Paul's blurbloghttps://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/2024-03-15T11:51:25.820000ZPaulPritchardEU president congratulates Putin on ‘landslide’ win … as Russian voting kicks off2024-03-15T11:51:25.820000ZClaudia Chiappahttps://www.politico.eu/article/charles-michel-congratulate-vladimir-putin-landslide-win-voting-russia-election/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>A zinger from Charles Michel! Yes, really.</p>
<p>The European Council president congratulated Vladimir Putin on his big win in the Russian presidential election — just as three days of voting began Friday.</p>
<p>“Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today,” <a href="https://x.com/CharlesMichel/status/1768548038711144654?s=20" target="_blank">Michel snarked on social media</a>. “No opposition. No freedom. No choice.”</p>
<p>Russians headed to the polls Friday for the first day of voting in a rigged election that Putin is almost certain to win, granting him another six years in power. </p>
<p>The Russian president, who spent years cracking down on any form of dissent against his rule, <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-kremlin-elections-our-democracy-is-the-best-in-the-world/">is expected to face off</a> against three candidates who have voluntarily abstained from criticizing him. The only two significant anti-war opposition candidates, Ekaterina Duntsova and <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/anti-war-vladmir-putin-boris-nadezhdin-disqualification-russian-election/">Boris Nadezhdin</a>, have been disqualified. </p>
<p>Russia’s grassroots opposition has organized mass participation of voters at polling stations at noon on Sunday <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/high-noon-vladimir-putin-opposition-trolls-russia-rigged-election-alexei-navalny/">in a show of protest</a> at Putin’s longtime reign over Russia.</p>
<p>Putin was first elected as Russian president in 2000 and — other than a break when he took on the role of prime minister between 2008 and 2012 — has held the top job ever since. In February 2022, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, upending Europe’s security landscape.</p>Elon Musk wades in on Belgian far-right figure’s prison sentence2024-03-13T10:54:03.414000ZSeb Starcevichttps://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-reacts-with-incredulity-to-belgian-far-right-figures-prison-sentence/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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“In Belgium, racism is not an opinion. It is a crime.”
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<p>Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk appeared to row in behind a Belgian far-right leader convicted of inciting violence and denying the Holocaust on Tuesday.</p>
<p>The Ghent criminal court <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-far-right-prodigy-dries-van-langenhove-prison-term-incite-violence-deny-holocaust/">sentenced</a> Dries Van Langenhove, the founder of the Schild & Vrienden Flemish-nationalist far-right youth movement, to a year in prison and a €16,000 fine, with a judge finding he “revelled in Nazi ideas.” Van Langenhove also received a 10-month suspended prison sentence for violating a local gun law.</p>
<p>The case revolved <a href="https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20240312_92493736" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">around</a> racist, antisemitic and misogynistic memes shared by members of the Schild & Vrienden in private online trashposting groups, which were later exposed by the Flemish broadcaster VRT.</p>
<p>X owner Musk first retweeted a social media post by Dutch far-right activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who slammed Van Langenhove’s conviction as “full blown tyranny,” writing <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1767542414128881811?s=20" target="_blank">“Whoa”</a> in a post to his 176.4 million followers.</p>
<p>Van Langenhove, who sat in Belgium’s federal parliament from 2019-2023 as an independent member in the far-right Vlaams Belang political group, posted a sample of the racist memes shared by Schild & Vrienden members, while seeking to raise funds to pay his court-imposed fine.</p>
<p>Responding to Van Langenhove’s X post, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1767543107858333895?s=20" target="_blank">said</a>: “Someone else sent this meme in a group chat and you were given a prison sentence?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Van Langenhove replied, without mentioning he had also been convicted of various other charges.</p>
<p>Belgian State Secretary for Economic Recovery and Strategic Investments Thomas Dermine <a href="https://x.com/ThomasDermine/status/1767574377124503841?s=20" target="_blank">responded</a> to Musk, saying: “In Belgium, racism is not an opinion. It is a crime.”</p>Facing reality, whether it's about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management2024-03-04T16:06:46.579000Zhttps://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>You can’t be a good manager or executive, in any industry, if you operate in constant denial of the facts on the ground. Arguing from ideology or beliefs that aren’t grounded in observation, measurement, or study, is the hallmark of a politician or media personality, not a manager responsible for other people’s jobs.</p>
<p>This should be obvious, but it isn’t.</p>
<p>Basing your opinion on factional loyalty and vibes is fine for a blogger or a pundit, but it does not make for a sound management strategy.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it’s the default for modern executives, best seen in the popularity of mass lay-offs – a strategy that has been resoundly proven to be counter-productive, costly, even disastrous, along multiple dimensions, over multiple decades of study.</p>
<p>There are a few examples of this trend towards denying reality. The starkest one being Elon Musk behaving as if European labour unions don’t exist and that labour is entirely powerless, leading his companies to lose money on strikes and other collective actions.</p>
<p>But Elon Musk isn’t alone. It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US. They treat the EU’s actions as analogous to a coalition of traditional media companies, such as The New York Times and Washington Post, trying to bolster their industry against tech. They cover EU statements as if they were the comments of the taxi industry trying to stave off Uber and Lyft.</p>
<p>But that’s just not the reality of the situation and to understand what’s going on – to be able to make sound management decisions and form executive strategy – you need to understand what the EU is. More specifically, you need to understand the European Single Market.</p>
<p>It is trivially obvious that the management at Apple, Google, and Microsoft have not done this work. Apple especially seems to be in denial about the nature of the EU.</p>
<p>This should worry you, because understanding it isn’t hard – the equivalent of a single high school civics lesson – but they seem to be basing billion-dollar executive decisions on wishful thinking, and that’s a cause for concern.</p>
<h2 id="the-european-single-market">The European Single Market</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>The single market: bringing Europe together</p>
<p>One of the cornerstones of EU integration, the single market makes it possible for goods, services, capital and people to move across the bloc as freely as within a single country.</p>
<p>It includes both EU and non-EU countries: Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway take part through the European Economic Area they have established with the EU, while Switzerland has concluded a series of bilateral agreements with the EU that give the country partial access to the single market.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230112STO66302/30-years-of-eu-single-market-benefits-and-challenges-infographics">30 years of EU single market: benefits and challenges</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The single market is, from the perspective of the EU itself, its single most important project. Greater trade unity and competitiveness with other markets is the very reason why its predecessors were formed. The EU is for lowering internal barriers to trade and services while protecting that internal market with whatever tools it deems necessary.</p>
<p>Most of the time that has involved some sort of <em>external</em> barrier.</p>
<p>This is the reason why I get a bit frustrated whenever I see somebody in tech dismisses the EU as just trying to protect European companies from competition with their glorious and wonderful US companies.</p>
<p>It is, to put it bluntly, an ignorant thing to say.</p>
<p>The EU absolutely <em>is</em> for protecting and strengthening the European single market.</p>
<p><em>This is not a gotcha!</em></p>
<p>There’s a lot to dislike about the EU. They operate internally on some of the worst ideas to come out of post-war economics theory. They are all too willing to let individual member countries slide into fascism. And, as an institution, they are largely all too convinced that an all-seeing universal surveillance state would be a good thing, actually.</p>
<p>These are all good reasons to criticise the EU.</p>
<p><em>But the single market is what it’s for.</em> Without it, the EU would cease to exist. To understand what motivates EU, as an organisation, you need to understand the single market.</p>
<p>Whenever I point out on social media that the single market is the purpose of the EU, I get bombarded by replies saying: “No you’re wrong. The EU was founded to preserve peace in Europe. Gotcha!”</p>
<p>What mechanism do you think they used to preserve that peace? Cozy feelings about elections for the EU parliament? Happy thoughts about student exchange programs?</p>
<p>The single market <em>is</em> the EU peace project, which makes protecting it an existential issue to many involved in the EU.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The process of European integration has many elements in common with the liberal theory of peace articulated by the US President Woodrow Wilson (1918) in his ‘Fourteen Points’ address to the Congress. In particular, there is and has been an emphasis on trade liberalization, democracy and open agreements as means of ensuring peace. Although the Second World War had shaken belief in the liberal approach to peace, the EU’s founding fathers—including Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gaspari and Konrad Adenauer—sought to build upon it.</p>
<p>Their approach to promoting peace through integration stressed the importance of trade liberalization and (at least implicitly) democracy. To these ingredients, they added an emphasis on functional integration and the creation of supranational institutions.</p>
<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1369148116685274">“European integration as a peace project”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many people today either don’t know this or have forgotten, even people heavily involved in EU industry, but the EU was formed on the basis of the liberal idea that integrated economies will not go to war.</p>
<p>Liberalism in general has always operated on the theory that free trade promotes peace. It’s what drove much of the US’s efforts towards globalisation in the post-war era.</p>
<p>But the EU peace project is explicitly not global.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Their European project also diverged from the Wilsonian vision in another, significant way. The European project was explicitly regional, rather than global, plurilateral rather than multilateral.</p>
<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1369148116685274">“European integration as a peace project”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The purpose of is the EU single market, and EU big industries generally believe it has worked.</p>
<p>In the words of <em>BDI</em>, <a href="https://english.bdi.eu/bdi/about-us">the Federation of German Industries</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Alongside the preservation of lasting peace in Europe, the single market is the greatest achievement of the European integration project. At the same time, it is the central basis for the future of the European Union. Only a well-integrated market is competitive, creates prosperity and jobs, guarantees stability and secures Europe’s political influence in the world. The continuous deepening of the single market in all areas is therefore imperative so we can continue to defend and claim our European sovereignty, our standards and values globally.</p>
<p><a href="https://urbis.secure.europarl.europa.eu/urbis/system/files/generated/document/en/20220101_Publications_BDI_Making%2520the%2520Single%2520Market%2520the%2520EU%2527s%2520Growth%2520Engine.pdf">“Making the Single Market the EU’s Growth Engine”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="why-should-us-tech-companies-care-about-eu-history">Why should US tech companies care about EU history?</h2>
<p>When US tech is fighting the EU on core policy issues, they are not fighting a few individual bureaucrats with an agenda. They are fighting a multinational trade organisation with an agenda.</p>
<p>To be effective, it pays to understand the agenda.</p>
<p>Integrating a single market has been a decades-long task along multiple dimensions, much of it taking the form of standardisation.</p>
<ul>
<li>Voltage harmonisation ensured that a device bought in one EU country won’t be destroyed by simply plugging it into an outlet in a different country. The EU standardised on 230v electricity.</li>
<li>The many <a href="https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/product-safety-and-requirements/eu-product-requirements_en">product standards</a> aren’t just there for the consumers but also for <em>trade</em> and <em>industry</em>. Businesses can better trust the work products they’re buying and industries need to worry less about parts and materials. The US has product standards as well, for similar reasons, but the EU arguably takes it further.</li>
<li>Phone charger harmonisation. We went from having dozens of different connectors to only two and, soon, hopefully only one.</li>
</ul>
<p>This is only a tiny part of the massive project that is the European Single Market, but it highlights just how important <em>standardisation</em> is to the EU theory of what makes a market free and open. The core mechanism that helps unify the single market is standardisation and the ability to move freely within the market.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulations">The EU ban on roaming charges</a> is a good example. European mobile phone companies generally aren’t allow to inflict surcharges for using their service across the EU.</p>
<p>Or, another way to put it would be that the EU does not let private parties turn the single market into multiple subdivided markets under private control. It doesn’t matter that most of these companies were European, their practices threatened the very concept of a single market, so the practice had to be eased out.</p>
<p>Private parties are not allowed to divide or fragment the single market, allowing that in the long term is an existential threat to the EU, because the single market is <em>what the EU is for.</em></p>
<p>The roaming regulations are also widely considered to be a success, even beyond their obvious popularity among EU consumers.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Assuming that our estimates are representative across the EU, the total consumer surplus gain of RLAH would be around €2 billion in 2017.</p>
<p><a href="https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ej/uead101/7444993?login=false#437472001">“The Welfare Effects of Mobile Internet Access: Evidence from Roam-Like-at-Home”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>And:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In total, however, the suggestive evidence presented here suggests that consumer surplus increased more than network operator surplus decreased, implying that RLAH had overall positive welfare effects.</p>
<p><a href="https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ej/uead101/7444993?login=false#437472001">“The Welfare Effects of Mobile Internet Access: Evidence from Roam-Like-at-Home”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Data use increased across the board, meaning that digital service providers benefited from the change, increasing economic activity there as well.</p>
<p>From the EU’s perspective, taking action to prevent private parties from fragmenting and taking private control over the single market simultaneously grew the economy and increased consumer surplus.</p>
<p>This is the operating theory behind much of the actions the EU takes regarding market regulation and product standardisation: <em>a single market built on standards is more profitable for both businesses and consumers.</em></p>
<p>It’s obviously a deeply capitalist perspective, but if you want to understand the actions and motivations of the EU as an organisation you need to understand their operating theories.</p>
<p>They are also quite pragmatic about it. For example, the EU has standardised on USB-C as the standard connector for phones. Phones are not infrastructure and people upgrade them regularly. USB-C is a flexible connector that’s even today capable of much more than most phones need, both in terms of data transfer and current. Mandating that future phones all use the same connector doesn’t require you to swap out existing phones or chargers and would increase customer surplus in the future at relatively little cost to the industry, which seems to be migrating to USB-C anyway. <em>Even Apple</em>, before the latest USB-C enabled iPhone was released, has slowly been migrating many of its products over to USB-C. That’s why standardising on USB-C looked to the EU to be the market equivalent of a free lunch and Apple’s protests to the contrary sounded weak.</p>
<p>In contrast, EU electrical plugs aren’t standardised. <em>The REFIT Platform</em>, at the EU Commission’s behest, explained it this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The REFIT Platform does not recommend harmonising the plugs and socket-outlet systems in Europe, due to (i) the strong social and economic impact on the citizens without evident benefits in terms of safety and (ii) the fact that the EU and Member States may currently have other legislative and investment priorities.</p>
<p><a href="https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2017-09/xii24a_plugs_and_sockets.pdf">“REFIT Platform Opinion on the submission by a citizen on Plugs and Socket”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Plugs and outlets are infrastructure and can be in place for decades. The costs of standardisation would almost certainly be much higher than any potential consumer or business benefit, so they aren’t standardised.</p>
<p>The EU, as an organisation, has a specific economic theory that guides most of its actions. Once you understand the theory, they become very predictable.</p>
<p>This is why Apple’s battle against the EU on both app stores and web browsers could become very costly.</p>
<h2 id="the-single-market-versus-apples-privately-fragmented-app-store-market">The single market versus Apple’s privately fragmented App Store market</h2>
<p>Much like roaming, App Stores let private companies subdivide and control the single market to their own financial gain. When much of the digital economy is taking place on phones, tablets, and various other devices that are largely limited to App Stores, this is effectively ceding the single market to a fragmented market that’s entirely under corporate control.</p>
<p>This is against the core operating theory behind the EU. They would be institutionally against this even if the companies in question were European. Many, if not most, of the mobile phone operators affected by the roaming regulations were European. That didn’t earn them a pass on compliance.</p>
<p>The web is also the closest thing to an international common standard we have for delivering digital services and software.</p>
<p>It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that the EU is very concerned about preserving the single market in digital services and software. That means they <em>have to</em> do something about Apple’s control over the iOS App Store and exclusion of competing web browsers. From their perspective, they don’t really have a choice.</p>
<p>What should surprise you is how accommodating and outright <em>gentle</em> the EU has been with Apple’s shenanigans over the years, whether it was about exploiting loopholes to avoid phone plug standardisation, or their <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1161">violations of EU antitrust regulation</a> that <em>pre-date</em> the new <em>Digital Markets Act</em>.</p>
<p>That’s because the EU is manifestly pro-business, but it feels forced to act because <em>the single market is the EU and the EU is the single market.</em></p>
<p>To Apple, the App Store is a side line. To the EU, the single market is the foundation of its existence.</p>
<p>Any time you see two entities of similar size fight, bet on the one that thinks it’s fighting for its life.</p>
<p>Preserving the single market is <em>explicitly</em> the goal of the new <em>Digital Single Market</em> regulation. In a resolution adopted by the EU Parliament on the 30th anniversary of the single market the MEP emphasised that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the recent entry into force of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act represents an essential contribution to the creation of a harmonised, fair, competitive and trustworthy digital single market; considers it essential to ensure the effective implementation and enforcement of these two legislative acts including by making available sufficient financial and human resources; calls on the Commission to monitor implementation of these acts continuously and closely and to report to the relevant parliamentary committee accordingly;</p>
<p><a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2023-0007_EN.html">“European Parliament resolution of 18 January 2023 on the 30th anniversary of the single market: celebrating achievements and looking towards future developments”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The EU’s desire to prevent the fragmentation of the digital single market has the backing of the EU political sector.</p>
<p>And, remember, the EU is a capitalist entity that serves European industrial and capital needs. But they, too, are <em>strongly</em> in favour of the EU taking action to prevent the fragmentation of the digital single market, what the BDI usually calls <em>digital sovereignty</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Studies show: Completion of the digital single market would unleash a growth potential of around EUR 110 billion per year. Therefore, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Member States should work towards a uniform, innovation-promoting, technology-open and industry-friendly regulatory framework for digital policy.</p>
<p><a href="https://urbis.secure.europarl.europa.eu/urbis/system/files/generated/document/en/20220101_Publications_BDI_Making%2520the%2520Single%2520Market%2520the%2520EU%2527s%2520Growth%2520Engine.pdf">“Making the Single Market the EU’s Growth Engine”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m not asking you to agree with either of these organisations, but if you are in a management or executive position at a non-EU tech company, you absolutely do need to <em>understand</em> them, otherwise you are going to get blindsided, just like Apple.</p>
<h2 id="apple-got-blindsided-by-the-eu-because-they-refused-to-understand-the-principle-theories-that-motivate-the-eu">Apple got blindsided by the EU because they refused to understand the principle theories that motivate the EU</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24005938/european-commission-antitrust-apple-investigation-anti-steering-rules-app-developers">This is costing them money</a>, and it’s going to cost them more money in the future.</p>
<p>Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.</p>
<p>Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/01/apple-reverses-decision-about-blocking-web-apps-on-iphones-in-the-eu/">only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.</a></p>
<p>This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks <em>were not negotiations</em> even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.</p>
<p>Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.</p>
<p>If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts <em>as they are</em>, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the <em>DMA</em> taking effect.</p>
<p>But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.</p>
<p>They were behaving like Elon Musk.</p>
<p>And we certainly don’t want more Elon Musks in the world.</p>America's Least Funny People Ecstatically Cry 'Comedy Is Back!' As Shane Gillis Drops Slurs On SNL2024-02-27T09:15:28.967000ZRobyn Pennacchiahttps://www.wonkette.com/p/americas-least-funny-people-ecstatically<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link is-viewable-img image2" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F222ddc74-c7b4-4caf-b0c6-1f00e3b052ab_1350x934.png" target="_blank"><div class="image2-inset"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="934" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F222ddc74-c7b4-4caf-b0c6-1f00e3b052ab_1350x934.png" width="1350" /><div class="image-link-expand"><svg class="lucide lucide-maximize2 " fill="none" height="16" stroke="#FFFFFF" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="16" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></div></div></a><figcaption class="image-caption">Shane Gillis, YouTube screenshot</figcaption></figure></div><p>This weekend, comedian Shane Gillis — whom I admit I was only nominally aware of to begin with — hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Gillis was previously cast on SNL in 2019 but fired before he ever made an appearance, after racist and homophobic clips came to light. Apparently they have different standards for actually hosting the show.</p><p>Did I actually watch the show? I did not. I can’t actually remember the last time I actually watched “Saturday Night Live” <em>live</em>. What I did catch, however, were the tweets from weird people overjoyed by the fact that Gillis “used gay and ret*rd” in his opening monologue, declaring that “comedy is back.”</p><div><hr /></div><div class="subscription-widget-wrap"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Loving this post? Not a paid or free subscriber yet? Let’s fix that!</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input class="email-input" name="email" tabindex="-1" type="email" /><input class="button primary" type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><div><hr /></div><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link is-viewable-img image2" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87e3433b-2aea-456b-ada3-a7a2af12a3b2_1212x1016.png" target="_blank"><div class="image2-inset"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="Shane Gillis said Gay, Retard and Cracker all within 17 seconds on his SNL monologue a comedy is back" class="sizing-normal" height="1016" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87e3433b-2aea-456b-ada3-a7a2af12a3b2_1212x1016.png" title="Shane Gillis said Gay, Retard and Cracker all within 17 seconds on his SNL monologue a comedy is back" width="1212" /><div class="image-link-expand"><svg class="lucide lucide-maximize2 " fill="none" height="16" stroke="#FFFFFF" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="16" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></div></div></a><figcaption class="image-caption"></figcaption></figure></div><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link is-viewable-img image2" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d647b76-9927-4277-82c6-28ad2f104eb8_1210x992.png" target="_blank"><div class="image2-inset"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="Comedian Shane Gillis goes on SNL after getting fired from the show in 2019 for "racist and homophobic jokes" and then says "gay", "ret*rd" and "cracker" in his opening monologue. Comedy is back." class="sizing-normal" height="992" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d647b76-9927-4277-82c6-28ad2f104eb8_1210x992.png" title="Comedian Shane Gillis goes on SNL after getting fired from the show in 2019 for "racist and homophobic jokes" and then says "gay", "ret*rd" and "cracker" in his opening monologue. Comedy is back." width="1210" /><div class="image-link-expand"><svg class="lucide lucide-maximize2 " fill="none" height="16" stroke="#FFFFFF" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="16" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></div></div></a></figure></div><p>I was not terribly surprised by the reaction or the “relief.” I actually think there are a lot of people who just never “learned” how to be funny beyond that and who would see the return of those words becoming acceptable to use as slurs again as something that would bring back the social power they once enjoyed. You know, in middle school. When it was still cool to make fun of people for being weird or different.</p><p>After all, nothing says “No one has laughed at anything I’ve said since middle school” quite like thinking these words are the height of comedy. </p><p>I would argue that the first shot fired in today’s current culture war was in 2012, when comedian <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-daniel-toshs-rape-joke-at-the-laugh-factory-wasnt-funny">Daniel Tosh told a rape joke</a> during an appearance at the Laugh Factory. A woman in the audience at the show responded “Rape jokes are never funny!” and Tosh responded with “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” </p><p>The shot wasn’t fired by Tosh. It was fired by feminists who did not, in fact, think that would be funny and publicly said as much. The real anger, the real fury, however, came from those who were horrified by the idea of a world without rape jokes.</p><p>It was really the first time in a long while that a feminist discourse had gone <em>that</em> public. It pushed a button that unleashed a certain flavor of male rage that, I believe, ultimately found form in Gamergate, the rise of incels, Red Pill theory and other flavors of online misogyny — and, ultimately, Trumpism. </p><p>And it came from finding out that everyone didn’t think a certain kind of joke was funny. </p><p>I also fully believe that <em>a lot</em> of anger over trans people existing and being treated like people was due to the loss of their very precious “That’s a man, baby!” jokes. It’s certainly a large part (if not all) of the rage people get over fat acceptance or, godforbid, being told that a person being an asshole does not give anyone a special free pass to make fun of their weight without <em>also</em> being an asshole themselves. </p><p>Because you can tell, you know? When “good people” have been biting their tongue on the fat jokes for a certain amount of time and are just so relieved to have a <em>bad</em> fat person to unleash them all on. </p><p>I’m trying to figure out a way to say this that does not suggest that anyone should have empathy or pity for the poor douchebags who don’t know how to be “funny” without using gay as a slur or saying ret*rd or by punching down in general. Obviously I do not think this. But I <em>do</em> think that people have a lot more abject terror over social interactions and social rejection than we realize. And there is a possibility that being told, “These things you used as a crutch, these things you said to fit in, to get laughs, to ensure that people were laughing at someone or some group of people <em>other</em> than you, not only can you not have them anymore, but if you <em>do</em> use them, you will experience the rejection you were using them to ward off in the first place” — that actually does send a lot of them right off the deep end.</p><p>This does not mean that we should stop pushing for the kind of social change that makes that kind of punching down obsolete — just as the fact that men frequently go on killing sprees because their romantic advances were rejected doesn’t mean that women should have to date with men they are not interested in. But I do think we probably need to do more to help people with social interactions and processing social rejection in a healthy way than we do currently. </p><p>Of course, it’s not just about being funny and getting laughs. It’s also about a perceived loss of social power. The kids who made these jokes in middle school weren’t actually funny, people were just scared of them. They were bullies. People laughed and went along so they wouldn’t be next, and that’s a kind of power that certain kinds of people find intoxicating. A lot of men, especially, love the idea of being the guy about whom people say “Oh, he’s an asshole at first, but once you get to know him he’s a great guy,” because it’s a pretty big compliment if people will put up with abuse in hopes of getting to the Tootsie Roll center. </p><p>If you’re an asshole and people put up with your shit and laugh at your bad jokes, you win. If they don’t … well, then you’re just an asshole, aren’t you?</p><div><hr /></div><p class="button-wrapper"><a class="button primary" href="https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=B2H2C68PXBLK4"><span>Donate Just Once!</span></a></p><div><hr /></div><p>All of this being said, if these people think that this one guy saying these words in one monologue on “Saturday Night Live” is the permission slip to start using them themselves (without risking people thinking they are assholes or punching them in the face) that they’ve been waiting for, it’s definitely not.</p><p><strong>PREVIOUSLY:</strong></p><div class="digest-post-embed"></div><div class="digest-post-embed"></div><div class="digest-post-embed"></div><div class="captioned-button-wrap"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Thank you for reading Wonkette. This post is public so feel free to share it with everyone you love (or hate).</p></div><p class="button-wrapper"><a class="button primary" href="https://www.wonkette.com/p/americas-least-funny-people-ecstatically?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share"><span>Share</span></a></p></div>‘Get the Tories out’ will carry the election, but it won’t fix the faultlines of a broken politics | Rafael Behr2024-02-21T08:34:05.494000ZRafael Behrhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/21/politics-rishi-sunak-keir-starmer-tories-labour<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/get-the-tories-out-w/6412632:2bc088">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6412632.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Rafael Behr | The Guardian:</b>
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"You can have multiparty rule with explicit deals to share power or, as we have now, submerged coalition politics with warring factions vying for supremacy within one party. The latter model is not obviously more democratic."
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<p>The duopoly at the centre of our electoral system promises stability, yet delivers anything but. Labour must be ready for that</p><p>A reliable test of a party’s campaign readiness is the pub justification question. Imagine friends having a drink on the eve of polling. Like most people in the country, they usually avoid talking politics. They don’t want their preferences interrogated. The more efficiently they can justify a choice to themselves and their mates, the better.</p><p>Why vote Tory in 2019? <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/13/bombastic-boris-johnson-wins-huge-majority-on-promise-to-get-brexit-done">Get Brexit done</a>. Three words. The Labour offer was trickier to summarise. Many of the party’s own MPs couldn’t explain why Jeremy Corbyn should be prime minister.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/21/politics-rishi-sunak-keir-starmer-tories-labour">Continue reading...</a>Neuralink patient masters mind-mouse maneuvers – if Musk is to be believed2024-02-20T13:43:59ZRichard Speedhttps://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/20/neuralink_patient_mouse_mind/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/neuralink-patient-ma/6135335:ca89c6">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6135335.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> The Register:</b>
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"Sharing information about clinical trials is vital in the development of treatments since it allows investigators to learn what does and does not work. It also ensures that results receive proper scrutiny. Science by tweet is, in comparison, a poor substitute."
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<h4>Brain-computer interface trial continues to display troubling lack of transparency</h4> <p>Founder Elon Musk has announced that the first human to receive a Neuralink brain-computer interface has fully recovered and can control a computer mouse pointer with their thoughts.…</p>The Philosophy Of Magic2024-02-14T18:23:25.753000ZCorey Mohlerhttp://existentialcomics.com/comic/537<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/the-philosophy-of-ma/5275170:c1186e">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/5275170.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Existential Comics.</b>
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<img src="https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/ThePhilosophyOfMagic.png" alt="PERSON: "Okay class, first lesson in magic, how to make an invisibility potion. "
PERSON: "Wait, i'm confused, when are you going to teach us magic?"
PERSON: "Take three moonstones, a ginger root, lavender, and place them into a boiling cauldron...."
PERSON: "What do you mean? Right now."
PERSON: "You are teaching us a set of determiistic rules about the natural world, that seems to have been discovered by emperical research and are shared among a community of thinkers. This is just science."
PERSON: "It turns you invisible, it operates outside of the laws of physics!"
PERSON: "But magic exists, right?"
PERSON: "Of course."
PERSON: "And it follows observable, predictable rules?"
PERSON: "Well, yes..."
PERSON: "Look, it's magic, okay? If you keep disrupting class i'm going to turn you into a Newt!"
PERSON: "Alright get out!"
PERSON: " By using a “spell” to manipulate the natural world, that you have inductively observed to have a certain effect over and over? "
PERSON: "How though?"
" title="As a rule of thumb, if the language of magic in a fantasy novel is based on Latin, they are just doing science. If the language based on the language spoken by the river, the sea, and the creatures which walked the Earth before the Sun and Moon first shone, then you might be on to something.
">Retreat from the Green New Deal2024-02-10T16:02:47.883000Znoreply@blogger.com (Peter Wrigley)https://keynesianliberal.blogspot.com/2024/02/retreat-from-green-new-deal.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/retreat-from-the-gre/9106887:cc2e86">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/9106887.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Keynesian Liberal.</b>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
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</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Sir Keir Starmer’s
decision to abandon Labour’s policy of spending £28bn a year on a Green New
Deal is shameful.<span> </span>However the shame
applies not to Sir Keir<span> </span>or the Labour
party – for them it is almost certainly prudent. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span> </span>The shame applies to the quality of Britain’s
public debate, in which the Conservative-leaning print media can be relied upon to
sully decent policy emanating from an opposition party and the public broadcasters
are cowed into soft-pedalling any enthusiasm for<span> </span>non-Conservative proposals for fear of <span> </span>further attacks on their funding.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Given such
dominance and subservience the Tories have succeed in demonising “sensitivity to
racial and social discrimination”* as “woke”, protection of consumers, including
children, as “the nanny state,” defenders of vulnerable people as “lefty lawyers”
and enforcers of international law as “enemies of the people.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Over a very
long period our media have somehow managed to convince most of our electorate that
Conservative governments are pillars of financial rectitude, whereas Labour
governments are recklessly profligate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The reverse
is nearer the truth. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span> </span>It was the Conservative government of Margaret
Thatcher which squandered the revenues from North Sea Oil on current
expenditure rather than set up a Sovereign Wealth Fund.<span> </span>That same government introduced the financial
deregulation which eventually led to the crash in 2008.<span> </span>It was under John Major’s government that we
were ignominiously ejected from the ERM, the Johnson Conservatives presided over
the VIP line for<span> </span>the procurement racket during
the COVID pandemic, and Liz Truss’s shortest government on record sent interest rates rocketing
and shook what remained of Britain’s reputation for financial stability.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">By contrast Attlee’s
post-war Labour government built up our welfare state, including the NHS “free
at the point of use,” introduced family allowances, and brought the public utilities<span> </span>under public ownership despite that fact that
the debt/GDP ratio when they took office in 1945 was well over 200% - more than
double what it is today.<span> </span>Under Tony Blair’s
government that ratio was brought down to 40%, substantially below the accepted
norm of 60%.<span> </span>And it was Gordon Brown’s
leadership that saved the world’s financial system after the 2008 crash.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So the
historical record shows that the Labour party is perfectly capable of introducing
its highly necessary, ambitious and relevant Green New Deal, the like of which
we need both to restore our economic prosperity and avoid further trashing our
planet, and financing it prudently</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Rather than
debate this and other issues in a reasoned, informed and constructive way,<span> </span>it is clear that our election will be fought
on sound-bites and slogans.<span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Labour will
be accused of being split, with the Leader not in harmony with the Shadow
Chancellor.<span> </span>True they are, but at least
on two “rights”: financial stability v sustainable green growth.<span> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span> </span>By contrast the Tories squabble over wrongs:
whether to bribe the electorate by <span> </span>unaffordable tax cuts, further neglect of the
public realm, and further opportunities
to feather their own nest.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Among the <span> </span>questions we should be asking the parties are:</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span>·<span> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What proposals have you to make the UK
fairer;</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span>·<span> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How will you improve our public services;</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span>·<span> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Will you repair our democracy;</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span>·<span> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Will you play a constructive and law-abiding
role in international affairs;</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span>·<span> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What proposals have you to stimulate
the economy for sustainable economic growth?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A responsible
media would help us understand the answers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span> </span><i>That is
the definition given in a clue in this-morning’s Guardian Quick <span> </span><span> </span>Crossword 16 773</i></span></p>Tories fret about a nanny state – but with decay all around, voters want politicians who step in | Rafael Behr2024-01-31T08:00:55.406000ZRafael Behrhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/31/tories-nanny-state-prime-minister-smoking<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<td width="100%" style="padding-top: 6px;">
<b>
PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/tories-fret-about-a-/6412632:6002f4">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6412632.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Rafael Behr | The Guardian.</b>
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<p>The prime minister’s anti-smoking crusade is panicking his party, even as it meets with enthusiasm among the public</p><p>Nicotine is a brilliantly malevolent molecule. It stimulates reward receptors in the brain that light up with satisfaction at a job well done. The addict registers its absence as an agony of incompletion. The next dose bathes the aching brain in a glow of bogus accomplishment. This makes tobacco great business. The customer can’t stop coming back for the product.</p><p>As an ex-smoker, I can testify that many of those purchases <em>feel</em> rational. Cravings are unpleasant. Making them go away by the most efficient means available seems like an obvious, necessary course of action. While that choice has been made without external compulsion, it is conditioned by addiction, which promotes short-term, impulsive behaviour and mutes the cognitive processes required for more analytical judgment.</p><p>Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/31/tories-nanny-state-prime-minister-smoking">Continue reading...</a>Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission2024-01-30T20:48:37.669000ZBrandon Vigliarolohttps://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/microsoft_edge_tabs/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<td width="100%" style="padding-top: 6px;">
<b>
PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/microsoft-edge-ignor/6135335:f23532">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6135335.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> The Register.</b>
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<h4>What goes together better than Redmond and respecting user preferences? Everything, really</h4> <p>Windows users, take notice: Microsoft's Edge browser seems to be actively importing open Chrome tabs and slurping other data from Google's browser without your permission – even if the "feature" that makes that happen is disabled. …</p>SciBabe’s (heavily abridged) Guide to a Fuckery Free Life2024-01-25T11:32:37.069000ZSciBabehttps://scibabe.com/scibabes-heavily-abridged-guide-to-a-fuckery-free-life/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=scibabes-heavily-abridged-guide-to-a-fuckery-free-life<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<td width="100%" style="padding-top: 6px;">
<b>
PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/scibabes-heavily-abr/5786454:31c667">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/5786454.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Scibabe.</b>
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<p class="">Something is rotten in skepticism. During the pandemic, our best ‘how to spot abject fuckery in the wild’ guidelines went ignored by some folks who should have known better. Those guidelines and logical fallacies were twisted to let folks keep the illusion alive that they were still the ‘rational’ thinkers, all while embracing the worst of pseudoscience.</p>
<p class="">This won’t fix the problem. But the first step is always admitting there is a problem.</p>
<p class="">Today’s Moment of Science… SciBabe’s (heavily abridged) Guide to a Fuckery Free Life</p>
<p class="">Look, I need a literal book to get through all of this, but you’re gonna see some fuckery on the internet. Today. Tomorrow. You almost definitely tripped over it yesterday too. It’s easy to say ‘fact check everything,’ but fact checking only works with a solid understanding of what you’re supposed to be checking for in the first place. So before you think to yourself ‘seems legit’ and hit ‘repost’ on the next meme with a fake Carl Sagan quote, here are a few things to consider before sharing anything on Al Gore’s internet.</p>
<p class="">Not all data, studies, or people with the title of “doctor” are created equal. However, some grifters are really hoping you don’t notice the difference. It’s not cherry picking to reject turds that were polished and painted to look like cherries.</p>
<p class="">Learn propaganda techniques so you can recognize them when you see them. This will help you recognize biased sources, even if that bias is towards “your” side. Propaganda is not always used for nefarious purposes like war or begging your parents for a puppy. If you have a dating profile, you’re probably using propaganda without even knowing it. Spot the techniques, and you’re better equipped to spot when they’re being used to conceal the truth or promote disinformation.</p>
<p class="">The easiest person to fool is yourself, and you come with an assortment of silly ideas and biases. When a news outlet affirms all your worldviews or opinions, take a step back and check what their biases are, and perhaps re-examine your own as well. Because news outlets aren’t supposed to give you opinions to agree with, they’re supposed to tell you what the fuck happened.</p>
<p class="">If you want something to be true, ask even more questions. Because we don’t make truth happen with the power of wishful thinking, we do that shit with data.</p>
<p class="">Be wary when a single story is presented as grander proof of concept. Even when a case study of one patient is published in a legitimate scientific journal, it’s documentation that a thing happened once. There’s still a lot of testing necessary to figure out why it happened or if it’s replicable. Whatever syringe of science liquid may seem like a miracle cure in that case study, there are another 10,000 data points to gather before you’ve got something real.</p>
<p class="">Nothing causes every health problem. From arsenic to ionizing radiation, they all have specific mechanisms by which they deliver a dose of fuck-you-up. So when one thing (like, for instance, vaccines or looking at RFK Jr’s stupid fucking face) is presented as the cause of every health issue imaginable, brace for disappointment if you get a chance to look at the data.</p>
<p class="">Furthermore, nothing cures everything. A miracle gizmo/product/cure is presented as unassailable and works 100% of the time. If it’s not working, it’s a sign you’re doing something wrong, not that the cure doesn’t work. You didn’t take it at the right time of day, in the sunlight, in the shade, in a box with a fox. The explanation may as well be that you didn’t clap hard enough for Tinkerbell. It’s never because it just doesn’t fucking work.</p>
<p class="">In a vacuum, nobody can hear you scream over the sound of all the grifters. When there’s a new scientific or medical thing in the news, real experts are doing the long job of sorting out how to keep your ass alive. Meanwhile, dickwards can shout whatever they feel like into the void as long as they use a few big technical words, public safety and the supply of anti-malarials be damned. It’s a great time for unscrupulous characters to take advantage of our collective ignorance regarding something new, scary, and potentially profitable.</p>
<p class="">Be wary of someone who trades in on a bit of fame and a calm tone of voice for legitimacy. A lot of people can say utterly fucking daffy things while staying perfectly calm to cast an illusion of expertise. I advise that you get yourself a real doctor who’s pissed and screaming about deadly vaccine misinformation instead.</p>
<p class="">When a small media outlet claims the mainstream media is ignoring what should be a major story, check where they got their information about that story to begin with. Because unless they were at the scene with a camera taking interviews, it was almost certainly covered in a much larger media outlet. There has to be a German word that means “laughable but also goddamn maddening” when these places cite the New York fucking Times.</p>
<p class="">Yes, most of these could use some elaboration. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a book.</p>
<p class="">This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://scibabe.com/scibabes-heavily-abridged-guide-to-a-fuckery-free-life/">SciBabe’s (heavily abridged) Guide to a Fuckery Free Life</a> appeared first on <a href="https://scibabe.com">SciBabe</a>.</p>We have seen heroes emerge from the Post Office scandal. Now focus on the villains | Marina Hyde2024-01-10T08:05:34.595000ZMarina Hydehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/09/heroes-post-office-scandal-villains<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<td rowspan="2" style="padding: 6px;width: 36px;white-space:nowrap" width="36" valign="top"><img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/16817a99109e30b56e7b7a6f55a90085" style="width: 36px; height: 36px; border-radius: 4px;"></td>
<td width="100%" style="padding-top: 6px;">
<b>
PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/we-have-seen-heroes-/192247:62eaf7">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/192247.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Marina Hyde | The Guardian.</b>
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<p>Ministers feigned shock while executives pointed fingers at others, but gradually the truth is coming out. The public anger is working</p><p>A week since ITV’s <a href="https://www.itv.com/watch/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office/10a0469?gclid=CjwKCAiA1-6sBhAoEiwArqlGPpqBSquwo4LeoFb69XybSsTWFGedvg58wIJLLKHa55sRYGvFld9cOBoC0b4QAvD_BwE">Mr Bates vs the Post Office</a> aired, and can you hear that sound? Can you feel the gathering thunder of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/08/ministers-clear-names-victims-post-office-horizon-accounting-it-scandal">politicians’ hooves</a>, as the herd suddenly migrates towards the great plains of looking busy, of seeming outraged, of suddenly giving a toss?</p><p>“Everyone has been shocked by watching what they have done over the past few days,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/07/post-office-suspected-of-more-wrongful-prosecutions-of-operators-over-horizon">declared Rishi Sunak</a> on Sunday, acting for all the world like he had found out about the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history from a TV programme. Which he didn’t. Of the pursuit of more than 900 innocent subpostmasters, some of whom were jailed, and the ruined lives of many more, the prime minister explained: “Obviously it’s something that happened in the 90s.” Which it isn’t. Prosecutions of innocent postmasters happened up until 2015, with the coalition government in place for the years in which the Post Office allegedly mounted a full-scale cover-up of the injustice it continued to mete out. Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells was awarded a CBE in 2019. Which is also not in the 90s. And, just as I was writing this, she’s only gone and handed it back.</p><p>Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/09/heroes-post-office-scandal-villains">Continue reading...</a>In Britain and the US elections signify democracy. They also mask its decline | Rafael Behr2024-01-04T09:36:53.317000ZRafael Behrhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/britain-us-elections-democracy-decline-donald-trump<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<td width="100%" style="padding-top: 6px;">
<b>
PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/in-britain-and-the-u/6412632:e5f6c1">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6412632.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Rafael Behr | The Guardian.</b>
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<p>Ballots in the UK are free by global standards, but that system alone is no bulwark against tyranny, as the spectre of Donald Trump proves</p><p>This year, countries with a combined population of <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/01/what-to-watch-global-elections-2024-00133027">about 4 billion</a> – half of all the people in the world – will hold elections. That would be cause for celebration if democracy consisted only of the act of voting.</p><p>That it doesn’t will be proved in March, when Russian citizens will be asked to choose a president, knowing in advance that the winner will be Vladimir Putin. Again.</p><p>Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/britain-us-elections-democracy-decline-donald-trump">Continue reading...</a>Substack Cofounder Defends Commercial Relationships with Nazis | TechPolicy.Press2023-12-22T15:56:24.760000Zhttps://techpolicy.press/substack-founder-defends-commercial-relationships-with-nazis<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<div class="MuiTypography-root MuiTypography-body1 html-to-react-article css-3vr8u"><p><em>Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press. Views expressed here are his own.</em></p><div></div><p>Even as antisemitic and anti-Muslim violence is dramatically <a class="external" href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/antisemitic-anti-muslim-incidents-israel-hamas-war-anti-defamation-league/" rel="nofollow">on the rise</a>, one Silicon Valley company is doubling down on its argument that doing business with Nazis is a good thing. In the view of its founders, helping Nazis build subscription newsletter businesses helps build trust in society.</p><p>Substack, a venture-backed newsletter platform founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie, styles itself as a bastion of “free speech,” seeking to differentiate its approach from platforms with more substantial content moderation policies. In keeping with its commitment to provide services to those with even the most extreme views, Substack hosts a number of newsletters that enthusiastically advance white supremacist and Nazi ideologies, including some that use “overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics,” <a class="external" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/" rel="nofollow">according to</a> the journalist Jonathan Katz writing in <em>The Atlantic</em>.</p><p>Now, in response to a <a class="external" href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-IFF6pyxKkgG3CWuyNmZVE8L1EL6Khxo3QPAqrHOTaw/edit#" rel="nofollow">protest letter</a> signed by nearly 250 Substack writers under the banner “Substackers Against Nazis,” cofounder McKenzie <a class="external" href="https://substack.com/@hamish/note/c-45811343" rel="nofollow">says</a> the platform will continue to platform and monetize Nazi newsletters.</p><blockquote>Chris, Jairaj, and I wanted to let you know that we’ve heard and have been listening to all the views being expressed about how Substack should think about the presence of fringe voices on the platform (and particularly, in this case, Nazi views). ... I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.</blockquote><p>McKenzie’s argument is a straw man. No one thinks banishing Nazis from Substack will make fascism “go away.” But some do think that it is ethically wrong for Substack to do business with Nazis, and for it to distribute and promote Nazi content. </p><p>This is not the first time the Substack founders have thought themselves into this particular ethical cul-de-sac. In fact, they have been consistently building this self-serving argument for at least three years.</p><p>In 2020, the three founders issued <a class="external" href="https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation?s=r" rel="nofollow">a manifesto of sorts</a> on content moderation, embracing a hands-off approach.</p><blockquote>Ultimately, we think the best content moderators are the people who control the communities on Substack: the writers themselves. On our platform, each publication is its own dominion, with readers and commenters who have gathered there through common interests. And readers, in turn, choose which writers to subscribe to and which communities to participate in. As the meta platform, we cannot presume to understand the particularities of any given community or to know what’s best for it.</blockquote><p>Those particularities, presumably, include curiosity about “the Jewish question” and promotion of the racist conspiracy known as Great Replacement theory, topics which are presently explored in newsletters published by Substack, according to Katz.</p><p>In 2022, the cofounders published <a class="external" href="https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more?s=r" rel="nofollow">another post</a> titled “Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse.” In it, they wrote:</p><blockquote>The more that powerful institutions attempt to control what can and cannot be said in public, the more people there will be who are ready to create alternative narratives about what’s ‘true,’ spurred by a belief that there’s a conspiracy to suppress important information.</blockquote><p>Others have pointed out that the company does, in fact, control what can and cannot be said on its platform, since it does not permit pornography. And in his latest missive, McKenzie does allow that Substack’s “content guidelines do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence.”</p><p>Why Nazism isn’t regarded as fundamentally violent, given that it denies entire groups of people their right to exist, is one point of contention with those leading the protest. As Marisa Kabas, an independent journalist who writes the Substack newsletter <em>The Handbasket </em>and <a class="external" href="https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/substackers-against-nazis" rel="nofollow">helped draft</a> the “Substackers against Nazis” <a class="external" href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-IFF6pyxKkgG3CWuyNmZVE8L1EL6Khxo3QPAqrHOTaw/edit#" rel="nofollow">letter</a> pointed out, “If being a literal Nazi who supports Nazi policies and encouragingly posts Nazi imagery isn’t an incitement to violence, then what is?”</p><p>McKenzie says a better plan to deal with fascism is to continue to publish and pay the Nazis. Giving them the ability to earn money and distribute their ideas, he reasons, will ultimately help to “strip bad ideas of their power” by exposing them to scrutiny.</p><p>This is, of course, patently absurd, as the lawyer Ken White points out today <a class="external" href="https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportunity" rel="nofollow">in his own</a> Substack newsletter.</p><blockquote>Substack is engaging in transparent puffery when it brands itself as permitting offensive speech because the best way to handle offensive speech is to put it all out there to discuss. It’s simply not true. Substack has made a series of value judgments about which speech to permit and which speech not to permit. Substack would like you to believe that making judgments about content “for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” or content promoting anorexia, is different than making judgment about Nazi content. In fact, that’s not a neutral, value-free choice. It’s a value judgment by a platform that brands itself as not making value judgments. Substack has decided that Nazis are okay and porn and doxxing isn’t. The fact that Substack is engaging in a common form of free-speech puffery offered by platforms doesn’t make it true.</blockquote><p>This is a similar line of argument as what Micah Sifry, who publishes the excellent newsletter <a class="external" href="https://theconnector.substack.com/" rel="nofollow"><em>The Connector</em></a> on Substack (and who <a class="external" href="https://theconnector.substack.com/p/substackers-against-nazis" rel="nofollow">endorsed</a> the Substackers Against Nazis protest letter), pointed out to me <a class="external" href="https://www.techpolicy.press/spotify-substack-misinformation-and-grift-a-conversation-with-bridget-todd-elizabeth-spiers/" rel="nofollow">last year</a>.</p><blockquote>And as much as we bemoan the decline of trust and the rise of polarization, platform owners all discover that they can't be perfectly neutral, and that it's actually a healthy thing to declare your values and moderate content accordingly.</blockquote><p>I published Sifry’s comment alongside <a class="external" href="https://www.techpolicy.press/spotify-substack-misinformation-and-grift-a-conversation-with-bridget-todd-elizabeth-spiers/" rel="nofollow">useful critiques</a> of Substack’s approach to content moderation from the writers Elizabeth Spiers and Bridget Todd. At the time, I think Sifry thought the Substack founders would have to eventually take more of a stand against dangerous ideologues, such as Nazis. But today’s statement suggests that’s not where their logic led them.</p><p>Indeed, it appears that McKenzie, Best, and Sethi have again affirmed their values, and are moderating (or choosing not to moderate) accordingly. It’s just that those values justify doing business with Nazis, an obviously “feckless and morally bereft position,” as Cinder cofounder and former Facebook director of Counterterrorism, Dangerous Organizations, and Content Policy Brian Fishman <a class="external" href="https://www.threads.net/@brian.fishman.5/post/C1Ic__Nv_aD/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">put it</a>.</p><p>Whether Substack’s business will suffer remains to be seen. There is nothing technically all that interesting about the platform. Many alternatives exist that permit writers to host, publish, and monetize their newsletters. I’m not sure what its investors see in it. If the various circus acts it has managed to cobble together decide to decamp, there isn’t very much value in the empty tents they leave behind.</p><p>But even if the “Substackers against Nazis” campaign is not itself successful in prompting the company to change its practices, perhaps a catalyzing event of a different sort will lead to change.</p><p>"Substack's position on Nazis only makes sense if you ignore the last eight years of world events and tech policy debates," Melissa Ryan, the CEO of <a class="external" href="https://www.cardstrategies.net/" rel="nofollow">Card Strategies</a>, an expert on far-right extremism, and one of the protest letter's signatories told me. "We know from experience that these choices have dangerous, sometimes deadly consequences."</p><p>She's not the only one imagining dark scenarios.</p><p>“There’s gonna be a moment in 2024 where someone starts some violent shit, and uses their Substack newsletter to do it,” noted George Washington University professor, <a class="external" href="https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/substackers-against-nazis?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web" rel="nofollow">Substack writer</a>, and <a class="external" href="https://www.techpolicy.press/parsing-the-political-project-of-techno-optimism/" rel="nofollow">recent <em>Tech Policy Press </em>contributor</a> Dave Karpf in a post on the social media platform Bluesky. “That’s when this position will dissolve.”</p></div>King Charles has appointed a homeopath. Why do the elite put their faith in snake oil? | Martha Gill2023-12-17T10:40:22.124000ZMartha Gillhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/17/king-charles-has-appointed-homeopath-why-do-elite-put-faith-in-snake-oil<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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The aristocracy and celebrities are in thrall to medical quackery that while useless can be far from harmless<p>When I hear someone extolling the virtues of homeopathy, I am often reminded of a quotation from the TV show <em>30 Rock</em>. “There are many kinds of intelligence,” Jack Donaghy tells a particularly stupid employee. “Practical, emotional … and then there is actual intelligence, which is what I’m talking about.” Similar, and perhaps correlating, are the many kinds of medicine. Natural, complementary, alternative, homeopathic, herbal, traditional. And then there is actual medicine, which works.</p><p>It is strange that homeopaths can still find employment in 2023, but somehow they do. In 1853, Queen Victoria’s doctor <a href="https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/28/bmj-debates-homeopathy-1990s-or-1840s" title="">was already calling the practice</a> “an outrage to human reason”. In the following 170 years it has been debunked repeatedly and comprehensively. After all, its principles run in complete opposition to science, based as they are on “curing like with like” – an extract of raw onion, say, to treat watery eyes – “strengthening” by process of dilution, and shaking it all up to “promote quantum entanglement”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/17/king-charles-has-appointed-homeopath-why-do-elite-put-faith-in-snake-oil">Continue reading...</a>Need a Christmas party game? Try ranking 13 years of Tory screw-ups in order of severity | Andrew Rawnsley2023-12-10T09:20:57.181000ZAndrew Rawnsleyhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/09/need-a-christmas-party-game-try-ranking-13-years-of-tory-screwups-in-order-of-severity<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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Public trust in the competence of the Conservatives has collapsed – and with very good reason<p>What will be an appropriate epitaph to inscribe on the tombstone of this Conservative government? Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, came up with a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/07/top-officials-call-boris-johnson-no-10-mad-and-poisonous-covid-inquiry-hears" title="">compelling contender</a> when he wrote: “I’ve never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country.” His <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/31/covid-inquiry-whatsapps-diaries-boris-johnson" title="">verdict</a>, which would have stayed undisclosed had it not been revealed by the Covid inquiry, related to the atrociously bungled handling of the pandemic, but it could serve as an overarching judgment on these 13 years and counting of Conservative rule.</p><p>Four successive Tory prime ministers have been and gone, each arriving at Number 10 brandishing promises to deliver a better Britain, each departing a humiliated failure and leaving Britain in a worse place than they found it. Now, in another zoom around the Tory doom loop, a fifth prime minister is struggling to keep his head above water in a raging tempest of division and chaos self-generated by the Conservatives. As Rishi Sunak foolishly makes his Rwanda plan a defining test of his premiership, there is feverish chatter among Tory MPs about triggering a ballot to try to eject yet another leader. The party chairman warns his colleagues that it would be “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-67656002" title="">insanity</a>” to oust Mr Sunak. That’s risky talk. Insanity is one thing that the Conservatives have consistently excelled at.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/09/need-a-christmas-party-game-try-ranking-13-years-of-tory-screwups-in-order-of-severity">Continue reading...</a>The class base of bad government2023-12-08T09:35:48.173000Zchrishttps://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/12/the-class-base-of-bad-government.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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"There's more to politics than the mere assertion of one's own moral and intellectual superiority. We must also understand why we are badly governed, and this requires us to appreciate that politics does not exist in a vacuum but instead is shaped by socio-economic conditions."
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Everybody from the centre-right leftwards agrees that we have been unusually badly governed for the last few years. As Ian Dunt <a href="https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1730248105289785582">tweeted</a>. </p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Quite a thing, isn't it. Reading about someone of the stature of Alistair Darling while watching someone as minuscule as Matt Hancock. A testament to how far we've fallen.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">But why have we so fallen?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There's a tendency among some centrists to attribute it merely to bad people doing stupid things; the word "cockwomble" occurs with worrying frequency. This is too superficial. It's what I've called <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/03/against-schoolteacher-politics.html">schoolteacher</a> politics, the notion that bad policy is mere intellectual or moral error that could be avoided if only we had better people in charge (where, of course, "better" means more like us).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Instead, bad government is endogenous. It's the product of dysfunctional capitalism allied to our unusually toxic class system. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Let's start with the rise of illiberal reaction and the Tories' perceived need to appeal to the far-right. This hasn't occurred because the British people had a bang on the head, or were fooled by media barons, or succumbed to the elegant wit Tommy Robinson. Instead, it's yet another <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/10/the-economic-base-of-culture-wars.html">example</a> of what Ben Friedman pointed out in <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/bfriedman/pages/moral-consequences-economic-growth">2006</a>:</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The history of each of the large Western democracies – America, Britain, France and Germany – is replete with instances in which [a] turn away from openness and tolerance, and often the weakening of democratic political institutions, followed in the wake of economic stagnation.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">His point has since been corroborated by many others. Thiemo Fezmer has <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/10/17/long-read-debunking-myths-on-links-between-austerity-and-brexit/">shown</a> that - at the margin - austerity caused Brexit. Markus Brueckner and Hans Peter Gruener have shown <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/p/acb/cbeeco/2016-639.html">that</a> "lower growth rates are associated with a significant increase in right-wing extremism." And Ana Sofia Pessoa and colleagues have shown <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4160971">how</a> "fiscal consolidations lead to a significant increase in extreme parties' vote share." This could be because a weak economy breeds discontent with the incumbent parties; or because people look for somebody to blame and that somebody is often the outsiders and marginalized; or because bad times generate a yearning for a past, one in which minorities were quieter. Whatever the reason, Marx was <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm">right</a>:</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The far-right has tapped into this richer seam of <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/09/the-government-is-changing-the-rules-of-the-work-capability-assessment-in-an-effort-to-push-more-people-into-work-and-thinkin.html">reaction</a> and illiberalism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But why have we got stagnation? Austerity is part of the story. But austerity was endogenous - a reaction to the increased public debt caused by the financial crisis. As the late Nick Crafts <a href="https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/brexit-blame-it-banking-crisis">said</a>, "Brexit is a legacy of the banking crisis." </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And that crisis was also endogenous. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To see why, imagine that there had been an abundance of profit-making opportunities in the early 00s. The fall in real interest rates we saw then would then have led to rising capital spending and R&D and to greater productive capacity. We'd have had faster GDP growth. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Which didn't happen. Growth was actually slowing even <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2013/06/origins-of-the-crisis.html">before</a> the crisis. There was, as Ben Bernanke <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/200503102/">said</a>, a "dearth" of such opportunities. That meant that lower rates fuelled not faster sustainable growth but rather a boom in housing and in illiquid mortgage derivatives and stretched bank balance sheets, which led to the crash. In this sense, that crash was a <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15404/revisions/w15404.rev1.pdf">symptom (pdf)</a> of a stagnant economy, not (just) a cause. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Exactly why the economy has been stagnating since the early 2000s is a matter of debate: an ageing population; difficulty in adapting to the rise of India and China; lack of innovation; falling profit rates; and so on. For my purposes now, however, this debate doesn't much matter. The fact is that capitalism is not working as well as it once did, and this is shaping the political climate by fuelling antipathy to migrants and benefit claimants and by stoking up culture wars. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Of course, in theory such reactionary politics could be led by politicians of substance rather than the charlatans and inadequates we've actually had. But the low calibre of politicians isn't mere bad luck. It's another effect of our class system. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One reason for this is simply that high pay in the financial sector attracts talent away from politics. If we're lucky, this leaves the profession open to those with a sense of public service. If not, it attracts second-rate egomaniacs. Also, private schools inculcate more <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/02/class-confidence.html">confidence</a> than ability - people who, in the American phrase, were born on third base but think they've hit a triple. David Cameron, for example, wanted to become PM because he thought he’d be “rather good” at it - an opinion not shared by posterity. And the Covid inquiry has heard how Johnson was "bamboozled" and "confused" by statistics. Sir Patrick Valance <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/covid-inquiry-boris-johnson-patrick-valance-b2450417.html">wrote</a>: </p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Watching the PM get his head around stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Such ignorance matters. Being Prime Minister isn't like being a newspaper columnist. It's about taking decisions under uncertainty. To do that doesn't require one to be a great statistician. But it does require that one be awake to the most common ways of misunderstanding numbers, which requires a basic statistical literacy. <a class="asset-img-link" href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cbef69e202c8d3a4d940200b-pi" style="float: right;"><img alt="Lectern_HP_PA" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451cbef69e202c8d3a4d940200b img-responsive" src="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cbef69e202c8d3a4d940200b-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Lectern_HP_PA" /></a> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">That Johnson thought he could be PM without such habits of mind shows his arrogant overconfidence. And that other people thought he could is another effect of class. Like attracts like. To a media dominated by public schoolboys, Johnson seemed a familiar jovial figure ("Boris") rather than someone with profound intellectual and moral defects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Of course, this is not to say that class is the only explanation for our bad politicians. Our mechanisms for <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/11/selecting-for-inadequates.html">selecting</a> them are also dysfunctional; politicians must now appeal more to a handful of cranks be they party members or journalists; the disappearance of public intellectuals has deprived us a a benign influence on the political class; our narcissistic age demands that politicians echo our own prejudices rather than display competence or independence of mind; and so on. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Even if politicians weren't overconfident inadequates, however, there'd still be a problem. The Tories have no economic offer to make to voters because to do so <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/10/the-tories-structural-crisis.html">requires</a> them to address difficult questions: how do we kickstart the economy when doing so requires more than the state stepping back? What if inequality is itself a <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2019/05/how-inequality-makes-us-poorer.html">barrier</a> to growth? How do you increase growth when so many of your supporters (financiers, nimbys, monopolists, Brexiters) are <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2022/07/the-futility-of-economic-policy-debate.html">opposed</a> to it? Faced with these questions, even the ablest of Tory politicians would struggle.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">That last question brings us to a further problem. A lot of <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/p/dip/dpaper/2013-04.html">powerful</a> people have an interest in sustaining bad and corrupt government, and the <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2021/04/capitals-political-power.html">power</a> to do so. I'm not thinking only of the media here, or those who exchange for party <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/07/conservatives-labour-election-fund-john-sainsbury">donations</a> for government money. Businesses also buy MPs (and <a href="https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/an-unregulated-merrygoround-how-some-new-roles-prove-controversial-after-working-in-public-service">regulators</a>) through <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/29/tory-mp-who-chided-gambling-regulator-received-8000-from-betting-industry">donations</a> or the prospect of cushy jobs after leaving office. And as Michal Kalecki <a href="https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/">noted</a>, "everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis”: one (albeit bad) justification for fiscal austerity was the fear of a bond market sell-off if debt were not being seen to be reduced. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We can put this another way. In the post-war decades government achieved some worthwhile things: full employment; a better welfare state; and decent economic growth. This wasn't merely because politicians were of greater moral and intellectual calibre back then. It was because full employment was in the interests of much of capital - mass producers needed a market for their goods whereas financial capital require low interest rates - and because capital's more rapacious instincts were constrained by powerful trades unions. In the absence of these conditions, we have what we have now.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And as if all this were not enough, Tories have also sustained in office by simple <a href="https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2013/10/mistaking-power-for-virtue.html">deference</a> - the habit of mind which leads people to atrribute merit to those in power. You don't need Marxian theories of ideology to believe this (though they help!). It was Adam Smith who <a href="https://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Smith/tms133.html">wrote</a>: </p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent…The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">All these things mean that the feedback mechanisms whereby bad governments are kicked out and bad policies reversed are not as strong as they might be.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">My point here is simple. There's more to politics than the mere assertion of one's own moral and intellectual superiority. We must also understand why we are badly governed, and this requires us to appreciate that politics does not exist in a vacuum but instead is shaped by socio-economic conditions. You can't understand politics without understanding capitalism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Of course, it's likely that we have only a few more months of this awful government: there are limits to how far reactionary rentiers can sustain an egregiously incompetent government in office. But many of the pressures that gave it us will still be in place: economic stagnation and the power of the media, finance, and other regressive sections of capital. And they will constrain even the most competent and best-intentioned Labour government. The idea that we can have good government if only good people were in charge is too hopeful. Centrists, at least as much as leftists, are prone to utopian fantasies. </p>You can't deepfake diversity, and that's a good thing2023-12-05T09:26:16.450000ZRupert Goodwinshttps://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/04/opinion/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/you-cant-deepfake-di/6135335:9773c8">shared this story</a>
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"Diversity is not optional. It's how to prosper in a changing world. It's matching the work you do and the things you make to the biggest market they can reach. It doesn't come for free, you can't tick-box it in, you have to treat it as you do any other aspect of your organizational and working life – with intelligence, curiosity, investment and long-term strategy."
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<h4>Fresh thinking and new approaches can only come from varied cohorts of people</h4> <p><strong>Opinion</strong> "My other car is a Porsche" was never the most convincing of claims you could make while out drinking on a Friday night, but it's as real as the Pope's Catholicism compared to the speaker list for the DevTernity developer conference. There, the otherwise pure male roster was de-bro-ed by "Anna Boyko, purportedly a staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor."…</p>I Fight For The Users2023-11-30T21:34:47.424000ZJeff Atwoodhttps://blog.codinghorror.com/i-fight-for-the-users/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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<p>If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year (if that), I can't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/god-did-us-a-favor-by-destroying-twitter/?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">can't possibly say it better than Paul Ford</a> (how could I?) so I'll just refer you there:</p><blockquote>Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “Humans 95 Percent Happier in Small Towns, Waving at Neighbors and Eating Sandwiches.” When we gather in groups of more than, say, eight, it’s a disaster. Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.” Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”</blockquote><p>It's been clear for quite some time that the early social media strategery of "jam a million people in a colosseum and let them fight it out with free speech" isn't panning out, but never has it been more clear than now, under the Elon Musk regime, that <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-isnt-funny-bad-jokes-twitter-1234712950/?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">being beholden to the whims of a billionaire going through a midlife crisis</a> isn't exactly healthy for society. Or you. Or me. Or anyone, really.</p><p>I tried to be fair; I gave the post-Elon Twitter era a week, thinking "how bad could it possibly be?" and good lord, <em>it was so much worse than I could have possibly ever imagined</em>. It's like Elon read the Dilbert pointy-haired-manager book on management and bonked his head on every rung of the ladder going down, generating an ever-growing <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-terrible-things-hes-said-and-done?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">laundry list of terrible things no manager should ever do</a>. And he <em>kept going!</em></p><p>It's undeniably sad. I really liked Twitter, warts and all, <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/twitter-service-vs-platform/" rel="noreferrer">from 2007 onward</a>. In fact, it was the only "social network" I liked at all. Even when it became clear in the Trump era that Twitter was unhealthy for human minds, I soldiered on, gleaning what I could. I'm not alone in that; Clay Shirky's moribund signoff at the end of 2022 was about how I felt:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img alt="alt" class="kg-image" height="1495" src="https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2023/11/image.png" width="1348" /></figure><p>Indeed, Twitter was murdered at the whims of a billionaire high on Ketamine while it was (mostly) healthy, <a href="https://www.gbnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-x-twitter-purchase-daughter-jenna-musk-woke-virus?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">because of the "trans woke virus"</a>. </p><p>I encourage you, all of you, <strong>to disavow Twitter and never look at it again</strong>. No one who cares about their mental health should be on Twitter at this point, or linking to Twitter and feeding it the attention it thrives on. We should entomb Twitter deep in concrete with this public warning on its capstone:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img alt="This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ...nothing valued is here." class="kg-image" src="https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/110/240/386/903/991/473/original/d3ff3462bf229383.png" /></figure><p>In the end, I begrudgingly realized, as did Paul Ford, that Elon unwittingly did us a favor by killing Twitter. He demonstrated <strong>the very real dangers of becoming beholden to any platform run by a king, a dictator, a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat</strong>. You can have all your content rug-pulled out from under you at any time, or watch in horror as your favorite bar... slowly transforms into a nazi bar. </p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img alt="alt" class="kg-image" height="1920" src="https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2023/11/image-1.png" width="1363" /></figure><p>I've been saying for a long time that decentralization is the way to go. We can and should have sane centralized services, of course, but <strong>it's imperative that we <em>also</em> build decentralized services which empower users and give them control</strong>, rather than treating them <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper/" rel="noreferrer">like digital sharecroppers</a>. That's what our <a href="https://discourse.org/?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">Discourse project</a> is all about. I propose collective ownership of the content and the communities we build online. Yeah, it's more work, it's not "free" (sorry not sorry), but I have some uncomfortable news from you: those so-called "free" services aren't really free.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img alt="Geek-and-poke-pigs-free" class="kg-image" src="https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2014/02/6a0120a85dcdae970b01a3fcc55683970b-800wi.png" /></figure><p>Which, again, is not to say that "free" services don't have a place in the world, they do, but please don't harbor any illusions about what you are giving up in the name of "free". Grow up.</p><p>I take a rather <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">Tron-like</a> view of the world when it comes to this stuff; in the software industry, our goal should be to <em>empower</em> users (with strong moderation tools), not control them. </p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img alt="alt" class="kg-image" height="640" src="https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2023/11/image-3.png" width="504" /></figure><p>So I encourage you to explore alternatives to Twitter, ideally open source, federated alternatives. Is it messy? <em>Hell yes it's messy</em>. But so is democracy; it's worth the work, because it's the only survivable long term path forward. Anything worth doing is never <em>easy</em>.</p><p>I'm currently on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">Mastodon</a>, an open source, federated Twitter alternative at <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror</a> – I urge you to join me on the Mastodon server of your choice, or quite literally <em>any other platform</em> besides Twitter. Really, whatever works for you. Pick what you like. Help make it better for everyone.</p><p>To encourage that leap of faith, I am currently auctioning off, with all funds to benefit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trevor_Project?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">the Trevor Project</a> which offers assistance to LGBTQ youth, these 10 museum quality brass plaques of what I consider to be the best tweet of all time, hands down:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img alt="alt" class="kg-image" height="1134" src="https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/2023/11/IMG_3328.jpg" width="2000" /></figure><p>(Blissfully, <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Horse_ebooks?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" rel="noreferrer">@horse_ebooks is also on Mastodon</a>. As they should be. As should you. Because everything happens so much.)</p><p>If you'd like to bid on the 10 brass plaques, follow these links to eBay, and please remember, it's for a great cause, and will piss Elon off, which makes it even sweeter:</p><p><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895658859?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895658859</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895658395?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895658395</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895657953?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895657953</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895656856?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895656856</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895655560?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895655560</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895655243?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895655243</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654889?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654889</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654391?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654391</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654002?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654002</a><br /><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895653408?ref=blog.codinghorror.com">https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895653408</a></p><p>I will sign the back of every plaque, because each one comes with my personal guarantee that it will easily outlive what's left of Twitter.</p>Spotify Wrapped is creepy, meaningless – and shows just how much data big tech has on you2023-11-30T21:03:05.825000ZAlexis Petridishttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/30/spotify-wrapped-is-creepy-meaningless-and-shows-just-how-much-data-big-tech-has-on-you<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/spotify-wrapped-is-c/9138923:13e14e">shared this story</a>
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<p>The annual summary of your listening habits has become a phenomenon – but marketing wheeze aside, Wrapped doesn’t reflect what we truly love</p><p>As a marketing exercise, it’s hard not to be hugely impressed by Spotify Wrapped. In less than a decade, the streaming giant has somehow managed to turn what’s essentially a bit of automated data-scraping into a global event. It’s a triumphant exercise in underlining the platform’s dominance in its field – this year, it arrives with the slogan Wrapped Or It Didn’t Happen, as if music consumed via Spotify is the only music that matters – and indeed in getting free advertising by encouraging users to share on social media Spotify’s personalised and heavily branded lists of most-streamed artists and listening trends. This year, the arrival of Spotify Wrapped results was heralded by a huge billboard advertising campaign, brand partnerships ranging from Amazon to FC Barcelona, a London launch gig that stars Sam Smith, Charli XCX and Chase and Status and the launch of the “Spotify Island experience” on wildly popular online game platform Roblox. It has provoked features everywhere from Teen Vogue to the New York Times, from Variety to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/29/spotify-wrapped-taylor-swift-sound-town">this very newspaper</a>. The latter’s report was enlivened by quotes from a Spotify employee, who compared Wrapped both to “election night” and the arrival of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.</p><p>Said employee was presumably speaking from their desk in Spotify’s legendary Department of Laying It on a Bit Thick, but empirical evidence suggests that Wrapped has become a surprisingly big deal. This week, my teenage daughters eagerly checked their results against each others’ and those of their friends. The results are more elaborately presented than ever: they now come with a “character archetype” based on the way you use the streaming platform – fans of “light upbeat music” are Luminaries, those reliant on algorithms to pick the next track are Roboticists and so on – and an add-on that tells you where in the world you’re most likely to find people with similar music tastes to you. But my kids appeared less interested in the way their ostensibly “favourite” artists were ranked than in the amount of time they’d spent listening and the number of songs they had listened to. In a world where streaming is the main means by which music is consumed these figures appear to act as a badge of honour, “proof” of how into music you are, a 2020s equivalent of walking around school with an album you were either borrowing or lending tucked under your arm to signify the seriousness of your commitment to prog or punk or metal or soul.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/30/spotify-wrapped-is-creepy-meaningless-and-shows-just-how-much-data-big-tech-has-on-you">Continue reading...</a>After years of Tory failure, getting Britain growing again will be Labour’s greatest test | Andrew Rawnsley2023-11-26T10:21:11.653000ZAndrew Rawnsleyhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/26/after-years-tory-failure-getting-britain-growing-again-will-be-labour-greatest-test<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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A Starmer government will inherit a nation with miserable productivity, emasculated public services, big debts, high tax levels and acute inequalities<p>Yogi Berra, the revered baseball player and coach, would have called it deja vu all over again. A Tory chancellor telling the country it has “turned a corner”, while scattering around a few tax cuts when a general election is looming was not the only reason Jeremy Hunt’s bag of tricks felt so familiar. The sense of having been here before was heightened because of another aspect of his financial statement, a budget in all but name. The chancellor also flourished a “<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/autumn-statement-2023-speech" title="">plan for growth</a>”.</p><p>He spoke as if getting more out of the economy was a novel idea that had never occurred to anyone before, but his is the 12th growth plan the Tories have fanfared since 2010, which makes it one for almost every year they have been in power. If the Tories had been as prolific at generating growth as they have at producing plans, we’d have no need for another one because the world would be beating a path to our door to discover how the genius UK had become a land overflowing with milk and honey.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/26/after-years-tory-failure-getting-britain-growing-again-will-be-labour-greatest-test">Continue reading...</a>Geert Wilders’ win shows the far right is being normalised. Mainstream parties must act | Stijn van Kessel2023-11-26T09:44:59.921000ZStijn van Kesselhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/26/far-right-normalised-mainstream-parties-geert-wilders-dutch<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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<p>The Party for Freedom leader succeeded last week because he has become part of the Dutch political furniture. This disturbing trend needs to be halted</p><p>• Read more: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/26/remember-who-we-are-riots-race-and-the-end-of-the-irish-welcome">Riots, race and the end of the ‘Irish welcome’</a></p><p>Election results lend themselves to different stories, certainly in the Netherlands, where so many old and new parties compete for votes. Yet the 2023 election will be remembered for one reason: a far-right party topped the polls for the first time, and by a large margin. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) is set to win 37 of the 150 seats in Dutch parliament, more than doubling its 2021 tally.</p><p>Far-right parties in Europe primarily attract voters on their core issues of immigration and multiculturalism. Most also express a populist message, criticising political elites and calling for popular sovereignty. Wilders’ PVV is no different.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/26/far-right-normalised-mainstream-parties-geert-wilders-dutch">Continue reading...</a>Netflix and bill – the high price of a subscription lifestyle2023-11-03T15:48:25.909000ZTim Harfordhttps://timharford.com/2023/11/netflix-and-bill-the-high-price-of-a-subscription-lifestyle/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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<p>One of the modern classics of economics is an article from 2006 with the self-explanatory title “Paying Not to Go to the Gym”, in which researchers Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier studied the behaviour of nearly 8,000 gym members and found it “difficult to reconcile with standard preferences and beliefs”. </p>
<p>By that, they meant that gym members seemed to be delusional, weak-willed or both. People on a monthly contract paid more per visit than those who simply showed up and paid at the door, suggesting they either had a very basic problem with arithmetic or, more likely, optimistic expectations about how often they would exercise. People on the rolling monthly contract also tended to let more than two months elapse between the last visit and the moment they got round to cancelling their membership. </p>
<p>For nerds like me, the article has an important message about the field of behavioural economics. We’ll get to that. </p>
<p>There’s also a broader question. The subscription business model has expanded from traditional products, such as newspapers and gym memberships to software, streaming media, vegetable boxes, shaving kits, makeup, clothes and support for creative types via Patreon or Substack. We should all be asking ourselves, if so many people are paying not to go to the gym, what else are we paying not to do? </p>
<p>A new working paper from economists Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack and Neale Mahoney attempts an answer. Using data from a credit and debit card provider, they examine what happens to subscriptions for 10 popular services when the card that is paying for them is replaced. At this moment, the service provider suddenly stops getting paid and must contact the customer to ask for updated payment details. You can guess what happens next: for many people, this request reminds them of a subscription they had stopped thinking about and immediately prompts them to cancel it. Relative to a typical month, cancellation rates soar in months when a payment card is replaced — from 2 per cent to at least 8 per cent. </p>
<p>Einav and his colleagues use this data to estimate how easily many people let stale subscriptions continue. Relative to a benchmark in which infallible subscribers instantly cancel once they decide they are no longer getting enough value, the researchers predict that subscribers will take many extra months — on average 20 — to get around to cancelling. </p>
<p>Don’t take the precise numbers too seriously — as with most social science, this is not a rigorously controlled experiment but an attempt to tease meaning out of noisy real-world data. What you should take seriously is the likelihood that you are swimming in barely noticed subscriptions, some of which you would choose to cancel if you were forced to pay attention to them for a few minutes. Perhaps you should. Come to think of it, perhaps <em>I</em> should. </p>
<p>But I promised a geeky lesson about behavioural economics too. Loyal readers will have noted some recent scandals in behavioural science: experiments conducted separately by two well-known researchers, Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino, have been found (in the opinion of independent experts) to contain manipulated or fraudulent data. Both deny wrongdoing. </p>
<p>In the light of this dismaying situation, it would be understandable if people lost a bit of confidence in the field of behavioural economics. So it is worth reminding ourselves of what behavioural economics is trying to achieve. The field has long aimed to bring some psychological realism to economics, whose traditional textbook model has no room for people who take out a gym membership, fail to go to the gym and then neglect to cancel the gym subscription. </p>
<p>Its founding member is the co-author of <a href="https://assoc-redirect.amazon.com/g/r/https://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3EM0PJ7CNCUAK&keywords=nudge&qid=1651816729&sprefix=nudge%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-3&tag=timharford-20">Nudge</a>, Nobel memorial prize winner Richard Thaler. Thaler’s project has always been not to argue that the textbook model is contradicted by laboratory experiments, but that it is contradicted by the way that important markets work in the real world. </p>
<p>It is certainly reasonable to ask how many experiments in social psychology may have been fraudulently manipulated. Less outrageous, but of more practical significance, is the possibility that many experiments in social psychology are poorly reported and analysed. As I’ve argued recently, we need to strengthen the foundations of scientific practice to prevent this. Economists can certainly learn from experiments, but contact with reality should be an important part of economics, which is — or should be — a practical subject. </p>
<p>Whether we are sticking closely to the old textbook model or embracing the latest ideas from behavioural science, our concepts should be taken more seriously when they explain what we see around us every day. If people really are lazy, short-sighted and inattentive, as behavioural economics suggests, then subscriptions are a hugely attractive business model. The subscriptification of everything suggests that businesses have noticed this. </p>
<p>There are some whimsical ideas in behavioural science, and some of them will not stand the test of time. But the central proposition of Nudge is not whimsical: it’s that the default position matters far more than you’d think, not in a laboratory experiment but in markets where billions or trillions are at stake. People delegate life-changingly huge decisions — for example, about contributions to their pensions — to the path of least resistance. If behavioural public policy means anything, it means shaping those default positions for the public good. It’s an idea to which I still subscribe.</p>
<p><em>Written for and first published in the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b2622d99-4eaf-44f7-bbe2-4b61c716a06b">Financial Times </a>on 6 October 2023.</em></p>
<p><em>My first children’s book, <a href="https://timharford.com/books/truthdetective/">The Truth Detective</a> is now available (not US or Canada yet – sorry).</em></p>
<p><em>I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/TimHarford">United States</a> and the <a href="https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/TimHarford">United Kingdom</a>. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.</em></p>Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a disaster for the French left – his response to the attack on Israel proves it | Alexander Hurst2023-10-27T14:50:53.866000ZAlexander Hursthttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/27/jean-luc-melenchon-french-left-israel-france<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
<a href="https://paulpritchard.newsblur.com/story/jean-luc-melenchon-i/9138923:8a96e5">shared this story</a>
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<p>He may be a gifted orator, but his rhetoric of rage and revolution is deepening divisions in France. It is time to dump him</p><p>If you want to know the deep values that drive someone, sometimes you have to look at who they admire, who they throw under the bus and who they refuse to unreservedly condemn. For the French far-left firebrand <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/jean-luc-melenchon-frances-unbowed-lefty-plans-another-run-at-presidency">Jean-Luc Mélenchon</a>, it should by now be clear. After all, the head of the leftwing opposition alliance has been in politics for four decades, and a senator since 1986. He stood as a radical left alternative to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/11/french-presidential-election-macron-le-pen-melenchon">2022 presidential elections</a> and almost got through to the second round. But while Mélenchon may have attracted many young voters to his campaign, he is no Bernie Sanders: his refusal to evolve from cold war-era reflexive anti-Americanism and his desire to pursue a “revolutionary” brand of opposition have dragged the French left into unelectability and moral confusion.</p><p>As late as 2019, long after Venezuela had <a href="https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/venezuelas-odd-transition-to-dictatorship/">ceased to be a democracy</a> and had become, instead, Latin America’s primary source of <a href="https://www.iom.int/venezuelan-refugee-and-migrant-crisis">political and economic refugees</a>, Mélenchon was still <a href="https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/venezuela-les-encouragements-de-melenchon-a-nicolas-maduro-27-01-2019-2289257_20.php#11">publicly expressing admiration</a> for the late Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.</p><p>Alexander Hurst is a Guardian columnist. He is a France-based writer and an adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies</p><p><em><strong>Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tone/letters"> letters</a> section, please <a href="mailto:guardian.letters@theguardian.com?body=Please%20include%20your%20name,%20full%20postal%20address%20and%20phone%20number%20with%20your%20letter%20below.%20Letters%20are%20usually%20published%20with%20the%20author%27s%20name%20and%20city/town/village.%20The%20rest%20of%20the%20information%20is%20for%20verification%20only%20and%20to%20contact%20you%20where%20necessary.">click here</a>.</strong></em></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/27/jean-luc-melenchon-french-left-israel-france">Continue reading...</a>Ofcom says GB news is not impartial, but how can that be true? It has every kind of wingnut going | Marina Hyde2023-10-25T07:26:03.760000ZMarina Hydehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/ofcom-gb-news-tory-mp-impartial-angelo-frangopoulos<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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PaulPritchard
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<p>Home to odd Tory MPs and conspiracy theorists, the channel is a broad church – except when it comes to those who follow the rules</p><p>Imagine how shocked I was to have my free speech endangered by the boss of GB News before the channel even launched. Angelos Frangopoulos was offended by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/08/us-chaos-britain-fox-news-trump-presidency">an article I wrote</a> just after the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, which Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News had arguably fomented with its endlessly repeated lies about the stolen election. I questioned the desirability of the UK being saddled with not one but two new opinion-led “news” channels (GB News and a Murdoch venture, which would eventually debut as TalkTV). Alas, my thoughts did not please Angelos, who was outraged at my “<a href="https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/gb-news-impartiality-political-bias/">false imagining</a>” that his channel would not be impartial. According to him, I had “misunderstood Ofcom’s due impartiality rules, which do not allow a biased news station in this country”. Mm. Maybe I have also misunderstood the shoplifting laws, which do not allow shoplifting in this country. And yet, shoplifters and biased news stations exist.</p><p>Spool forward in disbelief to this week, where the media “regulator” Ofcom has found GB News <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67194055">in breach of impartiality rules yet again</a>. Biologists will know that, along with sloths and anteaters, Ofcom belongs to the order edentata – toothless mammals – so its comment was: “We expect GB News to take careful account of this decision in its compliance of future programming”. Quite why it expects that is a mystery, given this is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News#:~:text=As%20of%20October%202023%20Ofcom,additional%20investigations%20are%20still%20pending">fifth time</a> GB News has been found in breach of rules that Frangopoulos once claimed were existential for any UK news channel. Maybe the problem with GB News is that it talks to itself and is so hyper-elite that it essentially exists consequence-free.</p><p>Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist</p><p><em><strong>Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tone/letters"> letters</a> section, please <a href="mailto:guardian.letters@theguardian.com?body=Please%20include%20your%20name,%20full%20postal%20address%20and%20phone%20number%20with%20your%20letter%20below.%20Letters%20are%20usually%20published%20with%20the%20author%27s%20name%20and%20city/town/village.%20The%20rest%20of%20the%20information%20is%20for%20verification%20only%20and%20to%20contact%20you%20where%20necessary.">click here</a>.</strong></em></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/ofcom-gb-news-tory-mp-impartial-angelo-frangopoulos">Continue reading...</a>