Fluent Radical

The Americans are getting worked up because of a new law, McCain-Feingold, that makes it a crime to screen certain political ads before elections. As a Brit, I’d love to have their problems. Here in Britain it’s basically illegal to screen any political ads at any time by any one.

Parties can’t screen ads for their candidates (they get a few `official’ broadcasts that each last 5 minutes in the run up to elections, you can imagine how much they get watched). But also, independent groups can’t screen ads that in any way touch on politics. In Britain, you can’t run an ad that supports or opposes a bill, just as you can’t run issue ads that say, call for lower taxes. Nope, all against the law.

We also have speech codes, produced by the regulator Ofcom, that require `impartiality’ and no `undue prominence of views and opinions’ from broadcasters. Note that this is ridiculous since in Britain, the media are without question left-wing to varying degrees. In practice, `impartiality’ means adhering to the dominant centre-left line of the BBC. This makes things like partisan talk radio a punishable offence. No Howard Stern or Hugh Hewitt over here. Both illegal. Certainly no FOX.

I’ll reiterate that this isn’t just during election season, this is ever.

To American conservatives, think how much more dominant the left-wing MSM would be now if your parties and organisations had been banned from ever screening ads, if talk radio was banned, and if FOX news could never have been founded. Here in Britain, all those things can never happen, by law.

So by all means criticize the new bill, because for God’s sake don’t let your country end up like this one, but at the same time, you guys are lucky. And free.

The recent news that employers may face ethnic quotas is even stupider than you think.

I created a simulation of the hiring process for firms to estimate the chance of falling foul of these quotas even if you are perfectly non-discriminatory.

Assumptions: the population is completely homogenous in terms of skills, and ethnic minorities form 10% of the population.

Let’s suppose that your application for government work will be considered unfavourably if ethnic minorities make up less than half the percentage of your workforce as in the population.

Results:

• If you have 100 employees, and are absolutely completely non-prejudiced against minority applicants, there is a 2.3% chance of breaking the rules anyway.
• If you have 50 employees, there is an 11.3% chance.

Youch! Not the kind of risks a business should be taking. What to do, what to do?

I know, discriminate in favour of minority applicants! What are the statistics for that?

Result:

• If you have 100 employees, you’d better start giving around a 55% greater weight to job applications from ethnic minorities if you want your chance of totally innocently being denied contracts to fall below 1%.

Well at least its clear what you have to do. If you have ten applicants for a position, nine white, one black, you should pick the black guy about 15% of the time.

Of course, this is just what firms should be doing in the long run, obviously if you are below the line right now you need to work a bit harder at being diverse, and give a really much bigger weight to minority applications.

Do I sense a business opportunity here? Do you think firms would pay money for statistical analyses of this type? After all, it’s only good risk management. It could work out the exact ‘affirmative action’ quotient your business needs at any given time.

Of course, since racism certainly exists, for many it won’t be an ‘affirmative action’ quotient, so much as a counterbalance for prejudice that actually exists.

Needless to say, it hardly seems as though policies of this sort are going to end racism as we know it.

(If you want the code for my simulation, ask in the comments. It’s in Ruby)

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of The European Union (PDF) is a very confusing document. Reading it, I begin to understand why there is so much confusion about human rights in this country.
For instance, it is not spelled out on whom human rights are obligations, but we can infer from the text that the rights apply to private citizens as well as governments.

As support of this claim, Article 3, “Right to the integrity of the person” states that in the fields of medicine “the free and informed consent of the person concerned” must be respected. This must be a right that is binding upon private citizens since it only applies to relations between doctors and their patients.

In addition Article 29 says that “Everyone has the right of access to a free placement service.” This either means:

1. that law cannot restrict a citizens right to consult a free placement service, or
2. that by law, some other people must have an obligation to provide or at least fund this service, free of charge.

Since I think that it means number 2, we discover that indeed, rights in this document place obligations not only on governments but on individuals.

Therefore, we can only conclude that Article 9, “The right to marry shall be guaranteed”, implies that should you wish to marry, a man or woman must be found and compelled to oblige. *

Applying this conclusion to Article 24, which says that children “may express their views freely”, must mean that parents have a duty to allow their kids to speak exactly as they see fit.

The only meaning of Article 13 - “The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint.” - which is consistent with the rest of the document is that it is a breach of the charter to obstruct a scientist in the execution of his duty. Financial budgets - no matter how large - are a constraint upon research. Therefore, we could provide scientists with all the money in the world, and even then, we wouldn’t succeed in removing the constraint.

As I said, it’s a confusing document. I assume that there are some other documents, perhaps obscure legal opinions, that explain why the text doesn’t actually mean what it says it means. It would be nice if the learned gentlemen who decide (presumbly from inside their own heads) what rights we actually have, could in some way feed this esoteric knowledge back into the text. Otherwise the Charter will remain the obstacle to the understanding of human rights that it is now.

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* Incidentally, if it’s important to give people the right to marry if they wish, isn’t it just as important to give people the right not to marry? If it’s possible that at some point in the future the government could require you not to be married for whatever reason, and therefore we need to guard against that possibility by creating a human right, isn’t it just as plausible that the government could require you to be married, and isn’t that just as much something that we should be protected from with a human right?

Coming out as a conservative to my family was an interesting experience. (I did it a little bit before Cameron arrived.) Reactions varied widely. Some were simply astonished. Others, I am sure, considered it (and still consider it) a betrayal. The most memorable comment has been

I just don’t think you can be a conservative and a christian at the same time.

Hmmm. Well, since I’m not christian I suppose that’s ok.

It is interesting that when compared to some in my family, I am very liberal. There are members of my family who believe in bringing back the death penalty and sending all asylum seekers home to be tortured. (I don’t think they are too hot on the gays either.) But it’s my supporting the Conservative Party that’s really scary.

In my head I get the chance to thoroughly explain why I am conservative and through a kind of Socratic dialogue bring my relatives onside. In real life there are no such opportunities.

One time someone did ask me outright, in shocked tones, “why are you a conservative?!”. I replied, ducking the question entirely, “because I hate poor people.” This was hilarious because for about 5 solid seconds everyone just looked shocked. It took the one other guy in the room who I know to be Tory to start laughing before they picked up I was joking. Sheesh.

That was from The West Wing of course. The hot Republican guy is asked by the hot Democrat babe, why is he a Republican?

Because I hate poor people. They don’t have jobs, some of them smell bad. I hate them Donna.

Fortunately I had this in my head when I was asked to defend myself, and I think it’s an effective way of unloading the question.

Of course this is less necessary now that Cameron has done such a good job of decontaminating the brand. In a way it makes me sad. There’s nothing like being a real Radical.

Tomorrow I’m flying to the United States o yes.

Actually, holidaymaking in the US is closely related to blogging in my mind. You notice that the archives on the right go from June last year? Well that was just after coming home from a trip to Washington D.C., where I read The Right Nation and decided that it was time to start blogging.

That is one seriously inspirational book. If you are on the right and in the UK then this is such a great read for cheering you up. It describes how the Republican Party went from being almost locked out of power in the sixties, with permanent minorities in both houses of Congress, to being in a position of unprecedented strength. It’s like a manual for how to build a right-wing political coalition, even though the authors are scrupulously even-handed.

I’ve been away from blogging for a while, and I’ve decided to re-read The Right Nation while on holiday. Hopefully it will inspire me to return to the keyboard when I get back.

Something I’ve been thinking about a bit in the last few days is the following question:

Are there political circumstances, less than dictatorship or communism etc, that would make you leave the UK for another country, say the USA?

For instance, for all conservatives reading, suppose that Britain became very obviously a region in a European state.  Suppose that we approached Swedish levels of taxation. Suppose the counties lost virtually all power to regional assemblies. Suppose Parliament lost all power to Brussels. All weights and measures everywhere must be solely metric including distance and beer. Suppose our military was unable to act independently of Continental political support. Suppose the United States no longer considered us a partner militarily or diplomatically. Suppose the common law was rationalised into a Roman system to permit greater integration. Suppose that Britain was a republic, with proportional representation and state funded political parties. Suppose there were European taxes, a harmonised exam system at 16 and 18, and a common European university degree qualification. Suppose the European Social Model and Polly Toynbee triumphed completely.

Would you stick around? Or would you prefer to live in a country that respected your political beliefs, and was created from the traditions that had been destroyed in Britain?

For myself, I really don’t know. I love my country, but like Rand, maybe I demand reasons to love it as well.

News from Oxford University, the great appeasers:

Oxford colleges are to lose their 800-year-old right to select undergraduates in response to Government pressure to admit more students from state schools and lower social classes.

I tried and failed to get into Cambridge twice. Guess what? It never even crossed my mind that it had anything to do with me being from a state school. Fact: not until right now, 5 years later, have I considered the possibility. And rejected it.

Also is news:

Candidates will be able to state a college preference once they have been offered a place but in principle all successful applicants will be centrally ranked on the basis of their performance, then distributed randomly.

Idea: what OU needs … is a sorting hat!

Actually this leads to an interesting idea (it’s like that lateral thinking technique). If you’ve got a school with ‘houses’, as I understand some extremely posh schools did/do (anyone know?), then you should give all entrants an in-depth psych test. Then house 1 can be the studious and hard working, house 2 can be the sporty types, house 3 can be the irritating prodigy geeks, and house 4 can be the party animals. Wouldn’t that make school life go much more smoothly?

Last night was my first time out canvassing for the Conservatives ever. It was survey canvassing, so we knock, say:

Hello, sorry to bother you. We’re doing a resident’s survey on behalf of the Wimbledon Conservative party, and I was wondering if you had a few moments to give us your opinions on a range of local issues in this questionnaire.

Although the first time I tried it, it was more like:

hellosorrytobother youwe’redoingaresident’ssurveyonbehalfoftheWimbledon
ConservativepartyandIwaswonderingifyouhadafewmomentstogiveusyouropi
nionsonarangeoflocalissuesinthisquestionnaire.

thanksverymuchbye.

Some observations:

• Although terrified of knocking on a stranger’s door at first, by the end I was perfectly happy with it all. The two ladies I was out with - one a councillor - were very nice and supportive.
• There are more ingenious ways than you might think to hide or disguise your doorbell.
• In the two streets we were canvassing roughly one gate in five worked properly. This despite being a ten minute walk from a B&Q and in a fairly well-off area in Wimbledon.
• A well-kept garden is no guarantee of niceness.
• Don’t do streets at the same time as carol singers - people get confused.

I look forward to picking it up again after the new year.

*Sigh*

The reason posting has been so light on optimates for the past week is that me and a few fellow bloggers have launched a new blog.

The Cameron Leadership is the new place for news about David Cameron and Cameron’s leadership. Why not head over there now?