Feeding The Fish

There’s an interesting letter in the Telegraph from the 2005 Tory intake calling for US style recall elections. It sounds nice but the world it belongs in is the one where most MPs enjoy the support the vast majority of voters and a recall can reflect a genuine shift in attitude. The problem is that we don’t live in that world and most MPs don’t have enjoy participially high levels of support in their constituency, 426 MPs had more of their constituents voting for other candidates than themselves and 56 had over 60% of their constituents vote against them (conversely only 35 had 60% or more vote for them). The fact that the system allows a majority of voters to be represented by people they didn’t vote for should really be one of the first places people look when trying to work out why no one trusts our political system.

Implementation wise I can see problems. As support for most MPs is quite low, the only way to prevent abuse of this system would be to have a prohibitively high level of signatures to authorize the recall. For this to happen they’d have have committed an offense so large that their removal would be a foregone conclusion and the recall would effectively be  a rubber stamp. Even more worryingly, unless all other parties bow out and allow a single alternative candidate to stand (which has happened), there is every possibility they could still win.  Adding a little bit of democracy could result in a profoundly undemocratic outcome, where an MP elected with 70% of the vote could lose over half their support and still retain their seat with 30% of the vote if the rest of the vote was divided between rival parties. Trying to patch over the holes in our political system just reveals it’s deep inadequacy.

Recall elections are a good idea when applied to executive positions like the example given of the California governorship, but in the UK we lack the same culture of elected executives (City mayors are the ones I can think of). In practice, they can’t be truly effective in legislatures.

So I like the sentiment, but I’d rather they were thinking about things that really would improve our political system. I don’t think the Tories are fundamentally a lost cause in this area, I think they’re are in a good position to deliver on some of my wish list; after last Autumn they could easily find enough support for fixed term parliaments and their experimentation with primaries leaves me hopeful they’ll extend that. I doubt they’ll be brave enough to talk about term limits and electoral reform, but they really should be if they’re serious about fixing the system.

It’s a bit of a strange week, here I have atheists defending establishment and theists attacking it.  Normally I’m a big fan of Jonathan Calder, but I think he’s wrong on this one.

So the question to ask is not what the ideal relation between church and state would be. Instead, as a good Popperian, I believe that we should ask what problem disestablishing the Church of England would solve. And a little reflection will tell us that it would makes things far worse.

I write this as an atheist, albeit one with a great love of church music and architecture. I suppose I could allow myself to enjoy these while adopting an intellectual faith (rather after the later Wittgenstein) and say that when Christians talk about everlasting life they are really saying something profound and poetic about this life, but that would be dishonest of me. Most Christians mean what they say about the afterlife, and it is not true.

As an atheist, then, I have to recognise that religion can be a hugely destructive force. What I value about the Church of England is that it largely keeps the Christians quiet. I saw a joke in one of Charles Masterman’s books from the Edwardian era to the effect that the established church is the greatest bulwark against the coming of Christ’s Kingdom. That has to be a point in its favour.

Disestablish the church and you will set free the evangelicals and their deeply conservative philosophy. That is the last thing I wish to see. If you doubt this, look at the USA. It has no established church, but the religion has a far greater role in national life.

I come down on the side of  disestablishment because I think that some of those conclusions are wrong. Arguably, the better guide for what happens in a secular British state isn’t the United States but the continent, where secularism hasn’t resulted in anything like the power of religious fundamentalists have in the US. There are far more factors at play here than state-church vs secular-state but culturally Britain has far more in common with the increasingly secular Europe than the highly religious US.

This argument also relies on it being true an established church keeps radical elements at bay, I think it would do if it were more strictly enforced but I think we’d be hard pushed to say the CoE is a particularly enforcing organization at present and if it were, I think there’d be widespread agreement that this was a bad thing. Even if it were true that an established church kept Christians quiet, that’s hardly a point in it’s favour. I disagree with them but would rather they speak up than keep quiet, if nothing else it gives me more to blog about.

It also assumes Church of England is itself benign. I think Theo Hobson has it right when he says that the age of the Liberal CofE has ended. In the benign, moderate Church of England we have the Bishop of Carlisle saying that being nice to gays is causing God to hate us so much he kills people. The constant talk of a split tells that this is not a universal attitude, but it is definitely mainstream. The CoE can’t be relied on to defend us from conservatives outside when it has it’s own powerful wing of conservatives, this should by itself make the case for disestablishment to those concerned by that: It is far more likely that the conservative wing will exert force through the CoE’s entrenchment than another faith or denomination rise to the same level of influence. I still don’t find that especially likely as establishment is becoming like the monarchy, theoretically powerful but would cause a constitutional crisis if it ever stepped over the line.

I’m much more optimistic that disestablishment is possible. The demographics are with us, as much as half the population claims ‘no religion’ and the CofE is no longer the largest Christian denomination. The case of secularism can definitely be made and if not that, the case against privileging what is now a sub-culture is even stronger. I’d shy away from saying it’s inevitable, but it’s certainly extremely likely in the next few decades. The key now is to be watchful for a ‘multi-faith’ settlement to try and worm it’s way in (arguably the real meaning of the Archbishop’s Sharia speech the other week). We shouldn’t try to extend special protection, but reduce it so that we all stand on the same level.

I’m revisiting my electoral system (last seen here) with some substantial revisions and improvements, and I’m trying a side experiment to see if effectively pulling 646 random votes out of a hat produces a more proportional government than our current one. Amazingly it seems so far it does, we actually do better by random chance than FPTP. I’m sure statisticians will be unsurprised but that’s going to keep me amazed for a while.

Blog memes are interesting, but the key idea of memes is they’re analogous to genes and not only replicate but evolve over time. But for the most part blog memes don’t evolve, they remain static as the Internet allows perfect replication. Let’s have a play around with that.

Here’s how it works, each person who answers a meme then creates a slight variation on it. The people they tag then have a choice of following the version answered before or the variation. They then create a variation on the one they choose and pass it on. Eventually it might change so much you could be reinfected with a descendant of your original meme without even realising it.

Here’s my meme to start it off: What’s an event or period in history you find interesting, but almost no one has heard?

The variation is: What’s an event happening in the world today that you find interesting, but almost no one’s heard of?

If this actually takes off, it might be a good idea if people note down the generation number of the meme in the post title.

I tag: The Religious Athiest, Oz Athiest and Life before Death.  If anyone else wants to jump in on this to get it rolling, feel free.

Who knows? It might never die.

Oh no, it seems a little while ago I was tagged with a blog meme AND I DID NOTHING WITH IT, seeing as being tagged is a sign that someone actually reads this thing (or just randomly picked me out of a blogroll…), this seems quite negligent of me. The goal of this meme is to pick out a combination of three Blogs that is unique to you, so here’s my picking:

Matthew Yglesias - Matt’s fantastic blog at The Atlantic is a must read if you’re following US Politics.

Jane in Progress - Did you watch Buffy? Do you watch BSG? If so you’ve seen something written by the amazing script writer Jane Espenson. In between tibbits about life in the industry, her blog is full of detailed tips and examples on story and script writing.

F-Word - A site that takes the ridiculous notion that, just maybe, women count as human beings and draws out those truth-telling cases (sadly too common) where not only people seem to disagree with this, but no one seems to care that much about it.

As I’m bringing this up faar past date, I’m not going to tag forward. Instead I’ll repay the world with a new meme later, have fun!

From the New Yorker:

McCain, who is seventy-one, looks both older and more vigorous than he does on television, which tends to conceal the scars from a skin cancer. In person, he is all energy and motion. At one moment, bursting into laughter, he exuberantly explains why, after “a short period of waterboarding to find out what they did in their absence,” he would take back some of the staffers who fled his campaign at its low point.

Hahaha, maybe I’m alone in thinking that’d be a lot funnier if people weren’t ACTUALLY being waterboarded by the United States…

Looks like Terence Blacker is going to miss Bush! I’m afraid he’s alone there.

Bush may have made some terrible decisions but, as a politician, he had things to recommend him. All too human in his social and verbal clumsiness, he has offered the world a brief respite from those bright, shiny faces of the practised politicians who are worked so perfectly by the mighty party machines behind them. For all their talk of change, the presidential candidates represent a return to smooth, professional politics after an interval of sometimes hilarious, often catastrophic amateurism.

When Richard Nixon slunk away from public life, he snarled at the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.” Bush, in many ways as discredited a figure, will doubtless leave as he arrived, with that stunned, gee-shucks-am-I-really-President? look on his face, but the message could be the same. For liberal opinion, he has been too easy a target over the past few years.

Perhaps it was good to have someone so fallible in charge for a while. Those who have bemoaned the age of spin-doctors and have complained that there is not enough personality in our leaders will at last understand that smooth, safety-first technocrats have something to recommend them.

The rest of us might even one day look back with fondness to the days when a normal, flawed human being was in the White House.

So the jist of that is, sure he did a lot of things that some liberals might consider to be, well, evil but he was a good laugh right?

I’m afraid to say I won’t miss George Bush. This is a man who it is easy to say lowered the standard of political discourse, ruined America’s worldwide reputation and undeniably made the world a less safe place to live.

This is a man who doesn’t understand that Congress writes the law and he either vetos or enforces them. As President he has no power to declare he won’t obey certain sections of law as he has done by writing hundreds of signing statements, and this was whilst REPUBLICANS controlled Congress! What a rebel!

This is a man who’s administration outed one of their own spies to silence a critic. What a maverick!

This is a man who pushed through incredibly expensive wars and tax cuts at the same time, grew the federal budget by 7% a year (double Clinton’s 3.5%) and then accused Democrats of fiscal irresponsibility! Oh George, what a character you are!

This is a man who after using discredited evidence and lies to sell the Iraq war to the world, causes thousands of deaths, creates millions of refugees and made the world less safe from terrorism made JOKES about his inability to find WMDs. How quirky! What a personality! How unlike normal politicians! How unlike a human being.

This is a man who is now telling Congress that if they don’t retroactively give immunity to telecoms companies who his administration told to break the law and spy on normal Americans, the terrorists win. Never mind the fact that if the Bill is this important it could pass without the immunity, and he as President could use his power of pardon to the same effect. Never mind the fact that all that’s needed to make these wiretaps legal is a warrent, which they can get after the fact. In order to do what they say is necessary to protect America, all they need to do is let someone else know at some point who and why. What delightfully secretive people! I’m sure there’s a word for people who use the threat of terror to reach their goals….nah, go on, it’ll come back to me.

But hey, it’s over soon right? The worst we can do next year is McCain and he’s such a maverick how can he not be alright? Oh, except perhaps the one thing that made him the least repulsive of the Republican candidates, his opposition to the US using torture, disappeared the other night when he voted against banning the CIA to use waterboarding - something he himself has described as torture. Oh John, you so wacky!

Oh yes, We laugh at Bush, because otherwise we’d have to cry. It’s a laughter of despair and disbelief that the last 7 years happened at all. No, I really not going to miss George Bush.

The Sun have a story today on British-Born Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, Iain Dale condemned them:

The Sun reveals this morning that British spy planes have picked up the voices of Taliban fighters speaking with Brummie and Bradford accents. These people are presumably British passport holders and are fighting British soldiers. When they are caught they should be charged with treason. There was a time when they would faced being hanged. To be honest, it’s what they deserve.

I just can’t get behind this kind of thing: Why are British-Born Taliban worse than Non-British Taliban? If we caught a British-Born Taliban and an Afghan-Born Taliban why would one have committed inherently worse crimes?

Am I a worse person if I’m a traitor against my country and murder a British person than if I murdered a French person? If it were India trying to keep the peace in Afghanistan, would the actions of these British Taliban be less evil?

Are the Germans who fled Germany to fight with the British Army to be looked down upon because they fought a war against their countrymen?

The Taliban are traitors against humanity, there are any number of reasons to despise them. Their nationality is utterly unimportant.

So, that scare on the North Sea oil Platform yesterday turns out to have been sparked by someone having a dream about a bomb on the rig, who was overheard telling someone about their dream by another person who then went to spark the alarm.

Now that’s ridiculous in itself, but now it turns out the woman who had the dream has been arrested and flown to Aberdeen for questioning and is appearing in court. Naturally, this is her fault as opposed to the person who half overheard the conversation and duly spread the rumour.

Unbelievable.

I’ve talked before about how using philosophy in education was a far better way of creating moral education than religious education and here’s an impressive demonstration of it’s power in a UK school.

Paul Jackson, one of the school’s two head teachers, said: “Gallions opened in 1999 on a new estate in the East End, with all the problems that an inner-London estate brings.

“Virtually everyone that came here had some kind of emotional or behavioural difficulty.”

Philosophy is taught across the board in place of citizenship lessons and the school has hired a dedicated “philosophy for children” teacher, Lisa Naylor.

She said: “I have witnessed children who barely spoke English and children who had very little self-confidence debating fervently whether the sound of rain on the window was or wasn’t music.”

At first, she had difficulties getting the children involved without being aggressive towards their classmates.

But soon pupils were able to “challenge each other’s ideas in an assertive and non-aggressive way”, leading to better behaviour and greater respect for one another.

How fantastic is that? Some of the comments are from people complaining that schools should be concerntrating on the fundamentals (schools are incapable of teaching children more than one thing you see), but how can teaching children to think not be fundamental? Given the improvement in behaviour shown, it’d suggest that teaching philosophy might make teaching other fundamental skills easier as well.

One comment said that these questions were far too advanced for kids this age, something that is demonstratively untrue from the article. Children are not only capable of thinking philosophically but seem to love it.