turkey, hardly noted for their basketball teams.

Do you have any numbers, or even any vague approximations to back up your statement, or do you believe that simply tossing off something superficially plausible is enough for you to ignore unfortunate facts?

Ah, here we go. This is the original article I was looking for, and covers the study in greater detail.

Some interesting extracts:

"In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world."

"When Komlos and his parents arrived in Chicago, in the winter of 1956, America was a land of almost mythical abundance. For more than two centuries, its people had been so healthy and so prosperous that they towered above the rest of the world—about four inches above the Dutch, for example, for most of the nineteenth century."

"In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising."

"But the height statistics that Komlos cites include only native-born Americans who speak English at home, and he is careful to screen out people of Asian and Hispanic descent. In any case, according to Richard Steckel, who has also analyzed American heights, the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity with Northern Europe."

"In the nineteenth century, when Americans were the tallest people in the world, the country took in floods of immigrants. And those Europeans, too, were small compared with native-born Americans."

"Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits."

One has to keep in mind that while wants are infinite, resources are not.

But the European countries are doing better with less, for values of "better" which result in social statistics. Deal with it.

And if you're going to repeat the old canards about "minorities dragging down life expectancies" and "Europeans not counting premature births in their stats" - provide numbers, because those factoids don't pass the smell test.

One has to keep in mind that while wants are infinite, resources are not.

There are multitudes of things that would be nice to do -- you can always use a new museum or national park or historic site or extra holiday or whatever -- but not everything can have the same priority, any more than everyone can be above average (except in Lake Woebegon).

For example, France has a number of nice shiny things; the train system is beautiful, to mention only one.

France also has permanent 10% unemployment, 25% youth unemployment, perennially low economic growth, and so forth.

This is what happens when you think a bunch of burkes from the 'grand ecoles' can allocate capital more efficiently than the market. You get pyramids, big showy things, and reduce the system's overall efficiency.

Allied to the above, note also the ubiquity of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Eg., laws intended to protect employees from arbitrary dismissal at the employer's whim weren't intended to prevent the creation of new jobs.

But they certainly have that effect. For every old job you protect, you kill several new ones; it's a process of sacrificing tomorrow to meet lobbying pressure today.

>The system mentioned, Stirling, was the US health system.

-- oh, that's a mess, no dispute.

Although nobody's really doing much better; the Canadian and European systems are approaching bankruptcy and breakdown.

The basic problem is that all our health care systems were designed when there was a lot less they could do, particularly for the old and very sick, who are the ones who consume most of the resources.

Giving palative care to the dying was cheap. Keeping them alive another six months turns out to be very expensive; treating the illnesses that accompany another 20 years of being old and frail is very, very expensive.

Same-same with pensions. People used to die at about 65, which is why the US Social Security system kicked in at that age. Now that people are living another 10 or 20 years or even more, it screws things up royally.

It's not as bad as Europe, with its deathbead-demographics, but still pretty bad.

Ghu alone knows what the Chinese are going to do, since they have Germany's demographics with nothing like European standards of income.

>If you want to claim it was because of pollution of your precious bodily fluids by Hispanic immigrants, then let's see some figures.

-- temper, temper, temper. I was referring to late-19th and early-20th-century immigrants, Italians and Greeks and so forth. They're considerably shorter than Dutchmen, you know.

It's amusing to see Europeans scramble desperately to find _something_ they're doing better than the US.

Edited by author 07-18-2005 01:38 AM
The system mentioned, Stirling, was the US health system.

And as regards height, you seem to have overlooked the graph showing how the Europeans overtook the Americans recently. If you want to claim it was because of pollution of your precious bodily fluids by Hispanic immigrants, then let's see some figures.

"Amanda Wynne, of the British Dietetic Association, said: "Many things will influence height - including genetics - but nutrition is an important factor."

-- well, yeah. You've got the potential height limitations of the gene pool in question, and then you've got nutrition. These are the only things which affect stature to any great degree.

Japanese are taller than they used to be because they eat more meat but they're never going to be as tall as an equally well-nourished group of, say, Swedes or southern Sudanese.

Americans achieved modern heights early (18th century for whites) because they were well-nourished, and in particular because they ate a lot of meat.

Over several generations, a diet high in animal proteins and fats maximizes your genetic potential as far as stature goes. (It takes generations because there's a complex mechanism which switches genes on and off.) Even American-born black slaves were taller than Englishmen in 1776.

Other things being equal, Nordics will be taller than other Europeans. Things are now roughly equal in terms of diet, so one would expect the Dutch, Scandinavians and northern Germans to be taller than Americans, who include a lot of people with Mediterranean, Amerindian and Balkan backgrounds.

As for obesity, Americans are simply ahead of the curve.

Obeisity rates are shooting up throughout the developed world; South Korea now has a serious problem with it, for example. (While North Korea has killing famines.)

"This has been covered by John Ralston Saul to a far greater extent - you might find On Equilibrium worth a go, although not all in one dose."

-- yeah, read that some time ago. Wooly-minded and illogical; more of a bleat than an argument.

"And we are their markets. If they want to sell to us, then they should meet our regulations on, say pollution or labour standards."

-- in other words, you want to keep poor countries poor forever?

If Bangladesh had to meet European or North American pollution and labor standards, it couldn't produce _anything_ at competitive prices and could never get a foot on the ladder.

The question is moot, anyway. Putting restrictions on imports just punishes consumers, without doing anything about capital flight. Vide Germany.

Coddling old sectors of the economy just kills new ones, without really protecting the old ones for long.

Face it, you're talking about trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom, or nail jell-o to the wall.

"And what of a system which is nominally free-market, wherein the government spends more than the governments of other more "socialist" systems,"

-- if you're referring to the US, the federal government took about 18% of GDP, last time I looked. Most of Europe is over 40%.

De-nile, De-nile...

The fear of the "Polish plumber" in France -- where they also admit that it takes forever and costs the earth to get plumbing work done if you use the official system -- is a pretty good sign of a system rife with perverse incentives.

And what of a system which is nominally free-market, wherein the government spends more than the governments of other more "socialist" systems, wherein private spending is more than government spending, and yet which delivers worse results for society as a whole than said more "socialist" systems? A situation increasingly written into the very bodies of its citizens?

In other words, if you regulate too much they'll simply shrug and take their toys somewhere else. Capital is mobile; very highly-skilled management and professionals and technicians are mobile; the rest of us are stuck.

And we are their markets. If they want to sell to us, then they should meet our regulations on, say pollution or labour standards. In real life "a level playing field" is a highly regulated area, and regulations can be designed to operate on sales as well as production.

This has been covered by John Ralston Saul to a far greater extent - you might find On Equilibrium worth a go, although not all in one dose.

The fear of the "Polish plumber" in France -- where they also admit that it takes forever and costs the earth to get plumbing work done if you use the official system -- is a pretty good sign of a system rife with perverse incentives.

The fact that 25% of the population votes for the fascists isn't a good sign either.

Best wishes for your parents, btw, Charlie. My mother died in 1998, and my father's 87 this year.

"Steve, one can address the meritocracy issue quite easily with a progressive inheritance tax."

-- even leaving aside the effect on incentives, or the way it would drive people to game the system and misallocate resources thereby(intra vivos transfers, anyone?), that would make things worse, not better.

Inheritance of property interacts with regression to the mean to reduce the average IQ of the upper classes, like any other system of hereditary privilege.

If every generation had to earn their way in, it would _increase_ the likelihood of hereditary castes.

The purer and 'fairer' the meritocracy, the worse this gets because it increases the tendency to segregate the intelligent and/or aggressive.

In fact, the more open and fair (and hence more competitive)it is, the higher the chance that _everyone_ at the top will be a complete bastard, too.

(Actually I expect genetic engineering to correct the problem in the next couple of generations, so it'll be moot. Everyone will be brilliant and hard-charging.)

>Again, the administration of inheritance tax will likely lie in the hands of the very class that is most likely to benefit from abolishing it

-- this points out the other great weakness of schemes of regulation.

People always game the system, and they (being many, smart, and highly motivated) will always be able to do so to a degree which pretty well completely frustrates the ambitions of the system's designers.

The same people who'd get to the top in any other competitive endeavor end up running the regulatory apparatus, or bribing it, or both.

And the regulators and regulated inevitably end up in bed with each other. For an extreme example, witness the decay of the Bolsheviks from a band of ruthless idealists to a gang of corruptionists, building palaces and so forth.(*)

Which means, of course, the more the government has to dispense in the way of favors and permits and so forth, the more rent-seeking in the form of bribery and backscratching there will be.

A bigger State apparatus is inevitably a more corrupt one. You can have a big State or a clean one, but not both, or at least not for long. Platonic "guardians" become corrupt fairly quickly.

That was precisely why 19th-century British liberals were so keen on keeping the civil service small, and on devices like competitive examination. They knew that it was a potent source of sinecures, graft and bribes, not to mention political patronage. That was what Peelites and Gladstonians referred to as the "Old Corruption".

And why they were so contemptuous of places like the Habsburg empire or the Papal states, with their legions of officials. Vienna already had thousands upon thousands in the early 20th century, when a city like Birmingham had about a dozen, with one telephone.

(Someone once defined the traditional Austrian system of government as relying on "A standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of clerks, a kneeling army of priests, and a crawling army of informers.")

(*) there's a joke from the 1980's about Breshnev showing his ancient mother around his dachas, limousines, hunting preserves, and armies of bowing flunkies. She looks more and more worried, until at last she bursts out: "It's all so wonderful... but what if the Reds come back?"

"On Capitalism: let me nail my colours to the mast and say that I figure capitalism is like fire; it's a great servant but a terrible master. We need it as an engine of wealth creation, but regulating it is essential."

-- some time ago, I saw a German businessman interviewed. He was asked why German business wasn't creating jobs. (And, in fact, there hasn't been a single net new job in Germany since the 80's).

He replied (roughly, from memory):

"That is a lie. We are creating millions of jobs. Jobs in China, jobs in India, jobs in Poland, jobs in Slovenia, jobs in Brazil, jobs in the United States. And when they make it worth our while, we'll create jobs here in Germany. Until they do, the working class can kiss my ass."

In other words, if you regulate too much they'll simply shrug and take their toys somewhere else. Capital is mobile; very highly-skilled management and professionals and technicians are mobile; the rest of us are stuck.

All those French people living in London haven't moved there for the weather, or the quaint farmhouses and vineyards, or for the food. Nor is it an accident that there are hundreds of thousands of European scientists and technicians working in the US.

>but there are still several dead people and several maimed people and a company that was skimping on railway track maintenance

-- over here, high-powered tort lawyers would descend on the company with contingency-fee lawsuits aimed at stripping the company to the bone like a school of piranha with a cow.

On Capitalism: let me nail my colours to the mast and say that I figure capitalism is like fire; it's a great servant but a terrible master. We need it as an engine of wealth creation, but regulating it is essential.

(I say this to the background of a corporate murder trial that's just collapsed, here in the UK, after five months in front of a jury, when the judge concluded there were no grounds for conviction of the specific directors on trial -- but there are still several dead people and several maimed people and a company that was skimping on railway track maintenance that it had been contracted to do, so badly that it caused a high speed passenger train to derail with lethal consequences.)

(Sorry, been away visiting relatives -- including two with cancer -- hence limited posting lately.)

Steve, one can address the meritocracy issue quite easily with a progressive inheritance tax. The objective being to tune the system so that the children of the "bright" class inherit enough to pay for as much education as they can eat, plus a starter home and enough cash to found a small start-up, but no more.

(You can also address the matter of competence in a feudal society the old Chinese way, by having a formalized hierarchy in which the children of a noble of a given rank are of the next rank down unless they do something to obtain promotion.)

Inheritance taxes bring their own problems, of course. Where land is valuable (e.g. the UK today) you'd end up putting every family farm in the country out of business within a generation if you don't add a loophole to cover it. Again, the administration of inheritance tax will likely lie in the hands of the very class that is most likely to benefit from abolishing it (thank you for the worked demonstration, George W. Bush). But if you consider a caste based society to be a bad thing, and if you're not averse to a little social engineering, inheritance taxes are the way to go.

(Says the man whose parents are 77 and 82 and who's already wondering about how to deal with this very issue on a personal level ...)

It's one of the drawbacks of meritocracy in general that it lets the most ambitious rise to the top more easily, so that all the people in positions of power are those who want it very badly.

Another is that it tends to drain all the bright people (or at least all the ones with any practical energy and ambition) into the upper social echelons, or at least into the professional classes and the intellectual professions.

The sort of person who would have been a Radical cobbler reading Tom Paine or a self-improving working-class savant back in the 18th or early 19th century goes to university now.

There he (or she) associates with (and eventually marries) the like-minded. The latter effect is visible in business, too. Once upon a time executives occasionally married secretaries. Nowadays they marry other executives.

And so, oddly enough, the logical end result of meritocracy and social mobility is a society of hereditary castes.

Charlie: "This is one of the drawbacks of the role of limited liability companies within the capitalist system. How to redesign capitalism so it doesn't reward sociopathic behaviour is left as an exercise for the reader."

-- I don't see how you can design a competitive system based on greed for accumulation that doesn't reward people who are ruthlessly competitive and greedy.

You're not going to get to the top in business unless you want it very badly, unless it burns in your veins and you worship Mammon to the exclusion of all else.

If you don't -- even if you're simply bored by it, rather than repelled -- someone who does think that way will climb over your face on the way to the top. No matter how you set up the system, they'll find a way to game it.

The most you can do is establish clear (and minimal) sets of rules and punish those who break them.

Or to quote Adam Smith, we don't rely on the good nature of the baker and shoemaker for our bread and shoes, but on their self-interest.

Most of the first great captains of industry who pushed through the Industrial Revolution against the moral and material resistance of traditional society were face-stomping bastards, absolute swine, the sort who'd squeeze the last farthing out of an orphan lad and then nail his ears to the factory wall for falling asleep at the end of his 14-hour day.

If the "nice" people like Dickens (or even Disraeli) had been in charge, we'd all still be peasants tugging our forelocks to the squire, if we hadn't starved to death in a potato famine.

(Of course, if the nice guys had been totally without influence, we'd still be having our ears nailed to factory walls. That sort of thing happens quite often in China these days.)

One of the main reasons Britain had an industrial revolution was that after 1688 it was run by a ferociously selfish (though very cunning) group of great landowners. It had been the Stuarts who showed some crumbs of compassion for the unpropertied. The Whig grandees who came back with William of Orange had no such sentimental illusions.

In most of Europe, innovators were regarded as selfish monsters who stole men's livings -- sort of the way outsourcing to India is regarded by many today. The 'moral economy' trumped the market. Kings were fearful of anything that might unsettle the masses.

The people running England after the Glorious Revolution agreed with that analysis for the most part, but they just didn't care who got it in the neck so long as innovation rebounded to their own profit.

And so they used the machinery of the State to smash the Luddites, send people protesting enclosures in chains to the colonies, tear up the whole fabric of traditional society, "clear" the Highlands, and so forth.

(Adam Smith also remarked that it was impossible for three men in the same line of work to have a drink together without conspiring against the public.)

>After all, capitalism is supposed to be a tool for improving the well-being of the public; that's why we put up with it.

-- well, it does, doesn't it? We're richer and freer than ever, and getting more so, on the whole. We've found a way to harness the ruthless and sociopathic to the social good.

Otherwise they'd be launching coups and backing totalitarian parties. You can't get rid of the power-hungry; at best, you can domesticate them a little.

"Yes, this stuff should be handled in primary school. Trouble is, it isn't."

-- well, it is for most people.

I'm not enamored of all aspects of modern pedagogy -- I'm a strong phonics advocate -- but it really doesn't take 10 or 12 or 14 years to teach a normal kid to read. If they haven't learned basic literacy and numeracy in that time, chances are that there's something wrong with the kid.

>what concerns me is that we ought to be using any tools that come to hand to turn criminals back into productive members of society, especially if the costs are low compared to continued incarceration.

-- well, no objection to trying. However, my gut feeling is that anyone who's committed more than one quasi-serious crime is a lost cause, on average if not in every single individual case. And prisons can be made self-supporting, or nearly.

SFnal reference: say we had some quick, cheap way of reprogramming individuals so that they could never commit a crime again, "Clockwork Orange" style. Should we?

I'd be inclined to stick with prisons and hangmen. They're less of an insult to human dignity.

The recidivism rate among the successful graduates of those classes dropped by about 70%.

-- the "successful" graduates. There's the kicker. See above.



This was a pilot project. The literacy course in question involved one teacher, about forty lessons, and took 'em as far as the "Janet and John" level ... we're not talking university degrees here.

Yes, this stuff should be handled in primary school. Trouble is, it isn't. The failing of the educational system in the small proportion of people who become illiterate recidivists warrants attention in its own right; what concerns me is that we ought to be using any tools that come to hand to turn criminals back into productive members of society, especially if the costs are low compared to continued incarceration.

You're dead right about sociopaths. Having -- in the past -- worked for managers who showed some or all of the salient traits, this rings lots of bells. Yes, the smart ones end up with MBAs and being promoted to senior management positions because they can exploit the corporate culture. This is one of the drawbacks of the role of limited liability companies within the capitalist system. How to redesign capitalism so it doesn't reward sociopathic behaviour is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Suffice to say, my gut feeling -- as a liberal -- is that if we don't do so, the system will ultimately discredit itself. After all, capitalism is supposed to be a tool for improving the well-being of the public; that's why we put up with it. If, instead, it turns into a rod to enable asocial psychopaths to terrorize the rest of us, it's not doing its job.)

Also, of course, criminals in jail tend to be disproportionately the _stupid_ criminals. If they were a bit smarter, they probably wouldn't have been caught -- or at least not as often.

The same thing happens with sociopaths. Stupid ones almost always end up in jail or dead.

Smart ones often function quite successfully. They're devoid of conscience but they can fake it, because they've figured out that they have to conform to the rules to some extent to survive.

They're even at an advantage in some professions, particularly ones that that reward the capacity for guilt-free physical aggression and lack of empathy.

>besides the usual psychiatric cases (for whom a strong case can be made that secure psychiatric institutions rather than prison is the appropriate solution)

-- no dispute there.

>about two-thirds of them were illiterate, innumerate, or both: often profoundly so, to the extent of being unable to read road signs.

-- however, we already have a very large, very expensive literacy program; it's called universal compulsory schooling.

If someone manages to get through 10 years of that without learning to read and do basic arithmetic, the best guess is that they're either just profoundly stupid, or have some serious mental disability, or both.

The main problem with just increasing the availability of education of all sorts is that it procedes from the unexamined assumption that there's an almost infinite supply of people capable of benefiting from it.

This just isn't so.

In fact, in most Western countries the number attending post-secondary education is probably already higher than the percentage of the population capable of getting anything useful out of it. The liberal-arts and social-science faculties are full of the horrible results.

Hence the dumbing-down of the university curriculum, to the extent that universities have to spend a lot of time teaching what used to be taught in high school (or the British equivalents).

And of course that spreads down the educational pyramid, driven by the same reluctance to admit failure; telling people that their little Johnny is a dimwit who ought to be in a vocational course for toilet-swabbers isn't going to make you popular.

The presence at all levels of people who won't or more often simply can't learn sops up money and staff attention which could be used to teach those who can and will.

This is a gross waste of resources, just as much as denying education to those who _are_ capable of benefiting from it would be. We used to make that mistake; now we're doing the opposite.

This is not progress; it's just falling off the other side of the horse. And of course ometimes we manage to make both mistakes at once.

It leads to further absurdities; people who should be gathering winkles sitting at desks soaking up society's resources, while Chinese are smuggled in to gather winkles.

Time out for laughter and applause: many of those Chinese winkle-gatherers probably _would_ be able to benefit from more education, unlike the English dullards they're indirectly supporting. You find the same ludicrous situation in other developed countries too, of course.

>The recidivism rate among the successful graduates of those classes dropped by about 70%.

-- the "successful" graduates. There's the kicker. See above.

It's sometimes possible to pound a basic education into the heads of the severely resistant/limited, but it costs like blazes. A bright, willing child usually just soaks up basic literacy and numeracy, often on their own, but the others...

This wasn't a problem when most people were going to spend their lives topping turnips or the equivalent, but it sure is now.

A quick hit-and-run before I go offline for a while --

The Home Office over here did a study of recidivists a couple of years back that discovered that besides the usual psychiatric cases (for whom a strong case can be made that secure psychiatric institutions rather than prison is the appropriate solution) about two-thirds of them were illiterate, innumerate, or both: often profoundly so, to the extent of being unable to read road signs. As part of the study, they then introduced remedial basic literacy and numeracy classes. The recidivism rate among the successful graduates of those classes dropped by about 70%. It was speculated that illiteracy and innumeracy are such huge barriers to successful participation in society today that a chunk of the recidivism was involuntary -- the subjects were drifting into crime because the usual social security/employment agency institutions simply weren't helping them because they couldn't fill out forms.

As you might imagine, this sparked renewed interest in prison study courses: it's a hell of a lot cheaper to add a crash-course in reading, writing and 'rithmetic to a first prison sentence than it is to lock someone up for years on a second and subsequent one.

Put this together with the neighbourhood/family paradigm for criminal activity, push it out into the community via social services and the local education authority, and with the right targeting it might be possible to do something to reduce the level of petty crime at source. (And no, I'm not suggesting abolition is possible; but a reduction by even 50% would make an immense difference to the perceived quality of life of the rest of the population, and doing it by relatively cheap means -- basically, by teaching their kids to read and write, which is cheap compared to the cost of keeping the adults in prison -- seems like a good idea.)

Yes, but such families aren't even a large minority of offenders. There are families it runs in, but they're quite rare. My criminal practice was in a city of just over 100,000 population (200,000 if you count the suburbs as well); there were two such families, both of whose names would cause the CPS lawyers and probation service officers of my acquaintance to groan and roll their eyes, but that made for about a dozen offenders out of a couple of hundred regular attendees at the local magistrates'.

"Not quite. A large percentage of theft and similar crime is committed by a small number of people, and it tends to run in neighbourhoods - there are, here and there, families where *everyone* is at it, but more usually it's someone in every house down a particular street who's an earner."

-- I was thinking in generational parent-child terms. It's been a criminological commonplace since the 19th century that successive generations of the same family tend to produce people who get in trouble with the law.

Edited by author 07-11-2005 05:51 PM

Anyone who's been involved with the criminal population (my brief career in law, for example) can tell you that a very large percentage of crime is committed by a small number of recidivists, and that it tends to run in families.

Not quite. A large percentage of theft and similar crime is committed by a small number of people, and it tends to run in neighbourhoods - there are, here and there, families where *everyone* is at it, but more usually it's someone in every house down a particular street who's an earner. I suspect my criminal law practice ran rather longer than yours and, ahem, I spent a fair chunk of my formative years in one of those neighbourhoods. And live a couple of streets away from one now, as it happens.

Patterns of offending may vary in other countries, of course, but I suspect the phenomenon of the rough neighbourhood is global.

>and also to the abortion since 1973 of large numbers of babies who were destined to be no-hopers.

-- I suspect that there's something to this, though I wouldn't stake the farm on it.

Anyone who's been involved with the criminal population (my brief career in law, for example) can tell you that a very large percentage of crime is committed by a small number of recidivists, and that it tends to run in families.

The decline in US crime since 1990 has been attributed to the vigorous incarceration of pot-smokers as Stirling says, and also to the liberalization of gun laws in most states since 1986, and also to the abortion since 1973 of large numbers of babies who were destined to be no-hopers.

Edited by author 07-10-2005 08:51 PM

It turns out that there's a specific set of brain activities associated with "intent to deceive", and that they can be detected.

Do you have a reference for that? Only I suddenly had this delicious thought that anyone with the skills of writing fiction would be able to deliver untruths without using that area of the brain, simply by presenting the matter as a story ... novelists as undetectable master criminals.

I'll return to the ID cards issue another time; I've checked in late after clocking up a couple thousand words and the above is indicative of the condition of my brain right now.

It turns out that there's a specific set of brain activities associated with "intent to deceive", and that they can be detected.

That'll be fun - we'll see people accused of lying because they tried to hide the fact that they were admiring the interviewer's ass.

BTW, it looks as if we'll have a _real_ lie detector soon, one that works with a virtual 100% efficiency.

It turns out that there's a specific set of brain activities associated with "intent to deceive", and that they can be detected.

Now, won't _that_ put the cat among the pigeons...

>Yes, but you've moved the goalposts.

-- you've got a point there, but we were discussing ID-cars-in-general, or possibly the Platonic Ideal of ID cards, not merely a specific proposal, weren't we?

>abolition of cash

-- no, that didn't come into it. However, cash is gradually becoming less important anyway. I hardly ever use it except for some vending machines anyway, for example -- all my usual shopping is done via debit card.

What I was speculating about was consolidating all identity documents into one; an ATM card is an identity document, after all, simply a private one.

And ATM cards are set to aquire biometric identification rather soon; the companies are already running trial programs. No PIN number; just in with the card and then a retina and/or fingerprint scan -- eventually an instant DNA analysis too, I suppose.

>regulations

-- well, if we had infinite transparency, it would be a strong incentive to eliminate regulations which only survive because everyone knows they can't really be enforced.

Yes, but you've moved the goalposts.

What you're suggesting isn't an ID card scheme, it's an ID card scheme as the lynchpin (if we were going to go into this in detail, point-failure-source) of a massive amplification of the state's role in everyday life, a restructuring of consumer credit and retail banking, abolition of cash and pervasive surveillance. (The driver's licence is already a photo ID document).

Those things _would_ help prevent and detect crime, but not to an extent that justifies either the massive reorganisation cost or the massive hit to civil liberties they would entail. And for me, the line on that one is that it had better reduce crime by more than an order of magnitude and cost less than an hour's wages per head per annum before I think it's worth sacrificing any liberties to get it.

And, of course, I make this concession taking the following as assumptions:

1. that all of the above will work perfectly, first time,

2. that the measures required to force every single bank and credit-card-issuer to comply, retool every small business to not need cash, retool every single vending machine in the country and otherwise completely rebuild the economy from the ground up don't wreck everything to the point where the economy can't afford to run the panopticon,

3. That the measures required to make the cards difficult and expensive to forge don't make them so difficult and expensive to make that they become uneconomic,

4. That the infrastructure required is within the amount that HMG can extract by way of taxation without ruining the economy,

5. That the ongoing cost of running the thing wouldn't divert so much productive capital and labour from the economy that we ended up unable to do anything *but* run the panopticon, and

6. That the elimination of the black economy isn't also the elimination of something vital to the economic health of a nation. Not thieves and fences, here, but the ability of ordinary people to sidestep unnecessary regulations and bring things within their budgets by dealing off the books in cash and leaving the taxman in the dark. If every business has to carry all of the adminsitrative overhead required to comply fully with all regulations all the time (because their entire trading is visible to the authorities all the time) you potentially suppress a massive pool of entrepreneurship and future competition for large businesses. This last is, I think, probably the biggest and most harmful unintended consequence of the scheme you propose.

>ID cards don't work to reduce crime or assist in its detection.

-- actually, I can think of several areas they'd help with. Illegal immigration, for example. If they were linked to a national database and impossible (or at least difficult and expensive) to forge, and made necessary for everyday life, they'd make an illegal resident's existance impossible.

That would mean one document serving as your driver's license, credit/debit card, etc., which would be a massive simplification and convenience in itself.

Ideally it would contain biometric information which could be checked against the person carrying it easily and quickly, and referenced back to the national database.

There are other areas in which an identity card could help, as well.

For example, if someone was suspected of a crime, you could alert the national system to flash his location whenever the card was used. If he didn't use the card, that would restrict his movements and actions and make him easier to flush out, since he couldn't get money from a teller machine, check into a hotel, use public transit, and so forth.

People on parole (is there a parole system in the UK?) could be tracked the same way to make sure they're not going anywhere naughty.

In fact, you could have hidden scanners in many places which would query ID cards automatically and spot people on the wanted list, terrorist suspects, and so forth.

I postulated a system something like that in my novel "Conquistador".

>The objection is that they'll completely fail in their stated purpose, the prevention and detection of crime, and to the extent that they do work, they will only do so to curtail civil liberties.

-- yeah, and I think that's dishonest. It's like PETA types saying animal testing isn't necessary for biomedical research because there are other methods that work just as well.

If they were _honest_, they'd say that animal testing does help research, but they don't care because animal rights are more important to them.

Likewise, if the anti-ID people were _honest_, they'd say that ID cards probably _would_ reduce crime, to some extent at least, but that they don't care because the damage to civil liberties is more important.

The two aren't comparable. Animal testing does actually achieve something; whether or not you think that is worth the cruelty to animals when there are alternatives that are, in some cases, nearly as good is, as you correctly identify, the real argument.

ID cards don't work to reduce crime or assist in its detection. They wouldn't even if you could absolutely guarantee that every person had one and that every single one was genuine. They are a token that some authority certifies that the person whose image (or biometric, or whatever) is on the card has the details recorded on or against that card. This absolutely _does_ _not_ _help_ prevent crime. It closes off some small subset of fraud techniques, but there are others which don't depend on establishing a false identity, and those other techniques will be used instead.

It does not provide evidence that the holder was present at the scene of a crime, that he committed the act complained of, or that he acted with the necessary intent. Those problems remain exactly as they were before ID cards. It does nothing to establish the holder's current location. It certainly doesn't magically cause the holder to Mend His Ways.

And that's assuming that they're guaranteed unforgeable.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a national ID forged well enough to pass unaided naked-eye inspection makes those crimes which require a false ID to be established a great deal easier, because your average ovine-in-the-street will see National ID and trust it.

This is for their stated primary purpose, the prevention and detection of crime. They don't work, and there is no mechanism whereby they /can/ work. In a small subset of circumstances, they will be actively counterproductive.

If they could work, there might be a worthwhile argument about whether or not that was worth the price in civil liberties. They're not worth it, and anyone who thinks they are is a puling coward who, to mangle Franklin's dictum, deserves neither liberty nor safety (getting my ad hominem retaliation in first, there).

In the meantime, HM Government is planning to piss at least £300 of my money (which is my share of the projected minimum cost of the wretched thing) up the wall on a scheme to curtail my civil liberties in return for no possible benefit to me in reduced crime. I am Not Happy about this. I fail to see any dishonesty in that position.

As to crime in Britain, I can modestly point out that crime in the US has been dropping sharply all over the country for the past decade and more, and is now back down to the levels of the early 1960's.

The entire post-1964 increase has been repealed, and rates are continuing to drop at around 10% a year for serious crimes involving violence.

There are a number of reasons for this (eg., crack dealers killing each other off during the 90's, demographics, etc.), but the main one seems to have been a sharp increase in the incarceration rate, which has gone up in tandem with the decline in crime.

This is due to more aggressive policing, and also to harsher sentencing -- "three strikes" laws and so forth.

The moral: if you find criminals and lock them up in iron cages until they either die or get so old and feeble they're harmless, you will have less crime.

There's tremendous resistance in some quarters to this; Ghu alone knows why. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

There also seems to be a distinct inverse relationship between gun ownership and certain _types_ of crime, particularly burglary when the residents are home.

In the US, the overwhelming majority of burglaries occur when the people who live on the premises are out; this apparently based on a rational fear on the criminals' part that if they try it when the people are home, they'll get shot and killed.

It's notable that when New Zealand dropped its agricultural subsidies, one result was a sharp drop in the use of chemical fertilizers. Without the subsidies, they didn't pay.

>The objection is that they'll completely fail in their stated purpose, the prevention and detection of crime, and to the extent that they do work, they will only do so to curtail civil liberties.

-- yeah, and I think that's dishonest. It's like PETA types saying animal testing isn't necessary for biomedical research because there are other methods that work just as well.

If they were _honest_, they'd say that animal testing does help research, but they don't care because animal rights are more important to them.

Likewise, if the anti-ID people were _honest_, they'd say that ID cards probably _would_ reduce crime, to some extent at least, but that they don't care because the damage to civil liberties is more important.

They're trying to have it both ways, and it makes me less inclined to take their civil-liberties arguments seriously. (And of course words cannot express my contempt for PETA and animal rights in general.)

They should take their stand on principle, not on technicalities.

>Because people living in cities, and getting their food through companies such as Walmart or Tesco, have collectively driven the prices paid to their suppliers, and ultimately to the farmers, below the cost of production.

-- if you think about it, this is a nonsensical statement. Prices, over the long term, _cannot_ drop below the cost of production because nobody can afford to sell to you at that price. They'd go bankrupt.

Obviously, if the farmgate price is below the cost of production for long, someone is sticking a thumb on the scales.



>Times have changed, and food is now flown half-way around the world, and if the farming industry supplying exotic fresh vegetable from Zimbabwe should collapse, because of stupid or corrupt politicians, the supermarkets go somewhere else.

-- a thoroughly good thing.

>And globalisation means that local shortages do not push prices up.

-- in plain English, this translates as "no famine". It's notable that places dependent on local peasant farming have famines; cities drawing on the whole globe don't.

>might as well be sold, at insanely high prices, for building land.

-- a splendid idea, which would reduce housing prices.

Mind you, as population declines they're going to go down anyway.

>Inefficient farmers, Mr. Stirling?

It depends on how you measure it.

-- no, it depends on whether they'd make a profit at undistorted market prices.

(American farm subsidies are just as bad, though not as big, relatively speaking. The ones for sugar production are particularly ridiculous; they're what keep large sections of the Everglades in sugarcane instead of swamp grass.)

Subsidies Are Bad. They're a tax, and a crude, regressive tax as well. They transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.

>How many tonnes per hectare do your American farmers produce.

-- this is totally irrelevant. The figure to look at is the value of inputs vs. the value of output.

Getting an extra couple of bushels per acre at a cost which exceeds what anyone will freely pay for those bushels is... well, "inefficient" is the word that comes to mind.

Not to mention "perverse" and "dumb".

>How many square kilometres of potential wilderness part are being sterilised by your country's low-yield wheat monoculture?

-- well, considering that there's more forest and more deer in the US than there were in the equivalent areas in 1492...

BTW, it only makes sense to maximize per-acre yields if you're short of acres. If land is abundant relative to capital and/or labor, then it's efficient to use land extensively. Chinese and Indian farming uses a lot more hand labor because it's cheap and abundant.

>Cut out Europe, convert us to wilderness, and you'd hear Walmart screaming from Tampa to Anchorage.

-- if there's sufficient market demand, European grain producers will stay in business without subsidies, and therefore the subsidies are useless.

If there isn't sufficient demand, the subsidies are harmful.

QED.

Charlie, a definite point -- I guess I'm a lot more tired and cynical than you. But it'll come...

Edited by author 06-24-2005 09:27 AM
Looks like the first inane use for this is being trialled. See, it starts with road tax. And although this starts as a good thing, how long before -insurance company- increase your inurance because your GPS box tells them you drive through a 'bad' area on your way home twice a week?

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/1...nsurance_pilot.html

Actually, it's the wrong /kind/ of cynicism that's corrosive. Positing that they're all one or more of a. crooks, ii. incompetents or 3. acting from ulterior and inimical motives says nothing about how one ought to respond. Extending that cynicism with the rider "... and there's fuck all we can do about it." is where it starts to be a problem. (The other version of the same problem occurs where a culture develops a meme of deference to the office, demanding respect for the holder of it; if it ever becomes unacceptable to call, for example, Tony Blair a canting sanctimonious trimmer who sold out his country to a foreign power and was too stupid to see that he got all thirty pieces of silver in return, I shall know this country is going to the dogs.)

Also:

The problem with the objectors to ID cards in the site you linked to is that they can't seem to decide whether they're against ID cards because they will work, or because they won't.

The objection is that they'll completely fail in their stated purpose, the prevention and detection of crime, and to the extent that they do work, they will only do so to curtail civil liberties.

While I'm happy to have the public purse spent to reduce crime, I fail to see the merit in spending it to inconvenience me and every other law-abiding person in the country without affecting criminals even slightly.

Neal, I'm with Serraphin on this. Skepticism is one thing, but cynicism is corrosive of our entire social infrastructure; if we ignore the posturing and refuse to engage with the fuckers, we're handing them unlimited power on a silver platter. Thus, calling them on it when they come up with a stupid idea seems to me to be one of the duties of any patriotic citizen.

If no-one bites, then who will make sure it doesn't all fall down?

But Charlie, this government isn't bothered about solving problems, only about being seen to be solving problems. Both the black box and the ID card are examples. You shouldn't have bothered biting.

I wonder if smart enough criminals will start stealing cars, to get the blackboxes, and either use their insides to resell as actual GPS systems - or perhaps just use them in robberies at night, before reattaching and returning it to your car.

Like stealing a licence plate but worse.

I wonder whether or not the test locale could be comprehensively munged by a number of low-power GPS transmitters left in the area?

When we get back to this...I have just found out that my locale is to be testing the blackbox system. I'll be having a word with my local Labour MP.

However chances of her listening to me...

Charlie - are you going to be in the East Midlands, or better yet Milton Keynes, any time in the foreseeable? I have something to show you.

While I'm not fundamentally against the idea of some funky tech solution to the problem of traffic congestion (as someone who doesn't own a car, I have the luxury of an attitude of amused detachment when the drivers get upset), I'm right behind you on GPS not being up to the job.

Leaving aside Edinburgh, I recently had the privilege of sailing around the southern end of Denmark, in a brand new yacht with a sweet little chart plotter installed. (Some background: I work for a nice company that lets poor little peons like me sail at a relatively low cost. Mostly in ageing boats in safe "point-and-shoot" waters in and around the Solent. The yachts all have GPS but there's rarely much to be gained by using the.)

Anyhoo, we'd anchored somewhere with good holding, had checked that we didn't seem to be dragging, but it seemed like a fun idea to put the GPS on anchor watch. (An attack of New Toy Syndrome). Within ten minutes the three IT geeks on board were panicking as the chart plotter shrieked an alarm. Had we drifted? No, the GPS had lost the signal. At 55 degrees North. With no substantial hills between us and the horizon, and probably for another 50km in any direction.

Maybe the boat had a duff GPS receiver, but we lost the signal several times in the course of that evening before we turned the thing off. (Then, after turning it back on, we had no trouble for the rest of the week). So no, I wouldn't trust GPS to track car movements in the UK anywhere north of Watford Gap. But then, the current government seems to have as bad a Metropolitan myopia as the previous one. Maybe the scheme is only intended to reduce traffic in the Home Counties.

Inefficient farmers, Mr. Stirling?

It depends on how you measure it. How many tonnes per hectare do your American farmers produce. How many square kilometres of potential wilderness part are being sterilised by your country's low-yield wheat monoculture?

If I recall right the article was in The Furrow, published by John Deere, and US wheat farmers were growing less than 3 tonnes per hectare, compared to a European 10 tonnes per hectare. The report was of an American farmer who, by slight changes to management, was able to get the same profit from 20% less cultivated area, simply by applying some European-style methods.

Though, here in Europe, the farming has to run at 100%, no margin for error or weather. And the world grains markets have astonishingly little slack, as a percentage of the total. Cut out Europe, convert us to wilderness, and you'd hear Walmart screaming from Tampa to Anchorage.

Erik, have you ever tried using a GPS system hereabouts?

In Scotland? No, at least, not yet, hoping to fix than in a couple of months.

But I have used them in London, worse, in Greenwhich, and not up on the Observatory, but in town, with that large ridge to the south. At first, it was seriously confused -- it was trying to fast start, which is where the GPS goes "The sats were here, I've been off FOO seconds, so now they're here." This works great if you turn it off an walk a few miles. It fails utterly when you fly from the middle of North America to London -- the GPS was looking for the sats that were above St. Louis. If I waited long enough, it would bail on fast start and start scanning numerically.

Realizing this, I helped, by telling it that I was roughly in Southern England. Upon finding this out, it went. "Oh. Hold on. (furious calcuation.) Okay, I should be able to see PRN 02, 07, 11, 19, 21, 28 and 35, assuming perfect horzions. Bang, lock to five sats. 35, the Geosynchronus WAAS sat, was but 20 degrees off the horizion, and blocked by buildings and whatnot to the south. The other was low enough that it wasn't locking up, until I moved a bit. However, three of them were about 60 degrees above the horizon, which is about ideal. Error quickly dropped to about 3M.

Why did I have a GPS in Greenwhich? You know why.

Older consumer GPS receivers had trouble locking up anywhere without a clear sky. They had one receiver, which stepped through the channels, and it wasn't a very sensitive receiver. You needed to see each sat all the time, because if you happened to be blocked when it tried to find that bird, you'd wait a fairly long time to try that bird again.

Nowadays, most all receivers, even the bitty $70 USB ones, have 12 channel parallel receivers, running off of an amplified antenna. They're able to handle updates from all 12, and deal with the various brief dropouts that happen as you drive by buildings -- or large vehicles drive by you. With the amp in the antenna, much more of the signal that hits the antenna makes it to the detector (the fact that the 1.5Ghz band is one of the less noisy bands makes amplified antennas work even better -- not much noise to amplify.)

Indeed, GPS with multi-channel recievers work better moving, since obstructions now just block the signal to a given low level sat for a moment, not constantly, and thus, the box is able to use them in a solution if they happen to be part of the best four needed for a full 3D position, even if the signal is present only, say, 50% of the time because of obstructions. Before, with a single channel, you might have a bad run, where every time the GPS looks, the sat is blocked, thus, you go minutes without seeing that bird.

In St. Louis, which is far enough south that WAAS is often available, it's very common to have a 3D fix that show less than 2M of error. That's not only accurate enough to show what road I'm on, it's enough to show which lane I'm in, to a very high level of confidence.

(For those wondering. Assume the Y axis runs forward/aft through the car, X is perpendicular, both congruent with the ground plane. Errors along the Y axis wouldn't affect lane determination at all -- it would think I was a little further down the road, or not as far, but if all my error was in the Y component, it would see me in the dead center of the lane. Only errors in X would change what lane I was shown to be in -- and, with a 2M error, the X component would have to be very large to actually shift a lane.)

Actually, the CAP is a massive system of transfering income to inefficient farmers and results in serious distortions -- increasing grain farming in chancy climates, for example.

Abolishing it would reduce food prices and increase (global) farm incomes.

A lot of European farmers would have to go out of business, or drastically restructure their operations, but apart from the farmers with their noses in the trough, I can't for the life of me see why this should be considered a bad thing. The no-longer-economic farmland could then be reforested or put in wilderness parks or something of that nature.

BTW, you're quite right about Blair & Co.; they are Thatcher "with a human face".

Thing is, this is why they were able to get elected.

The economic trajectory of the UK before and after the Iron Lady is relevant here, and that of countries like Germany and France who refused the bitter medicine and are now finding the spoon approaching their contorted faces once more, willy-nilly.

The problem with the objectors to ID cards in the site you linked to is that they can't seem to decide whether they're against ID cards because they will work, or because they won't.

There's a good civil-liberties case to be made against a national ID card system, but that shouldn't be mixed up with a lot of opportunistic stuff about technical difficulties.

Technical difficulties can be solved; that's just a question of time, money and willpower. Nothing inherently impossible is involved.

An honest discussion should focus on whether the problems _should_ be solved.

I got the PW review via my agent, who subscribes. But there's a review in Kirkus, and that's above her pain threshold so she's bugging my editor for a copy.

The Sweden thing is just a guest of honour slot at a con. Hey, it's closer than London ...

(Smile) Dave, please. The family has a problem with names (they're in such short supply) So David, big Dave, Dave, small Dave, Hairy Dave ... (it's not so bad as Pratchett's 'Jock' but close.) David - my cousin, is my age, and married to Barbara... my wife's name. So Dave, not David, please. Or you can call me Monkey. It's suitably derogatory and appropriate.

(PW costs IIRC $225 a year. Above my touch. I don't get it either, but you can get a month's free online access, or I can e-mail you the article. It's okay as these things go. Not as good as your previous books suggest you deserve, but a few usable quotes.)

As soon as it stops being ringfenced it becomes a general-purpose cash cow. And then incentive -- and money -- to reduce the problem is lost.
Privatised Toll roads. Yes. We have this pernicious evil.

Enjoy Sweden. Is this a quest to find somewhere with worse weather than Scotland? (Ok, this is envy speaking)

Dave

I used to be just such a 'doctrinaire free marketeer' a quarter of a century ago when road charging was something you only read about in anarcho-capitalist utopias by Murray Rothbard or David Friedman.

If anyone had told us back then in the era of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock that this would be looked at and rejected multiple times by Thatcherites and Reaganites, only to be implemented by a Labour government....

Excellent piece.

However I am not quite sure our masters are quite as dumb as you think they are.

(Yes, they are frighteningly ignorant of basic science, technology and logistics but who in the mainstream media is going to call them on it? and who in the general population would understand the arguments if they did?).

Just think about what their real motivations might be:

a) government and corporate bigwigs love their chauffeur-driven cars and spend inordinate amounts of time in them sat in traffic jams fuming over the fact that for all their money and power they have no more control over whether they are going to get to their destination on time than all the little people in the cars outside.

Unless you spend time with these people you've no idea how much this annoys them...

Day 1 of this new system coming into play, the motorways and the business and government districts of our cities will become magically free of traffic so that they can be whisked from home to office to airport with minimum delay.

Are they really that shallow? yes they are (and remember it's not their money that will pay for any of this - they won't even be paying the charges themselves).

b) The point about the vulnerability of Just in Time logistics is very important.

It is also significant that UK traffic issues prevent the full implementation of JiT in many sectors and regions and deny companies savings they would dearly love to make.

Thus supermarkets still have to throw away large amounts of produce as tothey have to keep far more goods instore than they would do in their ideal world.

Clearing the motorways of most passenger traffic will allow major JiT savings (and make us all even more more vulnerable to any disruption of transport systems).

On the other hand some of their employees might have more problems getting into work - but they (the employees) will just have get up earlier or stump up to pay the road charges, so the company will hardly suffer.

c)Last but very far from least, this represents an excellent opportunity to funnel vast sums of taxpayers money into the coffers of selected corporations who will demonstrate their gratitude in the time-honoured fashion.

And providing for the future careers of New Labour project operatives is becoming all the more important as it becomes evident that they cannot expect to stay in power for ever.

As you say it solves problems - but not the ones that they say they are trying to solve.

I should add, lest confusion be caused: I used "doctrinaire free-marketeers" as a short-hand for the species of cheerleaders of capitalism who go into politics and use their ideology as an excuse to justify stripping the public purse and transferring it to their friends. As opposed to the real thing, who go into business instead and focus on earning a living by, like, doing Useful Stuff. (And your socialists who, again, are usually honest about what they're doing.)

Hi David. (I don't get PW -- was the review good?)

You're dead right about putting taxes into infrastructure. That's one of the most annoying things about the Blairists; they're as doctrinaire free-marketeers as Thatcher, just with better rhetoric, and they never saw a way of pouring public revenues into private purses that they didn't like. Road and fuel tax in the UK used to be notionally ring-fenced for road and transport construction. But then they privatised the railways (badly) and I can see this bizarre road pricing proposal as not only a big civil liberties issue, but also as the first step towards privatising the roads. (And if that isn't an infringement of the right to free movement I'm not sure what qualifies.)

Agree completely re. the publishing industry.

(If you guys will excuse me now, I have to go pack my suitcases -- flying out to Sweden tomorrow.)

Hmm. Charlie, I hit upon your blog by curiosity, after reading the PW review of Accelerando. I hope you don't mind if I make a comment here. (Smile)I don't live in the UK, and the African solution to traffic congestion (either a shrug or a cavalcade of expensive German luxury cars, with outriders to clear the way) are not exactly any model for anyone (except political masters, whom, I must agree are generally dumber than a sack full of hammers) so I speak from ignorance. I do agree with a fair number of your statements and premises... but it seems to me there is a logic interrupt here: Viz. These politicos have the mental ability of brain-dead hamsters. They are incapable of understanding the faults in the 'technical solution' (ok up to here I'm with you). So we should increase fuel tax... which may as a side effect reduce road usage, but 1)gives these brain dead hamsters more money for the next loony tune idea, perhaps musical ID cards. 2)which seriously impacts the economy (fuel costs add to the cost of _everything_) because the revenue raised is not directed at solving the problem.

Back in pre-history, South Africa took the taxes collected from fuel, and put it directly into the road construction fund. Contrary to what some elderly white supremacists might say, that's the actual backbone of SA (relative to Africa) prosperity: infrastructure. Of course, just before Apartheid's monumental disaster in socialism-for-one-race-group fell apart... some 'clever' politico realised that the revenue in this dedicated account could be far better looted if it went into the general exchequer. Our new set of hammers (the more things change the more they stay the same, I swear) have not seen fit to change back, and though fuel taxes raise billions, little is going into road construction, or into improving public transport. If you showed me that tax was going into better rail freight transport, more roads (ok so more roads in the UK is problem...) And better public transport, well I'd buy into a fuel tax. I think people on average actually are capable of this level of thought (Ok I know. A thinking populace and one that understands the idea of 'fair', is anathema even as a concept to the hammers).

But the idea that you can tax fuel to extent that only very wealthy can afford to drive anywhere (and thus reduce congestion), strikes me far more of an infringement into the right to free movement than satellite tracking. (But then I would. I never believed being rich was much of a measurement of merit.) And, based Zimbabwe, and the Warsaw ghetto, I think you're underestimating the ability of humans to survive empty shop shelves with a semblance of civilization. However, removal of the right of free association (even if they're wrong) is vital to continuance of civilization, unless you want to say yes and amen to each and every hammer-sack forever more.

The one upside to dumb techno-ignoramuses deciding on technological courses is that it will be much like every other one of these decisions (Starwors for eg.): A way of stimulating research into an area no sane scientist would go. It's much the same as writing. If I'd had a clue about the publishing industry I would never have started, and have stuck to fisheries science.

I loved the comments on the manifesto and Baen BTW.

Dave

Edited by author 06-16-2005 03:43 AM
Tony - I see what you're saying; but it's not quite true. See at the moment, they can tell I've been going up the M60 at 75 (Assuming the cameras are working, which oft - they aint).

But if I've got a (viable, working) GPS system strapped to my car, they can tell I spent three hours outside of a house that isn't my own, visited the florist and quickly popped into the local Lingerie shop.

(Which should be nothing to worry about as long as our government stays out of utter power/corruption and I don't become important enough.)

If the labrador party really used the old nosh - they'd spend the millions, as Charlie mentioned, on improving the public transport system; building a high speed n-s link (along with an e-w link). That's the way to cut down pollution. If they'd have allowed the company that got the swiss rail moving an 8 year contract... (mutter mutter)

Tony: I take it you noticed that in the US you are supposed to show photo-ID to buy a train ticket? Or a long-range bus ticket? Or a plane ticket?

That's the US, where they confuse the constant mantra about "freedom" and "liberty" with the actuality.

It's heading in the same direction over here.

And when that happens, you've got a problem. I'm just saying that I don't see GPS black boxes in cars as substantially less threatening to your liberty than the combination of license plates and traffic cameras - they can track you now.

Edited by author 06-15-2005 07:50 PM
I think it just sounded sexy as a way of delivering the service...the far more plausible route is via camera logging of number plates. Of course this would significantly increase the pressure on forgery of number plates but this is probably copable with using active database consistency checking.

This tech is most notable in London congestion charging but is most worrying from a privacy viewpoint in the systems which monitor traffic for congestion and vehicle routing. These cameras recognise registrations and spot where they turn up next to generate traffic flow information. Supposedly these operate on hash functions of the registrations and are anonomysed(sp) but if I were security services I would want a back door into those systems.

-- Andrew

Charlie, I'm not sure you have your image of the underlying tech quite correct, but my experience parallels yours. Even a tree in the wronmg place can generate an obvious glitch in a recorded GPS track.

GPS would be workable for area-based charging, such as in London, but people on the fringes would have problems. I reckon it wouldn't be wise to have any big jumps iun charging rates.

Erik, have you ever tried using a GPS system hereabouts?

I have, and unless messrs. Garmin have sold me a turkey, it's an iffy proposition anywhere where the landscape isn't perfectly flat in all directions (especially southwards).

How on earth you'd price roads in the UK this way is beyond me; you frequently get empty two-lane A roads running parallel to heavily used motorways (which replaced them) at a distance of twenty metres. And streets that wind and twist about city blocks of variable size and shape.

Technical error: The fact that UK is at 60N doesn't affect GPS/GLONASS/Galileo availability at all. GPS works very well there.

Yes, the UK has an issue with sats in geosync orbits. But the vast majority of the GPS constellation is in polar orbits, and at any given moment, assuming a "full" constellation (that is, 20 or more sats up and active) there will be at least four, and at most twelve, sats in view at all all times, on all points of the globe. A quick check shows that there are currently 27 on orbit and active -- there are 32 assignable "Pseudo Range Numbers", 12, 17 and 32 are currently unassigned, 26 and 31 are on orbit, but flagged as inactive.

WAAS, the Wide Area Augmentation Systems, is based on a geosync satellite, and thus, isn't useful on the ground in the UK. However, WAAS is built for airliners, they have no problems seeing the WAAS geosync sats, even as far north at 70N -- but that's what WAAS was built for, to help route aircraft.

Right. I'm having 2 thoughts about this black box tracking mess:

What's going to happen if your black box gets stolen, and how will this work on motorcycles, given that it's going to have to be bolted on somewhere (how big will it be anyway?), which won't play nice with the tamperproofness of it.

CAP -- Common Agricultural Policy.

It's been part of the EU for a long time, and is most significantly a system of payments to farmers to keep them in business.

Because people living in cities, and getting their food through companies such as Walmart or Tesco, have collectively driven the prices paid to their suppliers, and ultimately to the farmers, below the cost of production.

In the past, during the Cold War, and with the events of WW2 still in the political memory of Europe, growing food in Europe was considered important.

Times have changed, and food is now flown half-way around the world, and if the farming industry supplying exotic fresh vegetable from Zimbabwe should collapse, because of stupid or corrupt politicians, the supermarkets go somewhere else.

During the Cold War, the supply chain in this country was expected to be the Strategic Reserve. That's gone too.

Add global warming, and its disturbance of the weather, and the risks in farming are going up, while the margins are dropping. And globalisation means that local shortages do not push prices up.

And the only asset most farmers can depend on is their land, which if it won't make a profit from farming might as well be sold, at insanely high prices, for building land.

So, do we need CAP Reform?

Yes, but I don't think the politicians are asking the right questions.

The fuel protests were brief and mild here because the government backed down sharpish and met the protestor's demands. Despite putting the army on alert. (Hence my opinion on why the fuel protestors succeeded and why they were playing with fire.)

Tony: I take it you noticed that in the US you are supposed to show photo-ID to buy a train ticket? Or a long-range bus ticket? Or a plane ticket? It's heading in the same direction over here. Tracking cars will close the public/private transport surveillance gap, if you're willing to be paranoid about our governments in the west acquiring surveillance facilities that would have been the Stasi's wet dream.

David: yep, housing policy has something to do with it. Reform of the CAP, anyone?

The basic problem here is that people do not _want_ alternatives to the car.

They _like_ cars.

They like public transport so other people will get off the road and leave them more room.

In the long run, as population declines auto numbers probably will too. That's a decade or two in the future, though.

As an aside, I was startled at how brief and mild the fuel protests were in the UK. If you tried that here, the "protest" would be a lot more violent and sustained.

Secondly, we give up the basic right to travel anonymously – a corollary of the basic human right to free public assembly.

No, you give up the right of your car to travel anonymously. Given license plates and traffic cameras, I don't think you've had that for quite some time.

People, on the other hand, can still travel anonymously.

Doesn't much matter how they collect the money when they do sweet F.A. to provide effective alternatives, and carry on letting people build new houses nowhere near where they can find jobs.

Counterpoint from the other side of the pond:

Over here, toll highways are quite common, at least in some parts of the country, with tolls that do in fact vary by distance travelled. (Taking the Massachusetts Turnpike from Framingham -- not that far out into the 'burbs -- into downtown Boston will cost you $2.40 each way. That's about $600/year if it's your daily commute, despite which, the road still gets jammed up at rush hour. Fees for other trips available here).

For decades the way this all worked was by human toll-takers at toll booths which were, quite frequently, jammed. However, lately, technology has entered the picture: you can now get a transponder which sits in your car, and tells machinery in the tollbooth to charge your credit card -- or just take the toll straight out of your checking account. The whole arrangement is increasingly standardized: your Massachusetts FastLane transponder can be used on the east coast all the way down to Virginia.

Of course, one of the reasons this works is that the retrofit cost to the vehicles is low -- and happily borne by the drivers, who pay for the privilege of avoiding long lines for human toll-takers. (All the longer now that many lanes at the tollbooths are transponder only). But if you could get more compliance -- which may be pretty soon around, say, New York -- you could imagine building the toll-taking equipment into the pavement and losing the tollbooths altogether. (Which, in fact, might be one way to introduce a technically similar scheme in Britain -- modulo enforcement measures to ticket transponder-less vehicles on the toll roads).

Besides, the transponder transmits only when signaled from outside. And the money charged is mostly tolls that have been in place for years. So, it's not as if these schemes have people paying hundreds of dollars to have their position tracked continually. For that, we have OnStar.

What I find most annoying, I guess, is the blatant political expediency of the whole thing; spend tens of billions, forcing drivers to foot the bill, in order to address a problem which could be solved by simply framing the fuel tax protestors with the real consequences of their actions. Money which could be better spent rebuilding the canal network (for shifting heavy, non-perishable goods) and rail network (for bulk high-speed freight), not to mention building that whizzy London-to-Scotland maglev for moving us humans back and forth.

The GPS part of the system is clearly insane. A much more workable system would involve short range signals and detectors built into the road. Any car not broadcasting an ID signal would be picked up as illegal, and you'd only need to cover the roads that were getting choked up (at least to start with). The level of technology would be a lot simpler, and because the metering system would be outside the car, it would be far less tamper proof.

This isn't to say that I'm in favour of the idea (I vary back and forth), but your technological objections certainly carry weight.

Yes, ideology runs smack into reality. I goofed in putting this only in terms of them being victims. They are, but they're also perpetrators. They complained about VCRs too, way back when, and they won concessions that they shouldn't have.

But let's not forget who'd be at fault here. It's the politicians. It happens with cartels (and unions) all the time. I do think they have a legitimate gripe here. It's the solutions that I worry about.

The "IP regime" is optional right now. You don't need to listen to music from big record companies.

They're trying to change that, you know.

What do you think the side-effects of a universal hardware-level DRM scheme are likely to be (the sort of scheme the RIAA and MPAA want to ram down our throats)? If home copying is impossible, then home recording and distribution will also become impossible. Which freezes out budding musicians who don't want to hand their creative rights over to the cartel.

A friend of mine -- a punk musician from way back when -- asserts that one of the goals of the introduction of the CD format in the early 1980's was to raise the bar to putting out a record, stamping out the grass-roots indie labels that were springing up (because by 1980 the cost of pressing a run of singles or LPs at an independent pressing plant was cheap enough that anyone could do it). Even though the price of CD pressing was set to fall, the format requires better recording, mixing and mastering facilities than most bands could afford back then -- and remember, the CD writer in a PC was science fiction. (I remember buying my first CD-R drive in, um, 1996? 1997? An HP drive, SCSI interface, slow as pigshit, somewhat unreliable -- and it cost £300. How times have changed!)

MPAA and RIAA, it bears repeating, do not represent the interests of musicians, they represent the interests of the studio system -- which would ideally like to reduce the creative status of musicians to work for hire, rather than having to pay them occasional royalties.

The "IP regime" is optional right now. You don't need to listen to music from big record companies.

I don't see why both open source and copyright can't operate simulataneously. MPAA and RIAA are speaking for the owners of their assets, and they have every right to deal with it as they please. After all, we have more alternatives. My own hope is that we'll soon have more garage bands (and the cinematic equivalent) online for free. The products of copyright holders are an option.

You're absolutely right about using "would". I'm a believer in freeware, shareware, and open source myself. I've even heard of a project to apply the open source model to pharmaceutical development. So I could easily imagine a major shift in that direction. But I still don't see it replacing the need for organized investment -- at least not until the products of intellectual labor become "too cheap to meter."

I'll confess to having missed a couple early chapters, but Manfred Macx wasn't exactly living in the street in "Lobsters".

I'm not an anti-copyright absolutist either. Just two comments.

First, I'm not really sure what my ideal society would look like as far as copyright is concerned, but I don't think that really matters. We're not going to get my ideal society, whatever that might be. It's not on the table. Abandoning copyright altogether is so far removed from the real world of contemporary policy that I almost feel like it's a waste of my time to say that it's not something I support. The real-world policy questions under discussion all resolve around the issue: do we keep the current IP regime, or do we make it even more restrictive? Given a world where that's the question being asked, I know which side I'm on.

Second: one should be careful about using "would" in policy discussions. There are cases, after all, where there's real work going on in ways where people don't directly get monetary value from their intellectual contributions. I'm typing this on a computer where large parts of the OS are given away for free. I've written free software, and I've worked hard doing it. People have a variety of motives for giving away their work: sometimes a desire for glory, sometimes pure altruism, sometimes because they've found an indirect way of making money from it. When you mention Manfred Macx, you are, after all, writing about a (fictional) person whose career as a human was based on non-ownership of his work.

Edited by author 02-12-2005 11:50 AM
Galambosianism is illustrative of the need for a social contract but I still say it's gotta be a joke. There are reasons why you can copyright some things and not others.

It's going too far to the other extreme to think that intellectual property cannot be owned. That really just means that it can never have a monetary value. And taken to its logical conclusion, that means investment capital wouldn't go towards its development except for private use or as a matter of charity.

We'd have a different society. Pharmaceutical developers would only distribute treatments to their own hospitals rather than sell them to competing hospitals around the world. I dunno what writers would do, other then look for sponsors. ("Would you like a cool, refreshing Diet-Coke?," Manfred asked.)

Man is also an ambitious animal.

Yep, I think you're right there.

(Parenthetically speaking, I have no time whatsoever for Objectivism, or indeed for doctrinaire Libertarianism. Both of them seem to be based on the fallacious idea that human beings are not, at root, social animals; or at least they seem to provide great justifications for folks who are looking for an excuse to deny the existence of a social contract. Galambosianism is just a logical next step, and I find the idea of a philosophy based on the idea that intellectual property can be truly owned to be both illogical and repugnant. But that's just my opinion ...)

Edited by author 02-11-2005 05:50 PM
You're right that he didn't, if we mean Galambosianism in a literal sense. But, as you say, the literal ideas of Galambosianism (if we know them) are silly enough that it's hard to imagine anyone genuinely believing them and even harder to imagine a functioning society using them.

I suppose when I mentioned Permanence I was taking Galambosianism metaphorically, the way I assumed you were. If you think of the MPAA and RIAA as Galambosian organizations, then the Rights Economy is the logical outcome of the views and policies they're pushing.

It is indeed deeply weird, if it's true. I'm not sure Schroeder took the idea far enough in Permanence, though ... hmm.

Who would own copyright on language? Would true Galambosianism mean we all have to invent our own languages?

I've never heard of this before but I could easily believe it was made up. One major flaw in the description is that there must be a public domain simply because if I truly own an asset then it must follow that I am permitted to give it away for free.

That's my reasoning, however, and no one should be permitted to repeat it without my express permission. <g>

One place where we see "the implications of Galambosianism if taken to its logical conclusion" is the Rights Economy in Karl Schroeder's Permanence. He doesn't like what that logical conclusion implies.

Galambosianism is probably best known from Jerome Tuccille's hilarious libertarian memoir It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Some readers suspected he had made it up.

A vast Galambosian conspiracy, secretly operating through Greenspan and the RIAA... *happy sigh* That's just so wonderfully paranoid and totally insane. And yet, it's almost plausible enough to support a short story.

I'm not, however, going to ask you where you get your ideas, because the answer is obvious. You're clearly taking the sinister anti-hallucinogen from Philip K. Dick's "Faith of our Fathers".

Scaling shouldn't have been that big a problem with the original Constitution.

The U.S. federal government was supposed to be limited. There was no federal control over business or labor or marriage or schools. Those things were supposed to be handled by the states, if not locally. This was even clarified by the ninth and tenth amendments (rights exist even if not expressed therein, and the federal government has no power not expressed). Politicians found excuses to ignore them.

The 17th amendment changed the way senators are elected from appointment by the states to election by the people. Some (whom I tend to agree with) think that was a big mistake because it took away power from the states. We had Prohibition just six years later.

Edited by author 10-31-2004 05:54 AM
Speaking hypothetically ... I suspect a lot of the problems with both American democracy and the British flavour -- indeed, with democracy in general -- is that it doesn't scale well. Direct participatory democracy only works at small town level, and representative democracy seems to run into problems when the community so governed passes about five million people; at that level, if you have on the order of a thousand representatives they each represent five thousand people, so the chances of them actually knowing everybody they represent become slim. (I'm exaggerating here: the chances of them knowing even 1% of their constituents remotely well enough to represent them is marginal.) A disconnect thus creeps in between the representatives and the represented, who in practice end up consisting of those who can get their representative's attention. Money being the key here, increasingly so as the polity grows.

I should note that the US constitution was drafted at a time when the colonies had a combined population on the order of three million, and the UK system of government took its shape in 1832 with a population on the order of ten million. The UK is creaking along with an order of magnitude more people, but clearly needs an overhaul -- from where I'm sitting, Scottish politics (back to five million again) seems more responsive to individual needs than national level politics. Again, the USA is now at a two orders of magnitude constitutional overstretch, and never mind the antagonism in party politics -- there's a huge degree of alienation, when only 40% of eligible voters bother to do so.

(Note that this theory does not fill me with optimism and hope for China's eventual democratization, or even for the European Parliament -- although I'll give the latter some credit for having been designed as a talking shop for a confederacy of loosely coupled states, rather than having simply grown like Topsy.)

<we here in Flyover Country get the distinct impression that our money goes in one direction.

Out to the Coasts.>

May I suggest that you look up the actual numbers? Mostly rural (republican) states are net recipients of federal funds while the heavily urbanised states on the coast, (usually democrat) are net contributors. This follows naturally from cities being both richer and, per capita, much cheaper to build infrastructure for. For some odd reason Texas is also a net payer but there are not a lot of R states that can say that.

I say that the real problem in american federal politics these days is that the republican party has gone necrotic and died from an infestation of church activists. They used to be the party of thight budgets, national defence and other classic conservative virtues, and to some extent they still have that reputation (probably because it is still true on the state level in many places) but what they actually are these days is a third-rate knockoff of the CDU, using state power to promote their ideological beliefs and running vast social engineering schemes in an attempt to build a more virtious society. Except they are unwilling to actually pay for all this through taxes. So at this point the US federal government has a "tax and spend" party and a "Don't tax, spend anyway" party. This is catastropic for america so if you are an actual patriotic american conservative, then please, take your party back from the "christian" wingnuts who are currently in possesion of it.

In this wiev the most important reason Bush should loose this election is simply that a Bush victory will cement the hold of the radicals who are currently in charge of the republican party while a defeat will hopefully bring about a bit of soulshearching. Kerry? I have no idea how he'll do as president, but if he should somehow manage to be less competent than Bush, well, then he to can be voted out in four, or rendered toothless in two years. Remember: Democracy isn't so much about electing good leaders as it is about getting rid of bad ones.

"...and eliminated inheritance tax...."

I seem to recall you saying this on several occasions here, and I'm reasonably sure I pointed out at least twice -- though I could easily be wrong -- that this isn't true. The inheritance tax has not been abolished. It might be more accurate, therefore, to avoid stating a nonfact.

True things include the Bush Admin's fervent desire to get rid of the thing, that the proposal passed the House, but that the Senate never agreed.

The precise curious situation is described here. "The decade-long public relations and lobbying campaign seemed to pay off when President George W. Bush signed his $1.35 trillion tax cut into law in 2001. The bill included a gradual phase-out of the estate tax over ten years (see sidebar). But because the tax bill--a bizarre assortment of delayed activation dates and gimmicks that money guru Jane Bryant Quinn called "a contemptible piece of consumer fraud"--was structured to "sunset" at the end of 2010, the estate tax will be fully repealed for only one year, after which tax rules revert back to what they were before passage of the bill."

It's presently a theoretical one-year grab; it's only if a new bill repealing the repealings is past that the tax would be eliminated. (Naturally, I think ath would be incredibly stupid, and unhealthy for the US polity.)

  

(It's an excellent article, very much worth reading in entirety, by the way.)

You can register me on your roster of right-wing readers.

I agree with Murph that the country will be divided no matter who wins. The Democrats really messed up picking Kerry, and it'll only get worse if he wins. Even a thoroughly anti-Bush and anti-war candidate like Howard Dean couldn't have been as devisive.

I wouldn't expect dictatorship and violence -- although Democrats can be irritatingly presumptious with their will to power. It was a Democrat working for Clinton who said, "Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Pretty cool!" (Paul Begala, as I recall.)

I would guess that you've probably heard of the prediction that no two countries with McDonalds franchises will ever fight a war with each other. Some say it didn't work in the case of Serbia v. U.S. but I doubt the ties were strong enough to make for a valid test. I expect them to hold a little better with the thousands of franchises we have here. :-)

9/11 rotted more than just the blogs, the internet is slowly rotting in a pool of repitition & shrinking rights. (9/11 isn't really the the only reason, just a heavy-weight.)


The nineties are long gone, long live the nineties!

Well, Charlie, you and I don't always agree, but I will always buy your books. As far as Outright Leftists go, I find your point of view, and your humorous science fictional implementation of that view, refreshing.

If the American Left adopted more British Left tactics (be nice if everytime I met an American Lefty they didn't react as if I had horns or that I was trying to burn their house down by preaching to me) then maybe I could calm down and listen to them.

We'll see how it goes. I don't like the choices I have (I'm voting for the guy you don't like and most of the Lies Reloaded thread over at Asimov's covers those reasons). But I've decided that if Bush wins a second term, I'll try and sign back up.

I supported the war. Seems only just that I go serve in it, especially now that it isn't going well.

If Kerry wins, I'll stay home and work on my own writing.

We'll see how Tuesday (or the next sixty days after) go.

Either way, half the country is going to be mad at the winner. Even if Kerry wins, a truly pissed off half of the population won't be a good thing.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.A.

If anything, the surprising thing is how similar the systems are, not how different.

One thing that seems blindingly obvious is that the Constitution was written for loosely connected eighteenth century colonies, and has been tacitly twisted to meet the needs of a unitary twentieth century nation, given the advances in communication and transportation.

The best example is the way the "inter-state commerce" clause has been used to justify, well, just about everything.

I'd be leery about saying one system is better than the other, between a Republic based system and a Parliamentary one. They have their strengths and weaknesses.

And the British system evolved over time as opposed to the U.S. system, which was cobbled together from what was leading theory of the day (and it took us two tries, the Articles of Confederation and then the actual U.S. Constitution).

The Speaker of the U.S. House is in the Line of Succession should the entire executive branch be wiped out. The Secret Service came and manhandled Dennis Hastert out of the Capitol building during 09-11-01 mainly to preserve that succession line.

A side note. The U.S. 09-11-01 Commission report is definitely worth a read. Probably the most accessible government produced document I've laid eyes on in quite a while. I think it is a good foundation for future historical research on the events of that day.

As for government in general, I often wonder if fifty states aren't too unwieldy. I wonder if maybe a series of regional macrostates (Northeast, Southwest, Midwest, etc) would be a more effective way to represent regional issues within the United States. More often than not, we here in Flyover Country get the distinct impression that our money goes in one direction.

Out to the Coasts.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

Hungry Jo: there was a revolution. In 1649. You might remember that it answered the question of where power resided rather firmly, by shortening the king. Subsequent monarchs proved rather more tractable, except in 1688, occasion of the (confusingly named) Glorious Revolution, where said monarch's grandson was given a slightly less terminal reminder by parliament. (Instead of trying him for treason and executing him, Parliament just sacked him and appointed a new King.)

The US political system is basically a codification of the English constitutional division of powers circa 1776, with some additional limits on the power of the "monarch" (see the preamble to the Declaration of Independence), substitution of an elected official for a hereditary blue-blood, and mechanisms to permit election of a lower and upper house when travel time across the states was measured in weeks or months rather than days (the colonies being rather larger than England and Wales).

The British Prime Minister is actually rather closer to the US Speaker of the House, if the President was held to ransom by Congress and delegated most of his power to the Speaker. But then, the evolution of political parties diverged in 1776 and different selection pressures kicked in. If anything, the surprising thing is how similar the systems are, not how different.

yeah, I'll admit steve that the American system makes alot more sense than the British one.

Our system still goes back to the days when you had the Monarch as the executive and Prime Minister was just head of the legislature (equivelent to House Majority leader or something) but as Parliament became more powerfull nobody ever sorted the issues out. There was no revolution so the system just changed bit by bit, leaving the basic structure in tact (which is why it's hopelessly outdated).

But having said that it tends to work pretty smoothly so nobody complains (or at least nobody complains when they get into power, because then the system's working for them which is why it's so hard to get any real electoral reform).

The thing with the British electoral system is that you aren't supposed to have any say in electing a Prime Minister. You elect your local representative to go to Parliament and he represents your views there, it's then up to that representative to choose who he supports for Prime Minister. The thing is the system actually pre-dates political parties. Stupid but that's the way it works.

What I meant by saying that a more populace state has less votes than you was that an individual in California has less say in the election than you, because your state has more votes per head.

Anyway, I take your point, America is a lot more fragmented than most people tend to think it is and that the USA is really exactly what it says on the tin 'United States' that make up a country, not a unitary single state.

HungryJo, all you have to do is remember that when the United States was established, each colony (which became a state) considered itself to be a sovereign, independent political block. They pooled their resources mainly because British might forced them to. I suspect that if Britain had not been as powerful as it was during the Revolution, or antagonistic for the first half of the 19th Century, things might have turned out a bit different between the original 13 States.

So, the electoral system is mainly a population equalizer to ensure that each state gets an reasonably fair say. It is the same way with the Senate/House of Reps division. Each state gets two Senators (who, by the way, used to be appointed by State Governors or State Legislatures if memory serves, not elected as they are today) and a population based amount of Representatives (Congressmen/women/people).

Look at it this way, HungryJo. As I understand the Parlimentary system (very poorly inspite of having a European oriented Masters Degree) when you vote in your elections, you do not get a direct vote for the office of Prime Minister. You vote for your local Member of Parliament, they add up the numbers to see with political party got the largest number of seats, then they figure out who is going to be the Prime Minister based upon who is the leader of the majority party.

Right? If that is the case, you don't get a direct vote for PM anymore than I really do for the President.

Here in the States, you can actually split up your vote between diferent offices (I'm not sure you can do that in the UK on a practical level). I can vote for a Democrat for State Governor (and McCaskill is saying more and more what I want to hear) while still voting for Bush, Bond and Talent for President and the two senate seats.

I get to have my cake and eat it to, to a certain degree.

At any rate, it is a misnomer to say that a more populated state has fewer votes than say Missouri. California and New York hold the most electoral votes, followed by Texas I think. Their populations are proportionally represented by the amount of ballots they get.

Maybe an easier, more efficent way to do it would be to have the State Governors vote. If your state goes 51% in favor of a candidate, then you vote for that candidate. One vote per state.

That's fair, isn't it?

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

IMO using a FPTP system to elect a single man is absurd, I can see why you'd use it to elect local representatives to a legislature but when elect a single man nationally it's bizare.

"Well, that is so a sheer total majority based upon total population can't overwhelm those of us who have the extreme misfortune of living in a less populated state."

What about the people who have the extreme misfortune of living in a very populace state? They have less votes then you!

I guess I just can't get my head round the whole 'state' buisiness. I understand the concept of trying to protect minority groupings from 'the masses' (Scotland for example has more Members of parliament than it should, but that's supposed to be scrapped now they have their own parliament to 'protect their distinctiveness'). I guess I just don't fully appreciate the affinity people have for their state and how protecting a state's individuality seems very important.

Tony,

A better count was taken later by a group of different newspapers, using several standards, and Bush won most of them. I wouldn't expect the Guardian to be pleased.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...-03-floridamain.htm

It also showed that Bush would have won if Gore had prevailed at the Supreme Court.


Murph,

I'm just relieved that there were only three provisional ballots rejected.

Ironically, my mother had once been allowed to vote on a provisional ballot (although I don't know if it was called that), and this was in Florida back in the 1990s. She had to sign a form subject to perjury, and that was all there was to it.

The Democratic Party has brought the Secertary of State for Missouri (States have their own Secretaries of State) Republican Matt Blunt up for a lawsuit because he refused three provisional ballots from Democratic voters during the Tuesday election. The provisionals were issued to voters like Yoshi who supposedly showed up at the wrong polling places.

Counter charges are that Democrats purposely sent the three voters to the wrong places in order to generate the issue being raised in Yoshi's blog, mainly for political reasons.

Either way you side, skullduggery seems to be at work. Again, my advice is that one should check their residency status. My further advice is that if the countercharges are true, then those voters had better pray I never learn about it. That would be enough for me to revert my State Governor vote back to the Republican candidate.

Which happens to be, by the way, Matt Blunt.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

What debacle? The right man won.

Democrats often find some misplaced satisfaction in noting that Gore won the popular vote, but that's misleading. If we had a pure democracy then campaign strategies would be completely different.

The people who like to complain about the system never give a second thought to the Senate, which is even more lopsided. People who live in the big states have far less representation.

It would take support in the small states to change all this (not that I want a change). It's also worth noting that we recently had a president from a small state, and nobody brought up the issue then.

I have to laugh at the thought of a close vote in a pure democracy. A nationwide recount would be fascinating.

Surely a one who can grasp the concept of "redistributing the wealth" can understand the electoral college.

Don't be tiresome, Steven, or I'll start using sarcasm on you. I'm not a socialist, and I understand the electoral college quite well. Which part of "it's unequal and undemocratic" do you actually think is wrong?

It is a means of making sure that we do not end up with a pure Tyranny of the Majority.

The flipside to that, of course, is that J Random Hick from Flyover State has more actual clout than K Random Slicker from BigEastCoastCity. Cf the two words "unequal" and "undemocratic" on which we both seem to agree.

My advice is pretty simple. If you don't like the current system for electing a President, perhaps people, to include SF writers, should be pushing for some kind of change.

Steven, I'm not an American. That's what "New Zealander" means. The US is *here* on the globe; New Zealand is *there*. Note the distance between them. Note the way they're coloured differently on the map. Note that the Head of State has a different name.

I don't really care what system you use to elect your President. I do snigger a bit at its failures and the way it gets rorted, though - but I'm hardly the only outside observer to have laughed at your country during the last electoral debacle.

Surely a one who can grasp the concept of "redistributing the wealth" can understand the electoral college.

Each State has so many electoral votes, which represents their population. Those electoral voters generally give all of their votes to the candidate based upon the popular vote of their home state.

So say Missouri gives 51% of it's vote to Candidate Donkey Kong. Then that candidate gets all of those electoral votes because that is what the majority of Missourians decides.

Missouri's votes compete against the other forty-nine states, like New York, California, Donkey Kong's home state, and Dumbo's home state.

NY and California give their electoral votes to Donkey Kong, again based on the notion that their popular vote gave him the majority for their respective states.

Follow me so far?

Donkey Kong's homestate and Dumbo's homestate both give their popular votes to Dumbo. In Donkey Kong's, it is by a wide margin (and they should know Donkey Kong because he/she/it started their career in that state).

Why is it designed this way? Well, that is so a sheer total majority based upon total population can't overwhelm those of us who have the extreme misfortune of living in a less populated state.

It is a means of making sure that we do not end up with a pure Tyranny of the Majority.

Besides, the electoral system is based upon State Popular Vote, which then factors into the Electoral vote.

So, arguing that the total mass of the population voted for either Dumbo or Donkey Kong based upon a statistical hairsplit (and I'd argue further based upon some extremely biased, bullshit recounts by the mainstream media, which is sore because the Internet Inventor didn't get the job) is rather pointless.

Besides, if the Democrats are so disgusted and angry about the Electoral College system, how come we have not seen ONE STITCH of legislation that would change it? Why isn't the current Democratic Candidate lobbying for a change of the system?

And as Homosexuals in the State of Missouri might point out, sometimes what the Majority wants (70% voted in favor of a State Amendment Banning Gay Marriage last week) is not always for the best.

So nope, it isn't pure democracy. But to say that people didn't get to express their wishes under the current system (which is designed to equalize the population disparity, just like wealth redistribution is supposed to provide social justice in a Marxist society) is a bit of nonsense.

My advice is pretty simple. If you don't like the current system for electing a President, perhaps people, to include SF writers, should be pushing for some kind of change.

While I may disagree with some of Charlie's theories related to that change, he is definitely writing about other options. And they are entertaining as well as educational.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.A.

Randy: The difference between our systems seems to be that your government wants everything filtered through government.

An interesting observation, and one which has some merit to it. The Resource Consent Act springs to mind. Then again, see this: http://www.heritage.org/Research/TradeandForeignAid/bg1781.cfm

There's no real way to determine which is more politically "free" - one major difference that might explain the different approaches is the difference in corruption levels: http://www.sizes.com/society/corruption_index.htm

Steven: but I do believe that the United States Governmental system is actually a Federal Republic, not, as everyone keeps saying, an actual Democracy.

I don't recall saying it was a formal democracy. Who exactly are you complaining about?

Personally, I prefer the current electoral system. I don't particularly care for some stuckup snot nosed turd in New York City or Los Angeles having the bulk of the power to chose our leaders based on sheer population weight.

That's fine as long as you recognise you're plumping for an unequal, undemocratic system.

I've said it before. I'd cheerfully throw the Northeast and California out of the Union. I get kind of sick of being seen as living in an unimportant backwater referred to only as "Flyover Country."

You're aware of these sort of statistics?
http://www.eriposte.com/economy/tax/tax_n_spend_truths.htm

Personally, I think both the Northeast and California could do quite well by themselves.

There's a (slightly out of date) book called "The Nine Nations of North America" by Joel Garreau you may find interesting. Give it a try.

How dare you patronising Libruls say I'm from England!

More to the point, can the old 'involuntary change of address' scam be done here? I seem to remember that we have an opportunity to fill the Electoral form in every October or so, and I think that we get confirmation of changes sent to us. Most important of all, if the polling cards (or postal vote rigmarole) don't arrive with a few days to go, you get a cue to complain. It would be nice if it was a geniunely secret ballot, of course, but that's another story.

Chris from England.

I may have been asleep in my public school history classes and again during my years as a undergrad history major and a history graduate student, but I do believe that the United States Governmental system is actually a Federal Republic, not, as everyone keeps saying, an actual Democracy.

Or "mobocracy," as the Founding Fathers would have called it.

Personally, I prefer the current electoral system. I don't particularly care for some stuckup snot nosed turd in New York City or Los Angeles having the bulk of the power to chose our leaders based on sheer population weight.

And it should be noted also, as much as the Dems complain about the current system (mainly because their boy couldn't carry his home state in 2000, lost it by 14 percent if I recall correctly) if Gore had won, the Republicans would be screaming "theft" and the Dems would be lauding the electoral college system.

I've said it before. I'd cheerfully throw the Northeast and California out of the Union. I get kind of sick of being seen as living in an unimportant backwater referred to only as "Flyover Country."

You can bet if someone had blown up a skyscrapper in Kansas City, New York would have been the first to mobilize protests against taking any sort of action.

Respects,
Steve
From Redneck Backward Hick Flyover Country, U.S.A.

The difference between our systems seems to be that your government wants everything filtered through government. I'll probably feel the same way when we start electing saints.

MoveOn has plenty of opportunity to get their message out. We see their propaganda all the time around here. The network that denied MoveOn a spot at the Super Bowl did the same thing to other groups. Freedom of speech means that you have the freedom to limit speech on your own network. To deny political ads during one particular type of program isn't censorship by any means.

Thomas Paine (a pamphleteer in the Revolution) wasn't forced to print Tory propaganda to balance his own output. The fact that the number of printing presses were more limited back then didn't impose any community obligations on him.

Bill Hicks is clever, but I seriously doubt that he doesn't have a favorite candidate in this race. MoveOn certainly does.

Which of our countries is more free? Can you and your friends advertise in support of or opposition to a candidate?

Here you go: http://www.elections.org.nz/esyst/parties.html

we still have freedom of speech (up to a point), and that includes political speech. I gather that's been restricted in New Zealand.

I'm sorry, but flooding the airwaves with selected corporate-funded propaganda while denying access to other groups doesn't really strike me as a serious "free speech" issue. You do realise moveon.org was denied advertising space?

The nice thing about our system is that we still have competing interests. Two major political parties; many business interests; many special interests; and no one has a monopoly on power.

I think Bill Hicks had the best comment on this belief:

"I'll show you politics in America; here it is, right here: I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs! I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking! Hey wait a minute, there's one guy holding up both puppets! Shut up! Go back to bed America, your government is in control.. here's Love Connection; watch this and get fat and stupid! By the way, keep drinking beer, you fucking morons!"

Tony,

>> Which of our countries is more democratic? <<

I'll be happy to concede that yours may be.

Which of our countries is more free? Can you and your friends advertise in support of or opposition to a candidate?

We just messed up our system a bit with "campaign finance reform" and the result was dozens (if not hundreds) of groups running their own ads separately from the candidate. It's legal (up to a point) because we still have freedom of speech (up to a point), and that includes political speech. I gather that's been restricted in New Zealand.

The nice thing about our system is that we still have competing interests. Two major political parties; many business interests; many special interests; and no one has a monopoly on power.


Joe,

>> Again, I'd be more willing to let my elected representative have some control over my life than that same company president. <<

I'd prefer they both leave me alone.

Democracy is great if you're in the majority.

Randy: If politicians were restricted to those powers required to run a government (courts, roads and armies) then fewer business interests would be attracted to it.

Indeed. And if waffling about politics online paid good money, I'd be farting through silk from a Bermuda resort right now. It doesn't, I'm not, and politicians are nowhere so restricted. Deal with the real world.

Isn't democracy grand?

I'm in a country that funds political campaigns (New Zealand). Not that long ago, popular pressure forced through a major restructuring of the voting system, removing power from monolithic "elected-dictatorship" parties (Westminster system), and forcing compromise politics through a proportional representation system.

That's impossible in the States - not technically impossible, but for all intents and purposes practically impossible. A good case can be made that the current Presidency, the current Senate, and the current Congress in the States do not reflect a democratic choice (lower popular vote, different state populations, gerrymandering of districts).

Which of our countries is more democratic?

I'd rather be controlled by whatever sounds nice to the masses than by whatever sounds nice to some company president.

"The result is that politicians control more of our lives."

Again, I'd be more willing to let my elected representative have some control over my life than that same company president. I don't have any say in who has money, but at least I have some say in who I vote for.

Corporate interests' involvement in politics is a symptom of government encroachment on individual liberties. If politicians were restricted to those powers required to run a government (courts, roads and armies) then fewer business interests would be attracted to it.

Do people fare better in nations where political campaigns are funded by the government? It seems to me that those politicians would then be beholden to whatever sounds nice to the masses. The result is that politicians control more of our lives.

Isn't democracy grand? <g>

The implication that some political groups view this kind of electoral fraud as a legitimate strategy is really disturbing -- because, if elected, they've already demonstrated their willingness to use illegal means to obtain and hold power.

On the other hand, if you consider the attainment of government power as a means to realise a return on investment rather than as a means to exercise democratic rights, it makes perfect sense. Given how deeply US political campaigns are in hock to corporate interests, and how well said interests get repaid if their team wins, it's only natural that such a cost-effective tactic would be used to help the investment.

Indeed, given the corporate obligation to advance shareholder interest, one could argue that they are legally *required* to subvert democracy by any means available. Ain't capitalism grand?

Looking back at Murph's point, I do agree that a driver's license would eliminate problems like what happened to Yosh. It's just that tying voter registration to driver's licenses means that more people are voting. Making people register separately limits the number to those who care enough to register.

I'm obviously not one of those who appreciates "Rock the Vote" efforts. <g>

I don't think ID's are mandatory everywhere, but you definitely need either that or a driver's license to open a bank account or to have something notarized. There was a recent Supreme Court decision that the police have the authority to demand an ID from somebody on the street.

It's a fair point that if you make everybody vote you might get a lot of uninformed idiots voting. To be honest, I'm not even sure why I brought that up because as Steve said just using some form of ID for registration would be just as good.

Not quite sure why your opposed to that Randy, I don't see how it makes things any different from the current situation other than that you have an added check on people's identity.

It would mean you'd have to have actual ID cards, drivers licence wouldn't really be fair as then people who couldn't drive couldn't vote :)

Are ID cards mandetory everywhere in America or is it just a state by state thing? Here we have no ID cards, although they are thinking of trying to introduce a national system to 'combat terrorism, benefit fraud and illegal immigration' but it seems like they are doing it so cack handedly that it won't amke any diffence to any of those issues.

The other thing with ID cards (if you don't already have them) is the civil liberties issues, but in reality very few people in this country do't have either a drivers licence or a passport but then I guess you still have the right not to.

I couldn't disagree more with either driver's license registration or mandatory voting.

Making voting easy or automatic just brings in more of those who don't care one way or another. I don't think any of us want our votes to be cancelled out by someone whose understanding of politics comes from watching MTV.

Those people don't look very closely at the issues, and they're likely to vote for the nutcase populism of the moment.

What would solve it is registering people to vote through their driver's license or state ID card (Missouri has state ID cards, especially if you are a drunken twit whose license is suspended). However, Missouri has continously shot down driver-voter registration over the years.

Just like Kansas City shot down light rail.

I could go on and on about Missouri and Kansas City in particular. I could go on for months.

We can't even fill the potholes in this town, let alone run an election correctly. And you ought to see the bridges in this town.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

You know what would solve this kind of problem?

Mandetory voting.

If everybody had to vote electoral fraud would be a lot harder, although obviously not impossible. Of course that's not really the point of mandetory voting but it would be an added benefit. It's always an idea I've always liked, but I guess it could be seen as 'forcing people to be free'.

Oh, and one other thing. Charlie do you really like Russian black bread? I had some in Russia tasted like a stale brick to me, but then maybe I didn't have 'the good shit' as it was just like the cheapest bread in the supermarket. Odd, because I tend to prefer my bread chunky and dense rather than this airy fairy kingsmill stuff.

I guess it pays to revisit that source, but a "legitimate mistake"???

Are there really two people named Yoshitsune in KC? (Okay, just kidding.)

One alternate possibility is that Karl Rove sent a team of hypnotists to take care of Yoshitsune. Somebody needs to check with Halliburton to see if anyone in their top secret hypnosis division is on the road.

The blogger you quote asks "But in effect what it means is voters are removed from the rolls - after all, if you're unknowingly registered in another precinct, how can you vote at yours?"

The answer is you cast a provisional ballot. It really really really helps if voters aren't ignorant of the how the electoral system works.

It's, of course, very much necessary to emphasize that, as the quoted article makes clear, provisional balloting has very serious flaws at present. But it's not as if this is a stunning problem no one ever thought of or bothered to address.

Plenty of serious questions about and problems with elections remain in the U.S., from the patchwork spector of evil electronic voting to a very long list of known other problems, let alone the unknown. On the other hand, when one looks at the history of Jim Crow, Chicago politics, Tammany Hall, Landslide Lyndon, 1960, and so on and so forth, it would be laughable to assert that the system was ever pristine.

Back yet again, your referring to what happened here as an "attack" is belied by the actual post you link to:

Final Edit: OK. The latest news from the election board is that, while this form of voter fraud is indeed being perpetrated here, what happened to me was a legitimate mistake.

Brings out the anarchist in me, Randy.

I sometimes wonder if the best thing for Kansas City wouldn't be a tac nuke down on 12th and Broadway.

Course, Colonel Mansour would probably get me before I could set one off. :)

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

You're right about this. No matter who's behind these things, Democrats, Republicans and/or bureaucrats, the importance of vigilance is something I definitely shouldn't be underestimating.

It's also a lesson in not letting politicians run our lives. This kind of stuff brings out the libertarian in me.

True, I see your point about bureaucracies and their problems. God knows I've seen enough of my important paperwork disappear down the rabbithole over the years.

Regardless, a little vigiliance of one's residency status, regardless of whatever the actual cause, is certainly warranted.

That said, conspiracy theories on electoral fraud (especially when race is involved) are a dime a dozen here in Kansas City.

It should also be kept in mind that vast parts of the Kansas City population (regardless of race) are militantly illiterate and rely upon either the radio (both talk radio and the FM radio shows which are liberal, I deleted a link today to my favorite off of my blog after a political comment) or worse, word of mouth.

It is an understatement to say that Kansas City is a sea of people afflicted with terminal cranial rectal disorder. I should never have come back here when I got out of the Army.

I can't wait for the day when I can afford to leave.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

Murph,

I don't doubt that Yosh is telling the truth. I'm just wary of who the villain is.

The elderly would only be more vulnerable under my scenario. As a group, they're more likely to vote in the primaries, and so they're more likely to correct the problem in time for the general election. And they'll be pissed. Advantage: Democrats. They've wound up their base very tight.

If Yosh had voted in previous primaries then the Democrats would have a record of that, and so they might have picked him deliberately.

As a matter of fact, the Pendergast and Daley machines were both run by Democrats. Add LBJ's shenanigans, and you've got a vast history of this kind of stuff to go by.

The main reason I'm still a skeptic is because we also have a vast history of bureaucratic incompetence to look at.

Randy,

I'm inclined to give Yosh the benefit of the doubt. Electoral skullduggery in Kansas City and St. Louis have almsot been perfected to a fine art. Remember, Kansas City used to be Pendergast country and the only political machine town that was worse than Kansas City in the 20th Century was Daley's Chicago (in fact, I think that machine is still in operation).

Regards of motives or who is doing it, or even why, I think it is something to be concerned about. At the same time, I think it is easy to employ countermeasures to ensure that it doesn't become a problem.

Sadly, a lot of people in Jackson County that might be affected are neither bloggers nor particularly literate per se. The elderly especially would be vulnerable to something like this.

I might do some digging around today at work (I'm trapped at an ISP security station instead of my usual roving). If similar reports start cropping up in The Kansas City Call (the local African-American newspaper and at least they make no bones about being biased) then we'll know it wasn't a singular incident.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

One alternate possibility is that Democrats targeted people like bloggers who'd then run and cry foul. It doesn't cost them more than a handful of votes in the primary, and then they'll have excited their base. The fact that Democrats are in control of Yoshitsune's district only makes this scenario more likely than any Karl Rove conspiracy theory.

Make that, "slightly more likely". I don't seriously think there's anything going on here, other than general bureaucratic incompetence. Just look at Florida in 2000. It was Florida Democrats who had been running those disputed districts, and yet they capitalized immensely from their own stupid mistakes.

Jackson County (which is where the core urban areas of Kansas City, Missouri are) has been heavily controlled by Democrats since the beginning of the 20th Century. There is a fairly hot and heavy battle for the 5th District Congressional Seat being vacated by Rep Karen McCarthy (a drunken twit and a moron who liked to drive her staff insane). It looks like it will be former two term Mayor Reverend Emaunel Cleaver (popular and articulate, but we are awash in potholes in this town, I wager Baghdad's roads are in better shape) versus whoever the Republicans trot out against them.

Cleaver will, fraud or not, handily slaughter the Republican opponnent. When you look at a Red/Blue Map of the State of Missouri, Jackson and Clay Counties (I live in Clay County which is north of the Missouri River) are solidly Democrat. Then it is a sea of Republican controlled counties until you come to Columbia (middle of the state, home of the University of Missouri and where Allen Steele went to Journalism School), Jefferson City (the capital) and then more Republican Counties until St. Louis (where that idiot Gephardt is from).

That having been said, the rural counties are always very close (on the razor's edge) between one or the other party. Like me, a lot of people are truly disgusted with both parties and feel like they've left us behind with their ideological battles (thus why I continue to vote the way I do today, which is against Democrats). So, the map may look like the Republicans control the state, but it is a tenuous hold at best.

Which explains the dirty tricks in Charlie's entry.

Which hints that both sides might try it (thus, why I'm concerned even though this incident happened to a Democrat).

All anyone needs to try this stunt is a phone book, a general assumption that most in a district are Dems (or Republicans in other places) and the forms that you can download off the internet.

You slap a fraud signature on them and send it in.

Easy. Personally, I think they should make you come in person to do such things, or do it through your driver's license (which Missouri has shot down multiple times).

I suspect Yoshi found out about their problem when they tried to vote in last Tuesday's election. It would have manifested itself then.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

Actually, those who were disenfranchised in Florida were notified by mail. I dunno if that's the case in KC, though.

One interesting thing about Yoshitsune's incident is that he says he lives in a Democratic district. That would seem to imply that the local election supervisor could be a Democrat.

See now if you could combine this with some sort of clever socio-demographic system (IRFF tagging to track the habits of 'known' types of voters') you could hand pick who to do this to.

Then, if you're terribly smart, you redirect a lot of it to your own mailboxes and then, a mere hour or so before closing of ballots (so it when no-ones come to claim their vote) send in your folks, or register and Internet ballot [If your country/county/state allows it].

You oculd pull it off if you were careful enough that no-one who missed their vote would notice. (ie the politically disenchanted like me).

I used an absentee ballot in 1992 when I was in Korea. You use them a couple of months before November. Considering the trouble with the military postal system (it has always been in bad shape, it was terrible during the First Gulf War) it would be a miracle if my vote was even counted in the '92 election.

If you think it is bad in Kansas City, it is apparently worse in St. Louis though I don't know particulars. Your cited blogger may know more about it than I do. They apparently had the good sense to contact The Pitch Weekly (which can sometimes be a double edged sword).

I've already started telling people to be sure to check their residency status as the final deadline for the November election gets near. I tend to agree with Yoshi that it shouldn't matter what your politics is, you don't need anyone dicking around with the voting system. If I can't beat my political opponents fair and square (even if I think they are cheating themselves) then I don't need to have my political choices in office.

How is the fantasy trilogy rewrite going?

Respects,
Steve
Northtown, Missouri

I've seen an American postal ballot -- and boggled at it. British ones are much, much simpler ... you only vote for one office per sheet of paper, the papers for different elections are different colours and go in different boxes, and they're counted by hand and the results tallied within a couple of hours of polling closing. (Voting on only one to three issues in an election thus obviates the need for complex mechanical or electronic voting systems.)

Still, this is a worrying one. I wonder if I could disenfranchise my MP? Hmm, that might get it noticed ...

Holy Shit, Charlie, that's here in Kansas City.

That having been said, Kansas City's elections have been rife with skullduggery between both parties for decades (see Tom Pendergast and Harry Truman for more examples).

While not aligned with this particular writer's politics, they are right to be concerned about this. I can see guerrila activists from both sides utilizing this tactic.

I need to hurry up and register to vote. I got so tied up in personal BS that I missed the August Primaries and my backward state went and approved a Gay Marriage Amendment Ban (the conservative in me and the liberal in me meet in the middle of the road and wonder why are we wasting time with this nonsense, let them get married for Christ's sake).

I will add as a side note, I'm not in the same district as this writer. I live North of the River and register for Clay County (this writer lives in Jackson county, not far from UMKC).

Personally, I prefer the scantron ballots with a pencil and the ovals. If you are too stupid to figure them out (and we've got a lot of stupid people on both sides of the political divide in Kansas City) I've got little sympathy. At least you can't hack a scantron with a wireless.

At least I don't think you can.

Iron Sunrise was great by the way.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

Certainly there'd be a difference - far, far better music being played in the meantime. I think that the Russians respected music and artists to much to 'muzakify' them.

Shoot them, ban them, send them to Siberia, etc., but never 'muzak'!

"You are currently being held 4652nd in the queue. Thank you for using Bank of Moscow, comrade. Your call may be recorded for training purposes and its content reported to local party officials for use in evidence."

Oh, so no difference at all then.

The sudden topic crossover makes me speculate about what the Soviet approach to online banking would have looked like ...

"You are currently being held 4652nd in the queue. Thank you for using Bank of Moscow, comrade. Your call may be recorded for training purposes and its content reported to local party officials for use in evidence."

The sudden topic crossover makes me speculate about what the Soviet approach to online banking would have looked like ...

I'm inclined to believe that Soviet strategy after Stalin's demise was primarily defensive and reactive to a perceived western threat.

As implemented in the typical Russian fashion of a system of client states and buffers. After I started getting interested in the subject, I came to understand that the idea of a Soviet juggernaut attempting to take over the world was pretty silly. Russia's foreign policy consisted of (i) preserving the USSR as a source of protection, (ii) preserving the Eastern Europe clients as a source of protection and (iii) screwing around on the cheap in Africa, Asia (and Cuba) as a means of distracting the US, and protecting itself.

Which sucked if you were a nationalist in the USSR, in Eastern Europe, or caught in an unstable African country - but meant that the Soviet Union wasn't a threat to us in the Pacific. And, lo, New Zealand treated it as a trading opportunity, and, lo, so it was. Australia, on the other hand, went along with the Cold War hype.

The US, on the other hand, was a pain in the ass all over the world, mitigated only by the limitations of what the administrations could put over the electorate. And let's not even mention the (*hoick* ptoeey!) French.

And now the US wingnuts are telling the rest of us that we should be afraid of China. Yeah, right.

Hi Charlie,

Just read your comments about online banking & the like. I have recently started online banking in earnest in an attempt to get on top of my finances and I am finding it pretty useful.

The NatWest online banking service is a horrible, IE-only abomination (spoofing the browser type will only get you so far before you hit the lousy javascript code and blatant flouting of web standards) but it does allow me to download a complete set of statements in CSV as well as their default MS Money & Excel formats.

Intelligent Finance (Credit card) fares a little better, I can access it from any browser and is always bang up to date.

The big advantage for me is the ability to check my accounts from almost anywhere and make quick adjustments to OpenOffice spreadsheet from work (via FTP to my home box) should any fiscal emergencies arise.

I am concerned about all that lovely data going away should I switch banks or as a result of a policy change, but I can keep my own records and this is all in addition to the regluar hardcopy statements I recieve through the post.

The problem with paper statements for me is that they are never there when you need them. By the time the Ilford post office manages to shuffle around with my bank statement each month, it is weeks out of date and I have had to make educated guesses about my outgoings when drawing up a monthly budget.

Fred: the "one to go" I aluded to in my blog posting title was Margaret Thatcher. And if you think what I wrote about Ronald Reagan was rude, all I can say is you have an education in store.

We ("you Americans") may not want you to express the same emotions as us, but when you title a posting "So, one down, one to go", don't be surprised if people (such as myself) get a little irked. If one of your leaders were to die, I would not put a posting in my blog with such a title (clearly designed to yank chains) and then express innocence at the response.

"But it is with some chagrin that I am forced to concede that he wasn't the worst president: as Patrick Farley put it, I now know what it's like to have a genuine moron in the White House."

Again: "I'm just surprised by all the Americans who seem to expect me to feel the same emotional engagement with their ex-leader as they do." You make a statement like the one above, then are surprised by our reaction? Oy.

Charlie:

"I'm just surprised by all the Americans who seem to expect me to feel the same emotional engagement with their ex-leader as they do. I suspect it's because they haven't quite internalized the fact that I am not American, and have a quite different set of national attachments."

Charlie, [speaking as an American] it's a combination of American-centrism, American-supremacism, and the Republican Party's cynical willingness to wrap their positions in the Divine.

Now it's had time to sink in, I'm beginning to remember that my feelings about Reagan mirror precisely my feelings about Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov when they died -- the sinister, ideology-driven head of a foreign superpower, more than happy to jam their own belief system down everyone else's throat at gun-point, and culpable in acts of violence by proxy.

I'm just surprised by all the Americans who seem to expect me to feel the same emotional engagement with their ex-leader as they do. I suspect it's because they haven't quite internalized the fact that I am not American, and have a quite different set of national attachments.

Yes, Russian history gave them reason to be nervous. And "never again" was a very strong political theme after WW2.

And don't forget that their technology was different. Their missiles may not have been as quick to launch from a cold start, or as reliable. Combine that with the generally more accurate American missiles, and you have a scenario in which a surprise attack might prevent nuclear retaliation.

From the Soviet PoV, it might pay the Americans to shoot first.

Figure in looming SDI, and the only use for the missiles might be as decoys to protect your cities.

As I recall the rhetoric of that time, the American line was that Soviet missiles were getting good enough that it would pay them to shoot first, and, despite the impervious unbrella image, SDI would be useful if it made a missile attack unreliable enough that shooting first wasn't worthwhile.

A lot of the pro-SDI argument was based in the idea of technology parity is missiles -- the combined effect of warhead size, accuracy, and reliability. When it was one warhead per missile, you needed to fire more than one missile at each enemy silo. Multiple warheads started to shift that balance.

And it isn't just numbers of warheads. A missile silo can stand up to quite a close hit. The more accurate the missile, the smaller the warhead needs to be, and the more warheads a missile might carry. The number of missiles, even the number of warheads, might have been shifting in favour of the Soviet Union, but they knew about the hidden factors.

They may even have known more than the Americans about the true reliability of their systems. They did live firings from in-service siloes. The USAF took their missiles to Vandenberg to test.

And then they saw the sabre-rattling, and picked up the advertising from the American defense industry. "They believe we can do that..."

Echoes of WMDs in Iraq?

"So wouldn't the people pointing missles at you be a more appropriate target for your anger?"

... Only if they actually used them.

You want some historical context when you try to understand the cold war. The history of the USSR was determined by three pivotal events, in this context: the civil war of 1917-21 (in which the White Russian forces were strongly backed by western troops and munitions), Hitler's surprise invasion, and finally the long-term nuclear confrontation. From the late 1940's to the early 1960's the west had an overwhelming nuclear superiority to the USSR; the balance only shifted during the late 1970's.

I'm inclined to believe that Soviet strategy after Stalin's demise was primarily defensive and reactive to a perceived western threat. Russia has a long history of being invaded by external conquerors, and this led to a pathological fear of invasion -- one recently exacerbated by the trauma of Hitler's offensive.

In contrast, Reagan's rhetoric was clearly offensive. It's like a neighbour who insists on plinking at the hornet's nest next to your open window with an air rifle. They may be at a safe distance, but you're going to suffer for their misjudgement all the same.

"The UK, as one of the most heavily armed NATO members and the site of numerous ports, airports, munition factories and supply depots, was targeted by several hundred thermonuclear devices. Even the more optimistic government estimates predicted a mortality rate of 50-65% in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange; more realistic estimates were 60-70% dead within the first day, and 90-95% of the population dead within six months."

So wouldn't the people pointing missles at you be a more appropriate target for your anger?

Liberty basically said, "if HMG prosecutes Clare, we'll provide the defense". And their defense will look like, in C:

#include <gun_defense.h>

(Where the mere <I>rumour</U> of the Katherine Gun defense was enough to terrify the government into backing down.)

Re: UK bugging plots, we now have Clare Short admitting that Kofi Anan, the UN Secretary General, was being bugged.

Now is her knowing this covered by the official secrets act? Is Clare going to be charged?

If not, is this open season on ex-cabinet ministers revealing what they know so they can get rid of Tony?

And just when is Robin Cook's next interview on such matters?

I wonder whether the US would be willing to invade The Hague to free Tony Blair, were he to be tried for war crimes.

The aircon wasn't on the fritz; it was working flat out. The rest of the hotel was at something in the high seventies, though, which didn't help. And I wasn't that keen on being switched to another room, on account of already having had one room switch (due to checking in several days early on a different reservation code).

"Gary: the aircon managed to get the room down to 67-68 degrees, but never quite made it down to the desired 63. If the windows had been open-able I'd have opened them; it was well below 60 degrees outside ..."

Okay. May I suggest that, since your time machine may be on the fritz, and you can't do anything about this now, that next time that your hotel ac in America is on the fritz, you inform the hotel desk; they'll either fix it, or switch you to another room, or should give you a price break. You'd also, at a con, have the aid of con hotel liason if for some reason the hotel was being unreasonable. (In a Boskone hotel, this shouldn't be necessary, but you never know.)

This is as standard as doing the same if the toilet didn't work, or the lights didn't work, Charlie. Being uncomfortable for days is an unnecessary alternative. It is not rude to point out a failure of a standard. Not about a broken (cooling to only 67 is broken) ac in a decent US hotel. Honest. Really. Trulio.

My cold is rather better today, though still distinctly there. Hope you're even better.

Gary: the aircon managed to get the room down to 67-68 degrees, but never quite made it down to the desired 63. If the windows had been open-able I'd have opened them; it was well below 60 degrees outside ...

Dan: you know about the reporting of Scottish football teams in the world cup? According to the BBC it's either a glorious defeat for Scotland, but a brilliant win for the UK ...

But to be fair, Canada and Mexico are still nominally independent countries. I mean, Bush isn't campaigning for re-election in either of them, is he? (The one thing that will probably keep Scotland voting for New Labour is the threat of Michael Howard forming a government in Westminster ...)

Americans often have trouble remembering that Canada and Mexico exist. For example, post-WW Last sf from the 1950s usually didn't mention either country.

English sf from that same period took for granted that England would continue to be a Great Power and would be among the leaders in space. That's "England" rather than "United Kingdom".

I've been working with the same cold you have, by the way; this is the third day. Although it's a bit better; the first day I literally spent most of the time jagging on six sneezes in a row; pause for thirty-to-ninety-seconds, repeat with six and then six and six more sneezes in the news two minutes, and so on. Driving me crazy. Yesterday was only half as bad. I don't actually get colds very often; this has been in the Top Ten Lifelong.

Anyway. Hope you feel better.

I hope you won't mind if I say that I got my impression that the AC wasn't making your room cold enough from what you wrote:

Even worse, all the hotel staff seem to think that exposure to temperatures below 75 degrees fahrenheit -- 23 celsius or thereabouts -- is liable to cause hypothermia. In a vain attempt to chill out, I dialed the temperature in our room down to 16.5 celsius (63 fahrenheit), as low as it would go ... and the next day discovered two things: firstly, that despite the exterior temperature being several degrees south of freezing, the aircon, wheezing its guts out as it ran constantly, couldn't actually cool the room down to that temperature: <p> [...] <p> The combination of high temperatures....

You said that you couldn't get the temperature down, and the AC "couldn't... cool the room down to that temperature" and that you suffered "high temperature."

I dunno if it's my poor reading skills, my cold, or your cold, that leads me to leap to the conclusion that the AC couldn't cool the room down, and therefore wasn't working the way it's supposed to. If an AC is working properly -- and certainly in a hotel -- it should very much make the room chilly, or at least 60 degrees F.

So I don't know how to reconcile that with "The AC did work...," but whatever.

"Incidentally, let's not belittle the significance of Thatcher circa 1979-83. [...] Those were not good years, unless you were a megalomaniacal corporate raider like the late James Goldsmith."

Yes, I'm aware, and agree. I don't believe I've ever, in turn, said anything like "and God Bless our wonderful President Bush, whose valuation of civil liberties, and all-around good sense are making us safer and more well-off! Where would we be without him!?"

I'm agreeing with you, Charlie. I've always maintained Bush is very, very, very Bad, to put it in short and sweet terms. I'm just agreeing that it's more in Nixon/Reagan/Thatcher territory than Hitler, 1933-36. I know there are mutual friends of ours, among many other Americans and non-Americans, who disagree strongly, and feel my opinion is idiotic. I suppose we'll know for sure in ten years, won't we?

I've come to lean mildly towards Edwards for President over Kerry, incidentally, but Kerry would be fine compared to Bush; I've said innumerable times that I can't imagine circumstances I'd ever vote for Bush, save a personal visit from God (whom I don't believe in the slightest in).

Feel better; enjoy your tea, but not too much caffeine....

The AC did work, Gary, that was the problem. (Temperature control without humidity control is about the best evidence I've got for the existence of Dark Powers at work in the US today.)

Incidentally, let's not belittle the significance of Thatcher circa 1979-83. Heads got broken, the economy shrank 10%, about 10% of the work force were thrown on the scrap-heap for good, communities were destroyed, we were dragged into a pointless and stupid war with a third-world junta that could have been avoided easily enough if the Dear Leader wasn't spoiling for a fight, and it took a decade to recover from the economic hangover: as for the political hangover, I think you could say that it traumatised British politics for a generation and came damned close to breaking up the Union. Those were not good years, unless you were a megalomaniacal corporate raider like the late James Goldsmith.

"What's really going on in the US seems in UK terms to be more like Thatcher circa 1979-83 than Hitler circa 1933-36."

Um, yes, rather.

"For one thing, it's been a bit of a relief to confirm that despite the weirdness-and-despair amplifier that is the mass media, people in the United States are in fact still basically sane ordinary folks and haven't turned into some kind of slavering jackbooted Borg oriented on grinding the planet beneath the iron boot-heel of totalitarian oppression."

Ha! Fooled you!

By the way, what happened when you complained to the hotel desk about the AC not working? Did you ask for your room to be switched if the AC couldn't be fixed?

Can't see social rights approaching economic rights in importance, nice though it would be, on account of power, which is wielded by economic actors these days afaict. The only interesting sorta-collectivist thing I've seen lately has been Open Sauce, and I'm not yet convinced it's a template for anything else.

BTW, I wanted to ask you if something you mentioned recently about corporations as superorganisms has received any fictional development by you or others that you know of. I've been chewing over some ideas about companies as a kind of early eukaryotic cell, with their mitochondria and other organelles being gradually integrated by the development of real-time information systems and really disturbing human resources software. I'm far too idle to write anything myself, however, so I'm looking for someone who's saved me the trouble.

"As for Eric Raymond, I don't have a lot of time for inflexible doctrinaire libertarians."

Hmph. You're no fun.

blip: Ken and I have been known to discuss politics over a pint of beer down at the pub from time to time, you know ...

(As for Eric Raymond, I don't have a lot of time for inflexible doctrinaire libertarians.)

What I will predict is that Socialism 2.0 won't be called Socialism. (In fact, it'll be called anything but Socialism -- because the right has successfully smeared socialism with the tarred brush of vanguard-party Communism.) But the core principle -- loosely, that social rights are as important as or more important than economic rights -- will be familiar.

So any hope that things like the call centers might cause wealth to redistribute itself globally and eventually put the worldwide middleclass on the same level?

It is indeed MacLeod, and Ian M. Banks - here's the link:
http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?cat=4
(scroll to last article)
I suspect he might try to fit Charlie in there as well...

There truelly might be a chance for "Socialism 2.0" in the future.

The below mentioned scottish writer might be SciFi Author Ken MacLeod, who extensivly uses ideas of socialism and posthumanism. hi webblog can be found at http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/

But stronger indications for "Soc2" might be seen in the left thought foundations of the anti-globalisation movement.
Or in efforts to renovate socialist ideas on a philosophical and abstract level, like in "Empire" by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Their book can be bought or you can get it at textz.com. ( Either search for it, then you get the text and the TOC, or visit this link: http://textz.gnutenberg.net/text.php?text=...egri_antonio_empire

Can't visualise Socialism 2.0 without a major kernel redesign, of which few signs are visible. You'd need something bigger than 11/9 to turn the zeitgeist around, not that such things are unimaginable.

PS have you seen ESR's musings on lefty Scottish sf-writing wrongthinkers on his blog? Interesting guy, albeit kind of crazy. Though his code is highly spoken of.

By "socialism 2.0", do you mean a Soviet-style totalitarian system (perhaps recycling the apparatus of computerised central control originally honed by the then-dead fascist regime that arose in the US and its satellites at the start of the century), or some sort of decentralised libertarian-communitarian "third way" (had the term not been hijacked by Blairite neocons)?

Ah, all this stuff about call centres takes me back to 1848:

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."

Charles and Fred 'Commmunist Manifesto',
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works...-manifesto/ch01.htm

Charlie,

The Shrub was a complete failure as an oil spiv. He's actually a baseball park spiv.

If this is a smear job, Dean should come out and give a guarantee that he won't be pushing to abolish open computing; something he can be held to.

I suspect that, whether or not Dean publicly stated as much, locking down computers and the internet (which are on the MPAA/RIAA's wish list; witness recent complaints from the copyright industry about how IPv6 facilitates piracy (translation: "if we're going to redesign the internet, it must have end-to-end authentication and digital rights management")) would be on a Democratic presidency's legislative agenda. Dean is a machine-man of Democratic special interests, which include the MPAA and RIAA, and the only thing the much-vaunted grass-roots behind him can expect is table scraps from his feteing the copyright industry.

Picked it up from The Register, not Declan's site.

Looks like it might be worth an update; still, given the history of Democrat reps vis-a-vis the DRM-obsessed RIAA it was a bit worrying.

Charlie, I posted a longer diatribe at Digby's, the upshot of which is that this is butt-naked propaganda from a repeat offender. modern journalists seldom bother to do any research when presented with an exciting storyline, but it ill behooves bloggers to follow their example.

Bear in mind that Declan McCullough wrote that story. I have a lot of respect for his stance on individual liberties and find his "politech" mailing list informative ... BUT (and you knew there was a 'but' coming, didn't you?) he is a virulent right-winger, and everything he says should be passed through libertarian-kook filters. He has been known to misrepresent politicians in the past. He, for example, is the one who should take responsibility for the preposterous story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

With Howard "the Digerati's favourite" Dean coming out and revealing what some have suspected, i.e., that a Democratic administration would give the copyright fascists Halliburton-sized concessions at the public's expense, this makes me think the unthinkable: what if George W. Bush is the lesser evil? At least in Bush's America, your PC may remain your own for some time longer.

Which makes me glad to live somewhere with preferential voting and a proportional upper house, where you can vote for non-evil candidates (i.e., the Greens) and actually see them take office, rather than choosing which way you'd prefer to be forcibly sodomised for the next four years.

Edited by author 10-23-2003 10:32 AM
South Korea had been genuinely liberated from Japanese occupiers. West Germany co-operated with the UK and US to avoid becoming bear food. Neither of these apply to Iraq.

"There is no such thing as a peaceful occupation, and there's no such thing as an occupier who is welcome: because occupations are always carried out by soldiers -- by definition, violent strangers -- and foreign soldiers are never welcome."

Fair enough. But -- and I wish to stress that I am not saying there's any sort of direct parallel here -- we can each knock ourselves out pointing out the innumerable significant differing circumstances -- what happened in Germany from 1945-54, or South Korea in the 1950s, say, didn't work out entirely badly, in the end.

What you leave out of your equation is the notion that many, though obviously not all, Iraqis, while understandably carrying perfectly justified resentment for the harm caused by the Coalition, also feel that, in the end, the war was justified. Now, where the majority will end up in, say, five years, I wouldn't make any firm predictions, but I'd be willing to venture a suggestion that it's quite possible that a majority will feel that way in five years. It's even possible that a majority feel that way now.

I immediately grant that this might be entirely wrong. I'm not saying I know. But I don't think you know, either.

Of course, I may be wrong about that, as well. But while I don't think the Iraqi bloggers, and some quoted in news reports, who are, at least grudgingly, grateful for being liberated from Saddam, are necessarily representative of the majority, I don't think that they are representative of a hopelessly tiny minority, either.

We'll see.

I can't say I was swayed. These "censored" happenings aren't really censored, not even with a stern glare, so the idea that the reports have discovered some massive conspiracy is implausible from where I stand.

I've been aware of many of the points for ages, from sources that aren't really silenced are given a heavy hand, so it begins to reek of conspiracy.

I still subscribe to cock-up or localised evilness rather than global conspiracy.

However, I mirrored the claims, so if I get knocks on the door and manage to escape to the local hills, I'll post again and warn you. :)

"Project censored" gets "Results 1 - 10 of about 25,500" as a Google web result. I guess the "San Francisco Chronicle" has ceased to be a "mainstream" news source. Very supressed, indeed.

Independence for Scotland
Andrew Smithers

The most interesting feature of the Scottish elections was the pledge by the Nationalists to cut business taxes. It shows why Scotland and England should both benefit from an independent Scotland.

Representing only 10% of the UK’s population, Scotland has long suffered from a dependency culture. While this was dominant, the central aim of politics was to get as much money as possible out of England, either through a heavily biased allocation of expenditure or by claiming exclusive rights to oil revenues.

Whichever route was preferred, it was a world away from the self-help philosophy of Samuel Smiles, which seems, as much for countries as for individuals, to be the long-term winner in terms of economic success. Over the centuries, the achievements of Venice, Holland, Britain, Hong Kong and Japan, compared with the Argentine or Venezuela, suggest that it is an economic advantage to have poor natural resources. This has been so well illustrated in recent years that the debilitating effect of easy wealth on the economies of the Middle East has become known as the curse of oil.

At first, oil enabled the Scottish National Party (“SNP”) to call for independence while pandering to a dependency culture. But as hopes fade about the long-term potential of Scottish waters, the clash between independence and dependence has become too blinding to ignore. From being to the left of Labour, the SNP seems to be starting on the long road to Thatcherism.

The current trend towards economic realism is generally attributed to the economist Andrew Wilson, who was previously at the Scottish Office and the Royal Bank of Scotland. He is advocating a cut in business rates and in corporate taxes, in order to encourage companies to “return to Scotland.”

Such measures are opposed by Gordon Brown, who has, therefore, been attacked by the SNP for advocating tax-competition within the European Union, while denying it within the British one. The SNP’s case is impeccable, but Gordon Brown’s dislike of Scottish independence is not likely to depend on economic logic. He stands for a Scottish seat and may not be anxious to give up the world stage provided by Westminster and G7 meetings for the more parochial pleasures of Edinburgh.

While the SNP are to be congratulated on the speed with which they seem to be accepting the economic logic of independence, they run a big risk of leaving their supporters behind. A Thatcherite Scotland is the sensible and natural result of independence. It is not, however, the most likely route to it.

<http://www.smithers.co.uk/newsdyn.php?pgty...pgmime=&pgndx=44>;

Edited by author 05-05-2003 06:44 AM
The Conservatives hold 18 seats in the new Scottish Parliament.
As a result of the PR system used here there are two types of MSP, constituency MSPs and Regional List MSPs.
A constituency MSP is elected in the same manner as an MP is in the Westminster elections - a first past the post system.
The regional list MSPs are elected by a second vote. The MSP is then chosen by proportion of the vote from a list of candidates.
The Conservatives have 3 constituency MSPs and 15 list MSPs, for a total of 18 MSPs.
See BBC Scoreboard for more details

Sorry, but I don't understand - do the Conservatives hold 15 seats (the first paragraph, quoted from BBC), or three (compared to previous one - the end of the third paragraph)? Or has the Conservative Party also split and is not the same thing as Tories anymore, or what do I have wrong?

And one more...
David
------

The road to 1984

George Orwell's final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Thomas Pynchon, Orwell - whose centenary is marked this year - had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion

GUARDIAN
Saturday May 3, 2003

 

George Orwell's last book, 1984 , has in a way been a victim of the success of Animal Farm , which most people were content to read as a straightforward allegory about the melancholy fate of the Russian revolution. From the minute Big Brother's moustache makes its appearance in the second paragraph of 1984 , many readers, thinking right away of Stalin, have tended to carry over the habit of point-for-point analogy from the earlier work. Although Big Brother's face certainly is Stalin's, just as the despised party heretic Emmanuel Goldstein's face is Trotsky's, the two do not quite line up with their models as neatly as Napoleon and Snowball did in Animal Farm . This did not keep the book from being marketed in the US as a sort of anticommunist tract. Published in 1949, it arrived in the McCarthy era, when "Communism" was damned officially as a monolithic, worldwide menace, and there was no point in even distinguishing between Stalin and Trotsky, any more than for shepherds to be instructing sheep in the nuances of wolf recognition.

The Korean conflict (1950-53) would also soon highlight the alleged Communist practice of ideological enforcement through "brainwashing", a set of techniques said to be based on the work of I P Pavlov, who had once trained dogs to salivate on cue. That something very much like brainwashing happens in 1984 , in lengthy and terrifying detail, to its hero, Winston Smith, did not surprise those readers determined to take the novel as a simple condemnation of Stalinist atrocity.

This was not exactly Orwell's intention. Though 1984 has brought aid and comfort to generations of anticommunist ideologues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell's politics were not only of the left, but to the left of left. He had gone to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco and his Nazi-supported fascists, and there had quickly learned the difference between real and phony antifascism. "The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7," he wrote 10 years later, "turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it."

Orwell thought of himself as a member of the "dissident left," as distinguished from the "official left," meaning basically the British Labour party, most of which he had come, well before the second world war, to regard as potentially, if not already, fascist. More or less consciously, he found an analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party under Stalin - both, he felt, were movements professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism, but in reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power. The masses were only there to be used for their idealism, their class resentments, their willingness to work cheap and to be sold out, again and again.

Now, those of fascistic disposition - or merely those among us who remain all too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong - will immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one's homeland, altering the landscape and producing casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening, unless it's for the air raids to be over and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument - let alone a prophecy - in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong. One could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet had behaved on occasion no differently from a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.

What is clear from his letters and articles at the time he was working on 1984 is Orwell's despair over the postwar state of "socialism." What in Keir Hardie's time had been an honourable struggle against the incontrovertibly criminal behaviour of capitalism toward those whom it used for profit had become, by Orwell's time, shamefully institutional, bought and sold, in too many instances concerned only with maintaining itself in power.

Orwell seems to have been particularly annoyed with the widespread allegiance to Stalinism to be observed among the Left, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime. "For somewhat complex reasons," he wrote in March of 1948, early in the revision of the first draft of 1984 , "nearly the whole of the English left has been driven to accept the Russian regime as 'Socialist,' while silently recognising that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by 'Socialism' in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like 'democracy' can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously."

We recognise this "sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking" as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse - the identification and analysis of doublethink. As described in Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism , a dangerously subversive text outlawed in Oceania and known only as the book , doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as "cognitive dissonance." Others like to call it "compartmentalisation." Some, famously F Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius. For Walt Whitman ("Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself") it was being large and containing multitudes, for American aphorist Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger's cat, it was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time.

The idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink - repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites - as if some aberrant form of Zen Buddhism, whose fundamental koans are the three party slogans, "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength", were being applied to evil purposes.

The consummate embodiment of doublethink in this novel is the Inner Party official O'Brien, Winston's seducer and betrayer, protector and destroyer. He believes with utter sincerity in the regime he serves, and yet can impersonate perfectly a devout revolutionary committed to its overthrow. He imagines himself a mere cell of the greater organism of the state, but it is his individuality, compelling and self-contradicting, that we remember. Although a calmly eloquent spokesman for the totalitarian future, O'Brien gradually reveals an unbalanced side, a disengagement from reality that will emerge in its full unpleasantness during the re-education of Winston Smith, in the place of pain and despair known as the Ministry of Love.

Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named "the department of defence," any more than we have saying "department of justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.

Besides the ambivalence within the left as to Soviet realities, other opportunities for doublethink in action arose in the wake of the second world war. In its moment of euphoria, the winning side was making, in Orwell's view, mistakes as fatal as any made by the Treaty of Versailles after the first world war. Despite the most honourable intentions, in practice the division of spoils among the former allies carried the potential for fatal mischief. Orwell's uneasiness over the "peace" in fact is one major subtext of 1984 .

"What it is really meant to do," Orwell wrote to his publisher at the end of 1948 - as nearly as we can tell early in the revision phase of the novel - "is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran conference) . . ."

Well of course novelists should not be altogether trusted as to the sources of their inspiration. But the imaginative procedure bears looking at. The Tehran conference was the first allied summit meeting of the second world war, taking place late in 1943, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in attendance. Among the topics they discussed was how, once Nazi Germany was defeated, the allies would divide it up into zones of occupation. Who would get how much of Poland was another issue. In imagining Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, Orwell seems to have made a leap in scale from the Tehran talks, projecting the occupation of a defeated country into that of a defeated world.

This grouping of Britain and the United States into a single bloc, as prophecy, has turned out to be dead-on, foreseeing Britain's resistance to integration with the Eurasian landmass as well as her continuing subservience to Yank interests - dollars, for instance, being the monetary unit of Oceania. London is still recognisably the London of the postwar austerity period. From the opening, with its cold plunge directly into the grim April day of Winston Smith's decisive act of disobedience, the textures of dystopian life are unremitting - the uncooperative plumbing, the cigarettes that keep losing their tobacco, the horrible food - though perhaps this was not such an imaginative stretch for anyone who'd had to undergo wartime shortages.

Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some critics like to play in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right". Looking around us at the present moment in the US, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised "crime dramas," themselves forms of social control - and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?" "Orwellian, dude!"

Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own - the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party - like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.

On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such exotic developments as the religious wars with which we have become all too familiar, involving various sorts of fundamentalism. Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the party. Big Brother's regime exhibits all the ele ments of fascism - the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective - except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in 1984 is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism .

Much has been made recently of Orwell's own attitude towards Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented with the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.

As close as 1984 gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing the characters Julia and O'Brien. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalised into anything racial. "Nor is there any racial discrimination," as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party . . ." As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984 , the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.

In a New Statesman review from 1938 of a John Galsworthy novel, Orwell commented, almost in passing, "Galsworthy was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself."

Orwell was amused at those of his colleagues on the left who lived in terror of being termed bourgeois. But somewhere among his own terrors may have lurked the possibility that, like Galsworthy, he might one day lose his political anger, and end up as one more apologist for Things As They Are. His anger, let us go so far as to say, was precious to him. He had lived his way into it - in Burma and Paris and London and on the road to Wigan pier, and in Spain, being shot at, and eventually wounded, by fascists - he had invested blood, pain and hard labour to earn his anger, and was as attached to it as any capitalist to his capital. It may be an affliction peculiar to writers more than others, this fear of getting too comfortable, of being bought off. When one writes for a living, it is certainly one of the risks, though not one every writer objects to. The ability of the ruling element to co-opt dissent was ever present as a danger - actually not unlike the process by which the Party in 1984 is able perpetually to renew itself from below.

Orwell, having lived among the working and unemployed poor of the 1930s depression, and learned in the course of it their true imperishable worth, bestowed on Winston Smith a similar faith in their 1984 counterparts the proles, as the only hope for deliverance from the dystopian hell of Oceania. In the most beautiful moment of the novel - beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of terror just able to be borne - Winston and Julia, thinking they are safe, regard from their window the woman in the courtyard singing, and Winston gazing into the sky experiences an almost mystical vision of the millions living beneath it, "people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!" It is the moment just before he and Julia are arrested, and the cold, terrible climax of the book commences.

Before the war, Orwell had his moments of contempt for graphic scenes of violence in fiction, particularly the American hard-boiled crime fiction available in pulp magazines. In 1936, in a review of a detective novel, he quotes a passage describing a brutal and methodical beating, which uncannily foreshadows Winston Smith's experiences inside the Ministry of Love. What has happened? Spain and the second world war, it would seem. What was "disgusting rubbish" back in a more insulated time has become, by the postwar era, part of the vernacular of political education, and by 1984 in Oceania it will be institutionalised. Yet Orwell cannot, like the average pulp writer, enjoy the luxury of unreflectively insulting the flesh and spirit of any character. The writing is at places difficult to stay with, as if Orwell himself is feeling every moment of Winston's ordeal.

The interests of the regime in Oceania lie in the exercise of power for its own sake, in its unrelenting war on memory, desire, and language as a vehicle of thought. Memory is relatively easy to deal with, from the totalitarian point of view. There is always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others, to rewrite the past. It has become a commonplace, circa 2003, for government employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history, trivialise truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis. Those who don't learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes - or best of all that it doesn't matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour's entertainment.

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?

The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.

In a 1946 article on The Managerial Revolution , an analysis of the world crisis by the American ex-Trotskyist James Burnham, Orwell wrote, "The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society." In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps "The Principles of Newspeak" serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending - sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.

There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger - his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith "believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945 . . ." Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984 , was imagining a future for his son's generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted - a faith so honourable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed.

© Thomas Pynchon 2003

· This is an edited extracted from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the new Plume (Penguin US) edition of George Orwell's 1984, published next week. It will be published in the UK by Penguin later this year.

· Thomas Pynchon's latest novel is Mason & Dixon

Is this giving Scotland a useful pluralism or just a bunch of fringe parties with no real power? It looks to me as if the left, which for Westminster needs to stand much more closely together to get elected, is being defracted through a prism, allowing each colour it's own handful of seats. The Labour party may be roughly mid-spectrum, but is it going to be able to keep enough loyalty to be able to follow it's own agenda? It doesn't look like it.

David M Gordon: Charlie re-uses a QuickTopic every now and then. It seems the best way to determine a thread is to look at the date clustering - and that can then be tied back to his blog for the same approximate date.

Arthur Wyatt:

The links are (assuming your request is of me):

Dalrymple: <http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_oh_to_be.html>;

Berman: <http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/18/berman-p.html>;

Could anyone explain how (and whether) these messages are threaded?

Edited by author 05-02-2003 12:56 PM
acb: not strictly true, I'm afraid. The Scottish Parliament can vary income tax by up to three percent either way (far more than it's ever been varied historically in one budget, so that's no mean power). Also, the "clean sweep", when Scotland returned no Conservatives to Westminster at all, happened before the return of the Scottish Parliament. While Tories have been able to get into the Scottish Parliament mostly on the basis of the list candidates - this time they gained two seats in the first past the post (one each from Lab and SNP) to add to their solitary hold.

I think two things happened - there was a slight resurgence in the Conservative vote (combine that with the current state of Scottish Labour, and we're actually looking at a jump to the right) and the Lib Dems and the Nationalists paid the penalty for equivocation on the War (they lost support, but not as badly as Labour themselves) - to the great advantage of the Scottish Socialists and the Greens. It was this shattering on the left, as much as increased Conservative voting that gave the Tories their two new first past the post seats

Of course, we'll almost certainly end up with a Lab/Lib coalition, but with an absolute majority of two votes, we could be in for interesting times.

Looking back to the first couple of elections under PR (STV admittedly, rather than a list system) in Northern Ireland, we're seing the exact same fragmentation as happened there. After the first PR election, the Unionist party split into about a dozen factions, ranging from the almost liberal to the completely Dagenham. Eventually, of course, some factions merged and others died out, but a multi-party system combined with PR really does seem to allow people to tune their votes.

I once read a piece (in one of the more highbrow Murdoch papers; make of that what you will) that put forward the proposition that the reason why Scottish politics are so left-wing is because the Scottish Parliament has no money-making/taxation powers, and thus is "the world's biggest student union". The gist seemed to be that if Holyrood had to raise its own revenues, they'd soon become hard-nosed Tory pragmatists.

Are these on the web somewhere where I can make links to them?

And one more re: Empire...

Thank you for your indulgence,
David



 

After Empire
by Theodore Dalrymple

As soon as I qualified as a doctor, I went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. In the next decade, I worked and traveled a great deal in Africa and couldn’t help but reflect upon such matters as the clash of cultures, the legacy of colonialism, and the practical effects of good intentions unadulterated by any grasp of reality. I gradually came to the conclusion that the rich and powerful can indeed have an effect upon the poor and powerless—perhaps can even remake them—but not necessarily (in fact, necessarily not) in the way they wanted or anticipated. The law of unintended consequences is stronger than the most absolute power.

I went to Rhodesia because I wanted to see the last true outpost of colonialism in Africa, the final gasp of the British Empire that had done so much to shape the modern world. True, it had now rebelled against the mother country and was a pariah state: but it was still recognizably British in all but name. As Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister of the short-lived and ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, once described himself, he was “half-Polish, half-Jewish, one hundred percent British.”

Until my arrival at Bulawayo Airport, the British Empire had been for me principally a philatelic phenomenon. When I was young, Britain’s still-astonishing assortment of far-flung territories—from British Honduras and British Guiana to British North Borneo, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland—each issued beautiful engraved stamps, with the queen’s profile in the right upper corner, looking serenely down upon exotic creatures such as orangutans or frigate birds, or upon natives (as we still called and thought of them) going about their natively tasks, tapping rubber or climbing coconut palms. To my childish mind, any political entity that issued such desirable stamps must have been a power for good. And my father—a communist by conviction—also encouraged me to read the works of G. A. Henty, late-nineteenth-century adventure stories, extolling the exploits of empire builders, who by bravery, sterling character, superior intelligence, and force majeure overcame the resistance of such spirited but doomed peoples as the Zulu and the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. Henty might seem an odd choice for a communist to give his son, but Marx himself was an imperialist of a kind, believing that European colonialism was an instrument of progress toward History’s happy denouement; only at a later stage, after it had performed its progressive work, was empire to be condemned.

And condemned Rhodesia most certainly was, loudly and insistently, as if it were the greatest threat to world peace and the security of the planet. By the time I arrived, it had no friends, only enemies. Even South Africa, the regional colossus, with which Rhodesia shared a long border and which might have been expected to be sympathetic, was highly ambivalent toward it: for South Africa sought to ingratiate itself with other nations by being less than wholehearted in its economic cooperation with the government of Ian Smith.

I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England. There were no electricity cuts or shortages of basic food commodities. The large hospital in which I was to work, while stark and somewhat lacking in comforts, was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency. The staff, mostly black except for its most senior members, had a vibrant esprit de corps, and the hospital, as I discovered, had a reputation for miles around for the best of medical care. The rural poor would make immense and touching efforts to reach it: they arrived covered in the dust of their long journeys. The African nationalist leader and foe of the government, Joshua Nkomo, was a patient there and trusted the care implicitly: for medical ethics transcended all political antagonisms.

The surgeon for whom I worked, who came from England, was the best I have ever known and a man of exemplary character. Devoting his enormous technical accomplishment to the humblest of patients, he seemed not only capable of every surgical procedure, but he was a brilliant diagnostician, his clinical intuition honed by a relative lack of high-tech aids: so much so that others in the hospital regarded him as the final court of appeal. I never knew him to be mistaken, though like every other doctor he must have made errors in his time. He saved the lives of hundreds every year and inspired the most absolute trust and confidence in his patients. He never panicked, even in the direst emergency; and he knew what to do when a man had been half eaten by a crocodile or mauled by a leopard, when a child had been bitten in the leg by a puff adder, or when a man appeared with a spear driven through his skull. When called in the early hours of the morning, as he frequently was, he was as even-tempered as if attending a social event. Greater love hath no man. . . .

He was not a missionary, however; he was infused by nothing resembling a religious spirit, only by a profound medical ethic and an enthusiasm for his art and science. He wanted a varied and interesting surgical practice, and he wanted to save human life; and the Rhodesia of the time offered him ideal conditions for using his skills to maximum benefit (even the best of surgeons relies on a well-organized hospital to achieve results). Within a short time of the political handover in 1980, however, he returned to England—not because of any racial feeling or political antagonism but simply because the swift degeneration of standards in the hospital made the high-level practice of surgery impossible. The institution that had seemed to me on my arrival to be so solid and well founded fell apart in the historical twinkling of an eye.

In leaving Zimbabwe and returning to England, he accepted a much reduced standard of living, whatever the nominal value of his income. Talleyrand said that he who had not experienced the ancien régime (as an aristocrat, of course) knew nothing of the sweetness of life. The same might be said of him who had not experienced life as a colonial in Africa. I, whose salary was by other standards small, lived at a level that I have scarcely equaled since. It is true that Rhodesia lacked many consumer goods at that time, due to the economic sanctions imposed upon it: but what I learned from this lack is how little consumer goods add to the quality of life, at least in an equable climate such as Rhodesia’s. Life was no poorer for being lived without them.

The real luxuries were space and beauty—and the time to enjoy them. With three other junior doctors, I rented a large and elegant colonial house, old by the standards of a country settled by whites only 80 years previously, set in beautiful grounds tended by a garden “boy” called Moses (the “boy” in garden boy or houseboy implied no youth: once, in East Africa, I was served by a houseboy who was 94, who had lived in the same family for 70 years, and would have seen the suggestion of retirement as insulting). Surrounding the house was a red flagstone veranda, where breakfast was served on linen in the cool of the morning, the soft light of the sunrise spreading through the foliage of the flame and jacaranda trees; even the harsh cry of the go-away bird seemed grateful on the ear. It was the only time in my life when I have arisen from bed without a tinge of regret.

We worked hard: I have never worked harder, and I can still conjure up the heavy feeling in my head, as if it were full of lead-shot and could snap off my neck under its own weight, brought about by weekends on duty, when from Friday morning to Monday evening I would get not more than three hours’ sleep. The luxury of our life was this: that, our work once done, we never had to perform a single chore for ourselves. The rest of our time, in our most beautiful surroundings, was given over to friendship, sport, study, hunting—whatever we wished.

Of course, our leisure rested upon a pyramid of startling inequality and social difference. The staff who freed us of life’s little inconveniences lived an existence that was opaque to us, though they had quarters only a few yards from where we lived. Their hopes, wishes, fears, and aspirations were not ours; their beliefs, tastes, and customs were alien to us.

Our very distance, socially and psychologically, made our relations with them unproblematical and easy. We studiously avoided that tone of spoiled and bored querulousness for which colonials were infamous. We never resorted to that supposed staple of colonial conversation, the servant problem, but were properly grateful. Like most of the people I met in Rhodesia, we tried to treat our staff well, providing extra help for them for the frequent emergencies of African life—for example illness among relatives. In return, they treated us with genuine solicitude. We assuaged our conscience by telling ourselves—what was no doubt true—that they would be worse off without our employ, but we couldn’t help feeling uneasy about the vast gulf between us and our fellow human beings.

By contrast, our relations with our African medical colleagues were harder-edged, because the social, intellectual, and cultural distance between us was far reduced. Rhodesia was still a white-dominated society, but for reasons of practical necessity, and in a vain attempt to convince the world that it was not as monstrous as made out, it had produced a growing cadre of educated Africans, doctors prominent among them. Unsurprisingly, they were not content to remain subalterns under the permanent tutelage of whites, so that our relations with them were superficially polite and collegial, but human warmth was difficult or impossible. Many belonged secretly to the African nationalist movement that was soon to take power; and two were to serve (if that is the word to describe their depredations) as ministers of health.

Unlike in South Africa, where salaries were paid according to a racial hierarchy (whites first, Indians and coloured second, Africans last), salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom.

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

These obligations also explain the fact, often disdainfully remarked upon by former colonials, that when Africans moved into the beautiful and well-appointed villas of their former colonial masters, the houses swiftly degenerated into a species of superior, more spacious slum. Just as African doctors were perfectly equal to their medical tasks, technically speaking, so the degeneration of colonial villas had nothing to do with the intellectual inability of Africans to maintain them. Rather, the fortunate inheritor of such a villa was soon overwhelmed by relatives and others who had a social claim upon him. They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.

It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes.

Viewed in this light, African nationalism was a struggle as much for power and privilege as it was for freedom, though it co-opted the language of freedom for obvious political advantage. In the matter of freedom, even Rhodesia—certainly no haven of free speech—was superior to its successor state, Zimbabwe. I still have in my library the oppositionist pamphlets and Marxist analyses of the vexed land question in Rhodesia that I bought there when Ian Smith was premier. Such thoroughgoing criticism of the rule of Mr. Mugabe would be inconceivable—or else fraught with much greater dangers than opposition authors experienced under Ian Smith. And indeed, in all but one or two African states, the accession to independence brought no advance in intellectual freedom but rather, in many cases, a tyranny incomparably worse than the preceding colonial regimes.

Of course, the solidarity and inescapable social obligations that corrupted public and private administration in Africa also gave a unique charm and humanity to life there and served to protect people from the worst consequences of the misfortunes that buffeted them. There were always relatives whose unquestioned duty it was to help and protect them if they could, so that no one had to face the world entirely alone. Africans tend to find our lack of such obligations puzzling and unfeeling—and they are not entirely wrong.

These considerations help to explain the paradox that strikes so many visitors to Africa: the evident decency, kindness, and dignity of the ordinary people, and the fathomless iniquity, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the politicians and administrators. This contrast recently struck me anew when a lawyer asked me to prepare a report on a Zimbabwean woman who had stayed illegally in England.

She was in her forties and clearly in a disturbed state of mind. Mostly she looked down at the floor, avoiding all eye contact. When she looked up, her eyes seemed focused on infinity, or at least upon another world. She spoke hardly a word: her story was told me by her niece, a nurse who had come (or fled) to England some years before, and with whom she now stayed.

During the war of “liberation,” her brother had enlisted in the Rhodesian army. One day the nationalist guerrillas came to her village and commanded her parents to tell them where he was, that they might kill him as a traitor to the African cause. But not knowing his whereabouts, her parents could not answer: and so, in front of her eyes, and making her watch (she was 17 years old at the time), they tied her parents to trees, doused them in gasoline, and burned them to death. (At this point in the story, I could not help but recall the argument, common among radicals at the time, that those African countries that liberated themselves by force of arms faced a better, brighter future than those that had been handed independence on a plate, because the war of liberation would forge genuine leadership and national unity. Algeria? Mozambique? Angola?)

Whether or not it was witnessing this terrible scene that turned her mind, she was never able thereafter to lead a normal life. She did not marry, a social catastrophe for a woman in Zimbabwe. She was taken in and looked after by a cousin who worked for a white farmer, and she spent her life staring into space. Then the “war veterans” arrived, those who had allegedly fought for Zimbabwe’s freedom—in reality, groups of party thugs intent upon dispossessing white farmers of their land in fulfillment of Mr. Mugabe’s demagogic and economically disastrous instructions. The white farmer and his black manager were killed and all the workers whom the farm had supported driven off the land. Hearing of her aunt’s plight, her niece in England sent her a ticket.

This story illustrates both the ruthless appetite for power and control unleashed in Africa by the colonial experience—an appetite made all the nastier by some of the technological appurtenances of the colonialists’ civilization—and the generosity of the great majority of Africans. The niece would look after her aunt uncomplainingly for the rest of her life, demanding nothing in return and regarding it as her plain duty to do so, also asking nothing from the British state. Her kindness toward her aunt, who could contribute nothing, was moving to behold.

My Zimbabwean experiences sensitized me to the chaos I later witnessed throughout Africa. The contrast between kindness on the one hand and rapacity on the other was everywhere evident: and I learned that there is no more heartless saying than that the people get the government they deserve. Who, en masse, could deserve an Idi Amin or a Julius Nyerere? Certainly not the African peasants I encountered. The fact that such monsters could quite explicably emerge from the people by no means meant that the people deserved them.

The explanations usually given for Africa’s post-colonial travails seemed to me facile. It was often said, for example, that African states were artificial, created by a stroke of a European’s pen that took no notice of social realities; that boundaries were either drawn with a ruler in straight lines or at a natural feature such as a river, despite the fact that people of the same ethnic group lived on both sides.

This notion overlooks two salient facts: that the countries in Africa that do actually correspond to social, historical, and ethnic realities—for example Burundi, Rwanda, and Somalia—have not fared noticeably better than those that do not. Moreover in Africa, social realities are so complex that no system of boundaries could correspond to them. For example, there are said to be up to 300 ethnic groups in Nigeria alone, often deeply intermixed geographically: only extreme balkanization followed by profound ethnic cleansing could have resulted in the kind of boundaries that would have avoided this particular criticism of the European mapmakers. On the other hand, pan-Africanism was not feasible: for the kind of integration that could not be achieved on a small national scale could hardly be achieved on a vastly bigger international one.

In fact, it was the imposition of the European model of the nation-state upon Africa, for which it was peculiarly unsuited, that caused so many disasters. With no loyalty to the nation, but only to the tribe or family, those who control the state can see it only as an object and instrument of exploitation. Gaining political power is the only way ambitious people see to achieving the immeasurably higher standard of living that the colonialists dangled in front of their faces for so long. Given the natural wickedness of human beings, the lengths to which they are prepared to go to achieve power—along with their followers, who expect to share in the spoils—are limitless. The winner-take-all aspect of Africa’s political life is what makes it more than usually vicious.

But it is important to understand why another explanation commonly touted for Africa’s post-colonial turmoil is mistaken—the view that the dearth of trained people in Africa at the time of independence is to blame. No history of the modern Congo catastrophe is complete without reference to the paucity of college graduates at the time of the Belgian withdrawal, as if things would have been better had there been more of them. And therefore the solution was obvious: train more people. Education in Africa became a secular shibboleth that it was impious to question.

The expansion of education in Tanzania, where I lived for three years, was indeed impressive. The literacy rate had improved dramatically, so that it was better than that of the former colonizing power, and it was inspiring to see the sacrifices villagers were willing to make to enable at least one of their children to continue his schooling. School fees took precedence over every other expenditure. If anyone doubted the capacity of the poor to make investments in their own future, the conduct of the Tanzanians should have been sufficient to persuade him otherwise. (I used to lend money to villagers to pay the fees, and—poor as they were—they never failed to repay me.)

Unfortunately, there was a less laudable, indeed positively harmful, side to this effort. The aim of education was, in almost every case, that at least one family member should escape what Marx contemptuously called the idiocy of rural life and get into government service, from which he would be in a position to extort from the only productive people in the country—namely, the peasants from whom he had sprung. The son in government service was social security, old-age pension, and secure income rolled into one. Farming, the country’s indispensable economic base, was viewed as the occupation of dullards and failures, and so it was hardly surprising that the education of an ever larger number of government servants went hand in hand with an ever contracting economy. It also explains why there is no correlation between a country’s number of college graduates at independence and its subsequent economic success.

The naive supposition on which the argument for education rests is that training counteracts and overpowers a cultural worldview. A trained man is but a clone of his trainer, on this theory, sharing his every attitude and worldview. But in fact what results is a curious hybrid, whose fundamental beliefs may be impervious to the education he has received.

I had a striking example of this phenomenon recently, when I had a Congolese patient who had taken refuge in this country from the terrible war in Central Africa that has so far claimed up to 3 million lives. He was an intelligent man and had that easy charm that I remember well from the days when I traversed—not without difficulty or discomfort—the Zaire of Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko. He had two degrees in agronomy and had trained in Toulouse in the interpretation of satellite pictures for agronomic purposes. He recognized the power of modern science, therefore, and had worked for the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, and was used to dealing with Western aid donors and investors, as well as academics.

The examination over, we chatted about the Congo: he was delighted to meet someone who knew his country, by no means easily found in England. I asked him about Mobutu, whom he had known personally.

“He was very powerful,” he said. “He collected the best witch doctors from every part of Zaire. Of course, he could make himself invisible; that was how he knew everything about us. And he could turn himself into a leopard when he wanted.”

This was said with perfect seriousness. For him the magical powers of Mobutu were more impressive and important than the photographic power of satellites. Magic trumped science. In this he was not at all abnormal, it being as difficult or impossible for a sub-Saharan African to deny the power of magic as for an inhabitant of the Arabian peninsula to deny the power of Allah. My Congolese patient was perfectly relaxed: usually, Africans feel constrained to disguise from Europeans their most visceral beliefs, for which they know the Europeans usually feel contempt, as primitive and superstitious. And so, in dealing with outsiders, Africans feel obliged to play an elaborate charade, denying their deepest beliefs in an attempt to obtain the outsider’s minimal respect. In deceiving others about their innermost beliefs, often very easily, and in keeping their inner selves hidden from them, they are equalizing the disparity of power. The weak are not powerless: they have the power, for instance, to gull the outsider.

Perhaps the most baleful legacy of British and other colonials in Africa was the idea of the philosopher-king, to whose role colonial officials aspired, and which they often actually played, bequeathing it to their African successors. Many colonial officials made great sacrifices for the sake of their territories, to whose welfare they were devoted, and they attempted to govern them wisely, dispensing justice evenhandedly. But they left for the nationalists the instruments needed to erect the tyrannies and kleptocracies that marked post-independence Africa. They bequeathed a legacy of treating ordinary uneducated Africans as children, incapable of making decisions for themselves. No attitude is more grateful to the aspiring despot.

Take one example: the marketing boards of West Africa. Throughout West Africa, millions of African peasants under British rule set up small plantations for crops such as palm oil and cocoa. (Since cocoa trees mature only after five years, this is another instance of the African peasant’s ability both to think ahead and delay gratification by investment, despite great poverty.) Then the British colonial governments had the idea, benignly intended, of protecting the peasant growers from the fluctuations of the marketplace. They set up a stabilization fund, under the direction of a marketing board. In good years, the marketing board would withhold from the peasants some of the money their crops produced; in bad years, it would use the money earned in the good years to increase their incomes. With stable incomes, they could plan ahead.

Of course, for the system to work, the marketing boards would have to have monopoly purchasing powers. And it takes little imagination to see how such marketing boards would tempt an aspiring despot with grandiose ideas such as Dr. Nkrumah: he could use them in effect to tax Ghana’s producers in order to fund his insane projects and to subsidize the urban population that was the source of his power, as well as to amass a personal fortune. A continent away, in Tanzania, Nyerere used precisely the same means to expropriate the peasant coffee growers: in the end causing them to pull up their coffee bushes and plant a little corn instead, which at least they could eat, to the great and further impoverishment of the country.

The idea behind the marketing boards was a paternalist colonial one: that peasant farmers were too simple to cope with fluctuating prices and that the colonial philosopher-kings had therefore to protect them from such fluctuations—this despite the fact that it was the simple peasants who grew the commodities in the first place.

After several years in Africa, I concluded that the colonial enterprise had been fundamentally wrong and mistaken, even when, as was often the case in its final stages, it was benevolently intended. The good it did was ephemeral; the harm, lasting. The powerful can change the powerless, it is true; but not in any way they choose. The unpredictability of humans is the revenge of the powerless. What emerges politically from the colonial enterprise is often something worse, or at least more vicious because better equipped, than what existed before. Good intentions are certainly no guarantee of good results.

The dialectic (below) re: empire -- er, Empire -- is notable for its insights and its parallel(s) with much current conversation in the US, and of course the 'Beltway'. Thank you.

I proffer the following lengthy essay by Paul Berman, who receives a friendly ear from the White House.

Regards,
David


Terror and Liberalism
Paul Berman


The present war, if that is the correct word, may very well be, as President Bush has observed, a war of a new kind--the "first war of the twenty-first century." But in one important respect, the present war also appears to be--and this, too, the president has hinted at indirectly--a war of an old kind, perhaps even the last war of the twentieth century. The terror assault was an astonishing event, but also a familiar event. And so it is possible, by glancing at the century that has just passed, to hazard a few guesses about the torrent of events that is already pouring over us.

The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long ago became old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For a hundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comforting sentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality and order were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, and modernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by the Western imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greater landscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. But World War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, and the outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And a series of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on the idea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to be a lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror.

The antiliberal movements took root in Europe and in small degree even in the United States. As the years went by, though, those same movements spread to other places and eventually to every remote spot where Western culture had also spread--that is to say, almost everywhere. The antiliberal movements flourished in several different versions, sometimes in versions that seemed utter opposites of one another. The Communist insurgency in Russia, dating from the world war itself, was merely the first. Then came Italian Fascists, German Nazis, the Spanish crusade to re-establish the Reign of Christ the King, and so forth, each country producing movements of its own based on local mythologies and customs. Antiliberal movements of the left and the right saw in one another the worst of enemies (except when they saw one another as allies and brothers, which did happen). Yet each of the movements, in their lush variety, entertained a set of ideas that pointed in the same direction.

The shared ideas were these: There exists a people of good who in a just world ought to enjoy a sound and healthy society. But society's health has been undermined by a hideous infestation from within, something diabolical, which is aided by external agents from elsewhere in the world. The diabolical infestation must be rooted out. Rooting it out will require bloody internal struggles, capped by gigantic massacres. It will require an all-out war against the foreign allies of the inner infestation--an apocalyptic war, perhaps even Apocalyptic with a capital A. (The Book of the Apocalypse, as André Glucksmann has pointed out, does seem to have played a remote inspirational role in generating these twentieth-century doctrines.) But when the inner infestation has at last been rooted out and the external foe has been defeated, the people of good shall enjoy a new society purged of alien elements--a healthy society no longer subject to the vibrations of change and evolution, a society with a single, blocklike structure, solid and eternal.

Each of the twentieth-century antiliberal movements expressed this idea in its own idiosyncratic way. The people of good were described as the Aryans, the proletarians, or the people of Christ. The diabolical infestation was described as the Jews, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, or the Masons. The bloody internal battle to root out the infestation was described as the "final solution," the "final struggle," or the "Crusade." The impending new society was sometimes pictured as a return to the ancient past and sometimes as a leap into the sci-fi future. It was the Third Reich, the New Rome, communism, the Reign of Christ the King. But the blocklike characteristics of that new society were always the same. And with those ideas firmly in place, each of the antiliberal movements marched into battle.

The wars that ensued, one after another in the decades after World War I, likewise shared a number of characteristics. Certain of the antiliberal movements succeeded in capturing a national state, from which they launched their wars in a more or less conventional manner: thus, the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in Russia. It was possible, as a result, to describe the twentieth-century wars in nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century terms--as wars of nation-states against one another, perhaps in alliance with other nation-states, bloc versus bloc. But the antiliberal movements were never fully synonymous with national states. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was genuinely a war between national states in the old-fashioned style.

But the war between France and Germany in World War II was complicated by Nazism's ability to call on sympathizers and co-thinkers all over Europe, including in France--which is one reason why the French went down to defeat. Communism was likewise an international affair, even if simpleminded analysts on the anticommunist side found it comforting to picture communists all over the world as mere agents of a reconstituted Czarist Empire. Likewise the Warriors of Christ the King, who may have described themselves as narrow nationalists but nonetheless drew their support and even their Warriors from all over the Latin world. And the twentieth-century wars displayed one other pertinent trait. The liberal side in those wars, the side that stood for a liberal and democratic society, was never entirely sure of itself.

The liberal side was internally divided. On the liberal side, there were always people, sometimes in large numbers, who suspected that the antiliberals might be correct in their view of liberalism and might even have justice on their side. And so the twentieth-century wars were ideological in a double sense. There was the struggle of liberalism against its enemies; and there was the struggle of liberalism against itself, a self-interrogation, which was liberalism's strength as well as its weakness.

The present conflict seems to me to be following the twentieth-century pattern exactly, with one variation: the antiliberal side right now, instead of Communist, Nazi, Catholic, or Fascist, happens to be radical Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist. Over the last several decades, a variety of movements have arisen in the Arab and Islamic countries--a radical nationalism (Baath socialist, Marxist, pan-Arab, and so forth) and a series of Islamist movements (meaning Islamic fundamentalism in a political version). The movements have varied hugely and have even gone to war with one another--Iran's Shiite Islamists versus Iraq's Baath socialists, like Hitler and Stalin slugging it out. The Islamists give the impression of having wandered into modern life from the 13th century, and the Baathist and Marxist nationalisms have tried to seem modern and even futuristic.

But all of those movements have followed, each in its fashion, the twentieth-century pattern. They are antiliberal insurgencies. They have identified a people of the good, who are the Arabs or Muslims. They believe that their own societies have been infested with a hideous inner corruption, which must be rooted out. They observe that the inner infestation is supported by powerful external forces. And they gird their swords. Their thinking is apocalyptic. They imagine that at the end they, too, will succeed in establishing a blocklike, unchanging society, freed of the inner corruption--a purified society: the victory of good. They are the heirs of the twentieth-century totalitarians. Bush said that in his address to Congress on September 20, and he was right.

It is worth remarking how often an antipathy for the Jews has recurred in these various movements over the years. Nazi paranoia about the Jews was an extreme case, but it would be a mistake to suppose that Nazism was alone in this. At the end of his life, Stalin, the anti-Nazi, is thought to have been likewise planning a general massacre of the Jews, of which the "doctors' plot" was a foretaste. The Nazi paranoia, just like Stalin's, was owed strictly to ancient superstitions and especially to psychological fears--the fears that were sparked by the mere existence of a minority population that seemed incapable of blending into the seamless, blocklike perfect society of the future. The Arab radical and Islamist antipathy to the Jews naturally displays a somewhat different quality, given that, this time, the Jews do have a state of their own. And where there is power, conflicts are bound to be more than imaginary. No one can doubt that Palestinians do have grievances and that the grievances are infuriating. Israel has produced its share of thugs and even mass-murdering terrorists. It has even managed, at this of all moments, to choose as its leader Ariel Sharon, whose appreciation of Arab and Islamic sensibilities appears to be zero. In these ways, the Israelis have done their share to keep the pot boiling.

Even so, how can it be that, after 120 years of Arab-Zionist conflict and more than 50 years of a Jewish state, the hostility to Israel seems to have remained more or less constant? For Israel's borders have been broad, but have also been narrow; its leaders have been hawkish and contemptuous, but have also been dovish and courteous; there have been West Bank settlements, and no West Bank settlements; proposals for common projects for mutual benefit, and no proposals. There have even been times, such as the 1980s, before the Russian immigration, when most of Israel's Jewish population consisted of people who had fled to Israel from the Arab world itself, instead of from Europe. And not even then, in a period when Israel, in its dusky-skinned authenticity, could claim to be a genuinely third-world nation, did the Israelis win any wider or warmer acceptance. Why was that, and why is it still?

It is because the anti-Zionist hostility may rest partly on the hard terrain of negotiable grievances; but mostly it goes floating along on the same airy currents of myth and dread that proved so irresistible to Nazis in the past. The anti-Zionist hostility draws on a feeling that Arab and Islamic society has been polluted by an impure infestation that needs to be rooted out. The hostility draws, that is, on a lethal combination of utopian yearning and superstitious fear--the yearning for a new society cleansed of ethnic and religious difference, together with a fear of a diabolical minority population. Does that sound like an unfair or tendentious description of Middle Eastern anti-Zionism? The curses of the clerics, the earnest remarks of the presidents of Syria and Iraq and other countries, the man-in-the-street interviews that keep appearing in the press and on radio--these are not pretty to quote. Even now the newspapers in parts of the Islamic world are full of stories claiming that the World Trade Center was attacked by (of course) a Jewish conspiracy. And so, the Arab and Islamic world burns with hatred for Israel in part because of issues that are factual, but mostly because of issues that are phantasmagorical.

No one should doubt that hatred for the United States likewise draws, in some degree, on real-life terrible things that America has done to the Muslim world. But to what degree? The United States is resented for supporting Israel. Then again, President Clinton did spend eight years trying to help the Palestinians negotiate a state--and hatred for the United States seems to have abated not one bit. Everyone agrees that America is loathed for its 10 years of fighting against Saddam Hussein. Yet there is reason to suppose that without military opposition from the United States the dictator who slaughtered 200,000 Kurds in northern Iraq would go on with his slaughters, as he has promised to do. (And he may yet.)

In any event, America was not always at war with Saddam; and in the antebellum age, anti-Americanism throve even so. America is resented for propping up autocracies such as the one in Saudi Arabia. And yet a Saudi collapse, if such a thing occurred, might well bring to power still worse despots whose government would inflict still more pain on the Arab masses. Or perhaps, as is sometimes said, America is resented because America's power, regardless of our intentions, ends up perpetuating Christendom's attacks on Islam from long ago--the medieval wars of the murderous Crusades. And this resentment is understandable; but it is understandable only in the realm of myth. In the Balkans during the 1990s, when the Serb nationalists invoked a medieval Christian zeal and set out to massacre and expel the Kosovo Muslims, the United States went to war--on the Muslim side. This seems to have done nothing to improve America's reputation in the world of the Islamists and the radical Arab nationalists.

It is because America's crime, its real crime, is to be America herself. The crime is to exude the dynamism of an everchanging liberal culture. America is like Israel in that respect, only 50 times larger and infinitely richer and more powerful. America's crime is to show that liberal society can thrive and that antiliberal society cannot. This is the whip that drives the antiliberal movements to their fury. The United States ought to act prudently in the Middle East and everywhere else; but no amount of prudence will forestall that kind of hostility. And this should not be news. For the radical nationalist and Islamist movements are not, as I say, anything new. Movements of that sort are a reality of modern life. They are the echo that comes bouncing back from the noise made by liberal progress. And this should tell us truths about the struggle that has suddenly fallen upon us.

One of those truths has to do with the terrorist tactics. In the middle 1960s, when the various groups within the PLO launched their disastrous war on Israel, the word terrorism by and large connoted the actions of a guerrilla army--small-unit strikes against the Israeli military. But terror evolved, and in recent years the terrorist method among Palestinians has consisted mainly of attacking random groups of civilians, who appear to have been selected because of their numbers and vulnerability. Discos and pizza parlors have replaced the army stations of yore. And this is also true of the Islamist and Arab nationalist terrorists in France and in Argentina, who in the 1980s and 1990s hurled their bombs wherever they could find a large enough crowd of ordinary Jews.

The violent acts that are conventionally described as terrorism against American targets have followed the same trajectory, starting with targets that were strictly military (the 1983 truck-bomb attack in Lebanon on the U.S. Marines, who were trying to protect one group of Lebanese from another; the 1995 attack on the U.S. Army base in Saudi Arabia; the attack on the USS Cole in the waters off Yemen last year) and advancing to targets that may have been governmental but were certainly civilian (the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa in which large numbers of ordinary people, especially Africans, were killed). But the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, together with the subsequent foiled plan to blow up New York's subways and tunnels and throw bombs in midtown Manhattan, already showed where the trajectory was heading.

Some people have argued that the terrorists chose to attack the World Trade Center for a second time because the towers were a symbol of American power. Perhaps so, though it would certainly have been possible, in that case, to attack other symbols with even greater fame--the Statue of Liberty, for instance. But how many people would have been killed at the Statue of Liberty? A mere few hundred tourists and workers. The Trade Center offered one of the greatest concentrations of ordinary people to be found anywhere in America. And in this grisly fashion, Islamist terror against the United States has ended up outdoing, in the scale of its murders, even the Palestinian terror against Israel. It is worth asking if there is anything genocidal in this kind of terrorist impulse.

Someone might reply that murdering several thousand people in the United States cannot be compared in sheer numbers to other massacres--Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, for instance. Yet nearly everyone seems to grasp intuitively that if the anti-American terrorists were to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, they would use it at once, and may perfectly well be planning such a thing even now. The word genocidal may go too far, but there is nothing excessive in observing that, like Hitler's Nazis and other such groups, these modern movements do seem to be entranced with slaughter for slaughter's sake. Nor do their motives and personal style set them apart from totalitarians of the past. It is not any kind of material desperation that pushes these people forward. It is a species of idealism, even piety. The terrorists in the United States were men with excellent German and American educations--flight-school alumni, no less. Their leader, assuming it is Osama bin Laden, is a multimillionaire. These are not the wretched of the earth. And so, given the strength of their beliefs, we can assume that the struggle will go on for years. Bush was right to make that point in his address to Congress. And if, in their grotesque fashion, the terrorists are idealists, what are we?

We are, to begin with, naïfs, and of the worst sort. That much is certain, given what we have discovered about our own security arrangements and intelligence. (Even now the Senate has voted up a far-fetched and wholly irrelevant missile defense, instead of, say, voting up 10,000 new security guards.) And the naïveté goes on from there. It is naïveté that has already led any number of commentators to go on a hunt for possible ways to minimize the dangers we face. There is an impulse to describe our enemy as a mere handful of people, perhaps a few dozen--far too small a number to merit the kind of opposition that could be called a war. How reassuring that would be--to learn that our enemy has the dimensions of a small street gang! It may even be true that, at least in regard to the attacks of September 11, only a few dozen people were involved. But that would be like saying that Pearl Harbor was attacked by merely a few hundred Japanese pilots.

Some people have emphasized that, so far as we know, not one of the national states in the Middle East or anywhere else seems to have been directly responsible for the attacks. Thus it is said that without the involvement of a national state, we cannot properly speak of something as capacious as war (as if wars can take place only between national states--when the great majority of wars in recent years have been, in fact, civil wars, meaning, conflicts in which only one side possesses a state). This is another way of making the same minimizing point: that we are not facing any kind of substantial or well-organized enemy, even if we have suffered a disastrous blow. But we are facing a substantial and well-organized enemy. Our enemy is the combat wing of radical and Islamist movements that are genuinely enormous.

Those movements are supported by clerics and businessmen. They are protected by the apologies of the shrewdest of intellectuals. They deploy worldwide networks of organizations. They enjoy popular support not just in one or two remote places--a support that is strong enough to have pushed one state after another into an ambiguous attitude toward those movements: not willing to endorse, and not willing to suppress, either. The few dozen people who are thought to be responsible for September 11 could be arrested or killed, and Osama bin Laden could end up captured or strung from a tree--and even so, with popular enthusiasm and political and intellectual structures to back them up, the terrorist assaults would very likely continue. For the assaults were already under way before bin Laden entered the scene, and there is no reason they could not continue without him.

There is a great deal of liberal and left-wing naïveté about this matter in the United States, and not just there. But there is also a conservative and right-wing naïveté, which may be still greater and is much graver in its possible consequences. (And I'm not even bothering with the Jerry Falwells of this world.) It should be remembered that George Bush the Elder was anything but astute about the dangers in Arab radicalism. Saddam Hussein would never have been able to invade Kuwait in 1990 if Bush the Elder had been on his guard. And Saddam would never have been able to survive his eventual military defeat if Bush the Elder had not decided to let him go. I have always wondered why the elder Bush was so easily taken in by Saddam. Maybe the Texas oil connection had something to do with it. Perhaps Bush had too many friends in Saudi Arabia, instead of too few, and the Saudi friends (being halfway implicated in these movements themselves) advised him to go easy. I don't know; I am speculating.

In any case, the first days after September 11, it seemed that Bush the Younger was likewise tempted to view our present conflict through a minimizing lens. His call for bin Laden to be delivered "dead or alive," Wild West-style, struck a very odd note. Dick Cheney, in a similar mood, acknowledged to a television interviewer that he would like to see bin Laden's head "on a platter"--quite as if our enemy were a lone bad guy, someone like Manuel Noriega or a cowboy bandit who ought to be brought in, limply slung across the saddle of a horse. The tone in those comments--a jaunty braggadocio, hinting of Hollywood--was worrisome all by itself. Then Bush delivered his September 20 address to Congress, and the speech turned out to be serious in presentation, realistic in its account of the complex nature of the enemy--an admirable speech. But the remarks about the Wanted poster and about bin Laden's head on a platter popped from Bush's and Cheney's lips spontaneously, whereas a very clever speechwriter wrote Bush's address to Congress. It has been hard to know which set of phrases expresses the true thinking of the administration.

The genuine solution to these attacks can come about in only one way, which is by following the same course we pursued against the Fascist Axis and the Stalinists. The Arab radical and Islamist movements have to be, in some fashion or other, crushed. Or else they have to be tamed into something civilized and acceptable, the way that some of the old Stalinist parties have agreed to shrink into normal political organizations of a democratic sort. The solution, in short, lies in effecting enormous changes in large parts of the political culture of the Arab and Islamic world--the sort of transformation that can be achieved, if at all, only after many years or even decades of struggle, and not through any single decisive strike. It is a transformation that would require a vast range of actions on the part of the liberal world--military and commando raids when necessary and possible, constant policing, economic pressure, and much else, all of it conducted under the kind of urgent and relentless mobilization that does go under the label of "war" and not with the kind of modest activity that might fit under the mild name of "policing." Is there any serious person who doubts the need for covert action today?

But what is troubling is the alacrity and even the enthusiasm with which the clandestine measures have lately been discussed, as if the main obstacle standing between us and freedom from terrorism consisted of legal inhibitions on the CIA's ability to assassinate its enemies. For neither the most ruthless of covert actions nor the most gigantic of military actions, veritable D days in this or that part of the world, will entirely rid us of terrorism--as the Israelis, who are greater experts than we, can certainly tell us. A few dozen or even a few thousand fanatics might conceivably collapse under the weight of violent repression. But we are dealing with movements of millions, who can only be persuaded, not forced. We need the Arab radicals and Islamists to adopt a new outlook--not all of them, but enough to discourage the others. And what might bring about such a change? It would have to be something like the pressure that encouraged the communists of Eastern Europe to adopt new outlooks of their own: the pressure of a long Cold War (which was sometimes hot), culminating in the pressure of dissidents and critics at home, whose persistent campaigns and superior arguments made the Communists lose heart. And the long campaign against Arab radicalism and Islamicism that has now begun will have to resemble the Cold War in yet another respect. It will have to be a war of ideas--the liberal ideal against the ideal of a blocklike, unchanging society; the idea of freedom against the idea of absolute truth; the idea of diversity against the idea of purity; the idea of change and novelty against the idea of total stability; the idea of rational lucidity against the instinct of superstitious hatred.

Bush did insist on the importance of ideas in his speech to Congress. It was astonishing to hear him touch on such a theme (though he didn't mention actually doing anything to further our ideas). On one point, he was exceptionally eloquent, and not for the first time, either. He went out of his way to salute the Muslims of America--even though here and there, in a few reactionary mosques in Brooklyn or in Texas, it would be possible to dig up some of the social bases of Islamist terror. He honored the overwhelming majority of American Muslims and of Arab Americans who do not share the radical or Islamist ideas, and he spoke against ethnic and religious prejudice and praised Islam. And by doing all of that, he made clear to our own society and to the world and even to our enemies that ours is not a racist or a bigoted fight (which it had better not become). He tried to show that Islam can survive in a liberal environment and that fervent believers do not have to turn in radical directions simply to uphold their religious identity--a crucial point.

But this is the same Bush who appointed John Negroponte to be ambassador to the United Nations--an ambassador who comes to his new post trailing an abysmal record of official mendacity and a murky relation to the darkest of deeds. At least, that is Negroponte's reputation among some of us who constituted the Central America press corps back in the 1980s, when he served as ambassador to Honduras. (The New York Review of Books recently published a concise account of Negroponte's Central American career, written by Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times.) At the United Nations, we need right now someone who can summon the nations of the world to a principled alliance for liberty and law. Bush has appointed an ambassador whose every speech will make those words seem like lies. It is as if, in his heart of hearts, Bush is a man given to Hollywood jauntiness and a cult of dark adventure, but now and then a wise adviser catches his attention, or a skillful writer hands him a well-considered speech to read aloud, and then a second Bush suddenly speaks up, who turns out to be a man of thoughtful principles.

The Bush administration is likely to go on wavering between those poles--sometimes principled and penetrating, other times drawn by the lure of the simple and by a cowboy romance of ruthlessness. That is our misfortune, and the world's. Those of us who worry about the administration's instincts and deficiencies will have to decide how to behave now. Of course, we should criticize the administration when appropriate, and we will. But the most important thing we can do is to try to make up for the deficiencies ourselves, to articulate certain points in our own voice, and to promote our own idea of what the present war will have to be about, whether the administration joins us in doing so or not. We should say that in putting up a struggle against the terrorists and against the movements that support them, we are defending public safety in the short run, which will have to be everyone's business now. But we should also explain that we want to defend public safety in the long run, which can only be achieved by securing and spreading liberty and democracy. We should explain that one day even some of our enemies will want a free society in their own part of the world, and on that day those people will be our friends. We ought to acknowledge that in the meantime America may well end up undergoing sufferings on a scale that can never be evoked by a modest word like "policing." It is not that we have chosen war; it has chosen us, and all we can do is behave correctly under the circumstances. But a glance at the past ought to steady our nerves. For one day the liberty that we enjoy will be enjoyed also in those portions of the Arab and Islamic world that lack it now, and liberty for them will mean safety for us.


Copyright © 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Paul Berman, "Terror and Liberalism," The American Prospect vol. 12 no. 18, October 22, 2001.

. . . in Boston last month, . . . nobody who talked politics was willing to admit that they were a Bush supporter . . .

Boston runs true to stereotype, then.

Charlie, I'll go along with your claim that Thatcher won the 1983 election because "the divided opposition sacrificed their ability to form a united front against her," so long as you don't turn out to be one of those people who puts the blame for the division squarely on the SDP. Some seem to have forgotten just how entirely looney the Labour Party of the time was, and for PM they offered ... Michael Foot. Sorry, but this was not a realistic option.

OK, Andrew Reed's no Geoffrey Howe, but I found this interesting:

http://www.iht.com/articles/89136.html

Fer shure I thought you were going to say Tony Blair...

Possibly. My point is: well, just see the bullet points. (If you think I'm wrong, please tell me -- I'd love to think I was, the idea of GWB's cronies running the USA for the next decade or two does not fill me with joy.)

The Return of the Iron Lady, starring Ralph Nader as Shirley Williams?

Think of the New York Post as a rightward (mirror) version of London's Daily Mirror. I was in London two weeks ago when Colin Powell spoke at the UN, and I remember the Daily Mirror's front page headline, helpfully delivering its verdict on the evidence: NOT ENOUGH.

As for USA TODAY, that paper is geared to travelers, especially business travelers, a large portion of whom are Republican would-be Masters of the Universe. They voted for Dubya en masse. The editors know who supplies the butter for their bread.

While in London, I picked up the three issues of Spectrum SF with your serial in it. The opening pages were great; I'm eager to read the rest.

I was at the protest in New York with some New York Friends and had much the same experience (I didn't plan to go, we just booked cheap tickets to New York ages ago and it happened to be on the same date)

It could just be that my friends are liberal hippy peaceniks, but standing there in the could it was amazing to realise just how many of them there are.

The media on the other hand... Jesus, you couldn't make stuff like the "Axis Of Weasel" doctored photographs up. I swear the local news only covered the protests because so much of 1st avenue and 2nd avenue being closed leaked into the traffic news.

The Grauniad has a piece about the single-minded warmongering of the entire Murdoch press stable, which includes the New York Post.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/...7558,896864,00.html

I suppose that would make it the American version of the Sun.

Charlie, that's very brave of you to stipulate a lifelong pension for ex-Jurors: it addresses one of the biggest problems of any jury system, which is the inconvenience and hardship of having your life disrupted. Many people will do anything to get out of serving on trial juries, and that's usually only for a week or two: to get ordinary blokes to be willing to sit in legal training and Parliament for six years, you'll need a mighty strong incentive.

Nevertheless, I know a lot of people who'd consider themselves both incompetent at and uninterested in a job reviewing laws. And most of the people I know who'd salivate at the prospect, well, I'd rather they didn't get to do it. (I'm thinking of your average stone libertarian here.)

But your idea is excellent in one way: it solves the problem of an elected Lords (why shouldn't such a body get some of its lost power back?) or an all-appointed Lords (who appoints?)

Six years is probably about right for a time span, though. Two years is way too short to get to know the job. And rotating memberships in classes would ensure that there was always a set of more experienced people around.

I wonder, though, if it might not be better still to leaven the Jurors with some genuine expertise. Perhaps we could add two other classes of members: first, all political parties represented in the Commons would be allowed to have representatives, to state their cases. (These would be the sort of people who currently serve as party leaders and ministers in the Lords.) Second, all ex-Cabinet ministers, retired from the Commons, of greater than a certain level of experience, should have a seat. (Level of experience could be something like this: anyone who'd served as PM, Foreign Secretary, or Chancellor of the Exchequer for any length of time; any other persons who'd served as cabinet ministers for more than N years, perhaps N=5.)

Martin: I do mean that they should have a pension for life after their period of service, pegged against the salary. Some will have had their careers wrecked by the job; six years out of a promotion ladder in a structured occupation is enough to ensure that you never have any hope of reaching the upper levels. Others will have had their training rendered obsolete; computer programmers or research scientists would be so out of date at the end of six years that they'd virtually have to start from scratch.

Professional politicians are better able to pick up the pieces after losing an election -- preparation for that sort of thing is part of their career plan. Spring that at random on ordinary folks and I don't think you can realistically expect them to take on the job unless they are secure in the knowledge that they will be provided for afterwards, no matter what.

Charlie, you did mention a pension; though I took "Give them a salary and a pension at least as good..." to mean pension contributions for the duration of a person's stint. If that's not what you meant, then I'm confused. Surely you don't mean that the six years as a Juror would be the last of one's working life?

Perhaps, to mirror the initial training in constitutional law, a person's service could be concluded with a period of suitable training to refresh their knowledge of their old careeer -- or start them on a new one.

Martin McCallion
http://devilgate.livejournal.com/

Martin: did I mention a pension? Index linked to final salary, for life? Yeah, that's expensive. But so is having an election that costs about 80 million pounds once every four or five years.

Good idea - very similar to the Martian Constitution proposed by Kim Stanley Robinson in Blue Mars (and his collection 'The Martians') wherein citizens are randomly assigned to an equivalent of the House of Lords. I think that the stay is two years rather than six though, which seems much more manageable. Each juror gets given a small staff so that they can navigate their way through the system properly. Of course, you have to make sure that their staff doesn't influence them unduly...

Edited by author 02-04-2003 08:21 PM
The House of Jurors is a great idea. It has a major problem, though. Anyone who works in any kind of technical job would find their skills decidedly stale after six years away.

Imagine going back to programming Perl after six years away, Charlie. Line noise, or what?

Perhaps some sort of part-time solution (it's not like the Commons sits for whole days anyway) to allow people to continue with their skills. Then again, one of the problems with the Commons to my mind is that MPs are allowed to have other jobs (directorships, at least). I think they should be required to give up all such interests.

Interesting idea, though.

Martin McCallion
http://devilgate.livejournal.com/

While all the talk about force projection, and how the USA may lose the protection of distance, is true, my experience of my American cousins suggests to me that most Americans have a very hazy grasp of geography. For one of them, their first slose-up sight of the sea was from Cleethorpes beach.

 Many Americans are caught in a cleft stick wrt the idea of the rise of a European superstate; in one half of their brain they are relieved that the American military will no longer be needed to keep those fractious foreigners safe from the Bear, and in the other half they fear the rise of a possible military competitor.

 It is perhaps difficult for Europeans to realise how much the UN's attempts at intervention and "peace keeping" are distrusted by many Americans. The kooks are convinced that the Blue Helmets are planning to invade the US and force an ill-defined Socialism on the Free American People. These outliers on the IQ curve we can discard, but they are a symptom of the general populace's atttitudes towards the endless deployments of American troops to various trouble-spots in the world, and the resultant MAC coffin flights back home. They do fail to realise that there is a lot of peacekeeping going on that never involves Americans, but these situations are typically quiet and don't make the front pages of the American news media.

 The reason people in trouble cry out for American intervention is because they are the only force on the planet with the military-logistical resources to do something, in many cases. The reason they have that capability is that the war they planned to fight was always three thousand miles away (in any direction) from their shores. What worries them now is that Europe is starting to put together a similar capability, and they know that America comes within the EU's three thousand mile range. America will no longer be isolated by geography the way it always has been, able to pick and choose when to intervene in somebody else's battles. They face the chance of another Pearl Harbor, and this unnerves them.

I agree with many of the points raised here, so I'd just throw in my two bits:

1) the US military is not just overwhelmingly more powerful than any other nation - it was designed to be that way, and it's funded well-enough to be, as military spending is the sole point of US national political agreement. As you mention, it was designed to fight two major wars at once with overwhelming force. While that has left it somewhat out of step with actual strategic realities (many more low-intensity conflicts than actual wars - more Black Hawk Down than Gulf War), it still represents a level of unilateral force projection ability simply unparalleled in the world, by any currently conceivable coalition of enemies.

2) And the US military is fairly useless. The real threats to American security (or near-hegemony, if you prefer) are non-traditional and non-military threats: global economic instability, global population explosion and poverty (and thus increased wars, genocides and forced migrations), disease, climate change, terrorism, environmental collapses, threats to food and water supply and the like. The US is more dependent than any other country on a relatively stable global system - and that system shows some signs of starting to wobble like a slowing spinning-top. Unfortunately, we have an Administration made up of fossils, criminals and idiots, none of whom see any US interest in global altruism, or even non-military stability, frankly.

3) 5% unemployment in the US is a joke. It doesn't count imprisoned citizens, but also part-time workers, those who have been out of work for longer than (I believe) a year, students without jobs, and those who have no jobs but aren't even trying to find one. Which brings me to the second great American weakness: our social policies suck. We have some of the highest rates of child poverty, lack of medical insurance (40%), illiteracy, incarceration, familial violence, personal bankruptcy caused by excessive debt, and wage/ income stratification in the developed world. These things simply do not make for a string country in the long run.

4) I tend to think that the wild cards here are the trump suit, though. Too many technological, social, cultural and politic inflection points coming on too quickly to say much that's truly meaningful through historical analogy.

5) I'll also say that I think one of the wildest trump cards is the American people. America does have an odd, almost unique, ability for reinvention and reform. It may suprise us all yet.

That said, enjoyed reading the below very much. Thanks!

Like you, I'm going to pass lightly over the large areas of agreement. I'm also going to skip over the military stuff, because this post is long enough as is.

> I disagree on all counts. The US is vastly superior militarily than
> you seem to believe, and it does have Empire -- although not the
> traditional kind. But then again, the British empire was
> substantially different from the Spanish, or Roman, or Chinese
> empires. In both cases, the UK and US reaped the benefits of a
> captive free trade zone in which competition by other great powers
> was kept to tolerable levels and cheap commodities were readily
> available. In both cases, policy set in the capital resulted in the
> periphery knuckling under and obeying -- grudgingly, as often as
> not, but it doesn't matter whether it's Argentina accepting an
> IMF-imposed fiscal policy or British Guyana a new governor-general
> as long as the cheap exports keep flowing.

The British empire was not a free-trade zone; it was a captive market run under a mercantilist policy. I'll illustrate the difference with a comparison of the UK's India policy and the US's trade relationship with Mexico under NAFTA.

The distinguishing feature of 19th century imperial colonies was that they were all run under the theory that colonies existed to supply raw materials for the factories at home. Under this view, building a factory in the colony was actively harmful, because it increased the level of competition your "home" faced. So the imperial governments passed laws forbidding investment in anything other than hand labor or resource-extraction industries, and restricting imports to just from the home country. For example, the reason that wearing homespun clothing was such a big deal to the Indian independence movement was that it was illegal to produce cloth in India -- it had to be imported from Britain.

To an economist, this is a totally ludicrous policy: the far lower levels of capital investment in poor countries means that the returns on capital are vastly higher there than in the industrial core (declining marginal return, you know). The proper policy is to drop all the trade barriers and let people invest as heavily as they like in the industrialization of the poor country. Furthermore, moving marginal industries to the poor country will free up the rich country's generally more skilled workers to work on higher-complexity, higher-return industries. This is basically what happened with the US and Mexico post-NAFTA; despite neo-mercantilists like Ross Perot warning that free trade would cost millions of jobs, Mexico began to grow much faster and the US shifted to better-paying jobs.

Now, note that there aren't any benefits to having a captive free trade area. If a French firm invests in Mexican plants rather than an American, that means that the American firm can invest in something else, and the Mexican workers -- and the French and American firms -- all win. The bigger the free trade area, the less wasteful duplication of effort and the faster the poor regions will rise to match the rich ones. It makes perfect sense, economically, to just drop your tariffs unilaterally. You'll benefit even if the other parties don't cut in turn.

Sadly, however, it makes much less political sense to do it, since the benefits of free trade are diffused across the whole population, and the losers are very obvious and vocal. The way that we get what free trade we have is by using bi- or multi-lateral trade agreements to convince local exporters to pipe up and verbally neutralize the portectionists. That's how trading blocs like NAFTA or the EU formed. The downside with this dynamic is that it only works with countries that are already trading with each other, because you need an exporter shilling for tariff cuts to balance the noise from the protectionists. Countries that don't have big trading volumes with a major bloc are screwed -- there aren't any exporters in the bloc to advocate mutual cuts in tariffs. So the key problem that poor countries face is that they are locked out of the global free-trade system, not that they are in it.

Look at the volume of trade flows between countries: the vast majority of it is inter-rich-country trade, with almost 80% of imports and exports to or from a rich country. The poor countries need access to big Western markets and capital to industrialize -- for example, last year, for the first time in ages, most African nations had GDP growth in excess of 3%. This is in large measure because of the US African Growth and Opportunity Act of 2000, which substantially (but incompletely) opened up the US market to African businesses. AGOA was basically passed through shaming Congress into action. The bill's sponsors paraded a series of poor-but-honest African businessmen through Washington, until the Congress became just too embarassed to be seen bullying the world's poorest nations. I'm not sure this is a trick you can repeat too frequently. :(

Also, your example of Argentina is ill-chosen: it hasn't accepted the IMF's recommended fiscal policy, as is its right as a sovereign nation (but I think they're foolish for doing so). It does, however, make a handy example for how the IMF really works. First, let's look at how financial crises work.

A financial crisis happens when government expenditures outstrip revenues, and the government can no longer find lenders willing to lend it the money to make up the difference. Argentina, for example, fell into crisis because its tax-collection system broke down completely, and now the central government basically can't collect the tax monies owed it. At this point, the government has basically four choices:

1) It can cut spending and increase taxes until the budget balances.
2) It can jack up interest rates until it finds willing lenders again.
3) It can print money and use devaluation to make up the gap.
4) It can default on its loan obligations.

All of these choices suck! #1 means cuts in critical infrastructure and social services. #2 will kill private investment and send the economy into deep recession. #3 will destroy your country's middle class by making their savings worthless. #4 makes it impossible to borrow for a /long/ while, and then the interest rates will be very high. In general, however, choices #1 and #2 damage a nation's underlying ability to grow less than #3 and #4. However, they are also more painful to implement over the very short run.

What the IMF does is it offers short-term loans to governments in crisis, in exchange for a promise to use a mix of policies #1 and #2. The loans let the government cut infrastructure and raise infrastructure less steeply than they would otherwise have to, making the correct policy less painful to implement -- the idea is that the government can repay the IMF loans once it has its fiscal house in order. The external IMF policy requirement conveniently also gives the politicians a useful ogre (the IMF) to point to when justifying the new policy.

It should be clear that the IMF is not even close to being the same thing as appointing a new governor-general. It can only offer an an incentive to make choosing a better policy less painful. Argentina's failure in this regard is totally baffling. The IMF plan for them boils down to "collect your fscking taxes, m'kay?" and instead the Argentine government has behaved completely randomly. This isn't exactly a shining example of the unstoppable might of the American imperium. :/

Been done, David, been done. Leslie Fish has a tape, "Our Fathers Of Old", which has it -- and if it's not too Christian for her -- Actally, I'm damn' sure she saw the relevqnce, too...

(The full poem is here)

All one needs to do is quote Kipling.

Specifically, "Recessional".

Well, it's maybe a bit too white Christian for some tastes, but it fits...

    Far-called, our navies melt away;
    On dune and headland sinks the fire:
    Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
    Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
    Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
    Lest we forget -- lest we forget!


There's a recording of the full text, by Peter Bellamy, somewhere out there on the net.

First, what we agree on:

>gt;My personal bet is that the US is the last human-run superpower in
>gt;history. What happens after that, only Hans Moravec knows.

Yeah. I haven't seen anything lately to change my mind on the prospects for a singularity in human affairs in the next thirty years -- unless the MPAA and RIAA succeed in banning universal Turing machines, or the legal system gridlocks, or we succumb to a Vingean ubiquitous surveillance regime.

But trying to figure out how to run good foreign relations on the basis of a projected future that is wildly divergent from the past is a non-starter. So, like the man in the story who's lost his keys, I'll keep fumbling through the grass under the street light.

>gt;First, the present:
>gt;
>gt;Judged relative to its peers, US-2002 is vastly weaker militarily and
>gt;much stronger economically than UK-1902. Both of these facts are
>gt;pretty much due to the fact that the US does not possess an empire.

I disagree on all counts. The US is vastly superior militarily than you seem to believe, and it does have Empire -- although not the traditional kind. But then again, the British empire was substantially different from the Spanish, or Roman, or Chinese empires. In both cases, the UK and US reaped the benefits of a captive free trade zone in which competition by other great powers was kept to tolerable levels and cheap commodities were readily available. In both cases, policy set in the capital resulted in the periphery knuckling under and obeying -- grudgingly, as often as not, but it doesn't matter whether it's Argentina accepting an IMF-imposed fiscal policy or British Guyana a new governor-general as long as the cheap exports keep flowing.

In military terms, I think you're mistaken when you assert that:

>gt;the US depends on a system of alliances to maintain the
>gt;military bases that allow it to project military power overseas. The
>gt;British Empire had bases in its own territory. This difference, all by
>gt;itself, dramatically reduces the US's ability to fight independently
>gt;of world opinion.

Firstly, the US has nuclear-powered carrier battle groups that, between them, have roughly the same total air power as Britain and France put together. Force projection is something that you can do without land bases, if you've got a big navy and nuclear-powered capital ships.

Secondly, basing isn't dependent on any one country. For example:

>gt;astonishingly, the House of Saud kicked the US out of Saudi Arabia,
>gt;*after* 9/11.

But the Bush administration is still talking about a land war with Iraq -- because Jordan, Kuwait, Russia, and Pakistan are all available to greater or lesser degrees.

The five-colour problem works to the benefit of the superpower in this picture, because over much of the world it is very easy to find neighbouring countries who dislike each other or have festering border disputes. If country A -- who you wish to attack -- borders {B, C, D, E, F}, and B refuses to let you base troops there, then you look among {C, D, E, F} for the country that has most border disputes or ideological conflicts with B and A and talk nicely to them.

>gt;Furthermore, the second dirty little secret is
>gt;that American military expenditure is not all that great. The DoD's
>gt;budget is 39% of world armaments expenditure, where the US economy is
>gt;30% of gross world product: only modestly above average. The UK, all
>gt;by itself, could build a navy to equal the USN. It would cost 6-7% of
>gt;GDP (5-6% if the RN were slightly more efficient at procurement than
>gt;the DoD), which is a level of expenditure a democracy can easily
>gt;manage. (The US hit this level in the 80s, for example.)

Again, I think this is a bogus example. To boost British military spending to such a level would basically require diverting an additional 3% of GDP to the military. That means either 3% of GDP -- realistically, US $50-100Bn -- extra in taxation, or less in public spending on other sectors. The Soviets tried the former, and screwed their economy into the ground; the latter isn't much of a starter, with the UK trying Keynsian policies (based on a budget surplus, thankfully) to dodge the bullet of an oncoming global recession, while trying desperately to patch up twenty five years of neglected infrastructure spending.

For example, as part of that Keynsian splurge, the UK's science budget is going up by 45% over the next three years, as is spending on education and healthcare. The science budget crashed under Thatcher, although it takes 20 or more years for something like that to show up in the Nobel prize stats; the NHS was in trouble a year ago, over-stretched and under- funded, and without more money a shitload of universities were due to go bankrupt next year. So yes, technically the UK could "afford" to run a fleet the size of the US navy. But not without a tax hike equal to an extra two hundred pounds per taxpayer per year, or a collapse of the health or education systems. And a tax hike like that would damage the economy in other ways, wouldn't it? Money spent on defense is not notoriously good at generating economic productivity or providing jobs in non-military sectors.

Finally, if the UK did decide to go back into the carrier battle group business, there's a striking question of imbalance in the rest of the military. Carrier groups are only useful for certain purposes -- waving a pointy stick at the bad guys to keep them in line, bombing littoral enemies, supporting land invasions. To do the rest of the job you need the rest of the gang -- the army, the marines, the air force heavy lift capability. In point of fact the UK did cripple itself with a first-rank navy, into the 1950's; it was one of the factors that damaged the UK's post-WW2 economic competitive ability, while the Suez crisis demostrated that it didn't really deliver the foreign relations clout that was expected of it.

>gt;Economically, the US is doing much better than the rest of the
>gt;industrialized world has been. Over the last two decades its share of
>gt;world GDP has grown from (IIRC) 22% in 1980 to 30% in 2001. This is
>gt;pretty much the opposite of what happened in UK-1902.

I'm going to wait until the current round of bankruptcies are over before I agree with you on this. A lot of the GDP growth seems to have been churn and market bubbles. Much of it wasn't, but the creative accounting is obscuring the reality of it.

>gt;And as for the special genius of the British Foreign Office, I need
>gt;but note the Pacifico affair. :) But that's a cheap shot: first of all
>gt;it was in 1850 not 1902, and second of all I don't think that US
>gt;foreign policy is storing up trouble at all. There's a statute of
>gt;limitations built into all human action, because people only give a
>gt;damn for so long. Anything that happened more than 20-30 years ago --
>gt;ie, happened to your parents -- is meaningless, except as a supply of
>gt;slogans to hallow *today's* grievances. If there are no present
>gt;grievances, people will write off the past and get on with the more
>gt;important business of making money and having sex.

There's a remarkable ability on the part of citizens of the US to awaken to a world invented anew each day. Bluntly, I don't agree with you on this. People do harbour irrational grudges for long periods of time, longer than 20-30 years -- and even when they know that giving in to the temptation to scratch that itch will damage their economic well-being, they tend to do so. Existence proof: Yugoslavia, or Rwanda, or the Arab-Israeli problem.

>gt;No one cares that
>gt;in 1975 Spain was ruled by Franco: he's dead and today it's a modern
>gt;democracy.

Which is why they're digging up the bodies of people killed by fascist death squads and re-burying them, and the relatives are yelling at the government to get involved in identifying the corpses ...

Yeah, right.

(Our disagreement is simple: you're an optimist and I'm a pessimist, at least on these issues. The optimist sees the glass and says it's half full, while the pessimist sees it and says it's half empty. Maybe we need an engineer -- "this pint glass is twice as big as it needs to be in order to hold this half pint of beer" -- instead.)

>gt;As for the future:
>gt;
>gt;In the medium-term -- say the next decade -- I don't forsee any huge
>gt;changes in the status quo. The big risk factor that I see is if the
>gt;fast labor productivity growth regime the US, Ireland and Finland
>gt;entered in the 1990s doesn't start up in the big European states. Then
>gt;I think there's a serious risk of political blowup.

Watch out for the demographic bomb caused by a declining birth rate and ageing population, coupled with large immigrant communities who aren't being adequately educated, housed, and assimilated. Immigration, handled correctly, could turn Europe's future around -- but the signs right now aren't good.

>gt;From an American
>gt;perspective, most of the continental social democracies have
>gt;unemployment rates in the 20% range, once you factor in the lower
>gt;levels of workforce participation.

But the US has a high level of unemployment, too, once you factor in the prison population. And you're disregarding the much higher proportion of the population employed in the "informal economy" in continental Europe than in the US.

I really don't believe that 20% figure, or the often-cited 5% figure for unemployment in the US. A 5% unemployment figure is equivalent to 100% employment, but for employees taking a month of unpaid vacation each time they switch job (on an average of once every two years). Alternatively, a 5% unemployment figure implies that half the people below the bottom 10% percentile in employability terms still have jobs. How productive are the bottom 10%?

>gt;Also, there's a danger of creeping authoritarianism everywhere in the
>gt;industrialized world, as computerization steadily lowers the costs of
>gt;surveillance. In the US Ashcroft and in the UK Blunkett are merely the
>gt;most obvious signs -- nearly anyone would have proposed the same
>gt;things. Another thing that worries me is that the big-brother types
>gt;will jump onto the copyright crusade as a way of getting universal
>gt;surveillance onto PCs, too. No one seems to have very effective civic
>gt;antibodies against it, either. (Insert Free Software Song here.)

Okay, we're singing from the same hymn-book here.

>gt;After that, I can't say. I don't know which nations -- or indeed if it
>gt;will be a nation -- will be dominant in 2047. That's far enough in the
>gt;future that it's likely to be past the end of the human epoch. Even if
>gt;you think a full Vinge-style Singularity is ridiculous, it's not at
>gt;all ridiculous to forsee a future in which robotic labor as an
>gt;effective substitute for human labor, at a rental rate below the human
>gt;subsistence wage. At that point a nation's human population will be
>gt;irrelevant to its wealth, which means that Madagascar or Eritrea (or
>gt;for that matter Boston, Koenigbserg or Lima) are as plausible as
>gt;superpowers as the EU, US, China or India.

The headache here is that the human population who aren't labouring will need new employment -- or a post-employment social system to keep them from making trouble. The alternatives don't bear thinking about.

I think you're wrong. The US in 2002 doesn't resemble the UK in 1902 at all. It's an analogy that conceals more than it illuminates.

First, the present:

Judged relative to its peers, US-2002 is vastly weaker militarily and much stronger economically than UK-1902. Both of these facts are pretty much due to the fact that the US does not possess an empire. I'll start with the military end first, since that's easier to describe.

"Preeminence", as the word is used in the media, refers to the fact that the US is pretty much the only country around that can fight a war anywhere in the world. The UK and France have militaries that are just as well-trained and modern as the US, but they don't have the force-projection capability of the US.

However, the US depends on a system of alliances to maintain the military bases that allow it to project military power overseas. The British Empire had bases in its own territory. This difference, all by itself, dramatically reduces the US's ability to fight independently of world opinion. In particular, observe that Manila kicked the US out of the Phillipines in 1990 with barely a murmur, and even more astonishingly, the House of Saud kicked the US out of Saudi Arabia, *after* 9/11. And there was nary a peep out of the US. If third- and fourth-rate powers can manage this, then it should be manifestly obvious that American bases in real countries like Japan or Italy are there on sufferance. Furthermore, the second dirty little secret is that American military expenditure is not all that great. The DoD's budget is 39% of world armaments expenditure, where the US economy is 30% of gross world product: only modestly above average. The UK, all by itself, could build a navy to equal the USN. It would cost 6-7% of GDP (5-6% if the RN were slightly more efficient at procurement than the DoD), which is a level of expenditure a democracy can easily manage. (The US hit this level in the 80s, for example.)

It should be pretty well obvious now that the US only has its "preeminence" as long as that fact doesn't seriously bother any of the other industrial powers. You don't even need to invoke the EU as a rival superpower: any of the other industrial nations, like Japan, Britain, France, Germany or even South Korea could do it if they cared to. And there's nothing -- /absolutely nothing/ -- the US could do about it, since all of them are nuclear powers or could be within six months of deciding to.

Economically, the US is doing much better than the rest of the industrialized world has been. Over the last two decades its share of world GDP has grown from (IIRC) 22% in 1980 to 30% in 2001. This is pretty much the opposite of what happened in UK-1902. And in the last decade the US had had the highest levels of labor productivity growth in the industrial world. This is very significant, since it is the best available measure of the efficiency improvements (both from technology and management) occuring within an economy.

Empire, OTOH, was disastrous for the UK: business interests convinced an economically-illiterate political elite to put up totally irrational barriers on investment to maintain the status quo. For instance, it was *illegal* to build a cotton mill in India. The right thing would have been to let the market ship those manufacturing jobs to India, which would let it start accumulating the manufacturing expertise that would set it on the escalator to modernity and would have let Britain free up its much better trained workers to work on more productive technologies. This meant that India didn't industrialize and Britain stagnated.

And no, this is not at all similar to the relationship between the developed world and the third world today. Most trade happens between rich countries; the poor countries barely register. The reasons for this are fairly fascinating, since this is in direct contravention of naive neoclassical economics, and it prompted, among other things, the discovery of the new institutional economics. (The only exception to this rule is oil, which has uniformly been disastrous for all the poor countries that possess it, from Nigeria to Venezuela to Saudi Arabia, because it makes kleptocracy "work".)

I think your valorization of the 19th century British government is singularly unapt: any government of any modern democracy leaves it in the dust. Economic planning is much professional and skillful, corruption is much less, transparency is greater, and the mechanisms of government are open to a much wider swathe of the populace. For example, consider how long it took for universal suffrage to become the standard. It was a post-WWI phenomenon! There is, obviously, still a lot of room for improvements (I for one wouldn't mind some genius figuring out how to scale up Denmark's absurdly high-quality government), but the past is not where we are going to find them.

And as for the special genius of the British Foreign Office, I need but note the Pacifico affair. :) But that's a cheap shot: first of all it was in 1850 not 1902, and second of all I don't think that US foreign policy is storing up trouble at all. There's a statute of limitations built into all human action, because people only give a damn for so long. Anything that happened more than 20-30 years ago -- ie, happened to your parents -- is meaningless, except as a supply of slogans to hallow *today's* grievances. If there are no present grievances, people will write off the past and get on with the more important business of making money and having sex. /No one cares/ that in 1975 Spain was ruled by Franco: he's dead and today it's a modern democracy. /No one cares/ that in *1980* South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee killed 200 students: he's dead and today it's a modern democracy.

As for the future:

In the medium-term -- say the next decade -- I don't forsee any huge changes in the status quo. The big risk factor that I see is if the fast labor productivity growth regime the US, Ireland and Finland entered in the 1990s doesn't start up in the big European states. Then I think there's a serious risk of political blowup. From an American perspective, most of the continental social democracies have unemployment rates in the 20% range, once you factor in the lower levels of workforce participation. A "reserve army of the unemployed" (so to speak) is seriously bad for long-term stability, and I can't say the last French presidential election filled me with confidence, either: in the first round over 40% of the populace voted for parties that were openly hostile to representative democracy.

Also, there's a danger of creeping authoritarianism everywhere in the industrialized world, as computerization steadily lowers the costs of surveillance. In the US Ashcroft and in the UK Blunkett are merely the most obvious signs -- nearly anyone would have proposed the same things. Another thing that worries me is that the big-brother types will jump onto the copyright crusade as a way of getting universal surveillance onto PCs, too. No one seems to have very effective civic antibodies against it, either. (Insert Free Software Song here.)

After that, I can't say. I don't know which nations -- or indeed if it will be a nation -- will be dominant in 2047. That's far enough in the future that it's likely to be past the end of the human epoch. Even if you think a full Vinge-style Singularity is ridiculous, it's not at all ridiculous to forsee a future in which robotic labor as an effective substitute for human labor, at a rental rate below the human subsistence wage. At that point a nation's human population will be irrelevant to its wealth, which means that Madagascar or Eritrea (or for that matter Boston, Koenigbserg or Lima) are as plausible as superpowers as the EU, US, China or India.

My personal bet is that the US is the last human-run superpower in history. What happens after that, only Hans Moravec knows.

Looking at the Pravda page you linked to, about a third of the way down, among the links to other stories, is one about how the "Russian Mafia" is one of the FBI's biggest problems. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they.

Question 2 deletes the issue that's at the heart of much liberal/libertarian disagreement. Few libertarians actually oppose the idea of altruism. Most I know are for it, and desire an altruistic society. Libertarian organizations go out and perform charitable work. What just about all libertarians oppose is the idea that altruism should and must be accomplished by the government. Wanting to help others and wanting to force everyone else to do what you think should be done to help others are not identical.