Willful waste - 1 comment

'Stop wasting food', urges Brown. It's a shame people have concentrated on what this means for Britain - supposedly £8 of food being thrown away per week by the average household - rather than on this somewhat more damning statistic:

[...] up to 40% of food harvested in developing countries can be lost before it is consumed, due to the inadequacies of processing, storage and transport.

Not being able to sell their products affects the livelihoods of far more people, who have far less to live on.

It is a little ridiculous for Brown to have to ask people to change their own behaviour in order to save themselves some money. However correct the cause, Governments have to allow individuals to make their own mistakes (to remind them is embarrassing for all concerned), and to address those mistakes themselves by buying less food if the £8 is indeed worth their while saving. Besides, this wastage of food probably helps rather than hinders poor food producers, so I must declare myself neutral on this aspect (read: blind alley) of the global food debate.

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One thing that immediately struck me when reading the piece, though, was: would the Government have been brave enough to suggest that people might save money by using less petrol, or that by borrowing less they might insulate themselves from rising interest rates? People inevitably realise this and adapt accordingly, but the reaction to a politician stating it would be furious.

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Returning to food, the Conservatives miss the point as usual:

Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said government departments should set a better example.

[...] But while the government is telling households to reduce food waste it has no idea how much food it is throwing away itself. This is yet again a clear case of the government saying 'do as we say not as we do'.

Feeble. Meanwhile, Lib Dem environment spokesman, Steve Webb, blames supermarkets:

Supermarkets make it harder for householders to avoid food waste, while throwing away large quantities of edible food through poor stock management. [...]

In this era of long-life food, fridges, and freezers, and with food generally being non-addictive, the only justification for not eating food before the use-by date is either greed, or (in my case) laziness. Please credit the people with some intelligence. As for stock management, supermarkets already pay a penalty for poor decisions, by being unable to sell food they've paid for, and by having to pay for its disposal, something shoppers would otherwise have done. These feel like big enough incentives already.

Compass on Boris - 3 comments

I can't think of any positive reasons why anyone would vote for Boris Johnson for London Mayor. What concerns me, though, is the distinct possibility that Compass - who have launched a 'dossier' (PDF) about the Johnson threat - will find one by mistake.

Compass, and everyone else in the Labour Party, ought to be offering positive reasons why Ken Livingstone should be re-elected, as well as impressing on Ken the need to avoid needlessly alienating many of his party's supporters by (for one thing) chumming-up with foreign dictators - part of the reason why he isn't a shoo-in (a mere 7-4 on) right now. We really must avoid insulting the electorate's intelligence by claiming, as Doreen Lawrence (why?) has, that Johnson they mustn't even think of standing voting for Johnson because cities have a 'unity' (perhaps in the same way that cities can be offended, as Liverpool's spokesmen once claimed it to be) that would be damaged by the election of someone with divergent views. Sorry, but can such sentimental tripe possibly convince anyone over the legal voting age? Adults conduct politics based upon policy (OK, fine, but they should), not identity, and we need to prepare for the day when the Conservatives decide to stand a proper politician as candidate for Mayor. Or PM, for that matter.

Via Tom. Tyger is somewhat in agreement.

Update: fixed an error; added a link.

An activist speaks... - 1 comment

Farbeit from me to defend David Cameron, but a drivel-obsessed media is hardly much more of a pleasant prospect than his premiership. So an 'activist' - Mr. Ali Miraj - is able to get media coverage for repeating the truism that "substance has been replaced by PR" among the Conservative leadership - while continuing to seek a position as a parliamentary candidate - and criticising his party leader's judgement "over his decision to visit Rwanda to learn about development issues while parts of his Oxfordshire constituency suffered flooding".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but would Cameron's presence in Witney during the flooding serve any useful purpose other than being a PR opportunity? I'm assuming Cameron's leadership skills wouldn't have been called upon to organise flood defences, rescue the stranded, or repair the damage left behind, whilst it was possible that visiting Rwanda would indeed improve his understanding of international development issues - issues that affect us all. What kind of impulse do you think Miraj was trying to appeal to there, all you Conservative-watchers?

I think it's only fair that if Cameron decides to dispense with this activist's services, we'll cut him a little slack.

An equal and opposite reaction - 1 comment

Just to prove that 'moderate' is a mere step away from 'extremist', and that looking like a recruitment consultant really does make you an enemy of all things human, yet another CiF post that spirals into madness towards the end, with two choice sentences:

Targeting and killing innocent people is wrong whether done by terrorists in London or via the illegal occupation of another country.

That sly little via. Who knows what horrors could conceivably occur at the end of a road that begins with the illegal occupation of another country? But I'm not buying that: I'm going to suggest the most reasonable interpretation is that the two possibilities must occur at the same time, at the same distance along their respective paths. That is, we're really being asked to compare 'targeting and killing innocent people' with 'illegal occupation of another country', and if Mr. Masroor feels this is debatable, how seriously can we take his earlier, less equivocating statements?

Don't think too hard, for this corker is just a full stop away (my link added):

To quote Sir Isaac Newton's definition of the laws of physics, our actions in Iraq must have equal and opposite reactions - our policies in the Middle East will haunt us for centuries and that is the price we will have to pay for our misguided former prime minister.

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I think B4L's readers are intelligent enough to see the essential difference between fundamentals of mechanics and physics on one hand, and human decision-making on the other. It's something most of us have an innate feel for as we look up at the bars of our cots, and which all too many dangerous idiots train themselves to deny.

Hard-working families - 4 comments

The Times brings us the news that "Thousands of buy-to-let families face tax shock".

The article's feeble and shamelessly partisan rhetoric has already been cut to pieces, but what is tragic is to see the same "boo" and "warm" words traded by all mainstream political parties. How demeaning it is to contemporary politics that people out for themselves can still be held up for pity in front of a less well-off electorate, and the stupid and greedy protected on the grounds that they have a home, a spouse, and perhaps dependants.

It continues to stink.

Another blogging witch-hunt - 1 comment

That the Mail on Sunday is happy to smear and victimise an individual (blogger) on the basis of their perceived political stance shouldn't surprise; what is depressing is to see other bloggers wading in to score the same political points.

It's not so much the Conservative-Labour aspect that bothers me - after all, I'm not at all sure that Owen Barder, the victim here, is indeed a Labour supporter - no, it's the crassness of the attack, the lack of thought for the individual concerned, for the reputation of bloggers, for the possibility of meaningful civil-servant blogging, as well as the resemblance of the perpetrator to something that shoots out from under a rarely-moved rug during a spring-clean.

Tim Worstall and Ministry of Truth have also posted about this.

Perhaps an alternative to the blogging "code of conduct" is some kind of "blacklist", that moves the burden of proof from the majority of bloggers who - for want of a better criterion - treat other bloggers as they would be treated, to the tiny majority who we only encounter when they sink their fangs into us, or someone we know. It shouldn't be too difficult to convince an independent panel of this, surely. How they could operate such a blacklist, once sentence has been passed, I leave as an exercise to readers. Just a thought.

I might make a full return to blogging this week...

Update: "Simon Walters is a Lying Scumbag" - the Mail on Sunday journalist, that is. I know, there's more going on in the world than this.

The Benn decade - 6 comments

Surely one of the silliest articles ever posted at Comment Is Free, Neil Clark - or, most likely, a child making their first, tentative foray into political writing - fantasises about the possibility of a three-term Labour government headed by, of all people, Tony Benn.

Tom H says what needs to be said, but the piece is so inane I hope he didn't spend too long on the critique.

In a similar vein, here's an interesting site that tries to judge the Labour government's adherence - in 2007 - to the "statements and conference decisions of 1992-4". Interesting it may be, but if the plan is to show how Labour has "sold out" (how else do people's minds change?) since the last "democratic/legitimate" setting-out of aims, then it's a ridiculous one. We're not talking about fundamental moral principles, but about - often - specific economic policies. I know economic understanding isn't evenly distributed, but surely 15 years is a long time in that business?

The appropriate baseline for future policy is today, not 1997, and not 1992. We should be asking the peddlers of policies past to justify their contemporary relevance - which is not necessarily difficult - rather than resorting to absent-minded dreams of Utopia.

The Web: enough already? - 2 comments

I'm getting increasingly irritated by articles attacking the political blogosphere (yes, blogosphere) - having covered the issue here already - online communities (e.g. Facebook), and user-generated content (e.g. the Wikipedia, and other Wikis).

Today's Observer has the latest: "Enough! The Briton who is challenging the web's endless cacophony":

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

I've never heard of him, but he has a book out in June (what do you expect from a Sunday newspaper?), and appeals to authority (thanks, Wikipedia!) are just so tempting.

Keen, who still lives in California and works in technology, questions the euphoria surrounding the rise of citizen journalism, online communities such as MySpace and user-generated websites including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and video-sharing site YouTube.

First problem: he questions the euphoria. OK, I quite like the technologies mentioned, but I don't express euphoria, and have been easily able to avoid those journalists who promote it, so how about we agree to drop all mentions of euphoria and stick to how the sites are actually used, day-to-day?

Keen has been praised for applying the brakes to what seems to have become a runaway train: the idea that anyone can use technology to gain control of the media and change the world.

Runaway trains, massive influxes, rising tides... they're everywhere, nowadays.

On his own blog last week, Keen noted growing support for his views: 'It's game on. Now the fun begins.' Oliver Kamm, an author and columnist, has accused bloggers of 'poisoning debate'.

This is so, but Kamm's opener and response were cut to pieces by some of the best political bloggers around (e.g. here and here), and the remains danced-upon with hobnailed boots at Normblog:

Oliver picks me up at one point for comparing blog discussion with the public meeting, when his own comparative reference point is the press and broadcasting media; he's judging blogging as a form of citizen journalism. But blogging is sui generis. It may be like citizen journalism in some ways; yet blogs and their audiences can also be seen as micro-communities of bloggers, readers and discussants, virtual segments of the public square in which voluntarily formed collectives, with participants free to come and go, consider issues that they want to consider. What can 'overproduction of opinion' mean in this context? Should all these people stop writing and reading and commenting unless they have been certified as competent? The complaint of overproduction of opinion doesn't sit well with the theme of freedom of opinion, or with the rights of members of a democratic society to assemble as they wish for legitimate common purposes.

And no one is forced to be a consumer.

As no response has appeared, I consider that to be the end of that particular debate.

Keen's interview continues:

As the internet grows, so do reports of faked identities and stalking on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, deliberately misleading entries on Wikipedia, virtual vandalism in online world Second Life and accusations that YouTube is a forum for either copyright infringement or mind-numbing videos of skateboarding cats. Critics believe the trends may have reached their logical, horrific conclusion last month when Kevin Whitrick, a father-of-two from Shropshire, hanged himself in front of his webcam watched live by members of an internet chatroom.

Sensationalist drivel. Anyone old enough to have been internet-savvy ten years ago - or longer - will recognise the same themes, and the same scaremongering. Everything listed above could have - and has been - done before online, albeit in perhaps a cruder and less visually exciting form. All that's changed is that a journalist has decided to spin things the other way for a change: perhaps someone with a book to promote, or an identity to find.

Keen, 47, presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

I wonder if it's significant that Keen's age makes its first appearance here, in what could so easily be a rant about "the state of modern music". Ultimately it shows a detachment with the human race: an assumption that the masses click "whimsically", and that the deep appreciation of history and literature developed during their school years will dissipate as they helplessly click from one teenager's blog to another, imbibing the self-obsessedness of each.

Maybe Keen would like to differentiate between the Bloggers4Labour Facebook group and a real-life Labour branch, because if he can spot some kind of essential difference, I can't. Perhaps one the one hand we both "confirm our own prejudices". On the other, perhaps we talk about things and change our minds, in a rather human way, and would swiftly tire and go elsewhere if we couldn't. It's a thought, isn't it?

He continued: 'I'm nostalgic for the world I grew up in where there was a clear distinction between author and audience. I'm not attracted or impressed by the idea of collapsing that distinction. It's hard to be good at what you're doing, it requires expertise. In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.'

Well, we have technical qualifications so that people who fancy having a go at being a doctor can be assessed on their competency before killing their first patient, but except insofar as other members of the public put themselves in their hands, people should try different jobs and roles in order that they can be publicly assessed on their competency. Writing - in a democratic, pluralist society - is a public good. It should be encouraged, and anyone arrogant enough to say that "most people do not have anything interesting to say" should try living in solitary confinement for a week or so.

Blogging provides an easy way for anyone to publish their ideas, and just as easy a way for people to judge them. Anyone concerned that those with talent and expertise are failing to get the attention they deserve should consider the huge head, and enormously long tail that blog traffic demonstrates.

Keen criticises Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia for making it impossible to discern the important from the trivial. 'Wikipedia is going to become the internet,' he said. 'It does away with the distinction between the distinguished and the ordinary and becomes a bizarre compendium of information. The absence of editors means there's no way of determining whether something is important, so you get a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. I want to learn about Martin Luther's epiphany, not the epiphany of the 11-year-old who blogs next door.

What kind of person judges the importance of an article based upon its size, or popularity? Anyone who reads the Pankhurst article will quickly realise she was a key figure in the struggle for the enfranchisement of women - a matter of concern across the world - and be directed to articles that will allow them to continue their research. Anyone happening upon the Pamela Anderson article will realise that she has played, at best, a bit-part in the major struggles of the past century, and has limited relevance to the downtrodden of the Earth, if that's how you judge "importance". Encyclopaedias cannot teach you what is important: you have to bring that with you, and if you don't have a clue, you can hardly blame the Web for taking you off down blind alleys.

As far as I'm concerned, the Web is sufficiently large, diverse, and democratic to meet the objections of Keen and others. People are smart enough to ration their own intake of trivia and escapism; curious and intelligent enough not to accept everything they read as fact; sufficiently averse to online abuse to try to push it off their own sites and contain it elsewhere; while editors who manage repositories of information are generally sensible enough to preserve its honesty and integrity. Until someone can show me that these are not generally true on the Web (or significantly less true there than off-line), I'm going to continue trying to make the most of all these new opportunities.

Update (30/04): Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also has a pop at the blogosphere (via The Daily Ablution). You can probably imagine all too well how it goes, and sure enough, it takes Keen's piece and adds the hysteria of a Daily Mail reader who hears a crash and finds an asylum-seeker's football in their kitchen sink. It's completely and utterly awful.

Mobile phone masts, and other incredible statistics - no comments

Says Rhod, via The Independent:

Two giant mobile phone companies are to move a mast at a primary school, after parents claimed their children fell sick [...]

I've long thought the "mobile phone mast health scandal" issue, that spreads from area to area rather like a circus - or a plague - was one of those classic situations where anxious parents' specious and unscientific claims were whipped up by ignorant journalists and ambitious local opposition politicians, with impressive-sounding statistics only being properly scrutinised after the political tornado had passed. Perhaps I've missed a subtlety somewhere along the line.

Their results showed 56 per cent of the children and 86 per cent of the staff had problems sleeping, 54 per cent and 59 per cent respectively were getting headaches and migraines, and 46 per cent and 95 per cent respectively reported fatigue and numbness.

The effects of the St Edward's RC primary school's phone mast - which is in Warwickshire - must be strong indeed, as I can attest to having experienced all of the mentioned symptoms during the 11 years covered, none of which could possibly be explained by other factors: everything from headaches, migraines, to insomnia, dizziness, and nausea. I've even heard "strange hums and clicks", but then I do like Autechre. It appears that staff are far more susceptible (95%, compared to 46%, are honest enough to declare this fact) to "fatigue and numbness". As the son of two teachers, I couldn't possibly comment on this scientific conundrum...

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Meanwhile, the BBC reveal that England cricket captain legend, Michael Vaughan, has successfully called a coin-toss six times in succession. Broadsheet science editors were "stumped" by this seeming mathematical impossibility until a Tipton resident revealed to the world's press that he owned a "powerful magnet", squeezed his eyes closed, and walked in circles around his sitting-room, humming loudly, and with his fingers crossed, while each toss was made, in order to achieve the desired result for England.

A Likely Story - no comments

A correspondent writes:

Today after a long days work (Yes I work weekends and holidays in a failing attempt to cover the direct and indirect taxes your party has inflicted on us) However having missed my nephews birthday I tried to log on to my bank to give hime what I hope will be a tax free birthday gift.

Unfortunartley I was unable to do so as my PC has been infected by a virus that will only open your odius website. My bank has also suspeneded all of my internet activity till "further notice"

I'm disgusted and be assured will be taking thi s further

[Name supplied]

I responded by pointing out a few inconsistencies in the account, and offered the following pieces of advice: (1) don't make unsubstantiated threats; (2) buy a virus scanner; (3) stop using Microsoft Windows. I know computer-newbies can get very confused, but isn't it pathetic to see people so consumed by political paranoia?

Happy Easter, everyone!

Student Respect - 3 comments

Via NewerLabour (also here), here's what purports to be (though it could so easily be a spoof) an NUS election broadcast from the student wing of the "RESPECT Coalition" - probably (though I'll accept alternative nominations) the most brain-addling of the many fascist-apologising political organisations found on these isles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jEA92uJwKk

I may embed a video in here some day, but I'm certainly not going to start here. Please swallow whatever you're eating or drinking before viewing.

Update: some more Respect-oriented idiocy (not deserving of a post in its own right): Lena de Casparis' silly article at CiF on the injustice of Ugly Rumours' "War" track (complete with George Galloway cameo) not doing better in the charts. I listened to it so you don't have to, and even in today's "hit parade" this doesn't deserve to be higher than #21.