tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71382852686628289822024-02-06T21:47:40.903-08:00Good Grief, LinusA philosophical audit trail.Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.comBlogger240125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-61007215736036656702022-11-26T10:22:00.021-08:002024-01-16T00:46:49.573-08:00Lockdown Scepticism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPzl_GaWuSpieQQmt68bRSBQDKh32Tx_-hx4zUynbDMaAY6zo9Gu6ATxQ8HaQA6WGiut1y7CQnVljTpxxZbtzTiGqXsD16YY2xp83nzCREMiIa4xUC-fCgIyLSmCE78wiBgImB5UZmbIxtJnTKKZtYU_xstUMFhsbmBzjY501oJWgiwurRQsmJ_FVEEW_EtjgnUg/s7200/DSCF4426-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="7200" data-original-width="7200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPzl_GaWuSpieQQmt68bRSBQDKh32Tx_-hx4zUynbDMaAY6zo9Gu6ATxQ8HaQA6WGiut1y7CQnVljTpxxZbtzTiGqXsD16YY2xp83nzCREMiIa4xUC-fCgIyLSmCE78wiBgImB5UZmbIxtJnTKKZtYU_xstUMFhsbmBzjY501oJWgiwurRQsmJ_FVEEW_EtjgnUg/s320/DSCF4426-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br />Ever since the start of the pandemic the country has been plagued by not one, but two viruses: Covid and lockdown scepticism. Here are some tweets from folk who have caught a bad dose of the latter.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqrehD25MzM8A2kg6N23SdMaKOs_ARV1VdvDUk77Hk9cpT5w9jAKWb6Ri9YoG8LqYauOd0gwcOuDum9VsQZb6QTR3ZjOr1HlLkzTMtxqjdEZdpdWdFejtjQY2vnndrbI3-jQS_EuXiHfiwENGd0SDONKGwLhwMCnAoI2IH7g65RjEFy3Z0hkBAX1QGGV4h4RDLPA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="574" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqrehD25MzM8A2kg6N23SdMaKOs_ARV1VdvDUk77Hk9cpT5w9jAKWb6Ri9YoG8LqYauOd0gwcOuDum9VsQZb6QTR3ZjOr1HlLkzTMtxqjdEZdpdWdFejtjQY2vnndrbI3-jQS_EuXiHfiwENGd0SDONKGwLhwMCnAoI2IH7g65RjEFy3Z0hkBAX1QGGV4h4RDLPA" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/danwootton/status/1593217284834996231">https://twitter.com/danwootton/status/1593217284834996231</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjuJa-QMViweCNZBq896cDA-J6JGho4iftczND312aF747BcAH-vDesX23u69qJM6cak4J0mIBQvLW419yd7FUQs9tO_vbUI4dKYkU87P6BTWnz-2_WvcNI2OHOkfOQS27hxzfztwBUJY4HmMpWQLiFj-5itCSkaAINmX_YFUQvqkCecEYtGoQMnFlJH4-dEN4Nhg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="118" data-original-width="595" height="63" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjuJa-QMViweCNZBq896cDA-J6JGho4iftczND312aF747BcAH-vDesX23u69qJM6cak4J0mIBQvLW419yd7FUQs9tO_vbUI4dKYkU87P6BTWnz-2_WvcNI2OHOkfOQS27hxzfztwBUJY4HmMpWQLiFj-5itCSkaAINmX_YFUQvqkCecEYtGoQMnFlJH4-dEN4Nhg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1588791977163702272">https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1588791977163702272</a><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSyuF531qB75F0epM1NCMTA_Wm7Cr0XwWTyF3KcE60cT-NBTecoDJG8OaZBQdBWvo5bFfI9ugJS4Np6ajTSB8m5YR4TmnGXfXj_9x27TLKwAnlHlYmjh1bDfxbuYSfvG8LSniCA3CTtCPq8QLWaEIHw1IG35SIVGa1-tF-OSvk7rn3nOUDYQajJ6bPhIlVgAL-Lw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="196" data-original-width="589" height="106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSyuF531qB75F0epM1NCMTA_Wm7Cr0XwWTyF3KcE60cT-NBTecoDJG8OaZBQdBWvo5bFfI9ugJS4Np6ajTSB8m5YR4TmnGXfXj_9x27TLKwAnlHlYmjh1bDfxbuYSfvG8LSniCA3CTtCPq8QLWaEIHw1IG35SIVGa1-tF-OSvk7rn3nOUDYQajJ6bPhIlVgAL-Lw" width="320" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/JuliaHB1/status/1560531529486458880">https://twitter.com/JuliaHB1/status/1560531529486458880</a><p></p><p>I think for these unfortunates the disease may be fatal, but I want to encourage others to vaccinate themselves against this virulent strain of stupidity by reminding them of what really happened in the pandemic in the UK. As well as talking about lockdown strategies I will quote widely from the book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spike-Virus-People-Inside-Story/dp/1788169220" target="_blank">Spike</a>, by Jeremy Farrar, to show how shambolic the UK Government was in addressing the pandemic. I thoroughly recommend everyone reads this account of the pandemic from the inside.</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Farrar" target="_blank">Jeremy Farrar</a> is a medical researcher for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellcome_Trust" target="_blank">Wellcome Trust</a> and a former professor of tropical medicine. To quote him from the first chapter:<br /><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>I know what it is like to deal with the science and politics of a new disease. I helped to alert the world to a potentially serious outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in Vietnam in 2004, along with colleagues Tran Tinh Hien, Nguyen Thanh Liem and Peter Horby, then an epidemiologist working for the World Health Organization in Hanoi and now an Oxford University scientist.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 8). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p><br />As an expert in new diseases his testimony is revealing of the facts surrounding the Covid pandemic; he was a member of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Advisory_Group_for_Emergencies" target="_blank">SAGE </a>until November 2021, which advises Government in emergencies, and did so in this one. Consequently he knows a lot about the ins and outs of what <i>actually </i>happened in 2020, and beyond, and not what people like to pretend happened.</p><p>Before the pandemic struck the UK, Farrar wrote in an email on Saturday 25 January 2020:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>This cannot be contained in China. and will become a global pandemic over the next few days/weeks of uncertain severity. Since Influenza 1918 things have never turned out quite as bad as they appear early on … but this is the first time since SARS I have been worried … I worry [the UK government] are underestimating the potential impact.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 50). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Still talking about January 2020 he writes:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I’ve known <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Whitty" target="_blank">Chris [Whitty, Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government]</a> for years too: he also trained in infectious diseases and did a period of study in Vietnam. The global health and infectious disease community can sometimes adopt a slightly weary attitude of ‘We’ve seen it all before and these things are never as bad as you think.’ And that was Chris, initially: he wanted to be much more cautious, to wait and weigh everything before taking action. <b>The lesson from every epidemic is that if you wait until you know everything, then you are too late. If you fall behind an epidemic curve, it is extraordinarily hard to get back in front of it. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 89). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Further:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>[Whitty] talked about the outbreak as a marathon not a sprint. In a sense, outbreaks are marathons, but there are times in every long-distance race when you need to go fast. <b>That go-slow outlook pervaded much of the thinking in January and February 2020 in the UK, even though all the information that had accumulated by the end of January should have set off the loudest of sirens.</b><b> </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 90). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>So it was clear that Farrar felt that the Chief Medical Adviser to the UK government was initially too cautious about this outbreak.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>By 15 February, the outbreak in China was seen as uncontainable, according to the minutes [of a SAGE meeting]. On 18 February, it was minuted that Public Health England could perhaps cope with five coronavirus cases a week, generating 800 contacts that would need tracing. That could be scaled up to 50 cases a week and 8,000 contacts – but, if sustained transmission took off, contact tracing would become unviable. <b>Today, it seems unbelievable that, thanks to a decade of austerity, the world’s fifth richest economy would be so woefully poised to respond and scale up fast to a public health emergency. The running down of public health in the decade before 2020 helped to turn what would have been a serious challenge into an ongoing tragedy. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 92-93). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Quite right; successive Tory Governments have run down the NHS to promote their preferred method of delivering health services - privately. And this left the UK hopelessly exposed to a virulent virus with a negligent Tory Government in power. </p><p>Around this time herd immunity became a possible approach to the virus. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOHiaPwtGl4&t=237s" target="_blank">Boris Johnson said</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>...one of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures. </p><p></p></blockquote><p>...indicating that someone had advised him this was a possible approach. Farrar writes:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Pursuing a fast ‘herd immunity by natural infection’ strategy would not have been ‘following the science’, as was so often claimed at that time, but doing the opposite. It went against the science. We have very little herd immunity to circulating coronaviruses that cause the common cold, which is why we are repeatedly infected. We have no idea if there is any long-lasting immunity to the related coronaviruses SARS-CoV-1 and Middle East respiratory virus. Back then, because of our lack of immunological knowledge, we could not have assumed herd immunity by natural infection was even viable for Covid-19, let alone safe. <b>It is not a twenty-first-century public health plan. The idea of pursuing such an idea three months into a new disease beggared belief. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 105-106). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>And:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>As far as I was concerned, the way forward in late-February was: to accept elimination was not possible (because of early, widespread seeding); reduce transmission; get R below 1; flatten the peak; stay within NHS limits; buy time to put measures like testing, tracing and isolation in place; increase NHS capacity; and to develop drugs and vaccines.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 106). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>By March (UK still not in lockdown!), Farrar was seriously worried about the Government's approach. After seeing some SAGE minutes that seemed to downplay how perilous the situation was, on 14th March 2020 he wrote an email to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance" target="_blank">Patrick Vallance</a> (the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser) and Chris Whitty:<br /><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Are you content that these minutes convey:</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The need for urgency that was palpable at the meeting </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The speed that this is unfolding </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>We are further ahead in the epidemic – not ‘we may be’</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The framing of the modelling, and the behavioural science comes with a lot of uncertainties and caveats </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Impatience that the diagnostic testing lags behind and that there are ‘plans’ to ramp up to 1000 tests/week at some point? </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Not sure when the decision to stop testing in the community was made – is that right, no more testing of community non-hospitalised cases?</p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The significant lag between any decisions and impact, such a time lag in a fast-moving epidemic is concerning </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The need for social distancing interventions to be implemented as soon as policy could be written and communicated – very soon </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Need for comprehensive suite of social distancing interventions </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Increase in capacity in the NHS – an operational issue but clearly a critical one </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>In next 24 hours </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Act early and decisively </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Open access to all the evidence being used within UKG [UK government] </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Shift in policy on social distancing with immediate effect and across all – working from home whenever possible, work places, mass gatherings, religious meetings, restaurants/bars/cinemas, public transport, advice to shops, limit number of people in shops and other places – etc, </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Home quarantine for suspected cases and family for 14 days </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* ‘Shielding’ of vulnerable populations </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Economic support for businesses, self-employed etc – Fair and equity </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* If possible keep schools open until Easter (2 weeks) to avoid staffing issues within NHS – but within schools actions such as pushing hand washing, no assemblies, break up classes into smaller units, no gatherings etc etc </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Massive increase capacity in the NHS </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Massively increased diagnostic capacity </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Support through G7 for R&D and Manufacturing of Diagnostics, Therapeutics and Vaccines </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Clear lines of decision making and control – may not be a time to keep a consensus if that means delaying inevitable decisions </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>* Increase the capacity, demands and expectations on DHSC, PHE, NHS and single line of decision making... I believe these changes needed in the next 24 hours – doubling time now 2.5–3 days</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 118-119). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p>Even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings" target="_blank">Dominic Cummings</a> (Chief Adviser to the PM) and his data scientists were getting worried. Farrar quotes Cummings:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>‘On that Friday night, Ben Warner said to said to me and Imran [Imran Shafi, Boris Johnson’s private secretary], “I think this herd immunity plan is going to be a catastrophe. The NHS is going to be destroyed. We should try to lock everything down as fast as we possibly can.”’ </p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 121). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Farrar adds "That was my view, and I am sure most people on SAGE agreed." Then:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers" target="_blank">Timothy Gowers</a> [British mathematician and Fields medallist] told Cummings in a series of emails that, in his view, the best strategy was to go in hard and early on interventions like lockdowns, because of exponential growth in case numbers. Timothy explains the reasoning he gave to Cummings: ‘I felt very strongly at the time that a herd immunity strategy was wrong – a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation made it clear that in order to implement it, either hospitals would have to be massively overwhelmed or the strategy would take years, and depend on reinfection not being possible … G<b>iven that a herd immunity strategy couldn’t possibly work, lockdown was inevitable, and that given that lockdown was inevitable, it was madness not to start immediately.’ All it needed, Timothy says, was an understanding of basic mathematics. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 121). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>This had been my (pretty worthless, admittedly) opinion since I had heard what was happening in Italy. We needed to do everything we could to reduce the R number - it was just maths (and still is). I told my boss I was going to work from home, and urged him to send everyone home. We locked down before the UK Government did, as did the Wellcome Trust (what did they know?).</p><p>Around this time the UK stopped community testing, despite the WHO urging every country to 'Test, test, test'. Farrar says in parenthesis "Cummings claims it was dropped as part of the herd immunity plan" (<i>p124</i>). Who the hell was pushing herd immunity if not SAGE or Cummings?</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I remember Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer, saying publicly that the UK did not need to follow the WHO’s advice because it did not apply to high-income countries. It was a dreadful thing to say. There was no public acknowledgement that abandoning community testing was a decision based not on public health or science considerations but on a lack of testing capacity. It meant we were flying blind when it came to transmission outside of hospitals, in the community and in care homes.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 124). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p>Hearing now about the turmoil inside Number 10 that weekend adds weight to what I and many others felt at the time: there was huge uncertainty about who was ultimately taking responsibility for the pandemic response. Boris Johnson as prime minister seemed more like an old-fashioned chairman than a chief executive and was being advised by Dominic Cummings and other figures in Number 10. It was unclear who was pulling the strings and who had the authority to ask, let alone compel, others to act. <b>Cummings shares the view that general confusion reigned in that period: ‘Nothing worked. The preparations were a farce, the plan was a catastrophe and had to be abandoned, and the management of many crucial things was a disaster.’ </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 125). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>And his boss had not been paying attention. Cummings adds: ‘The PM spent most of February dealing with a combination of divorce, his current girlfriend wanting to make announcements about their relationship, an ex-girlfriend running around the media, financial problems exacerbated by the flat renovation, his book on Shakespeare, and other nonsense, because obviously he never took the whole thing seriously.’</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 125). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Time lags are a consequence, in part, of piecemeal decision-making. There is an understandable desire for consensus as critical decisions are being made. Then, that advice must be translated into action. Each step builds in a delay. But time is the one thing you do not have in a fast-moving epidemic. Delays matter when an epidemic is doubling every three days. For one thing, you are always viewing data in the rear-view mirror. The number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths today reveals the state of the epidemic days or weeks ago, not the state of the epidemic today. Today’s data reflects the past.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 126-127). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Cummings knows now what should have happened: ‘<b>In retrospect, it’s obvious that if we locked down a week earlier that would have been better; two weeks earlier would have been better still … It’s just unarguable from my perspective that everything we did should have happened earlier. Fewer people would have died, lockdown would have been shorter and we would have had less economic destruction.</b>’ He believes that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, more people would have died if no action had been taken for a fortnight, which he claims could ‘easily have happened given the then current plans’. At his appearance before MPs, Cummings apologised for the fact that he and others had let the country down and that tens of thousands of people died who did not need to die. <b>That people died needlessly is, alas, unarguable from any insider’s perspective. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 127-128). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p>Cummings thought that the herd immunity strategy came from SAGE, but as an insider Farrar disagrees:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Cummings emphasises that Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty were always scrupulous in their presentation of SAGE discussions: ‘They were always careful to say, “This is not policy advice”, and I was careful to say, “We understand, you’re not telling us what policy should be, that’s our job. But what you are saying very explicitly is the Chinese plan will fail, the Singapore plan will fail, the Taiwan plan will fail and everyone’s basically going to have to do herd immunity,” right?’ <b>I do not believe that Chris and Patrick, or SAGE, would ever have knowingly agreed to that</b>. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 130). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><p>I do not believe that behavioural scientists on SAGE ever claimed that the public would not accept lockdowns. The scientists themselves have rejected Cummings’ assertions [that the behavioural scientists said the public would not accept lockdowns] and point out that it was not their role to suggest interventions, only to advise on how people should be encouraged to adhere to whatever interventions that ministers chose. <b>And I was told that ministers were universally opposed to even household isolation.</b> We understood that people would comply with measures if the rationale was explained, the reasons were transparent, they were applied consistently, and they were not disadvantaged by complying. It is still the case that the government must own the strategy it pursued, rather than hide behind the scientists. <b>Cummings says he thought these ideas originated on SPI-B or SAGE, but I dispute this. </b>It should be noted that the UK government does have its own Behavioural Insights team and <b>David Halpern (head of that team) gave the first interview mentioning herd immunity. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 130-131). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p>I think, reading between the lines here, the herd immunity approach was politically acceptable to the right wing nuts that made up the Brexit Government, and particularly Boris Johnson, who was not at his best when delivering serious news. He was a boosterish libertarian, and not a safe pair of hands at a time when attention to detail was vital.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>Still, we had clear evidence that the lockdowns in China and other countries were bending the curve the right way.</b> We were being chastened daily by the tales from critical care units in Italy; on 15 March, cases in Italy had risen to nearly 25,000, with more than 1,800 deaths. It was surely time for action. If we needed yet another compelling reason to act, ‘<a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-9-impact-of-npis-on-covid-19/" target="_blank">Report 9</a>’ fitted the bill. This paper was a pivotal piece of epidemiological modelling led by Neil [Ferguson]’s team. The team had modelled how the epidemic might progress if left to its own devices. <b>If no preventive measures were taken, and if people did not change behaviour of their own accord</b> – an ‘unmitigated’ epidemic – Neil’s team calculated that around 80 per cent of the population would become infected. With an overall infection fatality rate of 0.9 per cent, <b>510,000 people would die in the UK</b> and more than 2 million in the US. For comparison, there were an estimated 384,000 deaths among British forces in the Second World War. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 131-132). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>This was the point that <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/s.riley" target="_blank">Steven Riley</a> had been pushing, in raising the prospect of a China-style lockdown on the basis of the precautionary principle in his simple modelling note to SPI-M on 10 March. The strategy needed to switch immediately from mitigation to suppression – to try as hard as possible to stop the virus from circulating.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 132-133). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>That evening [March 16th], I expected to hear that the shutters were going down everywhere in the UK, as we had done at Wellcome. Instead, when Boris Johnson appeared on TV, he asked people to work from home, to stop non-essential travel and avoid pubs, bars, restaurants and mass gatherings. Venues could remain open. <b>The measures were being advised rather than mandated, and the PM, a self-confessed libertarian, made clear his reluctance to instigate them. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 134). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>So it's clear from a SAGE insider's view that lockdown should have occurred on March 16th (if not before) but the Government did not act.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I was shocked: <b>rather than taking a tough decision, the PM ducked it</b>. Johnson, in fact, did exactly what SAGE had cautioned against at the 25 February meeting. Social distancing measures should be mandatory, not optional. A prime minister cannot ask people to lock down if they feel like it. No countries in South East Asia had done it this way, for good reason: <b>that is not the way these sorts of public health measures work</b>. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 134). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Farrar does have a <i>mea culpa</i>, which I hope SAGE learns from (they don't seem to have):</p><p></p><blockquote><p>It is a fair criticism that the minutes from SAGE meetings do not explicitly show advisers calling for stronger action. I regret that SAGE was not blunter in that regard. We should have been, especially during that key weekend between Friday 13 and Monday 16 March; my Saturday email on 14 March was a late-night attempt to lay out the argument much more plainly and directly to Patrick and Chris that action, namely lockdown, was needed within 24 hours.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 134). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The middle of March 2020 was a critical time period in the failure of the UK response. Frankly, I was amazed that the government had not moved more definitively. By this time, Wellcome, along with many organisations, had locked its doors – after a month of contingency planning. With its lack of panic, the UK looked like an international outlier. Ministers, as well as Patrick and Chris, said the right measures would be taken at the right time. The belief was that people would only be able to comply with stringent social distancing measures for a limited period of time before ‘behavioural fatigue’ set in – and it would be dangerous if people threw in the towel just before the epidemic peaked.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 136). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Behavioural fatigue seems to have been a peripheral idea promoted beyond any merit or evidence. Behavioural scientists on SAGE had acknowledged that people might struggle to comply with restrictions, but had also, importantly, cautioned this was an intuitive observation, not one based on evidence. Besides, the danger was escalating and options were running out. On 16 March 2020, nearly 700 psychologists and behavioural researchers released an open letter to the government asking for the relevant evidence on behavioural fatigue to be disclosed or, if there was no evidence, to change tack. They were ‘not convinced that enough is known about “behavioural fatigue” or to what extent these insights apply to the current exceptional circumstances. Such evidence is necessary if we are to base a high-risk public health strategy on it...’ It was a constructive intervention. So, by 16 March, the judgement from outbreak veterans, epidemiological modellers and the UK’s behavioural science community had reached a consensus: act now.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 136-137). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>SAGE advised that schools should be closed as soon as possible, except possibly for the children of key workers; pubs, restaurants, other hospitality and leisure should shut, along with indoor workplaces. Any interventions should happen sooner rather than later, we advised once again. <b>Strikingly, a YouGov poll showed that 16 per cent of school pupils had not shown up the week beginning 16 March. Parents were already ahead of the politicians</b>. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 138-139). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>People's behaviour may be the most obvious reason why the lockdown sceptics are wrong. Even if a lockdown isn't imposed, millions of people will withdraw in the face of a deadly virus - that is surely human nature. Of course millions won't be able to by circumstance, so there is a deadly lottery to be played out depending on one's lifestyle. It's horrifyingly unfair to inflict mass death on one part of the population (predominantly the poorer part) whilst others try to isolate.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>A COBR meeting was scheduled for Friday 20 March 2020. Astonishingly, the PM reportedly skipped it. It was not until the next SAGE meeting, on Monday 23 March, after ten wasted days, that reality would hit those in power: the epidemic was on a runaway trajectory.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 139). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p>At that meeting, the modellers offered a chilling, two-page consensus statement on how the rapidly expanding outbreak would evolve. <b>The number of confirmed coronavirus patients entering intensive care was doubling every three to five days, meaning that hospitals in the capital would be overrun by end of March.</b> The statement ran: ‘It is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today.’ Breaches outside London would come one or two weeks later. None of this was a surprise to those who had been paying attention in the three previous SAGE meetings. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 140). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Lockdowns were <b>essential</b>, not an option.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Those deafening messages from the SAGE meetings of 13, 16, 18 and 23 March – that the country was racing dangerously up the epidemic curve, and that those in power needed to put the brakes on – finally struck home at the heart of government. At 8.30pm that night, Boris Johnson addressed the nation to announce that a legal stay-at-home order would be put in place immediately.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 141). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The UK was finally going into the kind of lockdown that Italy, France, Spain and Belgium had already enacted. As I noted in my 24 March update to Wellcome colleagues: The UK COVID19 policy finally aligned with global efforts – I do not believe you will hear the term ‘Natural herd immunity is our strategy’ again from UKG. But it had taken ten days to act – during which the doubling time of the epidemic was perhaps five days or less. <b>The decision not to act sooner was wrong and undoubtedly cost lives.</b> In June 2020, Neil Ferguson told the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee that locking down one week earlier would have halved the death toll. By the time Neil spoke, around 40,000 people in the UK had lost their lives to coronavirus. <b>That was, on the face of it, an appalling miscalculation: 20,000 lives swapped for an extra week of liberty. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 142). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Note that UK Government delays in implementing lockdowns <b>cost lives</b>. For comparison, Italy went into a national lockdown on 9 March; Spain on 16 March; France on 17 March; and Belgium on 18 March, UK 26th March. We knew, but did not act.</p><blockquote><p><b>Postponing intervention against contagion is a false economy and a drain on freedom: a country that shuts down later stays closed for longer – and risks losing the trust of its citizens that the State can protect them. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 142). Profile. Kindle Edition. </p><p></p></blockquote><p>So, ironically lockdown scepticism ends up <b>prolonging </b>lockdowns. The health and economic consequences of the past two years is primarily down to the virus itself, not the lockdowns. <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.25.21259556v1.full" target="_blank">One study</a> showed that New Zealand, which locked down hard and early, "produced the best mortality protection outcomes in the OECD. In economic terms it also performed better than the OECD average in terms of adverse impacts on GDP and employment." But the evidence above from Farrar's book shows that <b>there was no alternative to locking down</b>, devastating though that was for many. Given its inevitability, the UK should have locked down earlier, on each occasion it ended up having to lock down.</p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p>I hope this provides enough evidence of just how wrong lockdown sceptics are. Below I add more quotes covering failures of Government on other matters and subsequent lockdowns.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Testing was being dangerously outpaced by transmission and was proving to be the Achilles heel of the UK response. Public Health England was doing around 10,000 per week by 11 March. By comparison, Germany was doing 500,000 a week, some in drive-through centres.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 143-144). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>An epic failure of Government.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>With high rates of nosocomial (hospital/care home) transmission, the obvious thing to do would have been to test all staff, including cleaners and ambulance drivers, so they could isolate if infected. But testing also presented a Faustian bargain: do we test everyone working in hospitals, plus patients and staff, knowing that maybe 25 per cent of the workforce would have to isolate and the NHS would collapse? Or do we essentially turn a blind eye? That blindness lit the touchpaper for the devastating epidemic in hospitals and care homes. Patients with the virus were discharged, untested, from hospital back into sometimes barely regulated institutional settings, where poorly paid carers work across multiple care homes. Often, hospitals had little choice but to send patients back to care homes; they had been instructed to clear beds for the coming storm.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 144). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>As SAGE noted ... the UK needed a test, trace and isolate system (TTI). It had to be in place before restrictions were lifted, because TTI works best when infections are low to begin with. It is a bit like rigging up a system to detect forest fires: a small flare-up is easily spied against a quiet background but not amid a raging blaze. TTI is a textbook recommendation in public health and countries like Germany and South Korea were running it smoothly. Why couldn’t the UK?</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 145). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Ministers decided it should be run centrally and, on 7 May, Baroness Dido Harding was appointed as its unpaid chair. It was a grave error. Health secretary Matt Hancock praised her ‘significant experience in healthcare and fantastic leadership’, but I could not see what skills she brought to the role. She chaired the regulator NHS Improvement but she had no extensive experience of public health.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 145). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Another bad error.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Some of her comments to select committees since then have done nothing to soften my opinion. She claimed that nobody could have predicted the surge in September 2020, at the beginning of the second wave. That surge was obvious and had even been modelled: cases were creeping upwards just before schools opened. As Timothy Gowers says, epidemiology is sometimes about grasping basic maths.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 145-146). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>SAGE concluded later in the year that Test and Trace, launched in late May, delivered only a marginal benefit, even though many talented people dedicated great effort to trying to tackle its shortcomings. Despite the PM claiming it would be world-beating, it was not really functional nor anywhere near the capacity needed to make a difference. Contact tracing needs to reach 80 per cent of an infected person’s contacts within 48 hours to make inroads into an epidemic. The reality was closer to 50 per cent. Centralising the TTI, and bypassing local authorities, was a mistake. As anyone who has ever worked in diseases knows: all epidemics are local. Local authorities around the UK housed regional public health teams who knew their communities well and were used to contact tracing for outbreaks of food poisoning and sexually transmitted diseases.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 146). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Another error.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>A related problem around that time was the NHSX app, integral to the TTI effort. Apple and Google had offered to help to deliver a tracing app, but the government insisted on keeping everything in-house. I had spoken to people like Regina Dugan, who runs Wellcome Leap, our futuristic research arm, about this approach. Regina has previously worked at Facebook and Google, and the view of people with her expertise was that any attempt to go it alone was likely to fail. That proved to be true, but the go-it-alone mentality persisted for far too long, to nobody’s benefit.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 146). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>And more.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>A similar lack of focus plagued thinking on ventilators: worries in March 2020 that 8,000 NHS ventilators might be insufficient led to a call for British manufacturers to design and build new basic ones at speed. Companies with no history of making medical devices, like Rolls-Royce and Dyson, were recruited to the cause. The specs changed in April, as did treatment plans, and companies that were already making such machines to regulatory standards complained they had been sidelined. Many projects were quietly dropped and the government’s order for Dyson ventilators was cancelled.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 147). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>It's clear that Government action was chaotic and undirected, except to funnel taxpayers' money into <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/12/use-of-vip-lane-to-award-covid-ppe-contracts-unlawful-high-court-rules" target="_blank">VIP coffers</a>.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>It was the kind of haphazard, hour-by-hour decision-making in a crisis that wastes time, money, resources and emotional energy. Despite the best efforts of many fantastic civil servants, there was too little standing back and strategising.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 147). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p><b>The atmosphere of chaos made the government vulnerable to what looked like racketeering.</b> I remember sitting in a Downing Street meeting hosted by Boris Johnson and being surrounded by some very good diagnostics companies who were trying to do the right thing, but also snake oil salesmen pushing rapid tests which were just useless. Everybody was just scrambling to buy whatever testing they could. There were arbitrary decisions to spend large amounts of money to order things even though everyone, including PHE, knew they were rubbish. It sometimes felt as if I had strayed on a set for The Third Man, that fantastic Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene novel, which features a black market for penicillin. At one point during April, I contacted Number 10 asking them to stop the government ordering rapid tests that were both useless and a massive distraction. At that time, there were no good rapid tests. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 147-148). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Not <b>everything </b>was quite so shambolic:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>What was missing in March, April and May was calm strategic thinking. One bright spot was the appointment in April of Paul Deighton, the chief executive behind London’s 2012 Olympics, to solve the PPE shortage. He came in and sorted it all out very quietly behind the scenes. Another was Kate Bingham, chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, whose brio and competence stood out against a background of systemic mediocrity. It was all too common a pattern: <b>individuals were incredibly able and willing, but were frustrated by the chaos, bureaucracy and lack of strategic direction. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 148). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>On 27 March 2020, against lockdown rules, Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson, drove himself and his family to his in-laws in Durham while possibly infected. He has since told a parliamentary committee that he did this because he and his family received death threats – but, whatever the circumstances, it was a disastrous mistake for someone in a public position. Cummings refused to resign – and Johnson, who himself left hospital on 12 April after recovering from Covid, did not sack him. Cummings gave a press conference defending himself in the Rose Garden at the PM’s residence. <b>Whatever his story, he knew the rules and his actions sent a powerful signal that we were not all in this together, that the laws were different depending on who you were.</b> As Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said at the time, the rules applied to everyone. Public adherence depended on this basic principle, as the behavioural experts made clear. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 148-149). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Yes, one rule for us, another for them started with Cummings, and continued with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate" target="_blank">Partygate</a>. Meanwhile the libertarians who wanted to let the epidemic rip were targeting scientists like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)" target="_blank">Neil Ferguson</a>, who had been caught foolishly breaking lockdown rules (unlike Cummings, the Government were quick to condemn Ferguson's actions).</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The libertarians hated him because they saw his numbers, wrongly, as the driving force behind lockdowns, even though he was just one among several modellers. So they borrowed from the playbook used by the tobacco lobby and climate change sceptics: first, undermine the individual, then undermine the data and the advice. Dig out other scientists ready to give a so-called expert view that is diametrically opposed. The aim is to cast enough doubt on the science to sow public confusion. Presenting data and graphs of likely scenarios with confidence intervals was the right thing to do but it enabled critics to seize on the extremes, especially projections, to discredit perfectly reasonable central estimates.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 149-150). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Neil was quoted as saying:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>We’ve always had our fair share of conspiracy theorists and others on the fringes of the internet but what has been particularly disappointing is that media outlets have taken an avowedly political perspective. Their editorial departments seem to be less interested in the truth than in a political agenda and cherrypick things accordingly. It’s been shocking to see that in the UK.’</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 150). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Later in the year, we saw the Government making the same mistakes they made at the beginning of lockdown, but in reverse:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>On 10 May 2020, I updated my colleagues with my worries about the apparent lifting of lockdown. That day, the PM had urged people who could not work from home to return to the office while avoiding public transport. Lifting lockdown was a prospect that alarmed SAGE, given how high infections were still running:</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 151). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The rest of May felt like a struggle to keep the floodgates shut. R was hovering stubbornly around 0.7–1.0. It needed to stay below 1 for the epidemic to shrink. But TTI was not properly in place and the UK was racking up as many as 9,000 new cases every day. Loosening restrictions while infections were running that high would quickly swamp the system. Schools would have a phased reopening from 1 June 2020, with non-essential retail following on 15 June. SAGE feared that multiple sectors – schools, retail, hospitality – would all be flung open in quick succession or all at once, rather than spacing them out to test the effect of each restriction on transmission. That would throw multiple canisters of fuel on to a viral fire that was waiting to be stoked again. <b>In pressing to reopen, the PM might have been trying to meet his own timetable</b>. Back on 19 March, Johnson declared that the UK could ‘turn the tide on coronavirus’ in 12 weeks. The deadline of 11 June was looming. <b>SAGE believed that data, not dates, should set the timetable. Despite claims by the government that it was ‘following the science’, it was not. As in March, it was treading its own less cautious route under the cover of science.</b> <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 152). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>So the UK Government locked down too late and opened up too early. There can't be much doubt that was because of the libertarian bent of the Tories in power.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>On 31 May, a day that saw more than 1,000 coronavirus infections added to the national tally, I spelled out to my Wellcome colleagues what a mess the UK was in: People may have lost their trust in authority. No other country in Europe has lifted their restrictions with the case numbers UK has now. All countries had total daily new cases in the 100s when they lifted restrictions and all had more robust surveillance in place.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 152). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>What infuriated me was the lack of honesty with the public. SAGE advice was unanimous: infections were high, TTI was crawling along at a snail’s pace, the app was a disaster, and any release, let alone multiple loosenings, would trigger a rise in cases that would be tough to track and contain. Ministers were not following the science, even if they said they were. Governments owe it to people to be clear about when they are following advice and when they are rejecting it. They must shoulder responsibility for the decisions and be upfront about the possible trade-offs. The public should have been warned that cases would rise as restrictions eased. Instead, they were led to believe the epidemic was over.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 153). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Then there was Eat Out to Help Out:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I wrote to my Wellcome colleagues, somewhat fearfully, that I was ‘concerned that everyone has interpreted ‘lock-down is over’’’. That was certainly the mood music. Pubs and restaurants threw open their doors on 4 July; newspapers celebrated the UK’s ‘Independence Day’ from the virus. On 3 August, the ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme began. Diners would receive hefty discounts on meals served in venues but not for takeaways. John renamed it ‘Eat Out to Help the Virus Out’. Mike Ferguson at Wellcome called it ‘Eat Out to Spread It About’. By then, the UK Covid-19 death toll exceeded 46,000.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 156). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The effect was to create a tinderbox. Case numbers started rising through the months of July and August 2020. Minutes of a SAGE meeting held on 6 August noted: ‘Considering all available data, it is likely that incidence is static or may be increasing, meaning R may be above 1 in England.’</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 156). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>In August, news emerged that Government was going to scrap Public Health England:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Everything from July onwards was heading in the wrong direction. And then, on 16 August, news leaked that Public Health England was going to be abolished. Even worse, Dido Harding, who had failed to establish the world-beating TTI system promised over the summer, was appointed interim executive chair of PHE’s replacement, the National Institute for Health Protection.<b> I just could not believe that Public Health England (PHE) was being thrown under the bus in the middle of a pandemic while the figurehead responsible for the TTI system was being promoted.</b> <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 169-170). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>PHE was, in effect, being blamed for the coronavirus crisis, which at best was passing the buck. At the very least, it was disingenuous.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 170). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Farrar tweeted:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Arbitrary sackings. Passing of blame. Ill thought through, short term, reactive reforms. Out of context of under investment for years. Response to singular crisis without strategic vision needed for range [of] future challenges. Pre-empting inevitable public enquiry.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 170). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>And he updated his Wellcome colleagues:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>June–August was not used well enough to put in place what was needed, too much optimism that the worst was over and it could not be so bad again, continued focus on short term tactics, defending the indefensible, confirmation bias, and the lack of any central leadership or strategy ... Time has been wasted with distractions of ‘moonshots’, blaming the young or travellers/borders, the public enquiry, getting rid of PHE damaging morale of the very people who will be needed over the [next] 6 months, not preparing the NHS, TTI is very close to collapse at the moment... If it can be prevented what needs to happen? (What should have happened June–August) Get the ‘boring’ basics right and ready for autumn/winter, implementing what we know works and just do it well Value competence above rhetoric Be honest and transparent about the situation and what is needed Narrow the gap between the advice, what we know needs to happen and the capacity to implement it Strengthen the Cabinet Office, No 10, or a new grouping to oversee this, not driven by political announcements but by making a real difference Does this need a cross party, national emergency crisis approach? Admit not everything is working, conduct an immediate review, within a week reset a real, joined up strategy... S<b>top trying to pretend ‘it’s all world beating’ – it is not and everyone knows it, repeating that only loses more trust... </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 171). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>In September SAGE met again:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The advice from that SAGE meeting was unambiguous: ‘A package of interventions will be needed to reverse this exponential rise in cases…’ The measures included a ‘circuit breaker’, or a short lockdown; advice to work from home; banning the mixing of households, except those in support bubbles; closing cafés, bars, restaurants, indoor gyms and personal services, such as hairdressers; and moving university and college learning online.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 172). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Dominic Cummings has shed disturbing new light on the events in September 2020 and the efforts made to persuade Johnson that a circuit breaker was needed. By that time, Cummings said, there was unanimity among Patrick, Chris, Ben Warner and John Edmunds that intervention was needed. <b>The Prime Minister did not want to act</b>. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 173). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Cummings claims that, in order to try to change Johnson’s mind, he organised a meeting on Tuesday 22 September 2020, at which Johnson was presented with the case numbers and infections rates by Catherine Cutts, a data scientist newly recruited to Number 10. She showed Johnson the current data and then fast-forwarded a month, to role-play the scenario of infections and deaths projected for October. Cummings says: ‘We presented it all as if we were about six weeks in the future. This was my best attempt to get people to actually see sense and realise that it would be better for the economy as well as for health to get on top of it fast. J<b>ohnson basically said, “I’m not doing it. It’s politically impossible and lockdowns don’t work</b>.”’ <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 173-174). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>So, there you have it; lockdown scepticism from the PM of the UK, during the most dangerous public health crisis in living memory. Lockdowns do work (otherwise what was happening in Spring 2020?), but they were politically difficult for him, and his libertarian fellows.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>Johnson reportedly told Cummings that he should never have locked down in the first place and that he felt Cummings had manipulated SAGE into calling for the March lockdown. This allegation that SAGE was ‘manipulated’ is untrue.</b> <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 174). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Whatever happened behind the doors of Number 10, the government chose not to act in September 2020. Or, rather, it chose to not impose a lockdown – only a 10pm curfew and a request for people to work from home. <b>I respect the mantra that scientists advise and ministers must decide, but ministers were clearly overriding SAGE advice, often while claiming to follow it. </b>Not acting is a decision in itself – and it had awful consequences. This was not March 2020, where, if you were exceptionally charitable, you could just about claim that we did not know the epidemic was coming and the data was poor. Back in March 2020, ministers could, at a stretch, have said they did not want to make a decision as grave as locking down the country on the basis of infectious disease modelling and the possibly overblown fears of public health doctors. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 174). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p><b>Six months later, in September 2020, the government had no such excuse.</b> We had already been through it. We knew what a lockdown could achieve – and the terrible impact of delaying it. There was no way that the lack of action could be blamed on poor data: by the autumn of 2020, the UK were collecting some of the best epidemiological data in the world. And that data was clearly showing the epidemic was climbing, week after week after week. R was above 1 (at the next SAGE meeting, on 24 September, it was recorded in the minutes as lying between 1.2 and 1.5). <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 174-175). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The SAGE meeting on 22 October was ... unequivocal. The minutes laid out the signposts towards that winter disaster: an epidemic growing exponentially; an R of between 1.2 and 1.4; modelling that was showing between 53,000 and 90,000 new infections a day in England. Surveys suggested an average of 433,000 people were, at that moment, infected just in England.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 179). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>If scientists were advocating a lockdown, many politicians definitely were not. On 4 November, I was invited to talk via Zoom to the Covid Recovery Group, a group of 80 or so Conservative MPs in the UK Parliament. (I briefed the Shadow Cabinet on another occasion). I explained why tight restrictions were needed, highlighting rises in infections, hospitalisations and deaths. They asked questions like, ‘What should I say to my constituents who don’t see much Covid?’ <b>I kept coming back to the point that you can either act now for a shorter time or you can act later for longer. You have a choice, but only when it comes to timing: you cannot choose whether to act or not. </b>That is exactly the message that I have been giving to Emmanuel Macron from late 2020. We cannot begin to comprehend the anguish of a leader who is deciding whether to shut down his or her country, but the later the action, the more lives that will be lost and the more disruption to all sectors of society: schools, businesses, leisure, transport. <b>Governments are eventually forced to act because they cannot simply stand by and watch their health systems collapse, as happened in the UK in March 2020. </b><i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 180-181). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>The MPs listened respectfully and, in a passive-aggressive sort of way, were apparently thankful for me appearing before them. But did I change anyone’s mind? No. Their minds seemed already made up and I believe the majority went on to vote against restrictions.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 181). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Of course; because their objections were ideological, not based on reality.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I have thought deeply about why my scientific world view was anathema to those MPs. One reason is ideology: libertarianism is one of their guiding principles. Lockdowns are a sign of big government and undoubtedly curb individual freedoms in a draconian way that none of us want. But the alternative is worse, as we have discovered.</p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 181). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p>On the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration" target="_blank">Great Barrington Declaration</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>The Great Barrington Declaration was ideology masquerading as science and the science was still nonsense. </b>There was no evidence to support its central idea that herd immunity was a viable strategy. Earlier in the year, one of its scientists, Sunetra Gupta, had claimed that half of the UK had already been infected and therefore the UK was on its way to acquiring herd immunity. The antibody data showed nothing of the sort; only 6 per cent of the UK population had been infected by September 2020, nine months into the epidemic. At that point, the Declaration believers explained away the discrepancy between their theory and the antibody data by suggesting people were protected by ‘immunological dark matter’. It was an evidence-free assertion, as was the insistence by the Great Barring[t]on supporters that there would be no second wave. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 182). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Dominic Cummings claims he had wanted to run an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and to others opposed to blanket Covid-19 restrictions, such as Carl Heneghan (an Oxford University professor and GP), the oncologist Karol Sikora and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens. Cummings says: ‘In July, I said to [Johnson], ‘Look, much of the media is insane, you’ve got all of these people running around saying there can’t be a second wave, lock-downs don’t work, and all this bullshit. Number 10’s got to be far more aggressive with these people and expose their arguments, and explain that some of the nonsense being peddled should not be treated as equivalent to serious scientists. They were being picked up by pundits and people like Chris Evans [the Telegraph editor] and Bonkers Hitchens [Peter Hitchens].’ According to Cummings, <b>Johnson rejected the idea of being more aggressive with the media, saying, ‘The trouble is, Dom, I’m with Bonkers. My heart is with Bonkers, I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the Mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.</b>’ <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 182-183). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>For the record, nobody is pro-lockdown</b>. Lockdowns are a last resort, a sign of failure to control the epidemic in other ways. Locking down does not change the fundamentals of a virus but buys time to increase hospital capacity, testing, contact tracing, vaccines and therapeutics. <i>(my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (p. 183). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>Those behind the declaration, who managed to recruit people running the country to their cause, have done a great disservice to science and public health (that is the price one pays for the principle of academic freedom). <b>There was no data to support their theory, as immunology studies bear out</b>. Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College in London, described the central tenet of the Great Barrington Declaration as ‘nonsense’, and added that he could not see immunologists among the signatories. ‘It was unfortunate that their views could command such attention,’ Danny says. Nonetheless, they got a lot of airtime and had the ear of those in government, particularly in the US and UK, who shared the same optimism bias for an easy solution. <b>Frankly, I think their views and the credence given to them by Johnson were responsible for a number of unnecessary deaths. (</b><i>my emphasis)</i></p><p><i>Farrar, Jeremy; Ahuja, Anjana. Spike (pp. 183-184). Profile. Kindle Edition. </i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Well, there's lots more where that comes from, but I've reached my copy limit on the book. But hopefully there is enough there to show that Farrar considers the UK Government's response to the pandemic to be inadequate in many respects, anti-science, and ideological. No-one wants lockdowns (what an idea!) but people want to do the best thing for the general population. In the absence of vaccines, lockdowns were and are necessary in the circumstances of the COVID pandemic.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p></p>Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-49898656021401471992019-12-13T04:11:00.003-08:002020-05-30T01:58:13.824-07:00The People Have Not Spoken<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTex55XFo_sAR39LKxLkrQe7TIuIGbLtf2BxlnosyUV4eHFzFpTRZzAMdKx_n81Y758q2vUfM_GiWmQwylDI-n8eJpyMqzOcVfPytFk4R2L6xLVGpE6Bk8yXdnzp68aaCMgbrxvFf-sARUct8/s1600/UK.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="542" data-original-width="380" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTex55XFo_sAR39LKxLkrQe7TIuIGbLtf2BxlnosyUV4eHFzFpTRZzAMdKx_n81Y758q2vUfM_GiWmQwylDI-n8eJpyMqzOcVfPytFk4R2L6xLVGpE6Bk8yXdnzp68aaCMgbrxvFf-sARUct8/s320/UK.JPG" width="224" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looking like an injured smurf</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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We have heard plenty of lies before the election and now we're hearing that biggest of lies we hear after every election: that the 'people' have spoken. This is plainly bullshit of the highest order. As a Liberal/LibDem voter in a safe Conservative seat all my life I'm well aware that my voice has never been heard.<br />
<br />
Instead, what has happened is that a few people in marginal seats have spoken. I live in West Sussex, and The <a href="http://www.voterpower.org.uk/horsham">Voter Power Index</a> tells me that "In Horsham, one person does not really have one vote, they have the equivalent of 0.143 votes". Thanks a bunch. Meanwhile voters in Swansea West have 1.115 votes. That's nearly 8 times more voting power than me! <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-marginal-seats-2019-tactical-vote-constituencies-close-a9214371.html">Newspapers </a>offer lists of key marginals, well aware that no-one cares what's happening on the hustings in Horsham or Bootle.<br />
<br />
Capturing those few people has for many years been the task of the party campaign managers, and in 2019 the Tories were most successful at this, managing to capture many target seats and more, and Labour/LibDems least successful. But it wasn't completely down to Tory electioneering, or the Jeremy Corbyn effect. It was down to a unilateral pro-Tory-Brexit strategy from the Brexit Party (not standing in Tory held seats) and a refusal of the Labour Party and the LibDems to respond to that move. This was entirely predictable, of course.<br />
<br />
One of the first seats to declare is a prime example. Blyth Valley has been Labour since it was created in 1950, but Labour lost by 700 votes, with a swing to the Tories of 10%. But that swing would not have lost them the seat by itself. The Brexit Party did not stand down here, taking 8% of the vote, because many of their votes came from Labour. The LibDems took 5%, and the Greens 3%, both pointlessly. Any sensible anti-Brexit strategy would have seen Labour home.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0fokiRChYVvCNcuNt7Fn-nrDF9bmBcFfrY0kvm7xjFBUAUkA5Rn4pHMeMIGd2iw8AthrZFa6tfLVzSBeCqQtR-pLrVBrwOs4DagNkE2ZBp1LTxHHIJeDCs2TjnNbpmFmJw-z2aP8A5FcubY/s1600/blyth.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="657" height="352" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0fokiRChYVvCNcuNt7Fn-nrDF9bmBcFfrY0kvm7xjFBUAUkA5Rn4pHMeMIGd2iw8AthrZFa6tfLVzSBeCqQtR-pLrVBrwOs4DagNkE2ZBp1LTxHHIJeDCs2TjnNbpmFmJw-z2aP8A5FcubY/s400/blyth.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
Another example is Guildford:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYmemFD8dZ22_8vp-5YzL8Ggz9jH8tTff5brj-gioddiOpdQRMV2IEp48JpYPdVJqPgwJa60_tvr83OeCvx_-2W9-NnYtPCkm3us-wekQ9I5f_S2Dz-yB6-J3XU1CDliDrlVWvOXdzNAuFNF4/s1600/Guildford.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="527" data-original-width="490" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYmemFD8dZ22_8vp-5YzL8Ggz9jH8tTff5brj-gioddiOpdQRMV2IEp48JpYPdVJqPgwJa60_tvr83OeCvx_-2W9-NnYtPCkm3us-wekQ9I5f_S2Dz-yB6-J3XU1CDliDrlVWvOXdzNAuFNF4/s400/Guildford.JPG" width="371" /></a></div>
Here the problem was that Labour took nearly 8% and anti-no-dealer ex-Tory Anne Milton took 7%. If just half of those voters had gone with the LibDem candidate then the Tory would have lost. Furthermore, if a Brexit Party candidate had stood that would have taken another thousand or two at least from the Tories.<br />
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I have been predicting since last summer that the UK would suffer a no deal Brexit, or a hard Brexit at least, and that still holds true after the first past the post electoral system delivered a mandate for a hard Brexit against the wishes of the majority of the electorate. <a href="https://medium.com/@CraigGrannell/uk-election-2019-what-you-voted-for-and-what-you-got-bd24f6a4ade">52% of the vote went to pro-EU/second referendum parties</a>.<br />
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This will cause problems for years. Dissatisfaction with Brexit will rise, as the inherent difficulties of leaving the European Union are worked out, the promised benefits don't materialise, but the costs do. (This will at least be a slower process than if we had crashed out without a Withdrawal Agreement, so we can be thankful for small mercies.) Remember that <b>no</b> Brexit deal will command the support of the majority of the population - Johnson will face dissatisfaction from the majority Remain population and the many Brexiteers who don't like whatever arrangement he finally settles on. That will include the large rump of Brexit Party supporters left without a vote when they withdrew their candidates from Tory seats.<br />
<br />
Then the fear is that this populist authoritarian new Tory Party carry out their threats to fix elections for ever in their favour, with boundary changes and a strengthening of their grip on the press and broadcast media that has helped them deliver this mandate. I honestly don't know what can stop them, if they can avoid being blamed for the inevitable problems of the next five years. And certainly the press, the BBC and ITV are showing no willingness to speak truth to power any longer.<br />
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So, no, democracy has not been delivered with this election result. Far from it.<br />
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Addendum:<br />
<br />
Some statistics which highlight the lack of democracy in the UK 2019 General Election:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Conservatives, increase in popular vote: 329,881<br />
Conservatives, increase in seats: 48<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
LibDems, increase in popular vote: 1,324,562<br />
LibDems, increase in seats: -1<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Greens, increase in popular vote: 340,032<br />
Greens, increase in seats: 0<br />
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<br /></div>
<div>
The Greens increased their popular vote by more than the Conservatives, but it resulted in no more seats.<br />
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Addendum 2:<br />
<br />
Here is master psephologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Curtice">John Curtice</a> raising the issue of the illegitimacy of the election as a way of settling the Brexit question:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
John Curtice: Remain parties and Remainers are in the majority, but FPTP and no Remain Alliance is how Johnson won.<br />
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<a href="https://t.co/318FGbtf5p">pic.twitter.com/318FGbtf5p</a></div>
— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 🕷 (@g_gosden) <a href="https://twitter.com/g_gosden/status/1205581012991909894?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></div>
Addendum 3:<br />
<br />
Martin Sandbu in the Financial Times writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Boris Johnson won last week’s election not by getting more people to vote Conservative — he only improved on Theresa May’s 2017 vote share by about a percentage point — but by getting the right people to vote Tory, and by getting a lot more people to stop voting Labour (with good help from Nigel Farage and the Brexit party). Given the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system, the Conservative vote was much more effectively distributed in this election, so by trading an almost equal number of urban Remain voters for northern small-town Leave voters, Johnson converted a near-stagnant vote share into a landslide of parliamentary seats.</blockquote>
<div>
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0b64a206-2013-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96">https://www.ft.com/content/0b64a206-2013-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96</a></div>
<br />
Some recommended further reading:<br />
<br />
Professor Chris Grey, <a href="https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-brexit-dystopia-bequeathed-by-this.html">The Brexit dystopia bequeathed by this election</a>.<br />
<br />
Philosopher Jonathan Pearce, <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2019/12/13/uk-election-analysis-brexit-the-media-scotland-and-fptp-political-ignorance-deunionisation/">Brexit, the Media, Scotland and FPTP, Political Ignorance, Deunionisation</a><br />
<br />
Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/12/who-to-blame-for-johnson-winning.html">Who to blame for Johnson winning?</a><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Prof. Dr. Eric Schliesser, <a href="https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2019/12/on-johnsons-victory.html">On Johnson's Victory</a>.<br />
<br />
Philosopher Philip Goff, <a href="https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2019/12/16/corbyn-not-corbynism-was-to-blame-my-view-on-uk-election/">Corbyn not Corbynism was to Blame: My View on UK Election</a><br />
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-2898241742333209332019-08-16T02:41:00.000-07:002019-08-16T02:46:08.907-07:00The No Deal Argument<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of Nick Robinson's <i><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49008826">10 things that stopped Brexit happening</a></i> was "No deal was an empty threat". I wrote about that article <a href="http://goodgrieflinus.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-no-deal-argument.html">here</a>, but I am extracting the No Deal argument from that blog here.<br />
<br />
The idea prominent among Brexiteers is that unless the UK shows the EU that it is serious about leaving without any deal at all then the UK's negotiation position would be weakened in some way. But, my thinking goes, if this is correct then the argument applies to the EU's negotiating position, but more so.<br />
<br />
The Leave argument goes something like this:<br />
<br />
P1) To effectively push one's demands in a negotiation, one needs to demonstrate that the consequences for the proponent of not getting those demands are worse than the consequences for the proponent of walking away from the deal.<br />
<br />
P2) Not getting the backstop removed from the Withdrawal agreement is worse for the proponent than No Deal.*<br />
<br />
C) No Deal must remain a credible consequence to effectively push the proponent's demands.<br />
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There are at least three problems with this.<br />
<br />
P2 is clearly false from the economic point of view for both sides. Leavers would probably argue that the politics trumps the economics here, with the principle of freedom overriding the economics, but I doubt a majority of the country would agree.<br />
<br />
P2 also contradicts another, connected, Leaver narrative: that No Deal is overridingly bad for the EU. This leads to Leavers claiming that No Deal will be great for the UK, whilst simultaneously bad for the EU. But the economic effect of No Deal is smaller on the EU than the UK (proportionately, and maybe in toto) while the politics of the situation do seem to overwhelm the economic consequences from the EU point of view.<br />
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This leads to a more important objection, to my mind, and one that I've not seen raised explicitly (although I may have missed it). It is that this argument (if accurate and sound) would apply to the EU side too. To effectively push their demands, they could threaten a No Deal. And it seems to me, this is a much more credible threat coming from the EU. A No Deal will cause much less disruption to the EU than to the UK, so their P2* (Getting the backstop removed from the WA is worse than No Deal) has a much lower bar to pass than the UK's P2. Removing the backstop threatens the integrity of the Single Market and the Good Friday agreement. True, No Deal threatens the Good Friday agreement too, but it doesn't threaten the integrity of the Single Market.<br />
<br />
The Single Market is the cornerstone of the EU, so it's hard to see any consequence outweighing a threat to that, so of course the EU would prefer a No Deal to dropping the Backstop. And see also the point made by <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49008826">Frans Timmermans</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If the only goal of the EU is this market obviously you could think that the German car industry could force the German government to comply with the demands coming out of London, but for Germany the EU is much, much more than a market. It's their destiny, it's not revisiting the horrors of history so even the car industry itself understands that this is fundamentally more important than selling cars to the United Kingdom.</blockquote>
So, in fact, according to Leaver logic, the EU should threaten the UK with a No Deal!<br />
<br />
I think it's a measure of how well the EU has treated the UK during Brexit negotiations that it has not seriously done this yet (maybe Macron has floated it?), but it may just be a matter of time. I'm sure they are worried about the political consequences of 'inflicting' No Deal on the UK.<br />
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*There are other problems with the WA, but let's assume for simplicity that the backstop is the only one.<br />
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Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-46310339420908573952019-07-19T03:25:00.000-07:002019-08-16T02:22:03.322-07:00Britain's Brexit Crisis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Nick Robinson made a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006wj2/panorama-britains-brexit-crisis">reasonable program</a> on the disastrous post-Brexit period that has delivered the UK a constitutional crisis like no other. What it showed was a catalogue of errors by the Tories and others, which Robinson helpfully documented <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49008826">here</a>. For convenience I repeat the list here, with brief notes from me:<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>1. The UK had no plan for Brexit</b><br />
<br />
<b><i>Leavers </i></b>had no detailed plan for Brexit, just vague aspirations. Vote Leave, the official campaign, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/08/if-brexit-was-vote-leave-single-market-why-didnt-campaigners-say-so">claimed we could have our cake and eat it</a>, by retaining access to the Single Market while forging our own trade deals and not paying contributions as members of the EU. Leave.EU were less keen on the Single Market, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5UhCDIwvUc">Farage talked up the possibility of pursuing the 'Norway' option</a>; Norway are in the EFTA/EEA.<br />
<br />
This highlights one of the major problems with the 2016 referendum. In normal democratic votes whoever wins is authorised to implement what the public voted for, subject to parliamentary scrutiny, with the possibility of voting out those who do the implementation if things don't turn out as promised. The man who arranged the referendum jumped ship immediately after the referendum and many leading Leave campaigners were not part of the Government nor likely ever to be included. In other words, any promises made during the campaign could be made with impunity, and without any democratic correction.<br />
<br />
<b>2. The EU did have a plan - a plan for its own survival</b><br />
<br />
Of course. Brexit represents an existential threat to the institution. But there is a tension between making Brexit difficult (to dissuade Frexit, Grexit etc) and the need to minimise disruption to the EU. So they were always bound to be helpful, but not too helpful. This, it seems to me, has been borne out throughout the negotiations.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>3. "Brexit means Brexit" but what on earth did that mean?</b><br />
<br />
This is similar to no. 1, but highlights <b><i>Theresa May</i></b> making the exact same mistake the Leavers made: having no detailed plan for leaving.<br />
<br />
<b>4. The first rule of politics - you have to be able to count</b><br />
<br />
Theresa May should never have called a General Election.<br />
<br />
<b>5. The clock was always ticking</b><br />
<br />
Parliament should not have triggered Article 50 until the UK had agreed a detailed plan for leaving. This seems so obvious now one wonders how Parliament could have been so naive. Once the clock was ticking without an agreed plan, any problems with agreeing a plan internally would take time away from negotiating with the EU. And, sure enough, most of the 2 years after Article 50 has been spent with the various Leave factions with access to Theresa May - the ERG, the DUP, and the more moderate wing of the Tory party (she has refused to listen to anyone else) - squabbling about the detailed plan for leaving.<br />
<br />
<b>6. No deal was an empty threat</b><br />
<br />
The Leave argument goes something like this:<br />
<br />
P1) To effectively push one's demands in a negotiation, one needs to demonstrate that the consequences of not getting those demands are worse than walking away from the deal.<br />
<br />
P2) Not getting the backstop removed from the Withdrawal agreement is worse than No Deal.*<br />
<br />
C) No Deal must remain a credible consequence to effectively push one's demands.<br />
<br />
There are at least three problems with this.<br />
<br />
P2 is clearly false from the economic point of view. Leavers would probably argue that the politics trumps the economics here, with the principle of freedom overriding the economics, but I doubt a majority of the country would agree.<br />
<br />
P2 also contradicts another, connected, Leaver narrative: that No Deal is overridingly bad for the EU. This leads to Leavers claiming that No Deal will be great for the UK, whilst simultaneously bad for the EU. But the economic effect of No Deal is smaller on the EU than the UK (proportionately, and maybe in toto) while the politics of the situation do seem to overwhelm the economic consequences from the EU point of view.<br />
<br />
This leads to a more important objection, to my mind, and one that I've not seen raised explicitly (although I may have missed it). It is that this argument (if accurate and sound) would apply to the EU side too. To effectively push <b><i>their </i></b>demands, <b><i>they </i></b>could threaten a No Deal. And it seems to me, this is a much more credible threat coming from the EU. A No Deal will cause much less disruption to the EU than to the UK, so their P2* (Getting the backstop removed from the WA is worse than No Deal) has a much lower bar to pass than the UK's P2. Removing the backstop threatens the integrity of the Single Market and the Good Friday agreement. True, No Deal threatens the Good Friday agreement too, but it doesn't threaten the integrity of the Single Market.<br />
<br />
The Single Market is the cornerstone of the EU, so it's hard to see any consequence outweighing a threat to that, so of course the EU would prefer a No Deal to dropping the Backstop. And see also the point made by Frans Timmermans in no. 10 below, regarding the historical backdrop of the EU. So, in fact, according to Leaver logic, the EU <b><i>should</i></b> threaten the UK with a No Deal!<br />
<br />
I think it's a measure of how well the EU has treated the UK during Brexit negotiations that it has not seriously done this yet (maybe Macron has floated it?), but it may just be a matter of time. I'm sure they are worried about the political consequences of 'inflicting' No Deal on the UK.<br />
<br />
*There are other problems with the WA, but let's assume for simplicity that the backstop is the only one.<br />
<br />
<b>7. The Irish border issue just wouldn't go away</b><br />
<br />
In discussion with one or two Brexit friends, it's clear to me that the English aren't that bothered about the Good Friday agreement. They would rather break up the Union than not Brexit.<br />
<br />
I think this is a grave mistake because, whilst I think a united Ireland is inevitable ultimately, we don't want to disturb the fragile peace that rules in Northern Ireland currently. A disorderly Brexit would probably mean a disorderly break up of the Union, with all the terrible consequences that might bring.<br />
<br />
<b>8. The EU dreamed that the UK might change its mind</b><br />
<br />
This doesn't seem to me to be a 'thing that stopped Brexit happening', so I won't comment on this.<br />
<br />
<b>9. MPs couldn't agree on anything</b><br />
<br />
This leads directly from no. 1 and no. 3. Without a defined mandate from the 2016 Referendum chaos reigned!<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Parliament is and has been deadlocked for one simple reason," says Julian Smith. "Large groups of MPs have been prepared to gamble that they could force the outcome they wanted - a harder Brexit or another referendum or a general election - rather than backing Theresa May's deal."</blockquote>
<br />
<b>10. It was all a terrible misunderstanding</b><br />
<br />
Leavers consistently misunderstood what the EU was about; ironically (given recent claims that <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/18/may-economic-cost-no-deal-plenty-people-want-anyway/">Brexit isn't about the economics</a>) they said that economics would force the EU to give us a good deal ("Within minutes of a vote for Brexit the CEO’s of Mercedes, BMW, VW and Audi will be knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding that there be no barriers to German access to the British market.", as <a href="http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/02/david-davis-britain-would-be-better-off-out-of-the-eu-and-heres-why.html">David Davis wrote</a>). But as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_Timmermans">Frans Timmermans</a> says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If the only goal of the EU is this market obviously you could think that the German car industry could force the German government to comply with the demands coming out of London, but for Germany the EU is much, much more than a market. It's their destiny, it's not revisiting the horrors of history so even the car industry itself understands that this is fundamentally more important than selling cars to the United Kingdom.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
I have thought for some time now that we are heading for a No Deal exit, and the change of Prime Minister makes that possibility even more likely. My hope is that some fudge is eventually agreed upon, because No Deal is the ultimate Lose Lose as far as I can see, and almost any fudge is preferable!<br />
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-395065956658153092019-03-21T08:27:00.000-07:002019-03-23T01:11:40.902-07:003rd Message to Jeremy Quin<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Dear Jeremy</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Parliament is in paralysis and as such a no deal Brexit appears to be the most likely outcome on 29th March.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
This would be very damaging to the UK economy, according to most economists and the Government's own forecasts. If Mrs May's deal cannot be agreed by parliament and no extension is forthcoming from the EU, I ask you to vote for a revocation of Article 50 rather than let the UK destroy what little credibility it has left by leaving the EU in the most disorderly way imaginable.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
A revocation would not necessarily mean an end to Brexit - we could reconsider our options and establish a more pragmatic approach to this difficult subject. But I think it's possible that a no deal Brexit would be the end of a Brexit that works, and, as such, would result in years, probably decades, of instability and strife. I have no doubt that Remainers will immediately start to campaign to re-enter the union, and no doubt hard and soft Brexiters will spend the next few years arguing about the precise relationship we should have with our nearest trading bloc. The country will be split like never before, and I fully expect the United Kingdom to break up. Anyone who is complicit in bringing about such a sorry state of affairs would have to answer for it.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
I hope that this is a similar message you are getting from your other constituents,</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Kind regards</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Mark Jones<br />
<br />
UPDATE:<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47660019">EU have offered</a> the Prime Minister an unconditional extension to 12th April (or an extension to 22nd May in the unlikely event her deal is passed). This doesn't change the issues as far as I can see, and we still face a no deal Brexit on 12th April, rather than 29th March.</div>
Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-79583752682182629302019-03-12T04:39:00.001-07:002019-03-12T09:33:56.286-07:00The Law, the Weather, and the Climate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb65N4hk4kaOX03U0g5DIUoTIp7IXptM4Egl1yvf4-5uW6T_g5Fu7exQQZctWqN-CosvNdFEEkFsGkqQDAUQneLiY1GZ61AE33POWJtghYhcyDxb8rE2_hMXMPXyhJku5IIk1OVM-of9ST5uw/s1600/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg_2016_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb65N4hk4kaOX03U0g5DIUoTIp7IXptM4Egl1yvf4-5uW6T_g5Fu7exQQZctWqN-CosvNdFEEkFsGkqQDAUQneLiY1GZ61AE33POWJtghYhcyDxb8rE2_hMXMPXyhJku5IIk1OVM-of9ST5uw/s320/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg_2016_portrait.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>
<span id="goog_91660041"></span><span id="goog_91660042"></span><br />
The excellent film <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Basis_of_Sex">On the Basis of Sex</a></i> is now in cinemas, and covers the trials of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</a> (what a woman) fighting for sexual equality through the courts of the United States.<br />
<br />
It included an excellent quote from, <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/transcript-interview-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg">she says</a>, jurist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_A._Freund">Paul Freund</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A Court ought not be affected by the weather of the day, but will be by the climate of the era.</blockquote>
Surely true, but I worry about climate change.<br />
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-26419480818987397432019-02-02T15:27:00.000-08:002019-02-02T15:29:06.986-08:00A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_tlzbVsAhzrwSy5ynIFcLSDsoqHmduYtjq-Q6xB4zbDU7mTne518LmndpwjnRNGo5eHMJJimK6kHUIWSgh1w2Bh6PJYcckZm_rmt7cRV0ASXJ1-vsAYGak85_jqui_l0TPlEE33CFblzWoSY/s1600/IMGL6747.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_tlzbVsAhzrwSy5ynIFcLSDsoqHmduYtjq-Q6xB4zbDU7mTne518LmndpwjnRNGo5eHMJJimK6kHUIWSgh1w2Bh6PJYcckZm_rmt7cRV0ASXJ1-vsAYGak85_jqui_l0TPlEE33CFblzWoSY/s320/IMGL6747.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowhammer">Operation Yellowhammer</a> is the codename given to the UK government's no deal preparations. Sam Coates of The Times has leaked <a href="https://twitter.com/SamCoatesTimes/status/1091613773150990342">details </a>of the plan. Some extracts from his tweets:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
- “Operation is potentially enormous”<br />
- “Impacts ... could grow exponentially as issues impact upon each other and capabilities of responders at all levels decrease or become overwhelmed”<br />
Government creates war-like structure with 24 hour, 3 shift a day “battle rhythm” all reporting to cabinet office / Cobr<br />
Government admits it only has facilities to cope with “two concurrent events to be managed”</blockquote>
Just a reminder: this is something the UK Government is planning to inflict on its own population simply because a marginal non-binding vote was returned from an illegal campaign.<br />
<br />
Apparently the song of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowhammer">Yellowhammer </a>is "a little bit of bread and no cheese".<br />
<br />
Cheese-eaters better stock up.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B3KBuQHHKx0" width="459"></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-45375170866698484132019-01-16T05:30:00.002-08:002019-01-16T05:30:30.718-08:00Brexiteers: The New North Sentinelese<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2y-ctSVR91mbWs_gut8QCknU4123fgHmviDXF8UeNVJtXadg5wpEBxkAcPy5iffHAoG165Kb9VVTLWLOyDP96tb-ngDlIhoSkG1nauMw5YbTkCroYKiN-jrLkLrY_PHieQsL3DVbyuaTKyak/s1600/uncontacted-tribe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="800" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2y-ctSVR91mbWs_gut8QCknU4123fgHmviDXF8UeNVJtXadg5wpEBxkAcPy5iffHAoG165Kb9VVTLWLOyDP96tb-ngDlIhoSkG1nauMw5YbTkCroYKiN-jrLkLrY_PHieQsL3DVbyuaTKyak/s400/uncontacted-tribe.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Leave Demonstration</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Sometimes I think that some ultra-Brexiteers want to turn the United Kingdom into something like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island">North Sentinel island</a>; cut off from the rest of the world because our culture and wellbeing cannot stand engagement with the outside world. See this:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
😳 Ooof, bit of a Brexit ding-dong <a href="https://t.co/oZQ4qY6Uw8">pic.twitter.com/oZQ4qY6Uw8</a></div>
— BBC Wales News (@BBCWalesNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/BBCWalesNews/status/1085229507131424768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<br />
Ignoring the irony of a <a href="https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/report-claims-wales-gets-245m-11375402">Welshman suggesting that we're always bailing out the EU</a>, he defends the prospect of a no deal by invoking our predicament in the Second World War, when we did indeed stand isolated in the world. <a href="http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2018/07/27/this-is-what-no-deal-brexit-actually-looks-like">Why in the world would we want to inflict this on ourselves</a>? We are not facing an existential crisis from abroad, however often Brexiteers portray <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/01/4-most-unfortunate-nazi-eu-comparisons-made-brexiteers">the EU as a fascist regime</a>, so this hardship would be quite unnecessary.<br />
<br />
Of course we would survive a no deal Brexit, in the sense that there will still be people living in the British Isles afterwards, but it's very much <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-46858111">debatable </a>that the <i>United Kingdom</i> itself would survive the economic hit and the isolationism that would result from a no deal.<br />
<br />
Brexit will not be the end of the world; it's just a harm we need not inflict on ourselves, because, unlike the North Sentinelese, we do not suffer from our engagement with the outside world, or <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/202a60c0-cfd8-11e5-831d-09f7778e7377">in particular our membership of the EU</a>. Our problems stem <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-economic-and-political-cost-of-uk.html">from much closer to home</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
I think what this incredibly complex, intractable constitutional and political crisis really needs is more callers to radio phone-ins suggesting 'they should just sort it out.'</div>
— John O'Farrell (@mrjohnofarrell) <a href="https://twitter.com/mrjohnofarrell/status/1085477024976773120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
Of course, it's the 'just sorting it out' which has proved intractable, hence the inability of the Tory party to agree among themselves what Brexit should look like, and even the <a href="http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2018/07/12/war-gaming-the-brexit-chaos-what-the-hell-happens-now">ERG</a> has struggled to come to a consensus:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is impossible to state the true ERG numbers, because they are now internally divided. They are splitting on similar lines to how Remain split after the referendum - on principles and tactics. Some prioritise the survival of the Tory party above Brexit, some are prepared to accept a sub-optimal Brexit deal and then want to try to unravel it after we've formally left. But the ones that are pertinent, who'll define this whole thing, are those in the die-hard camp, the ones that consider this an existential, almost Biblical, battle and will prioritise a full-blooded Brexit above any other consideration. They are now going to war against their own party leadership.</blockquote>
The reason it's intractable is because of the incompatible promises made by various Leave campaigns. Until that fact is acknowledged by sufficient people we are condemned to suffer this appalling Groundhog Brexit.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-k3WXna1llcoTGuy0MawNnlmLECcsd_rC7x7sich0wW-jlWlzXOhYbs6TbPJ-hnqJkxp05G4m8fbtpbcxoHNW6fyJHsMJjsgR3i6sF2Wa_FAi-XQcPkyCtmFdqFwGSt5Ligp_7lgMC0UbvsE/s1600/DhqXd6rW4AAj0EM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="491" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-k3WXna1llcoTGuy0MawNnlmLECcsd_rC7x7sich0wW-jlWlzXOhYbs6TbPJ-hnqJkxp05G4m8fbtpbcxoHNW6fyJHsMJjsgR3i6sF2Wa_FAi-XQcPkyCtmFdqFwGSt5Ligp_7lgMC0UbvsE/s400/DhqXd6rW4AAj0EM.jpg" width="343" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>(with apologies to Sidney Harris)</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-30812057186780275232019-01-12T18:18:00.003-08:002022-02-15T00:43:32.964-08:00The BBC and its Continuing False Balance Problem<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKN87OcyAr6w2C7D2V65_vqRQqtBJ1skfDU0KtP1KNmDgl6Cox-2p0L_muGgqo2UhyphenhyphenuOwWLPkpiSebeCu7CZOtcOBTZu0rC3qqZ3sHGIdvLB3Bnjw37sS0k0HpHLQWZDxQw9x07L3M9PaaEU/s1600/lies2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="415" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKN87OcyAr6w2C7D2V65_vqRQqtBJ1skfDU0KtP1KNmDgl6Cox-2p0L_muGgqo2UhyphenhyphenuOwWLPkpiSebeCu7CZOtcOBTZu0rC3qqZ3sHGIdvLB3Bnjw37sS0k0HpHLQWZDxQw9x07L3M9PaaEU/s320/lies2.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.shchambers.com/">http://www.shchambers.com/</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
"'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows" - <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty">Isaiah Berlin</a></i></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
"What I'm asking of the world's oldest public broadcaster is an understanding of the difference between impartiality and balance. What I mean is your nonsense bloody quota of giving equal coverage no matter what...we put up a Nobel prize winning economist to highlight the negative impact on Sterling if we leave, and then you feel you have to give equal weight to some batty backbencher who's just there to parrot "not true, project fear, take back control"" - <i>Words put into Craig Oliver's mouth, played by Rory Kinnear, speaking to the BBC, in <a href="https://www.channel4.com/programmes/brexit-the-uncivil-war/on-demand/65804-001">Brexit: The Uncivil War</a></i></div>
<br />
I've written before about Isaiah Berlin's concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty">positive liberty</a>, a surfeit of which is really a prerequisite for a properly functioning democracy. <a href="http://goodgrieflinus.blogspot.com/2011/09/dangers-of-positive-liberty.html">I previously described</a> it as "the freedom to choose the ideal life; ideal, that is, according to informed reason". "Informed reason" is the key phrase here. Berlin contrasts this with negative liberty, which I described as "the freedom to conduct our lives without obstruction from other people or groups of people, including the state".<br />
<br />
Firstly, positive liberty is a prerequisite because in a free market economy we need participants who are as well informed as possible to ensure that the market operates as well as it can.<sup>1 </sup>A market ignorant of derivatives, amongst other things, caused the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932008">credit crunch</a>.<br />
<br />
Secondly, we need citizens who are as well informed as possible to ensure they make the best choices when acting politically, either as representatives of the population, or as voters.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately the rise of Trump and the emergence of far right narratives in the UK which have resulted in the vote to leave the European Union show that our society is in a dangerous place. The currency of facts is flowing very slowly, thanks to decades of misinformation and attacks on science and expertise. Many of these attacks are documented by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Oreskes">Naomi Oreskes</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_M._Conway">Erik M. Conway</a> in <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt">Merchants of Doubt</a></i>. They sum it up very well:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our story began in the 1950s, when the tobacco industry first enlisted scientists to aid its cause, and deepened in the 1970s when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Seitz">Frederick Seitz</a> joined forces with tobacco, and then with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jastrow">Robert Jastrow</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nierenberg">Bill Nierenberg</a> to defend the Strategic Defense Initiative. It continued in the early 1980s as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer">Fred Singer</a> planted the idea that acid rain wasn’t worth worrying about, and Nierenberg worked with the Reagan White House to adjust the Executive Summary of his Acid Rain Peer Review Panel. It continued still further, and turned more personal, in the 1990s as the Marshall Institute, with help from Singer and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixy_Lee_Ray">[Dixy Lee] Ray</a>, challenged the evidence of ozone depletion and global warming and personally attacked distinguished scientists like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Sherwood_Rowland">Sherwood Rowland</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_D._Santer">Ben Santer</a>. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Why did this group of Cold Warriors turn against the very science to which they had previously dedicated their lives? Because they felt—as did <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_O._Graham">Lt. General Daniel O. Graham</a> (one of the original members of Team B and chief advocate of weapons in space) when he invoked the preamble to the U.S. Constitution—they were working to “secure the blessings of liberty.” If science was being used against those blessings—in ways that challenged the freedom of free enterprise—then they would fight it as they would fight any enemy. For indeed, science was starting to show that certain kinds of liberties are not sustainable—like the liberty to pollute. Science was showing that Isaiah Berlin was right: liberty for wolves does indeed mean death to lambs. - <i>Oreskes, Naomi. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (p. 238). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. </i></blockquote>
Later:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...the idea that free markets produce optimum allocation of resources depends on participants having perfect information. But one of several ironies of our story is that our protagonists did everything in their power to ensure that the American people did not have good (much less perfect) information on crucial issues. <b>Our protagonists, while ostensibly defending free markets, distorted the marketplace of ideas in the service of political goals and commercial interests. The American belief in fairness and the importance of hearing “both sides” was used and abused by people who didn’t want to admit the truth about the impacts of industrial capitalism</b>. - <i>Oreskes, Naomi. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (p. 250). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition, my emphasis</i></blockquote>
On the issue of media balance they say this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Balance” had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority—in some cases extreme minority—views. In principle, the media could act as gatekeepers, ignoring the charlatans and snake oil salesmen, but if they have tried, our story shows that at least where it comes to science they have failed. As we have seen, it wasn’t just obviously right-wing outlets that reported false claims about tobacco and these other subjects; it was the “prestige press”—indeed, the allegedly liberal press—as well. - <i>Oreskes, Naomi. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (p. 243). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. </i></blockquote>
This false balance has been, and continues to be, a serious problem in the BBC's coverage of the news. In 2011 Steve Jones <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/science_impartiality/science_impartiality.pdf">wrote a report</a> on the BBC's treatment of science and said this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Equality of voice calls for a match of scientists not with politicians or activists, but with those qualified to take a knowledgeable, albeit perhaps divergent, view of research. <b>Attempts to give a place to anyone, however unqualified, who claims interest can make for false balance</b>: to free publicity to marginal opinions and not to impartiality, but its opposite. Conflicts of interest and outright dishonesty exist in science and these must be exposed, but not at the cost of an over‐literal interpretation of the guidelines. The BBC has tried to find a solution to this problem but has not entirely succeeded. <b>It must accept that it is impossible to produce a balance between fact and opinion.</b> The notion of due impartiality in science should be treated with more flexibility. The central criterion of the new Guidelines, that the BBC should seek to achieve “due weight” in its coverage of perspectives and opinions and that minority views should not necessarily be given equal treatment, may do something in this regard although proof of that has yet to emerge. <i>(my emphasis)</i></blockquote>
This recommendation has clearly gone unheeded by many in the corporation. Consider this tweet by <a href="http://www.mediamasters.fm/rob-burley/">Rob Burley</a>, Editor of BBC Live Political Programmes. Politics Live, Andrew Marr Show, This Week, Westminster Hour & Newswatch:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
Dear <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/bbcbias?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#bbcbias</a> mongers, if we are featuring people on BBC political programmes who you disagree with, this is proof of impartiality not bias. If we weren’t hearing dissent from your position then you’d have a reason to be worried.</div>
— Rob Burley (@RobBurl) <a href="https://twitter.com/RobBurl/status/1074596097115516934?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
No, no, no, this is <b>not </b>proof of impartiality. In response I tweeted:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
That's not 'proof' of impartiality, it's a prerequisite. Proof would be an analysis of BBC coverage that showed a fair hearing to all sides proportionate to their validity. *Undue* coverage to far right/left views could then show bias, even though they dissent from my views.</div>
— Mark Jones (@Groveler) <a href="https://twitter.com/Groveler/status/1074627464184455169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
The point being that simply giving a hearing to all sides of a debate will give rise to the false balance Steve Jones warned about and which has blighted our media ever since the 'merchants of doubt' started to wage their propaganda war against the truths that threaten their interests.<br />
<br />
And it's not like some don't understand the issue. Last year BBC journalist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Robinson_(journalist)">Nick Robinson</a>'s views were reported in <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2018/07/why-bbc-getting-its-brexit-coverage-wrong">The New Statesman</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In Robinson’s view, the BBC doctrine of “due impartiality” should, when properly observed, enable his colleagues to “take account of how much support someone has and the evidence underlying his or her arguments before deciding how much coverage he is entitled to. We need to move beyond ‘he said, she said’ and ask ‘what is?’” Neutrality should not, indeed, deny the proper function of journalism.</blockquote>
And yet the BBC still don't do it. In 2017 the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/24/bbc-apologises-over-interview-climate-sceptic-lord-nigel-lawson">BBC had to apologise</a> for putting the unqualified climate change denier Nigel Lawson up against a climate change expert in Robinson's own Radio 4 <i>Today</i> programme:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Today programme rejected initial complaints from listeners, arguing that Lawson’s stance was “reflected by the current US administration” and that offering space to “dissenting voices” was an important aspect of impartiality.</blockquote>
This is the line pursued by Rob Burley in his tweet from December 2018, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong, as <a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/profile/bob-ward/">Bob Ward</a>, the policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics explained:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“There needs to be a shift in BBC policy so that these news programmes value due accuracy as much as due impartiality.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“As well as taking account of the rights of marginal voices like Lord Lawson to be heard, the BBC should also take account of the harm that its audiences can experience from the broadcast of inaccurate information,” said Ward. “His inaccurate assertion that there has been no change in extreme weather was harmful to the programme’s listeners because they may have been misled into believing that they do not need to take precautions against the increasing risk of heatwaves and flooding from heavy rainfall in the UK.”</blockquote>
So we're back to the quote from Brexit: The Uncivil War; Craig Oliver's cry of anguish when talking to the BBC. Oliver was the leader of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain_Stronger_in_Europe">Remain campaign</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What I'm asking of the world's oldest public broadcaster is an understanding of the difference between impartiality and balance. What I mean is your nonsense bloody quota of giving equal coverage no matter what...we put up a Nobel prize winning economist to highlight the negative impact on Sterling if we leave, and then you feel you have to give equal weight to some batty backbencher who's just there to parrot "not true, project fear, take back control"</blockquote>
I believe it is this false balance, in the BBC and elsewhere, that has reduced the positive liberty of UK citizens, and led them to make fateful errors when voting in the referendum and pursuing their political goals in other ways. In Berlin's terms, we have a surfeit of negative liberty (freedom for the pike), but a deficit of positive liberty.<br />
<br />
It has been <i>such </i>a campaign of misinformation that I really think this is an existential threat to Western democracy. It is hard to see how, if we continue to pursue misinformed policies uncorrected, we can survive in the form we are now. I fear a breakdown of law and order as demagogues take power. Trump is a demagogue, as are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro">Bolsonaro </a>and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0lkay_G%C3%BCndo%C4%9Fan">Gündoğan</a>; who will be ours?<br />
<br />
I previously shared <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker">Stephen Pinker</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature">optimism in the upward trend of humanity</a>, but now I'm not sure those angels will save us :-(.<br />
<br />
For further reading on the causes of Brexit, see:<br />
<br />
Peter Jukes - <a href="https://www.byline.com/column/2/article/2379">A Duty to Inform as Well as Entertain: The BBC on the Edge of an Abyss</a><br />
<br />
Chris Grey - <a href="http://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2019/01/britain-is-on-brink-of-historic.html">Britain is on the brink of an historic strategic decision</a><br />
<br />
Simon Wren-Lewis - <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/12/experts-and-elites.html">Experts and Elites</a><br />
<br />
Ian Dunt - <a href="http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2018/11/06/backstop-breakdown-is-a-product-of-the-oldest-brexit-lie">Backstop breakdown is a product of the oldest Brexit lie</a><br />
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<br />
<div>
<i>1 </i><i>Perfect knowledge is impossible, of course, but disinformation will tend to corrupt the operation of a free market economy. And we must accept that humans are not a perfectly rational animal, even if they were omniscient, so we can only aspire to perfect reason.</i></div>
Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-74525514083129747492018-12-19T07:46:00.003-08:002018-12-19T07:48:25.644-08:002nd Letter to Jeremy QuinThis is the text of another email I have sent to my MP, Jeremy Quin:<br />
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Parliament is at an impasse and cannot raise a majority for *any* course of action. In such a circumstance there is only one legitimate route our representatives can take: ask the people to choose their preferred option.<br />
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If people vote to remain we can revoke Article 50, and we can start working on the damage done to this country by this wholly unnecessary episode.<br />
<br />
The 2016 referendum only sanctioned the UK leaving the EU, not Mrs May's deal specifically. As we have seen, this has left MPs a wide range of possible 'leavings' to choose from, which has resulted in stasis. If people vote for Mrs. May's deal, then the naysayers in Parliament cannot legitimately vote against it, because it will have been *explicitly* sanctioned by the people. She can implement the deal with the full backing of Parliament.<br />
<br />
Therefore the only sensible approach an MP can follow currently is to campaign for a new People's Vote to remove the logjam. I urge you to follow the only sensible path, away from the cliff edge.<br />
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Yours sincerely<br />
<br />
Mark Jones<br />
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Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-50148011686329581982018-12-05T04:15:00.000-08:002018-12-06T01:12:24.152-08:00Letter to Jeremy Quin<div class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
This is the text of an email I have sent to my MP, Jeremy Quin:</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
Dear Mr Quin</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
I am writing to urge you to vote against Prime Minister May's proposed Withdrawal Agreement.</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
I voted Remain in the referendum, but accepted the result. People voted Leave for many reasons, but perhaps the most fundamental one was to reclaim the sovereignty we had given up to the EU. </blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
But I had not fully appreciated all the difficulties that would arise in achieving a satisfactory Brexit. In particular, I had not appreciated the importance of our current frictionless trade with the continent, the Good Friday Agreement and the many EU agencies that would all need their own separate arrangements, such as the Galileo project and the EASA.</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
The more *sovereignty* we reclaim from the EU, the less we can participate in the *benefits* of the EU; that much is obvious. Leave voters, I presume, placed a higher value on the sovereignty we would reclaim than the benefits we would lose, whilst I, as a Remain voter, valued the benefits more than the dilution of sovereignty. </blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
But now we have a much clearer estimation of the sovereignty we are reclaiming and the costs of departure. Mrs May's deal means we will have *no* say in the rules of the EU, which rules we will still have to closely observe, since it is our closest trading bloc. We will lose our ability to travel and work freely in the EU. We will lose frictionless trade, which will hit our GDP hard, according to the Government's own forecasts. We endanger the Good Friday Agreement, with all the dark possibilities that would entail.</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
So, in fact, the best deal on offer (according to the government), actually means *less* sovereignty than we currently enjoy within the EU, and vastly increased costs to leaving. We also threaten the peace in Northern Ireland. These matters were not apparent at the time of the referendum - the Leave campaigns suggested there would be a Brexit dividend, that we were taking back control and there would be solutions to the Northern Ireland border issue.</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
Since the population is now much clearer about the reduction in sovereignty that will arise under Mrs May's deal, the vast costs of leaving, and the threat to peace in this country, the democratic thing to do would be to have another vote to confirm the public are in favour of paying these costs, suffering this reduction in sovereignty and threatening our own peace.</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
I hope you will therefore agree to vote against the deal and instead insist on another referendum to clarify the views of the electorate in the light of these now-known consequences of Brexit.</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
Kind regards</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
Mark Jones</blockquote>
Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-8093931867049536352018-09-09T08:53:00.000-07:002018-09-09T08:53:14.147-07:00Certainty and doubt: Descartes Revision Notes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for <a href="https://msds.open.ac.uk/students/study/undergraduate/course/a222">A222 Exploring Philosophy</a>, Book 4, Knowledge by <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/people/cc863">Cristina Chimisso</a>.<br />
<br />
I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.<br />
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<iframe height="480" src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRXvILZICkC_hsYho9_qt-U6OpneZhLh-jOdCrAb2hZp6cngz-8RD8EP8Rk0h7tvMm7_hVcxG0fEGpq/pub?embedded=true" width="540"></iframe>Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-76948389836649655072018-07-04T08:29:00.000-07:002018-07-04T08:29:55.826-07:00Metaethical Theories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Theists occasionally claim that atheists pragmatically 'believe' in God, because they act morally, or attribute praise and blame, which acts implicitly accept the existence of God. Behind this is the idea that an objective morality can only be grounded in God. Here's <a href="https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/can-we-be-good-without-god/">William Lane Craig</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...if God exists, then the objectivity of moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability is secured, but that in the absence of God, that is, if God does not exist, then morality is just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding. We might act in precisely the same ways that we do in fact act, but in the absence of God, such actions would no longer count as good (or evil), since if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Thus, we cannot truly be good without God. On the other hand, if we do believe that moral values and duties are objective, that provides moral grounds for believing in God.</blockquote>
..and here's an article on Catholic website <a href="https://strangenotions.com/god-vs-just-because-two-explanations-for-objective-morality/">Strange Notions</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Objective morality is observable apart from knowledge of God, which is why atheists and agnostics can know right from wrong, and why philosophers can talk about self-evident moral propositions, and why everyone reading this knows what we mean by “moral” and “immoral.” Some things are just wrong, regardless of our philosophies, and even if we desperately want them to be right.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But objective morality isn’t explicable apart from knowledge of God: every attempt... fails to explain why objective morality exists.</blockquote>
But there are a number of theories that attempt to explain the grounding of ethics that have nothing to do with God; the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/">Metaethics</a> article at the SEP has an extensive bibliography that is mostly concerned with secular explanations.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, God grounding is not a fruitful avenue for analysis, because that is where the buck stops, and that is that. (As such, it may be subject to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument">Moore's Open Question argument</a>.) But to get an idea of what is happening in contemporary metaethics, take a look at this diagram from <a href="https://www.otago.ac.nz/philosophy/dept/staff-miller.html">Alexander Miller</a>'s <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Contemporary-Metaethics-Introduction-Alexander-Miller/dp/0745646581/ref=dp_ob_title_bk">An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics</a> (2003 edition)</i>:<br />
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Here we have a handy guide to the current debate in metaethics, little of it concerning God. God doesn't even warrant an entry in the index, while <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Railton">Peter Railton</a> has 20 references! Here are links to some of those theories:<br />
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<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/">Ayer</a>'s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/#7">emotivism</a><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Blackburn">Blackburn</a>'s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/projectivism-quasi-realism.html">quasi-realism</a><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Gibbard">Gibbard</a>'s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#NorExpPlaExp">norm-expressivism</a><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Mackie">Mackie</a>'s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-error-theory.html">error-theory</a><br />
<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/">Moore</a>'s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#1">non-Naturalism</a><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McDowell">McDowell</a>'s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/">non-Naturalism</a><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Railton">Railton</a>'s <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=15253">reductionism</a><br />
<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/#CornReal">Cornell realism</a><br />
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This does not show that morality is not grounded in God, of course, but it does show it would be wrong to suggest that that there are simply no alternatives for the atheist seeking a metaethics for her moral behaviour.<br />
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-69683773025661327192018-06-13T09:18:00.000-07:002018-06-13T09:18:19.871-07:00Darkening Preconceptions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is a comment on the <i>reaction</i> to a book, rather than the book itself.<br />
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<a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/catherine-nixey">Catherine Nixey</a> has written a new book called <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darkening-Age-Christian-Destruction-Classical-ebook/dp/B06XCHMZTK">The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World</a>, about the transition from the ancient Roman world to a Christian world. She studied classics at Cambridge, but is now a journalist. It's clear that this book is a polemic, aimed at redressing the imbalance caused by the Christian-good, pagan-bad narrative that has (mostly) dominated since then, at least in the West, and because of that it has received very contrasting reviews.<br />
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I've not read the book yet, partly because of the polarising nature of those reviews; is it too polemical for a layman? Christians and those sympathetic to religion and the early middle ages have damned it, while classicists seem to mostly like it. It would be nice to have an objective view of this era, but the subject is emotive and the events discussed are multi-factorial, which allows prejudices and preconceptions to dictate one's interpretation of those events. Is it too glib to say that classicists defend the classical world and experts of the middle ages and Christianity defend theirs?<br />
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Here is a sample of the conflicting reviews:<br />
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<b>Anti Nixey</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.thetablet.co.uk/books/10/11298/blame-the-christians">Averil Cameron (professor emerita of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford) in Catholic magazine The Tablet</a>: "Hearts will sink among historians of early Christianity and late antiquity, as well as medievalists and, needless to say, Byzantinists, when they see the title of this pugnacious and energetically written book. The words ‘darkening age’ evoke everything they have been trying for years to overturn."<br />
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<a href="https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/staff/roach/">Levi Roach (lecturer in the early and high middle ages)</a> in <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/at-cross-purposes">The Literary Review</a>: “does not seek to present a balanced picture (…) this is a book of generalisations. (…) Nixey (…) is unwilling to see shades of grey.” (from <a href="https://gegrammena.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/reactions-reviews-to-catherine-nixeys-the-darkening-age-eeuwen-van-duisternis/">here</a>)<br />
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The most damning review comes from <a href="https://historyforatheists.com/about-the-author-and-a-faq/">Tim O'Neill</a> (anti-new-atheist-atheist historian blogger) <a href="https://historyforatheists.com/2017/11/review-catherine-nixey-the-darkening-age/">here</a>: "...this is a book of biased polemic masquerading as historical analysis and easily the worst book I have read in year."<br />
"While Nixey does indeed detail several incidents of Christian violence and several more of Christian destruction, the problem is that she highlights these while neglecting or lightly skipping around other, similar incidents perpetrated by her heroes, the pagans. This makes for a good story – one with clear “good guys” and “bad guys” – but it is hopelessly biased, deliberately distorted and bad history."<br />
"Anyone reading Nixey’s book is likely to come away thinking they know and understand more but will actually have learned things that would have to be unlearned or corrected later. Nixey’s is not a good history book. It is, as Dame Averil said so pithily, “a travesty”."<br />
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Josh Herring (Christian evangelist) for the religious think tank <a href="https://acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2017/12/22/book-review-darkening-age-catherine-nixey">The Acton Institute</a>: "The best of historical writing is accessible to educated adults of all disciplines, and it furthers our understanding of the human person; The Darkening Age is not such a work. Instead, it reveals more to us about Catherine Nixey and her understanding of history. The scholars she assembles are uniformly opposed to Christianity, presenting it as a destructive force that ended the “merry, jolly days” of pagan festivity. The prose she uses is filled with judgmental adjectives, indicating that she does not trust readers to draw their conclusion from the evidence; we must be told how to feel about the person she describes. Her book was several years in the making, but it does not reflect a clear understanding of Christianity, the complexities of Late Antiquity, or the nuances of historical craft. While this book is sold under the guise of popular history, treat it instead as an insight into how a secular journalist views Christianity in the year of our Lord 2017."<br />
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<b>Pro Nixey</b><br />
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<a href="https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/staff/jerrydegroot.html">Gerard DeGroot</a> (professor of 20th century history at the University of St Andrews) in <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-the-darkening-age-the-christian-destruction-of-the-classical-world-by-catherine-nixey-x2c5f5mrb">The Times</a>: "The Darkening Age is a delightful book about destruction and despair. Nixey combines the authority of a serious academic with the expressive style of a good journalist. She’s not afraid to throw in the odd joke amid sombre tales of desecration. With considerable courage, she challenges the wisdom of history and manages to prevail. Comfortable assumptions about Christian progress come tumbling down."<br />
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<a href="https://www.bettanyhughes.co.uk/about">Bettany Hughes</a> (professor of classical history) in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-nixey-darkening-age.html">New York Times</a>: "Nixey delivers this ballista-bolt of a book with her eyes wide open and in an attempt to bring light as well as heat to the sad story of intellectual monoculture and religious intolerance. Her sympathy, corruscatingly, compellingly, is with the Roman orator Symmachus: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?”"<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Wilson">Emily Wilson</a> (Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania) in <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/darkening-age-how-christians-won-brutal-culture-war-against-rome">The New Statesman</a>: "Nixey is a funny, lively, readable guide through this dark world of religious oppression. She wisely insists at the start of her book that this account of cultural violence should not be read as an attack on those who are “impelled by their Christian faith to do many, many good things”. It is instead a reminder that “monotheism” (or, one could say, religion in general and Christianity in particular) can be used for “terrible ends”. The book is also an essential reminder, in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, that intolerance, ignorance and hostility to cultural diversity are sadly nothing new."<br />
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<a href="https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/professor-tim-whitmarsh">Tim Whitmarsh</a> (professor of Greek culture at Cambridge) in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/28/the-darkening-age-the-christian-destruction-of-the-classical-world-by-catherine-nixey">The Guardian</a>: "But this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of early Christianity and its complex, embattled relationship to the Roman empire, and it would be unfair to judge it against that aim. It is, rather, a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly."<br />
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It's also worth bearing in mind the experts who gave Nixey a <a href="http://www.catherinenixey.com/">blurb</a>:<br />
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Engaging and erudite, Catherine Nixey's book offers both a compelling argument and a wonderful eye for vivid detail. It shines a searching spotlight onto some of the murkiest aspects of the early medieval mindset. A triumph. <a href="http://edithhall.co.uk/">Edith Hall</a> (Professor in the Classics Department and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College London)<br />
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Captivating and compulsive, Catherine Nixey's debut challenges our whole understanding of Christianity's earliest years and the medieval society that followed. A remarkable fusion of captivating narrative and acute scholarly judgment, this book marks the debut of a formidable classicist and historian. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Jones_(writer)">Dan Jones</a> (journalist and historian)<br />
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Nixey's elegant and ferocious text paints a dark but riveting picture of life at the time of the 'triumph' of Christianity, reminding us not just of the realities of our own past, but also of the sad echoes of that past in our present. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scott_(author)">Michael Scott</a> (associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick)<br />
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Reading through the reviews it feels like they are talking about two different books, such is the discrepancy in their takes. The 'anti-Nixey' reviews make a lot of apparently valid points, and decry Nixey's bibliography. But then why would classicists and others find so much to approve of in the book? I think I know the answer: it's <i>because</i> it's a polemic against the presupposed goodness of the triumph of Christianity, so it's not <i>supposed</i> to be a balanced academic piece. In the end I guess her fans applaud that approach while her critics decry it.<br />
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I dare say one would have to study the era for some time before being expert enough to form one's own conclusion and, just as I'm not going to study cosmology to form an opinion on cosmology, I'm not going to study the history of that era either. I'm going to have to form a judgement based on scholarly consensus, and currently I lean toward the classicists. I know that science, technology and art was lost from antiquity; Christianity is <i>prima facie</i> culpable. The nuance that apologists for Christianity too often offer is sufficient to show other factors in play but insufficient to exculpate Christianity.<br />
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That betrays my prejudices and preconceptions too, but I've grown up in a Christian culture and have slowly realised how other cultures have been automatically and unthinkingly othered by the Christian narrative, so Nixey's book may well be a much-needed corrective.<br />
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It's interesting how the Christian persecution complex comes to the fore when there is push-back against the prevailing Christian narrative, and this push-back doesn't just come from Christians. All of us raised in a Christian culture are rather too quick to defend the atrocities committed to perpetuate our culture, and find it difficult to push against our own culture. Nevertheless, push against it we must, because we now live in a multi-cultural society and our cultures need to be reconciled. It's time to reassign the credit Christianity claims, and the blame it disclaims.Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-90831332980747934172018-05-12T15:30:00.001-07:002018-05-14T01:23:43.328-07:00Brexit and Xenophobia<div>
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<span style="color: #663333; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/e-tendayi-achiume/">Professor Tendayi Achiume</a>, the UN special rapporteur on racism, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/11/uk-has-seen-brexit-related-growth-in-racism-says-un-representative">has said</a>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #663333; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">The environment leading up to the [Brexit] referendum, the environment during the referendum, and the environment after the referendum has made racial and ethnic minorities more vulnerable to racial discrimination and intolerance...</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #663333; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">..and:</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #663333; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Many with whom I consulted highlighted the growth in volume and acceptability of xenophobic discourses on migration, and on foreign nationals including refugees in social and print media.</span></span></blockquote>
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It would be wrong to dismiss the entire Brexit movement as xenophobic; I know a number of Brexiters who are certainly not xenophobic and voted against the EU for reasons such as its institutional failings or for its support for globalisation. So there are two half-decent reasons to vote Leave, even if in the end I disagree with them. Ian Dunt analyses the left-wing 'Lexit' movement <a href="http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2017/11/17/everything-you-need-to-know-about-lexit-in-five-minutes">here</a>. Some on the left see the EU as a barrier to certain left wing aims, but I agree with this assessment from Dunt:</div>
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<span style="color: #663333; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">The EU is basically a social democrat project, based along German or Scandinavian lines. That's probably too right-wing for some people, and it's certainly too left wing for others. But it has a lot of space there for a wide range of political arrangements, covering the vast majority of political views in the UK. It doesn't always get the relationship right between abiding by EU rules and workers' rights, but you have to be a very stern observer to conclude from these fairly limited problems that we should take the massive risk of leaving the EU altogether, especially under such a right wing government. But still, we shouldn't write off left wing criticisms of the EU. Many of them are perfectly valid. Remainers would do well to address them, rather than dismiss them.</span></span></blockquote>
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I doubt there are many xenophobes amongst the Lexiteers.</div>
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However, I think it’s fair to say that xenophobes are more likely to have voted Brexit. Why do I think this is fair to say? Well, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/brexit-prejudice-scientists-link-foreigners-immigrants-racism-xenophobia-leave-eu-a8078586.html">more than one survey</a> has concluded that Brexit is strongly linked to xenophobia. Furthermore, <a href="http://natcen.ac.uk/media/1488132/racial-prejudice-report_v4.pdf">more Brexit voters self report as racist</a>.</div>
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The Institute of Race Relations <a href="http://www.irr.org.uk/app/uploads/2016/11/Racial-violence-and-the-Brexit-state-final.pdf">said </a>“‘Brexit means Brexit’ is already being translated for BAME and migrant communities into ‘Brexit means racism’ – not just on the ground but also in the repressive proposals already emanating from politicians and government departments in October 2016”.<br />
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Now, to be fair, the statistics aren’t completely clear; analysis of Yougov’s surveys for the Campaign Against Antisemitism in <a href="https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/921pn4p2fh/CampaignAgainstAntisemitismResults_MergedFile_W.pdf">2015 </a>and <a href="https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/bs0i5dmt7s/CampaignAgainstAntisemitismResults_170803_JewishOpinions.pdf">2017 </a>shows a <b>reduction</b> in anti-semitic attitudes in that period (and, by the way, show a reduction in antisemitism amongst Labour voters, <i>pace </i>the recent accounts of antisemitism in that party).<br />
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Nevertheless, the weight of the evidence suggests a link between the Brexit vote and xenophobia, and at the very least existing xenophobes were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/27/sadiq-khan-muslim-council-britain-warning-of-post-brexit-racism">more vocal</a> about their xenophobia after Brexit.<br />
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And it comes to something when Jacob Rees Mogg effectively tweets that Enoch Powell’s famous speech was racist and gets a load of abuse for it from other right-wingers; click on this link and check out the abuse JRM gets for supporting his father's view that Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech was 'racialist':</div>
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My father’s view which has stood the test of time about Enoch Powell’s famous speech</div>
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If JRM is too moderate for some people, then the right wing really is heading in a bad direction!</div>
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Maybe the increase in reported xenophobia around the Brexit vote is just a temporary blip, and I am being too pessimistic; I certainly hope so.</div>
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Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-18373105467654464032018-05-11T02:52:00.003-07:002018-05-11T16:20:22.744-07:00Success on Faith School Cap<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIuXGRVkM3nqqOr4LGmWmG_QLpKX0rB1eu34jcV0TEzFdYWzn1ZtLTKx2CZixtZwm3sNl-M8MJj-v94sJSN_qq3j2R6A8ul2D7HCF93txHVY9bZJSA35GVZuZuMk2dl3fvtX1QWZuDStNrSQs/s1600/DSCF8908_09_10_easyHDR-dramatic-bright-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1198" data-original-width="1600" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIuXGRVkM3nqqOr4LGmWmG_QLpKX0rB1eu34jcV0TEzFdYWzn1ZtLTKx2CZixtZwm3sNl-M8MJj-v94sJSN_qq3j2R6A8ul2D7HCF93txHVY9bZJSA35GVZuZuMk2dl3fvtX1QWZuDStNrSQs/s320/DSCF8908_09_10_easyHDR-dramatic-bright-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Back in December 2016 I <a href="http://goodgrieflinus.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/ideology-driving-faith-schools.html">participated in the letter writing</a> campaign to prevent the abolition of the 50% cap on selection for faith schools. This is what I wrote to my MP:<br />
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<i>Dear Jeremy Quin MP,</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I am writing to you as a constituent to ask you to oppose the plans to allow new and existing religious free schools to discriminate against all your constituents who happen to fall outside a school's denomination. I have at least 3 objections:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>1) Principles of fairness: it cannot be right that my tax money, and that of most taxpayers, goes towards educational establishments that would bar our children and grandchildren. In fact, of course, equity dictates quite the opposite; that the public funding of schools should require that they are open to all, in principle.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>2) Integration: we should all know by now that a major challenge to us in the modern world is to effectively integrate our multi-cultural populations. Secularism has proved the best approach to this problem, for the religious and non-religious alike. Gandhi, recognising the challenge that faced the Indian subcontinent, was religious and a secularist, and said that the state should never promote denominational education out of public funds. As I'm sure you know, David Cameron said about the existing 50% rule:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>‘It cannot be right…that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths. That doesn’t foster a sense of shared belonging and understanding – it can drive people apart.’</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Well, he was wrong about Brexit, but I hope you’ll agree that on this score he was absolutely right! The evidence tells us that religious selection in schools entrenches religious segregation in the community, and reduces social cohesion.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>3) Educational standards: faith schools have a worse record than other schools in teaching anti-science, such as creationism, and promoting views that discriminate against minorities, like the LGBT community. Despite the teaching of creationism being banned, this still didn't prevent Ofsted awarding a status of 'Good' to a school that censored questions on evolution in a science exam and admitted to teaching creationism (https://humanism.org.uk/2014/11/13/bha-questions-school-censored-evolution-exam-questions-receiving-good-rating-ofsted-inspection/). Allowing full selection will increase the dangers of the wholesale indoctrination of children with these retrograde views. Of course, that is exactly why religious groups lobby for full selection!</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>So I hope you agree that on grounds of fairness, integration and educational standards, the removal of religious selection is what we should be aiming for, not its re-introduction. Thank you.</i><br />
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Mr Quinn's reply made the following defence of removing the cap:<br />
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<i>While the number of children in a good or outstanding school has risen dramatically in the last few years it remains the case that too many children in this country still do not have access to either. The proposals that have been put forward look to deliver an even more diverse school system that gives all children, whatever their background, the opportunity to achieve their potential. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Faith schools have a strong record of high pupil attainment and are often very popular with parents. Current rules, however, restrict the ability for more good faith schools to be opened, without succeeding in promoting integration. The proposals would see the current cap on the number of pupils who can be admitted on the basis of faith when the school is oversubscribed removed. </i><br />
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At the time I didn't appreciate the significance of the sentence "<i>Current rules, however, restrict the ability for more good faith schools to be opened, without succeeding in promoting integration.". </i>This argument was driven by the decision of the Catholic Church in England and Wales to <a href="http://www.catholic-ew.org.uk/Home/News/2013/School-Admissions">boycott </a>the free schools programme because of the 50% cap. But, as <a href="https://humanism.org.uk/2017/11/20/mps-misled-on-catholic-school-admissions-claims/">Humanists UK</a> (formerly the BHA) and the Accord Coalition have pointed out, the Catholic Church's stand on this issue is bogus; <a href="http://accordcoalition.org.uk/2018/05/11/accord-welcomes-government-academy-faith-schools-discrimination-u-turn/">the Accord Coalition says</a>:</div>
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The Catholic Church of England and Wales has opted not to open Catholic free schools, which is a self imposed boycott designed to undermine the 50% cap. It is very telling that state funded Catholic schools in other developed countries do not select pupils by faith, nor do most private Catholic schools in England.</blockquote>
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Now <a href="https://humanism.org.uk/2018/05/11/humanists-uk-wins-government-u-turn-on-50-cap-on-faith-school-admissions/">the Government has announced that it will break its manifesto promise</a> and keep the 50% cap on selection. Chief Executive of Humanists UK <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Copson">Andrew Copson</a> said:</div>
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The decision to keep the cap on faith-based selection is a victory for integration, mutual understanding, and the interests of children. It is also a significant victory for Humanists UK and its supporters, who have successfully led the national campaign against the removal of the cap and in favour of open, integrated schools.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If this vision is to be fully realised, then attention must now turn to preventing new, fully segregated schools by another means, which the Government has now unwisely created. The need for the Government to save face, or to appease a handful of religious organisations and their unreasonable demands, should not be prioritised over what’s best for children and society. Today’s u-turn makes clear that fully segregated school intakes are anathema to an open, diverse society, but the Government should now recognise this throughout the education system and not create new segregation.</blockquote>
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Kudos to him, and also to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Romain">Rabbi Jonathan Romain</a>, chair of the Accord Coalition, for spearheading this campaign. The second paragraph of Copson's quote above, however, points to a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44067719">£50m expansion fund</a> that the Government has announced for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_aided_school">voluntary aided</a> sector. This appears to be a sop to the Catholic Church and others for the Government not following through on their manifesto commitment to remove the 50% cap. It is ridiculous to be spending money on segregated schools at a time of reduced community cohesion and a squeeze on budgets generally.</div>
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I agree with Copson and Romain that fully segregated schools are anathema to an open, diverse society. Here's <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/apr/26/religion.faithschools">Jonathan Romain</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is a real danger that the growth in faith schools today will be blamed in 30 years' time for the social disharmony then. It is not too late to reverse that trend, if we want a society that has diversity within unity, not at the expense of it. Perhaps this Passover the message should be: "Let my children mix."</blockquote>
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Hear, hear.<br />
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UPDATE - tweet from Andrew Copson today:<br />
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Damian Hinds' <a href="https://twitter.com/BBCr4today?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BBCr4today</a> defence of funding new 100% selective faith schools incoherent and it's clear why: the reality is that the argument for inclusion was won, government has nowhere to hide, and this is just a dirty little workaround to appease religious lobbyists .<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/r4today?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#r4today</a></div>
— Andrew Copson (@andrewcopson) <a href="https://twitter.com/andrewcopson/status/994827305200619520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 11, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-27055958030775279972018-04-21T08:22:00.001-07:002018-04-21T08:22:28.138-07:00Miracles and Revelation Revision Notes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3k-y-sj8aQdo7-OYK53oe35EXpsPf5kERPLGAym3H8f482DK-Nu8GcbZwlEpf1zm_5BZ-xb8jCT8-Fd6LTWlTzq9OtSPSRseoC-XXNsthVfSCvKY81hPavbnAdeh-wPYNkyYjN0xRqamWbU/s1600/DSCF8771-1-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1008" data-original-width="1600" height="401" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3k-y-sj8aQdo7-OYK53oe35EXpsPf5kERPLGAym3H8f482DK-Nu8GcbZwlEpf1zm_5BZ-xb8jCT8-Fd6LTWlTzq9OtSPSRseoC-XXNsthVfSCvKY81hPavbnAdeh-wPYNkyYjN0xRqamWbU/s640/DSCF8771-1-4.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for <a href="https://msds.open.ac.uk/students/study/undergraduate/course/a222">A222 Exploring Philosophy</a>, Book 2, Acts of God by Timothy Chappell.<br />
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I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.<br />
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<iframe height="480" src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQaA7aASmsVjUJMzlloQ092iVvzA-zEpzkKT7Q06rDgRUbC4qxfkWAXnL1GHYIHenbbVYgxPdlWROpd/pub?embedded=true" width="540"></iframe>
Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-79788430538392214932018-02-03T16:53:00.001-08:002018-02-03T16:54:07.149-08:00Aristotle at the Seaside<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJJkN_vuXZSs5oZCSt0kKNyrTfKK6ASEqmg_kuOxWvsTjkLrlhvHb98WfccAtYFIwMdndQfKodP-8Q3iAEKryOhRKlE7D7N1QqVfXnaYJjXWzvUIbqEA4qFMy0u9qkMxjK9y_aIrhH6yboE4g/s1600/blackpool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="472" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJJkN_vuXZSs5oZCSt0kKNyrTfKK6ASEqmg_kuOxWvsTjkLrlhvHb98WfccAtYFIwMdndQfKodP-8Q3iAEKryOhRKlE7D7N1QqVfXnaYJjXWzvUIbqEA4qFMy0u9qkMxjK9y_aIrhH6yboE4g/s400/blackpool.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">© </span>http://www.visitthepast.co.uk/blackpool-tower-from-north-pier</td></tr>
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In 1868 the South Jetty in Blackpool was opened in an attempt to keep the hoi-polloi away from the genteel North Pier; it was “the first major commitment of resources to pleasing this more plebeian public” (<i>quoted in Chant, 2008, p.156</i>). This charming sentiment marks a new start for the seaside holiday, with activity-based attractions vying with the rather more sedentary approach favoured before that time. The new pier offered cheap pleasure cruises and all day dancing. A brief examination of secondary sources on Aristotle (384–322 BCE) suggests he might not value the more robust pleasures on offer; for example, Jonathan Barnes says Aristotle thinks that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To flourish, to make a success of life, requires engagement in intellectual pursuits. (<i>Barnes, 2000, p.125</i>)</blockquote>
...and Carolyn Price, answering the question “What is the best way to use one’s leisure?”, concludes that Aristotle’s answer is “intellectual reflection” (<i>Price, 2008, p.19</i>).<br />
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The South Jetty was later renamed the Central Pier and a new pier, the Victoria (now called the South Pier) was opened in 1893; as its regal name suggests, this was also aimed at the more upmarket clientele, and it banned dancing. So Blackpool had the North Pier and the Victoria Pier for what might be considered the <i>higher</i> pursuits, and the Central Pier for the more vulgar seaside attractions. A late Victorian textile worker may well have stood on the promenade at Blackpool and wondered at the two to one overprovision of Aristotelian diversions to Epicurean ones. Although perhaps it’s unlikely the worker would have thought so classically. (Very briefly, Epicurus, 341–270 BCE, favoured activities that felt good for promoting well-being (<i>Price, 2008, p.27</i>), so he and Aristotle oppose each other in a centuries old dialogue between the active and contemplative ways of life, that continues today.)<br />
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A class-based analysis of Aristotle’s philosophy of leisure is also suggested by these developments at the seaside, in addition to his rather rude dismissal of the ‘vulgar’ mass of men in the <i>Nichomachean Ethics</i> (<i>1095b19-20</i>). I shall discuss this more later, after considering support for the views quoted above from Aristotle’s own writings.<br />
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For Aristotle, <i>eudaimonia</i>, or human flourishing, is the ultimate objective of human life – the state to which we all aspire – and this is inextricably linked to certain activities, specifically leisure, which have no aims but themselves:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘For, let me emphasise once again, leisure is the foundation of all that we do. Both leisure and work are necessary, but leisure is to be preferred to work, and is its aim.’ (<i>Politics 1337b33-34, in Price, 2008, p.32</i>)</blockquote>
So leisure is our aim, but what sort of leisure? To answer this, Aristotle asks: what is our function? He thinks that things, animals and humans have functions, and, that the expression of each thing’s distinctive function is the activity which perfectly expresses its being, and that activity must be valued as an end in itself. For example, a good hammer would be one that hammers nails well. In the <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i> he applies this ‘function argument’ to human beings:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘What then might the human function be? Simply living seems to be something that we share with plants. But what we are looking for is something distinctively human. (...) What remains is the exercise of reason. [...] So the function of a human being is to engage in activities that use or are governed by reason.’ (<i>Nicomachean Ethics 1097b33-1098a8, in Price, 2008, p.32</i>)</blockquote>
He concludes that a good man would be one that reasons well, so it’s safe to assume that this teleological view of the world is what would drive his judgement on leisure activities, and this supports the quotes above, from secondary sources, that he would most value intellectual pursuits. With this in mind, we can consider how he would have viewed some seaside holidays, ancient and modern.<br />
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In antiquity, seaside Roman villas were popular with high born citizens at leisure. In Pliny the Younger’s (61–c.112 CE) description of his villa on the West coast of Italy at Laurentum, he says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Round the corner is a room built round in an apse (...) with one wall fitted with shelves like a library to hold the books which I read and read again. (...) When I retire to this suite I feel as if I have left my house altogether and much enjoy the sensation: especially during the Saturnalia (...) for I am not disturbing my household’s merrymaking nor they my work. (<i>Pliny the Younger in Radice, 1969, in James, P, and Huskinson, J., 2008, pp91-93</i>)</blockquote>
The whole piece emphasises the villa as Pliny’s sanctuary, with phrases such as ‘profound peace and seclusion’ and ‘retreat’ included. This conforms to the Roman idea of <i>otium </i>– leisure – in opposition to <i>negotium</i>, the business and public duties of everyday life. Even if he was exaggerating the contemplative aspect of his villa for public consumption, we can conclude that the Roman ideal for leisure, among the upper echelons of Roman society in which Pliny moved, was intellectual reflection. It’s evident that he also finds something about the seaside situation conducive to reflection – he remarks on how the rooms integrate with the villa’s surroundings.<br />
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Further evidence for this intellectual leisure ideal can be found in mosaics found in Roman villas; many images from classical mythology are depicted to give the impression of a cultured property owner, reflecting highbrow interests. In the seaside Romano-British villa at Brading, for example, amongst many other mythical characters we find an unusual roundel of Medusa:<br />
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(<i>Image from Roman Villa DVD, 2008</i>)<br />
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Mosaics of Orpheus, Bacchus and other Roman gods and goddesses fill the rooms. And many similar characters and scenes from mythology have been found in the ruins at Pompeii. Because of this preponderance of scholarly subjects, Aristotle would find much to approve of in a visit to a Roman villa. The signs are not all one way, however; the Brading mosaics perhaps include the depiction of a gladiator, referring to the games put on in large stadia to entertain the masses in Roman cities. This might not meet with Aristotle’s approval so readily.<br />
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For a later seaside example, let us consider the introduction of sea bathing in the eighteenth century. Bathing doesn’t appear to meet the requirements for Aristotle’s ideal leisure activity – it’s not a uniquely human activity nor could it be said to be solely enjoyed for its own sake. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism">humoral system</a> was the prevailing theory of medicine for many centuries, and the practice of sea bathing arose at a time when this theory still had some credibility, and perhaps as a consequence doctors began to recommend a medicinal dunking for some of their patients. Its persistence in popular culture is notable; bracing sea air and the benefits of paddling in ice-cold Atlantic waters were recommended to me by my mother in the 1960s!<br />
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It’s not really the case that bathing per se is health-giving, but empirical enquiry shows that vigorous activity of any kind promotes health. A contradiction is suggested here in Aristotle’s philosophy; we have an activity that promotes well-being but which isn’t, apparently, the ideal leisure activity. This can be resolved by observing that Aristotle would probably not dismiss bathing as worthless; it has medicinal value, even if it’s not the ultimate reason for being, so it cannot be the most valuable leisure activity.<br />
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Returning to the battle of the piers in nineteenth century Blackpool, Aristotle does rather dismiss the simple pleasure-seeking (dancing, games) in which many indulge:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (...) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; (<i>Nichomachean Ethics, 1095b14-16</i>)</blockquote>
And because the vulgar lead a life pursuing pleasure, and are ‘slavish in their tastes’ (<i>Nichomachean Ethics, 1095b19-20</i>), it follows that this cannot be the epitome of what it is to be human, Aristotle reasons. In the <i>Politics</i>, however, we can deduce some value from play:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So we need to consider what we should do with our leisure. (...) Rather, play is needed by those who are hard at work and who need to rest from their labours, for the point of playing is to rest. Work involves labour and exertion, and so we should make room for play at the right times, applying it as a kind of medicine. (<i>Politics, 1337b35-43, in Price, 2008, p.32</i>)</blockquote>
The nineteenth century saw an explosion in concentrated populations of labour, thanks to the industrial revolution; this would have generated a demand for an antidote to the lives of drudgery led by most people week in and week out. The technology of the industrial revolution, such as railways and funfairs, together with the means to power them, helped to satisfy this demand. Scenes like this, photographed at Blackpool Central Railway Station in 1937, became commonplace:<br />
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<br />
(<i>Chant, C., Figure 4.18, 2008, p.154</i>)<br />
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Since society was comparatively free (no slaves!), Aristotle could have predicted that this explosion of work would lead to a burgeoning of leisure activities that are, in his terms, medicinal rather than ideal (in his view). Dancing, fun fairs, bathing, crazy golf are all valid leisure activities from this viewpoint, and Aristotle would see the value in them. As a consequence, at Blackpool we see a move from a gentle, contemplative, middle class seaside holiday, for folk looking for the intellectual life of leisure, to a more active, pleasure-seeking, working class seaside holiday. And, for a more modern example, in the twentieth century we see a similar evolution in the resort of Benidorm. A quaint and peaceful Spanish fishing port, popular with the well-to-do, develops into a destination for the ‘fun-loving’ Brits, seeking sun, sea, sand and sex. Whilst Aristotle might have denigrated what the masses sought out, I think he would concede some value in them.<br />
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Despite these developments, Aristotle’s ideal was still part of popular culture. In 1918 Fred Gray produced this postcard, making explicit the contrast between workers’ everyday lives and their putative escape:<br />
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<br />
(<i>Chant, C., Figure 4.17, 2008, p.152</i>)<br />
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The couple at the bottom, on an improbably deserted beach, may well have achieved <i>eudaimonia</i>. It’s to be hoped, for Aristotle’s sake, that the gentleman puffing on a cigarette is pondering the human condition; but the lady with a book open on her lap is surely fulfilling the ideal, once she stops posing. Sun bathing became fashionable in the twentieth century, and shortly after acquired a healthy connotation, with news that vitamin D from the sun was an important contribution to health. From this time, for our purposes, it can be compared to sea bathing – a valuable medicinal activity without being Aristotle’s ideal. Before that, he may well approve of folk simply lying on the beach, cogitating or reading like the couple above.<br />
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To consider a more recent, but perhaps atypical, seaside activity, I shall look at the Mods in the 1960s, when I was freezing my toes in Ilfracombe. The Mods were a teenage subculture defined by their fashion, music taste and leisure choices, and, because of those choices they often clashed with another subculture, the Rockers. Trips to the seaside on the Mod’s trademark Lambretta scooters regularly resulted in clashes with their arch enemies, and if Aristotle noticed that their leisure time was spent “going to clubs, taking amphetamines, dancing to certain types of music” (<i>Jones and Danson Brown, 2008, p.188</i>), he might not be surprised that this didn’t result in a sense of well-being, since they aren’t the activities that he would identify as the best way to spend one’s spare time. The Who’s rock opera <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrophenia_(film)">Quadrophenia </a></i>is a paean to the disturbed youth of that period; the hero is mentally ill and this is reflected in the film’s use of the seaside location. However, a line in the song “Bell Boy”, from the <i>Quadrophenia </i>album, suggests a link to Pliny the Younger’s more obviously healthy experience of the seaside location:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A beach is a place where a man can feel/He’s the only soul in the world that’s real. (<i>quoted in Jones, N. and Danson, R., 2008, p.193</i>)</blockquote>
This sentiment also harks back to Fred Gray’s postcard depiction of the beach (above), and points to a unique quality that the beach may have which helps us to achieve well-being.<br />
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To conclude, we’ve seen how Aristotle would find much to value in seaside holidays down the ages, even if he might not think it all ideal. The modern vogue is moving away from his ideal of intellectual reflection, catering as it does for entertainment of the masses, although many still value the thoughtful life. The basis for Aristotle’s analysis, founded on what a human being is, might be a naturalistic fallacy, and since modern science has shown that there is no need to posit a teleological life, his conclusions could be attacked. Further, I cannot agree with his attitude to the mass of humanity. But even if we have no ultimate purpose, it’s important to create our own purposes, and so Aristotle’s ideas still intrigue, and can inform our own choice of seaside holiday.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bibliography:</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Barnes, J. (2000) Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press.</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Price, C. (2008) ‘Aristotle and Epicurus on Leisure’, in Brunton, D. (ed.) Place and Leisure (AA100 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 10-34</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">James, P. and Huskinson, J. (2008) ‘Leisure in the Roman Villa’, in Brunton, D. (ed.) Place and Leisure (AA100 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 65-96</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Faire, L. (2008) ‘Dressing for the Beach’, in Brunton, D. (ed.) Place and Leisure (AA100 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 131-145</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Chant, C. (2008) ‘Technology and the Seaside: Blackpool and Benidorm’, in Brunton, D. (ed.) Place and Leisure (AA100 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 147-168</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Brunton, D. (2008) ‘The Healthy Seaside’, in Brunton, D. (ed.) Place and Leisure (AA100 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 169-182</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jones, N. and Danson, R. (2008) ‘Seaside Music: The Beach Boys and the Who’, in Brunton, D. (ed.) Place and Leisure (AA100 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 183-204</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Aristotle (2001) Nicomachean Ethics (trans. W.D. Ross), The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York, The Modern Library, pp. 935-1126.</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">‘Roman Villa’ (2008) (AA100 DVD), Milton Keynes, The Open University</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">‘The Seaside’ (2008) (AA100 DVD), Milton Keynes, The Open University</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Brunton, D. (2008) ‘From Greece to the Middle East to Europe: The Transmission of Medical Knowledge’, in Danson Brown (ed.) Cultural Encounters (AA100 Book 3), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 151-189</span></i><br />
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Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-83033316749479075602018-01-31T04:09:00.000-08:002018-02-02T01:28:29.013-08:00The Non-existent Agenda?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Peter Harrison recently wrote a negative <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/from-conflict-to-dialogue-and-all-the-way-back">review</a> of Yves Gingras's new book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B072Y32V27/">Science and Religion, An Impossible Dialogue</a></i>.<br />
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Yves Gingras has <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/from-conflict-to-dialogue-and-all-the-way-back-and-then-back-yet-again/#!">responded to Harrison, and Harrison has responded</a> to Gingras's response:<br />
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Gingras makes some good points, but perhaps wants to have his cake and eat it by suggesting that he is primarily conducting a <i>review</i> of the history of science and religion, and not advocating a conflict thesis, whilst advocating it! I should say that I haven't read Gingras's book yet, so I'm not saying that his book is good or bad.<br />
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Harrison is surely in denial, however, when he says, while doubting Gingras's claims that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation">Templeton Foundation</a> has had a distorting effect on the history of science:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My review sought neither to praise nor bury the Templeton Foundation, but simply offer a factual account of its operations and correct the misconception that it is in the business of funding historical research.</blockquote>
But this claim that, effectively, Templeton has had a neutral effect on the recent history of science is implausible, as Harrison's reviews themselves show. He is no impartial observer here; he was a director of Oxford University's <a href="http://www.ianramseycentre.info/">Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion</a>, an organisation whose very name is predicated on challenging <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis">the conflict thesis</a>, and promoting the 'dialogue' thesis. In his response Gingras writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Harrison] is also silent on the fact that I take care to define the meaning of the word “dialogue,” identify its main apostles, and show that the discourse involving dialogue takes off only after 1979, followed by an exponential growth after 1993, when the Templeton Foundation’s visibility and money was also ramping up. And far from explaining that growth by a single cause (namely Templeton money), as Harrison suggests, I clearly identify (p. 149–152) three other causes of the rise of the “dialogue” rhetoric: 1) the return of the religious after the 1970s (well analyzed in Gilles Kepel’s The Revenge of God), which led to the creation of many organizations promoting a dialogue with science, and which also put organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on the defensive; 2) Pope John Paul II’s creation (in 1979) of a committee to reconsider Galileo’s trial and to promote “dialogue” with science; and 3) the emergence of a postmodern lexicon among historians eschewing “false dichotomies” and “conflict” in favor of such terms as “conversation” (as used by Harrison), “meeting,” “exchanges,” and “encounters,” all suggesting that, after all, “everything is in everything,” and that making conceptual distinctions is a bit passé.</blockquote>
A reminder of the <a href="http://www.ianramseycentre.info/about-us.html">mission </a>of the Ian Ramsey Centre:<br />
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"Members of the Centre also <b>carry out extensive work on the history of science and religion</b>, often challenging simplistic accounts of what has been a complex and varied interaction." (my emphasis)<br />
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We know what 'challenging simplistic accounts of what has been a complex and varied interaction' means in this context. Harrison continues this very mission when he concludes in his response to Gingras's response:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Finally, “there were many cases over the last 300 years of conflict between science and religion.” Quite, although we might quibble about what counts as “science” and “religion,” and how many is “many.” The point is that this is only part of the picture, and leaves out equally decisive cases of creative and mutual support between science and religion, and the more common instances of indifference or peaceful coexistence. Attempting to understand examples of conflict is indeed the role of the historian, but an understanding that considers only instances of conflict will be impoverished and partial, and will likely give rise to the kind of flawed and one-sided perspective that we encounter in Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue.</blockquote>
And the Ian Ramsey Centre '<a href="https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/organizations/ian-ramsey-centre-for-science-and-religion">receives significant financial support from the John Templeton Foundation</a>'. Two recent Templeton grants to the Centre:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.templeton.org/grant/special-divine-action">Special Divine Action, $2.4m</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.templeton.org/grant/science-and-religion-in-latin-america">Science and Religion in Latin America, $0.5m</a><br />
<br />
Templeton also supports the <a href="http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/">The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion</a> at Cambridge University – <a href="https://www.templeton.org/grant/expansion-of-faraday-institute-the-next-20-years">it has recently given it $2.4m to expand</a>. These are substantial sums of money, and Templeton are welcome to give it. But the rest of us need to be aware that Templeton’s religious underpinning is playing a role, at the very least, in the fostering of this pseudo-discipline of science and religion. And this must surely have an effect on historians of science.<br />
<br />
The Institute's role:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Faraday Institute has a Christian ethos, but encourages engagement with a wide diversity of opinions concerning interactions between science and religion, without engaging in advocacy. It aims to provide accurate information in order to facilitate informed debate.</blockquote>
The Institute says it doesn't engage in advocacy, and it certainly doesn't advocate <i>for</i> the conflict thesis. Consider these <a href="http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Papers.php">research papers</a>:<br />
<br />
<b>The Science and Religion Debate - an Introduction</b> - "Science and theology have things to say to each other since both are concerned with the search for truth attained through motivated belief."<br />
<br />
<b>Does Science Need Religion?</b> - "Must science constitute a closed system, assuming all reality is within its grasp? So far from science being autonomous, and its method defining rationality, it itself rests on major assumptions. We may take for granted the regularity and ordered nature of the physical world, and the ability of the human mind to grasp it. Yet theism can explain this by invoking the rationality of the Creator."<br />
<br />
<b>Models for Relating Science and Religion</b> - "Interactions between science and religion are varied and complex, both historically and today. Models can be useful for making sense of the data. This paper compares four of the major types of model that have been proposed to describe science-religion interactions, highlighting their respective strengths and weaknesses. It is concluded that the model of ‘complementarity’ is most fruitful in the task of relating scientific and religious knowledge."<br />
<br />
And so it goes on; papers all suggesting that conflict between science and religion is a myth. So, by consistently denying the conflict thesis, it appears to be advocating <i>something</i>.<br />
<br />
All this evidence strongly indicates that Templeton <i>is</i> in the business of funding historical research to counteract the conclusion that science and religion conflict in many ways, and Peter Harrison is being disingenuous if he denies this.Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-65362435473939117092017-09-30T07:38:00.003-07:002017-10-01T01:22:40.198-07:00The Archbishop of Canterbury's 'Breathtaking Hypocrisy'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Justin Welby <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41449299">has compared the BBC's approach to abuse</a> to that of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I haven't seen the same integrity over the BBC's failures over Savile as I've seen in the Roman Catholic Church, in the Church of England, in other public institutions over abuse.</blockquote>
This is a remarkable statement. Certainly, the BBC as an organisation was negligent in its handling of Jimmy Savile from the 70s up until his death (frankly the whole of Britain were; many, many people and institutions turned a blind eye to his activities, including <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31637320">the NHS</a>). <a href="http://www.damejanetsmithreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Opening-Statement-of-Dame-Janet-Smith-25.02.16.pdf">Dame Janet Smith said of the BBC</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There was a culture of not complaining or of raising concerns. BBC staff felt – and were sometimes told – that it was not in their best interests to pursue a complaint. Loyalty to and pride in a programme could hinder the sharing of concerns; there was a reluctance to rock the boat. </blockquote>
(Although ironically one of the men she singles out for not doing more to stop Savile was Anglican priest Canon Colin Semper:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He was a producer in the Religious Broadcasting department and worked closely with Savile. With commendable honesty, when giving evidence to the Review, he accepted that he had come to think that Savile had casual sex with a lot of girls, some of whom might have been underage. He did not discuss what he knew with his managers because he thought that they already knew about Savile and did not seem to be concerned about it. In my view, he should have discussed his concerns with his line manager. I think he now deeply regrets that he did not. )</blockquote>
<div>
So, it's clear that the BBC were culpable for Savile's continuing activities over decades. But, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00G8GJRJK">as Noel McGivern</a> points out:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...there are key differences between the BBC and Catholic Church. The BBC does not behave as a moral guardian of Britain or the world; it doesn't claim spiritual authority over 1.3 billion people. It is not a primary human identity. Any organisation can have paedophiles in it, but what sets the Catholic Church apart is how actively it sought to protect both them and itself.</blockquote>
<div>
Even before the report was published, the BBC had made steps to safeguard the vulnerable. In <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/corporate2/insidethebbc/howwework/reports/goodcorporation-review-of-the-bbcs-child-protection-and-whistleblowing-policies">2015</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The <a href="http://www.goodcorporation.com/">GoodCorporation </a>conclude that the BBC has strong child protection policies in place and that considerable effort has been made to improve them. Their report states that “there is a clear commitment and recognition of the importance of child protection and safeguarding in the BBC”.</blockquote>
Now, no doubt it's important to keep monitoring the BBC at all levels to ensure abuse does not recur, but the signs seem to be promising. It's not clear to me that this behaviour represents a lower level of integrity to that of the C of E and the Roman Catholic Church. A <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41449299">BBC spokesman said of Welby's comments</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This isn't a characterisation we recognise. When the Savile allegations became known we established an independent investigation by a High Court judge. In the interests of transparency, this was published in full. We apologised and accepted all the recommendations. And while today's BBC is a different place, we set out very clear actions to ensure the highest possible standards of child safeguarding.</blockquote>
Re the Catholic Church, this is what Geoffrey Robinson QC says in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00433T3Q2">The Case of the Pope</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Church's response, still echoed by those like Alan Dershowitz who defend the present Pope, is that hierarchical sex abuse occurs in all religious institutions and in secular schools, and it is wrong to 'stereotype' the Roman Catholic priesthood. But the evidence does reliably show a remarkably higher level of abuse in Catholic institutions (see chapter 2) and in any event, the defense misses the point, namely that this church, through its pretensions to be a state, with its own non-punitive Canon Law, has actually covered up the abuse and harboured the abusers. Moreover, this particular religion endows its priests with god-like powers in the eyes of children, who are put into their spiritual embrace from the time when they first develop the faculty of reasoning...A church that puts its children from this early age under the spiritual control of its priests, representatives of God to whom they are unflinchingly obedient, has the most stringent of duties to guard against the exploitation of that obedience to do them harm. That duty includes the duty of handing over those reasonably suspected of child sex abuse to the secular authorities for trial and, if convicted, for punishment. It is this duty that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, a.k.a. Benedict XVI, has for the past thirty years adamantly refused to accept. (pp3-4)</blockquote>
Certainly there is no way that the BBC could operate at the level of the Catholic Church, since that Church is also a state; a state that throws its weight around at the UN, <a href="http://www.secularism.org.uk/32964.html">for example</a>. The Church's record on covering up abuse, and, in fact, <b>facilitating</b> it, are legion. These were the facts behind the award winning film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film)">Spotlight</a>, focussing on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_scandal_in_the_Catholic_archdiocese_of_Boston">child abuse scandal in Boston</a>. I previously reported on their behaviour surrounding <a href="http://goodgrieflinus.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/cover-up-kings-strike-again.html">Father Kit Cunningham</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...on the day that Pope Benedict XVI, during his visit to Britain last September, was in Westminster Cathedral expressing his "deep sorrow to innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes", the Rosminian order was writing to refuse to pay any compensation for what it has openly acknowledged are the crimes of four of its own priests.</blockquote>
(The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosminians#Child_sexual_abuse_scandals">Rosminian Order</a> ran the school where the priest committed his abuse.)<br />
<br />
As for the Church of England, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/30/archbishop-of-canterbury-accused-of-hypocrisy-by-sexual-abuse-survivors?CMP=share_btn_tw">its victims of abuse are none too happy</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In a statement, six survivors of abuse by powerful church figures rejected Welby’s comments and said the record of the church and Welby himself was one of “silence, denial and evasion”.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Their statement said: “Speaking from our own bitter experience, we do not recognise Archbishop Welby’s description of the integrity with which the Church of England handles cases of abuse in a church context.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Far from the ‘rigorous response and self-examination’ he claims, our experience of the church, and specifically the archbishop, is of long years of silence, denial and evasion. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Church of England needs to confront its own darkness in relation to abuse before confronting the darkness of others.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Matthew Ineson, who was allegedly raped as a teenager by a C of E vicar, said Welby had shown “breathtaking hypocrisy”. The vicar, Trevor Devamanikkam, killed himself the day he was due in court to face charges.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I know from my own experience, and the experience of others, that safeguarding within the C of E is appalling,” Ineson said. “The church has colluded with the cover-up of abuse and has obstructed justice for those whose lives have been ruined by the actions of its clergy. I have been fighting for five years for the church to recognise its responsibilities and I’m still being met with attempts to bully me into dropping my case.”</blockquote>
The <a href="https://www.churchofengland.org/media/3999908/report-of-the-peter-ball-review-210617.pdf">independent report</a> into the case of Anglican bishop <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ball_(bishop)">Peter Ball</a> (pictured) said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This report considers the serious sexual wrongdoing of Peter Ball, a bishop of the Church of England (the Church), who abused many boys and men over a period of twenty years or more. That is shocking in itself but is compounded by the failure of the Church to respond appropriately to his misconduct, again over a period of many years. Ball’s priority was to protect and promote himself and he maligned the abused. The Church colluded with that rather than seeking to help those he had harmed, or assuring itself of the safety of others. </blockquote>
The former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carey#Sex_abuser_Bishop_Peter_Ball">forced to resign</a> because of his treatment of Ball.<br />
<br />
So Welby <i>himself </i>is guilty of silence, denial and evasion, according to one of the Church's victims, and a report into one abuser states baldly that the Church <b>colluded </b>with the abuser rather than help those he harmed.<br />
<br />
Remember, Welby's contention was that he hasn't seen "the same integrity over the BBC's failures over Savile as I've seen in the Roman Catholic Church, in the Church of England...over abuse." Perhaps he means the BBC have shown <b>more</b> integrity, but I doubt it!<br />
<br />
I think one might make a case that the BBC have been equally as bad as the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church over abuse, but really the evidence shows that both these Holy institutions have been <b>much worse</b> than the BBC. The Archbishop should retract this claim, and ensure that his organisation stops bullying the victims of abuse, like Matthew Ineson, and recompenses them properly for their years of abuse.<br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE</b>: See this Youtube recording of an LBC interview of Justin Welby with annotations by <a href="https://twitter.com/andymorseuk?lang=en">Andy Morse</a>, an alleged victim of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smyth_(barrister)">John Smyth</a>, a some time friend, or acquaintance, or colleague, of Welby. The abuse is alleged to have occurred at Christian holiday camps in Africa. This is Part 1 of 4 parts.<br />
<br />
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<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-59606976697474911432017-09-22T03:13:00.001-07:002017-09-22T03:57:34.962-07:00EASAC statement on Homeopathy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Here, dated September 2017:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/EASAC_Homepathy_statement_web_final.pdf">http://www.easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/EASAC_Homepathy_statement_web_final.pdf</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
EASAC – the European Academies' Science Advisory Council – is formed by the national science academies of the EU Member States to enable them to collaborate with each other in giving advice to European policy-makers. It thus provides a means for the collective voice of European science to be heard.</blockquote>
Extracts:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
EASAC, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, is publishing this Statement to build on recent work by its member academies to reinforce criticism of the health and scientific claims made for homeopathic products. The analysis and conclusions are based on the excellent science-based assessments already published by authoritative and impartial bodies. The fundamental importance of allowing and supporting consumer choice requires that consumers and patients are supplied with evidence-based, accurate and clear information. It is, therefore, essential to implement a standardised, knowledge-based regulatory framework to cover product efficacy, safety and quality, and accurate advertising practices, across the European Union (EU).</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our Statement examines the following issues:</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Scientific mechanisms of action</b>—where we conclude that the claims for homeopathy are implausible and inconsistent with established scientific concepts.<br />
<b>Clinical efficacy</b>—we acknowledge that a placebo effect may appear in individual patients but we agree with previous extensive evaluations concluding that there are no known diseases for which there is robust, reproducible evidence that homeopathy is effective beyond the placebo effect. There are related concerns for patient-informed consent and for safety, the latter associated with poor quality control in preparing homeopathic remedies.<br />
<b>Promotion of homeopathy</b>—we note that this may pose significant harm to the patient if incurring delay in seeking evidence-based medical care and that there is a more general risk of undermining public confidence in the nature and value of scientific evidence.<br />
<b>Veterinary practice</b>—we conclude similarly that there is no rigorous evidence to substantiate the use of homeopathy in veterinary medicine and it is particularly worrying when such products are used in preference to evidence-based medicinal products to treat livestock infections.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We make the following recommendations.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. There should be consistent regulatory requirements to demonstrate efficacy, safety and quality of all products for human and veterinary medicine, to be based on verifiable and objective evidence, commensurate with the nature of the claims being made. In the absence of this evidence, a product should be neither approvable nor registrable by national regulatory agencies for the designation medicinal product.<br />
2. Evidence-based public health systems should not reimburse homeopathic products and practices unless they are demonstrated to be efficacious and safe by rigorous testing.<br />
3. The composition of homeopathic remedies should be labelled in a similar way to other health products available: that is, there should be an accurate, clear and simple description of the ingredients and their amounts present in the formulation.<br />
4. Advertising and marketing of homeopathic products and services must conform to established standards of accuracy and clarity. Promotional claims for efficacy, safety and quality should not be made without demonstrable and reproducible evidence.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our purpose is not to seek the prohibition of homeopathic products, and we recognise the fundamental importance of allowing and supporting consumer choice. Rather, we aim to explore the policy dimensions for ensuring informed patient choice with the emphasis on ‘appropriately informed’, and for achieving a standardised knowledge-based, robust regulatory framework and sound advertising practices across the EU, which can apply equitably to all medicinal products, whatever their origins and whatever their mechanisms.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The continuing popularity of homeopathic products worldwide might be taken as demonstrating an unfortunate point – that scientific evidence is not always relevant to the policy maker nor understood by the public-at-large. In this eventuality, there might be only limited room for optimism that EASAC and others – in reiterating that homeopathic products and practices lack proof of efficacy– could influence the present situation. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Any claimed efficacy of homeopathic products in clinical use can be explained by the placebo effect or attributed to poor study design, random variation, regression towards the mean, or publication bias. Among these, the placebo effect can be of value to the patient but there are no known diseases for which there is robust, reproducible evidence that homeopathy is effective beyond the placebo effect.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
• Homeopathy raises issues of concern for patient-informed consent if health practitioners recommend products that they know are biologically ineffective.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
• There are also potential safety concerns for homeopathic preparations because of poorly monitored production methods, and these require greater attention to quality control and assessment of adverse effects.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
• The scientific claims made for homeopathy are implausible and inconsistent with established concepts from chemistry and physics. In particular, the memory effects of water are too short-range and transient (occurring within the nanometre and nanosecond range) to account for any claimed efficacy.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
• The promotion and use of homeopathic products risks significant harms. First, by incurring delay in the patient seeking appropriate, evidence-based, medical attention or, even worse, deterring the patient from ever doing so. Secondly, by generally undermining patient and public confidence in the nature and value of scientific evidence for decision making in health care and other societal priorities.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
• In the absence of similarly robust evidence for homeopathic products in veterinary medicine, it is an error to require organic farmers to use these products in preference to prevention or treatment for which there is demonstrable efficacy and an established mode of action.<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-17395785413409522622017-08-21T08:57:00.001-07:002017-09-02T14:55:10.252-07:00Hume on Induction Revision Notes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for <a href="https://msds.open.ac.uk/students/study/undergraduate/course/a222">A222 Exploring Philosophy</a>, Book 4, Knowledge by <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/people/cc863">Cristina Chimisso</a>.<br />
<br />
I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.<br />
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Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-12763010348912667102017-06-16T07:06:00.000-07:002017-06-16T07:08:22.366-07:00It's 'Elf and Safety Gone Mad!<div style="text-align: left;">
Well, contra the cliché, this is what health and safety gone mad <i><b>really </b></i>looks like:</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5p6kkB0x-odeHFK_dXIcmTb5rym2DGc_CIPA3P_MSPCuoerUVvS1KWaw2RMDXNOl1szX1Nm49Fy0hSzwieHkQGD8CCtlayxOE-WMrPCvj7Guhwr08kExi5vUBbnlQFgaPajlsvd2z5eJO2xg/s1600/nintchdbpict0003314784321.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="543" data-original-width="960" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5p6kkB0x-odeHFK_dXIcmTb5rym2DGc_CIPA3P_MSPCuoerUVvS1KWaw2RMDXNOl1szX1Nm49Fy0hSzwieHkQGD8CCtlayxOE-WMrPCvj7Guhwr08kExi5vUBbnlQFgaPajlsvd2z5eJO2xg/s320/nintchdbpict0003314784321.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A trapped resident tries to get help as the fire engulfs the Grenfell Tower block.<br />(c) <a href="http://universalnews.photoshelter.com/">Universal News and Sport (Europe)</a></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It can lead to disadvantaged men, women and children being burnt alive in their own homes. It <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/16/manufacturer-of-cladding-on-grenfell-tower-identified-as-omnis-exteriors">appears undeniable now</a> that the Grenfell disaster is down to a failure in regulations somewhere.<br />
<br />
Philosopher Jonathan Pearce <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2017/06/16/regulation-morality-london-fire-trump-brexit/">highlights the narrative</a> that makes life that little bit worse for the poor and vulnerable in our society, and which can lead to tragedies like this one, following George Monbiot in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/15/grenfell-tower-red-tape-safety-deregulation?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail">The Guardian</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But what is regulation? I think when the word is used, people really don’t think about what it is. Regulation means rules. Why do we have rules? Rules are moral proclamations about how the world should be. Regulation is codified morality. In shorthand, then, when people claim they want “deregulation”, they are actually asking for less morality, fewer moral rules.</blockquote>
And he links it to the movement that has brought us Brexit:<br />
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What regulation does (when done properly) is seek to make production ethically responsible, which is better for everyone. A company in Europe, now, cannot employ children, must have strict safety regulations such that the product won’t be faulty enough to blow up or catch fire, must be produced by a workforce that has minimum legislation for workers’ rights, and so on. These regulations work best when adopted by multiple countries across a wide platform. There is a uniformity for everyone such that no one in that marketplace can get away with not adhering to them.</blockquote>
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... </blockquote>
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Now, with the UK, we are leaving a large regulatory network that has historically given us a massive amount of regulation. And this is a good thing [he means the network is a good thing, not the leaving!]. Either we take that all on (and manage that at a higher cost), or we drop some or lots of it. We become a low-tax haven full of corporations who define the rules of play. </blockquote>
For at least the last 20 years, in my memory, there has been the constant narrative that we are all pandered, soft somehow, because we have 'elf and safety regulations, and that businesses should be allowed to carry on their trade without so many restrictions. Here's David Cameron responding to that retrograde sentiment in 2012, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-i-will-kill-off-safety-culture-6285238.html">saying he will "kill off the health and safety culture for good"</a>:<br />
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He said:<br />
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I don't think there's any one single way you can cut back the health and safety monster.</blockquote>
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You've got to look at the quantity of rules - and we're cutting them back; you've got to look at the way they're enforced - and we are making sure that is more reasonable; we're taking self-employed people out of whole classes of health and safety regulation.</blockquote>
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... </blockquote>
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But the key about health and safety is not just the rules, the laws and regulations - it's also the culture of fear many businesses have about health and safety.</blockquote>
Rather than referring to the 'health and safety monster' he should have been challenging this shibboleth of the right and championing health and safety as a good and necessary feature of a properly functioning society.<br />
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Sadly, it looks like it's not only the health and safety culture he and his ilk have killed off.<br />
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<br />Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-64117494278129175312017-06-09T17:11:00.000-07:002017-08-18T08:23:53.567-07:00The Asymmetry of Pain and Pleasure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Jeffery Jay Lowder at the Secular Outpost blogged an excellent piece last year detailing <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/06/26/pererz1-25-evidences-against-theism/">25 lines of evidence against theism</a>. I think all of them bear consideration, and, if I remember correctly, one or two more lines of evidence against theism popped up in the comments.<br />
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I would like to add another modest line to this list, or maybe just an adjunct to his No.8: The Biological Role (and Moral Randomness) of Pain and Pleasure, following <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=8999">Paul Draper</a>. It is prompted by a trivial injustice that surely everyone experiences on a daily basis, but that perhaps points to a bigger issue. The minor injustice is this: the fact that the more one experiences a pleasure the less it satisfies and, indeed, it can turn to pain, while the more one experiences a pain it is not relieved, and it never turns into a pleasure.<br />
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Now, for the purposes of this discussion, I am taking a pretty simple view of pain and pleasure as things that are, in order, fundamentally bad and good. I will not consider the paradoxes of people seeking out pain for pleasure, for example, although, granted, this does suggest we have a complicated relationship with pain and pleasure. I think it's also true to say that one can become numbed to further pain to a degree. But this numbing doesn't seem as effective as the numbing of pleasure. Note too that people who feel chronic pain report it as a bad thing, while people who feel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_genital_arousal_disorder">chronic pleasure</a> also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/14/women-persistent-genital-arousal-disorder-orgasm-pgad-pain">report it as a bad thing</a>.<br />
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These things are pretty understandable on, and consistent with, Naturalism; we are the products of a natural selection that favours survival and reproduction over all else, so pain and pleasure are regulating systems that have evolved to help bring about gene persistence through that survival and reproduction. The particular fate of the gene vehicles is not so important as the gene persistence, so, as we see in nature, any number of strategies to achieve this persistence is possible, including ones which serve up pain and pleasure to the gene vehicles unequally (are there any animals that experience an asymmetry of pleasure over pain, I wonder?*). On an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent account of theism, these pose a problem; why would an omnibenevolent god allow an asymmetry of pain and pleasure, leading to more pain than pleasure?<br />
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What these observations lead to relates somewhat to our attitudes to death. <a href="http://goodgrieflinus.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/would-immortal-life-be-meaningless-life.html">I wrote recently</a> defending Bernard Williams's thoughts on eternal life, that it would end up become meaningless because categorical desires would be exhausted. I recently heard Shelly Kagan expressing a similar opinion on <a href="http://philosophybites.com/2017/04/shelly-kagan-on-death-and-deprivati.html">Philosophy Bites</a>:<br />
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I do think that eventually life would grow excruciatingly dreadful, boring, tedious no matter what it was filled with, but for all that it would still have been true that during the initial satisfying, richly rewarding 100 years, 500 years, or however long it would take before it got boring, those initial 500 years will still have been worth living, they were still good. To give a humdrum, everyday analogy: if you offer me a piece of chocolate, I love chocolate, thank you, thank you, thank you; if you give me a second piece of chocolate, I love chocolate; you offer me a third piece of chocolate, I say thank you thank you thank you. Now there must be some number...of pieces of chocolate at which I would say: no more. Chocolate is no longer a good thing for me at this point, I'm not enjoying it.</blockquote>
He goes on to claim that the initial period before the boredom is worth living, and I think that's right. But what is going on here? Why do some of us think that these pleasures will stop? Pleasures derive from the satisfaction of desires. But once a desire is satisfied the pleasure stops. I guess that means that, in the Bernard Williams scenario, we are saying that over time all our desires will be satisfied. So no more pleasure will be possible.<br />
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Conversely, we could say that pain derives from the imposition of 'undesires'. But there is an imbalance: there is an effectively never-ending supply of 'undesires', while there is no never-ending supply of desires. So pain is inevitable in a way that pleasure is not.<br />
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This perhaps derives from our nature: we need a fine balance to maintain our health - nutrition, warmth, water - so evolution has shaped us to maintain that fine balance. If the pleasure was never turned off we would soon over-indulge and do ourselves serious harm. Chronic pain does not pose the same immediate risk to our health, (although, granted, it can lead to damage in some circumstances), so stopping pain is simply not as important or pressing as stopping pleasure. *Perhaps this answers my question in parenthesis above.<br />
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So I think the asymmetry can be expressed simply as:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Satisfaction of desires is inevitable, so pleasure must end, but relief from undesires is not, so pain never will (end).</blockquote>
I think this is clear evidence for naturalism over an omnibenevolent god. Not a knock-out blow, to be sure, just another strike against God. Further, I think this asymmetry is inevitable given our nature. God need not have given us a nature that results in this asymmetry, so it's more likely we are not products of such a divine being, but of indifferent Nature.Mark Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04982524614308121228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7138285268662828982.post-79395905442291071912017-05-06T08:05:00.000-07:002017-08-21T06:55:27.372-07:00Functionalism Revision Notes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for <a href="https://msds.open.ac.uk/students/study/undergraduate/course/a222">A222 Exploring Philosophy</a>, Book 5, Mind by <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/people/dcm4">Derek Matravers</a>.<br />
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I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.<br />
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