Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2012

Brendan O’Neill: Israel as a “rogue state”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill on the branding of Israel as a rogue state by the usual suspects:

Events of the past week have illuminated what Israel has become in Western political circles: a rogue state for the right-on. Where George W Bush had Iraq, and Barack Obama has Iran, Western Leftists have Israel: an allegedly rogue entity, a deviant state, whose lawlessness they can rail against in precisely the same way that American leaders slam states that they judge to be roguish. Today’s fashionable bashing of Israel is not a genuinely anti-imperialist or even particularly anti-war stance — rather, it is motored by the same thirst to discover a faraway embodiment of evil we can all get righteously angry about that has fuelled American foreign policy in recent years.

The most striking thing about the Israel-bashing lobby is how similar its language is to that used by Washington, which is hardly known for its peacenik virtues. Most strikingly, the anti-Israel set promiscuously bandies about the phrase “rogue state”, which was first invented by the Clinton administration in the 1990s in its desperate search for post-Soviet Union foreign wickedness that it might define itself against. As one author has said, the term “rogue state” is used by Western officials as a “certificate of dangerous insanity in the diplomatic world” — that is, it is used to brand certain states as mad, bad and beyond the Pale, as offensive to all right-minded people. A very similar streak of Western chauvinism runs through the Israel-loathing lobby.

So this week, Labour MP Gerald Kaufman said Israel is a “rogue state” and an “aggressor state”. Leaving aside that it is hilariously hypocritical for a man who voted for both the Labour government’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (600 dead) and its bombing of Iraq in 2003 (many thousands dead) to snootily refer to another state as an “aggressor” — what is more striking is Kaufman’s insistence that Israel is “criminal” and that its people are “complicit in [their] government’s war crimes”. This depiction of Israel as deviant, as rogue, as a breaker of international laws, and the burdening of its people with collective guilt for all this criminality, precisely echoes the arguments used by the most war-hungry of today’s Western politicians as they seek to assert their authority over some “bad state” or “bad people” overseas.

October 17, 2012

Matt Gurney on Iran’s anti-Canadian coverage

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

A pair of former First Nations chiefs have been on Iran’s Press TV to denounce Canada and Canadian treatment of natives:

Friends, I have a double dose of bad news for you. There’s no easy way to say it. So here it is. Not only is Canada set on exterminating a whole segment of its population. That would be bad enough. It also turns out that we frankly aren’t very good at it.

These painful revelations come to us from Tehran courtesy of Terry Nelson, formerly chief of the Roseau River Anishinabe nation south of Winnipeg, and Dennis Pashe, of the Dakota Tipi nation. Both men have plenty of time to travel these days, having both lost their jobs as chiefs. Nelson lost his after his own band council gave him the boot, for the third time, last fall. Pashe was fired by Ottawa in 2003, after the federal government sent in a third-party manager in the face of corruption allegations and violence on his reserve, compounded by Pashe’s refusal to call elections.

[. . .]

But ignore Tehran’s pathetic attempts to portray Canada as worse than Iran (or ask some of the protesters gunned down, raped or tortured during the post-2009 election protests what they think about the two nations’ comparative human rights records). The truly sad thing about Nelson and Pashe’s trip is that there are, indeed, systemic issues facing Canada’s native population, and Nelson and Pashe have made a mockery of them.

Nelson isn’t wrong to point out that many native women are missing. Or that natives are overrepresented in the prison population. Or even to point out that many resource extraction projects, including petroleum sites, are on or near native reserves. And many Canadians, native and otherwise, agree that many reserves are essentially designed to fail, and that the living conditions for natives there are unacceptable. These are all fair things to say.

October 9, 2012

The fight to save booze-soaked Britons from themselves

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

At sp!ked, Tim Black points out that the inconvenient truth is that Brits drink less than they used to, despite all the tabloid coverage of boozy downtown outings:

Not that painting a miserable portrait of our drinking habits is particularly hard today. There seems to be a consensus across political parties and the media that alcohol consumption is indeed a big, big problem. The only discussion centres upon the best way to address it. Prime minister David Cameron, for instance, can announce, as he did earlier this year, that the ‘scandal’ of drunkenness and alcohol abuse needs to be tackled, and no one bats an eyelid. Booze Britain, complete with puking teens and pissed parents, is a given, a fact that simply doesn’t need to be challenged.

Yet it really should be challenged. At the same time as 4Children was busy readying its assault on parents who — shock, horror — like to drink, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) released rather sobering figures. Using tax-receipt data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and survey material from the Office for National Statistics, the BBPA revealed that reality was rather drier than the drink-soaked fantasists would have us believe. In fact, alcohol consumption in Britain has actually fallen to its lowest level for 13 years. Furthermore, according to The Economist, supping rates have veritably plummeted among the young over the past 10 years. That is, the very people deemed to be vomiting and fighting at the coalface of binge-drink Britannia don’t actually seem to be drinking that much. ‘In 2003’, reports The Economist, ‘70 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds told interviewers they had had a drink in the previous week; by 2010, just 48 per cent had. The proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds who had drunk in the previous week halved over the same period. Heavy drinking sessions are down, too.’

And this is why the existence of 4Children’s scaremongering report is revealing. In its contorted argument, its counterfactual assertion that there is a big, big problem, it shows how the largely state-backed anti-booze industry, a morass of report-churning quangos and ever-so-concerned charities, is dead set on creating a problem where there really isn’t one. Or perhaps more accurately, it wants to problematise an aspect of our everyday behaviour. It wants to wrest an accepted part of social life from its mundane context, and present it back to us as something weird, harmful, perhaps even sinister.

October 7, 2012

Libertarian propaganda appears even in video games like Minecraft!

Filed under: Gaming, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Those evil Ayn Rand types are fitting their loathsome philosophy into everything! It’s even shown up in otherwise wholesome areas like video games:

I just realized that this has been nibbling at the back of my mind for some time: Minecraft may be a very subtle (and probably unintentional) piece of propaganda that could corrupt people into believing in Objectivist or libertarian/anarchocapitalist ideas. For those not familiar with political theory in this vein, one of the popular libertarian metaphors is that of resources as sand on a beach, and that there are so many grains of sand that no one should need to share, because they can just go out and get more sand.

Nowhere is this ideology more present than in Minecraft. You are a single individual, gendered male, who is placed randomly in a wilderness. You are able to fashion tools from only that which surrounds you. At first you can only build primitive tools and live in a shitty shack, but as you work more and more, you can eventually dwell in a castle. All you have to do is work hard and know what to do.

The metaphor gets even worse when we factor in monsters and villagers. Monsters are like socialist parasites — they come to attack you, and literally to parasite themselves off of you, but many of them — especially creepers — destroy your projects in trying to get at you. Think of Howard Roarke’s courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. The player in Minecraft is that quintessential builder-architect who discovered fire and was hated by others. Meanwhile, the villages — people living together in communities — can never aspire to the kinds of feats that the player can, and they exist only as resources to be exploited. There is no moral penalty for demolishing them or for stealing.

I’m not saying Notch intends this to be the reading of Minecraft, but it’s there and it unsettles me.

September 26, 2012

Unthinking support of “the troops”

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

If you’ve read the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m far from anti-military. I was in the Canadian militia (the army reserve) during my teenage years, and still have friends who are serving in the armed forces of Canada, Britain, and the US. Since 2001, Canadians in particular have re-evaluated their views of the military and are now much more likely to demonstrate their support for the army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Even so, Canadians are much more low-key in their demonstrations of respect and approval than Americans are.

Some of the more outspoken supporters actually give me the creeps … rather than showing their support for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen, they seem to be showing their support for militarism. That sort of thing enables and encourages military adventurism, armed intervention in other countries, and the militarization of civilian life (look at the military-style gear many police departments now operate, including drones for border surveillance and drug war operations). That’s a line I never want to see Canada cross.

At the Future of Freedom Foundation blog, Jacob Hornberger expresses some of the same concern:

One of the most fascinating phenomena of our time is the extreme reverence that the American people have been taught to have for the military. Wherever you go — airports, sports events, church — there is a god-like worship of the military.

“Let us all stand and express our sincerest thanks to our troops for the wonderful service they perform for our country,” declare the sports broadcasters.

“Let us pray for the troops, especially those in harm’s way,” church ministers exhort their parishioners.

“Let us give a big hand to our troops who are traveling with us today,” exclaim airline officials.

Every time I see this reverence for the military being expressed, I wonder if people ever give any thought to what exactly the troops are doing. No one seems to ask that question. It just doesn’t seem to matter. The assumption is that whatever the troops are doing, they are protecting our “rights and freedoms.” As one sports broadcaster I recently heard put it, “We wouldn’t be here playing this game if it weren’t for the troops.”

There is at least one big problem with this phenomenon, however: The troops are engaged in actions that are harmful to the American people, including most of the people who have a reverential attitude toward them.

August 14, 2012

O’Neill: London outdid Beijing in politicizing the Olympics

Filed under: Britain, China, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Brendan O’Neill says that the London Olympics were far more politicized than the Beijing games in 2008:

From the flurry of fanboy commentary that followed Danny Boyle’s am-dram opening ceremony to the insistence that the Games represented the coming to fruition of the post-Diana dream of a new, less stuffy Britain, the urge to politicise the Games has been intense. That the political classes have sought so shamelessly to usher in ‘another kind of Britain’ on the back of the Games speaks volumes about their desperate need for a new national narrative, and their disillusionment with the democratic route to social overhaul.

Normally we frown upon elites that heap their political obsessions on to mass sporting events. We think of Hitler turning the Berlin Games into an advert for Aryan superiority (a vision shot down by Jesse Owens) or of the Beijing opening ceremony’s thousands of fantastically coordinated drummers and boastful history lesson, described by one British hack last week as ‘crypto-fascist’. And yet, Britain’s ostensibly liberal observers thought nothing of turning 2012 into an advert for their own allegedly superior way of life and thinking.

The tone was set by Labour MP and historian Tristram Hunt, who described Boyle’s opening ceremony as the ‘march past’ — that is, victory parade — of his side in the Culture Wars. The ceremony was proof, said Hunt, that ‘the left took victory in the Culture Wars’, and moreover that a New Britain was being born: if the Queen’s Jubilee celebrated a ‘staid and nostalgic national identity’, this ceremony ‘offered an attractively contradictory, complicated, and above all creative conception of these Isles of Wonder’.

There has since been a concerted effort to turn the ‘bonkers’ opening ceremony into a new national narrative. Somewhat defensively, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland insists that it is ‘not just Guardian types’ who are exalting in the new political vision provided by both the ceremony and the multicultural message of the Games that followed — the whole nation is, apparently, recognising that ‘we have glimpsed another kind of Britain’, and that we should ‘love the country we have become — informal, mixed, quirky — rather than the one we used to be… reactionary’.

June 28, 2012

Don’t expect Korean re-unification to follow the German script of the 1990s

Filed under: Asia, China, Japan, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Some potentially chilling geo-strategic news from China:

The government has had reports issued denying American and Japanese studies of the rapid expansion of Chinese military power in the last decade. The Chinese reports were issued in Chinese, English and Japanese. China’s official line is that their armed forces are only for defense and are growing at a far more modest rate than foreign analysts are claiming. The Chinese are having a hard time refuting the foreign analysts, given the availability of satellite photos and many cell phone images of new Chinese weapons. China tries to control this sort of information leak, but has been unable to do so.

Another problem for China is the fact that internal propaganda campaigns cannot be kept secret from the outside world. This was never possible, but even with a heavily censored Chinese Internet, such embarrassing news quickly gets to an international audience very quickly. The latest example of this is remarks by Chinese officials about the “Great Wall of China.” The new claims are that the wall was larger than its current official size, and incorporates parts of North Korea. This was alarming news in South Korea, which is preparing to take over North Korea when the communist dictatorship up there collapses. The collapse is expected soon. With this new “Great Wall” argument the Chinese are announcing that if the North Korean government losses control, China will reclaim some “lost provinces” and the foreigners (including South Korea, Japan and the United States) had better stay out of it.

Given the Chinese claims in the South China Sea (that is, almost all of it), it is probably no surprise to the other nations that China might also have designs on part or all of the territory of modern day North Korea. When the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) collapsed in the early 1990s, the Federal Republic (West Germany) was able to pick up the pieces in a relatively co-ordinated manner. China may not want South Korea doing the same thing after a North Korean collapse.

May 6, 2012

The UN keeps its priorities clear

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

As if we needed any reminder that the UN is a political entity, this story by Hillel Neuer should provide a useful refresher:

According to the World Food Program, half a million people don’t have enough to eat in Syria. Fears are growing that the regime is using hunger as a weapon.

This is the kind of emergency which should attract the attention of the UN Human Rights Council’s hunger monitor, who has the ability to spotlight situations and place them on the world agenda. Yet Olivier de Schutter of Belgium, the “Special Rapporteur on the right to food,” is not going to Syria.

Instead, the UN’s food monitor is coming to investigate Canada.

That’s right. Despite dire food emergencies around the globe, De Schutter will be devoting the scarce time and resources of the international community on an 11-day tour of Canada — a country that ranks at the bottom of global hunger concerns.

A key co-ordinator and promoter of De Schutter’s mission is Food Secure Canada, a lobby group whose website accuses the Harper government of “failing Canadians…and [failing to] fulfill the right to food for all.” The group calls instead for a “People’s Food Policy.”

[. . .]

Before Canadians can take De Schutter seriously, they ought to ask him some serious questions about whether his mission is about human rights or a political agenda.

First, consider the origins of the UN’s “right to food” mandate. In voluminous background information provided by De Schutter and his local promoters, there’s no mention that their sponsor was Cuba, a country where some women resort to prostitution for food. De Schutter does not want you to know that Havana’s Communist government created his post, nor that the co-sponsors included China, North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe.

These and other repressive regimes are seeking a political weapon to attack the West. That is why the first person they chose to fill the post, when it started in 2000, was Jean Ziegler. The former Swiss Socialist politician was a man they could trust: In 1989, he announced to the world the creation of the Muammar Gaddafi Human Rights Prize.

H/T to Nicholas Packwood (Ghost of a Flea).

April 22, 2012

Protecting the Turkish identity should not include ignoring history

Filed under: Education, History, Liberty, Middle East, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Ayşe Kadıoğlu is a Turk who went to university in the United States. Part of the experience was meeting Armenian-American students in Boston and learning about events in Turkish history that have been rigorously suppressed in aid of bolstering “Turkishness”:

I grew up in Turkey, where the prevailing education system still conceals certain historical facts in primary and secondary school curricula lest they harm the “indivisibility of the state with its country and nation”, an expression that is used several times in the current Turkish constitution. Perhaps the fear about deeds that can harm the unity of the state and nation is best symbolised in the Turkish national anthem, which begins with the lyrics “Do not fear”.

When fears nurture and sustain taboos, the ability to retain experiences declines. Enduring an education that is laden with either false historical facts or an eerie silence makes it impossible for people to exit the state of self-imposed immaturity.

[. . .]

There are many taboos in Turkey that mainly concern the protection of the “indivisibility of the state and nation”. There are also many laws that make it a crime to break these taboos. When taboos are sustained by law, the minds (and, many times, bodies) of citizens end up being imprisoned. One such taboo involves the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In Turkey, it is a crime to insult his memory and harm his statutes. Another taboo involves the sacredness of the armed forces. This is sustained by a law against discouraging people from performing their compulsory military service.

[. . .]

Taboos, enforced by law, are fetters in front of the ability to reason. It is possible to be released from the spell of taboos and strengthen the ethos of democracy by upholding the realm of public debate and deliberation. Therefore, yes, I agree with Free Speech Debate’s fourth draft principle, “We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge”, because we try not to be trapped in a state of immaturity and want to do our utmost to fulfil our capacities as reasonable human beings.

April 17, 2012

The US Navy’s next destroyer will be the USS Lyndon B. Johnson

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

I guess they’re happy they don’t have to use that particular name on an aircraft carrier:

Strike one against the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson: the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A confusing episode off the Vietnamese coast on August 2, 1964 resulted in a brief maritime skirmish with the North Vietnamese. The destroyer U.S.S. Maddox got shot; one of its aircraft was damaged. It was unclear who fired first. (A claimed follow-on engagement two days later was ultimately determined to have been a fiction.) Johnson’s administration, seeking an excuse to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, portrayed the incident to Congress as a clear-cut act of North Vietnamese aggression. A decade later, the futile Vietnam war had claimed 57,000 American lives.

Strike two: Lyndon Johnson’s Naval war record was similarly dubious. As Johnson’s magisterial biographer, Robert Caro, documented in Means of Ascent, Johnson’s Naval commission in World War II was the result of string-pulling. (Johnson was a sitting congressman at the time; he sought a commission to bolster his political career.) His military career consisted of a single combat flight over the Pacific for which he received a Silver Star. For the next two decades, Johnson repeatedly exaggerated his tall tale of defying a Japanese Zero.

Strike three: the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson will be a Zumwalt-class destroyer — a class of ship singled out by good-government watchdogs as an unaffordable boondoggle.

April 9, 2012

The “bloodiest battle” in British history

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Although the total number of casualties would be exceeded in other wars the British fought, the Battle of Towton in 1461 was the bloodiest battle to take place in Britain:

The bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil was not Hastings in 1066, when King Harold died, nor Marston Moor in 1644, where the Whitecoats fought to the death against Cromwell’s Ironsides, nor Culloden a hundred years later, where “Butcher” Cumberland broke the Highland clans. It was the now all-but-forgotten Battle of Towton, fought on Palm Sunday 1461, between Lancastrians and Yorkists in one of their many clashes in the Wars of the Roses, to decide who should be king.

Forces totaling 75,000 men marched to Towton, reckoned at 10% of the total military-age manpower of England and Wales, and 28,000 of them died there. The figure is the result of a body count performed on the field by heralds and confirmed by several independent contemporary witnesses.

[. . .]

Even though far more of Henry’s Lancastrians than Yorkists fell at Towton, the battle was not even a decisive one: The Wars of the Roses rolled on for more than 20 years afterward. One reason for the clash’s harrowing violence was that civil war had turned into personal vendetta. The Yorkist leader, later King Edward IV, had lost his father and younger brother, dying in battle or murdered after it. Killing York senior and stirring the wrath of his son was a mistake, for the 18-year-old was 6-foot-4, a giant by medieval standards, and he had charisma that inspired followers.

His Lancastrian enemies were led by the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland and Baron Clifford, all of whom also had fathers to avenge. After years of regional feuds and fighting, the gentry and even the yeomanry of England had scores to pay off as well. There was no taking for ransom, and no quarter given. That probably accounts for the determination with which both sides fought, confirmed by high losses suffered even by the winners. Twenty thousand Lancastrians died, probably at least half of them as they were remorselessly pursued in retreat, but 8,000 Yorkists fell too.

One of the reasons the battle is so little-remembered — aside from it not being decisive in spite of the carnage — is that it was shoved down the memory hole by the Tudors after that dynasty came to the throne:

Very few records of the battle survive, which is one reason that so little is known about it. Historians believe this could be due to an early propaganda campaign by the Tudors.

Author and historian George Goodwin, who this month publishes a new book: Fatal Colours: Towton, 1461 – England’s Most Brutal Battle, said: “The Tudors did a tremendously good propaganda job in making Bosworth the key battle because that was the battle which ended the Wars of the Roses. They were the winners and they got to write the history books. Because Towton was a Yorkist victory that wasn’t really very useful to them.”

March 23, 2012

Millennial generation not following the script

Filed under: Economics, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

They’ve been subjected to more “sharing/caring” and “we are the world” propaganda than any group of youngsters since the Young Pioneers and the Hitler Youth, yet they appear to be shrugging off the programming in double-quick time:

Young Amer­i­cans care less and less about the the en­vi­ron­ment, pol­i­tics, and the world around them in gen­er­al, a study has found; even the idea of seek­ing a mean­ing­ful life is out of fash­ion.

In­stead, mon­ey, im­age and fame are the idols of our time.

“Pop­u­lar views of the mil­len­ni­al genera­t­ion, born in the 1980s and 1990s, as more car­ing, com­mun­ity-oriented and pol­i­tic­ally en­gaged than pre­vi­ous genera­t­ions are largely in­cor­rect, par­tic­u­larly when com­pared to ba­by boomers and Genera­t­ion X at the same age,” said the stu­dy’s lead au­thor, Jean Twenge, a psy­chol­o­gist at San Die­go State Uni­vers­ity and au­thor of the book Genera­t­ion Me. “These da­ta show that re­cent genera­t­ions are less likely to em­brace com­mun­ity mind­ed­ness and are fo­cus­ing more on mon­ey, im­age and fame.”

[. . .]

The wish to save the en­vi­ron­ment, an ar­ea of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to mil­len­ni­als, showed some of the larg­est de­clines, with three times as many mil­len­ni­als as ba­by boomers at the same age say­ing they made no per­son­al ef­fort to help the en­vi­ron­ment. Fif­ty-one per­cent of mil­len­ni­als said they made an ef­fort to cut down on elec­tri­city use to save en­er­gy, com­pared to 68 per­cent of boomers in the 1970s.

[. . .]

In the Amer­i­can Fresh­man sur­vey, the pro­por­tion of stu­dents who said be­ing wealthy was very im­por­tant to them rose from 45 per­cent for ba­by boomers (sur­veyed be­tween 1966 and 1978) to 70 per­cent for Genera­t­ion Xers (sur­veyed be­tween 1979 and 1999) and 75 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als (sur­veyed be­tween 2000 and 2009).

The frac­tion who said it was im­por­tant to keep up to date with pol­i­tics dropped, from 50 per­cent for boomers to 39 per­cent for Genera­t­ion Xers and 35 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als. “Be­com­ing in­volved in pro­grams to clean up the en­vi­ron­ment” fell from 33 per­cent for boomers to 20 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als. “De­vel­op­ing a mean­ing­ful phi­los­o­phy of life” de­creased the most across genera­t­ions, from 73 per­cent for boomers to 45 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als.

March 10, 2012

More on the story of the WWII poster “Keep Calm and Carry On”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

That looks like my kind of book shop! If/when I’m next in Alnwick, I’ll have to stop in for a visit.

Earlier item about the poster here.

February 8, 2012

Help combat RRSHS (Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome)

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Timandra Harkness on the latest “scare the shit out of people with blatant propaganda” campaign in Britain:

To put that another way, the campaign is suggesting that if 48,000 women all drank two large glasses of wine every night (it doesn’t specify for how long — a year, 20 years — this is a health campaign after all, so why would we need to see proper research citations?), then out of those assiduous drinkers an extra two would die in a year because they drank more than the government guidelines suggest.

It’s a classic case of RRSHS — Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome. Why bore people with a sober assessment of how likely something is to kill them when you can scream a terrifying figure at them instead? So what if they’re far more likely to die of something else?

And in fact, moderate drinking offers significant protection against heart disease, which kills one in three of us. ‘Apparently, two large glasses of wine, or more, a day could make me half as likely to die from a heart attack’, the plasticine figure could truthfully have said.

RRSHS is a variant of the “science by press release” variant of junk science.

Update: Tim Worstall loses his cool over the statistical lies being bandied around in this particular Nanny campaign:

    Prime Minister David Cameron is known to have sympathy with the idea of minimum pricing, which medics say could save nearly 10,000 lives per year if set at 50p per unit.

Gosh, that’s amazing.

    Alcohol related deaths in the UK rose to 9,031 in 2008, up from 8,724 the previous year.

Rilly? A slight rise in the cost of cheap booze will save more lives per year than are lost to all booze?

Hey, why not put it up to £50 a unit and we’ll all live forever?

Forgive me the crudity but I’ve really had it with cunts lying to get their bandwagons rolling.

And in the comments, “PJH” says:

One wonders, of course, if these figures are created in the same way as alcohol related admissions to hospitals.

“30% of this death was due to alcohol, 10% of that teetotaller’s death was due to alcohol, 14.243245% of that other death…”

January 9, 2012

What is really meant by the term “Deliberative democracy”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Frank Furedi explains the intent of “consultations”, “public conversations”, and “deliberative democracy” — which are neither conversations nor democratic in nature:

In these situations, ‘consultation’ is turned into a tool of management masquerading as genuine deliberation. The demand for deliberation always comes from above, and the terms of these ‘public conversations’ are always set by professional consultants. The process of deliberation depends on ‘procedures, techniques and methods’ worked out by experts. The exercise itself is overseen by professional facilitators, whose rules are really designed to assist in the observation and management of the participants. These phoney conversations are not forums where the participants interact as equals — rather, skilled facilitators are employed to create the right kind of environment and desirable outcomes. One writer sings the praises of ‘citizens’ juries’ — a common form of deliberative democracy — by saying that such juries rely on ‘trained moderators’ who ensure ‘fair proceedings’. With zero self-consciousness, the writers endorses such a highly manipulative environment as being superior to ‘liberal institutions’, which apparently only encourage passivity amongst citizens. What we have is a pretence of deliberation and a reality of manipulation.

Deliberative democracy is neither deliberative nor democratic. Rather, it is about promoting propaganda through the pretence of having an open conversation. However, when it comes to manipulating the public imagination, ‘deliberative polling’ beats deliberative democracy to the finishing line. Deliberative polling stage-manages an allegedly open discussion on a controversial issue in order subliminally to alter people’s views and convictions. According to one of the advocates of deliberative polling, the beauty of this exercise is that ‘many participants changed their voting intentions as a result of the dialogue’. The author, Carne Ross, offers a scenario where, prior to an exercise in deliberative polling, 40 per cent of people surveyed said they would vote for mainstream centrist parties, 22 per cent for socialists, nine per cent for centrist liberals and eight per cent for greens. However, by carefully finessing the wording of the choices available to the participants, the deliberative manipulators successfully increased the number of participants who wanted to ‘emphasise the fight against climate change’ from 49 to 61 per cent.

Deliberative democrats are not shy about acknowledging that their support for conversational forums is contingent upon the participants reaching the ‘right’ decisions. Deliberative democracy is often promoted on the basis that it provides an environment conducive to changing people’s minds and having them adopt the ethos of the forum’s organisers. Deliberation is the preferred method of communication, because it can be a useful tool for transmitting the outlook of the organisers. To ensure that this objective is achieved, the group’s interpersonal dynamic is carefully controlled. To prevent the spontaneous emergence of informal group leaders, ‘most moderators are alert to the manner in which deliberations can be dominated by confident and outspoken individuals’, assures one assessment of deliberative democracy. It appears that deliberative democracy works best when ‘confident and outspoken individuals’ are put in their place.

The depiction of an exercise in brainwashing as a new form of democracy shows that political rhetoric is just that these days — empty rhetoric. It is a sign of the times that a procedure that could have come straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can be presented as an enlightened alternative to representative democracy. The assumption that the professional facilitator has the moral authority to determine how people should think and emote speaks volumes about the patronising attitude of today’s ‘deliberators’.

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