Posts tagged politics

Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden.

— maybe Niels Bohr

Here’s what I think is coming and why: make of it what you will.

[An old article I forgot to publish.]

The UK government wants to effectively ban end-to-end encryption for messaging. Even if this was desirable, it is not usefully possible. The effort wasted on this futile and stupid attempt to do the impossible would be better spent elsewhere.

The tories are very keen that what they call ‘mickey mouse degrees’ be abolished, in favour of apprenticeships. At first blush, this seems to be just a depressing utilitarian idea. But then it seems at first rather odd, and then not odd at all.

It is very hard to see what the tories think they are trying to do. They face an opposition which, while not particularly progressive, is a lot more progressive than they are. This opposition is also much more popular than they are. So what are they doing? They’re proposing policies which are even more extreme than the ones they’ve already enacted. Why?

On the 19th April, 2024, Rishi Sunak gave a speech. For reasons which escape me, what he said might still matter.

I am unfortunate enough to have Mel Stride as my MP. On the 21st of March, 2024, he said some really unpleasant things about mental health. I was going to write to him, but there’s just no point: someone who can say what he said is not someone with whom it is useful to communicate. Below is the draft of what I wrote.

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 apparently 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?

Some time ago I wrote a post with empirical evidence for sexism in computer science. I’ve since realised that the data I used then is part of a much larger data set maintained by the US National Center for Education Statistics: here are some more pictures of their data.

Does the UK government’s incompetent response to COVID–19, as exposed by the enqury, offer any lessons for the future?

Here is the British government’s new ‘plan for drivers’. And here is a quote from it:

We will explore options to stop local councils using so-called “15-minute cities”, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives

We are now ruled by people pushing conspiracy theories: 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.

Wayback machine link because rewriting history is pretty much certain here.