Quotulatiousness

March 6, 2023

Britain’s Free Speech Union at three

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:00

Earlier this month, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union celebrated its third birthday:

Toby Young founded the Free Speech Union in early 2020, and on Wednesday, 1 March a party was thrown to celebrate the organisation’s third birthday. The delicate baby born just before the Covid-19 lockdowns has grown into a boisterous, disruptive toddler that stomps about the political scene breaking things.

Over 100 people came to the In and Out on St James’s Square to enjoy the FSU’s success, including Professor Nigel Biggar, whose book Colonialism was effectively cancelled by Bloomsbury when the publisher’s executives decided that “public feeling” was against its publication. The legal profession was well-represented — Francis Hoar acted as counsel in various legal challenges for those damaged by the government’s lockdowns. He was heard to complain that the Covid-19 inquiry under Lady Hallett had granted core participant status to various bereaved family groups and those suffering from long Covid, but had denied it to the hospitality and other businesses which had been pushed into bankruptcy. Other attendees included Matthew Elliott, who led Vote Leave; Matt Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist; and Adam Afriye MP. The FSU has been remarkably successful in raising funds, and there was a good turn out of donors like Lady Bell, the widow of Bell Pottinger founder Lord Bell of Belgravia.

Young told the room what his creation had achieved in its short life so far — a paying membership of 11,000; more than 2,000 cases taken on; a staff of 16 including eight full time employees — and talked about his political campaigns. Currently in his crosshairs is the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) Bill, which has been tabled by Vera Hobhouse MP and is supported by the government. The Equality Act already imposes a duty on employers to stop their workers from being harassed by other employees in relation to a protected characteristic such as sexual orientation, disability or age. Hobhouse’s bill will extend that duty so companies can be liable for third parties’ harassing actions, unless the employer has taken “all reasonable steps” to protect them.

It is almost certain to have a chilling effect on free speech in the workplace, as well as creating additional costs which will have to be passed on to consumers — perhaps good news for HR departments, probably bad news for everyone else. The FSU hopes to see amendments proposed to the bill which will need to have public consultation, thereby delaying its parliamentary progress. It is hoped that the delay will prove fatal.

Updating Pascal’s Wager

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman discusses moral realism and comes up with an improvement to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager:

Blaise Pascal from Practical Physics (1914), by Macmillan and Company.
Wikimedia Commons.

Blaise Pascal famously argued that one ought to believe in the Catholic faith because the enormous payoff if it was true, heaven instead of hell, made it in your interest to believe even if you thought the probability that it was true was low.

There are three problems with the argument. The first is that belief is not entirely a matter of choice — I cannot make myself believe that two plus two equals five however much I am offered for doing so. The second is that belief motivated not by love of God but by love of self, the desire to end up in Heaven instead of Hell, might not qualify you for admission. The third is that the argument applies to many doctrines other than Catholicism and so gives you no way of choosing among Christian sects or between Christianity and alternative religions, short of somehow estimating the probability that each is true and the associated payoff and choosing the one with the highest expected return.

I, however, have an improved version of the argument free from all of those problems, an argument not for Christianity but for moral realism.

One explanation of our moral feelings is that right and wrong are real and our beliefs about right and wrong at least roughly correct. The other is that morality is a mistake; we have been brainwashed by our culture, or perhaps our genes, into feeling the way we do, but there is really no good reason why one ought to feed the hungry or ought not to torture small children.

If morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things. If morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs but since morality correlates tolerably, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large. It follows that if you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct you ought to act as if the first is.

No god is required for the argument, merely the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, as most human beings intuit them. The fact that you are refraining from evil because of a probabilistic calculation does not negate the value of doing so — you still haven’t stolen, lied, or tortured small children. One of the odd features of our intuitions of right and wrong is that they are not entirely, perhaps not chiefly, judgements about people but judgements about acts.

How the powers-that-be got drunk on (practically unlimited) power with the pandemic lockdowns

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Brendan O’Neill on the revelations from the release of British government officials’ informal chats on WhatsApp as the initial lockdowns were imposed:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: “Hilarious“.

It was Simon Case, the UK’s top mandarin. In February 2021 he had a breezy virtual chat with Matt Hancock, the then health secretary. A policy had just been introduced stipulating that any Briton returning from a “red list” country – which eventually included 50 states around the world, including India and vast swathes of Africa – would have to quarantine in a hotel at a cost of £1,750 per person, later rising to £2,285. A total of 200,000 British citizens and residents endured this painful, expensive quarantine. To Hancock and his civil-service pals it was all a big laugh. “I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoe box”, chortled Mr Case. He later asked Hancock: “Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?” Locked up in hotels. Hancock replied that 149 people “are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!”. “Hilarious”, said Case.

Hilarious? Tell that to the people whose lives were ruined by this policy. The idea that it was just reckless rich folk jetting off to exotic destinations that were on the “red list” is ridiculous, as academic Aleksandra Jolkina has explained. Consider the NHS worker who travelled to Ethiopia to visit his dying uncle and look after his sick mother. While he was there Ethiopia was added to the “red list”, meaning he could not return to the UK; he couldn’t afford to. Or the Briton who travelled to Pakistan to visit his terminally ill father. He was forced to raid the family savings to pay the return quarantine fee. As a result, his “family’s ability to survive financially” was put “at risk”. Or think about the many Brits who did not go abroad, to one of those supposedly toxic countries, because they didn’t have the funds for that stay in a “premier inn shoe box”. People who, as Jolkina describes it, could not “visit their ill relatives or wish them a final farewell”. Hilarious, right?

The sinister cruelty of lockdown is laid bare in this grotesque vision of officials laughing over a policy that caused so much heartache and hardship among often low-earning Brits whose only crime is that their families live overseas. You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the feudalistic authoritarianism that underpinned the ideology of lockdown. Civil servants working from their plush homes having a giggle about a policy that inflicted severe financial pain on the diverse working classes. A health secretary breaking his own guidelines to snog his mistress while sending snide WhatsApp messages about a policy that prevented poorer citizens from kissing the cheek of a dying relative. For me, this is the most important thing about the Lockdown Files – their revelation of just how morally cavalier and even inhuman the political elites can become when they are drunk on power, when they are liberated from democratic accountability to pursue whatever extreme policies they like.

The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files are based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent and received by Matt Hancock in the pandemic years. Hancock gave the messages to Isabel Oakeshott when she was co-writing his book, Pandemic Diaries, and now Ms Oakeshott has given them to the Telegraph. They provide only a partial insight into the machinations of lockdown, of course. Hancock is not the centre of the universe, whatever he might think to the contrary. And he says some of the messages are being taken out of context. Perhaps. Nonetheless, the Lockdown Files represent our first serious reckoning with lockdown, our first glimpse at what was happening behind the scenes of this unprecedented exercise in social control. And it’s not a pretty picture.

The Rise and Fall of Fast Food Architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Business, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Stewart Hicks
Published 3 Nov 2022

What happened to McDonald’s? Their restaurants used to be so iconic. It was impossible to mistake one, for say, a Wendy’s. Distinguished architecture used to be an important part of a brand’s identity. But today, fast food restaurant’s all look the same. Bland grey boxes. The great convergence toward this standard has been called “Chipotle-ification”. In this video, we trace the changing restaurant designs of McDonald’s, from the iconic golden arch era to the soulless boxes of today. We break down the architecture and the forces at play in the great homogenization of fast food architecture.
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QotD: The pastries of the wider paradonut family

Filed under: Food, Health, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

When people say “I’d like a donut”, #Science indicates that Actually, they don’t want a donut at all. They say donut, but they really mean a pastry from the paradonut family.

Exhibit A: The Coffee Roll — Phasers on Star Trek have three settings: Stun, Kill, and Coffee Roll.

Exhibit B: The Eclair — From the French for “lightning”, the eclair was invented by a psychiatrist as a delicious alternative to electroshock therapy for schizophrenics. Because when you’re eating an eclair, you can’t deny the marvelous cream-filled reality you’re actually present in.

Exhibit C: The Cheese Danish — Cheese Danishes have a mix of flavors and textures that make them, in scientific terms, “a gang-bang for your face”.

Exhibit D: The Bear Claw — The bear claw is the ugly, bewarted King Pimp of the pastry shop window, with a dozen smaller, more effeminate donuts it’s turned into its sad little bitches and tricks following behind it.

Exhibit E: The Apple Fritter — The so-called “Emperor of Pastries” makes your stupid little glazed donut look sad and weak like Barack Obama’s gay arms.

Exhibit F: The Cinnamon Bun — Cinnamon Buns have been proven to be responsible for America’s obesity epidemic and diabetic crisis, and also totally worth it.

Bonus: Worst Donuts

1. Jelly Donuts — Jelly donuts are always what’s left after people eat the real donuts. Jelly donuts are consolation prizes for losers who came late. They taste like failure for a reason. If you’re eating a jelly donut, that’s because you’re not a competitor and you don’t have any friends to set aside a good donut for you.

2. Plain Donuts — Plain donuts are also called “not donuts” or “ring-shaped bread”. Plain donuts were invented for parents who don’t love their children. They are also sometimes put out as bait for poisoning rats, though they have a 75% failure rate. Rats don’t like them either. Sometimes a poisoned plain donut will be found intact, with a dead rat next to it — rats will lick the poison off the plain donut while avoiding the plain donut itself. According to Leviticus, you are supposed to pay the dowry of an ugly woman in plain donuts.

3. Powdered Sugar Donuts — Powdered sugar donuts are made primarily by mental degenerates employed by donut shops as charity hires. They are sometimes called “Retard Donuts”. To compare powdered sugar donuts to the Holocaust would be to trivialize the horror of powdered sugar donuts.

Ace, “Science Proves That The Best Donuts Are Actually Non-Donuts”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-06-17.

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