Fragments: Posts tagged 'doomed'urn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-tags-doomed-html2024-01-29T13:25:10ZThere is no cabalurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2024-01-29-there-is-no-cabal2024-01-29T13:25:10Z2024-01-29T13:25:10ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Everyone wants to believe in conspiracies. Some people believe that the alarmingly far-right government of the UK is conspiring with shadowy plutocrats to enrich themselves. That government itself <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66965714" title="15-minute cities">apparently</a> believes in the ludicrous ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy theory, and that something variously known ‘the blob’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ is working furiously against them. Trump supporters in the US believe in more conspiracy theories than it’s easy to count. Their opponents believe that Trump is a sock puppet for Putin, or in various conspiracies called ‘disaster capitalism’. People on all sides think the Jews or, perhaps, the Muslims, are behind everything. Or is it the climate scientists?</p>
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<p>Here’s the thing: it’s all nonsense. The illuminati do not exist. There is no cabal. If you think there is, you need to get out more.</p>
<p>It’s pretty obvious that large-scale conspiracies are all but impossible: humans are just not very good either at keeping secrets or at running large organisations effectively. And, of course, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147905" title="On the viability of conspiratorial beliefs">you can make this formal</a>, if you want to.</p>
<p>In fact this is very easy to see. If you say that a person has some chance, \(c\), of leaking information about some conspiracy they’re involved in each year, then if you have \(n\) people conspiring for \(m\) years, and if all of them independently may leak information, then the chance that the conspiracy leaks after this time is</p>
<p>\[1 - (1 - c)^{nm}\]</p>
<p>What this means is easy to see. For a conspiracy where each person has a 1% chance of leaking it each year you get a picture like this:</p>
<div class="figure"><img src="/fragments/img/2024/there-is-no-cabal/chance-one-percent.svg" alt="Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 1%/person/year" />
<p class="caption">Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 1%/person/year</p></div>
<p>For a conspiracry where the chance is 0.1%/person/year then you get this:</p>
<div class="figure"><img src="/fragments/img/2024/there-is-no-cabal/chance-tenth-percent.svg" alt="Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year" />
<p class="caption">Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year</p></div>
<p>And I don’t know if this is clearer or not, but here is the 1% graph in 3d:</p>
<div class="figure"><img src="/fragments/img/2024/there-is-no-cabal/chance-one-percent-3d.svg" alt="Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year" />
<p class="caption">Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year</p></div>
<p>Well, you can see that the situation looks pretty hopeless: large conspiracies which last a long time are just doomed to leak. Of course real conspiracies aren’t made up of people, all of whom know everything, and who decide, randomly and independently, whether they should leak information each year: they’re more complicated than that. But that doesn’t make them more plausible.</p>
<p>Large, long-lived conspiracies are <em>extremely</em> implausible.</p>
<p>If you don’t want to think about the maths just look at the world. Look at the catastrophic, chaotic mess that is the current UK government. Look at the appalling series of disasters that was the Trump administration<sup><a href="#2024-01-29-there-is-no-cabal-footnote-1-definition" name="2024-01-29-there-is-no-cabal-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>. These are not people capable of conspiring with themselves, let along anyone else. Trump is not a smart person, and neither is Rishi Sunak.</p>
<p>Look at Putin and Ukraine.</p>
<p>Or look at the supposed great genius of private enterprise: Elon Musk. I mean, it’s impossible not to laugh at the mess he’s made of Twitter.</p>
<p>It’s not that these people can’t do harm: they can do, and are doing, enormous harm. If Trump wins another term, we’re all fucked. But the harm they do is not being done by some clever hidden scheming: they’re doing it in plain sight. They’re doing it both because they are exactly the evil shits they seem to be, and because they are grotesquely incompetent.</p>
<p>It’s not that they’re not corrupt: <a href="https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023">they are very corrupt</a>. But that corruption is <em>obvious</em>: the reason they don’t get caught is because they run the government. And that’s not a conspiracy: we know they run the government because many of them <em>are</em> the government. When all these government ministers ‘lose’ WhatsApps from 2020–2021 we know what that means: they’re not hiding it, they’re lying, we know they’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s in plain sight.</p>
<p>The problem is not, in fact, conspiracies, it’s the <em>belief</em> in conspiracies. If you believe that some hidden group of people are behind everything (as Trump supporters do, and as many, many other people do), then you <em>believe a thing which is false</em>, and every conculsion you draw from such a belief is therefore junk. The more you believe in conspiracies, the worse your reasoning will be.</p>
<p>The truth is out there: there is no cabal.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2024-01-29-there-is-no-cabal-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Let’s pray it doesn’t turn out to be the <em>first</em> Trump administration. <a href="#2024-01-29-there-is-no-cabal-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>Government by conspiracy theoryurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2023-10-05-government-by-conspiracy-theory2023-10-05T17:26:35Z2023-10-05T17:26:35ZTim Bradshaw
<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plan-for-drivers/the-plan-for-drivers" title="The plan for drivers">Here</a> is the British government’s new ‘plan for drivers’. And here is a quote from it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We will explore options to stop local councils using so-called “15-minute cities”, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives</p></blockquote>
<p>We are now ruled by people <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-10-04/what-is-the-15-minute-cities-conspiracy-theory">pushing conspiracy theories</a>: either knowingly because they think that provoking further divisions in society will keep them in power, or because they believe the conspiratorial nonsense they’re peddling to be true. I don’t know which is more terrifying, but in either case these people are grotesquely unfit to be in office.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231003195645/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plan-for-drivers/the-plan-for-drivers" title="A plan for divers via archive.org, 3rd October 2023">Wayback machine link</a> because rewriting history is pretty much certain here.</p>15-minute citiesurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2023-10-01-15-minute-cities2023-10-01T09:58:30Z2023-10-01T09:58:30ZTim Bradshaw
<p>The government of Britain wishes to stop councils — councils elected by local people — implementing schemes where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk for their voters.</p>
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<p>Since access to essential services is clearly unimportant to them, perhaps the government would like to relocate to somewhere other than central London. May I suggest the Moon? I hear <em>Mare Moscoviense</em> is very pleasant at this time of year.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-new-long-term-plan-to-back-drivers">Government announcement</a>; <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20230929214257/www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-new-long-term-plan-to-back-drivers">Wayback machine copy</a>; <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66965714">BBC news article</a>.</p>The end of hopeurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2023-09-29-the-end-of-hope2023-09-29T11:22:44Z2023-09-29T11:22:44ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Being another letter I will not send to my MP.</p>
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<h2 id="dear-mr-stride">Dear Mr Stride</h2>
<p>I’d like to ask you about some recent policies of the government of which you are a member.</p>
<ul>
<li>The government is vigorously opposed to actions to reduce emissions from vehicles in cities. This will damage the health of almost everyone, and of course put further stress on the health service. But the people who will be <em>most</em> likely to die or have seriously damaged health over their lives are children.</li>
<li>The government is also vigorously opposed to actions to improve the habitability of towns and cities for pedestrians and improving road safety, such as low-traffic areas and lowered speed limits. Again the people most likely to die or be harmed by this will be children.</li>
<li>The government is in the process of reducing its commitment to addressing anthropogenic global warming, because ‘we are doing enough’. That is a lie as I am sure you know: we are not doing enough. Although the rate of current warming is extremely high, it is still fairly slow by human standards. It is hurting us today but it will get far more serious over the next few decades unless we do something serious very soon. You and I will probably not live to see things get really bad. Your children probably will, and their children <em>certainly</em> will. Yet again the people most damaged by this are children.</li></ul>
<p>These are counsels of despair: the government has simply given up hope for the future. The message sent to children and young people is that the government does not care about them, at all, and that it is entirely willing to sacrifice their lives and their futures to keep itself in power for a little longer, because that is all it can think of doing. What hope can they have for their futures when faced with behaviour like this?</p>
<p>Indeed, what hope should any of us have when our government is happy to sacrifice children to stay in power? I can see none.</p>
<p>I woud be grateful if you would answer two questions. Do you support these policies? If so, why?</p>
<p>Yours sincerely</p>
<hr />
<p>I was tempted to add the recent approval of the Rosebank oil field to the list above, but I think it does not belong there. It is obvious to anyone thinking at all about it that no oil will ever come from Rosebank, as it will be cancelled by the next government: it will have no climate impact. But there will of course be fees when the contract is cancelled, to be paid to the oil companies by the government. <em>Cui prodest scelus, is fecit</em>.</p>Numerical predictionurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2023-07-28-numerical-prediction2023-07-28T10:39:12Z2023-07-28T10:39:12ZTim Bradshaw
<p>In late 2018, when I still worked at the Met Office, I sent a document to some people there which explained why I thought AI would come to dominate weather forecasting, and why weather forecasting organisations should be looking at AI, urgently. Today, the 28th of July 2023, there is <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/27/how-ai-could-save-thousands-of-lives-through-weather-forecasting">a leader on the subject in <em>The Economist</em></a> as well as <a href="https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/07/26/how-to-better-forecast-the-weather">an extended article in its Science and Technology section</a>.</p>
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<h2 id="2018">2018</h2>
<p><a href="/texts/2023/numerical-prediction.pdf">Here</a><sup><a href="#2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-1-definition" name="2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> is the document I wrote in 2018: if it was ever sensitive I don’t think it is now. Here are some excerpts from it<sup><a href="#2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-2-definition" name="2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Neural networks are likely to provide better weather forecasts in due course than current numerical models. If this is true then weather forecasting organisations that don’t use them will be replaced by ones that do. Even though this only may be true, weather forecasting organisations should be investigating these techniques, today.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>[…] NN models are likely to be highly successful for weather prediction. However they will not be trivial to design and deploy: cargo cult NN approaches are not going to work.</p>
<p>If NN models are successful then they will largely displace hand-crafted physics-based models (GCM models such as UM<sup><a href="#2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-3-definition" name="2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>). Weather forecasting is a <em>service</em>, and consumers of the service care only about how good the forecasts are rather than how they are produced.</p>
<p>If this happens then organisations involved in weather forecasting, such as the Met Office, will need to adopt NN models or cease to exist: NNs are an <em>existential threat</em> to weather forecasting organisations.</p>
<p>This means that such organisations should be investigating NN models very seriously <em>now</em> so that, in the likely case that they are successful, they are not left behind.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>The traditional approach [to weather forecasting] is to understand the physics and write a system which numerically solves the equations to a lesser or greater degree of accuracy. This has been pretty successful of course.</p>
<p>An alternative approach is to not do that at all, but rather build a system which can, itself, <em>learn</em> to simulate the weather: a system which can be trained to simulate the weather, in other words, based on observations. As far as I’m aware such an approach has not been tried on any significant scale.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p><strong>There is copious training data.</strong> There is obviously a really huge amount of data which can be used to drive a model, which NNs love. But NN models need <em>training</em> data in general: they need to be told how well they did so they can correct their weights. And weather is almost the best example it’s possible to think of of this: if we want to predict, say, rainfall in 24 hours time, then, if we wait 24 hours, we know how much rain actually fell, and we can use that data to teach the model how do to better. <em>And this is true for everything, all the time</em>: every time the model makes <em>any</em> prediction about the state at some future time then, at that future time, we know what the state actually is and can use that information to train the model. This is the sort of situation NN people dream about.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>[…] Hand-crafted models are more likely to remain sane than NN models in the early stages. There’s no rule that says that an NN won’t get some mad idea into its head and start, occasionally, making predictions which are completely physically insane.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>While NN models are an almost perfect fit for weather forecasting they are, perhaps surprisingly, a terrible fit for climate modelling. This is for two reasons.</p>
<p><strong>Sparseness of training data.</strong> NNs are likely to work for weather prediction because the training data is so copious: if you want to predict the weather a given time ahead then you simply predict, wait until that amount of time has elapsed and you have training data, and then you iterate this process. You can’t do that for climate: if you want to predict the climate a century ahead you can neither wait for a century for the training data nor can you iterate the process.</p>
<p><strong>Opacity of NN models.</strong> Even if climate modelling by an NN is technically practical it’s an absolutely terrible answer to the questions people actually want to answer. If I run some NN model and it predicts 4 degrees of warming by 2100 the first thing people will ask is ‘why does it predict that?’. And the best answer to that question is ‘because some opaque blob of weights which neither I nor any human understands told me that’, which is a <em>terrible</em> answer: it’s essentially the same as ‘a voice in my head told me’. Given the political sensitivity of climate modelling this is not going to be an answer anyone will accept, and nor should they.</p>
<p>So climate modelling is a really good example of a place where a transparent physics-based model is the only reasonable answer. And that’s ultimately because the people who are interested in climate ere <em>not</em> just interested in a statistically-good prediction (whatever that even means in this case): they’re interested in <em>why</em> the prediction is what it is. Climate modelling requires hand-crafted physics-based models, and there’s no way around that.</p></blockquote>
<h2 id="2023">2023</h2>
<p>Here is an excerpt from <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/27/how-ai-could-save-thousands-of-lives-through-weather-forecasting"><em>The Economist</em>’s leader</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The application of machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) will improve things further. The supercomputers used for NWP calculate the next days’ weather on the basis of current conditions, the laws of physics and various rules of thumb; doing so at a high resolution eats up calculations by the trillion with ridiculous ease. Now machine-learning systems trained simply on past weather data can more or less match their forecasts, at least in some respects. If advances in AI elsewhere are any guide, that is only the beginning.</p></blockquote>
<p>Well, I am not some unique genius: many people could, and probably did, see what was coming when I wrote the 2018 document. I predicted that neural network approaches would come to dominate weather forecasting, and it looks like they will.</p>
<p>But what I also realised remains, I think, important, and is not addressed at all in the articles in <em>The Economist</em>. And that is this:</p>
<ul>
<li>AI, in the form of neural networks, is <em>not</em> a suitable approach to climate prediction both because the training data is inadequate, but more importantly because it is critical that climate models not only predict the climate but allow people to understand <em>why</em> they are predicting what they predict, rather than simply being an opaque blob;</li>
<li>currently climate models, at least in the Met Office and I am sure elsewhere, are to a great extent parasitic on weather models, sharing a great deal of of their code with those models.</li></ul>
<p>This means that if weather forecasting becomes dominated by opaque NN models, climate modellers will have to bear the entire cost of funding development of their models. Chances are they can’t do that.</p>
<p>An even worse outcome would be that climate modellers leap into using opaque NN models without thinking through what this means. This would hand the climate denialists who increasingly dominate the politics of the UK a weapon which they would certainly not hesitate to use.</p>
<p>When I sent the 2018 document to people in the Met Office I did not even receive an acknowledgement: I am quite sure nobody read it. I think this says a great deal about the nature of organisations like the Met Office.</p>
<p>Despite how the all this might read, I’m not at all embittered by this: if I cared about the Met Office in 2018 I certainly don’t now, four years later. If anything, I’m rather pleased that what I thought, in 2018, would happen does indeed seem to ba happening. Most importantly I want the other thing I realised in 2018 — that climate modelling <em>isn’t</em> well-suited to NN approaches and that organisations which do both weather and climate modelling need to worry about this as NN approaches to weather forecasting eat physics-based approaches alive — to exist in some form that is accessible to people. That’s why this article exists.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>The location of this document might change. <a href="https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2023/07/28/numerical-prediction/">This post itself</a> is a better link to remember as I will update the pointer if I move the document. <a href="#2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Note that I used the term ‘neural network’, abbreviated to ‘NN’ in the document, as I did not then (and do not now) want to lazily consider neural networks to be the same thing as AI. <a href="#2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>UM, the Unified Model, was the model the Met Office used for both weather and climate modelling ain 2018. <a href="#2023-07-28-numerical-prediction-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>Another letter to Mel Stride that I will not sendurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2023-02-21-another-letter-i-will-not-send2023-02-21T11:03:05Z2023-02-21T11:03:05ZTim Bradshaw
<p>I’d like to believe there was some purpose in writing to my MP, but I no longer do. He probably means well, but his soul has been sold, if he ever had one.</p>
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<h2 id="dear-mr-stride">Dear Mr Stride,</h2>
<p>So it seems we’re going to have yet another prolonged episode where we all watch the group of rather stupid spoiled children who now make up almost all of the parliamentary tory party quarrelling with each other over a problem which is <em>entirely of their own making</em>. And, while your friends are involved in fighting whatever stupid battle it is this time, the country will be falling apart around them. But they don’t care about that, do they? Their own idiot squabbles are so much more important to them, because, after all, they are not the people using food banks, or the people not getting health care, or the people dying, and nor will they ever be. Because while they’re very stupid they are also very rich.</p>
<p>Nobody wants this: nobody wants to hear the same collection of entitled halfwits emit yet another batch of transparent lies about why the problem they created is somebody else’s fault. Who will they find to blame this time? Those nasty Europeans? Some party which hasn’t been in power for over a decade? The imaginary deep state? I don’t think they can blame the Jews out loud just yet, so I expect we’ll hear people talking about ‘citizens of the world’ again, because everyone knows who that means. I am sure the gypsies will be mentioned because apparently you can blame them for almost anything.</p>
<p>Why not do something radical: ask the people of the country who they would like to govern them the way democracies do? Please, do the right thing for once in your life and resign: if enough of your colleagues do so it will, finally, bring about the election the people of the UK so desperately need.</p>The paperclip maximizersurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2022-10-18-the-paperclip-maximizers2022-10-18T09:05:49Z2022-10-18T09:05:49ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Or, the calls are coming from inside the house.</p>
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<h2 id="the-paperclip-maximizer">The paperclip maximizer</h2>
<p>The paperclip maximizer, probably first described by <a href="https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai">Nick Bostrom</a>, is</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal. […] with the consequence that it starts transforming first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities.</p></blockquote>
<p>It is often used as a parable about the dangers of AI research, and particularly of creating AIs which are smarter than us.</p>
<p>But it’s obviously a fairly silly idea: how could anything which is really intelligent be dedicated to such a meaningless, useless goal, to a goal which, if pursued relentlessly and to the exclusion of all else, will certainly result in its own extinction?</p>
<h2 id="a-sufficiency-of-paperclips">A sufficiency of paperclips</h2>
<p>The production of paperclips is not, in fact, a meaningless goal: paperclips are quite useful. The problem happens when the the production of paperclips in numbers greater than could ever be useful becomes the <em>only</em> goal.</p>
<p>But hold on. The production of wealth is not, in fact, a meaningless goal: wealth is quite useful. The problem happens when the production of wealth in amounts greater than could ever be useful becomes the <em>only</em> goal.</p>
<p>How rich do you have to be before ‘being richer’ becomes meaningless? I don’t know, but there is, quite clearly, a level at which this happens. And a large number of extremely wealthy people are far beyond this level. And yet they strive unceasingly to accumulate more
<s>paperclips</s>money, even though doing so has long lost any meaning for them or for anyone, and even though doing so is having catastrophic consequences for the future of us all.</p>
<p>Even more absurdly, we are all told by apparently well-educated and quite respectable people that endless economic growth is the cure for all our ills, even though endless economic growth means that resource requirements must grow exponentially with time, which is not physically possible. The pursuit of endless economic growth is merely the pursuit of paperclips in fancy dress: it will lead only to catastrophe.</p>
<p>Do you want to know what living in a world of uncontrolled paperclip maximizers looks like? Look around: the paperclip maximizers are us.</p>How did we get here?urn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here2022-08-31T08:39:34Z2022-08-31T08:39:34ZTim Bradshaw
<p>I don’t understand how the UK got onto its current death march, or where that death march will end. Here are some ideas which are worth what you paid for them.</p>
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<h2 id="a-death-march">A death march</h2>
<p>In the middle of 2022, the UK is watching a competition between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister of the UK. Johnson is an incompetent, narcissistic liar who is and always was grossly unfit for any high office. Sunak is a plutocrat: he is a man who has never used a contactless payment card, presumably because he has servants who do that for him, a man who doesn’t know the cost of bread, and who pretends to take his children to MacDonalds to buy a meal which has not been available for two years. Liz Truss is merely very stupid: it is curiously difficult to discover what class of degree she
<s>bought</s>was awarded.</p>
<p>Both Sunak and Truss served in Johnson’s cabinet: Sunak did, at least, eventually resign, triggering the cascade of resignations which finally lead to Johnson’s downfall. Truss did not resign: she is a Johnson loyalist who seems to think that Johnson almost literally dancing on the graves of the people of the UK was just fine, not to mention his incompetence, endless lying and theft from the country is just fine. Liz Truss is, in fact, Continuity Johnson.</p>
<p>Sunak and Truss are not competing for the votes of the UK electorate: they are competing for the votes of a tiny number of conservative party members who have paid for the privilege of selecting the prime minister. These people are overwhelmingly well-off, old if not actually senile, white, and male. Most of them live in the south-east of the UK. These are people who read newspapers, on paper, and they have the views you would expect them to have: they’re right-wing racists who look back fondly on an imagined golden age of the 1980s and before. They think anthropogenic climate change, if not actually a lie, is something that will matter only after they are dead (this is true: it will matter mostly after they are dead) and since they value their comfort far above the lives of their children and grandchildren they are happy to do nothing about it. They don’t like cyclists, feminists, people who are not white, gypsies and travellers, poor people, immigrants, and so on. ‘Woke’ — a term which means ‘being decent to other people’ — is anathama to them: they do not want to have to behave decently to other people, especially not people who look different than them. They are, in other words, exactly who you would expect them to be.</p>
<p>This group is <em>extremely</em> unrepresentative of the population of the UK, and increasingly so. And they know this, at least dimly. They know if they are to continue their lives of comfort then something must be done about this awkward fact: something must be done about democracy.</p>
<p>Both Sunak and Truss are working hard to appeal to this group: lurching ever further to the right and ever further away from democracy. Probably they will not succeed in levels of voter suppression sufficient to ensure their long-term survival, although they may. But whoever wins will actively and intentionally do vast damage to the UK in the next two years, and will certainly do nothing about climate change. And by the time the victor leaves power — if they leave power — it will be too late: too late to rescue the UK as a serious country, and too late for any concerted, international action to address climate change which must happen <em>now</em>.</p>
<p>Finally, of course, it is almost inevitable that Truss will win: tory party members are racists, and she is white and blonde, while Sunak is not. Both would be terrible prime ministers, but Sunak might at least be competent:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Tory party itself is quite rotten now and the sign of that is that they can’t think of anyone better than Boris, who’s clearly just completely shot. They are collectively saying, “if we get rid of him, we might get somebody worse”. It says a lot about the state of the Tory party. And they actually could get somebody worse: Liz Truss would be even worse than Boris. She’s about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament. — <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/05/dominic-cummings-i-dont-like-parties/">Dominic Cummings</a></p></blockquote>
<p>The future for the UK is not bright.</p>
<h2 id="no-easy-answers">No easy answers</h2>
<p>It’s tempting to say that, well, it’s brexit: this is what was always going to happen after brexit. I don’t think that’s true: brexit was certainly a bad idea, but it didn’t have to be anything like <em>this</em> terrible.</p>
<p>Brexit was always going to be extremely challenging<sup><a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-1-definition" name="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> to implement in a way which was not a catastrophe, which should not have been surprising to anyone. However it does seem to have been surprising to a lot of the politicians who were so desperate for brexit. They had no plan, at all, for how it should be implemented. Why not? Why did the very people who wanted brexit so much have no plans?</p>
<p>Well, I think there are three or four plausible reasons.</p>
<ol>
<li>They didn’t understand that brexit would be complicated, because they were not terribly smart. Smart people, after all, understand that it is often best to quietly abandon goals which are extremely complicated and risky to achieve<sup><a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-2-definition" name="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>, even if they are much-desired: brexiteers did not.</li>
<li>They did not expect to win, so having a plan for winning was not seen as something they needed to do.</li>
<li>They expected that other people would plan for them. The motivation for brexit has always been mostly about resentment: somehow <em>other people</em> are always the problem, in the case of brexit those other people are the EU and foreigners generally. And, like children, they then expect the other people to solve the problem for them.</li>
<li>Perhaps brexiteers <em>wanted</em> a catastrophe because they thought it would give them a route to wealth and power. People do suggest this, usually under the rubric of ‘disaster capitalism’: I think it’s not very plausible.</li></ol>
<p>Between them, I think these do explain what happened.</p>
<h2 id="the-day-after-judgement">The day after judgement</h2>
<p>On midsummer day, 2016, the brexiteers faced an inconvenient truth: they had won. Now, instead of sitting around whining, they had to do something.</p>
<p>You might think that the sensible thing to do would have been to say that implementing brexit was going to be extremely complex, make some excuse about why they had made no plans, and explain that it would thus take a long time. But they couldn’t do that: they knew very well that the brexit vote was driven by older people: if it took a decade or so to be ready to actually leave the EU then enough of those people would be dead that it would be clear that brexit was being implemented against the clear will of the majority of voters. There would at the very least be strong pressure for another referendum, which they would lose.</p>
<p>So, if they were going to succeed in their stated goal, brexit had to happen rather quickly. But they had no plans: they were in a serious bind.</p>
<h2 id="the-phoney-war">The phoney war</h2>
<p>I’m not going to write some long, boring, and probably wrong, description of what happened between the referendum and Theresa May’s resignation. Enough to say that this was the period when it became clear even to people who had not being paying attention that implementing brexit was somewhere between hard and impossible. Perhaps the most interesting question is why May invoked article 50 as soon as she did: my guess is that she believed that, if she delayed, the brexiteers would destroy the tory party. Probably she was right.</p>
<p>But the brexiteers destroyed the tory party anyway.</p>
<h2 id="the-church-of-the-subgenius">The church of the subgenius</h2>
<p>After the phoney war everyone who knew anything knew there was now now hope of a good answer to brexit, and that things were therefore going to get much worse in the UK. This really left two-and-a-half sorts of people interested in running the country:</p>
<ul>
<li>people who were too stupid to understand this;</li>
<li>people who did not care;</li>
<li>and perhaps a foolish few who still sought to minimise the damage<sup><a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-3-definition" name="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>.</li></ul>
<p>What we got was Boris Johnson: the worst of all possible worlds. Johnson certainly does not care about the consequences of brexit for the UK as there is only one thing Johnson cares about: Johnson. He is often portrayed as brilliant but indolent: he is certainly indolent but he’s very far from brilliant. in 2016 he was too stupid to realise that the poisoned chalice of brexit would poison him as well; in 2020 he was too stupid to understand that a pandemic whose doubling time was three days required action to be taken extremely quickly, and too stupid to realise that, since phone cameras exist, holding drunken parties during lockdowns was not going to end well for him.</p>
<p>But he was not just stupid: he was a narcissist who regarded himself as a very god amongst men. He was not about to put up with dissent, or people who might cause him to suspect, however dimly, that they might be smarter than him as, for Johnson, there could be nobody smarter than Johnson. So talent was systematically driven away from his cabinet and from the parliamentary party: with Johnson in charge, what was rewarded was only bovine obedience.</p>
<p>And so a generation of competent people were driven out of government.</p>
<h2 id="an-infestation-of-idiots">An infestation of idiots</h2>
<p>After Johnson finally collapsed under the weight of his own arrogance and stupidity who then was left to take his place? The tory party has long been known as the stupid party<sup><a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-4-definition" name="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup>: after successive episodes of defenestrations of anyone who expressed independent ideas, that statement was now true. Only stupid people remained.</p>
<p>In particular I think the notion that the tories are somehow conspiring with some unspecified group of financiers to enrich themselves (the fourth possible reason for there being no plan for brexit above) is really pretty implausible. You only have to look at them: these people are idiots suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, not evil geniuses.</p>
<p>It <em>is</em> possible, of course, that, while they are idiots, they are somebody’s <em>useful</em> idiots. But they are still idiots. Dark forces may perhaps be conspiring to get rich from the destruction of the UK, but if they are doing so they are not doing so with the knowledge of the halfwit clowns in the tory party who are, in fact, just what they appear to be.</p>
<p>In any case, the selection of someone to replace Johnson could only be made from the group of people who had not either left or been driven out by Johnson: from last remaining dregs of the tory party. A choice to be made from the dim, by the dim. And thus we have a competition between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work. In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.</p></blockquote>
<hr />
<h2 id="addendum-liz-truss">Addendum: Liz Truss</h2>
<p>When I wrote the above it was clear Truss would win, although she had not yet won. But I had no real idea what a spectacular catastrophe she would be: obviously I knew that she’s very stupid, but I don’t think I had any real appreciation just how stupid she would turn out to be.</p>
<p>I don’t know, now, what the best hope for the UK is: that she remain in power and lead the tories to a landslide defeat, or that she is evicted promptly and we have someone — anyone, almost — who will do less damage in the next couple of years.</p>
<p>The future for the UK really <em>isn’t</em> bright, is it?</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>If not impossible: it’s very hard to see what could have been done about the Northern Ireland / Eire problem without serious damage to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement">Good Friday agreement</a>. <a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>I’d really like to move to a flat in London but I have too much stuff and too many entanglements and getting from here to there is just absurdly hard. So, however much I might want to move, I understand that it’s not really possible. <a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Rory Stewart, perhaps. <a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>A quote attributed to John Stuart Mill. <a href="#2022-08-31-how-did-we-get-here-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>More on UK retail energy pricesurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2022-05-24-more-on-uk-retail-energy-prices2022-05-24T12:36:50Z2022-05-24T12:36:50ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Three days ago I pointed out that the UK government was lying about the influence of the war in Ukraine on UK retail energy prices. Now we have a better idea what that influence might actually be.</p>
<!-- more-->
<p>The UK government has been <a href="../../../../2022/05/21/the-uk-government-is-lying-about-energy-prices/">lying that the current retail energy cost is largely due to the war in Ukraine</a>. But on 24th May 2022, the head of Ofgem <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61562657">told MPs that the energy price cap was likely to rise to £2,800 from the 1st October 2022</a>, and these predicted rises <em>may</em> be largely due to the war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>Here are details of the cap at various dates, based on <a href="https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/price-cap-increase-ps693-april">Ofgem</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61562657">the BBC report</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li>2022, to 30th March 2022: £1,277;</li>
<li>1st April 2022 to 30th September 2022: £1,971, increasing by £693 (differences due to rounding) or 54%;</li>
<li>from 1st October 2022 (predicted on 24th May 2022): £2,800, increasing by $829, or 42%, or a cumulative increase of 119%.</li></ul>
<p>So, in 185 days, retail prices will have gone up by 119% – in other words they have gone up by a factor of 2.19, more than double – of which predicted increase rather more than half may be largely due to the war in Ukraine (again: <a href="(../../../../2022/05/21/the-uk-government-is-lying-about-energy-prices/)"><em>none</em> of the current retail price is due to the war in Ukraine</a>.</p>
<p>Given the <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/05/19/the-coming-food-catastrophe">coming food catastrophe</a>, which <em>is</em> largely a result of the war in Ukraine, and the grotesque incompetence of the UK government, people will probably both die of cold, and starve in the UK in the winter of 2022–2023. For the second time in a little over two years, the UK government will have failed in its most basic task: keeping its citizens alive.</p>The UK government is lying about energy pricesurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2022-05-21-the-uk-government-is-lying-about-energy-prices2022-05-21T14:22:17Z2022-05-21T14:22:17ZTim Bradshaw
<p>The UK government would like you to believe that the recent increases in the rate people pay for energy are due to the war in Ukraine. This is a lie.</p>
<!-- more-->
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322">This article from the BBC news</a> contains the following statement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Energy bills are the biggest contributor to inflation at present, largely because of the impact of the Ukraine war on oil and gas prices. After a rise in the UK’s energy price cap last month, average gas and electricity prices jumped by 53.5% and 95.5% respectively compared with a year ago.</p></blockquote>
<p>Note in particular that they claim that energy bills, which are indeed the largest contributor to inflation, have risen ‘largely because of the impact of the Ukraine war on oil and gas prices’. In this the BBC is, I am sure innocently, simply repeating what the UK government wants us to believe.</p>
<p>But this statement is false: the UK government is lying, again. It is lying in order to make it less obvious that it is both grossly incompetent and simply does not care about the people of the UK.</p>
<p>First of all this statement should immediately make you wonder: what happened in 2021? I got a message from my former energy supplier on 14th October 2021, 133 days before Russia invaded Ukraine, which reads in part</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Due to the global energy crisis, record high wholesale energy costs, and the restrictions placed on us by the Ofgem Price Cap, we are sadly unable to keep operating [supplier]. […] The Government and Ofgem, our regulator, expects [supplier] to sell energy at a price much less than it currently costs to buy.</p></blockquote>
<p>My former supplier, along with many other suppliers, went out of business in 2021: that means <strong>the energy crisis was well underway by 2021</strong>.</p>
<p>But perhaps there is an escape: there was an energy crisis by 2021, yes, but perhaps the current crisis is still <em>largely</em> due to the war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>That also is false. Look at <a href="https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/default-tariff-cap-level-1-april-2022-30-september-2022">this document</a>, in which Ofgem announced the increase in the tariff cap, and in particular look at the <a href="https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2022-02/Default%20tariff%20cap%20letter%20for%201%20April%2020221643903154554.pdf">attached letter</a> (PDF link). From that letter, you can read this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To all market participants and interested parties […] The level of the cap for the cap period eight (1 April 2022 to 30 September 2022) has increased by 54% since the last update. From 1 April 2022, the level of the cap will increase to £1,971.</p></blockquote>
<p>This letter is announcing the rise in the tariff cap described by the BBC above: about 54%. It is dated <strong>3rd February 2022</strong>: almost a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.</p>
<p>And indeed on 24th February 2022, coincidentally the day Russia invaded Ukraine, I received a letter from my current energy supplier in which the folloing text appears:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our prices are changing to reflect high wholesale energy costs in line with Ofgem’s latest price cap review.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>Your current tariff [for electricity and gas]: £ <em>T</em>. Your new tariff: £ <em>T</em> × 1.4 […] Your electricity rates will change from 21.607p to 28.408p per kWh and your standing charge per day will change from 25.66p to 51.62p. Your gas rates will change from 4.197p to 7.476p per kWh and your standing charge per day will change from 26.11p to 27.22p</p></blockquote>
<p>[I have replaced the specific amounts I pay by <em>T</em> above.]</p>
<p><em>That capped tariff is the tariff I, along with almost everyone else, is currently paying</em>. The new cap was set in <em>early February 2022</em> for implementatation on 1 April 2022. The war in Ukraine has had no influence on this cap, because it was agreed well in advance of the war.</p>
<p>In summary: <strong>The war in Ukraine has not yet influenced retail energy prices in the UK because the cap was decided in early February 2022 at the latest. To say otherwise is to spread misinformation.</strong></p>
<hr />
<p>Of course, the war in Ukraine <em>will</em> influence retail energy prices: the current cap runs until 30 September 2022. It is safe to say that when it expires there will be some very bad news indeed about UK retail energy prices. Combined with the certain large increases in the price of staple foods, the winter of 2022 is going to be extremely unpleasant: I think it not unlikely that significant numbers of people in the UK may well start to starve to death.</p>
<p>But this has not happened yet.</p>An unsent letter to Mel Stride, MPurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp2022-05-03T10:23:12Z2022-05-03T10:23:12ZTim Bradshaw
<p><em>They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.</em></p>
<!-- more-->
<p>In the last week<sup><a href="#2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-1-definition" name="2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>:</p>
<ul>
<li>Neil Parish, a tory MP, has been caught, twice, watching pornography on his phone in the house of commons;</li>
<li>an anonymous source, but almost certainly a tory MP, has told misogynistic, false, stories about a senior, female, labour figure to a newspaper which duly published them;</li>
<li>Liam Byrne, a labour MP has been found to have bullied his staff and suspended;</li>
<li>Boris Johnson, prime minister and criminal, told more lies (although this is hardly news);</li>
<li>we’ve learned that 56 MPs (not all tories) are under investigation for sexual misconduct.</li></ul>
<p>Let’s take that last figure. Presumably not all of those under investigation will be found to have done whatever it is they have been accused of, and some of those actually won’t have done it. But given the very obvious culture of bullying in the house of commons and the pervasive lying, at least by senior tories, there are probably many other people too frightened to come forward. So let’s say that it’s a round 65 people all in. So, plausibly, one MP in ten has been sexually abusing people.</p>
<p>And that’s not the end: for each person who was doing this, how many others knew but did nothing? Based on my own personal experience as someone who knew but did nothing the answer is ‘several’, so let’s say two. If that’s correct (and it’s perhaps low if anything) it means about <em>one MP in three</em> was plausibly either sexually abusing people or knew others who were and chose to do nothing about it.</p>
<p>Let’s leave the bullying, the lying, the bribery, corruption and all the other manifold abuses which infest the UK’s politics for another day: this letter is already too long.</p>
<p>And while all this has been going on more than half of the MPs in parliament – <a href="https://members.parliament.uk/member/3935/voting">including you</a> – have been either actively supporting or too frightened to vote against legislation which would make Putin proud. <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2839/publications">Peaceful protest is now criminalised in the UK</a>. <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3023/publications">British citizenship can be removed without notice</a>. Based on transparent lies about imaginary election fraud, <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3020/publications">voter ID will now be needed</a>, which it is estimated will <a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8194/documents/83775/default/">reduce turnout by over a million</a>, with a <a href="http://theconversation.com/democracy-undermined-elections-in-the-uk-are-changing-heres-how-182251">convenient bias</a> towards those who would not vote for the johnsonite tory party if they could vote. And finally, <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3020/publications">the Electoral Commission is now under the control of ministers</a>: people who, you know, might have just a tiny conflict of interest, don’t you think?</p>
<p>There is someone else who told lies about electoral fraud in order to keep himself in power, isn’t there? The same person who attempted a coup on January 2021. The same person who has turned his party into <a href="https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/01/01/the-republicans-are-still-donald-trumps-party-and-they-can-still-win" title="The Republicans are still Donald Trump’s party, and they can still win / TheEconomist">an explicitly anti-democratic shell</a> for his own desire for personal power, a shell which, quite probably, will turn the US into an authoritarian state in two years time. He might remind you of someone closer to home, I think.</p>
<p>The UK is not there yet, but the <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1114753/the-death-of-democracy/9781786090300.html" title="The deathof democracy">death of democracy</a><sup><a href="#2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-2-definition" name="2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup> is now clearly in sight. The johnsonite tory party must now be seen as an explicitly authoritarian party aiming to secure eternal power for itself at any cost. You belong to that party: I will leave it to you to decide what that means.</p>
<p>(And don’t insult me by claiming that ‘it can’t happen here because the UK is a democracy’: in 1933 Germany was also a democracy; in the late 1990s Russia was a democracy. And besides, if it can’t happen here <em>why are you voting for it</em>?)</p>
<p>It’s a strange situation, isn’t it? Perhaps the best hope for the UK is that johnsonite tory MPs will be so stupid and so incompetent (really, how stupid do you have to be to watch pornography in the house of commons? or to go to parties during lockdown given that phone cameras are a thing? pretty fucking stupid, I think), and so busy masturbating, sexually assaulting people and taking money from Russian oligarchs in return for favours, that they’ll eat themselves alive before they get around to installing the one-party state they so clearly desire. That’s not an attractive choice.</p>
<p>And in the meantime, the next time some MP whines about how hateful and abusive people are to MPs who are ‘just doing a very hard and difficult job as best they can’, then we’ll know what to say. You know what: you don’t have hard or difficult jobs, and most of you don’t even know what a hard and difficult job <em>is</em>. Doctors and nurses working in hospitals have hard and difficult jobs. During the pandemic (which means now, because lying about it does not make it over) they have <em>very</em> hard and difficult jobs. People in Ukraine have extremely hard, difficult jobs. Do you think doctors and nurses keeping people alive have time to watch porn while doing so? No, you don’t in fact have hard and difficult jobs: you have easy, undemanding jobs which involve sitting around, talking and drinking. Or in many cases sitting around, lying, drinking and abusing people. Here’s a clue for you: if your job allows you time for a second job then whatever it is, it’s not hard. So don’t expect any sympathy from the people you lord it over like childish tinfoil tyrants.</p>
<p>And the next time <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61255056">some halfwit</a> gets up on his hind legs and says that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the problem in the house of commons is ultimately the overall culture of long hours, bars and people sometimes under pressure and after all of that, that can create a toxic mix that leads to all sorts of things</p></blockquote>
<p>we’ll also know what to say. Here’s the thing: being tired and drunk all the time doesn’t make people into bigots and misogynists: it removes their inhibitions so they express the bigotry and misogynism they always felt. If you behave like a bigot and a misogynist when you are tired and drunk (because your pretend-hard job somehow requires you to get drunk a lot), than it’s not because you’re tired and drunk: <em>it’s because you are a bigot and a misogynist</em>.</p>
<p>I wish no-one ill: but if the sea were to rise up tomorrow and drown the houses of parliament and everyone in them, I would not weep.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.</em></p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>This was written on May day, 2022. Mel Stride is my MP: I did think about sending it but what purpose would it have served? In the unlikely case that he read it rather than one of his staff would it make him change his mind? Of course it would not. <a href="#2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>A book you should read, along with <em><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die">How democracies die</a></em>. <a href="#2022-05-03-an-unsent-letter-to-mel-stride-mp-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>What if Putin is rational?urn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2022-03-07-what-if-putin-is-rational2022-03-07T14:19:52Z2022-03-07T14:19:52ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is horrifying. As well as the awfulness of what is happening to the people of Ukraine, Putin’s apparent irrationality is terrifying. What if he is not being irrational?</p>
<!-- more-->
<p>A strategy that the Russians have used against both Napoleon and the Nazis is to retreat further than anyone thinks is possible, accept more losses than anyone thinks is possible and then wait for the winter to do its work. Perhaps Putin is using a variant of this strategy. In particular perhaps he simply does not care whether he wins in Ukraine because that’s not what he’s trying to do: he’s not trying to annexe Ukraine, he’s trying to destroy the west.</p>
<p>The invasion of Ukraine will have significant economic repercussions:</p>
<ul>
<li>sanctions on Russia will have very severe repercussions for Russia, but they will also have economic repercussions on the west which will be at least fairly severe;</li>
<li>oil and gas prices will go up significantly and the west is not anywhere near in a position to escape from fossil fuel dependency;</li>
<li>a lot of wheat is grown in Ukraine, and the harvest is not going to be very good this year, which will push up wheat prices and hence food prices.</li></ul>
<p>So there will be catastrophic economic effects in Russia, but also severe to very severe effects in Europe and the west more generally.</p>
<p>In addition the attack is causing an enormous refugee crisis: as I write this <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-60555472">more than 1.7 million Ukrainians have left Ukraine</a>. I don’t know how many might eventually be driven out of course, but it might be of the order of 10 million people. Essentially all of those people are going to be driven west, into central and western Europe. This will be an enormous humanitarian crisis in Europe: bigger than anything seen since the second world war.</p>
<p>Well, in 2007–2008 there was a very significant economic crisis, and from 2011 to now there has been a civil war in Syria which has caused a refugee crisis. And I don’t think it’s controversial to say that one of the results of this was populism, authoritarianism and large-scale bigotry. These crises gave us Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban and the johnsonites, and they gave us brexit and other disasters.</p>
<p>So what is this crisis going to give us? More of the same, almost certainly. Everyone loves the Ukrainians now, but when there are 10 million of them trying to find a way of living in central and western Europe a lot of people are going to like them a lot less: there is going to be a lot – a lot – of anti-Ukrainian bigotry. And while this is happening, food and fuel will be becoming far more expensive: almost everyone will be poorer, and in particular poor people, for whom food and fuel is a larger proportion of their spending.</p>
<p>And in the background, climate change will be doing its inevitable work: weather-related damage will be increasing, harvests will be poorer and refugees from areas becoming dramatically less habitable will be arriving in ever greater numbers. And people like me will be saying that we must therefore reduce our dependency on fossil fuels rapidly if we want to have a long-term future. But decades of denying the problem exists will mean we can’t do that, and the populist demagogues given power by the crisis in Ukraine will say we don’t need to do that anyway. And so things will get worse, and they will get worse faster than they were before the crisis. And we’ll get more populists, more authoritarianisms and more democracies will fail.</p>
<p>But populism and authoritarianism <em>don’t work</em>: populism seeks to provide simple, appealing, answers (‘send the nasty foreigners home’) to complex, unappealing, problems (‘how do we deal with climate change?’), and those answers are <em>wrong</em>; authoritarianism doesn’t even pretend to look for answers because the answer to all questions is ‘do as your told or you will be killed’. Both systems make a few people better off but almost everyone poorer. So once liberal democracies get replaced by populist or authoritarian regimes thing almost always get <em>worse</em>, and the forces which gave those regimes power become stronger: ‘if sending the foreigners home didn’t work, perhaps we should just kill them?’. And things thus get worse, and they get worse ever faster.</p>
<p>Thought of as a physical system, liberal democracies are not necessarily <em>stable</em>: they tend to fall off their plateau into nasty regimes of various kinds, which in turn cause things to move further down from the plateau, and so on. As has been obvious in the last few years, a lot of work is needed all the time to defend them. Even fairly small external kicks of various kinds can destabilise them, and there will always be people working within them to do the same thing.</p>
<p>So, perhaps Putin’s ongoing rape of Ukraine is not an irrational attack based on some toxic nostalgia for the USSR: perhaps it is an entirely rational attempt to do something else. Perhaps he does not really care what happens to Ukraine because that’s not what he’s interested in. Perhaps he is using the strategy that has worked for Russia before: accepting more damage than anyone thinks Russia can in order to cause, in the liberal democracies of Europe, lesser but still very significant economic damage along with with a vast humanitarian criss, with the aim of causing them to collapse. After all, he is not himself affected by the economic damage being done to Russia: it is only ordinary Russians who will starve. And he does not care about them.</p>
<p>Well, I hope I am wrong: I usually am wrong.</p>The way outurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-12-04-the-way-out2021-12-04T13:07:57Z2021-12-04T13:07:57ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Many people would like to believe that the CV19 pandemic is over. Unfortunately viruses do not listen to what people want to believe: the CV19 pandemic is not over, and there is a significant possibility it may <em>never</em> be over. The way out is not to pretend that it is.</p>
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<h2 id="cv19-is-not-over">CV19 is not over</h2>
<p>Unless CV19 can be <em>globally</em> eliminated it will not be over: new cases will leak into countries however hard they try to prevent it. Eliminating CV19 globally requires achieving herd immunity through vaccination or infections <em>everywhere</em>.</p>
<p>We are not particularly close to that. It’s tempting to do a lot of calculations at this point to show this but those calculations are fiddly and I always get them wrong. Instead consider the UK: currently (3rd December 2021) <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&uniformYAxis=0&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated+%28by+dose%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=GBR~DEU~Europe~USA~FRA" title="Our World in Data">about 75% of the population have had at least one dose</a> and there is a current effort to roll out third, ‘booster’, doses. Yet, even before the omicron variant, CV19 was nowhere near gone in the UK. And the UK is doing reasonably well at vaccinations. Boris Johnson’s lies notwithstanding it is <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-12-03&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+fully+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=ARE~PRT~CUB~CHL~ESP~SGP~KHM~URY~KOR~CAN~CHN~IND~USA~IDN~PAK~BRA~NGA~BGD~RUS~MEX~JPN~ETH~PHL~EGY~VNM~TUR~IRN~DEU~THA~GBR~FRA~TZA~ITA~ZAF~KEN~OWID_WRL" title="Proportion of people fully vaccinated, 3rd December 2021">nowhere near</a> <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-12-03&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated+(by+dose)&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=ARE~PRT~CUB~CHL~ESP~SGP~KHM~URY~KOR~CAN~CHN~IND~USA~IDN~PAK~BRA~NGA~BGD~RUS~MEX~JPN~ETH~PHL~EGY~VNM~TUR~IRN~DEU~THA~GBR~FRA~TZA~ITA~ZAF~KEN~OWID_WRL" title="Proportion of people vaccinated by dose, 3rd December 2021">the top of the table</a>, but it is well above the global average: globally about 55% of people have had at least one dose.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, by hoarding both vaccines and the rights to manufacture them, the rich countries are actively hurting the effort to globally eliminate CV19. So they are undermining the efforts they are making to protect their own populations. It is, apparently, too hard for politicians to understand that the virus cares much less about some lines drawn on a map than they do.</p>
<p>Worse than this, until CV19 is eliminated, it will still continue to evolve new variants, which will spread if they are fit. If we assume that CV19 won’t be eliminated soon, what’s likely to happen, in rich countries like the UK, as new variants appear?</p>
<p>The remainder of this essay concentrates on the UK as far as human responses go: that is obviously parochial, but the UK is where I live and I am most familiar with what the responses are there<sup><a href="#2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-1-definition" name="2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>.</p>
<h2 id="what-might-the-virus-do">What might the virus do?</h2>
<p>There are two important choices, which are orthogonal to each other: will a much-less-deadly variant become dominant? and will a variant which escapes the current vaccines become dominant? Neither of these cases excludes anything happening in the future: for instance a mild variant which does not escape vaccines could become dominant this year, only for a serious variant which does escape the vaccines to become dominant in a few years if such a variant has a selective advantage. As long as the virus exists it will be endlessly trying new variants.</p>
<p>Two independent choices gives a total of four scenarios.</p>
<h3 id="a-mild-variant-flu">A mild variant: ‘flu’</h3>
<p>Two scenarios involve a mild variant which may, or may not, escape the current vaccines: these are the ‘flu’ scenarios. Such a variant might become seasonal in the way flu is (CV19 may well already <em>be</em> seasonal of course: we just haven’t lived through enough seasons yet). If the current vaccines don’t work for this variant the results will not be too severe, and new vaccines will be developed. If vaccines, new or existing, confer long-term immunity, then things would become relatively normal. It’s likely that they don’t, however, so we would probably require regular courses of vaccinations, which may be new vaccines as the virus evolves: this is still pretty close to normal life.</p>
<p>Well, we could live with that, the way we live with flu. Except that we don’t always live with flu: Spanish flu<sup><a href="#2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-2-definition" name="2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup> killed between 17 and 50 million people, and perhaps as many as 100 million (by comparison, The Economist thinks that CV19 <a href="https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates" title="The pandemic’s true death toll">has probably killed about 17 million people so far</a> from a larger population). Again, as long as CV19 exists it will be developing new variants and there is nothing I can see to stop one arising which is like that.</p>
<p>But, perhaps, this is at least no <em>worse</em> than flu is now, except perhaps that more people will need to be vaccinated more often.</p>
<h3 id="no-vaccine-escape">No vaccine escape</h3>
<p>A third scenario is that CV19 stays roughly as deadly as it is now, but the vaccines we have keep working against it, probably with regular courses required. People continue to die in significant numbers, with those numbers depending to a great extent on the precautions people are willing to accept. This may seem much like the flu case except that a lot more people die. It might be only that: there are unfortunately much nastier possibilities discussed below.</p>
<h3 id="vaccine-escape">Vaccine escape</h3>
<p>The final scenario is that a variant arises which is significantly deadly and for which the current vaccines are not effective. This is year zero: new vaccines will need to be developed, and a new urgent vaccination programme will be required. Until the vaccination programme is well under way there will either need to be very significant restrictions on social contact if very high death tolls are to be avoided. Unfortunately very high death tolls during the vaccine development and the early stages of the vaccination programme are, again, far from the worst things that could happen.</p>
<h3 id="other-scenarios">Other scenarios</h3>
<p>There are other possibilities. A variant might arise which is much more deadly, for instance. It’s easy to argue that very deadly viruses are selected against: a virus which kills too many of its hosts will tend not to thrive in competition with less lethal one. But in real life things are not that simple: the black death <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death" title="The Black Death">killed between 75 and 200 million people in 7 years</a>, killing between 30% and 60% of the population of Europe, and perhaps 25% of the world’s population. <em>Yersinia pestis</em> was, perhaps, not competing with less deadly versions of itself, wasn’t so subject to mutation as a virus would be and there were other factors, but still: very bad things can happen.</p>
<p>A very nasty possibility is that a variant will arise against which <em>no</em> vaccines work very well. Before the current vaccines were developed some people were suggesting this (search for ‘there has never been a successful vaccine against a coronavirus’: I am not going to link to any of the results because some of them are awful people who do not deserve anyone’s attention). It seems to me that this is absurdly unlikely, but I’m not an expert.</p>
<p>No doubt there are many other scenarios I have not thought about.</p>
<h3 id="an-endless-war">An endless war</h3>
<p>Once again: until the CV19 virus is globally eliminated it will continue to evolve new variants. None of the above scenarios excludes any of the others: CV19 will explore as much of the space of options as it can. Until it is eliminated the pandemic will not be over: if it is never eliminated the pandemic will <em>never</em> be over.</p>
<h2 id="what-might-the-humans-do">What might the humans do?</h2>
<p>The virus is only one of the players in this game: the other is us. What happens depends on our response as much as what the virus does.</p>
<h3 id="normality">Normality</h3>
<p>If the virus is eliminated then normal pre-pandemic life resumes. In either of the ‘flu’ scenarios something quite like normal life resumes. In the flu scenarios normal life only resumes so long as the virus doesn’t evolve some much nastier variant. So, rationally, in these scenarios, work should still continue to eliminate the virus globally as fast as possible. I think it’s safe to say that won’t happen, so the normality in these scenarios is almost certainly impermanent.</p>
<h3 id="stability">Stability</h3>
<p>If there is a deadly variant which does not escape the vaccines then it’s possible to imagine a stable scenario where some combination of restrictions on social contact, regular vaccinations, masks, and just accepting that a fair number more people die each year than before CV19 will keep things under control. That’s a nice dream, anyway.</p>
<h3 id="instability">Instability</h3>
<p>A variant which escapes the vaccines results in instability: it is essentially a whole new pandemic and rapid lockdowns will be needed while new vaccines are developed to avoid very high death tolls or even worse outcomes. The instability can be minimised by careful management but the chances of that seem low.</p>
<p>Unfortunately I think that, even for variants that do not escape current vaccines, stability is unlikely. Instead there will be some more-or-less chaotic cycle of too-much relaxation followed by panics as death rates rise. None of this is helped by politicians who, in the UK at least, do not care very much if many people die, are not competent to understand what is required for stability, and neither understand nor care about the consequences of serious instability.</p>
<h2 id="what-is-really-happening">What is really happening?</h2>
<p>We’re still in the early stages of the pandemic, but what has actually happened?</p>
<h3 id="the-virus">The virus</h3>
<p>I don’t know. Since I started writing the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant" title="Omicron variant">omicron variant</a> has appeared: this has a very high number of mutations, 62, compared to the original virus, of which 32 affect the spike protein which vaccines target (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Delta_variant" title="Delta variant">delta</a> had 8 or 9). Currently (5th December 2021) it’s not known how infectious it is or how severe the illness it causes is compared to the previous, delta, variant. More seriously it’s not known how well vaccines work for it, but with a very large number of mutations on the spike protein people are clearly pretty worried.</p>
<p>So the omicron variant might be a ‘flu’ variant, a vaccine escape variant, both, neither, or something else. It might also not be very interesting at all. But there will be more variants in an effectively endless succession<sup><a href="#2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-3-definition" name="2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>: sooner or later something interesting <em>will</em> arise. Given selective pressure on the virus it will probably be sooner: if omicron is not it we are not off the hook.</p>
<h3 id="the-humans">The humans</h3>
<p>What are the humans doing? In particular what is the UK government doing? As a populist government what it does is to offer simple, appealing, wrong answers to complex, unappealing problems. It gives the answers that people would like it to give, without ever trying to explain why those answers are wrong or what the consequences of believing them will be. The johnsonites are very far from democratic, quite the opposite in fact, but in this case we can treat them as avatars of what people would like to be told is true.</p>
<p>Well, until a few days ago the answer was that they were saying that the pandemic was over and that normal life could resume. Now there is incoherent messaging: scientific and medical advisers are advising caution in the face of omicron, while Boris Johnson is publicly ignoring them. Johnson, clearly, is too stupid to understand the consequences of what he is doing and would not care about them if he did. He also has demonstrated, publicly and repeatedly, that he believes <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59491568" title="Christmas parties">rules do not apply to him</a>, thus ensuring that no-one else obeys them either. More competent (perhaps merely less incompetent) members of the government are giving more cautious messages, but there is simply no coherent strategy and the government is very obviously no longer ‘following the science’ nor even pretending to do so.</p>
<p>This is a recipe for instability: if omicron is serious then Johnson’s strategy, if it can be called such, will maximise its impact early in the new year. Johnson shows no sign of having learnt anything at all from his earlier mistakes: if anything he’s learnt that he can, in fact, get away with murder. If lessons are not learnt from this cycle the best we can hope for is a continuing chaotic cycle of restrictions followed by relaxation, for years.</p>
<p>The worst is that Johnson continues to maintain that it is all over, while people die around him in huge numbers. This is stability, of a kind, but not one anyone should wish for. Sadly many people do seem to wish for it, and to be happy with enormous numbers of deaths so that they don’t have to experience the momentary inconvenience of wearing a mask or otherwise behaving safely.</p>
<h2 id="collapse">Collapse</h2>
<p>That is, in fact, not the worst outcome. Because we live in a society built on complex systems which took a long time to assemble and which, if they are stressed to the point of collapse, can not then be reassembled quickly, if at all.</p>
<p>In 2008 the global financial system came close to collapse. Many people said at the time, and probably still do say, that the banks should just have been allowed to fail. Those people were fools. Banks are close to the archetypal complex system which, if it collapses, can not quickly be repaired if it can be repaired at all. If the banking system had been allowed to fail in 2008 then essentially money would have ceased to exist: ATMs would have stopped working, salaries would have stopped being paid, everything involving money would have stopped. And once that had happened it would have taken years to restart. Pretty quickly people would have started getting hungry, there would have been riots and far worse. And this would have gone on for years. Huge numbers would have died. The 2008 financial crisis was a nasty experience, but it was <em>vastly</em> less nasty than what was narrowly avoided.</p>
<p>There is another such complex system: the health service. The NHS is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain: I think the greatest in fact. If the NHS is pushed too hard it, too, will collapse, and if it collapses, bad things will happen. And CV19 is pushing the NHS very hard indeed. Already many people are dying of things which would have been treated if not for CV19, and people who are not dying are sitting in lengthening backlogs which will take years or decades to clear. And this is only the start of what could happen. People who are working in ICUs will eventually become burnt out: they’ll end up shell-shocked and unable to work. And so the number of staff in ICUs will decline just as the requirement for them increases. That’s a death spiral: more and more people will get burnt out as their workload increases because their colleagues have already become burnt out. These people will themselves then need care, which is already very limited. Without care they may never return to work. And it takes quite a long time to train someone to work in an ICU: it is not an easy job. And, having witnessed what happens to people who work in ICUs, who is going to apply to be trained?</p>
<p>So the likely end result of a series of chaotic cycles of relaxation and panic is that the NHS will collapse in due course. And the likely end result of simply accepting large ongoing death rates, of Johnson’s stability through suffering, is that the NHS will collapse rather soon.</p>
<p>And if the NHS collapses it can’t be put back together quickly. Perhaps it can’t be put back together at all. And very large numbers of people will then die.</p>
<p>Avoiding collapse of the NHS is critical, but the UK government shows no sign of being competent to do so, or in fact of caring if the NHS collapses.</p>
<h2 id="the-way-out">The way out</h2>
<p>The way out is to eliminate the virus, globally. Until we can do that the best we can hope for is that it becomes like flu and that no nastier variant arises. I can’t see any reason why a nastier variant should not arise from a flu-like variant: nastier variants of <em>flu</em> arise, after all. So a flu-like stage, though very desirable short of elimination, is probably only temporary: something nastier will come back.</p>
<p>Managing the presumed nastier variants is hard. Inevitably there will be cycles of restriction and relaxation. Those cycles will have inevitable economic impact. That is not something that can be wished away.</p>
<p>The UK government, as with populists everywhere, has been hugely incompetent at managing the first few cycles, and shows no sign of becoming more competent. Johnson is stupid, uncaring and believes rules do not apply to him: while he controls the UK government there is little hope. Johnson, perhaps, believes that he can declare the pandemic over and it will be over. But the virus does not care what he thinks.</p>
<p>Almost certainly, absent a competent government, the UK will therefore experience a series of chaotic cycles of relaxation and restriction culminating in the probable collapse of the NHS and all that implies.</p>
<p>A competent government would understand that until the virus is eliminated the old world is simply gone: the world has now changed. Working from home is here for good, with all that implies for cities. Masks are here for good. A competent government would work to educate its people about this. And it would understand that since elimination will take years at least some of these changes must be regarded as permanent: in five years or a decade no-one will want to go back to spending three hours a day on a packed train or in a traffic jam.</p>
<p>The world has changed, and it has changed irrevocably, one way or another. The way out is to accept that there is no way back.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Disclaimer: I’m not an expert and I’m not even pretending to be one on the internet. I’m just trying to understand things as best I can, then writing the down so I can see how wrong I was, later. <a href="#2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Which, of course, was not Spanish. <a href="#2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2" title="SARS-CoV-2">SARS-CoV–2</a> has a genome about 30,000 bases long: there are \(4^{30000}\) such genomes. Only a tiny proportion of those will encode anything interesting and only a tiny proportion of <em>those</em> will encode anything very like SARS-CoV–2, but that is still a lot of variants. <a href="#2021-12-04-the-way-out-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>The way downurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-11-30-the-way-down2021-11-30T16:12:38Z2021-11-30T16:12:38ZTim Bradshaw
<p>The idiot child god and where he will lead us.</p>
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<h2 id="a-five-year-old-boy">A five-year-old boy</h2>
<p>Something I’ve recently realised is that to understand the johnsonites you need only to understand that Boris Johnson is a rather dim, extremely spoilt, five-year-old boy from an extremely privileged background. He may look like an adult but he’s not: he’s a small child wearing <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill_(character)" title="It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again">an adult suit</a>.</p>
<p>I remember being five, more-or-less. When I was five I had no notion that other people were really people: I thought that I was perfect, that I was infallible, that I was a little god who one day would grow into a far greater god. I thought the world, and my parents who made up most of it, existed to serve me; that my siblings and the people at school were lesser beings who also, in due course would exist to serve me as I grew into my godhood. I thought, in other words, what all five-year-olds think. I remember, vividly, the time during which I realised that this was not true: that I was just a person like all the other people, that I wasn’t as good or as clever or as handsome as some of them, perhaps as most of them.</p>
<p>I think this happens to almost all people: almost every small child thinks that they are a tiny god and that the world is built around them. At some age larger children realise that this is not true and this is a huge shock to them. Except, for some few people it never is: some people simply never realise that they are not god. Johnson is such a person: he has, quite simply, never realised that the world, and everything in it, exists for any purpose other than to serve him. He was not helped, of course, by growing up to a life of extreme privilege: much of his world did indeed seem as if it existed to keep him and his class in their state of comfort and idleness.</p>
<p>If Johnson was clever rather than merely glib he would be absolutely terrifying: he is pretty terrifying as he is, but you really do not want clever people who think they are gods anywhere near you<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-1-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>Johnson’s purpose in life is to <em>maximise Johnson</em>: everything, for him, exists only to further his own ascension to godhood and nothing must interfere with that. Nothing must ever be allowed make him feel bad about himself or question his own judgement – as an incipient god he is, of course, infallible and no questions must ever be asked or, if they should be asked then the questioners must be derided as naysayers, disruptive influences or worse.</p>
<h2 id="the-johnsonite-revolution">The johnsonite revolution</h2>
<p>So Johnson’s purpose is Johnson: more money for Johnson, more glory for Johnson, more acolytes for Johnson, more power for Johnson, more sex for Johnson<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-2-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>, more children for Johnson. That is all he cares about: nothing else matters, at all.</p>
<p>Sadly for Johnson and us all he is not actually very good at anything. Achieving maximum Johnson is hard when the only Johnson you have available is, frankly, second-rate. Like his idol Churchill he wants to be a great writer of history but he is very far from being that. He can write witty articles full of subtle bigotry and offence, but his talent, such as it is, is no more than any number of other journalists and far less than the best of them<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-3-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>.</p>
<p>In 2015 he must have wondered how he was to bargain this base johnsonite ore into the gold of godhead which he never doubted he deserved. We know the answer he came to: brexit. Brexit was never a good idea, and a botched brexit was likely to do very serious damage to the country. But it also might give him power, which was far more important: Johnson was happy to sacrifice his country without a thought.</p>
<p>And it worked: brexit did give him power. And the cost of that power for us all was altogether predictable but terrible nonetheless. Enthusiasm for brexit, with <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Carswell" title="Douglas Carswell">perhaps a few exceptions</a>, is not normally associated with great intellect among politicians but Johnson, believing himself now a very god, could tolerate no dissent, no questioning, any more than any other spoilt five-year old boy could. And so he purged the parliamentary Conservative party of anyone who might doubt him, of anyone who might be cleverer than he was: constructing a government of the inadequate, a government of incompetents, ideologues and the dull-witted. Johnson has laid his eggs in the Conservative party like a parasitoid wasp, and now this new johnsonite party is growing in its body, consuming it from within while it still lives.</p>
<p>This is the maximum Johnson revolution.</p>
<h2 id="like-saturn">Like Saturn</h2>
<p>Rule by spoilt five-year-old boy was never going to end well. And it is not ending so well, is it? A child, seeking personal power and glory at any cost, does not make decisions which are good for anyone but himself. And as he <em>is</em> a child he doesn’t even make decisions which are good for himself in the long run: there is a reason why parents have authority over their children, it turns out. Being unable to be wrong means that he can never correct errors: he can never learn from his mistakes since he believes himself incapable of them. Surrounding himself only with people who are unwilling or unable to challenge him makes this worse.</p>
<p>Brexit was always going to make the UK poorer and weaker, and was always going to imperil the UK’s relations with its much larger and more powerful neighbour. The Northern Ireland situation probably had no really good solution. But Johnson hasn’t even tried: he, or his stooge David Frost, negotiated a minimal deal which, less than a year later, they are going back on, demonstrating in the most public possible way that they have either acted in bad faith throughout or were simply not competent to understand the implications of what they were doing<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-4-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup>.</p>
<p>But Johnson can never be wrong, so the catastrophes of the brexit he chose will always be the fault of other people.</p>
<p>And then of course the world throws something unexpected at him, in the form of CV19<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-5-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-5-return">5</a></sup>. Something he is even more utterly incompetent to deal with than the fallout from the brexit he engineered. It is hard to know how many people he has now killed due to his lack both of competence and of care, but it is safe to say that it is tens of thousands. And it is not over: the omicron variant may escape immunity through vaccines or previous infection<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-6-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-6-return">6</a></sup>, in which case, if it is as deadly as previous variants, we are starting again.</p>
<p>And Johnson can never be wrong, and Johnson can never learn so all the mistakes must have been made by other people. And he will make exactly the mistakes he made before, and the corpses will pile up in his wake. And these mistakes, too, will be someone else’s fault.</p>
<p>Like Saturn, Johnson’s revolution is eating its own children<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-7-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-7-return">7</a></sup>.</p>
<h2 id="the-way-down">The way down</h2>
<p>Where do we go from here?</p>
<p>Johnson is vastly incompetent but can never be wrong. If he is not removed by some kind of coup within the tory party<sup><a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-8-definition" name="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-8-return">8</a></sup> then he will continue to lead us on the way down: the only way he knows. As disaster follows disaster, he must find endless new people to blame. So when the Northern Ireland agreement turns out not to work very well, somehow this is the fault of the EU, and the EU is duly demonised. So he will publish a rather stupid letter he wrote to the French president, causing the French to react, he hopes, badly. So now he can blame the French for the invented refugee crisis. So he will blame ‘remoaners’ who, somehow, are to blame for the ills of brexit. So he will blame the judges for getting in the way of his idiot brexit. So someone will be found to blame for the mounds of the CV19 dead. And so it goes on, for ever, with Johnson and his acolytes finding ever new groups to blame, waving their idiot flags and working their supporters into an ever stronger frenzy of resentment and hatred.</p>
<p>This strategy of finding identifiable groups to blame for your mistakes is familiar because it has happened before. It is the strategy of authoritarians, both those we call fascists and those we call communists, everywhere and always. And it ends with camps, pogroms and death. Not yet, not even soon, and not yet inevitably, but we are on the way.</p>
<p>It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>No-one would want to be very near Elon Musk. <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Although his mentality is that of a privileged five-year old boy, his body is not: like most physically-adult people he wants sex. And he behaves exactly the way you would expect: he has limited or no self control. Who knows how many children he has by how many different partners: perhaps not even he does. Who knows how many partners he has had and how many he has been unfaithful to? <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>I freely admit my talent for writing is very slight. But I do freely admit it: something Johnson could never do. <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Or, of course, both: David Frost is some kind of poster child for a person promoted far beyond his rather limited competence. <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-5-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>For Johnson CV19 is perhaps a blessing in disguise. Many thousands have died and many thousands more will die through his incompetence and carelessness. This is something he cares nothing about of course, since these are other people. But the enormous costs of CV19 will obscure the true costs of his brexit, and he <em>does</em> care about that. <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-5-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-6-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>But it may not: I don’t think the data is clear yet, although people who should know such as the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59426353">CEO of Moderna</a> are clearly quite worried about it. It may also be less deadly. <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-6-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-7-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p><em>A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants</em> – Jaques Mallet du Pan <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-7-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-8-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>A coup within the tory party is probably our last, best hope. But Johnson has such a strong grip that it is by no means certain: it is frightening to plot against the man on whom you depend for career advancement. Still, we must hope. <a href="#2021-11-30-the-way-down-footnote-8-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>The endless droningurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-11-22-the-endless-droning2021-11-22T12:36:25Z2021-11-22T12:36:25ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Someone <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/qz0a3j/why_there_is_no_new_modern_common_lisp_ide/">asked about better Lisp IDEs on reddit</a>. Such things would obviously be desirable. But the comments are entirely full the usual sad endless droning from people who need there always to be something preventing them from doing what they pretend to want to do, and are happy to invent such barriers where none really exist. comp.lang.lisp lives on in spirit if not in fact.</p>
<p>[The rest of this article is a lot ruder than the above and I’ve intentionally censored it from the various feeds. See also <a href="https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2021/11/25/the-endless-droning-corrections-and-clarifications">corrections and clarifications</a>.]</p>
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<p>First of all it is nice to see people dismissing LispWorks because it’s ‘too expensive’. LW actually <em>has</em> an IDE and it actually <em>does</em> provide an editor which (while an Emacs inside) can pretend to be a native mac or windows editor. And it’s portable: you can develop on Windows and then build and deploy on Linux and that just works, and has done for at least two decades. But it’s ‘too expensive’: a new license for LW might cost the equivalent of a few days of employing a programmer, and the support on that license (which gets you upgrades for ever) might be a day or so. If that’s ‘too expensive’ then your costing is so fucked you might as well give up now and become a beggar. (The announcement of the Haskell IDE which triggered the post is for a commercial one, by the way, so let’s not have any ‘oh, but it’s not ideologically pure’ noise, thanks.)</p>
<p>And then we get the endless ‘things were better on ⟨<em>ancient technology of your choice</em>⟩’. Here’s the thing: I used both Symbolics and Interlisp-D based systems, extensively. They weren’t better than the LW IDE. They had one or two neat features that the LW IDE doesn’t because it’s hard to do on modern hardware, but they were not better. In the case of Interlisp-D systems it took a couple of weeks of practice before you could even use the thing for more than ten minutes without spending most of the time wondering what some front panel code meant (it always meant ‘I have crashed for reasons I cannot explain and you have lost your work and must now reload the sysout and that will take half an hour’) and how to restart it. That was … harder than learning Emacs. Those ancient systems might have been better than Emacs/SLIME … but they might not, I am not sure. But always, always there is the endless mindless droning from people mourning some distant lost golden age: well, I was <em>there</em> and that golden age never existed.</p>
<p>And then there’s the ‘but the new programmers find Emacs hard’. Seriously? Because people starting to learn Lisp are learning a language whose key idea is that it is a programming language <em>in which you write programming languages</em>. Lisp makes doing far more possible than other languages, but nothing is ever going to make it easy because designing programming languages turns out to be hard. Lisp is a language all of whose interesting features are intellectually difficult ideas. If you are put off Lisp by having to learn some different keys to press, <em>give up now</em> and learn Python or some other intellectually undemanding language instead, because Emacs is not remotely the hardest thing you are going to have do deal with. This is like people doing maths degrees complaining about the squiggly Greek characters: if that’s putting you off maths, <em>don’t do maths</em>. OK, ζ and ξ are kind of fiddly to write, but understanding what a Banach space is actually <em>is</em> hard. And, by the way, at some point you <em>are</em> going to have to learn LaTeX, and if you think Emacs is hard, you have a whole other think coming.</p>
<p>Oh, and by the way, I’ve worked somewhere where large numbers of people from non-programming backgrounds wrote vast masses of Python. How did they do it? They used Emacs: some of them probably used vi or vim. But they were actual scientists so they know what hard things are, and knew that learning Emacs was not one of those things.</p>
<p>And finally, there’s a long diatribe from someone listing all the steps they had to go through to get a CL IDE set up on a machine. This same person claims to have run teams of Lisp programmers. Well, there’s this idea called <em>programming</em>: if you have a long laborious set of tasks to do more than once <em>you write a program to do that for you</em>. And yes, I have done just that.</p>
<hr />
<p>All of these people <em>want to lose</em>: they need there always to be something in the way that prevents them getting whatever it is they pretend to want to do done. If such a barrier is removed <em>they will build a new one</em>: I know this because I have done just that and watched them build their new barrier so they could avoid actually doing anything and keep complaining. These barriers <em>do not exist</em>: if you want a cross-platform IDE for Lisp <a href="http://www.lispworks.com/"><em>that IDE exists</em></a>. If you don’t want to use a commercial product, Emacs and SLIME/SLY are free, and fine. And yes there is a learning curve which is somewhat steep, but <em>intellectually difficult things have steep learning curves</em>: if you’re going to become a productive mathematician you are going to go through four years of very steep learning curve indeed, and if you’re going to become a productive Lisp programmer you’re going to go through a learning curve perhaps a tenth or less as hard as that, of which Emacs is one tiny part. If you’re not up to that, <em>don’t write Lisp</em>.</p>
<p>And if what you enjoy doing is whining in public about how things are always in your way then <em>fuck off</em>.</p>A letter to my MPurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-11-04-a-letter-to-my-mp2021-11-04T09:53:11Z2021-11-04T09:53:11ZTim Bradshaw
<p>On the occasion of the johnsonites’ rewriting the rules on political corruption to suit themselves.</p>
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<p>So, England essentially now has two political parties: one which, though deeply flawed, represents democracy, and the other one: the once-great party to which you belong and which now represents nothing but its own greed, obvious corruption and lies. The party of a laughing idiot clown whose incompetence and gross stupidity has caused tens of thousands of deaths in the last two years and who, no doubt, will kill tens of thousands more in the next few years. The party of a man who, somehow, will be found not to be responsible for the heaped corpses on which he stands. The party whose foreign aid cuts will probably kill hundreds of thousands (but, you know, mostly poor black people and no-one in your party cares about them, do they?). A party of liars and cheats. A party which thinks nothing of changing the rules so its own corrupt MPs are let off. A party of flag-waving little Englanders and racists.</p>
<p>You must be very proud of yourself to represent such an organisation. For myself, I am now ashamed to be English, ashamed to live in your constituency, ashamed of everything your party has come to stand for.</p>
<p>I hope you sleep well. Please, don’t reply.</p>An age of optimismurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-10-27-an-age-of-optimism2021-10-27T09:16:22Z2021-10-27T09:16:22ZTim Bradshaw
<p>On the occasion of Rishi Sunak’s budget.</p>
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<p>Have we just made enemies of our best friends? are there shortages bought about by our own idiocy? well, never mind, be optimistic! Have we just killed tens of thousands of people through our own inaction? do not think of that, that is past now: simply declare the pandemic over and be optimistic! Does the virus not hear our optimism and will tens of thousands more die as a result? do not worry be optimistic! Does physics not listen to the stupid tales of endless exponential growth told by idiot economists? don’t worry, physics cannot stand in the way of our glorious future: be optimistic, that is enough!</p>
<p>Will the climate talks fail, or if they succeed will we not think to implement our grand vaporous proposals: who needs actions when you’ve got words? Will the sunlit uplands, instead, be deserts drying in the sun? will there be water shortages? will there be catastrophic movements of people fleeing as their homes become uninhabitable? will there be resource wars? will billions die? Don’t think of it, it is years away yet and we can push our exponential death cult a little further yet: instead be optimistic!</p>
<p>Are we ruled by idiot clowns who are in the process of dismantling democracy so they may rule for ever? yes, we are: we are those clowns and we will march in glory, right arms raised, into our brilliant thousand-year reign: be optimistic! The future is ours!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop
<br />And an illustrated book about birds
<br />You see a lot up there but don’t be scared
<br />Who needs action when you got words
<br />— The Meat Puppets</p></blockquote>The lost cause of the Free Software Foundationurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation2021-07-24T08:50:53Z2021-07-24T08:50:53ZTim Bradshaw
<p>The Free Software Foundation has <a href="https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-of-richard-stallman" title="Statement of FSF board on election of Richard Stallman">reelected Richard Stallman</a> to its board. At first glance this looks like a wilful act of self-harm by the FSF: RMS has <a href="https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2021/03/24/richard-stallman/">expressed opinions which are abhorrent</a> and has behaved appallingly towards women, at least. This is to misunderstand both what the cause of the FSF really is and what their options for that cause now are.</p>
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<p>[What follows is wrong in some important ways: please see <a href="https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2021/08/17/neurodivergent/">this article</a> which has both corrections and an apology.]</p>
<h2 id="the-cult-of-richard-stallman">The cult of Richard Stallman</h2>
<p>RMS is, to put it rather mildly, someone who a large number of people find <a href="https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2021/03/24/richard-stallman/" title="Richard Stallman">extremely toxic</a> but who is unsurprisingly also supported by <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/12/free_software_foundation_doubles_down/" title="FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org">other groups of people</a>. The people who support him are generally exactly the sort of people you would expect to support him — white male programmers — and have exactly the sort of views you would expect: they’re bigots. They’re not people with whom it would be pleasant to work if you were female, not white, or both. In fact they’re not the sort of people with whom it would be pleasant to work at all if you were a decent human being.</p>
<p>It seems likely that RMS himself is ill, or at least not neurotypical, rather than malevolant: he almost certainly is someone who really finds it very hard to understand that paedophilia is abhorrent, for instance. And like most people, he wants sex, but <em>unlike</em> most people he fails to understand that the way to get it is not to repeatedly harass women<sup><a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-1-definition" name="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>. If so, he is clearly someone who deserves sympathy and understanding. But he also should not be in a position where he has any kind of power over people: after all, psychopaths are <em>also</em> people who are ill, or not neurotypical in a different way, and you definitely don’t want psychopaths in positions of power or responsibility.</p>
<p>Some of the people who support RMS within and outside the FSF are probably also not neurotypical in similar ways. But the great majority are: they are simply the sort of people who believe in the innate superiority of white men, that women are inherently inferior and exist to satisfy the sexual needs of men regardless of their own desires: in other words they are racists and sexists of the worst kind. They also, perhaps, don’t have any serious problem with sex with young girls<sup><a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-2-definition" name="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>. These people <em>are</em> malevolent. And RMS is a quite convenient figurehead for them as he is enabling them to do exactly what they want to do anyway. While I and many other people believed ten years ago that racism, sexism and other bigotries were fading into the past in many advanced countries, the events of the last decade have made it very clear that this is not the case. Very many people have always held horrible views: between perhaps the late 1970s and the mid 2010s they simply were less willing to speak those views in public. The ascent of ‘populism’ — which really means, among other things, white male supremacy — means that they are no longer so hesitant about expressing their views in public. You don’t have to read far into the comments on, for instance, <a href="https://theregister.com/" title="The Register">The Register</a> to see how common some of these views are<sup><a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-3-definition" name="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>, and they can also be widely seen elsewhere: this is not something I am making up.</p>
<p>So it seems like what is happening with the FSF is simple: white male programmers have maintained their position of dominance and will continue to drive out everyone else. The FSF continues to be a white male supremacist organisation as it has always implicitly been.</p>
<p>Well, that’s all true, but there is more to it than that.</p>
<h2 id="a-guild">A guild</h2>
<p>The FSF is essentially a <em>guild</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>guild</strong> or <strong>gild</strong> /gild/
<br />[…] A mediaeval association looking after common (<em>esp</em> trading) interests, providing mutual support and protection, and masses for the dead
<br />— Chambers</p></blockquote>
<p>Like all guilds this one’s underlying purpose is to benefit its members, who regard themselves as uniquely, innately blessed to be members of the guild, and to forbid entrance to those they regard as inferior. As with many guilds this is dressed up in what are essentially religious clothes: only those blessed by the god of the guild are allowed to join. Guilds are distinct from unions in this way: anyone can join a union if they pay the fees, but only the elect of god can join the guild. The FSF and much of the culture around the broader free software movement<sup><a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-4-definition" name="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup> isn’t socialist: it’s mediaeval.</p>
<p>The free software guild has also been very successful. Because it has become so dominant in the fields in which it operates it has all but driven out the groups it regards as not blessed from those fields. It’s not currently legal to do this (see below), but since the guild is so dominant it is inevitable that anyone starting work in one of the fields it operates in will encounter guild members, who will then make their lives so miserable that they leave, and pretty quickly non-elect people simply don’t even consider working in those fields. The guild got started in the mid 1980s and you can see its success in the figures. In 1984 <a href="https://tfeb.org/fragments/2020/05/09/sexism-in-computer-science/" title="Sexism in computer science">one group of the non-elect</a> made up 38% of those entering the workforce in one of the guild’s areas: by 2011 they made up under 18%. In areas directly under the control of the guild they now make up under 10% (and may never have made up more than that).</p>
<p>Well, of course mediaeval trade practices are even more hostile to capitalism than socialist ones are: the whole elect-of-god thing is just toxic to capitalism as it restricts the workforce enormously, and the weird religious ornamentation surrounding everything the guild does is also not helping anything. Capitalists want the guild to die or become irrelevant, so their available workforce can be much larger, they can drive down wages to reasonable levels, make more money for themselves and everyone else.</p>
<p>Capitalists are also often working in legal systems which make what the guild is doing illegal, and they are worried about that. So this is a rare case where the desires of the plutocrats and those of decent human beings align: neither wants the bigotry and pseudo-religion that is what the free software guild stands for.</p>
<p>Almost inevitably, the capitalists will win, and at some level the guild probably knows this. It is faced with two options.</p>
<p>It could chose to diminish and go into the west: remaining in existence but achieving an accommodation with the capitalists. This is pretty much what, for instance, the Anglican church (a descendant of another hugely powerful mediaeval institution) is doing: gradually relaxing all sorts of restrictions on things in order to avoid an outright confrontation with the rest of society. The Anglican church, in England (and its episcopal equivalents elsewhere in he UK) is now all but irrelevant in practical terms to most people: there are probably gay men who still worry that having sex with other men is ‘sinful’ but the number is diminishing, as one example. But it still exists, it still owns property, it still is involved in all sorts of ceremonial occasions.</p>
<p>Or the guild could choose to fight. It will lose, we must hope<sup><a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-5-definition" name="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-5-return">5</a></sup>, but, like the nazis at the end of the second war, it will go out in a blaze of what its members consider to be glory. Because it is quite powerful, this fight will cause a great deal of damage: it will destroy the guild of course, but many people and organisations not directly involved in it will also be badly hurt. But, from the perspective of the more fundamentalist members of the guild, this is a war for their religion and a war which they are obliged, therefore, to fight. They must fight even though they know they will lose, and even though the damage caused to others and to society as a whole will be severe.</p>
<p>And so, although they know their cause is already lost, the guild has chosen to fight.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>And, given how hard it is for him to understand that paedophilia is wrong, perhaps girls as well. <a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>They will, of course, deny this. But they also will defend the remarks RMS made about paedophilia as not being particularly problematic, and talk about how unreasonable it was for various people for whom Jeffrey Epstein procured underage girls to check that they had consented, or could consent, to what was being done to them. And, after all, why should someone who believes that consent is not required for him to have sex with a woman really have a problem with having sex with a child, who cannot consent? Remember that these views were <em>completely standard</em> until quite recently in many societies. <a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Note that this is not intended to reflect on the <em>staff</em> of The Register, or its editorial policy, merely on the demographic of some of its commentariat. <a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>To be very clear: I am not against free software, which I believe has done a lot of good. <a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-5-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>We, together with the plutocrats, must hope it will lose because we must hope that the populist parties which have gained so much ground in recent years are eventually defeated and that democracy does not give way to regimes which are explicitly white male supremacist. Those regimes would destroy both liberal democracy <em>and</em> plutocratic capitalism, just as the nazis did in 1930s Germany. The rape of the UK by the Johnsonist party (still known as the ‘Conservative party’ although it is no longer a conservative party) makes it clear that this is not a safe assumption. <a href="#2021-07-24-the-lost-cause-of-the-free-software-foundation-footnote-5-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>The idiocy of Marsurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars2021-06-18T08:17:24Z2021-06-18T08:17:24ZTim Bradshaw
<p>If you think that we can continue economic growth by simply moving to Mars, you’re a fool.</p>
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<p>Many people do not understand that the growth in resource usage by humans will, if not stopped, result in us hitting the limits of what Earth can provide at some point in the fairly near future. Unless we address this problem the result will probably be the collapse of civilisation. Some of the people who think they <em>do</em> understand this problem argue that, well, there is Mars<sup><a href="#2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-1-definition" name="2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>: we can just go there and carry on as normal and everything will be fine.</p>
<p>It won’t be, and here’s why.</p>
<h2 id="growth">Growth</h2>
<p>We all hear about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth">economic growth</a> in the news. And people like it when it’s some positive number. Growth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time. [From Wikipiedia article above.]</p></blockquote>
<p>What that means is that growth is the rate of change of some measure of the size of an economy. Growth is measured as a percentage increase in the size of the economy per year, which I will call \(g\), so if at some time \(t\) (measured in years) the economy has size \(s(t)\), then \(s(t + 1) = s(t)(1 + g/100)\). That means that if growth is constant over the long term, the size of the economy is increasing exponentially with time:</p>
<p>\[
s(t) = s_0 e^{t/\tau}\quad\text{where $\tau = 1/\ln(1 + g/100)$}
\]</p>
<p>And economists are very keen that \(g\) should not drop to zero or, still worse, become negative: they want it to be some long-term constant value.</p>
<h3 id="rescaling">Rescaling</h3>
<p>One possibility is that this measure \(s(t)\) might simply involve rescaling the economy somehow: we think it’s bigger but in fact it’s not. Let’s say that I’m interested in buying aluminium: if, every year, the economy ‘grows’ by \(1 + g/100\), but the price of aluminium <em>also</em> grows by \(1 + g/100\) then I can’t actually buy any more at the end of the year, even though the economy has ‘grown’.</p>
<p>This, in fact, is inflation: the economy hasn’t grown, it’s just been rescaled. Inflation is not what people mean by growth: they mean that you can actually buy more stuff.</p>
<p>Well, if you can buy exponentially more stuff over time there’s a problem, isn’t there? Even economists can see this, I expect.</p>
<h3 id="hand-waving">Hand-waving</h3>
<p>So if growth means being able to afford ever more material goods there’s a problem: at some point you’ll run out of stuff. This is awkward for economists who have built entire theories on the idea that growth can continue indefinitely.</p>
<p>Is there a meaning of the term ‘growth’ which <em>doesn’t</em> involve crashing into finite limits or somehow finding an endless source of new material goods? One option that economists push is that we start being able to use the existing raw materials ever more efficiently. That’s fantasy in the medium term because there are hard physical limits on efficiency. Another popular option is that we all somehow fall into a simulation and live ever more complex virtual lives, while the real world carries on without us. That’s almost certainly <em>also</em> fantasy both because, despite endless AI hype, we have no idea how to do that, and because exponential growth in computing power also has hard physical limits<sup><a href="#2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-2-definition" name="2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law">Moore’s law</a> is only a transient phenonenon.</p>
<p>In these hand-waving cases there’s also a question about what happens to the prices of physical materials. For things to make any sense the prices have to inflate at least as fast as the growth rate, and in fact faster. If, for instance, the price of aluminium remained roughly constant (when corrected for currency inflation), then after some time it would be possible to simply buy all the aluminium in the world and thus hold to ransom anything which is made from it, however efficiently that is done. So that shows that the price of materials must rise at least as fast as growth. In fact it must rise faster than that: given the finite supply of aluminium ore, the real cost of aluminium should represent that, meaning that, even as people become richer, new physical goods must become more expensive and scarce over time.</p>
<p>But there’s no need to speculate: instead let’slook at what actually <em>has</em> happened.</p>
<h2 id="energy">Energy</h2>
<p>A good proxy for the processing and consumption of material goods is energy consumption: energy is consumed to do some useful physical work, so it should correlate approximately with the amount of materials being processed in some way. And energy is fungible, so it’s easy to measure. And data on energy usage is available. <a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/03/textbook-debut/">Tom Murphy’s excellent book</a>, <a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions"><em>Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet</em></a> contains, in section 1.2, this information for the US, sourced from the <a href="https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/index.php">US Energy Information Administration</a>. He uses this data to derive a rate of growth in US energy usage of about \(3\,\mathrm{\%/y}\) between about 1650 and 2000. So during this period growth in energy usage was approximately exponential and so, it’s pretty safe to say, there was exponential growth in the physical material being used during this period.</p>
<p>So at least until recently (see below) growth meant what it naïvely means: an exponentially increasing rate of material production. This obviously can’t continue on Earth.</p>
<h2 id="mars">Mars</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>But we can just go to Mars right? Once we’ve used up Earth we can up sticks, move planet, and carry on. It took us thousands of years to use up Earth’s resources, so Mars will buy us thousands more years.</p></blockquote>
<p>Or so say the innumerate space fantasists.</p>
<p>This kind of claim is so silly it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s just take it at face value. I will assume:</p>
<ul>
<li>it is possible to either move huge numbers of humans to Mars or to mine it for raw materials and bring them back to Earth cheaply, using spacecraft driven by some unexplained magic<sup><a href="#2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-3-definition" name="2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>;</li>
<li>Mars has the same amount of raw materials as Earth (it doesn’t);</li>
<li>we can hit the ground running and simply immediately start stripping Mars at the rate Earth was being stripped;</li>
<li>any other kind of problem I haven’t thought of can be solved by yet more unexplained magic.</li></ul>
<p>So let’s do the maths.</p>
<h2 id="the-maths">The maths</h2>
<p>Let’s assume that we’re using up physical resources at some rate \(r(t)\) which is increasing exponentially:</p>
<p>\[
r(t) = r_0 e^{t/\tau}
\]</p>
<p>Where \(r_0\) is the rate at some time \(t = 0\). This can be integrated to get the total resources consumed to some time:</p>
<p>\[
R(t) = R_0 e^{t/\tau}\quad\text{where $R_0 =\tau r_0$}
\]</p>
<p>Here \(R_0\) is the total consumption to \(t=0\).</p>
<p>OK, so let’s measure \(t\) in years and assume that the annual growth percentage is \(g\). In other words:</p>
<p>\[
r(t + 1) = \left(1 + \frac{g}{100}\right)r(t)
\]</p>
<p>Well</p>
<p>\[
\begin{aligned}
r(t + 1) &= r_0e^{(t + 1)/\tau}\\
&= r_0e^{t/\tau}e^{1/\tau}\\
&= e^{1/\tau}r(t)
\end{aligned}
\]</p>
<p>so we can get \(\tau\) in terms of \(g\):</p>
<p>\[
\tau = \frac{1}{\ln\left(1 + \frac{g}{100}\right)}
\]</p>
<p>So, now, how long does it take for the resources consumed to go up by some factor, say \(k\)?</p>
<p>\[
\begin{aligned}
k = \frac{R(t + \Delta t)}{R(t)} &= \frac{e^{(t + \Delta t)/\tau}}{e^{t/\tau}}\\
&= e^{\Delta t/\tau}
\end{aligned}
\]</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>\[
\begin{aligned}
\Delta t &= \tau \ln k\\
&= \frac{\ln k}{\ln\left(1 + \frac{g}{100}\right)}
&&\text{using $\tau$ from above}
\end{aligned}
\]</p>
<h2 id="how-long-does-mars-get-us">How long does Mars get us?</h2>
<p>Let’s assume, as above, that at \(t=0\) we run out of resources on Earth and start mining Mars, and that we start doing it at the same rate that we were stripping Earth, and that Mars has the same amount of material as Earth, and that growth continues as before at a rate I will assume to be \(2\,\mathrm{\%/y}\) (so lower than the measured rate above). When do we run out of resources on Mars? Well, we run out of resources when \(R(t+\Delta t)/R(t) = k = 2\), so when</p>
<p>\[
\begin{aligned}
\Delta t &= \frac{\ln 2}{\ln\left(1 + \frac{g}{100}\right)}\\
&\approx 35\,\mathrm{y}
\end{aligned}
\]</p>
<p>Under entirely unrealistically optimistic assumptions, <em>stripping Mars will maintain growth at \(2\,\mathrm{\%/y}\) for 35 years</em>.</p>
<h2 id="what-about-venus-jupiter">What about Venus? Jupiter?</h2>
<p>If we make the same assumptions about Venus and start on that after Mars it gets us a further 20 years and six months. If instead we went to Jupiter, and assuming its resources scale like the ratio of its mass to Earth’s we’d buy about 256 years, which is better, but we’re not going to be able to do that.</p>
<p>So, growth of physical resource usage can not be maintained at \(2\,\mathrm{\%/y}\) for <em>any</em> significant amount of time in the future.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="perhaps-good-news">Perhaps good news</h2>
<p>The good news here is that data since 2000 does make it look as if the growth in energy usage is slowing down. That means either we’re moving into one of the economists’ handwavy fantasy scenarios (hint: it doesn’t), or that we’re in the early stages of falling off the exponential phase of growth. Assuming that’s true then we’re moving into a world where the models economists have built simply no longer work, and where we can’t endlessly assume we will get richer for ever. It’s perhaps not coincidental that the years since 2010 have seen the rise of a number of extremely unavoury political movements: there will be more of these as there is more competition for increasingly scarce resources and as climate change takes effect, further increasing scarcity and driving migrations on vast scales. The likely outcome, I think, is not a smooth transition to a zero or negative growth world, but something pretty unpleasant: resource wars between major players, extreme racist responses to the migration problem, authoritarianism and fascism.</p>
<p>Some of these processes seem to be well on the way as I write.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="some-pictures">Some pictures</h2>
<p>Here are plots which show the time to exhaust resources on:</p>
<ul>
<li>Mars (about \(35\,\mathrm{y}\)) & then Venus (another \(20.5\,\mathrm{y}\), exhausting both in about \(55\,\mathrm{y}\));</li>
<li>Jupiter alone (about \(291\,\mathrm{y}\));</li>
<li>the Sun alone (about \(642\,\mathrm{y}\)).</li></ul>
<p>These assume that available resources scale like mass, and that growth continues at \(2\,\mathrm{\%/y}\). Note that time is the y-axis in these plots: the x-axis is the resource ratio (assumed to be the mass ratio) compared to Earth’s.</p>
<div class="figure"><img src="/fragments/img/2021/mars-idiocy/mars-venus.svg" alt="Time to exhaust resources on Mars & Venus, growth at 2%/y" />
<p class="caption">Time to exhaust resources on Mars & Venus, growth at 2%/y</p></div>
<div class="figure"><img src="/fragments/img/2021/mars-idiocy/jupiter.svg" alt="Time to exhaust resources on Jupiter, growth at 2%/y" />
<p class="caption">Time to exhaust resources on Jupiter, growth at 2%/y</p></div>
<div class="figure"><img src="/fragments/img/2021/mars-idiocy/sun.svg" alt="Time to exhaust resources from the Sun, growth at 2%/y" />
<p class="caption">Time to exhaust resources from the Sun, growth at 2%/y</p></div>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Or Venus, but usually Mars. Sometimes asteroids. <a href="#2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>It is possible to imagine a world where the simulation we are assumed to end up in runs exponentially slowly, giving the consciousinesses in it the idea that growth still continues when in fact it doesn’t. <a href="#2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Here’s an idea: if you have unexplained magic to drive your vast fleets of spacecraft, <em>you’ve already solved the problem on Earth</em>! <a href="#2021-06-18-the-idiocy-of-mars-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>Richard Stallmanurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-03-24-richard-stallman2021-03-24T11:24:44Z2021-03-24T11:24:44ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Richard Stallman (RMS) is a famous hacker who wrote Emacs and founded the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project. He is an important figure in the history of free software. He is also someone whose behaviour towards women has been appalling and who believed, for a long time, that sex with children was not harmful: he is someone who should have no place in the present or future of free software, at all. And yet he is vociferously defended by a significant number of free software advocates: this says exactly what you think about them.</p>
<!-- more-->
<p>[What follows is wrong in some important ways: please see <a href="https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2021/08/17/neurodivergent/">this article</a> which has both corrections and an apology.]</p>
<p>There are many well-attested examples of RMS’s grotesque attitudes to women<sup><a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-1-definition" name="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>. Here is an example <a href="https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June%202006%20%28Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party%29" title="Richard Stallman's personal political notes from 2006: March - June">from his own blog in June 2006 (updated April 2018)</a>, of his attitude to something else:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, you are reading that correctly: RMS thought, in 2006 (he was 53), that <em>adults having sex with children</em> was OK, so long as it was, you know, ‘voluntary’: so long as the children consented. Because children, in his view at the time, <em>could consent to sex</em>.</p>
<p>In other words, in 2006 (and for many years following that) RMS was someone who did not understand, even slightly, what it means to be able to consent to sex (or who understood but did not care). How do you think he treated women?</p>
<p>Thirteen years later, on <a href="https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong)" title="Richard Stallman's personal political notes from 2019: July - October">14th September 2019</a> and at the age of 66, he retracted this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.</p>
<p>Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic<sup><a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-2-definition" name="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.</p></blockquote>
<p>If we assume that he is writing in good faith (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), then I think there is only one conclusion to draw from this: something is badly wrong with his mind which makes it extremely hard for him to understand notions such as consent, and probably other things as well. Perhaps he is someone who deserves sympathy, not contempt. But, like other people who suffer from such problems, he needs to be kept out of situations where he can do harm.</p>
<p>Unfortunately he is not being kept out of such situations: rather he is being supported and enabled by a group of acolytes, for their own reasons which are certainly not good ones.</p>
<p>I’ve known since the early 1990s that cooperation with RMS was impossible, because I was a bystander on the right mailing lists and I saw the mail exchanges<sup><a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-3-definition" name="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>. I had no idea, at all, about this stuff (which is unforgivable: I should have known, even though I left the cult in about 1994). As I said above, almost certainly he is ill rather than evil: there is simply something which does not work properly in his mind which makes him unable to understand these things. If this is true then it is very sad for him. However like other similar people he is still a danger to those around him: a man who finds it hard to understand that sex with children is wrong should be nowhere near any kind of leadership position, in anything, and should never have been so.</p>
<p>But, of course, instead of that, his acolytes and fanboys have built an elaborate halfwit cargo cult around him for more than 30 years. Many of them are now so blinded by the cult that they have made that they simply can no longer see, if they could ever see, that the little tinpot god they have built it around is damaged, if not evil. And so they will drink the kool-aid and end up, with the other cult members, still praising the idiot toy god they made even as the building burns around them<sup><a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-4-definition" name="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup>.</p>
<p>And I have some limited sympathy for them, as I have some provisional sympathy for him, as I have sympathy for other damaged people. But the cult built around him does great harm and RMS directly does great harm, and it needs to stop. It needed to stop 30 years ago but it needs to stop even more now.</p>
<p>On the other hand I don’t have sympathy for the many others: the people whose minds have not been damaged by the cult, the people who think that RMS’s attitudes are just fine nonetheless. The people who knowingly cheer on this damaged human being because he represents <em>their</em> views: their views towards women and perhaps their views towards children too. The people who think that the women and other people who are offended by the grotesque attitudes of RMS, and of many others in the free software community, are <a href="https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/03/23/fsf_stallman_outcry/#c_4226763" title="'radfems'">‘radfems’</a>. If you are one of those people then fuck you: fuck all of you.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Since writing the first version of this post, I’ve exchanged email with a friend of mine who describes having been ‘accosted’ by him at an event some time ago. Her native language is not English and she pretty clearly did not want to discuss it further, but I don’t believe she meant she was physically assaulted but rather that she was approached inappropriately. <a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>‘Per’ seems to be a third-person-neutral pronoun used by people who don’t understand that ‘they’ has been used that way for hundreds of years in English. <a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>And I’m a Lisp hacker: I have low standards for cooperation. (What’s the difference between a Lisp hacker and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.) <a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Yes, I know I’m mixing my cults here. <a href="#2021-03-24-richard-stallman-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>Unhappy far-off thingsurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-12-23-unhappy-far-off-things2020-12-23T11:42:20Z2020-12-23T11:42:20ZTim Bradshaw
<blockquote>
<p>It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken bricks.</p></blockquote>
<!-- more-->
<p>It can’t happen here, can it? Of course it can not: this is something that happens to other people in lesser countries far away. Something we read about in newspapers or watch in enchanted horror on the news. We watch as some unhappy country eats itself alive, vomiting forth a spray of refugees who, somehow but inevitably, we will not be able to accept here, though they be ever so deserving. And of course these distant tragedies are never our fault, not even slightly.</p>
<p>No, these tragedies can not happen here: we are too clever, too well-educated, too English. We have too much to lose so it will not be allowed. And if it were to happen here it would if course not be our fault: it would most certainly be the doings of inferior foreign people who wish us ill. We are, after all, simply better fellows than those unhappy far-off people.</p>
<hr />
<p>Quote from <em>Unhappy far-off things</em> by Lord Dunsany.</p>The Boris maximizerurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer2020-12-11T18:37:08Z2020-12-11T18:37:08ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Or, a theory about the mess we’re in.</p>
<!-- more-->
<p>The UK is about to finally leave the EU as the transition period finishes at the end of the year. Leaving the EU was always a terrible idea, based on appealing to a combination of the bigotry of mostly-older voters<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-1-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> and falsified memories of a golden age of English glory which never existed. But the decision is made: the UK has chosen to fade into irrelevance and poverty<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-2-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup> and that can’t be undone any time soon.</p>
<p>What it could have decided to do was to minimize the damage by agreeing a trade deal on good terms with the EU to minimize the harm done by brexit. It will almost certainly fail to do that: the EU, very reasonably, wants to ensure that a country granted privileged access to its markets can’t then undercut the EU’s own members by lowering standards. <a href="http://theconversation.com/brexit-talks-the-sticking-points-explained-151706" title="Brexit talks: the sticking points explained">This position was clear</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/13/the-eus-red-lines-were-clear-in-2016" title="The EU's red lines were clear in 2016">before the referendum</a> and has not changed since then. The UK government, having pretended to be unaware of this position, now finds it unacceptable: I suppose because undercutting the EU by lowering standards is exactly what it wants to do. And there is some stupidity about fishing as well.</p>
<p>So, at the end of the year when the transition period ends, the UK will probably leave with no deal at all<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-3-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>, which will be an immediate catastrophe: there is a quite serious possibility of food shortages for instance. Almost no-one who voted leave in 2016 voted for this, even those who understood what they were voting for.</p>
<p>How did we get into this mess?</p>
<h2 id="disaster-capitalism">Disaster capitalism</h2>
<p>There is a theory, well-described by <a href="https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-say-you-want-a-revoluti.html" title="So you say you want a revolution">Charlie Stross</a> and others that what has happened is that a small group of clever-but-evil people have taken over the Conservative party and, with the support of a larger group of bigots, have consciously tried to achieve this outcome, so that they can profit from the resulting chaos. This is <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine" title="The shock doctrine">disaster capitalism</a>: the idea that small factions are deliberately causing disasters so that in they can force through measures which will benefit them in the aftermath, and which people will not notice amongst all the smoke and rioting.</p>
<p>That sounds plausible: there are certainly plenty of bigots and xenophobes, particularly in the British tory party. And certainly the original brexit vote was driven very substantially by bigots and xenophobes. So, well, this is a situation ripe to be exploited by a small clique of disaster capitalists, isn’t it? Perhaps this clique is headed by Jacob Rees-Mogg who is certainly evil, certainly a financier, and also an important member of the European Research Group which was one of the groups which helped drive brexit.</p>
<p>Well, this all sounds very reasonable, then: there is a conspiracy by a small hidden group of financiers who have gained control of the tory party and are driving the UK into the ground to enrich themselves. How obvious.</p>
<p>Except, wait. Didn’t some other group of people once believe a theory a bit like this? That there was a group — a cabal in fact — of financiers who were working behind the scenes to cause chaos and destruction (and there certainly was chaos and destruction) to enrich themselves at the cost of the good, honest, ordinary folk of the country? What was the name of that country, again, and who were the people who believed this? Ah, yes, it was Germany, and the people who believed this were the nazis. And it didn’t end well, did it?</p>
<p>Of course, the theories are not identical, and I am very sure that many people who believe the disaster capitalism theory are not antisemites<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-4-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup>, let alone nazis. One crucial difference is that membership of the supposed cabal of disaster capitalists is something a person can choose of their own free will, while if you are Jewish you are so because of your ancestry which you can not choose. The lies the nazis told about a mythical cabal of Jewish financiers, along with all the other lies they told about Jews, were clearly a lot more toxic than the idea of a cabal of disaster capitalists within and behind the tory party.</p>
<p>But they are both conspiracy theories: they both assume there is a small group of people working, mostly in secret, to cause chaos and disaster from which they will benefit hugely at the cost of the ordinary, honest, working folk. And Something Must Be Done about this, and that Something might include an uprising and, perhaps, in due course, camps of some kind where the conspirators could be, well, processed.</p>
<h2 id="the-nature-of-the-conspiracy">The nature of the conspiracy</h2>
<p>It’s in the nature of conspiracy theories to be false, because people are not very good at conspiring, and when they do conspire they’re not very good at keeping the conspiracy secret.</p>
<p>But the disaster capitalist theory also relies on another common notion: the idea that, somewhere very close at hand but always just out of sight, there exists a group of people who are enormously more competent, or machines that are enormously more capable, or drugs that are enormously better than anything to which we have access. Sometimes it is also clear that we are being actively <em>denied</em> access to this superior technology, perhaps by these invisible superior people. I call this notion the <em>myth of competence</em>.</p>
<p>Just sometimes, the myth of competence is not a myth: the people who put humans on the Moon were actually pretty good at what they did, even if they only became as good as they were by going through <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1" title="Apollo 1 fire">an awful and unnecessary accident</a>. The people at Bletchley Park during the second war were also pretty good. And there are other examples, of course.</p>
<p>But almost always the myth of competence really is a myth: something people want to be true which is not actually true.</p>
<p>A good example of the myth of competence is the NSA. The NSA, obviously, is staffed by the most elite mathematicians and computer scientists: people who are just better than everyone else. People with a deep understanding of the security of computing systems, working for an organisation with hugely deep pockets. The NSA is just spookily good as well as, conveniently, just out of sight. And yet in 2013, a contractor to the NSA was able to acquire a vast trove of sensitive data from them, something that would not be possible if their security was at all competent. The NSA, in fact, are incompetent, or at least they were so in 2013 and almost certainly they still are.</p>
<p>And this isn’t surprising, in fact. Let’s imagine that you’re a smart person with an interest in sifting through big data to look for patterns. You have a couple of career options.</p>
<ul>
<li>You could go to work for a web company, where you will get to deal with as much data as you want, where you get to go to parties with other nerds and talk about the cool stuff you are doing, and where you stand a chance you can persuade yourself is reasonable of getting rich. You can probably also fool yourself that what you are doing is ethical<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-5-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-5-return">5</a></sup>. If the job doesn’t suit you you can move to another company, or you could start your own, giving you a rather smaller chance of getting very rich indeed.</li>
<li>Or you could get a job with the security services. You will not be able to tell anyone outside your workplace what you do. You will not get rich (you might not even get a decent pension nowadays). You won’t easily be able to change jobs, at least not outside the organisation you work for. Given who your ultimate masters are and what they do to people who they don’t like, you might have worries about your safety in the longer term, and you certainly would when you realize just how unethical what they are doing is and decide to tell someone about that.</li></ul>
<p>Which career sounds more appealing? Well, clearly some people are attracted to the whole cloak-and-dagger aspect of the second option. Those people tend also to own rather too much camouflage clothing and take paintball games altogether too seriously. For the rest of us the chance to do things which are just as technically interesting while fooling ourselves that we might get rich is probably rather more compelling.</p>
<p>And so it turns out that the NSA isn’t, in fact, staffed by super-intelligent super-competent people after all: it’s staffed by the people Google and Facebook didn’t hire.</p>
<p>The disaster capitalist theory assumes that there is a cabal of evil super geniuses — the disaster capitalists — who are working in secret to destroy the country for their own benefit, probably from their sinister supervillain lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes. Somewhere, behind the incompetence and stupidity of the tory party we can see, exists a group of evil geniuses who, somehow, we never can quite see. This is both a conspiracy theory and a classic example of the myth of competence. I suggest that it is not true, and that there is an alternative, simpler, explanation.</p>
<h2 id="maximizers">Maximizers</h2>
<p>There is a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer" title="The paperclip maximizer">famous</a> <a href="https://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html" title="Ethical issues in advanced artificial intelligence">thought experiment</a> about an imagined artificial general intelligence (AGI) whose goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe, and which proceeds to to that, with bad consequences for humans and, ultimately, probably itself too, as it turns everything into facilities for making paperclips.</p>
<p>This seems like a fairly silly idea, not least because of the G in ‘AGI’: general intelligence is, generally, not associated with this kind of monomania. It is quite close to the way that <em>genes</em> work: the ‘purpose’ of a gene, or replicator, is to make as many copies as possible of itself, and this drives evolution. But, well, we do seem to be dealing with monomaniacs of one kind or another, and it’s an interesting idea to explore.</p>
<p>The first fairly obvious thing is that maximizers can lead to quite nasty consequences: the paperclip maximizer destroys everyone and everything in order to make more paperclips, for instance, and 2020 has shown that packages of genes which replicate at the costs of the organisms hosting them can be quite bad news, in case we had forgotten that.</p>
<p>The second thing is that maximizers can run into a nasty problem: local maxima. You can think of a maximizer as something which is walking around on the surface of some function which it is trying to maximize. An obvious approach is to calculate the gradient of the function and then move in the direction where it is steepest. At the point where the gradient is zero and the second derivatives are all negative then you’ve reached a maximum. This technique is called <em>gradient ascent</em>, or, equivalently when used to find minima, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent" title="gradient descent">gradient descent</a>. It seems like a good strategy if you don’t think about it too hard. But consider what would happen if you were trying to maximize your altitude on Earth using this strategy, and you started in Scotland. If you were very lucky indeed you might get to the summit of Ben Nevis, from which all directions lead down. But Ben Nevis completely fails to be the highest point on the Earth’s surface: it’s a local maximum, not a global one. And more likely if you start where I used to live, you’d end up at the top of Lady Fife’s Brae on Leith Links which isn’t even the highest point on Leith links.</p>
<p>To deal with this problem maximizers need to be able to explore bits of the space far from where they currently are, so they can see whether they would do better by moving far away. This requires various clever tricks: a dumb maximizer will end up getting trapped on local maxima most of the time.</p>
<p>As well as being close to the way genes work, the idea of maximizers is also fairly close to the way that a lot of economists think about people: people are assumed to spend their time trying to maximize their <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_maximization_problem" title="utility maximisation problem">utility</a>. Well, this is true, but usually it’s vacuous because ‘utility’ for most people has a definition which is unknown but certainly extremely complicated, and the maximization method they use is also unknown but almost certainly complicated. So saying people are trying to maximize their utility means, really, nothing: it just helps economists feel as if what they are doing is science.</p>
<p>But sometimes, for some people, it does mean something. Some people have a utility function which is obvious and relatively simple. Conveniently, these people often also only have very rudimentary maximizers.</p>
<h2 id="the-boris-maximizer">The Boris maximizer</h2>
<p>Boris Johnson is such a person. Boris Johnson’s utility function is Boris Johnson: his only purpose in life is that there should be maximum Boris: more power, more glory, more worship for Boris. He cares about this to the exclusion of all else: he is the Boris maximizer. And like many people with utility functions this obvious and simple his technique for achieving maximum Boris is also rather simple: it’s either gradient ascent or something very close to it.</p>
<p>The standard term for people like Johnson, of course, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism" title="narcissism">narcissism</a>, and there is a lot written about narcissists and narcissism. Since I want to understand how narcissists end up driving themselves and others into bad places, I’m going to stick with the notion of narcissists as rather simple maximizers of themselves rather than get lost in a wash of made-up pop psychology.</p>
<p>Another important thing about Johnson is that he’s a very pure example of what he is. Trump is a narcissist of course, but Trump <em>also</em> is full of fear, resentment and bigotry: Johnson isn’t. Johnson is upper-class, rich, went to the right school and university and has exactly the belief system you would expect from his background: he has never questioned anything, never thought deeply about anything, and he is not envious of anyone because why would he be? He is not, in fact, able to think hard enough about anything to even see that there might be a problem: doing so would require thinking about other people as more than tools for maximizing Boris, and he certainly is not able to do that.</p>
<p>Boris Johnson has nothing in his head but maximizing Boris: he is the paperclip maximizer made flesh.</p>
<h2 id="the-mess-were-in">The mess we’re in</h2>
<p>Firstly, <em>there is no brexit cabal</em>: there is no secret group of disaster capitalists scheming to destroy the UK, and still less is there some hidden group of clever brexiteers in the tory party: the closest they have to that is Dominic Cummings, who is at least not stupid, but is also a crank: someone who does not realize that there are things he doesn’t understand and who certainly is not as clever as he thinks he is. For the rest of the brexiteers in government, well, the people we can see are the people there are, and they are not pretending to be incompetent and stupid: they <em>are</em> incompetent and stupid.</p>
<p>Secondly <em>Boris Johnson doesn’t care about brexit</em>: Boris Johnson cares only about Boris Johnson. He is purely a machine for increasing the glory and worship of himself: a Boris maximizer.</p>
<p>Thirdly, while there is no cabal, there <em>are</em> a significant number of people in the tory party and elsewhere who are xenophobes and bigots and who believe in an invented idea of a golden age of England<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-6-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-6-return">6</a></sup> which is now, as it always has been, just beyond living memory<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-7-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-7-return">7</a></sup>. These people want desperately to leave the EU because it is full of foreign people and is holding back their imagined restoration of the golden age of England<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-8-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-8-return">8</a></sup>.</p>
<p>In 2016, David Cameron made the disastrous mistake of calling a referendum to make these people go away. At that point Johnson had to make the only decision a maximizer ever makes: what should he do to maximize Boris? Competent people understand that allowing maximizers access to power is extremely dangerous: no competent group of people would ever select Johnson for high office. In a tory party run by competent people he would never achieve the glory he deserved. But he might achieve it in one run by incompetent people. So he threw in his lot with the brexiteers.</p>
<p>And the brexiteers won: there really are a lot of aged bigots in the UK, it turns out.</p>
<p>The government then spent nearly three years falling about, as it became apparent that the brexiteers who had nominally won had no plan at all for what to do because they were simply not smart enough to think through the consequences of what they wanted. Indeed the only idea they had seemed to be that the remainers should do their planning for them, in much the way that adults do the planning for their children.</p>
<p>During the period of falling about the attitudes of the brexiteers hardened: as it became more and more clear how confused and stupid their aims were, they became more and more rigid in their thinking: they turned into fanatics. As fanatics they are unwilling, ever, to consider any ideas in contradiction with their fanaticism and unwilling, ever, to give up, whatever the cost. These are not people you want in government<sup><a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-9-definition" name="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-9-return">9</a></sup>.</p>
<p>In 2016, Johnson failed at his maximization project: there were enough competent people left, then, to keep him well away from any real power, at least for a while. But this didn’t last: in 2019 the fanatics won, and Johnson finally achieved maximum Boris: he became prime minister (or as he probably thinks of it, ‘world king’). But even as he was annointed he was in terrible trouble, although he did not realize it then and probably still does not.</p>
<p>The trouble he was in is that he can only operate by gradient ascent and he had achieved this on the back of increasingly fanatical brexiteers with a serious competence problem. If he started listening to the competent people (there still were some, then), and doing what they suggested — for instance cutting a good deal with the EU — the fanatics would hate him for betraying their cause, and even if they did not do what fanatics often do to those who betray them, their hatred alone would certainly temporarily <em>reduce the amount of Boris</em>. Gradient ascent will not allow this, and so the competent people were systematically driven out of government, to be replaced by fanatics whose endless chants of praise would further maximize Boris. Never mind that they were also grossly incompetent: competence is not relevant to maximizing Boris.</p>
<p>He was now stuck on top of a local maximum.</p>
<p>And there he remains: all around the little hill he is sitting on are deep valleys, the crossing of which means a temporary reduction in Boris which gradient ascent will not allow. A little way away, in clear view, there are other, much larger hills, on top of which there would be far more Boris. But he can not reach them, because he can not, ever, reduce the amount of Boris.</p>
<p>And so there will be no deal with the EU: not because of a cabal of evil disaster capitalists somewhere just out of sight but because of the incompetence and fanaticism in full view in the government. And that incompetence and fanaticism is sustained by Johnson’s goal of maximizing Boris and his inability to do anything to reduce the amount of Boris, however temporarily, and even if doing so would ultimately increase it.</p>
<p>Well, he can not, but history will. Boris Johnson could have chosen to be the prime minister who minimized the damage to the UK from brexit, or even the person whose decision in 2016 to support remain led to the UK staying in the EU. But he will not be: he will be the prime minister who oversaw a no deal exit, whose actions led to the break-up of the UK and who, because he had surrounded himself with incompetent fanatics, caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths from CV19. Perhaps he even dimly knows this.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>At the time of the referendum 27% of voters then aged 18—24 voted to leave, rising to 60% of voters then aged 65 or older. The younger voters, of course, will be most affected by the decision as they will live more years with their life chances restricted by it. Indeed many of the older cohort will already be dead and thus will have voted purely to damage other people’s chances, having themselves benefited from membership of the EU for most of their lives. The demographics is such, in fact, that there is almost certainly now no majority support for leaving the EU and has not been for several years. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>And it hasn’t only chosen that. As I’ve written previously: the consequences of brexit — even a ‘good’ brexit — will be that the administrative part of the UK’s government (probably, soon, this means the government of England and Wales, after Scotland secedes and rejoins the EU) will be working at or beyond its capacity for a decade. That decade, of course, is the decade which action must be taken if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. The UK, therefore, will play no useful part in dealing with global warming, and thus further increase the chances of a catastrophe which will kill billions of humans, mostly not yet born. Conveniently, almost all the brexit voters will be dead by the time this matters. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>As I write this, there is still some fading hope that a deal will be struck, but neither the EU or the UK sound at all optimistic, and there is very little time left. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Although the UK Labour party, where there will be many believers in the disaster capitalism theory, has had a rather serious problem with antisemitism recently. These two things may not be related, of course: but they may be. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-5-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Or you could in 2013 when I wrote the text from which this section is extracted: not so much now, I think. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-5-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-6-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Not Scotland, not Wales, certainly not Northern Ireland: England. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-6-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-7-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>This, of course, is related to the myth of competence: somewhere, just before we were born, there was a golden (or, in fact, a white) England where flowers bloomed, birds sang, and everyone was happy. And the fact that flowers don’t bloom and birds don’t sing and everyone is miserable is nothing to do with our actions in systematically poisoning the land. No, it’s <em>someone else’s</em> fault: probably it’s those Europeans, in fact. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-7-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-8-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>There are also a very small number of people — Douglas Carswell for instance — who believe in brexit for reasons which are not simple bigotry: they’re wrong, but they’re not bigots. But these people are in a small minority of brexiteers, of whom the great majority are, like it or not, bigots. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-8-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-9-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>To repurpose an old joke about guitar players: what’s the difference between a brexiteer and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist. <a href="#2020-12-11-the-boris-maximizer-footnote-9-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>MIME as a disease vectorurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-08-27-mime-as-a-disease-vector2020-08-27T10:34:35Z2020-08-27T10:34:35ZTim Bradshaw
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME">MIME</a>, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, seems like a good idea: what’s not to like about being able to send arbitrary data by email? In 1996, when I wrote the below, I didn’t think it was.</p>
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<p>Let’s say there are two computer system vendors:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Vendor 1</strong> provides a proprietary OS of high quality and high price, with good quality support. Is committed to ‘open systems; and publishes specifications of its interchange formats for mail, files and so forth. Its interchange formats may be ’high value’ — text with logical rather than visual markup.</li>
<li><strong>Vendor 2</strong> provides a proprietary OS of lower quality but much lower price, with essentially no support. Is completely uninterested in open systems: does not publish its interchange formats, changes them frequently and incompatibly. Its interchange formats may also be ‘low value’ — for instance text with visual rather than logical markup.</li></ul>
<p>Obviously one should buy systems from vendor 1: since purchase and vendor-support cost is rather small compared to the costs caused by low-quality systems this is clearly the right thing to do.</p>
<p>Wrong. Circumstances can easily arise where buying from vendor 2 is the only viable option. This will increase greatly the cost of computing over what it ‘should be’, and will probably ensure that computing systems are of marginal benefit, if any. Even so it is necessary to buy these inferior systems.</p>
<p>How does this happen? The key is data interchange. If the systems of vendor 2 become popular — they are cheap, after all, and they will run on cheap hardware, so they are quite seductive to people who are not costing their systems thoroughly, as well as for home use — and if people who have these systems once start interchanging data — say mail messages using MIME — with the owners of vendor 1 systems, then vendor 1 is doomed.</p>
<p>Vendor 2 system owners will soon start getting mail in formats supported by vendor 1. But these are open standards: vendor 2 can implement displayer and editors for these formats. In fact it’s likely that free versions of these things sill become available. Owners of vendor 2 equipment are happy.</p>
<p>Vendor 1 system owners will start getting mail in formats supported by vendor 2. These are closed, rapidly changing, formats. Vendor 1 has a problem: it has to reverse-engineer the format as it is closed, and as soon as it has done that, vendor 2 changes the format. Even if it can reverse-engineer the formats, the upward conversion from visual markup to logical markup is a hard problem which does not have a general solution.</p>
<p>If vendor 2 systems are common, then it becomes commercially important to owners of vendor 1 equipment to be able to deal with vendor 2’s formats. But vendor 1 cannot keep up with the vendor 2 formats.</p>
<p>The solution is to give up and buy from vendor 2 rather than vendor 1, and use vendor 2’s interchange standards. This will allow you to survive, since you can interchange data with other vendor 2 owners, but will mean that your computing systems are marginally useful, if at all:</p>
<ul>
<li>data is kept in low-value formats so you cannot reuse it;</li>
<li>formats change so old data cannot be used even in vendor 2 systems;</li>
<li>support costs go up as the lower-quality systems provided by vendor 2 break more often, and the poor or nonexistant support from vendor 2 forces local support at great cost.</li></ul>
<p>Of course, vendor 2 needs to be able to force its data formats on people who have vendor 1 systems. This is now easy: computer networks and email are so prevalent that almost anyone has to be able to do interchange with almost anyone else. In particular MIME opens the door: if I’m on a vendor 1 machine, and vendor 1 has implemented MIME in its MUA (after all, vendor 1 is committed to open standards), then I will shortly find vendor 2 documents arriving in my mailbox, and shortly after that I will find myself buying a vendor 2 system.</p>
<p>It’s all a catastrophe.</p>
<hr />
<p>I wrote this in early August 1996: the text above has been converted to markdown from its original HTML but is otherwise essentially unchanged from then. ‘Vendor 1’ was Sun, and ‘vendor 2’ was, of course, Microsoft, wth the low-value interchange format was Word.</p>
<p>I don’t think I was completely right, but I was at least partly so: a lot of really terrible, very low-value data formats have become very prevalent, at least in part because MIME allows them to be easily transmitted.</p>
<p>One thing I didn’t see coming (or saw coming but had not yet accepted) is that the disease spread by MIME would spread to even systems provided at very low or zero up-front cost, such as Linux: if you use OpenOffice or a derivative, you have been infected by the disease.</p>
<p>Another thing that was not obvious was that some of the low-value formats would become effectively standardised, and so would be less toxic. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format">Rich Text Format</a> is perhaps one good example, but even Word’s own native format may now be effectively a standard. This means that writing in these formats, while still very seriously limiting the value of your data, does not lock you in to a vendor as much as it once did.</p>
<p>It is still, however, a catastrophe.</p>Golden earsurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-07-29-golden-ears2020-07-29T12:13:16Z2020-07-29T12:13:16ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Or: Hi-Fi and the death of truth.</p>
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<p>High fidelity audio is now dominated by people who think they have ‘golden ears’ and are able to hear differences between audio components which have been physically impossible to detect and almost certainly do not exist. Unsurprisingly these people refuse to consider any experiment which could reliably reveal whether they can, in fact, detect any difference. Often the same group of people will make absurd claims for systems which have very audible <em>lack</em> of fidelity — distortion — such as records and valve amplifiers, which shows how far removed they have become from reality<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-1-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>There are plenty of areas where subjective opinion is the only useful thing: my opinions about some of the guitars I own are extremely subjective, as are my opinions about various movies, bands, books and a huge number of other things<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-2-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>. But subjective opinions about things which are objectively measurable either agree with the measurements or they are wrong: if you try to live on the Moon without oxygen you will die within a few minutes, and believing you won’t will not keep you alive if you try: there are no alternative facts, there are only errors and lies.</p>
<p>Not all objective facts can yet be measured: for instance until 2015, while we believed gravitational waves to be a real phenomenon, we only had indirect evidence for them<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-3-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>. Perhaps the differences that the golden eared claim to detect between Hi-Fi components are real, but not yet measurable other than by their golden ears. If that was the case then there is still a good way of detecting whether they are real: carefully controlled, sufficiently blinded<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-4-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup> comparison experiments. If someone claims they can detect a difference between two things then you do a careful experiment which will reveal whether they can, while removing any possible bias due to the subject, the experimenter or anyone else involved. If it turns out that they can, then you know there is something to be measured and you can try and work out what it is. Even if you can’t measure it you know there is <em>some</em> objective truth there.</p>
<p>The golden eared reject such experiments.</p>
<p>The golden eared delusion is not itself significant: who, really, cares if a bunch of rich cranks believe they have magic ears? But the antiscientific thinking which underlies it is very significant. Once someone fails to understand that the differences they ‘hear’ are in their own minds, rejects experiments which could show this then they have decided that they can believe whatever they want to believe about Hi-Fi: there is no objective truth. And if you are free to believe whatever you like about Hi-Fi, why should I not believe whatever I like about vaccination, climate change or how many Jewish people, Roma and others the Nazis killed? Once objective truth is dead, it’s dead: you don’t get to say it’s only dead in specific domains. The golden eared delusion is one small path to the decay of any notion of objective truth itself which we are now seeing.</p>
<p>It’s interesting to understand how the mechanisms of truth decay work: if we understand them perhaps they can be reversed. So it is interesting to try to understand how how and why this particular pathology arose. Fortunately this is pretty easy.</p>
<h2 id="ancient-history">Ancient history</h2>
<p>Initially there was a period during which there was rapid and very audible progress in music reproduction. This started before 1900, and came to an end sometime in the late 1980s, with some tail-off after that. I have a Quad 2 / 22 / FM2 in (now) better-than-new condition and even with a very good source it’s really noticeably worse than a good modern amplifier. Even after amplifiers got good, there was lots of progress in turntable, tonearm and cartridge design right through the 1970s. However even then some early signs of the later pathology appeared, such as S-shaped tonearms which started because of confusion for which spurious justifications were later invented as they looked so pretty.</p>
<p>Throughout this period you could get better Hi-Fi by getting newer Hi-Fi. Manufacturers loved this of course, and a certain kind of person also liked it. My friends and I spent an altogether inordinate amount of time obsessing about Hi-Fi in the late 1970s, and everyone knew someone whose father (inevitably father: Hi-Fi was then and almost certainly still is a male hobby) had some really expensive and beautiful system on which we could listen to the latest Yes album. Some people even probably thought it attracted girls: in my experience, if it did, it didn’t work nearly as well as guitars, motorbikes or just being a decent human being did.</p>
<h2 id="the-wall">The wall</h2>
<p>But then it all gradually hit the wall. Successively various components of systems got sufficiently good that, while they could still get better, they could no longer get <em>perceptibly</em> better. Loudspeakers were the only significant exception: see below for more about this.</p>
<p>During and after this event something related also happened: very portable audio reproduction systems arrived and became pervasive. Almost everyone who wanted to listen to music started using these systems rather than enormous Hi-Fi setups. Their quality was at first very poor, and any system based on in-ear headphones has limitations even now, but for people whose goal was to listen to music rather than to play with toys, they were more than adequate.</p>
<p>These two changes meant that large numbers of people who would formerly have bought Hi-Fi systems to listen to music bought portable systems instead., and people who still wanted to listen to music on a traditional Hi-Fi and had formerly upgraded their systems regularly to improve the quality largely stopped doing so as there became no reason in terms of quality of sound reproduction to replace components. This was very bad news for the Hi-Fi industry.</p>
<p>Well, the inevitable happened: many Hi-Fi companies went out of business. I have no idea how many Hi-Fi companies there now are compared to 1980 or how their financial value compares, but fewer, and less.</p>
<p>Some companies survived by simply servicing the relatively small remaining market as new generations of customers appeared: not everyone wants to use their parents’ or, more likely, grandparents’ Hi-Fi and in any case electronic components don’t last for ever.</p>
<p>Some companies realised that, for many people who are interested in Hi-Fi only part of their interest is in achieving the best possible sound reproduction: a very significant reason they like Hi-Fi is because it can be beautiful. It is undeniable that a well-engineered turntable or valve amplifier is a very lovely machine in much the same way that a vintage sports car or a 1950s jukebox is. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the desire to own beautiful things and very well-engineered things are often beautiful. A reason which is, I think, rather less good than the desire to own beautiful things is the desire to own status symbols: very expensive objects which will be recognised as such by other people. So some companies started to produce Hi-Fi which was explicitly designed to be appealing in this way.</p>
<p>Some companies — very often the same ones who were producing very beautiful Hi-Fi — made a business of being willing to maintain their own products for a very long time: when you bought something from them you knew it could be repaired almost indefinitely and you were therefore willing to pay a high price for it<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-5-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-5-return">5</a></sup>.</p>
<h2 id="a-way-under-the-wall">A way under the wall</h2>
<p>Other, less honest, companies realised they could exploit four secrets that had been lurking, usually slightly below the surface, in the minds of their customers since the beginning.</p>
<p><strong>The first secret</strong> is that quite a lot of people suffer from what is called ‘gear acquisition syndrome’ — GAS for short. GAS was first described among musicians and it involves thinking that ‘if only I had a better (guitar, amp, effects pedal, …) I would be able to play much better and would become the hugely successful rock star I know I could be.’</p>
<p>In other words, GAS makes you think that what’s stopping you being a great guitarist is not lack of talent or unwillingness to practice, but <em>lack of the right gear</em>. GAS is a form of <em>displacement activity</em> where instead of dealing with the real problem — that you’re not very good, that you don’t practice — you spend endless ours obsessing over what gear to buy and in fact buying gear. And GAS doesn’t stop: once you have the expensive guitar and you still can’t play like Jimmy Page, well, it must be because the modern ones aren’t up to much — you need a 50s or 60s one. And the tape echo simulator you have isn’t good enough — nothing but a real tape echo (valve, not solid state mind you, the solid state ones where never up to much<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-6-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-6-return">6</a></sup>) will do. And on it goes, endlessly, eating money and consuming the time you should spend practicing in looking at adverts & reading reviews.</p>
<p>GAS applies to Hi-Fi as well: rather than just <em>listening to music</em> people start obsessing that it would all sound much better if only they had better Hi-Fi. And it doesn’t matter whether it actually would, or even if it <em>could</em> sound any better: GAS is still driving you to buy more, ‘better’ Hi-Fi<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-7-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-7-return">7</a></sup>, spending time on that which would be better spent listening to more music.</p>
<p><strong>The second secret</strong> is that people like to think that they are special. Everyone likes to think that they are somehow gifted: one of the hard things that happens to almost everyone as they grow up is realising that, in fact, they are pretty much the same as everyone else. Some very few people really are gifted: Mozart was gifted, Einstein was gifted, Picasso was gifted, Jimi Hendrix was gifted. But most of us have more-or-less the same gifts as everyone else. And this is obvious really: if everyone is gifted, or most people are gifted, then, well, those gifts are just ordinary.</p>
<p>Most people learn this truth eventually, but no one enjoys learning it and some people don’t learn it at all. In some cases this failure to learn is very toxic: Donald Trump and Dominic Cummings are current examples. Even people who understand that they are not, in fact, special are susceptible to suggestions that they are. This is why rock stars, dot.com billionaires and film stars are such horrible people: they spend their lives surrounded by sycophants who are endlessly telling them how special and important they are. Almost everyone will eventually break under the pressure of such flattery: even if they didn’t start by believing they were, well, a bit special, they will end up doing so after enough people have said they are.</p>
<p>So if you tell someone, often enough, that they have the special gift of golden ears then, unless they have a very deep-rooted understanding of why they don’t, in fact, have golden ears — why golden ears can’t exist — some of them will start to believe they have. Because they’re special, and they have special ears: of course they do.</p>
<p><strong>The third secret</strong> is that human sensory perception is both unreliable and subject to bias. There are very many examples of this: many of the most famous ones being <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion" title="Optical illusion">optical illusions</a> of various kinds. A good example is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion" title="Chequer shadow illusion">chequer shadow illusion</a>, in which two areas which are in fact identical shades of grey appear to be different shades. Another good recent example is the famous viral <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress" title="The dress">dress</a> phenomenon from 2015, in which different people perceive the same dress as being coloured either black and blue or white and gold. There are many, many others: human visual perception is clearly simply not reliable.</p>
<p>But all these examples are <em>optical</em> illusions: perhaps hearing is special and is reliable and not subject to bias? This would be extremely surprising, but without evidence it can’t be ruled out as a possibility. Well, there is lots of evidence. A famous example is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect" title="McGurk effect">McGurk effect</a>: this is something that will be familiar to anyone who has watched dubbed films, or films in which the audio is not completely in sync. What happens is that, if you are watching someone speak then they actually produce one phoneme but the sound corresponds to a different phoneme, you can end up hearing a phoneme which is neither the one that they really said nor the one that the sound corresponded to but some third phoneme. If someone says /ga-ga/ but the sound of /ba-ba/ is played over it you can end up hearing /da-da/, for instance. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone" title="Shepard tones">Shepard tones</a>, which seem to endlessly rise in pitch are another example<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-8-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-8-return">8</a></sup>. There are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion" title="auditory illusions">many more</a> examples of auditory illusions.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most well-known auditory illusion of all is <em>stereo</em>. When you listen to a correctly set-up stereo speaker system and a well-engineered recording, the impression that sounds come from instruments at well-define points between and often much further away than the loudspeakers<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-9-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-9-return">9</a></sup> is compelling for most people. But no sounds are coming from those points: your senses are fooling you.</p>
<p>None of this should be surprising: as our senses did not evolve to provide reliable, repeatable information free from bias: they evolved to make sure that we heard some terrible monster approaching from behind before it ate us. And if, occasionally, we hear monsters which are not there then that’s a lot better than being eaten. What would be surprising, in fact, would be if our sensory system <em>was</em> reliable.</p>
<p><strong>The fourth and greatest secret</strong> is that people want to believe in magic. I’m sure there are some people who want to believe only in the things that science can explain, but almost everyone wants to think that, somewhere, there are elves and dragons, water-spirits and wizards. In 2003, the BBC <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Read" title="The Big Read">conducted a survey</a> to find the best-loved books in the UK. Of the top ten books, six involved magic of some kind; of the top five, four did. The best-loved book of all was <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, which has also been found to be the best-loved book in Australia, Germany and the US, and has sold more than 150 million copies: about one copy for every 50 people now alive.</p>
<p>Almost no-one wants the world to be a place where there is no magic of some kind: even people who ‘don’t believe in magic’ want to believe in things like faster-than-light travel and time travel which are magic dressed-up as science<sup><a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-10-definition" name="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-10-return">10</a></sup>. I want to believe in magic: wouldn’t the world be a better place if there <em>were</em> elves, river gods and goddesses and magical objects? Of course it would.</p>
<p>And this desire for there to be magic runs pretty deep. Perhaps we can’t have elves and genii locorum (or, perhaps, we can, somewhere just out of sight), but can’t we still have magical objects? I <em>know</em> that there are no magical objects, but still I own a beautiful valve compressor using a ‘new old stock’ military valve. Is it better than a really good digital compressor? Certainly it is not, but I want to believe it is. And I <em>know</em> that my beautiful ES–175 is just machine made of wood, metal and bone and not even a particularly good example of one, and that it’s easily replaceable. But I would risk my life to rescue it in a fire, because some part of me believes that it is made of wood, metal, bone <em>and magic</em>.</p>
<p>The four secrets are:</p>
<ul>
<li>the human desire for an endless succession of better objects (GAS);</li>
<li>the desire of humans to believe that they are special and have special abilities not granted to other people;</li>
<li>the unreliability of human sensory perception and the ability to bias that perception;</li>
<li>the human desire to believe in magic, and particularly magical objects.</li></ul>
<p>Now it is easy to see how these can be exploited by unscrupulous Hi-Fi companies:</p>
<ul>
<li>offer an endless succession of ‘better’ Hi-Fi components, thus satisfying customers’ GAS;</li>
<li>persuade customers that they are special and have golden ears able to hear the differences in sound that ordinary, lesser, humans can not hear;</li>
<li>rely on the unreliability of human auditory perception together with poor or no experimental controls to do this;</li>
<li>provide components which purport to be magic in all but name — special speaker cables, special capacitors, turntable plinths made of lignum vitae, Hi-Fi components made long ago which are purported to have magic properties and so on.</li></ul>
<p>And, for some Hi-Fi companies this has worked very well indeed. The market is necessarily fairly small because magic objects don’t come cheap and, well, if the ordinary people had access to them the argument that the people they were selling to have golden ears would fail.</p>
<p>And, well, why does it matter? It’s obvious why it happens — companies need to stay in business, customers need to justify GAS, believe they are special and that magic exists, and lack of experimental discipline can be used to achieved this. And it’s obvious that the customers are gullible fools: but it’s their money, why should anyone else care?</p>
<h2 id="the-death-of-truth">The death of truth</h2>
<p>They should care. They should care because people are not compartmentalised. People who believe that they have special powers in one area tend to believe they have special powers in other areas. That makes them deeply unpleasant people — it’s hard enough dealing with the arrogance of people who really <em>are</em> gifted: dealing with the arrogance of people who only <em>think</em> they are gifted is a horrible experience.</p>
<p>But that is only a tiny part of the problem: people who don’t accept properly-controlled experiments in one area will be less likely to accept them in other areas; people who think that they can ignore scientific method in one area will tend to ignore it in other areas.</p>
<p>But you don’t get to pick and choose: in the areas where science works, <em>it works</em>, and if you say it does not work in an area where it applies what you are saying is that, well, you get to choose when to believe what it tells you or not based on what you want to be true. The end result of this is that people will start to think that they can just get to choose what they think is true as suits them: if it is convenient to them for something to be true, well then it is true, if it’s not convenient, then it is false, even if it’s the same thing that was true yesterday.</p>
<p>Once you open Pandora’s box, then you open Pandora’s box: what comes out is whatever is in it, but also <em>everything</em> that is in it. You don’t get to say you only want some of the contents.</p>
<p>And we have opened Pandora’s box: we live in a world of alternative facts and made-up truths, a world where the very notion of truth is in the process of being destroyed. Many of us are now ruled by people who think that truth is whatever is convenient to them this week, because many of <em>us</em> think that truth is whatever is convenient to us this week. Truth is dead.</p>
<p>But it’s not: there is, in fact, a world outside your head and that world does not care what you think is true or whether you think you have special golden ears. That world cares only about what <em>is</em> true. A virus does not care what you think: it cares only about what is true. The physics, chemistry and biology of the planet’s climate does not care what you think: it cares only about what is true. The virus will kill you whether or not you think it can, and the consequences of what we are doing to the climate will kill billions of humans no matter how hard they pretend it won’t. There is no magic, there is only truth, and the only way to discover that truth is carefully controlled experiment.</p>
<p>The fabric of myths and lies on which modern Hi-Fi is built are a small part of the death of truth, but they are a part of it. If you think you have golden ears while conveniently choosing to reject any experiment which could tell if you really have, if you believe in the magic properties of certain components, or if you are merely involved in selling these myths and lies to people who believe then you are partly responsible for this catastrophe. And I will not forgive you.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>I am personally very fond of the sound of records and of valve equipment, and have constructed a valve hifi amplifier as well as owning another. But I am fond of them because I <em>enjoy</em> the lack of fidelity they introduce. I do not pretend that either thing provides particularly accurate reproduction. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Somewhere, some reductionist AI person is saying ‘but these can be reduced to objective facts about the state of the brain’. Well, yes, but ‘reducing’ something to the state of a system which is so complex no human can understand it in any detail (this is obvious: if a human brain has enough state to store a complete copy of another human brain then, by recursing, it is clear that it must have an infinitely large state space) is not reducing it to anything objective in any useful sense. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves">first direct observation of gravitational waves</a> was made on the 14th September, 2015, although not published until 11th February 2016. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>These experiments are normally called ‘double blind’ since neither the subject not the experimenter knows enough to bias the result, consciously or not: they are both blinded. I prefer the term ‘sufficiently blinded’, which covers experiments where there may be more than two parties involved. What I mean by ‘sufficiently blinded’ is that no-one involved has information in advance which would allow them to bias the outcome. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-5-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>For a long time Quad — formerly the Acoustical Manufacturing Company — made a business doing this: they may still. These two ideas — producing objects which are very beautiful, which serve, emphatically, as status symbols and being willing to maintain them indefinitely — has of famously been exploited in the photography field by Leica <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-5-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-6-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Related to GAS is the idea of some lost golden age in which everything sounded better — somehow, the sound achieved with a specific model of tale echo, or a particular studio compressor made in tiny numbers in the late 1960s has never been equalled. It is not acceptable to consider that the sound achieved on records using the magic equipment might have been more due to the genius of the sound engineer than the equipment, because that would mean that <em>your</em> recordings sound bad because you are not very good, which can never be considered. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-6-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-7-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>GAS is, in some ways, a malignant version of the ‘beautiful object’ motivation: the never-ending sequence of guitars, amplifiers and effects pedals that a musician with GAS buys are ever more exotic and beautiful, as is the never-ending sequence of Hi-Fi components that a person with GAS acquires. Of course, in both cases, the sufferer continues to fool themself that this is not what is motivating them. Again, Leica is a good parallel: if you are thinking of spending more than ten thousand pounds on a camera and lens and you think that it will make you a better photographer the you are a fool; it would be better to admit that you ate doing it because you want the beautiful object or the status symbol. The sufferer from GAS either does not recognise this or truly believes that it is not the case. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-7-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-8-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>This is related to a device sometimes used in electric music called a ‘barberpole phaser’ which gives the impression of an endlessly upward or downward sweeping <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaser_(effect)" title="Phaser">phaser</a>. The same effect can also be achieved with flanging. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-8-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-9-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>I find the stereo illusion works very much less well with headphones. But, well, it’s an illusion: perhaps other people hear the illusion much better than I do with headphones. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-9-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-10-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Almost certainly: FTL travel translates directly into causality violation, which is extremely bad news. <a href="#2020-07-29-golden-ears-footnote-10-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>An open letter to Michael Johnstonurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston2020-05-18T19:25:23Z2020-05-18T19:25:23ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Michael Johnston runs a website dedicated to photography. He also promotes anti-scientific nonsense about audio: you should not support him.</p>
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<p>[This was an email I never sent: in the end I got fed up and was a lot more rude. I don’t regret that, but perhaps I should. This was also written before COVID–19: it’s pretty clear that anti-scientific behaviour by the US administration is killing tens of thousands of people, which makes this a lot more urgent (although not, in fact, more serious).]</p>
<p>After thinking about it for a few months I have decided to stop my Patreon subscription to TOP.</p>
<p>I’m doing so as a result of your audiophile posts. I don’t want to discuss these in detail, but I think we can agree that these are explicitly and consciously anti-scientific in nature: you have said, for instance, that you would not accept double-blind experiments<sup><a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-definition" name="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>. Since sufficiently-blinded experiments are the <em>only</em> way to remove human bias from experimental results this means you are explicitly, consciously and publicly rejecting science.</p>
<p>I don’t have any problem with what you think about hifi in private — indeed I probably have more fancy hifi than most people, and have built several amplifiers including one valve (tube) one. However, I am not willing to help fund you, or anyone, in making anti-scientific statements in areas where science applies<sup><a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-definition" name="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>We live in a world which is built on science: you and I are probably only alive as a result of the work of scientists, and you certainly have working eyes only because of science. We also live in a world where scientists are telling us that unless we take quite urgent action to address environmental problems — largely but not only anthropogenic climate change — we are in extremely bad trouble. Unless we address climate change <em>soon</em> our grandchildren’s generation will have blighted lives and many of them will die in horrible circumstances.</p>
<p>Well, a lot of people don’t like this: they have vested interests in not fixing the problem in the short term, will be dead in the long term and either do not care about their descendants or expect that they will be wealthy enough to fence themselves off as the environment degrades. And they certainly do not care about anyone <em>else’s</em> descendants, especially if those people live far away or look different.</p>
<p>Those who don’t want the problem fixed need other people not to listen to the scientists, or not to believe what they hear. One way they achieve this is by casting doubt on science itself: by casting doubt, ultimately, on the concept that there is such a thing as ‘objective truth’ in areas where we should expect there to be. They have been astonishingly successful at this in the last few years. Of course the side-effects are terrible: people who no longer believe that science works or that truth exists also don’t believe, for instance, that the evidence that vaccination works is real. But the things vaccination protects you against do not care about what you think is real, they only care about what is in fact real: whether you have immunity to them or not, or whether the population as a whole has enough immunity to stop epidemics. And immunity is falling and many children will die. But not the children of the vested-interest people: just other children who they care nothing about.</p>
<p>And that’s what’s coming reasonably soon: in the longer term the result of people not believing the science of climate change and not doing anything about it is going to be billions of additional deaths and billions more shortened lives, and the loss of most or all of our culture.</p>
<p>This is not some conspiracy theory: all this is going on quite openly both in your country and mine.</p>
<p>Well, why does what you say about hifi matter? You’re not, after all, denying anthropogenic climate change or supporting the anti-vaccination nonsense. Why do I care that some middle-aged photographer has whacky unscientific ideas about hifi? I care for two reasons.</p>
<ul>
<li>You don’t get to pick and choose: in the areas where science works, it works, and if you say it does not work in one area the message is that, well, you get to choose when to believe what it tells you or not based on what you want to be true. That is toxic as it means that people just get to choose what they think is true as suits them, <em>which is the whole problem</em><sup><a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-definition" name="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>.</li>
<li>You have a significant audience: people read your blog and some of them are inevitably influenced by what you say.</li></ul>
<p>Finally, why does it matter? It already seems clear that we’re not going to deal with anthropogenic climate change and that the truth-deniers have won: just look at the politics of the last four years. Why should I care that I’m funding a little more of it? Well, that’s true: I think that there is very little hope, and what hope there is left is fading fast. We have perhaps 50 years or so before things get really bad, and far less than that before there is no chance of preventing the catastrophe. Long before that the corrosion of truth will have less serious but still horrible consequences: we are seeing some of them now. The future is not bright.</p>
<p>But there is <em>some</em> hope. Not, perhaps, much hope but there is still some. And I believe that what little I can do I should do to increase the amount of hope, and to decrease the corrosion of truth, in all its forms. And what you are doing is corroding truth. You are only doing it in a small way, but you are doing it. I can only make a difference in a small way, but not supporting TOP is a difference I can make.</p>
<p>This is why I will no longer support TOP financially.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Although it was not clear you knew what a double-blind experiment really was. <a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Science does not apply everywhere, it should have nothing to say about what makes a great photograph, or what makes good bokeh for instance, in my opinion. For that matter it should have nothing to say about what makes hifi sound good in the cases where distinctions really exist. I <em>like</em> how my valve amplifier sounds, but I don’t pretend I like how it sounds because it is has lower distortion than any reasonable transistor amplifier: I like how it sounds just because it has significant distortion and I like the sound of that distortion. The same is true for records, which I also prefer to CDs, and which also are objectively and measurably far worse in terms of fidelity. <a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Note again that I don’t think science is useful for, say, judging photographs as art or cameras or hifi as desirable objects: this is not about that. <a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>The revenge of the bloburn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob2020-03-18T12:44:58Z2020-03-18T12:44:58ZTim Bradshaw
<p><em>And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free</em>.</p>
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<h2 id="the-blob">The blob</h2>
<p>It has been very fashionable among populist politicians and their supporters to fulminate against ‘the blob’. The blob is:</p>
<ul>
<li>the civil service;</li>
<li>journalists;</li>
<li>news reporting organisations other than ones that report ‘good’ news<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-1-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>;</li>
<li>the BBC in particular;</li>
<li>scientists, especially climate scientists;</li>
<li>economists;</li>
<li>experts of all kinds;</li>
<li>judges;</li>
<li>the whole legal system;</li>
<li>the liberal/metropolitan elite in general, however it is defined;</li>
<li>the deep state, whatever that may mean;</li>
<li>the reality-based community<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-2-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>;</li>
<li>anyone who disagrees with whatever plan is in favour this week, or points out that it is not possible, will be economically catastrophic, is illegal, or anything inconvenient like that.</li></ul>
<p>The blob is an amorphous group of people who all think the same way and who all are somehow trying to prevent whatever transformative programme the populist wants to embark on. Which people exactly constitute the blob varies from time to time and populist to populist. Whatever the blob thinks is wrong, and the blob must therefore be eliminated so that we can all get things done<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-3-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup> and, rejoicing in our inevitable victory, march forward to the sunlit uplands of the glorious future that awaits those lucky elect over whom we will rule in splendour for a thousand years.</p>
<h2 id="populism">Populism</h2>
<p>I’m sure there are many elaborate definitions of what it means to be a populist. One fashionable idea is that populists somehow side with ‘the people’, who are good, against ‘the elite’ (<em>aka</em>, of course, ‘the blob’) who are bad. But definitions vary a lot depending on who is making them and when they made them<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-4-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup>. One defining characteristic is that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>populists seek to gain power by providing simple, appealing answers to complex, unappealing problems.</p></blockquote>
<p>These answers are almost always wrong because problems which have easy answers have already been solved and are no longer problems. The definition of a ‘complex, unappealing’ problem is one which does not have a simple, appealing answer.</p>
<p>But it doesn’t matter whether the answers are wrong: they are appealing and easy to understand, and the populist aims to ride that to power. Consider this problem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>foreigners are coming to our country and eating our children!</p></blockquote>
<p>Well, if you think about it, this is really not that simple to solve: there are quite strong taboos amongst humans about eating other humans — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Eating_Myth" title="The man-eating myth (Wikipedia)">many, perhaps all, claims of large-scale cannibalism turn out not to be true</a> — and there are even stronger taboos against eating children. So what is making these foreigners so desperate that they feel they need to eat children? Even more so, why are they coming here to do it: are there no children to eat locally? Perhaps they have eaten all their own children: but then why haven’t they died out? It’s all, really, quite complicated.</p>
<p>But the populist doesn’t care about this as they have a simple answer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>THROW THESE LOATHSOME CHILD-EATING FOREIGNERS OUT! LET THEM EAT THEIR OWN CHILDREN! BUILD THE WALL! REMEMBER THE SPIRIT OF THE BLITZ! ENGLAND FOR THE ENGLISH!!!</p></blockquote>
<p>Well, that will certainly fix it, at least until the populist has ridden the wave of disgusted horror at the unspeakable behaviour of these horrible baby-eating foreigners<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-5-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-5-return">5</a></sup> to power, wealth and glory.</p>
<p>And what happens then? What happens when the whole problem turns out to be intractable after all? There are a range of answers to that.</p>
<p>People have pretty short memories so a good approach is just to try to forget, either that the problem existed at all, or that the solution was ever suggested. When you come up against people who <em>do</em> remember then you can simply ignore them, or deny that you ever offered the solution or in fact that the problem ever existed at all. While doing so be sure to imply that these inconvenient long-memoried people are acting in bad faith somehow, or are acting against the will of the people which you, of course, represent.</p>
<p>Blaming someone else is also a good approach: of course the problem would be solved by now but the liberal elite — mostly made up of foreigners<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-6-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-6-return">6</a></sup> and people who are, you know, <em>different</em> — is preventing the solution for reasons of their own which you will hint, but never quite say, are because they quite like a bit of children-eating themselves, as rootless cosmopolitans<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-7-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-7-return">7</a></sup> tend to do. Certainly they are enemies of the people and something must be done about them (that ‘something’ may, you will imply, involve camps).</p>
<p>Of course you can simply lie that the problem has been solved when it has not been. If it’s not, in fact, really a very severe problem — only one baby was ever eaten, and it turns out that the evidence for even that is pretty apocryphal — then you can just declare it solved and move on.</p>
<p>A final, brilliant, approach is to <em>make up problems which do not exist</em> and then, later, declare them solved. Foreigners certainly no longer come here and eat our children: this is, therefore, a problem our glorious leader has solved! Crime also is no longer rising and this too is something which the great chief has strived day and night to achieve and why he must be elected as leader for life. Do not mention that crime was not rising previously, still less that it now is: only enemies of the people with their annoying facts would do that.</p>
<p>What is it that makes the populist’s appealing answers so appealing? What, exactly, do they appeal to? Well, the answer is obvious: just look at the answers that populists give. They appeal to the things that, secretly, ‘everyone knows’ are true: to things that people perhaps think but, until recently and not always even now, most people have not dared to say in public for the last few decades; they appeal to instinct, to intuition, to prejudice, to bigotry. But they never appeal to rationality.</p>
<p>So this is because, secretly, everyone is a bigot, right? No, it’s not: a fair number people <em>are</em> secretly — and, increasingly, not so secretly — bigots of course, but by no means everyone is. Until fairly recently the proportion had also almost certainly been declining for decades. Rather this is because populists are dealing with an awkward truth: <em>there is no division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’</em>: there are just people, belonging to a myriad different intersecting groupings, with each person usually belonging to many groups. But mostly, there are just <em>people</em>.</p>
<p>So the populist has to <em>invent</em> groups of people to set against each other, and then to persuade enough people that they belong to the ‘good’ group <em>aka</em> ‘the people’ by various rhetorical tricks. There’s no ‘white working class’<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-8-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-8-return">8</a></sup>, until you talk about it enough, and then suddenly there is. Indeed there is no England, until you persuade enough people that, well, English people are not the same as Scottish or Welsh people, and definitely not the same as people who live on the wrong side of some water who, really, are barely people at all. There is certainly no blob until you persuade enough people that there is, and that the people in it are bad people and should most definitely not be listened to and perhaps, in due course, be eliminated. Not surprisingly a good way to invent these groups is by invoking bigotry, because bigotry is entirely about creating artificial divisions between groups of people.</p>
<p>What they are doing is something physicists call <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_breaking" title="Symmetry breaking">‘symmetry breaking’</a>, which is a process where initially tiny differences get blown up so they become very large. And they’re doing this so that they can construct a large group of people who will support them, and force into existence one or more other groups who can be identified as the enemy, and who can be blamed for all bad things. A good example of this process is sentiment in the UK about the EU: this was simply not a major issue between 1990 and 2010; yet from 2016 until COVID–19 displaced it in early 2020 it entirely dominated UK politics. The populists have, quite brilliantly, divided the country into ‘the people’ who now desperately want to escape the EU they were hardly aware of only a few years before and a despised elite who are supposed to be plotting to prevent this, and the populists have ridden the division they have invented to power. Brexit is a canonical recent example of gaining power by providing simple, appealing, and wrong answers to complex, unappealing problems.</p>
<h2 id="populists">Populists</h2>
<p>What sort of people do this?</p>
<ul>
<li>Actual bigots, such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Bannon & others. They are not pretending to hate people they see as different, they really do hate them.</li>
<li>People for whom personal power and glory matters above all else, such as Trump & Johnson. Populism is an easy way of gaining power if what you care about is power rather than the welfare of the people over whom you have power, so people who care about having power above everything tend to be populists when they can’t be despots, or perhaps as a route to becoming despots<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-9-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-9-return">9</a></sup>. Almost all politicians are interested in personal power, of course: populists are different because <em>anything</em> else can be traded for power. Does anyone really think that Johnson really believes in brexit? Of course he does not: he believes only in Johnson, and he will support anything that furthers that cause.</li>
<li>Cranks, such as Cummings and perhaps Bannon: the true believers. These people are often sidekicks or advisors & are by far the most interesting group, and perhaps the most dangerous one as well.</li></ul>
<p>Populists are <em>not</em> people who merely want power, or who are involved in extracting money from their position or other forms of corruption: populists <em>do</em> want power, with the possible exception of the cranks, and usually <em>are</em> corrupt, but these things are true of almost all politicians and is not a useful distinguishing feature of populists<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-10-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-10-return">10</a></sup>.</p>
<h2 id="cranks">Cranks</h2>
<p>Anyone who has worked as a scientist or with scientists or in many other fields will have come across cranks. These are the people who have disproved special relativity, who can show that quantum mechanics is incorrect, who believe in perpetual motion and who want to tell you about it in endless, excruciating detail. They seem annoying but harmless until suddenly they aren’t: suddenly they’re refusing to vaccinate their children causing measles outbreaks and threatening herd immunity; suddenly they are destroying telecommunications infrastructure; suddenly they are advocating eugenics and ‘scientific’ racism; suddenly they believe the apocalypse is coming; suddenly, they are the chief advisers to the president or the prime minister.</p>
<p>It’s easy to think that cranks are just stupid people, but they’re not: <em>Trump</em> is stupid and Johnson is superficial, but whatever Cummings & Bannon are they’re not stupid. Instead I think that the distinguishing feature of cranks is that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>cranks don’t realise when they don’t understand something<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-11-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-11-return">11</a></sup>.</p></blockquote>
<p>So, for example, if I try to understand <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem" title="Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem">Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem</a> I very quickly realise that it is beyond my understanding: perhaps if I spent the rest of my life on it I could understand it, eventually. But in practice I couldn’t because I just don’t have enough intuition for that sort of maths, and almost certainly I am also just not clever enough. That doesn’t happen for a crank: if they start off trying to understand special relativity and fail to do so they never recognise that they have failed. Instead, when they start trying to do calculations and get answers which disagree with special relativity or are inconsistent, they conclude that <em>everyone else is wrong</em>: that they alone understand special relativity or that they alone understand what is wrong with it. This then leads to some bad places.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why does everyone refuse to listen to me when I try to explain how they are wrong about special relativity? Why won’t they publish my papers? Why do they all claim to think the same thing when it’s so obviously wrong? It’s group-think! Do they really believe what they profess to believe or are they hiding something? Is there some kind of hidden conspiracy of elite scientists trying to suppress the truth, which I have now exposed? And wasn’t Einstein, the founder of the conspiracy, Jewish? Why yes, he was. What is really going on here? Why is the cosmopolitan elite suppressing the truth? Are they in league with the financiers? How are the climate scientists involved? What are they concealing from the common, decent, everyday working folk? The truth is out there, if you will only look, however hard the hidden superiors try to conceal it! THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.</p></blockquote>
<p>Not all cranks are populists, but it’s pretty easy to see why populism attracts cranks: the intellectuals of populism are cranks.</p>
<p>The trouble with populist cranks is that they <em>really believe</em> what they profess to believe. The bigots are just little knots of fear and hatred, the power-seekers don’t really believe anything at all, but the cranks have constructed vast thought palaces which may even, at first sight, seem plausible. And the cranks are not stupid: their simple, appealing answers don’t work because complicated problems simply don’t have simple appealing answers, but they can and will argue for them endlessly in enormous and incomprehensible detail. Arguing with a crank is like fighting an octopus: whenever you think you’re winning there’s another tentacle to deal with.</p>
<p>And the cranks really hate the blob, because there’s a reason the blob disagrees with them: the cranks are wrong. But the cranks are now in power: they have won and they are going to destroy the blob so they’ll never have to listen to all the reasons they’re wrong again. The octopus now has an infinite number of tentacles, and a flamethrower.</p>
<h2 id="against-the-blob">Against the blob</h2>
<p>What the blob represents is <em>truth</em>: the truth discovered by good journalism, the truth uncovered by the legal system, the truth discovered by scientists and economists. And the populists hate the truth because their programme is built on lies. The bigots hate truth because it exposes their bigotry for the lies it is, and also simply because they are made of hate; the power-seekers hate the truth because they have built their path to power on lies; finally the cranks hate the truth because they don’t understand what truth is.</p>
<p>And so the populists set out to destroy the blob, and with it any notion of truth. The BBC must be eliminated because it tries to keep its reporting unbiased<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-12-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-12-return">12</a></sup> and to uncover the truth, rather than this week’s alternative truth. Science must be discredited because the facts it uncovers may be inconvenient, and similarly economists and experts of all kind must go as they seek to point out the gaping holes in the cascade of lies the populists tell: we have, after all, had enough of experts. The legal system must be dismantled and reassembled to suit the populist agenda.</p>
<p>When this is done there will be no truth left: all will be lies and nothing will matter. Any facile answer to a problem can be given to anyone and anyone who points out that it is false or impossible will, if they have not already been dealt with, simply be eliminated. This is what the populists seek to achieve: the death of truth.</p>
<h2 id="the-revenge-of-the-truth">The revenge of the truth</h2>
<p>Once the truth is dead, simple appealing answers to complex, unappealing problems — otherwise known as lies — are, well, simple and appealing: combined with appeals to the substantial minority of secret bigots & conspiracy theorists they’ve worked pretty well for the populists. Once the blob is eliminated who, really, will care if the answers are wrong? So the good honest people will be poorer once they have gloriously been marched into the sunlit uplands; but they won’t be <em>much</em> poorer and they probably won’t notice. If they do notice, well, look at those cosmopolitan elite Europeans who have made use of their elitist skills to not be so poor: it’s their fault, we should, you know, do something about them, too. So the fruit will rot in the fields for want of people to pick it but we can’t allow those elite dusky foreigners here to pick it: we never liked fruit anyway. And of course the children and grandchildren of the working folk are going to live blighted lives because we chose to treat climate change as some conspiracy of elite blob scientists and anyway doing anything about it would have hurt our investment portfolios<sup><a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-13-definition" name="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-13-return">13</a></sup>; but, well, we’ll be long gone by then and who really cares about their children? What sort of person even knows how many children he has?</p>
<p>And then, suddenly, not. Suddenly there’s a complex, unappealing problem which is killing people, today. Suddenly you are a faced with a problem which simply does not care about the lies you tell: it cares only about the truth. You can’t lie to something which is not sentient. Suddenly your simple, appealing answers are going to cause tens or hundreds of thousands of people to die, not over a few decades but over a few months, and people won’t have time to forget that it was your wrong answer that killed their friends and their family as they dig the mass graves. Shit just got real.</p>
<p>And suddenly, it turns out that the blob were, all along, not the villains they were made out to be: the boring old civil servants turn out to be good at actually administering things and understand how to deal with crises, the scientists turn out to be good at understanding what it is that is killing people and how to stop it. The BBC turn out to be good at communicating the truths people need to understand if they want to avoid dying. And experts, well, it turns out that experts turn out to be some use after all. The cranks’ tangles of mad ideas turn out to be mad. Real problems don’t get solved by a torrent of bullshit and lies: they need real solutions based on real data and real understanding. The reality-based community turn out to be useful after all. Suddenly the blob is the your best friend, at least until the crisis is over. Truth matters.</p>
<p>Or, well, you could just keep on piling lie on lie and hope no-one notices the piles of corpses rotting in the streets. It’s the American way.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>‘Good’ news is, of course, fake news, but not ‘fake news’, which is good news. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>‘The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community”, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. [But] that’s not the way the world really works anymore”.’ Yes, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community" title="The reality-based community">really</a> <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Which things exactly need to get done doesn’t matter very much so long as they have memorable names. The important thing is to do something, something <em>important</em>, something <em>transformative</em>, something that respects the <em>will of the people</em> to which all populists have immediate unconscious access. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>I have heard people described as populists because they let the banks get away with things they shouldn’t have in the run up to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and because they gave peerages to their friends. These are, at best, very odd definitions of ‘populism’: although these activities certainly made the people concerned popular with a group of people, that group of people was ‘bankers and the friends of politicians’, who are not really ‘the people’. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-5-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Although it may not be stated there will, of course, be no doubt that the filthy baby-eaters are both ‘dusky’ and have ‘watermelon smiles’, even when they are not looking like letter boxes. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-5-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-6-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Not, of course, the baby-eating kind. On the other hand you never know: what <em>do</em> they eat at their elite dinner parties? <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-6-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-7-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’ — <a href="https://www.citizen-nowhere.com/quotes/" title="Citizens of nowhere">Theresa May, 2016</a> <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-7-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-8-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>There is a working class, or at least there was, but does it really matter what colour your skin is if you belong to it? Is the implicit ‘black working class’ distinct in any way other than the colour of its members’ skin? Why would anyone who was not trying to create division where none really exists use the term ‘white working class’? <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-8-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-9-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>In so far as he is capable of planning, this seems likely to be Trump’s plan. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-9-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-10-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Although Trump is corrupt in a deeply spectacular way. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-10-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-11-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>For cranks, there are no known unknowns, only unknown unknowns. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-11-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-12-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>‘The corporation is either “stacked full of right-wingers” (as a Guardian columnist complained) or so lefty that even its “Sherlock” detective drama contains anti-Tory messages (as claimed by the Daily Mail). Yet polling by the Reuters Institute finds that the BBC reaches an audience that is broadly in the middle of the political spectrum. This contrasts with its main commercial rivals, ITV and Sky, whose viewers lean to the right, and with public broadcasters in other countries, whose audiences usually lean left’ — <a href="https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/04/25/the-bbc-is-having-a-good-pandemic" title="The BBC is having a good pandemic">The Economist, 25th April 2020</a> <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-12-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-13-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Of course we don’t have investment portfolios, because we are simple honest people, like you. Almost everyone at Eton is the first generation of their family to have gone to school, don’t you know: their fathers were down the pit at fourteen. Of course we’re not shorting the pound: I don’t even know what that means … oh, hello, sorry I have to take this call from my, ah, friend … hello, yes, yes, 14 at 330, yes, buy Euro, yes, jolly good. <a href="#2020-03-18-the-revenge-of-the-blob-footnote-13-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>Those who control the presenturn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-02-19-those-who-control-the-present2020-02-19T16:09:58Z2020-02-19T16:09:58ZTim Bradshaw
<p>‘Those who control the present can rewrite the past’ — Anne Fortier</p>
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<hr />
<p>‘The free trade agreement we will have to do should be one of the easiest in human history’ — Liam Fox, 2016</p>
<p>‘The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want’ — Michael Gove, 2016</p>
<p>‘There will continue to be free trade and access to the single market’ — Boris Johnson, 2016</p>
<p>‘Not a single job would be lost because of Brexit’ — Lord Digby Jones, 2016</p>
<p>‘After we vote Leave, we would immediately be able to start negotiating new trade deals with emerging economies and the world’s biggest economies which could enter into force immediately after the UK leaves the EU’ — Leave Campaign, 2016</p>
<p>‘We will maintain a free flowing border at Dover. We will not impose checks at the port. The only reason we would have queues at the border is if we put in place restrictions that created those queues. We are not going to do that’ — Chris Grayling, 2018</p>
<p>‘Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market’ — Daniel Hannan, 2016</p>
<hr />
<p>How long will it be before these statements were never made?</p>The death of hopeurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-01-12-the-death-of-hope2020-01-12T11:36:29Z2020-01-12T11:36:29ZTim Bradshaw
<p>In 2016 you voted for brexit. But you voted for it because the leave campaign lied to you, of course: not because you didn’t like foreigners very much and didn’t care very much about your children’s future.</p>
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<p>Of course you didn’t vote for those reasons: how insulting and arrogant of me to even suggest you might have, to suggest that you might be even a little bit selfish or even a little bit racist. Instead I am meant to believe that you are so stupid that you believed the lies you were told.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t believe that. I don’t think you are stupid: I think you knew what you were asking for in 2016, whatever you might claim.</p>
<p>On the 12th of December 2019, enough of you voted for brexit again to ensure it happens. This time you don’t get to claim you were lied to: you knew what brexit means because you are indeed not stupid and you have not been fooled by the lies the laughing clown and the people pulling his strings tell. This time you know that brexit means that your children will not have the opportunities you had, that we will not fix climate change and that your grandchildren will live with the terrible consequences of that failure. But you don’t care about your children & still less about their children, do you? All you care about is yourself and that there should be less foreign people: you really don’t like foreign people, do you? And you will get your racist fantasies fulfilled even if it means murdering your own children.</p>
<p>And when it’s done, when the nasty foreigners are gone and somehow your dream racist empire has not arisen, who are you going to blame then? Who will be the next group to be eliminated? The Gypsies first, I expect, and then the Jews and anyone not ‘English’ enough for you, the ‘liberals’, the ‘deviants’, the scientists and anyone who wanted to remain in the EU, anyone who wanted there to be hope. Especially them.</p>
<p>Finally, when they are all gone (who will wonder where they have gone?), your empire of mud will be complete and you will turn on each other.</p>
<p>It has been coming for a long time, but this is the moment when hope for the future died. You are old and you know there is no hope for you: your future holds only slow physical and mental decline, with death at the end of it, as does mine. But you can’t bear to think that there are other, younger, people who might have less dark futures ahead of them than yours. So you have put out the lamps of their futures along with those of your own. Because there is no light in your life you have extinguished the light of the world.</p>
<p>How dare you?</p>Burning the futureurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-11-25-burning-the-future2019-11-25T12:26:04Z2019-11-25T12:26:04ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Whatever you think about brexit, there is something which matters more. And brexit is not compatible with that thing.</p>
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<p>Boris Johnson is lying when he says he will ‘get brexit done’: it’s always been obvious that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50222315" title="General Election 2019: What does 'Get Brexit done' mean?">brexit will take years</a>. The much-trumpeted deal — if the UK leaves with a deal — covers only a small proportion of what needs to be done as the UK leaves the EU. After the UK leaves it needs to sort out not only what its future relationship will be with the EU but also all the other relationships it has not had to address independently for more than a generation. This is lot of work.</p>
<p>Well: this would be a lot of work if the UK had recent experience of conducting such negotiations on its own behalf. It doesn’t, as it has been able to rely on being part of the EU for a very long time. Everyone who knew how to do this in the UK has retired or died. This has become very apparent over the time since the referendum, as the UK has made a laughing stock of itself in the most public way possible. Indeed, some people seem to have forgotten even that negotiating complicated deals is hard: Liam Fox famously said that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history.</p></blockquote>
<p>If we assume he was not just lying or bullshitting then his ignorance is fairly astonishing: he was the secretary of state for international trade at the time, and clearly just had <em>no idea</em> of the effort involved. There are really only two choices here: either he was hugely incompetent to do his job, or he was lying.</p>
<p>So the negotiations will not be a lot of work: they will be an overwhelming amount of work as the entire organisation in the UK has to relearn skills it has forgotten, all while negotiating in many cases with larger entities with current experience, such as the EU.</p>
<p>The end result of this is that brexit is going to take essentially all of the available resources of the UK government and civil service for many years: conservatively a decade. During that time a lot of other things which need to be done simply won’t happen. In fact, that’s something like the best case: anyone who has ever done a job which is really several jobs knows what can happen when the load of things to do becomes so overwhelming that even working out what to do next becomes impossible. When that happens everything just collapses, and essentially nothing gets done. That can happen to organisations as well, and it’s equally bad: the term for this in extreme cases is ‘failed state’.</p>
<p>This will all be particularly bad if there is some important task which can’t wait: something which needs to be done in the next decade, if it is to be done at all.</p>
<p>There is. We have about a decade (perhaps rather less, perhaps a little more) to start dealing with anthropogenic climate change in a really serious way. The IPCC special report <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" title="Global Warming of 1.5ºC">Global Warming of 1.5ºC</a> makes this very clear, and in particular it is easy to play with the <a href="https://apps.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/fig1/index.html" title="interactive figure">interactive figure</a>, which lets you explore how the future temperature increase depends on the year that net-zero emissions is reached. That figure, in fact, is interestingly optimistic: the very worst case it allows is for net-zero emissions to be reached in 2100. Currently there is no real indication that net-zero will be reached <em>at all</em>.</p>
<p>Dealing with climate change, if it’s to be done at all, will need a huge, international effort, and brexit means that the UK will play essentially no part in that effort.</p>
<p>At this point you probably expect a huge section on why anthropogenic climate change is in fact a real thing. But, really, I can’t be bothered writing that: if you don’t believe in climate change then you should just <a href="https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm" title="The Discovery of Global Warming">do</a> <a href="https://skepticalscience.com/">some</a> <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/">reading</a> and stop listening to people who are being paid to lie to you by the oil companies. The truth is out there, but it does not involve aliens.</p>
<p>So, well, OK, what about the people who know it’s a real problem but still don’t bother, because they think that brexit, or having a nice new car, or their next holiday, or, really, anything, is more important? People like everyone’s favourite clown prince, Boris Johnson, who <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50596192" title="General election 2019: Row over Boris Johnson debate 'empty chair'">didn’t bother turning up to a debate on it</a> and then threatened the organisation holding the debate. I don’t know, perhaps he’s just a coward and was too frightened to face the other party leaders. But I don’t think it was just that: I think that he and his party just don’t care about climate change. Getting rid of nasty foreigners and bringing back the glorious British empire (which, of course, will be run by the English, lead by the great Boris before whom all will kneel) is just much more important to him than his children’s future. And this is the case for lots of people: climate change is this slow thing which doesn’t really matter much <em>now</em> and by the time it does matter, well, that’s a long way away and someone else will deal with it and who really cares about their children anyway?</p>
<p>And that’s the thing: if you don’t care about climate change, what you really mean is that you <em>do not care about your own children’s future</em>. If you think brexit is more important than climate change then you are burning your own children’s lives on a fire you have built specially for the purpose.</p>
<p>If you think that brexit and dealing with climate change are compatible then you’re naïve: if you think that brexit is more important than climate change then fuck you.</p>
<p>Brexit or your children’s future: pick one.</p>Clown fascistsurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-08-28-clown-fascists2019-08-28T19:18:24Z2019-08-28T19:18:24ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Welcome to the age of the clown fascists.</p>
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<p>Just as dangerous and unpleasant as traditional fascists but, you know, clowns as well. With mad, blond clown hair, some of it even real. And, like all the best clowns, really fucking creepy: either making not-jokes about wanting to have sex with their own daughter, or having creepy relationships with much younger women who they almost certainly are not beating up. Or, who knows, both.</p>
<p>And the Amazon is burning.</p>
<p>How did we get here?</p>The lessons of Apollourn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-07-23-the-lessons-of-apollo2019-07-23T11:14:07Z2019-07-23T11:14:07ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Tough and competent.</p>
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<h2 id="the-lessons-we-have-forgotten">The lessons we have forgotten</h2>
<p>Have a plan. Have a plan for what happens if that plan goes wrong. Have a plan for what happens if <em>that</em> plan goes wrong (and go as far as you can down this recursion). Be competent to spot things going wrong and execute these plans in real-time. Accept responsibility for your actions and mistakes.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-do-instead">What we do instead</h2>
<p>Make no plan at all: it will be fine because everything is easy. Do not take responsibility but blame someone else when it is not fine — foreigners, black people, liberals, gays, traitors, democrats, muslims, jews, gypsies, it does not really matter — and work up the mob to hate them.</p>
<h2 id="tough-and-competent">Tough and competent</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough and Competent.” <em>Tough</em> means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. <em>Competent</em> means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will <em>never</em> be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.</p></blockquote>
<p>Gene Krantz, address to his branch and flight control team on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster, 30 January 1967</p>2020urn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-07-19-20202019-07-19T18:24:52Z2019-07-19T18:24:52ZTim Bradshaw
<p>What sort of people will vote for Trump in 2020, if he lasts that long?</p>
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<p>Racists will.</p>
<p>After his <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-48982172">tirades of the last few days</a> it’s completely clear that Trump is a racist. He’s no longer a ‘dog whistle’ racist: telling people from minorities to ‘go home’ and supporting ‘send her back’ chants at rallies is explicitly & openly racist. And there’s evidence that this is <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49025177">deliberate policy</a>.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing: <em>if you vote for a racist, then you are a racist</em>. There’s a very common argument that somehow people who vote for something didn’t really understand what they were voting for: this argument was made about brexit and about Trump’s election. The argument is, essentially, that the people who voted for, say, Trump or brexit in 2016 were just too stupid to know what it was they were voting for. The argument is that people who disagree with us are stupid, that people who vote for racists aren’t, really, racists, they are just too stupid to understand what they’re voting for. They’re not, you know, <em>bad</em> people, they just have weak minds, unlike our superior strong minds.</p>
<p><em>Really?</em> Do you really think that someone who votes for a man who tells minorities to ‘go home’, and who chant ‘send her back’ at rallies don’t understand what that means? <em>Of course they understand what it means.</em> People who do this are racists — perhaps, perhaps, they are <em>stupid</em> racists, but they are racists — and they are supporting a racist president.</p>
<p>If Trump wins in 2020 then racism & bigotry will have won in the US.</p>I remember Apollourn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-07-16-i-remember-apollo2019-07-16T20:15:08Z2019-07-16T20:15:08ZTim Bradshaw
<p>All serious historians agree that the Apollo programme of the 1960s and early 1970s was the highpoint of western civilisation.</p>
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<p>There were, of course significant achievements after Apollo — Voyager, the Hubble space telescope and its successors, images of black holes, the development of economic fusion power even, although it was too late. And there was very considerable social progress after Apollo: for nearly 45 years things improved steadily. It is easy to forget this latter fact given the events that came later: the incarceration without trial, forced labour, mass rape and eventual butchery of immigrants, minority groups, people with ‘incompatible’ sexual orientations, journalists, liberals and others who inconvenienced those in power in the mid 2020s now completely overshadows the progress that was made ten years earlier.</p>
<p>The rise of the oligarchs and dictators, with their systematic suppression of the press and all divergent opinion, encouragement of mob rule, stupidity, xenophobia and science denial in the second and third decades of the 21st century was the beginning of the end.</p>
<p>The failed expeditions to Mars in 2024–2025 were both farce and tragedy. Donald Trump, still claiming democratic legitimacy despite the unequivocal results of the 2020 elections, was by this time in the final stages of senile decay: never more than the shell of a human, he was by then no more than a fulminating husk under the direct control of his Russian masters. Musk, a deeply flawed man, comes out as the unlikely hero of the affair: defending the choice of black and female astronauts against Trump’s tirades and demands and, when the outcome of the mission was beyond doubt, volunteering himself. The heroism of the astronauts, knowing they faced, at best, slow death by radiation poisoning on Mars, can not be overstated. In the event, of course, they did not get that far: the live broadcast of the terrible end of the second mission, with the doomed astronauts’ condemnation of the programme and Trump even as their oxygen leaked away, ensured there would be no more although the US was by then losing the technical ability in any case. Musk’s fate remains unknown: it is assumed he was murdered by members of Trump’s family in revenge for his ‘sabotaging’ of the missions.</p>
<p>The two nuclear wars of 2032 (US-China) and 2035 (Russia-China-UK), while limited, killed well over half a billion people. Climate change (denied, of course, by the oligarchs but well-known to be an existential threat by the turn of the millennium) did the rest: the harvest failures of 2040 killed nearly 150 million people in North America alone and marked the effective end of the US which had already been weakened by the war with China and a series of preceding wars (the US won no war it fought after 1945): after 2040 there were never less than two competing presidents claiming authority over what had been the US, and in 2053 there were, briefly, seven.</p>
<p>Reliable information is increasingly scarce after 2055. The Kessler event of 2032–2033, triggered by the intentional destruction of satellites by the US in the US-China war, destroyed essentially all existing satellites and made space inaccessible to humans, possibly for the next few centuries. Planet-wide Earth-based communication systems had been catastrophically damaged in the two wars, and finally collapsed in 2055. So information after 2055 is inevitably somewhat speculative: we simply do not know how many survivors there are in the UK and what their condition is, for instance.</p>
<p>By 2060 the population of the former US was estimated at under ten million, of which no more than a few tens of thousands had access to electricity. Those numbers will be lower now. The UK, long in decline, and latterly little more than vassal state of the US, itself effectively a dictatorship between 2020 and 2040, also essentially ceased to exist in the 2035 war: the estimated surviving population there may now be as few as tens of thousands, mostly in Scotland. The northern areas of continental Europe are still relatively benign, but Italy, Spain, Greece, much of southern France and many other countries have been lost to climate change.</p>
<hr />
<p>Few people are now alive who were alive during the Apollo programme, and fewer still who have any memory of it. Soon there will be no-one alive who remembers it.</p>
<p>But we must remember Apollo: we must remember that a great nation could devote itself to a mission of exploration, not war, and could thus achieve great things, whatever came later. We must remember that this is possible, that hatred, lies and division spread by people with small minds are not the only way. We must remember that, once, there was a project where they could truly say</p>
<blockquote>
<p>that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. “Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I remember Apollo.</p>
<hr />
<p>Translated from the Japanese, 20690716</p>Democracyurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-06-21-democracy2019-06-21T10:54:14Z2019-06-21T10:54:14ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Sometime in the middle of 2019, the UK will have a new prime minister. He<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-1-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> will have considerable power to control whether, when and how the UK leaves the EU.</p>
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<p>This prime minister will have been selected from a shortlist of two, both representing the same party, by a tiny electorate who can vote only because they have paid money to be able to do so. This electorate are 97% white (the UK as a whole is under 90% white), 71% male (UK as a whole approximately 50%) and far richer than the UK average<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-2-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>Almost certainly this person will be Boris Johnson. Johnson has been sacked, twice, for lying<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-3-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>, and this is very far from the limit of his lies. He has conspired to beat up a journalist<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-4-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-4-return">4</a></sup>. He is the kind of casual racist that people from his social class usually are, having published a column in a newspaper in which he talked about black people as ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’. He is an English nationalist bigot, having been the editor of a magazine in which a poem was published suggesting that Scotland be turned into a ghetto and the ‘tartan dwarves’ within it should be exterminated. He has referred to women as ‘hot totty’ and talked about the ‘tottymeter’. To say that he has a long record of offensive behaviour would be putting it rather mildly<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-5-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-5-return">5</a></sup>.</p>
<p>Although he is highly-educated in a rather unhelpful area (classics, inevitably at Eton and Oxford), he also seems to be rather stupid. He had to be stopped from reciting a Kipling poem inside a temple in Myanmar<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-6-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-6-return">6</a></sup> by the British ambassador: even someone who holds racist views as he does should realise that expressing them in that context is a catastrophically stupid thing to do. Unless, of course, he was simply too stupid to understand what he was doing. He is, in fact, an upper-class twit.</p>
<p>Or, perhaps, not: perhaps he just does not care. There’s a well-known<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-7-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-7-return">7</a></sup> quote about him from Max Hastings:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not sure he’s capable of caring for any human being other than himself.</p></blockquote>
<p>Perhaps, in fact, he was reciting Kipling because he just doesn’t care how much damage he does; because, like Trump, he’s only dimly aware that other people even exist.</p>
<p>Johnson’s supporters are even less typical of the UK than the already tiny, skewed electorate: 85% of his supporters want to leave the EU with no deal compared with 66% within his electorate, and 25% within the UK as a whole<sup><a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-8-definition" name="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-8-return">8</a></sup>.</p>
<p>He has suggested, or at least refused to rule out, that he might ‘prorogue’ parliament in order to allow the UK to leave the EU with no deal at the end of October 2019: this means suspending it, so that MPs — the people the UK actually voted for, as opposed to him, who they did not vote for — have no say in what happens.</p>
<p>If that happens, the UK will leave the EU with no deal on Hallowe’en, under the control of a man educated at Eton and Oxford and elected by less than 120,000 people (0.2% of the people entitled to vote in the UK) who were allowed to vote for him because they paid to do so.</p>
<p>This, apparently, is democracy.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Because he will, of course, be a middle-aged white man. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>See <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48395211">this article from the BBC</a>, and <a href="https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/06/13/the-question-is-not-who-will-lead-the-conservative-party-but-whether-it-will-survive">this article in <em>The Economist</em></a>. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Once from a newspaper, and once from his position as shadow arts minister. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-4-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>See <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/29/boris-johnson-channel-4">this article</a>. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-4-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-5-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>See for instance <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-record-sexist-homophobic-and-racist-comments-bumboys-piccaninnies-2019-6">this</a>. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-5-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-6-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>The poem was <em>The Road to Mandalay</em>: see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johnson-caught-on-camera-reciting-kipling-in-myanmar-temple">this</a>. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-6-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-7-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>I think the origin of this quote is an interview in the ‘PM’ programme on BBC Radio 4, although I haven’t been able to track it down. it is cited in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/23/the-guardian-view-on-boris-johnson-a-question-of-character">this Guardian editorial</a>. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-7-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-8-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>See <a href="https://theconversation.com/boris-johnson-supporters-want-no-deal-brexit-and-less-talk-of-climate-change-new-survey-of-party-members-reveals-118633">this</a> and also a reference in <em>The Economist</em> article above. <a href="#2019-06-21-democracy-footnote-8-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>Surveillance & magicurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2017-03-07-surveillance-magic2017-03-07T11:58:36Z2017-03-07T11:58:36ZTim Bradshaw
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws">Clarke’s third law</a> is that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.</p></blockquote>
<p>It does not apply to organisations who want to intercept communications: if it’s claimed that they can do something which requires magic, then in fact they can’t do that.</p>
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<p>Donald Trump apparently thinks, or at least pretends to think, that Obama was tapping his phone. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/06/trumps-wiretap-paranoia-reality-modern-surveillance">This article in The Guardian</a>, among many others, points out how ridiculous these claims are. Unfortunately in doing so it perpetuates a common and stupid myth. In particular it contains this claim:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The security agencies can access electronic devices across the planet with ease. They can listen in to a target’s mobile, even if it is switched off.</p></blockquote>
<p>Can they, in fact, do that? Well, yes, they probably can: you can only know if a modern mobile phone is really <em>off</em> if it has no power source, and since many mobile phones have batteries which can not be removed without destroying the device, you can never really know it is off without destroying it. So, once some suitable bit of software is in the phone it can be used like this.</p>
<p><em>Except that they can not use magic</em>. If a phone is listening to a conversation and transmitting it to someone, then it is using power to do so: it is, in fact, making a call. And modern phones are not famous for their long battery lives: <a href="https://www.apple.com/lae/iphone-7/specs/">Apple claim</a> ‘up to 14 hours’ talk time for the iPhone 7, and that claim will be an upper limit which applies to a phone which is brand new, has very good reception and so on. A more realistic estimate might be 7–10 hours, perhaps even less.</p>
<p>So, if someone is using your phone like this, you can tell if you are even slightly competent because its ‘standby’ time will be absolutely terrible. Even more bizarrely its battery life <em>when ‘off’</em> will be terrible.</p>
<p>So if you think people might be using your phone like this you should:</p>
<ul>
<li>turn it off;</li>
<li>do <em>not</em> keep it plugged in to the charger when it is off;</li>
<li>note how fast it runs down when in this state.</li></ul>
<p>Because even government agencies can not do magic.</p>
<hr />
<p>Of course the conspiracy theorists will claim that actually, mobile phones can have very long battery lives, but the technology is somehow being suppressed in order to make surveillance possible. Given that any company which makes use of this technology in its phones would make a huge amount of money, for this to be true all phone-making companies must be controlled by some shadowy Zionist world government. It used to be safe to deride people who believe this as the cranks they are. Unfortunately they seem to be winning: soon we will be being taught this stuff in schools, or at least those of us who have not gone to the gas chambers.</p>No futureurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2016-10-14-no-future2016-10-14T06:54:37Z2016-10-14T06:54:37ZTim Bradshaw
<p>We’ve been fooling ourselves for thirty years. We believed that the awful toxins that defined society in our youths were, while not yet dead or even nearly dead, clearly dying.</p>
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<p>We thought that the horrible treatment of people with brown skins, women, gay people, Irish people, Roma, people with the wrong religion or from far away and generally anyone who did not conform to some grey english stereotype was fading away. We thought this because we saw the acceptance of difference everywhere: we went to gigs where the audience was not all of one tribe, we walked through the park and saw couples where one person had come from Poland and the other’s parents from Pakistan. It seemed as if there was hope and, gradually, we stopped worrying.</p>
<p>We were wrong. England is not suddenly becoming a nation of bigots after the brexit vote: it has always been a nation of bigots. All that has changed is that now the bigots are saying what they have always thought.</p>
<!-- ## God save the queen-->
<p>The conventional thing to say about people who voted for brexit is that they were, on the whole, well-intentioned but a bit dim: they were fooled by a group of malignant politicians with their various agendas into voting for something very clearly against their own interests. In other words, stupid people voted for brexit, bamboozled by clever (or, at least, highly educated) people like Boris Johnson & demagogues like Farage.</p>
<p>While Johnson, & especially Farage, have a lot to answer for, I don’t think this is true. Apart from anything else it is insulting the intelligence of people who voted for brexit: I just don’t believe that a huge number people were stupid in that way. I don’t think that people ever really believed the lies that the leave campaign told: rather, they used these lies as a shield to conceal what they were really after. They were probably concealing it even from themselves in the way we all do; but they knew what they wanted.</p>
<p>What did they want? I think they wanted to live in the past: a version of the England that sputtered and failed at the end of the 1970s: the England that many of them grew up in — that I grew up in.</p>
<p>Well, that seems fairly uncontroversial: this is more-or-less what people <em>said</em> they wanted, isn’t it? To go back to a world before the EU, where people had jobs for life in the pits and steelworks, where England was a great country. Of course that world never really existed outside of television, but we can fix that: we can mix the best of the old with the best of the new, right?</p>
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<p>But of course, there was rather more to that vanished dream of England than that: quite a lot more in fact. It was a world where black people were treated as second-class citizens at best, and where if they objected then the police would beat them up. Quite often the police would beat them up just for fun. Women were the playthings and servants of men, and no-one really cared if they had a few bruises. Gay people were treated, if anything, even worse than black people. Somehow, sex with children was tolerated, at least if the people doing it were white: it was officially not OK, of course, but everyone knew it went on and nobody did anything about it.</p>
<p>And of course everyone (well, everyone English, which is the same thing) knew that England was the greatest country in the world: Scotland and Wales were just parts of England, European countries were convenient holiday destinations inhabited by people who were greasy and often suspiciously dusky or humourless German-types who were busy eating each other and burning Jews (English people wouldn’t do anything so vulgar, of course, although they certainly didn’t want any Jewish people in their golf club). They didn’t have to be taken very seriously. And as for the rest of the world, well, the empire was a recent memory, and they definitely knew their place, which was serving proper English people.</p>
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<p>The people who voted brexit want a return to the past, and they want <em>all of it</em>: perhaps they are not saying it quite yet, but I think it is terribly clear that this is what they want. You don’t have to read very hard to interpret what Farage is saying, or what people who talk about ‘the white working class’ mean.</p>
<p>Why? Why have people suddenly changed? It seems impossible that such a vast change in attitudes happen so quickly. Indeed, it <em>is</em> impossible: such a change in attitudes hasn’t happened, because the attitudes that people now evince <em>are the attitudes that they have always had</em>. For thirty years the people we all now despise as ‘the liberal elite’<sup><a href="#2016-10-14-no-future-footnote-1-definition" name="2016-10-14-no-future-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> fooled themselves that education and cultural change were gradually making bigotry and xenophobia a thing of the past, but in fact all they did was was to make it, for a while, impossible to say what you think.</p>
<p>There is no future.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2016-10-14-no-future-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>‘Liberal elite’ will soon start to mean the same as ‘underground resistance’: members of the ‘liberal elite’ will meet in fear in back rooms while uniformed faragists patrol the streets, hanging suspected and real liberal elitists on meat hooks. <a href="#2016-10-14-no-future-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>The end of summerurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2016-06-26-the-end-of-summer2016-06-26T18:56:20Z2016-06-26T18:56:20ZTim Bradshaw
<p>On midsummer’s eve 2016 old people in the UK demonstrated that, by a significant majority, they are xenophobic leeches who are happy to suck the life out of their children and grandchildren, and have now found a way of continuing to do so even after they are dead.</p>
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<p>The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36619342">demographics are very clear</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li>27% of those aged 18–24 wanted to leave;</li>
<li>28% of those aged 25–34 wanted to leave;</li>
<li>48% of those aged 35–44 wanted to leave;</li>
<li>56% of those aged 45–54 wanted to leave;</li>
<li>57% of those aged 55–64 wanted to leave;</li>
<li>60% of those aged 65 or older wanted to leave.</li></ul>
<p>People born in the UK in 1962 or earlier were likely to vote leave, while people born in 1982 or after were very likely to vote stay (I was born in 1962).</p>
<p>But perhaps older people are just demonstrating their superior wisdom, and leaving is the right thing to do? In what sense could it be right?</p>
<p>Well, it certainly is going to make people who live in the UK a lot poorer. The <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21696517-most-estimates-lost-income-are-small-risk-bigger-losses-large-economic">economics are not in doubt</a>: no credible economist thinks that the results of a British exit from the EU will be good. And indeed <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36611512">the pound collapsed</a> immediately following the result, and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36644934">the UK’s credit rating was lowered</a> shortly after that. <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701265-how-minimise-damage-britains-senseless-self-inflicted-blow-tragic-split">There will probably be a recession</a> and the results are likely to be long-lived. This will particularly hit the poor, and of course the cost of this catastrophe enormously outweighs the funding we were providing to the EU.</p>
<p>They have also voted to destroy the United Kingdom they profess to love: Scotland will now almost certainly leave the UK as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-36621030">the SNP are calling for a second referendum on Scottish independence</a>. I lived in Scotland for 22 years, and was strongly against independence in the last referendum: I would vote for it now, and I imagine it will be a landslide. This will mean that the ‘United Kingdom’ is in fact England in all but name (if you they will care about Wales, and still less Northern Ireland, think again). It will also have a new <em>land border</em> with the EU.</p>
<p>But it’s a matter of <em>democracy</em>: we in
<s>the UK</s>England will now be our own masters, free from awful undemocratic EU practices. Well, let’s leave aside that the EU isn’t actually undemocratic (the ‘unelected’ commissioners are in fact appointed by representatives of the elected governments of the countries which make up the EU, which is at least as democratic as the way the government of the UK is appointed): this just isn’t true. Assuming we’d like to trade with the EU on reasonably favourable terms we’re going to need to agree to their rules, except that, now, we don’t get a say in what those rules are. This is not more democratic: it’s less.</p>
<p>But, they say, we didn’t know any of this last Wednesday! Old people voted in good faith, believing in a bright new future as promised by the leave campaign. Don’t be silly: the leave campaign lied consistently and it was common knowledge that they were lying. For instance take the ’£350 million a week’ figure: the UK Statistics Authority <a href="https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/uk-statistics-authority-statement-on-the-use-of-official-statistics-on-contributions-to-the-european-union/">debunked this</a> a month before the referendum, and this was <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/eu-referendum-statistics-regulator-loses-patience-with-leave-campaign-over-350m-a-week-eu-cost-a7051756.html">widely</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/27/uk-statistics-chief-vote-leave-350m-figure-misleading">reported</a> at the time and later. <em>Everyone knew that the leave campaign was built on lies</em>. Everyone knew it would make us poorer, everyone knew the UK would fragment.</p>
<p>Perhaps not everyone knew that <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2016/06/anarchy-uk">the leave campaign had no plans at all</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On live television Faisal Islam, the political editor of SkyNews, was recounting a conversation with a pro-Brexit Conservative MP. “I said to him: ‘Where’s the plan? Can we see the Brexit plan now?’ [The MP replied:] ‘There is no plan. The Leave campaign don’t have a post-Brexit plan…Number 10 should have had a plan.’” The camera cut to Anna Botting, the anchor, horror chasing across her face. For a couple of seconds they were both silent, as the point sunk in. “Don’t know what to say to that, actually,” she replied, looking down at the desk.</p></blockquote>
<p>They don’t just act like upper-class buffoons: they are upper-class buffoons.</p>
<p>Finally let’s debunk one more myth: that immigrants are a great cost to the country. No, they aren’t, and in fact they are <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21631076-rather-lot-according-new-piece-research-what-have-immigrants-ever-done-us">a significant economic benefit to the country</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Between 2001 and 2011, the net fiscal contribution of recent arrivals from the eastern European countries that have joined the EU since 2004 has amounted to almost £5 billion. […] Immigrants’ overall positive contribution is explained in part by the fact that they are less likely than natives to claim benefits or to live in social housing.</p></blockquote>
<p>Immigrants are <em>less</em> likely to claim benefits and <em>less</em> likely to live in social housing than natives. Especially, of course, than older natives, who contribute little and consume enormous resources from the health service.</p>
<p>It is very simple: the predominantly older people who voted leave did so because <em>they don’t like foreigners</em>, especially those whose skin is dark: they are at least xenophobic and usually straightforwardly racist. There has already been <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36643213">an increase in racist attacks</a> following the referendum and this will get much worse. They are also selfish: they voted leave even though they knew it would seriously damage the future of young people, <em>because it would not damage theirs</em>. They’re old: they don’t <em>have</em> long futures, and in many cases they have already left the workforce and are living on their pensions.</p>
<p>The older people who voted leave were the greatest winners of the post-war period: they had the NHS, free higher education, stable jobs, pension schemes that worked, and benefited from the long housing boom in the UK. These are people who have done very well out of the country they live in. But they care only about themselves: they don’t like foreign people and, since it has no cost to them to do so, have turned around and savaged the country that gave them everything they have. They have sacrificed the futures of their own children and grandchildren so that they don’t need to see so many foreign faces.</p>
<p>Despite what <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/brexit-rift-feelings-honest">some people think</a> this decision was not made by children, childishly expressing feelings they do not understand about their new sibling who need to be soothed and appeased by their parents: these are adults who consciously chose to eat their own grandchildren. There can be no excusing this.</p>
<p>We have always been told to respect our elders: we should help them across the road, give up our seats on trains for them, visit them in their declining years, listen to their advice. I am trying to think why anyone should continue doing this, and I can’t.</p>
<p>Eat the old.</p>