MP Expenses

What an unbelieveable pile of crap. How has this story dominated the news for so long? It’s so insignificant as to be a total non-event in my opinion. They had an expense allowance. They had rules. They had an overseight body. They claimed and were told they were within the rules and given the money. Now they’ve got to pay it back because … well, I can only come back to jealousy and envy. They followed the rules, they shouldn’t have to pay it back. If you disagree with the rules, then they should be changed, but people who complied with them should not be forced to pay back what they claimed. It’s a fundamental fule of justice, that changes to the rules should not be retroactive! Not breaking the rules is not grounds for punishment.

Take the case of the guy who’s having to repay £41,000. Now, even if every MP had to repay a similar sum that’s only about £2.7 million. Yes, I say only. The budget of the NHS alone was £90 billion in 2007 and was set to reach £110 billion in two years time. That’s one service the government provides which is over 33 thousand times higher than what would take to give every MP £41,000. And, of course, the £41,000 repay was accumulated over 4 years. So it’s even less siginificant. It would work out to £675,000 a year, or 133 thousand times smaller than the budget of the NHS. It wouldn’t even make a dent in the NHSs £900 million deficit last year.

Lets say the figure for MPs over claiming is actually massive and averages to £15,000 per MP, per year (not the case considering the largest ‘over claim’ is £41,000 over four years, or £10,250 per year). Lets also say we can get every penny of that back at zero cost (impossible) and lets round it up to a nice even £4 million reclaimed. Lets say we then give all of the money reclaimed from the past four years to the education department. The education department gets around £80 billion a year. If we translate that to numbers which can be more easily comprehended, it’s like giving a minimum income worker, pulling in £12,000 a year an extra 60 pence. It’s not going to change anything for that person. They can now afford an extra bar of chocolate. They’ll be thrilled.

Okay, lets say we were even more specific and gave that £4 million to primary schools, which have a budget of £700 million. Now we’re talking! That’s the equivalent to giving our £12,000 a year worker an injection of almost £70! Not life changing, sure, but they’ll be able to buy… well, maybe they’ll be able to replace a broken part on their car which didn’t seem worth it before. Or they might be able to take a loved one out for a nice meal.

Of course, the assumptions made are crazy. There’s no way that reclaiming the money would come without cost. There’s no way that the over claim by MPs is that high. The whole thing is a total non-event. Complete storm in a tea-cup.

Interestingly (or actually not if you’re even slightly clued up on how the media operates) it was actually quite hard to find a web news page that said the £41,000 repay figure even in the same paragraph as the fact it’s spread over four years.

I think the story should have been told as: “Look how many MPs don’t claim nearly any of their allowed expenses! What a bunch of freaks/saints!” (depends on how you want to spin it) Seriously, how many people can honestly say that, if their company was to offer to pay for something that they would say no? How many people, when offered either money for, or money towards their work-related costs say no to that money? I would venture to say very few, and further to venture that the ones who do say no say that because of the difficulty of claiming, not because it’s morally wrong to claim. These MPs claimed when everyone of us would have claimed and we hang them out to dry for it!

Of course, there are those who are arguing that it’s not the money, it’s the principle. These people followed the rules and got money. They were open about what it was being spent on. It’s a fucking disgrace! They should all be strung up and shot! No, wait. Hang on. That actually sounds like reasonable behaviour to me. There’s the guy who had his daughter stay with him. He’s a total fiend of course. We want our MPs to be good family people, but not in a house part paid for by us, goddamnit! We want our MPs to represent us and be normal people and we want them present at Parliament and able to vote on the issues of the day, yet we want to make it so that only the disgustingly wealthy can actually hope to be an MP because we want them to finance their own central London houses!

I’ve heard it suggested that MPs should share bed sits… which is a really wonderful idea. Yes, lets have the leaders of the country hunkering down like crack addicts, four to a room!

I hate the coverage of this story because it is so petty. The premises at work are envy and jealousy. The ones demanding these MPs act like super humans are themselves acting like brats who’ve just been told the kid next door has got a new bike.

It strikes me that this story is being used to try and distract us from the worsening economic situation. For fear that we might notice that the system is seriously broken and we might get it into our precious little heads that maybe it needs changing. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have a system built on growth! Maybe it’s not a good idea to have power and wealth pooled in a very small number of hands. Maybe we should think about doing things differently… no, wait! That guy there claimed expenses he was entitled to, in a way he was supposed to, for things he was allowed! Burn him! Get the mob together and tell them to put down the “We demand change” banners and grab up the pitch forks and flaming torches! It’s witch hunt time!

Debt

So, we’re all fairly sure that the current economic crisis is something to do with the banks lending money to people who couldn’t finance their debts. We’re reasonably sure of this because we’re quite certain that the American Sub-Prime mortgage market was where the problems started and that if they’d not lent money to those people then we’d all be fine now and would be enjoying the same level of economic growth as before. How true is all this ‘knowledge’ though?

Money is debt. The available pool of cash with which to do things comes from each of our promises to finance our debts. The money you paid for your house with almost certainly doesn’t physically exist anywhere. Unless you’re in the minute minority of people who paid for their house from their earnings, then you got out a mortgage, the majority of which would have been created ex-nihilo. It exists as a string of 1s and 0s on a computer. As you pay/paid your mortgage off most of the money you gave back disappeared. It had never truly existed in the first place. The only money which didn’t disappear was the interest and the reserve deposit equivalent. That is the amount they have which they can lend from. The ‘real’ money that allows them to make fake money out of nothing more than your promise to repay. Their reserve ratio could be as high as 24:1, they could be able to loan out 25 times the real money they have.

Okay, so the bank can lend out more money than it actually has, but this fake money it creates is destroyed as it’s repaid, leaving only the real money and the interest. At a reserve ratio of 9:1 (as I understand it, a fairly low, reasonably common rate) they can collect interest on a £10,000 loan while only having £1,111.12 of real money. The interest on that £10,000 loan is theirs to keep and they only need to recover £1,111.12 to get their initial investment back, the rest of the £10k will be destroyed once repaid anyway. Of course, that £10,000 loan will be deposited somewhere once the loan’s been used for whatever it was intended for. The £10,000 loan, once deposited, can be then used to make a further loan of £9,000. That £9,000 loan can then be used to make a further loan of £8,100, and so on until we’re approaching £100,000 of loans (and the interest payments on those loans) for a £1,111.12 initial deposit. If there were only one loan made then the bank could only collect on the £10,000 initial loan. However, with dozens of smaller loans after the initial large loan the bank can collect on £100,000. Lending to lots of people wanting smaller quantities makes the bank a lot of money from nothing.

So the banks can make the huge loans that large businesses want, then use those to make medium loans that medium businesses want, then use those to make loans that small businesses want, then use those to make loans that consumers want. All of the loans made with the same initial deposit by the central bank. And the interest collected on all of the loans can then be used to make more loans and collect more interest.

Of course, no bank would get the deposits from their own loan from every stage of this process, but since the banking system is a closed system, it effectively means that, since each bank gets some deposits from every other bank’s loans, it works out to the same thing in the end.

So, the total amount of money in the system and the total amount of interest the banks can ‘earn’ is entirely dependent on the demand for debt. If you can find a way to give money to everyone demanding debt in such a way that you can get your money back in some way, with some interest, then you will. Capitalist greed demands that we do everything possible to get that extra penny of profit. It doesn’t matter if your business model is that you lend money to people to buy houses, knowing they will probably be unable to pay, because you’re gambling that their house will be worth enough to cover that by the time you come to repossess it, you will do it, collect your profit and sleep sound at night. Ethical considerations are not part of a capitalist system.

That’s a lot of explaining to essentially say that the sub-prime market was good for the economy, until the housing market started to shrink instead of grow. Once houses were starting to lose value rather than gain it the system stopped working, the gamble turned sour. Our long, sustained growth period was thanks in no small part to the extra money generated by the sub-prime market. It’s just sad that the means we chose to fend off a small deflationary period will have the effect of causing a massive deflationary period. Cest la vie.

Growth isn’t sustainable. I’ve said it many times within the course of writing entries for this blog, but I feel the need to say it once again. Growth is not sustainable. No level of growth is sustainable. No level of depletion is sustainable. It’s logically obvious that both of these statements are necessarily true. Yet, our culture doesn’t accept that logic. It says that either the conclusion is wrong or that some form of technology will appear to allow us to defeat the conclusion. The amazing tech fix.

We have been lulled into believing in the tech fix because it’s worked for so long now that we can’t perceive a time when human innovation will not provide us with new and innovative ways to continue killing the planet. We even imagine such a situation – where we can’t think of a new way to continue business as usual – as horrific. It would be terrible if we had to deal with the Earth as a partner and not as a slave! Tech fixes have been possible because of easy access to cheap energy. If peak oil strips us of our easy access to cheap energy, will the tech fixes be possible? Probably not if we’ve not done wide scale, serious investment in the alternatives prior to the peak. If, as some people argue, the world has already peaked, then we’re too late. Time to ride the roller coaster.

The Complexity of Truth vs The Simplicity of Doubt

When talking about the current economic crisis, climate change, man’s negative impact on the planet, etc, it is often the case that the truth is massively complicated. Climate change, as an example, requires one to understand compliex chaotic interrelationships across much of the planet. The fact that we still have such poor weather forecasting, even over short time periods, is evidence that the systems are so complicated and chaotic that we don’t yet fully understand them. Explaining to people that past average global warming has caused northern Europe to disappear under two meters of ice is tricky, they can’t accept that a lot of the warmth we enjoy comes from the Gulf of Mexico via the Gulf stream. It seems counter intuitive to them that increases in warming over the planet may cause come areas to suffer from incredible freezing incidents.

Doubt, however, is easy. You pick one facet of an idea and take a liberal sprinkle of misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not, and then package it in certainties. You don’t follow the scientific language model, using qualified and uncertain terms. No, you make use of that scientific language in entirely the wrong way. You nit-pick, you poke holes, you highlight where scientific language makes it seem like there is a lot of uncertainty (it doesn’t matter that good science is full of such language, even when reasonably certain). Doubt is easy to generate, because science doubts itself all the time. The scientific method doesn’t prove, it dis-proves. You come up with how you think things are, what would be the case if they weren’t and then experiment. The experiment never proves that things are a certain way, only that they aren’t. If a statement can’t be disproven then it’s not science, it’s a tautology or it’s non-sense. If you have no criteria which would compel you to change your position, then you’re not engaged in science, you’re engaged in dogma and religion.

Both sides of a debate can often be accused of dogmatic adherence to their personal beliefs. Often it’s the case that they don’t admit what it would take for the other side to convince them that they are wrong. Often they don’t admit to themselves that there’s even a chance they are wrong. They believe they have arrived at their position by examining all the evidence critically, so how could they possibly be wrong?

I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be wrong. I’d love it if someone were able to show conclusively that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. That the nuclear industry is safe. That the economy can grow exponentially forever without negative side effects. That mankind is smarter than yeast. I long for these things to be the case, because it would mean a much, much nicer future to look forward to. Hell, if I’m wrong then there is actually a future to look forward to! Wouldn’t that be great?

Those Less Fortunate

One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.

I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.

I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.

When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?

How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?

The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.

Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.

Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.

In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.

The Crucifix

Right, so you want to remember Jesus, you want to show piety, you want to wear your religious commitment for those around you to see, whatever reason you have for wearing a crucifix, stop. Seriously. If you believe in the second coming especially, stop. When Jesus comes back to Earth do you really think he wants to see another cross? It’s like wearing a sniper rifle pendent and going up to JFK’s kids and telling them you’re wearing the pendent because you want to remember John (stolen from Bill Hicks). They almost certainly wouldn’t be pleased!

Maybe I’m mis-reading Christs pain and suffering, maybe I mis-understand when he asks for the cup to pass from his lips, for his father to make it so he doesn’t have to suffer and die. Maybe I don’t get how wearing the object that killed him is respectful. But if I were Jesus (and I accept that I could never be since I am all human and no divinity) and I were coming back to the planet I’d died a horrible death to save, died for sins I had not committed, died for people who didn’t even accept that I had even lived, the last thing I would want to see would be another cross.

I’ll get around to the actual point of this post now: People like Nadia Eweida who believe that it’s either an important part of their faith, or necessary for a Christian to wear one. I can’t think of many things less true, more intended to spark religious based racial feuds. The purpose of the court cases are for people to shout and cry and gnash their teeth about how this is no longer Our country and is now Their country. We are white, We are Christian, We are people born here with parents and grandparents who were born here. They are not-white, They are not-Christian, They may have been born here, but They don’t have parents and/or grandparents who were born here.

Us versus Them. Classic dichotomy.

The plain and simple truth is that we have no culture of wearing religious icons because of two things: 1) Christianity doesn’t demand we do; and 2) Christianity demands no false icons. If you’re wearing a cross then there is the risk that you are creating a false icon. The cross isn’t what is being worshipped, the Lord is. Wearing the cross takes focus from the Lord, it creates competition and God hates that.

This has only become an issue in recent years due to the way Christians are feeling threatened by Muslims. Muslims have a lot of religious based cultural dress and behavioural requirements. You can more often than not tell a strict Muslim just by looking at them. The same is not true for a Christian. Christians are required by their faith to not draw attention to themselves like hypocrites do. They are commanded to not deny their faith, especially when asked, but they are also commanded to not pray loudly, to not even let the left hand know that the right hand is giving charity. Christianity teaches that being brash and loud about good deeds and about your faith without invitation have their rewards here on Earth, not in Heaven. If you let a lot of people know you’re generous to charities then you have your reward – the admiration of your fellow man. If you let a lot of people know you’re pious and go to church every Sunday then you have your reward – the admiration of your fellow man (taken from the book of Matthew, 6:1 onwards). Christianity doesn’t want its followers to proclaim their faith loudly as the Muslims do.

What am I getting at? Christians should stop court cases such as these. You lose your rewards in Heaven. You lose the credit with God that you’ve built up. You should also stop wearing the cross. Jesus wouldn’t be impressed.

Questions and Answers

The name of this blog is inspired by Endgame by Derrick Jensen.

Often the premises of the media are shrouded in secrecy. We have to read between the lines to try to understand where the news writers stand, for example. This leads to the right being able to claim the media is left wing, and the left being able to claim the media is right wing. The obscurity of the premises that the media operates on results in this situation. A given media source will be written by a lot of people and so can easily be accused of a lot of different things. A person levelling such criticism is likely to focus on the aspects which support their case and ignore the aspects which don’t. Were the media to put their premises up front and be honest about them then this couldn’t happen. You could argue that given articles operated within different premises, or that many articles did and thus the media was lying about its premises, but you couldn’t make any claim you wanted to about them.

Because we don’t know their premises we don’t know what questions they are asking. Because we don’t know what questions they are asking we can’t know if the answers given to us within their content are actually of any use or not. The formulation of a question is very, very important, as anyone who has spent time on compiling a good questionnaire will tell you. Ask the wrong question, or even the right question in the wrong way, and you get a useless answer. Assume the answer and ask a question aimed at getting it and you might as well not have wasted your time. However, assuming the answer is what happens every single day in the media. Their premises are assumptions they don’t even admit to themselves. These assumptions lead them to answers which leads them to questions. A meaningless exercise.

The stealthy nature of the media’s premises leads to the general public having no idea that there is even a problem. They don’t understand the importance of questions. They belittle the role of stories and narrative. They fail to realise that every news item they absorb is based on assumptions, assumptions which they probably would agree with without understanding why (simple truth is they’ve absorbed the assumption from so many stories that they see it as ‘just the way things are’ and not as an assumption based on nothing more than other’s having made the same assumption).

This blog isn’t claiming to have the right answers and to have asked the right questions. It is simply an attempt to get people who read it to think in different ways, to ask questions about their assumptions. To motivate people to try to find out more. To compel people to find their own questions, their own answers. To help them to open their eyes to the scary reality of the world they live in and ask why, who, how. To get to the bottom of the mess so they at least understand what they are doing to the planet, to children in developing nations, to mother’s breast milk, to their own bodies. If they achieve that level of understanding and then continue to want to carry on with business as usual then they can (how could I stop them?), at least they’re armed with the understanding of what they are doing. They are informed.

Exponential Growth

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

Just Following Orders

Tag surfing yesterday I came across a blog entry made by Strategerie, saying nobody is above the law. They had some good points, and made them well.

“Just following orders” was supposedly thrown out as an excuse after the second world war when we deemed it insufficient to justify the actions of the rank and file Nazis. If they couldn’t use it then, we can’t use it now because, as Strategerie says, we’ve all got our own brains and we should realise that certain actions are just wrong, no matter who told you to do them.

Personally I think that anyone who wishes to engage in ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ should be forced to first endure them. If you consider them to be legitimate to use on innocent people (and you have to remember that the people they use them on are only suspects, not convicted of any crime, and are by the definition of our society innocent until we can prove them guilty) then you should consider them appropriate to use on yourself.

I’ve read about half a dozen instances of people who were rabidly pro-waterboarding, pro all kinds of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, who agreed to undergo the process because ‘it wasn’t that bad’, only to come out of it totally against waterboarding. Like the Mythbusters who experimented with Chinese water torture who thought it would be just a bit of a laugh because having a drip land on your head couldn’t possibly be that bad, these people found out that torture isn’t funny.

Torture is not okay. I’ve said this for a long time, in a lot of places. People will formulate all kinds of non-existent scenarios in order to justify torture. One of my most loathed is this one: “You have a suspect. You caught him red handed planting the bomb. The bomb will explode killing everyone in London (10+ million). Is torture okay to get the deactivation code?” Those who fight so hard to justify torture will say: “Yes, because it will (not the certainty) save the lives of the citizens of London.”

Flaw 1: Just because he planted the bomb doesn’t necessarily mean he has the code to turn the bomb off.

Flaw 2: If you have time to get a reliable answer from the suspect then you have time to evacuate the city, or at least start to and save as many lives as possible.

Flaw 3: There is every chance that the code he knows is one which will instantly activate the bomb, rather than deactivate it. It’s what I’d do if I were masterminding attacks (and for one that has a scale of 10 million victims, there is a mastermind) of this magnitude. I’d tell the guy a deactivation code to give him the illusion of control, knowing him likely to get an attack of jitters right after he plants the bomb and possibly trying to ruin my plans. If he then tries to ruin my plan, boom.

Flaw 4: If torture is okay to save the lives of 10 million, is it okay to save the lives of 1 million? 1 thousand? 1? At what point do we stop and say that torture is not okay, once we allow it? 10 million is used because it’s emotive. London is used because of its financial importance. The question is formulated to make ‘no’ as hard an answer as possible, but the lengths needed to make you feel like saying ‘yes’ are so extreme as to make the question almost meaningless. The scenario is designed to chip away at the certainty of conviction that comes with the statement “torture is never okay”. What about Rabidly Extreme Case A? Chip. What about Rabidly Extreme Case B? Chip. What about Extreme Case C? Chip. What about Extreme Case D? Chip. What about Case E? Then enhanced interrogation techniques are okay…

Flaw 5: These criteria of certainty are never, ever, ever going to be met. Even if you catch someone with the bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are the terrorist. Even if their hands are on the bomb there is no certainty, they could have been trying to stop it and the police could have misunderstood in the confusion. The certainty in the example is necessary for the argument to work as we balk at the prospect of torturing innocent people. They need to provide us with a concrete example of a terrorist caught in action, certainly guilty of being a terrorist.

The example is fiction and so to is the idea that torture is okay.

Of course, the terminally clueless will not understand this. People like That’s Right Nate, who believe that television shows such as 24 provide genuine, accurate examples of how torture works. Anyone looking to macho fiction for exemplary material and drawing analogies between waterboarding and having their hair washed probably shouldn’t be someone I point out, since it might only get them more attention and spread their diseased mentality still further. However, I chose that blog post because it seemed to represent the mentality that thinks waterboarding is okay, the 24 mindset that thinks shooting, or threatening to shoot, someone will make them squeal like freshly spanked pigs. But torture is unimaginably repulsive, as Hunter says.

The guy posting that 24 is a good example of torture in action, also seemed to think torture was good because it allowed the war in Iraq. Seriously, what? We went to war in a country with no connection to al-Qaeda because people under torture provided information that there was, and you think that’s an advert for torture? I’d have to agree with Daniel, Bush and Cheney should be tried as war criminals, along with Tony Blair and all other ‘leaders’ who participated in this world-wide disgrace.

Torture is not okay. It does not provide accurate information. There are claims circulating that the torture of Sheikh Mohammed stopped an attack on LA which could have destroyed the Library Tower (more commonly and accurately called the US Bank Tower) in LA. This is strange, since the plot was broken up in 2002, and he wasn’t even caught until 2003. Now, changing history is nothing new, Bush and the neocons were doing it the entire time they were in office. They got very good at it in fact. One of my favourite memories was watching a UK television programme where two Americans were arguing, one a Democrat, one a Republican. The Republican starts to spout off a whole ream of total falsehoods about the second world war and his Democrat counterpart turned to him and said “You do remember we’re in the UK right? These guys actually know their history!” The audience laughed and the Republican was very red-faced. He didn’t try it again after that.

It seems to me that if an American is a Christian or believes in their Constitution then they must demand to see the people who ordered these actions brought to justice along with those who did the most torturing. Not only to ensure accountability, but to ensure their Christian/Constitutional values are upheld.

Firefly: An Opinion About its Demise

Firefly was a television series which was the child of Joss Whedon, he of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a Space-Western, heavy on both space and western.

Firefly was cancelled in the middle of its first season. Following its cancellation it got such a cult following, once it came out on DVD, that it spawned a movie called Serenity which did very well for a spin-off of a television show cancelled half way through the first season.

I’d like to venture my opinion as to why the show was cancelled.

Within the universe of Firefly humans have abandoned a dying Earth and colonised a new solar system. They live on a large number of planets and moons. Before the series there had been a war between two ideologies, one called the Independents and one called the Alliance. Although not much depth is really given about the causes and roots of the conflict, the choices of names gives a good indication about core ideologies of both sides. One wanted independence, the other not so much.

The Alliance won the war (Mal at one point says they won because of superior numbers, although the brief flashbacks of what the war was like also suggests superior technology) and has consolidated its control of humanity. However, we’re shown a number of times that the Alliance aren’t actually that great. They are horribly bureaucratic and controlling at the same time as being quite incompetent and indifferent.

Now, on to why I think the show was cancelled: Daring to imply that conclusive victory doesn’t make you right; Daring to imply that legality and morality aren’t the same; and, Daring to show prostitution as not only acceptable but, with the right legal framework, safe and beneficial.

The Alliance are shown to be wrong about a number of things, for example they allow slavery. Mal, our hero and main protagonist even says in one episode that he was on the losing side but he’s still not convinced that it was the wrong side. He’s our hero and so we believe him. Winning the war doesn’t necessarily make you right. It makes you better at war, which is killing people. We don’t generally consider murderers to be right, except in the case of one country against another, since the murder of enemy soldiers is okay and civilians aren’t our actual targets, really. We were right, despite our decision to fire bomb Dresden (as just one example in many), because we won the second world war.

So long as there is still a fight there are allowed to be opinions other than the ‘official’ one. As soon as conclusive victory is decided then the winners were the ones who were right. Joss says no to that.

Fox, the network responsible for the death of Firefly, are very hawkish. By this I mean they are pro war and seemingly believe that it’s America’s duty to go to war to bring democracy to places which were doing fine until America started to mess with them. To have a show on its own network which implied that winning wasn’t what made your position right is anathema to the Fox network’s dominant values and beliefs. It had to go. Stage one of getting rid of it was not showing the pilot, with all of its character exploration, first. Stage two was moving the show around the listings so it was never in the same place and couldn’t build a following. Stage three was to then complain about its ratings and cut it in the middle of the first season.

Firefly not only dares to follow the losers and make them look like they might have been right, but it also dares to imply that breaking the law isn’t necessarily bad, that legality is not morality. Mal and his crew get away with a lot of crimes, yet they are a moral bunch (maybe with the exception of Jayne). They return stolen goods which poor and sick people need, for example. Mal makes it clear that, although killing isn’t necessarily wrong in his eyes, that there are rules of conduct he abides by (”You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake; you’ll be facing me; and you’ll be armed.”).

Not only are we following a bunch of thieves and murderers, but they have a prostitute on board! And her activities are legal! The winning side not only condones slavery, but it’s okay with legislating for the safety and continuation of the prostitutes business. It’s enough to make Fox pull the plug. Which they did.

I can hear the question now though. If Fox were so against this then why the BDM (Big Damn Movie, Serenity)? Well, Fox is motivated also by greed. If you watch the BDM you’ll probably see that most of these themes are missing from it, or very much down-played. It becomes more a ‘little guy vs corruption and conspiracy’ than ‘winning doesn’t make you right and legality isn’t morality’.

Firefly died because it questions a few of the dominant beliefs of a very right wing station which sadly happened to also be the ones putting it on the air. Not a good combination.

Crunchy Crunchy

I’ve just read David Waddell’s very wise words over on his blog about whether debt is good, bad or ugly. He makes a lot of very sensible points about micro scale economics. In his example of Bob and his new sofas, for example, he’s entirely right that if Bob saved, rather than got his sofa on credit every time, he’d be able to buy more sofas in the long run. Bob doesn’t do this and the economy doesn’t encourage him to because of the very nature of our entire society. The short term is more important than the long term. Governments look no further than the next election. Businesses look no further than the next profit report. Individuals look no further than the next pay slip. There are exceptions to those rules, but generally people live pay slip to pay slip, saving and then spending their savings, putting a tiny amount into a pension and then regretting it in the long run. Businesses may have what they call a ‘long term plan’, but they’re usually only very sketchy beyond 5 years, and 5 years isn’t the long term. Governments are seen as over-stepping their legitimacy if they make too many policy decisions which run for more than their term in office. Etc, etc, etc.

Also, Waddell seems to ignore the fact that our currency is now debt. It’s not linked to anything more tangible than the debt we owe to the banks. If we stop borrowing or they stop lending then we’re in serious problems (hey… spooky). Because we can no longer be paid on demand the sum of £5 in gold, and instead are paid the sum of £5 in £s, we now need banks to keep providing easy to obtain debt and consumers to keep taking out more debt than they can easily finance. Bob may be better off if he figures out that saving will enable him to get more, or more expensive, sofas in the future, but for that to work as Bob intends it to work there needs to be enough other people who don’t realise it so the system keeps working and Bob’s money is still worth enough to buy him a sofa by the time he wants one.

He also overlooks the fact that the interest paid on loans made by the banks becomes available for re-lending. So a sea of consumers taking out loans is a good thing for lending as it generates interest which the banks can then lend out to more customers. Since the banks are able to lend many times what they actually have in reserves, and since the interest is theirs to keep, they can get a lot of money for lending from lending money.

It’s a brilliantly subtle system while it’s working. People believe the money they trade for goods and services is a unit of value. They believe it is worth something, because of that belief it is. If that belief disappears then the money they trade actually has no value at all. They can’t trade in the money at a bank for a thing which has value as a tradeable item such as gold, they can only trade in the money for different money. If they don’t accept the value of that money, where does that leave them? It’s in their best interests that they accept that the 1s and 0s in the bank’s computer which represents their wealth has value as they have no other recourse if they don’t. Belief is what holds the entire economic system together. That and the legal system deems it to be acceptable if someone will only offer to repay a debt they owe to you in the legal currency of the country you’re in, whether or not you believe in that currency’s value any more.

Waddell has a good point when it comes to the three phenomena of self-certification, 6 x mortgages and over 100% mortgages. However, once one accepts that money is debt (rather than value) and that the banks hoover up the money supply through interest payments, it becomes obvious why such things started to happen. The system needs larger and larger debts to finance the interest payments on the debt already in circulation.

There is a finite limit on what credit-worthy people can finance and are willing to finance. So they introduce self-certification to allow those who aren’t credit worthy to get into debt. Since this debt is secured against their house, which is going up in value, it doesn’t matter if they finance the debt or default, the bank makes money, the interest gets paid and the loan has created the money it needed to create for the system to work.

The banks lend money to everyone, even those who on paper can’t pay it back, and that fuels further increases in property prices, which helps the banks out because the defaulters’ homes are worth repossessing. Now, the increase in price starts to mean that people who should be able to finance a house can’t. So the bank increases the amount they will lend, because more people buying houses is good for them, both in interest payments and in house price inflation for future repossessions.

When you’re moving house there is almost always something you want to change about the house you’re moving to. Some small or not so small detail which is wrong. Now, if you’re having to give the vast majority of your pay to the bank so they’ll give you a 70 or 80% mortgage then you can’t make that change right away and may never get around to it. Many such changes will increase the value of the home, such as an extension. The bank wants your house to be worth as much as possible and so starts giving out 100% mortgages, so you can spend that 20% you’d saved on your extensions and remodelling. Lovely. However, word gets around that the banks are now giving 100% mortgages, so people stop saving that 20% and just want their house. The banks still want the house to increase in value by the addition of extentions and remodelling, so they up the percent they will loan to the borrower in the hopes that the excess will be used to increase the value of their home or buy some other retrieveable goods. If the mortgage is financed the bank gets its share. If not then its gets its share by repossession. This works so long as the price of houses is going up.

The reality is so stupid that it seems almost impossible that it would be allowed to continue. A bank shouldn’t be allowed to loan out almost $100,000 on a starting capital of only $1111.12 (part two of Money As Debt), but in effect they can. They can have $1111.12 and collect interest on almost $100,000.

The current credit crunch (God I hate that it got called that) was obviously going to happen. The system makes it inevitable. If we have the fossil fuel energy reserves left to claw our way out of the huge hole we’re in then it will happen again, unless we change the way banks and loans operate. We wont change a thing though because we like the illusion of prosperity that the system creates. We like to buy things today that we can’t afford until next year/decade. We like to have businesses able to operate despite losing £75 million in one financial year. We like these things and these things are what the system provides. There is so little real incentive to change the system that it wont be changed. I can even imagine post-crash societies which still operate this type of credit system. We’re short term animals. We like the benefits today and don’t care if it hurts tomorrow. We like it even more when the benefits are today and the pain might not be felt until after we die (see the way we treat the environment, the problems looming with peak oil and the lack of action, etc).