Aug 292020
 

“All it takes it hard work” they say, and point to someone like Jeff Bezos as an example.

Which is an interesting example of how to lie by telling the truth.

It isn’t always an intentional lie, although you do have to wonder how daft someone has to be to miss the obvious problems with the idea. There are three big problems with the idea that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough.

The first is that nobody starts a business with nothing. In many cases, a loan is involved – in the case of Jeff Bezos, the load started with a $300,000 loan from his parents (and there were a lot of other loans as Amazon didn’t start making a real profit for a long time). There are also bank loans that start some businesses.

But even without a loan, businesses are still not started with nothing – someone worked and saved to build enough savings to keep the business running initially. Saved? How when you’re on a minimum wage job and can’t make ends meet.

Glossing over that, how about having had enough education to start a business? Or living in a free society with a modicum of law and order? Or roads to take your business’ goods to markets? Or the markets to sell your goods in? This list could go on for quite a while, but the key point is that nobody succeeds on their own – there are a whole bunch of things helping them.

The next problem is that we ignore all of the others who tried and failed to become the “next Jeff Bezos”. Some succeed partially and end up with a comfortable life having either established a small business or having sold out. Others end up with nothing and have to start again. But the overwhelming majority don’t become the next Jeff Bezos.

Lastly, we hear how because these self-made people have made it on their own, we hear that it isn’t fair to tax them on their earnings. Apart from the fact that we have already seen that they have not made it on their own, we overlook that most people who are classified as billionaires haven’t made it on their own.

They inherited their wealth. Is that wrong? That is a different argument although I would lean in favour of saying no it’s not wrong. But the increasing concentration of wealth in a relatively small number of plutocrats across multiple generations is wrong.

The Wild Chained
Aug 162020
 

When is “terrorism” not really terrorism? When it is a fake label attached to something lesser by those who want to condemn something without a strong argument against it.

Terrorism is using violence or threats of violence (“acts of terror”) to attempt to achieve political or religious goals. It isn’t all acts of violence and a certain level of (threatened) violence is required.

It certainly doesn’t apply to a group of protestors marching down a rich white suburban street at midnight shouting to wake people up. That’s annoying as hell, but hardly terrorism.

Acts of terror include (but are not limited to) :-

  1. Flying planes into buildings killing thousands.
  2. Blowing up shopping centres, business buildings, places of entertainment (pubs), etc.
  3. Shootings – in mass shootings, or individual cases. Or any other form of extra-judicial execution (i.e. lynching).

There is almost always a certain level of randomness in the attack, although it will tend to target certain subgroups of a society. There is also an element of propaganda to the act (the so-called propaganda of the deed). Threats of violence can also be classified as terrorism too – if the threat is associated with real violence in a way that elevates it above the “ordinary” threats – such as leaving a burning cross on someone’s lawn in an area where the KKK operates.

It is common to see non-terrorist acts labelled as such by two groups – ones who want to blacken the name of a protest group, and those who accidentally trivialise real terrorism by equating the individual’s terror at a relatively trivial incident with the kind of collective terror that real terrorist acts are supposed to cause.

For example, one of the events that triggered this post was a tweet claiming that BLM protestors were terrorists because they were marching through a rich suburban neighbourhood at midnight shouting to wake people up. Just because a particularly nervous suburbanite feels “terror” at being woken up by protestors doesn’t make that march terrorist. It may be a dickish move, but it’s not terrorism.

To claim such a trivial act is equivalent to a terrorist attack is an insult to those who have been in real terrorist attacks, have been in bomb scares, or just waited for the phone call letting us know whether a loved one was okay.

And protests that degenerate into vandalism and looting aren’t terrorist acts either. Whilst terrorist acts can involve property damage the main thrust of such acts is threats against life. And anyone who thinks property damage is anywhere near as bad as threats to life is someone who needs to re-examine their values.

Besides which there are a fair number who believe (and in some cases have the evidence to show) that the looters weren’t protestors · they just took advantage of the confusion.

And for officialdom to label protestors as “terrorists” is dangerous because all of a sudden you’re seeing legitimate protestors being criminalised with some rather draconian punishments that can be brought into play. If anything, it is a warning that your government is veering towards repressively authoritarian.

And yes that’s a reference to Trump’s shower of thugs.

Aug 152020
 

Yeah! Yeah! If you actually asked the Black Lives Matter activists whether all lives matter, they would agree. But the “All Lives Matter” slogan is just a way of hiding the message that the Black Lives Matter activists want to put across: “We have noticed that no matter how much it does protest, this society treats Black people inferior to others in matters up to and including lethal force”.

You can criticise the slogan “black lives matter” for not saying “black lives matter is much as white lives” (or similar). But it’s a slogan not a manifesto, and slogans are never as accurate as they could be – it’s in the nature of using few enough words to be catchy.

Personally I think that the BLM campaigners over-estimate the problems of racism and under-estimate the problems of economic disadvantage (which applies to all ethnic groups). People with poor parents are less likely to do well than those with rich parents; and yes exceptional people will do well regardless.

Tracks
Jul 112020
 

So the pubs have re-opened and our media is full of images of rowdy crowds busy drinking and blithely ignoring social distancing recommendations. And “more sensible” people are reacting by claiming that it was too soon to re-open pubs.

Well, … perhaps.

It was always inevitable that re-opening the pubs was going to be met with a bit of a major drinking session, but was it really as bad as it was portrayed? Whilst I do not have figures (and this anecdote only applies to one of many locations), I got the impression that Saturday night was much quieter than you might expect.

I live on a busy road that whilst does not have many drinking establishments (four plus four licensed restaurants), is often used by city centre drinkers on their way home. Saturday nights are usually quite lively, and special occasion Saturday nights can be quite rowdy. And this Saturday night didn’t seem as busy as an ordinary Saturday night.

What we do not see are the pictures of less controversial pub gatherings where social distancing is observed. Whilst the daft went out in droves on Saturday night, many people did not go out.

There are many different kinds of pubs – to give just two examples, there are the city centre “party pubs” and there are the quiet country pubs with a beer garden. And yes a pub can be more than one kind at different times.

Crowding into a busy city centre pub with lots of people on their way to getting quite sloshed is a relatively high risk activity; having a quiet drink with one or two others in a beer garden is a relatively low risk activity.

It is quite possible – indeed likely – that the daft people who went out on Saturday night are already participating in relatively high risk activities. So opening the pubs may only be increasing the risk of more infections only slightly.

And given the other side of opening pubs – business survival, jobs for those who work in pubs, and the ability of us all to pop into a quiet pub at the end of a long walk (or similar), why not?

Jun 142020
 

In the wake of the tearing down of many US statues of Confederate generals and in the UK, the removal of a statue to a slave trader in Bristol, there is an ongoing debate about the status of statues in the public space.

And some pretty daft things have been said about it.

One of the daftest is the notion that they represent our history and destroying them is destroying our history; no they don’t and no it isn’t. History is a lot bigger and more diverse than the handful of historical (in some cases) so-called heroes.

The best a statue (almost always of an old white dude) can achieve in that direction is to spark an interest in history. And replacing the Bristol statue of Edward Colston with a statue of Paul Stephenson would have very little effect on this “sparking effect”. From a purely ancient history perspective, I might prefer one to Robert Fitzharding, but given that there is no shortage of statues to old white dudes, someone else can take centre stage.

The Bare Family

In the US, it is rather peculiar to say the least that many US cities have statues to traitorous (not to mention racist) Confederate generals. Even ignoring the political question of why they are there, a fair few of them have little to no aesthetic value – if I were one of those dead Confederate generals, I’d be saying “Look, I may have been pretty ugly but at least I looked human!”.

But it gets on to an interesting point – we don’t so much worship the real people depicted in statues as our idealised version of them. In the case of Confederate generals (and ignoring the conscious and blatant racists), some view these as heroes of states’ rights which is more than a little invented – those making up the Confederacy were quite happy trampling on states’ rights when it came to achieving things they wanted (such as the return of run-away slaves).

In some cases the myth of the man (and woman in some rare cases) is enough to justify their statue despite what they were like in life – for instance Churchill was a racist and an imperialist but he also represents anti-fascism, Britain’s war leadership, and the initiation of the European state project.

There are those who would point to the Bengal famine of 1943 as a reason why he should not be venerated in statue form. He certainly deserves criticism for his handling of that famine and bears some responsibility for it, but he hardly caused the famine and there was plenty of other things going on at the time.

Back to the Confederate generals … I don’t think their myth is sufficient to justify the continued existence of their statues in the light of their very real crimes.

In the case of at least some statues, their origin story can be more interesting than expected – for instance there is a statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the British parliament that was put up in the late 19th century. At the time, it was felt that putting up such a statue was rather provocative given the situation with Ireland at the time.

So no public money went to funding the statue; a ‘benefactor’ paid for the statue, but it was put up in the public space anyway – kind of missing the point!

But is the violent removal of such statues justified?

Normally, no. But in some instances, yes.

In the case of the Bristol slave trader, people have been trying to have the statue removed through official channels for over twenty-years! If you do not have a sensible way of handling reasonable objections to questionable statues in a reasonable time frame you can’t get too upset when people resort to direct action.

There must be a sensible, timely, and semi-democratic mechanism by which statues in the public space can be removed – perhaps if 25% of the local electorate vote to remove it, it should go. Whilst this is not properly democratic, if a statue is offensive to a quarter of the local population it seems not unreasonable to remove it.