Quotulatiousness

January 21, 2022

Boris is in trouble, threaten the BBC to take the heat off him!

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Gareth Roberts wonders why Britons should continue to pay an annual license fee to support a media conglomerate that demonstrably hates them and their country:

Culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the most ardent of Boris Johnson stans, obligingly threw the deadest of cats on to the table at the weekend to distract from the woes of her beleaguered boss. She announced a two-year freeze on the BBC licence fee and dangled the prospect of scrapping it entirely.

Dorries must be well aware that any threat to the BBC always results in a Furies’ chorus of anger, horror and prophecies of woe, coming from precisely those people the Tory grassroots are likely to detest. And up they obligingly popped – Polly Toynbee, Nish Kumar, Gary Lineker, all present and correct. This wasn’t so much political theatre as a pantomime with stock phrases and responses. She’s behind you!

Behind all this repetitive call and response, there is something different this time around, on both sides. Dorries was noticeably blatant and direct when she tweeted that this licence-fee consultation “will be the last” (though she seemed less so in the Commons a couple of days later). And her detractors seemed more at a loss, struggling to find the counter examples of BBC excellence that used to come quickly and easily to hand. Citizen Khan creator Adil Ray tweeted a BBC promotional video asking “What has the BBC ever done for us?” that was made 36 years ago. Comedian Simon Day provided a list of great BBC comedies going back to the 1950s, which contained only one show commissioned in the last 15 years.

Canada’s CBC has a similar attitude toward Canadian culture and (ugh!) Canadians that the BBC displays, but the CBC gets direct government subsidies rather than a formal TV license required of all British TV owners. It’s quite reasonable to wonder what benefit Canadian taxpayers and British license-holders derive from all this financial support of increasingly unwatched TV and online propaganda that mocks and belittles them:

What this seems to show is that the BBC is now in a fix. In a way, the BBC hasn’t changed all that much. It is doing now what it has always done, reflecting and embodying a certain section of the middle class. When that section was sane, or at least fairly sane, that could be irritating on occasion, but we all forgave it because it had its heart in the right place. But in the past decade, the nominally “liberal” middle class has, to put it politely, gone both doolally and totalitarian.

To consume the BBC since about 2012 is to be never more than 10 minutes away from being scolded or berated, usually based on some spurious identity-politics talking point imported from the sick vortex of American academia. (On Radio 4 this happens much more frequently, about every 35 seconds.) It is unbearable, like paying £159 a year, on pain of imprisonment, to be told off by a particularly irritating polytechnic lecturer.

BBC News gets a lot of stick for this, understandably, but the Beeb’s drama, comedy and documentary output is now infested with it, too. It’s the same crushingly banal suite of opinions across everything.

Life before Blair was a grey, damp horror, a cultural wasteland of prejudice where Oswald Mosley had huge amounts of support (strangely enough, insinuating that people’s grandparents were all fascists doesn’t endear them to you). Working-class whites are bigots who can’t be trusted with basic information in case they start a race war. Fiona Bruce has kittens live on air when a doctor states the simple fact that it’s impossible to change sex. The BBC’s younger journalists have to be told that people have different opinions. If upper-class or working-class people can’t be shamed or blamed for something, the BBC just isn’t interested. It is stultifyingly bourgeois.

The BBC is often valued, and often trumpets itself, as a thing that brings the nation together. I think it has transmogrified into doing the opposite, with a superior sneer that treats Britain like something it’s found on its shoe.

Conservatives versus the “Blob”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sam Ashworth-Hayes is writing here about the British Conservative party, but just swap out the names and it’s equally applicable to the Canadian equivalent, and very likely true for the rest of the western world:

The Conservative party is trapped in a nightmare of its own making. Number 10 is rocked by scandals, support in the polls is plummeting, the Northern Ireland Protocol (Chekhov’s car bomb) waits patiently for its return to the newscycle. As with every good nightmare, there is the sense of unease that something remains undone.

That something would be “conserving”. Set aside economic policy, where the Conservatives and Labour are still just about separable — although the new interest in higher taxes, spending and regulation is rapidly eroding this gap — and judge the period on the social axis: same-sex marriage, net migration at record highs, the march of progressive ideas through academia, business and press and into government speeches. You could be forgiven for thinking that Labour won the 2010 election, and every bout subsequent.

Why is that the Conservative party governs in such a fundamentally unconservative way? Part of the issue is that the average Conservative MP is, on social issues, basically indistinguishable from the average Labour voter, while the average Labour MP is to the left even of this. The centre of gravity in Parliament is well to the left of the general population.

A second part of the answer — and a partial cause of the first — is that the infrastructure of British politics is not designed for the right. When Michael Gove and his then-Special Advisor Dominic Cummings attempted to shake up the English education system in 2014, they found themselves publicly at war with what they termed “the Blob”: an amorphous conglomerate of civil servants, academics and unions that acted to gum up change and ensure stasis in the interests of its members. Rightwards reform is received as violent revolution, whilst the constant leftwards drift goes unremarked and unchallenged.

When Cummings made his way to Number 10, so did the concept of the Blob, expanded to include the BBC, various quangos, much of Whitehall and what is sometimes called “civil society”. The example of hate crime policy is illustrative of the general idea. The concept is not dissimilar to Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, or the Trumpian “deep state”. Critics of such accusations point out, not unreasonably, that coordinating so many constituent parts would be almost impossible — but this misses the point entirely. The purpose of a system is what it does, and individual elements responding to an ecosystem of incentives that produce given results can act in a remarkably coordinated way, when those incentives point in the same direction.

January 20, 2022

QotD: The Boot-On-Your-Neck parties

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As my regular readers know, as far as I’m concerned, they represent two not-terribly-different wings of exactly the same political party: the Boot on Your Neck Party. If it isn’t George Bush with his boot on your neck after 2008 — if George isn’t there any more to steal half of everything you make, and enslave your kids for military and other purposes, and dog your steps, and lowjack your phone, and read your mail, and ransack your medical records, and censor your radio and television, and search your home, and probe your bunghole — it’ll be Hillary.

Or somebody just like her.

Neither of these phony antagonists will offer not to do any of those evil things. Instead, they’re competing on the basis of who can deprive us all of more of our rights faster. Standing on the shoulders of would-be tyrants like Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson, Bill Clinton did his damnable best to make the state stronger and more unaccountable to the people. George Bush stands on Clinton’s shoulders today.

Any “progress” made by Republicans in converting America into a dictatorship will be absorbed by the next Democratic administration before they go on to make “progress” of their own. The “no-fly” list will become the “no-ride” list, then the “no-drive” list, then the “no-walk” list, and finally the “no-breathe” list. Why anybody should think that it matters which wing of the Boot on Your Neck Party is doing it to us at any given moment is — and always has been — beyond me.

L. Neil Smith, “Time for a Boynout”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-02-19.

January 19, 2022

QotD: Pandemics

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Governments thrive on infectious diseases, because only governments, or institutions that are very hard to distinguish from governments, can contain them. Which is why I always suspect that such “pandemics” (pandemic seems now to be the regular word for an “epidemic”) tend to be somewhat exaggerated. But if I were a politician, I would never dare to say such a thing.

Brian Micklethwait, “Not a good time to be a chicken”, Samizdata, 2006-02-21.

January 17, 2022

“We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Frank Furedi on the British government’s use (and over-use) of “nudge” polices to influence the behaviour of the British public:

Behavioural science, aka “nudging”, has been used by the government during the pandemic to scare people into doing the “right” thing. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the UK government. He wrote that the “most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed [to] the public”.

Though he said that the propagation of fear had more to do “with government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters” than with behavioural scientists themselves, Ruda’s admission is still striking. He even expressed concern about the state’s willingness “to use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny”.

Ruda is not the only behavioural scientist concerned about officialdom’s systematic scaremongering. On 22 March 2020, a paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Behaviour Advisory Committee (SPI-B) for the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) complained that the public was too relaxed about the pandemic. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”, it stated, adding that too many “are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group”. It then urged the government to increase “the perceived level of personal threat… among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”.

Some members of SAGE have since reported feeling “embarrassed” by the nature of SPI-B’s advice. As one regular SAGE attendee put it last year: “The British people have been subjected to an unevaluated psychological experiment without being told that is what’s happening.”

It is to be welcomed that at least some behavioural scientists are now questioning the political use of their discipline. But the problem goes deeper than fear-mongering during the pandemic. We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life in general.

January 14, 2022

People who tell “noble lies” are still liars who should not be trusted

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley considers why so many scientists went along with the disinformation campaign to obscure or discredit the lab-leak theory on the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.
In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

January 13, 2022

Canadians believe we have the world’s best healthcare system … we’re sadly deluded about that, as the pandemic has demonstrated

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Harrison Ruess points out how far down the international “league table” Canadian healthcare ranks, despite our fervent beliefs that it’s our healthcare system that somehow “defines” what it is to be Canadian (I’ve honestly never understood that particular belief):

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Millions of Canadians are extremely proud of our health-care system. They defend it and are utterly convinced of its greatness. They react with hostility to any hint of change.

But on what basis could Canada make a claim to health-care greatness?

According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On morality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit at seventh.

In modern parlance of TL;DR, what the OECD data says is that Canada spends a disproportionately large amount of money to get strongly mediocre health outcomes.

For an overall picture we can look at the World Health Organization’s ranking system, which measures, “responsiveness (both level and distribution), fair financing, and health inequality, in addition to the more traditional goal of population health.” Here, Canada ranks 30th overall.

“But …” I’m sure you’re about to say … “Canada has universal health care!”

Yes. And that’s good. But the shortfall of that argument is that dozens of other countries have universal health care and many also have far better overall outcomes. In short, universal health care access is not a unique feature in Canada. For instance, a few notable countries from the WHO’s top 10 include France, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Austria, and Japan. These are hardly countries that let citizens go bankrupt or die in the streets when they need health care.

So why are we so darned committed to defending the Canadian status quo?

I genuinely can’t make sense of it. Canadians are smart, sensible people. We want the best for ourselves and our children. But at the same time, we have a very long history of refusing to change and improve our health care despite every piece of evidence that says we desperately must do better. The COVID pandemic has made this especially clear over the last couple years, but none of this is new.

As Robyn Urback recently asked in the Globe & Mail, “When do we admit Canada’s health-care system just isn’t working?” and as Matt Gurney pondered on TVO, “When can we start trying to make it [better]?”

QotD: A libertarian view of government

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[M]ost libertarians see the government as the mafia’s mildly retarded big brother.

Jonathan David Morris, “The Non-Aggression Principle”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-06-05.

January 10, 2022

English counties explained

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jay Foreman
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I wouldn’t say it explains why my home town seemed to move from county to county every few years since my family emigrated, but at least it provides a few clues about the changes.

QotD: Absolute monarchs versus modern bureaucracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.”

True. His Majesty was an absolute tyrant — in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. In Tocqueville’s words:

    Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.

Just so. You were the mean and worthless subject of a cruel and mercurial despot but, even if he wanted to, he lacked the means to micro-regulate your life in every aspect. Yet what would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

That moment has now arrived.

Mark Steyn, After America, 2011.

January 8, 2022

The Board of Green Cloth — the original “we investigated ourselves and found us innocent” organization

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes explains how England managed to avoid the first attempt by King James I to impose absolute monarchy — that is, putting the Stuart notions of the “divine right of kings” in place of royal powers limited by the Parliamentary control of the royal income:

King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland)
Portrait by Daniel Myrtens, 1621 from the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

The year 1610 might by the most under-rated year in British history. It was the year in which England almost became a more permanent absolutist monarchy. Had things gone only a little differently, King James I might have obtained a substantial annual income — enough to pay off his debts within just a few years, to run a substantial surplus, and perhaps even to never have to summon a Parliament ever again. Over the course of a few decades, so long as they didn’t require too many extraordinary taxes to pay for one-off wars, the Stuart kings could have ruled without challenge, issuing proclamations that would have gradually taken on the force of laws.

[…]

As we saw in the last instalment of this series, James I’s finances were desperate. His predecessor had left him substantial war debts, and he was running a large deficit, so the chances of repaying them anytime soon were slim. So in 1604 he had summoned a Parliament with the aim of making a financial deal. Parliaments were typically called in order for the monarch to raise one-off, extraordinary taxes, usually in times of rebellion or war. Rather confusingly from today’s perspective, these taxes were known as “subsidies”, because they were a subsidy to the Crown. Yet James and his ministers wanted Parliament to instead establish peacetime taxes that would be both ongoing and ordinary — what came to be known as “support”. The deal was that he would give up some of his least popular feudal prerogative rights in return.

The House of Commons did not go for the deal in 1604, as we saw. They may have hated feudal obligations like purveyance or wardship — the requisitioning of goods for the court, and the Crown’s control of noble heirs whose fathers had died before they came of age — but they also saw some major risks in trying to make a deal with the king.

When it came to the matter of purveyance, for example, many members of Parliament wanted to stamp out the abuses rather than see the institution abolished. They thought it perfectly legal for the Crown to compulsorily purchase goods, and even to requisition the carts to carry them. What they complained of was that many purveyors were failing to give compensation immediately, and that corrupt purveyors were sometimes taking more than was required, pocketing the difference for themselves. Many MPs also argued that there was no legal basis for purveyors to determine their own prices for the provisions that they seized — a privilege that the Crown adamantly insisted upon.

James’s predecessor Queen Elizabeth I had granted a concession over patent disputes — “patents” at that time were a rather different and much wider legal notion than our more product-oriented modern patents: the monarch granted patents to assign lands and titles, appoint officials, create cities or guilds, or to allow monopoly privileges over an economic resource among other purposes. The concession was that patent disputes would be litigated in common-law courts rather than by royally appointed judges.

Yet by extending the jurisdiction of the common-law courts to monopolies, Elizabeth opened the floodgates of complaints against all prerogative courts — especially against the court of royal household officials responsible for commissioning the purveyors, known as the Board of Green Cloth.

To Hyde and his followers, this court was especially corrupt. Whereas the trying of monopoly patents had at least been done in the more general prerogative courts, anyone hauled before the Green Cloth for denying the purveyors was effectively being tried, judged, fined, and even imprisoned, by the very organisation that was accusing them. Even if purveyors really were acting illegally by naming their own prices, as opponents maintained, there would be no justice so long as the purveyors effectively judged themselves. For Hyde and his allies then, they wished to do to purveyance what they had done to monopolies — to subject them to the common law.

QotD: You can’t fight City Hall

Filed under: Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Robert Heinlein said that the smaller any unit of government happens to be, the harder it is to move. It’s relatively easy to make enough fuss to alter the course of a federal government, for example, but everybody “knows” you can’t fight City Hall and that the most viciously dictatorial level of government is the school board.

My daughter’s home schooled. And generally, I ignore my city government because I have far bigger fish to fry (or I’m taking the coward’s way out, you may decide for yourself which). But because I’m willing to bet that one city government across this country is pretty much like another (they should all be given 24 hours to get out of town) and the trends they set have a regrettable tendency to spread upward and outward, I think it’s appropriate to discuss them from time to time, so that we’ll all have an idea of what we’re up against.

If it were only a matter of good old-fashioned Chicago-style graft, we could probably accept it philosophically. For example, say some city council somewhere passed a law that lawn sprinkling systems (which our hypothetical city government urged us to install because they save water) must now be inspected and a whopping fee collected for this “service”. Never mind that the Earth got along perfectly well for the last four and a half billion years without the fee-collecting lawn sprinkling system inspectors who lobbied for this law. What we have here (and as usual, employing government as a truncheon) is sheer, primitive, plug-ugly greed, which I happen to define as an inordinate and potentially violent desire for the unearned.

L. Neil Smith, “Feeding the Ducks”, Libertarian Enterprise, 1995-10-01.

January 4, 2022

J.K. Rowling’s subversive tale of a government “controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

No, it’s not a new work by Rowling … it’s a deeply embedded thread of her best-known books in the Harry Potter series (as related in a 2005 article by Benjamin H. Barton for the Michigan Law Review):

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books include a very strong anti-authoritarian thread.

This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.

Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence. Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.

This partial list of activities brings home just how bleak Rowling’s portrait of government is. The critique is even more devastating because the governmental actors and actions in the book look and feel so authentic and familiar. Cornelius Fudge, the original Minister of Magic, perfectly fits our notion of a bumbling politician just trying to hang onto his job. Delores Umbridge is the classic small-minded bureaucrat who only cares about rules, discipline, and her own power. Rufus Scrimgeour is a George Bush-like war leader, inspiring confidence through his steely resolve. The Ministry itself is made up of various sub-ministries with goofy names (e.g., The Goblin Liaison Office or the Ludicrous Patents Office) enforcing silly sounding regulations (e.g., The Decree for the Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans or The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery). These descriptions of government jibe with our own sarcastic views of bureaucracy and bureaucrats: bureaucrats tend to be amusing characters that propagate and enforce laws of limited utility with unwieldy names. When you combine the light-hearted satire with the above list of government activities, however, Rowling’s critique of government becomes substantially darker and more powerful. Furthermore, Rowling eliminates many of the progressive defenses of bureaucracy. The most obvious omission is the elimination of the democratic defense. The first line of attack against public choice theory is always that bureaucrats must answer to elected officials, who must in turn answer to the voters. Rowling eliminates this defense by presenting a wholly unelected government.

H/T to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds for the link.

January 3, 2022

“… the ill-conceived concept of hate crime is tempting police officers away from law enforcement towards making moral judgements”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Josephine Bartosch outlines some of the problems with Britain’s approach to “hate crime” policing:

Photo from The Critic

When campaigner Harry Miller was questioned about comments he’d made online, the dutiful copper on the other end of the phone clearly thought he was just doing his job. Apparently unaware of the raging debate around the reform of the Gender Recognition Act, the officer explained that he knew he was right because he’d been on a training course. This small exchange, which was referenced in the recent case won by Miller at the Court of Appeal, underscores a wider problem: the ill-conceived concept of hate crime is tempting police officers away from law enforcement towards making moral judgements.

Hate crime does not exist in itself as an indictable offence; it is comprised of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHI) and considered as an aggravating factor during sentencing. Developed as a response to the institutional racism exposed in the Macpherson report, hate crime is an attempt to give a voice to those too easily side-lined by a majority white, straight and male police force. The College of Policing (CoP) identify five specific “strands” which designate people at risk from hate: disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.

A new form of prejudice is baked into this touchy-feely approach: provided complainants tick the requisite boxes to show social disadvantage, they are not credited with the wit to be vexatious. Consequently, the police have found themselves unwitting foot soldiers in a culture war which has seeped from social media into real life. The good intentions of officers have been weaponised by unscrupulous whingers who claim offence to muzzle their ideological opponents. Miller was far from the only person targeted by police for exercising his freedom of speech — numerous others have been questioned, arrested and in some cases dragged through the courts for doing nothing more than sharing their opinions online.

Miller’s well-publicised victory against the CoP will force a rethink. It is estimated 124,091 NCHI have been logged since 2014. Many of those with NCHIs recorded against their names have no idea about it.

Looking outside at the cheerless drizzle, it’s easy to understand why police officers might prefer to sit inside cosy offices logging tweets rather than pounding the streets or breaking-up bar room brawls. At a time when much of the left-leaning press has tarred the law enforcement officials as “baddies”, notching-up hate crimes serves as a reminder that law enforcement is on the side of the righteous.

January 2, 2022

Eat the bugs, peasants! Leave the meat for your betters!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Europe, Food, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Orlowski on the self-imagined elite attitudes to the environment and — as a direct result — the growing chorus of journalists pushing the idea of substituting plant-based synthetics and/or insects in place of meat for us proles:

In recent years, media messaging has been emphatically bossy about what we should eat. State micromanagement of taste has increased, too. After government intervention, British staples ranging from sticky-toffee pudding to Sugar Puffs have been reformulated beyond recognition. But the anti-meat crusade demands that something far more radical should happen – it seeks to stigmatise something central to many of our lives, and demands a shift in how we regard nature. As part of this, our media now seek to normalise lab-grown Frankenmeats, and strangest of all, adopt entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.

So what’s behind the war on meat? The apparent justification is the political elite’s great preoccupation of our time – climate change. We’re told that rearing livestock for meat is bad for the environment, and that cows are the worst offenders of all. That’s the assumption behind hit YouTube videos like Mark Rober’s “Feeding Bill Gates a fake burger (to save the world)”, a promotional video for Gates’ synthetic-meat investments, which has racked up nearly 46million views.

But the environmental argument doesn’t look so robust on closer examination. Agricultural CO2 emissions are small – so small that if the United States turned entirely vegan this decade, it would lower US emissions by just 2.6 per cent. In reality, a cow is a highly efficient protein-conversion system, turning protein that we can’t eat into protein that we love to eat. Three quarters of livestock, on balance, improve the environment, enhancing the yield of the land through fertiliser, which would otherwise need to be made synthetically. For example, one of the crimes regularly levelled against beef is water consumption. But the cow loses most of this water the same day – it’s returned to nature. So with environmental claims so weak, there must be some other rationale for the war on meat.

Much of today’s war on meat appears to be driven by venture capitalists, and their client journalists in the media. Ever eager for the next dot-com boom, Silicon Valley has made a bet on lab-grown, synthetic meat. This requires an industrial bioreactor – an expensive chemical process. But lab-grown meat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Business Insider recently reported that scepticism about the sector is growing, as costs remain higher than those for real meat – and this is before one single laboratory-meat formula has received regulatory approval, let alone passed the consumer test.

Another factor driving the war on meat is the academic blob. For example, Professor Peter Smith, an environmental scientist at Aberdeen University and a leading contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likes to insist that “we’re not telling people to stop eating meat”, before adding that “it’s obvious that in the West we’re eating far too much”. Have a guess who defines what is “too much”. It’s Smith and his colleagues, not you or me making informed consumer choices.

But the oddest spectacle of all is the relentless promotion of entomophagy at the posh end of the media. The posher the paper, the keener they are on normalising bug-eating.

This is a campaign that has a high hurdle to overcome in most markets, where insects are associated with disease. “Deeply embedded in the Western psyche is a view of insects as dirty, disgusting and dangerous”, a group of academics found in 2014. Many bugs, such as cockroaches, carry disease. Flies like shit, as the saying goes. “Individuals vary in their sensitivity to disgust”, another academic paper acknowledges. “This sensitivity extends to three dimensions of disgust: core, animal reminder and contamination.” Only seven per cent of the US population would countenance the idea of eating insects, even in powdered form, according to one academic study in 2018. Processing insects also raises practical problems, with e-coli and salmonella. “Spore-forming bacteria and enterobacteriaceae have been reported in mealworms and crickets, with higher levels found in insects that had been crushed – likely due to the release of bacteria from the gut”, another study found. It’s easier to clean a cow’s stomach than a cockroach’s.

It should be no surprise, then, that the edible-insect movement has hit a few snags. Blythman recalls the startup, Eat Grub (geddit?), providing the snacks for an insect pop-up in London’s hipster East End. On the menu were “Thai-inspired” creations such as spicy cricket rice cakes and buffalo worms wrapped in betel leaf. “It tasted disgusting, and so I swallowed it whole. Then the legs stuck in my throat”, she recalls. The pop-up hasn’t returned. The following year, Sainsbury’s tapped Eat Grub for its first range of insect products – barbeque-flavoured crickets. Today, the only crickets you can buy at Sainsbury’s are cigarette lighters.

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