tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78670152024-03-13T14:21:04.083+00:00Squander TwoThe worst thing about being cynical is being right.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1005125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-54066829514723339432022-02-26T03:25:00.001+00:002022-02-26T03:25:18.471+00:00Wrong. “Missile by missile, warhead by warhead, shell by shell, we’re putting a bygone era behind us. Inspired by Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar, we’re moving closer to the future we seek. A future where these weapons never threaten our children again. A future where we know the security and peace of a world without nuclear weapons.”<div><br></div><div> — Barack Obama, 2012, on the disarming of Ukraine</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-28747555244241913512022-01-29T18:42:00.005+00:002022-01-29T18:44:29.081+00:00When all you have is a hammer....<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQF-OQyhU8ZVtk2nEo8vJlIbQdd6FpnIGN_GSUgqnLLC--R3A8lrrHMp-SshBv1TMEnqRlzRxPfoLpZv7vz2j2FMnu9Nz1N1ZoO-yf-k_oduMhNITwBBqyMR7wttOjYPkdYbq2-CBpV9zHLneGWaAOA9gNzO_h8bwT6ZO0HLoEIzDvnPzUZQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="653" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQF-OQyhU8ZVtk2nEo8vJlIbQdd6FpnIGN_GSUgqnLLC--R3A8lrrHMp-SshBv1TMEnqRlzRxPfoLpZv7vz2j2FMnu9Nz1N1ZoO-yf-k_oduMhNITwBBqyMR7wttOjYPkdYbq2-CBpV9zHLneGWaAOA9gNzO_h8bwT6ZO0HLoEIzDvnPzUZQ" width="163" /></a></div><br /><p>Excitable <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2022/01/theres-more-to-conspiracy-theories-than.html" title="There's more to conspiracy theories than just theories about conspiracies.">conspiracy theorists</a> are triumphantly distributing this "revelation" that only 6000 people in the UK have EVER died of Covid-19. What's particularly odd is that they simultaneously believe that there's been a massive cover-up by the Government <i>and</i> that they've uncovered the secret by simply asking the Government for the information. I'll happily take on all comers in the Ridiculing Government Incompetence Games, but come on, seriously. </p><p>Because of course there is no cover-up or revelation here. The controversy is based on the obvious bollocks that "died of" and "died solely of" are the same thing, which they aren't remotely. The premise here is that having two things on a death certificate means that neither of those things is fatal. When of course their fatality is the reason they're on a death certificate.</p><p>The logic is puzzlingly unidirectional, too.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><blockquote><li>"This person has covid and condition X on their death certificate; therefore condition X killed them and covid didn't."</li><li>"This person has covid and condition X on their death certificate; therefore covid killed them and condition X didn't." </li></blockquote></ul><p></p><p>These two arguments are logically identical, yet the conspiracy theorists are only making one of them and regard the other as crazy. </p><p>Comorbidities are a thing. Two examples.</p><p>Firstly, diabetes is a comorbidity of covid. The conspiracy theorists claim that every diabetic person who died of covid in fact died of diabetes and merely happened to have completely non-fatal covid at the time. But diabetes doesn't kill you in weeks; it kills you in decades. When a forty-year-old with diabetes dies of covid, yes, it's technically true that they were going to die of diabetes "anyway" — in twenty-five to thirty-five years time. When some other disease accelerates that timeline to a month, the conventional way to describe the process is "killing".</p><p>Secondly, HIV. HIV screws up your immune system, causing you to eventually die of whatever ailment happens to come along. People with AIDS die of tuberculosis or cancer or meningitis or some other opportunistic infection. No-one has <i>ever</i> died of <i>only</i> HIV. By the exact same reasoning the conspiracy theorists are applying to the covid stats, the all-time worldwide fatality rate of HIV is zero.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-38938650805544739052022-01-13T20:54:00.002+00:002022-01-29T18:46:23.564+00:00Prince Andrew's defence in full. <div>"I went to lots of parties at the houses of my close friend the convicted paedophile pimp. While I was there, there were always young borderline-underage girls hanging around, partying with me and the other unattractive rich old friends of my close friend the convicted paedophile pimp. None of these girls ever had any family or parents around, but I thought nothing of it. I never found it suspicious that these borderline-underage girls might be partying not with other young people of their own age but with me and the other unattractive rich old friends of my close friend the convicted paedophile pimp. I never wondered what their parents, whom nobody ever mentioned or seemed to know, thought about it. I enjoyed partying with at least one of these borderline-underage girls myself. </div><div><br></div><div>"BUT I DIDN'T FUCK HER."</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-54668677886173670182022-01-10T02:35:00.003+00:002022-01-13T20:56:23.892+00:00There's more to conspiracy theories than just theories about conspiracies.<div>
Leonid Brezhnev set up a department within the KGB tasked with finding out who was really running Capitalism.
<br /><br />
He was, of course, perfectly well aware of the "official" (a.k.a. accurate) explanation of free markets: that each individual shopkeeper freely chooses to set the price of each of their products at whatever they want; and that they adjust those prices based on their personal judgement of the balance between too high to sell any and too low to be worth selling. He just didn't believe it. Immersed in an environment of centralised control by diktat, he couldn't bring himself to believe that anything could work effectively without it. I like to imagine those KGB officers, beavering away, chasing down leads, convincing themselves that <i>this time</i> they're genuinely on the trail of that elusive man who secretly contacts EVERY SHOPKEEPER IN THE WORLD and tells them all their prices. I truly hope that they found the occasional shopkeeper willing to break the code of silence and spill the beans. Fun times.
<br /><br />
Brezhnev was a conspiracy theorist.
<br /><br />
Thing is, Brezhnev also believed in lots of real conspiracies that really were happening. He'd have been an idiot not to, and an idiot with a short life expectancy at that. It was the Cold War, probably humanity's peak of weaponised conspiracy. Brezhnev was the Russian Premier and dictator of the USSR. Approximately half the conspiracies he believed in, he was nominally in charge of. Would it have been irrational of him to suspect that the CIA might be trying to undermine his grip on power? Of course not. They were.
<br /><br />
For Brezhnev, believing in conspiracies was not, <i>mostly</i>, conspiracy theorism; it was perfectly sensible theories about conspiracies. And yet, on top of all that common sense and rational deduction, he was also a conspiracy theorist.
<br /><br />
So what's the difference?
<br /><br />
The thing about conspiracy theorists is not that they believe in conspiracies at all, but that they believe in conspiracies first and foremost and no matter what. When the evidence points towards conspiracy, they believe in the conspiracy. When the evidence points towards an accident or a coincidence or something that just happened, they still believe in the conspiracy. When there is proof that the conspiracy didn't happen, they conclude that the proof must have been faked by the conspirators as part of a cover-up, and therefore that all evidence <i>against</i> a conspiracy is in fact just yet more evidence of the conspiracy.
<br /><br />
The second belief conspiracy theorists cling to follows necessarily from the first: that there is no effective limit to the number or type of people who can keep a secret, or for how long. The dogma of constant omnipresent conspiracy that somehow remains secret cannot survive without insane numbers of people, often each other's enemies, all taking part in the cover-up.
<br /><br />
That was the key difference Brezhnev should have noticed. He knew that the way the KGB kept their conspiracies secret was by telling as few people as possible as little as possible, and, when necessary, killing people to reduce the number who knew. The sheer number of people choosing for themselves what to charge for their goods and services — basically, all of us — shouldn't have passed the smell test. And even those Westerners who opposed Capitalism and supported the USSR were setting their own prices. Wouldn't one of them have spilt the beans? Just how devilishly cunning <i>was</i> this conspiracy?
<br /><br />
Look at Flat-Earthers. Their fundamental belief is a bit odd, considering that you can literally see the Earth's curvature. But it's nowhere near their craziest idea. They believe that all the world's governments know that the Earth is really flat and have been working together for decades to suppress the truth. That's <i>governments working together</i> and <i>always succeeding</i> and <i>never having any leaks</i>. They believe that, during the Cold War, the Americans and Russians collaborated in this conspiracy. During that era of defections and triple-agents, everyone stayed on-message <i>with their mortal enemies</i>. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians and Americans were still, on this one issue, working together, staunch allies in the fight against people discovering that the Earth isn't round. Have these eejits ever <i>met</i> a human?
<br /><br />
And where's the motive? <i>They</i> don't want us to know that the Earth is flat, because then we might... <i>WHAT?</i> What would we do with this knowledge? And how would it harm our Lords & Masters?
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Back at the start of The Cursed Pandemic, we now know that various institutions, including the World Health Organization, the British Government, and the American Government, all claimed that masks were completely useless against SARS-CoV-2 while they in fact believed that masks were useful. (Later arguments about the possible inefficacy of masks are immaterial here; the point is that the people claiming they were useless believed them to be useful at the time.) They did this, as they have since admitted, because they were worried about supplies of masks for medical staff, and they wanted to discourage the public from buying them so that there would be plenty available for hospitals. Some of us noticed the lie at the time. We weren't conspiracy theorists; we were merely people with a theory about a conspiracy. The conspiracy was not unlikely: it involved the careful coordination of public communication by organizations that do usually carefully coordinate their public communications. It did not require us to believe that thousands of people all kept on-message, since there was widespread disagreement and argument. They didn't manage to keep it all secret for decades; they barely made it a few weeks. There were various plausible hypothetical motives, one of which turned out to be true. And there was actual evidence that masks are useful. To believe in this conspiracy, at no point did anyone have to elevate their dogmatic belief in conspiracy above a reasonable assessment of actual evidence.
<br /><br />
There have been so many ridiculous claims made over the last two years, I could pick dozens of examples. I'll go with one from the anti-vaxxers: that mRNA vaccines killed every single animal they were injected into during animal trials, and the researchers destroyed all records of those results so that they could proceed to mass human vaccination. I have spoken to people online who genuinely believe this. First of all, it has to be said: what a stroke of luck! These vaccines, developed by people who are determined to commit genocide, killed every single non-human mammal they were ever given to, and yet have only had fatal side-effects in a tiny proportion of humans. What are the chances that humanity's would-be murderers would create the one toxin that kills every animal except humans? They must be kicking themselves.
<br /><br />
And imagine the conversation that needs to have happened:
<blockquote>
"We have the results of the animal trials. Our vaccine appears to be highly toxic. It killed every test subject. Every single one. Turns out it's not so much a vaccine as more of a venom."
<br />
"So, back to the drawing board, then?"
<br />
"No, we're going to hush up the results, go ahead with mass production, and inject it into every human on the planet."
<br />
"Er, why?"
<br />
"Mass genocide, of course. Why else would we be working in medical research?"
<br />
"Oh, OK, then."
</blockquote>
What I really can't get my head around is the recruitment process. I mean, how often do you meet someone who's really keen on genocide? How does a medical research lab go about recruiting scientists <i>all</i> of whom want to kill everyone on the planet? They can't exactly advertise their secret plot, so they'd get loads of applications from normal scientists who are going into the field of medical research because they have at least some intention of developing medicine. What do they ask them in the interview to try and sound out the misanthropic psychopaths? "Would you describe yourself as a people person?"?
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Now, <i>that's</i> a conspiracy theory. Because the only way you can possibly believe it is if you start with an iron-clad belief in the secret machinations of nefarious cabals, and ignore every ounce of evidence and common sense and basic knowledge of human nature that says — nay, screams — that it's a load of old bollocks.
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And all of that is why this argument holds no water:
<blockquote>
"See? There really <i>was</i> a conspiracy! So we conspiracy theorists were right all along, and you need to start listening to us."
</blockquote>
Nope. You were unhinged. There was a conspiracy. And you're still unhinged.
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0United Kingdom55.378051 -3.43597327.067817163821154 -38.592223 83.688284836178838 31.720277tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-27802949566392866132020-11-08T07:18:00.026+00:002020-11-10T02:07:07.684+00:00You are gaslighting yourself.I am a mathematician. Not professionally, but mentally. I'm one of those people who had an affinity with numbers and logic from a very early age, which led eventually to a degree in maths and a career in IT. I understand that a lot of what seems bleeding obvious to people like me is opaque to many people. (This is not to be boastful: we all have our strengths and weaknesses, and Lord knows there's plenty I don't understand, like football and small talk and not making people want to punch me.) But I honestly did not appreciate until this week the extent to which obvious mathematical truths are complete mysteries to such a huge chunk of humanity.
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Of course I'm talking about the cursed election. You may have seen these graphs:
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_gyf-iqu_FkovMkArMtL7Y31Yr6emldbfhsg7XCNrC54kg1KlFrZbItijLfchsh9IjQYuztNRlehq-E6524uLcZ4EdCzzLvD2-4LDGJ96TPxXE6tRa6KqKbQbAfsX1EtzYpT/s1277/wisconsin.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1277" data-original-width="1119" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_gyf-iqu_FkovMkArMtL7Y31Yr6emldbfhsg7XCNrC54kg1KlFrZbItijLfchsh9IjQYuztNRlehq-E6524uLcZ4EdCzzLvD2-4LDGJ96TPxXE6tRa6KqKbQbAfsX1EtzYpT/s320/wisconsin.jpg"/></a>
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Those graphs are evidence of something highly suspicious happening. Clearly and obviously, to anyone who understands numbers. That has nothing to do with what they're measuring. If they were graphs comparing the performance of two brands of dishwasher, they'd be suspicious. If they were exchange rates or share prices, the financial regulator would be demanding an explanation from the banks involved, and actively considering raiding those banks if such explanation was not forthcoming. The idea that those numbers are not suspicious is just preposterous. I shan't bother explicating why; one thing I've discovered this week is that those who can't already see it will determinedly continue not to. But the evidence honestly couldn't be much clearer. And yet the dominant claim, repeated all week throughout the world's media, is that there is "no evidence". Not that the evidence is, on balance, unconvincing, or that it can be explained, but that there simply is none. That so many millions of people are apparently willing to believe such a thing is the most damning indictment I have ever seen of the state of maths teaching.
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Now, let's be clear here about what the word "evidence" actually means. It doesn't mean "proof". When a defendant is found not guilty, all the evidence against them doesn't cease to exist; it is still evidence against them, which has been weighed and found not damning. Even though they were not guilty, the evidence against them is the reason why it would have been remiss not to try them in court at all. Evidence is something that is worth looking into.
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There are various scenarios that could explain graphs like that. "This is normal; nothing to see here" is not one of them — but that's the one we've been given, again and again, smugly and condescendingly, by people insisting that even being suspicious of numbers like that is a sign of knuckle-dragging stupidity.
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But, utterly unsurprisingly, it turns out that the evidence was worth looking into. For instance, <a href="https://twitter.com/robbystarbuck/status/1324783531139235841" target="_blank" title="One Michigan county clerk caught a glitch in tabulation software so they hand counted votes and found the glitch caused 6,000 votes to go to Biden + Democrats that were meant for Trump and Republicans.">Antrim County, Michigan discovered that software had allocated 6000 votes to the wrong candidate</a>. That's not a conspiracy theory; it's not a paranoid accusation by the losing party; it's a fact, verified and confirmed by the election officials. The numbers were evidence that something was wrong, so people investigated the numbers, and found that indeed something was wrong. That's how evidence is supposed to work. It may be that the software was hacked with the intent of fraud; it may also be a mere innocent error. But what it most certainly is <i>not</i> is nothing.
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That software, incidentally, is in use in 47 counties. Since we now have proof that it malfunctioned to the tune of thousands of votes in one of those counties, that proof is in turn evidence that it may have done something similar in the other counties. That evidence should of course be investigated. It might turn out that it only miscounted in Antrim and worked correctly everywhere else. That's how evidence is supposed to work too. But claiming that it might have behaved the same way everywhere it was used (which is, after all, what such software is explicitly designed to do) is not crazy, is not sore losing, and is not an attempt at a fascist power-grab. It's an entirely reasonable suggestion. And refusing to investigate it would be insane.
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I currently work in financial regulatory reporting. If I were to see numbers like that and not investigate them, I could go to prison. And I'd deserve it.
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The graphs are far from the only evidence. <a href="https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/11/05/the-2020-election-fuckery-is-afoot/" title="THE 2020 ELECTION: FUCKERY IS AFOOT" target="_blank">Larry Correia set a load of it out here</a>, along with a good explanation of what a red flag is in an audit and what it does and doesn't mean. I recommend reading it if you're interested in the US election.
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But, believe it or not, I don't want to talk about the US election.
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I've deliberately not mentioned Trump till now, because this isn't really about him — or shouldn't be. Trump will be gone in four years or a few weeks, and either one is the blink of an eye. (Note to teenagers: Yes it really is. Just wait.) Democracy, we should hope, will be with us somewhat longer.
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Four years ago, in a context that was different yet ultimately the same, <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2016/06/democracy-and-power.html" title="Democracy and power.">I wrote this:</a>
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<blockquote>But to think that that makes the theft of our rights and powers OK is to fall into the usual trap of thinking that democracy is just a decision-making mechanism, and that therefore it is the decision it reaches that matters. But democracy is not primarily a decision-making mechanism. I mean, really, if you were setting out to design a good way of making good decisions, would you come up with democracy? Of course not. Because it's laughably useless.
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However, democracy <i>is</i> a very <i>very</i> good civil-war-prevention mechanism.</blockquote>
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Democracy works because enough people believe that they will get their way some of the time. Because of that, they are willing to accept the result when they don't get their way — they know their time will come soon enough. It is this general belief spread throughout the populace that has effectively stopped people resorting to violence. This is why not only actual propriety but <i>the appearance of</i> propriety in the electoral process matters so much. This is why it is vital that suspicious events be investigated seriously. This is why investigating events and finding them to be above board is <i>not the same</i> as pre-emptively declaring that they are not worth investigating in the first place. The process matters far more than the result, because the process is the alternative to what our ancestors did. Our ancestors killed each other. In huge numbers. The best estimate of the effect of <a href="https://www.liquisearch.com/english_civil_war/casualties" target="_blank" title="English Civil War - Casualties">the English Civil War</a> on Ireland is that about 41% of the population were killed. No, that's not a typo. Over disagreement about who should be in charge of another country.
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Personally, I prefer voting.
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American ideas have a way of spreading. For a long time, that hasn't happened with <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/election-fraud-in-the-1800s-involved-kidnapping-and-forced-drinking" target="_blank" title="Before sophisticated computer models were used to get out the vote, violent gangs would kidnap voters, feed them alcohol or drugs and force them to vote multiple times dressed in various disguises. Known as “cooping,” this was a common strategy to ensure a win on election day.">their electoral fraud</a>. They have generally had a bigger corruption problem than the rest of the English-speaking world for some reason — just compare the number of entries for the US to those for the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_elections#United_States" target="_blank" title="List of controversial elections">Wikipedia's list of controversial elections</a>. That is about to change.
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Because any tactic that works will be used.
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Try and forget about your dislike of Trump for a second. Sure, you want him gone, for whatever reason. It ought to be possible to say so and yet still notice <a href="https://www.steynonline.com/10744/election-day-plus-two" target="_blank" title="Mark Steyn: Election Day Plus Two">crap like this:</a>
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<blockquote>Just a general observation from a foreigner feeling ever more foreign since Wednesday morning: I have spent election night in many countries over the years, and have never seen what I saw on Tuesday night. And I am amazed that even the parochial brain-dead American legacy media could pass off what happened in Philadelphia as normal. Everywhere else the polls close and the riding or constituency counts the votes until they're all done and they have a final 100 per cent result - by 9pm, 11.30pm, 3am, however long it takes. But, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, they suddenly stop counting and everyone goes home until late the following morning to start counting the boxes that have shown up under cover of darkness.
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And everybody on ABC, CBS, NBC pretends this is perfectly normal.</blockquote>
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If that were to happen in a British election, we'd regard it as completely mental. I'd expect <i>every</i> candidate to protest — not on the grounds that they suspected their opponents of nefarious shenanigans, but for the more basic reason of <i>seriously, what the utter fuck?</i> This is just not how one does elections.
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Until this week.
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Because what happens when you insist that this is unremarkable, that there's nothing to see here, that this is a correct way of conducting affairs, is that you make it more likely. Half of America have their own reasons for insisting that it's AOK. You don't <i>have</i> to agree with them to prove your hatred of Trump. As long as the British were outsiders looking in, regarding such behaviour as a bizarre foreign American thing, it remained a bizarre foreign American thing. This week, when you declared you were fine with it, you invited it in.
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Political parties are full of devious cheating bastards — because they are groups of human beings, so of course they are. Devious cheating bastards will do whatever they can get away with to win — you could look it up. Up till last week, there were things they thought they couldn't get away with in Britain. You are now busily telling them otherwise. You have told them that you're happy for polling centres to have their staff sent home and for tens of thousands of votes to be delivered while they're away. You have informed them that you will avert your eyes from obviously suspicious numbers. You have even told them that you will accuse anyone who does notice obviously suspicious numbers of corruption. The safeguard against this stuff was your refusal to stand for it. And you threw it away.
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Any tactic that works will be used. Sooner or later, it will be used against you. Once these practices take hold, they'll be in our elections in twenty years, in fifty years; they'll be entrenched in the elections your grandchildren vote in. They won't even have heard of Trump, but they'll be stuck with this shit. Until they get fed up with it not working, so start killing instead.
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Because half our generation eagerly lied to themselves because they disliked one politician, who wasn't even in this country.
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Trump didn't do this. You did.
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<b><i>Update, 10/11/20:</i></b>
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The original version of this article contained a third graph. It has since been removed from its original source, so I've removed it from here too.
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-26537177360120611192020-04-06T22:50:00.002+01:002022-01-13T20:57:25.558+00:00On the occasion of Boris Johnson entering intensive care.If you are so dedicated to the grand cause of tribalist politics that you are welcoming the prospect of a child being born to its father's widow, then your soul is fundamentally broken, and your presence is a poison to all who encounter you.<br />
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That is all.
<div><br></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-78763245672158780882020-03-18T00:06:00.002+00:002020-03-18T00:06:21.349+00:00Covid-19, lightning strikes, and the nature of risk.There's this way of measuring risk that's so popular it's a cliche: "You're more likely to be struck by lightning than <i>[insert supposedly unlikely event here]</i>." It's interesting that we're hearing it used less these days about terrorist attacks — in the UK, you have actually been more likely to be hurt by a terrorist than by lightning for some years now, and perhaps, even without looking up the figures, people are intuitively sensing that. That rather annoying thought aside, what I really want to discuss here is the fact that the comparison is a big steaming pile of fallacy.<br />
<br />
Because the way the expression is used is always to express derision at the very idea that anyone might worry about such a tiny risk. The logic goes: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>The probability of X is lower than the probability of being hit by lightning; <br />
the probability of being hit by lightning is extremely low<br />
: therefore taking measures to avoid X is a stupid waste of time.</i></blockquote><br />
But here's the thing. In the Developed World, every tall building has a lightning conductor on top, and so do most of the smaller ones. And every crane. Every car has been designed to protect its occupants in the event of a lightning strike. Aeroplanes are designed to survive lightning strikes. The electrical ring main in your house is lightning-proof. The entire national electricity grid has lightning resilience built in. Scientists and engineers keep researching lightning, so that we can keep improving our lightning-proofing measures. And we teach our children not to shelter under trees in thunderstorms. Apart from that last one, this all costs money — money and time and resources and effort. Our entire society is, at great expense, largely lightning-proof. The reason we've done this is obviously not because it's such a rare event that it's not worth doing anything about.<br />
<br />
So the logic is actually: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>The probability of X is lower than the probability of being hit by lightning; <br />
the probability of being hit by lightning is high enough that we collectively spend billions on mitigation measures against it<br />
: therefore taking measures to avoid X is a stupid waste of time.</i></blockquote><br />
It's even rarer than a thing that isn't rare! <br />
<br />
I am reminded of this by the scaremongermongering fuckwits out there <i>still</i>, even now, saying that Covid-19 is not much worse than the flu.<br />
<br />
Influenza is a big deal. We research the new strains constantly, so that we can identify which are the ones we need to vaccinate against each season. We develop a new vaccine for those strains every year. We deploy that vaccine to millions of people. We prepare a certain amount of capacity in our hospitals to deal with serious flu cases. We train doctors and nurses in its treatment. We obviously do not do all this because flu is not worth doing anything about.<br />
<br />
Again, here's that logic, only even worse this time: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>Covid-19 is not much worse than the flu;<br />
the flu is a serious enough problem that we pour massive resources into combatting it<br />
: therefore making all this fuss about Covid-19 is stupid.</i></blockquote><br />
It's only slightly more dangerous than a very dangerous thing! Genius.<br />
<br />
Part of the problem here is the word "fuss" and its various synonyms — "worry", "panic", etc. These are loaded words, all being used to mean "effort", but with derision of that effort built in. It's true: we don't make a lot of fuss about flu; we don't worry or panic about flu; but we do put lots of effort into fighting it. We just don't think of that effort as fuss or worry or panic, because it's routine. But it's still effort, and using loaded words doesn't create some logical difference between that effort and the effort put into fighting Covid-19. <br />
<br />
And of course the other glaringly obvious point is that we aren't replacing flu with Covid-19. We're getting both. This is a new risk piled on top of all the old existing risks we already know about. Very few people do think about the risk of dying of flu — or tuberculosis or hantavirus or an embolism or a car crash or a freak shopping-trolley accident (it happens). What we do think about and take into account in the back of our minds is the risk of dying in general. That risk just suddenly increased, so of course we're seeing an adjustment. And it's not surprising or irrational that that adjustment is so extreme when the size of the risk is currently unknown and unknowable. <br />
<br />
Now, there is an argument to be made that, whilst Covid-19 just increased the risk of dying, we have, on the other hand, been steadily decreasing the risk of dying for the last few decades, and so we might rationally offset those two factors: sure, things just got significantly more dangerous, but cancer is no longer a death sentence, you can live a long life with HIV now, and modern seatbelts and airbags are frankly amazing, so maybe this stuff balances out. Thus far, I have heard that reasonable argument from precisely zero people.<br />
<br />
And then there's the fatality rate. The scaremongermongers measure Covid-19's badness by its fatality rate, with the underlying assumption, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that those who don't die will be just fine. Sorry, but no. There's a whole world of mostly horrible grey areas between dying and being AOK. Covid-19 causes pneumonia. Pneumonia is nasty. It's very painful. It damages your lungs, usually long-term, often for decades, often permanently. "Recovering" from pneumonia could well mean that every respiratory illness you get for the rest of your life will hit you harder than it would have otherwise — and there are a lot of respiratory illnesses out there. Imagine if, every time you caught a common cold, it turned into a chest infection. Imagine if you got so many chest infections, you built up a resistance to most antibiotics. That's what a significant proportion of survivors are facing. And then some lucky sods can carry Covid-19 completely asymptomatically. It's not all that bad for everyone, but it's a lot more complicated and worse than just putting survival in the "no problem" column.<br />
<br />
Another thing you've no doubt been hearing is that Covid-19 mainly kills elderly people. This is true, and, not to be callous, but, frankly, after a certain age, whatever you die of, you really die of old age. When she was merely in late middle-age, my grandmother broke her leg and didn't notice, continuing her daily ten-mile walks across the Yorkshire Moors while being vaguely annoyed that the limp wasn't wearing off. In her nineties, she broke her leg and, though it took a year, died. We know this is how life goes, and are generally resigned to it. But perhaps you haven't fully thought through what "elderly" means in the context of Covid-19 fatalities. <br />
<br />
You don't suddenly drive off a statistical cliff-edge at the age of seventy. There's a curve. Yes, at seventy, you're at much higher risk. At sixty, not as bad, but still higher risk than a fifty-year-old. And so on. I'm forty-five. I certainly don't think of myself as elderly. But I'm on the curve. I'm unlikely to get away from Covid-19 as cleanly as a twenty-year-old would. I run part of that increased risk that shows up in the stats and gets described with the shorthand term "elderly". Maybe you do too.<br />
<br />
I'm not panicking about this. I half hope I catch the damn thing, so I can grow some antibodies and cease to be a danger to my wife. But only half, as it will probably be fucking agony. But this is not panic, it is not fuss, it is not a ridiculous overreaction to nothing much: it is a reasonable response to a rational analysis of something that really is much worse than flu.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-28955507611829348712019-12-11T13:15:00.004+00:002019-12-11T13:16:52.139+00:00They're just spitting in our faces now.<a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1200675327636385792?lang=en" target="_blank">This is Labour's video about how they support minority groups.</a> They've got quite a lot of racial and religious groups in there. But not Jews. Because of course not Jews.<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago, that would have been fine: you can't crowbar every single demographic into a brief advert; no particular reason to put Jews in there. But this comes when Labour's antisemitism is one of the biggest controversies the party has ever faced, when Corbyn and McDonnell have spent a good chunk of the last few years facing and denying accusations of antisemitism, when the Equality & Human Rights Commission is investigating Labour's institutional antisemitism, when Labour MPs are leaving the party and telling the public to vote Tory because of Labour's antisemitism, when some Jewish Labour MPs have been forced out of the party while those that stay require bodyguards at Labour Conferences, when British Jews are leaving the party in droves and preparing to leave the country if Labour get in, when the Chief Rabbi, traditionally a staunchly politically neutral entity, has made an unprecedented foray into politics to plead with the British public not to support the party that is an actual threat to British Jewry. And, even faced with all that, when making a promotional film, when someone suggested (and there's no way no-one suggested) maybe putting a conciliatory message for Jews in there, doing nothing more than including them in their list of minority groups Labour gives a fuck about, Corbyn still couldn't bring himself to do it. The man can't even pretend not to hate Jews. <br />
<br />
Perhaps we should admire his honesty.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-67160199197664299752019-12-10T00:58:00.000+00:002019-12-10T01:22:45.112+00:00The gathering storm.It is not possible to be more assimilated than me. My father was sent to Catholic school during the War in case the Gestapo made it to London, and never really got his Jewishness back. I was born and raised British Christian atheist; I speak no Hebrew, have never set foot in Israel or even in a synagogue, and eat plenty of bacon. By a lot of people's standards, including most Jews, I am not a Jew — I'm not so much Jewish as Jewishish. My Jewishishness has always been a mere bit of trivia, a technicality, something I know and like about my family history, something that matters to me but does not inform my day-to-day life. Until the last three years.<br />
<br />
The state of Israel, in its wisdom, qualifies people like me for citizenship. And now we are receiving an object lesson in why that is.<br />
<br />
The question of whether I, born and bred British, am welcome in Britain has been too absurd to even ask for almost all my life. For more obviously Jewish British Jews, the same: to have questioned whether they were accepted as part of the British populace was ridiculous in the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties, in 2010... and now here we are. Large numbers of them have their passports to hand, ready to get the hell out of here. Many have already left. And I see their point, because it's not even about Corbyn winning any more — though he certainly could. Labour are doing quite spiffingly in the polls. This is no splinter faction: about a third of the British public, faced with <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/438367082/Redacted-JLM-Closing-Submission-to-the-EHRC" target="_blank" title="Redacted JLM Closing Submission to the EHRC">unequivocal evidence of what that man and his acolytes are</a>, intend to vote for them, want him as Prime Minister. If he loses, those people aren't going away. I've never been one for nostalgia, but, for the first time in my life, I miss the Britain I grew up in. That society, one in which Jews were welcome, is gone and I don't believe it is salvageable. It is impossible to exaggerate my sense of loss. The Jews are no longer welcome in this country. <br />
<br />
It is difficult to know how even to approach the enthusiastic antisemitism of the modern Left, that has taken firm root in the Labour Party. I don't believe that any of those who deny its plain and obvious existence haven't seen the evidence, so what's the point going over it all again? Here, at least, are <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/hitler-was-right-the-shocking-cases-unearthed-in-jewish-groups-labour-antisemitism-dossier-11879053" target="_blank" title="12 shocking claims of abuse in leaked Labour antisemitism dossier">a couple of examples of the bile</a> that <a href="https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/labour-s-barry-gardiner-says-corbyn-isn-t-antisemitic-just-critical-of-the-politics-of-israel-1.494120" target="_blank" title="Labour's Barry Gardiner says Corbyn isn't antisemitic, just 'critical of the politics of Israel' -- Shadow International Trade Secretary says Labour and its leader 'have not, in my view, been antisemitic'">Labour's defenders insist is merely "critical of the politics of Israel"</a>:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>At Labour Party meetings, one person was called "a child killer", "Zio scum", "good with money", told "shut the fuck up, Jew" and of course the ever-popular "Hitler was right".</li>
<li>A Labour Party member said: "The only reason we have prostitutes in Seven Sisters is because of the Jews". I do have to admit, I'd be very interested in hearing which Israeli government policy this refers to.</li>
<li>At a Labour Party conference, a member said US police who killed black teenagers were trained in Israel, because of course no-one kills innocent children without the advice of the experts.</li>
</ul><br />
That's what being a Jew in the Labour Party is like these days.<br />
<br />
Lord Sachs put it best, I think, when he said that he hadn't known anything much about antisemitism. Being British, it was a phenomenon that, <i>even though he was Chief Rabbi</i>, he just didn't need to know about. And now he does. Since Corbyn came to power, Sachs had to go and read up on the subject and educate himself. Suddenly, almost overnight, being an expert on antisemitism became a major part of the British Chief Rabbi's job. That is both incredible praise for the Britain that was — what other country's Chief Rabbi doesn't need to know anything about antisemitism? — and utterly damning of what the country has become.<br />
<br />
Corbyn's cultish acolytes still insist that anyone talking like I am (such as the Labour members and ex-members who provided the above evidence under oath) is part of a joint Tory/Mossad/media smear campaign to keep Labour out of power because they threaten the wealth of the capitalist class. Because nothing proves to the world you're not antisemitic like disseminating a conspiracy theory about money-grubbing Jews controlling the media in order to keep the world's governments in thrall to a sinister agenda. I hope that some of my still-Labour-supporting friends have merely accepted such excuses without thinking them through properly and seeing them for what they are. If you're still reading this far and not scoffing derisively at the Tory stooge yet, please listen.<br />
<br />
<b>Please do not vote Labour.</b> <br />
<br />
This is the first time in my life I've ever presumed to ask such a thing. I might well tell you why I think you're wrong, but I'd never tell you how to vote. And I am somewhat sheepishly aware that <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2015/06/nodding-and-smiling.html" title="Nodding and smiling.">I have in the past ridiculed</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/11/cry-election-emotion-left-tories-empathy" target="_blank" title="Why it’s OK to cry about this election">hysterical overreactions to mere election results</a>. In a modern free democracy, all that sturm and drang between the Left and Right boils down to quibbling whether a tax rate should be at 45% or 50%, and frankly everyone should chill the fuck out about it.<br />
<br />
But this election is truly different. This is not about policy, the NHS, schools, or whatever, and my plea is not even about Brexit (if you want to stop that, you can vote Lib Dem). This is about <a href="https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-functions-of-anti-semitism" target="_blank" title="The Functions of Anti-Semitism">the organization of politics against the Jews</a>. And that is something you're either for or against.<br />
<br />
This is not a matter of opposing Labour, but of defeating this terrible movement that has taken over Labour, hopefully starting the process that could lead to their becoming a decent Opposition and a party of government once again. That is why the decent civilized Labour MPs have not only left the party but asked the public to vote Tory. Turned out there weren't many of them, though.<br />
<br />
This election is the British people's great chance, faced with this venomous claptrap, to unequivocally reject it. And it doesn't look like they have the remotest intention of doing so. <br />
<br />
So please. Labour will never abandon antisemitism if it wins votes. Please don't let it win yours.<br />
<br />
I'm writing this knowing I'm going to lose friends just for doing so — and that says it all right there, really, doesn't it? A sizeable proportion of British people will want nothing further to do with you if you say that not hating Jews is more important than hating Tories. Well, bye, then. I hope the door hits your arse good and hard on the way out.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/the-shame-of-labours-liberal-supporters/" title="The shame of Labour’s liberal supporters" target="_blank">I'll let Stephen Daisley finish:</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>History tells me to look glumly on the prospects that, for once, we might do right by Jews. We don’t always side with their persecutors but we almost never side with them when it matters. If the anti-Semites win on 12 December, their victory will belong to the nexus of complicity, from the people who know exactly what they are doing to those who one day will feign ignorance and deny the role they played.<br />
<br />
But these things they should know: Know that you were warned. You were warned and you turned away because the Tories are evil and Labour’s heart is in the right place. Know that Jews pleaded for your help. They pleaded for your help and you offered warm words then worked to put their tormentors in power. Know that you are culpable. You are culpable for what happens next, for every Nefesh B’Nefesh flight that takes off from Heathrow, for how Corbyn’s supporters take out their frustrations when his government begins to falter, for every British Jew who accepts that his countrymen have abandoned him and acquiesces quietly in his new status as civically less than others. Know that you will be remembered. You will be remembered and counted among the plentiful persecutors of the Jewish people and the even more plentiful bystanders. Your children will teach their children not to be like you.</blockquote><br />
Your children will teach their children not to be like you.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-12207040533137833642019-10-16T22:45:00.001+01:002019-10-17T00:54:56.119+01:00Another open letter to Aer Lingus on the occasion of their laughable reply to my earlier one.<br />
A while ago, <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2019/08/an-open-letter-to-aer-lingus-on.html" title="An open letter to Aer Lingus on the occasion of their quite dreadful service.">I complained to Aer Lingus about their impressively atrocious service.</a> They replied impressively atrociously:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Thank you for contacting Aer Lingus.<br />
<br />
I was sorry to learn you were affected by the disruption to flight EI937 on July 19, 2019. Please accept my apologies on behalf of Aer Lingus.<br />
<br />
The EI937 was diverted to Dublin due to BHD curfew. Aer Lingus deems this an extraordinary circumstance and wish to invoke Article 5 Paragraph 3 of the European Regulation 261/2004.<br />
regrettably, there is no compensation due.</blockquote><br />
There are no words. Oh, hang on: yes there are, and they're right here:<br />
<br />
<br />
Dear Aer Lingus,<br />
<br />
I received your reply of 22nd August. It is appalling.<br />
<br />
Firstly, my complaint to you contained quite a large number of matters to be addressed — indeed, the fact that you had got so much so wrong is exactly why I was complaining. Your response addresses only one of those issues, and that badly.<br />
<br />
You have had an opportunity not only to respond to the points I raised, but to refute them. That you have not even tried to do so, I shall take as implicit confirmation that all my complaints were essentially correct. I did say that the onus was on you to dissuade me of the obvious, that your staff diverted your passengers to Dublin, further delaying an already badly delayed flight by a further two hours, for their own selfish benefit. So thanks for confirming that.<br />
<br />
The one thing you have actually addressed is this:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The EI937 was diverted to Dublin due to BHD curfew. Aer Lingus deems this an extraordinary circumstance and wish to invoke Article 5 Paragraph 3 of the European Regulation 261/2004.</blockquote><br />
As I said in my first letter, I fly a lot, so I'm quite familiar with the "extraordinary circumstances" clause and airlines' fondness for invoking it when it does not apply. I have to say, though, that this is the most brazenly ridiculous attempt to do so I have ever seen. It is impressive, in a way, that you have responded to a letter about how your staff insulted my intelligence by insulting my intelligence. But, admirable though chutzpah can be, I'm not convinced it's the ideal way to run a customer service department. A time and a place, and all that.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.belfastcityairport.com/Community/Environment/Aircraft-Noise.aspx" target="_blank">Here's Belfast City Airport's published opening hours:</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Operating hours: flights may only be scheduled to operate between 06:30 hours and 21:30 hours. Extensions may be granted in exceptional circumstances to facilitate delayed aircraft up to 23:59 hours.</blockquote><br />
Now, that <i>is</i> interesting. Because, on the occasion in question, no extension was granted, which implies either that Belfast City Airport decided that the circumstances were not exceptional or that you didn't even ask them for an extension in the first place because <I>you</I> decided that the circumstances were not exceptional. Do you wish to claim some quibbling distinction between "exceptional" and "extraordinary"? <br />
<br />
The other point about Belfast City's opening hours is that they are completely normal. They haven't changed in years. They are published. I assume that even Aer Lingus has heard about them. They are, in a word, ordinary: the completely literal opposite of extraordinary. Do your customer service staff really have the sheer nerve to gaslight your customers in this way? Or do they just not know what "extraordinary" means? I find myself hoping that they're merely ignorant, as the alternative is that you're paying them to be obnoxious bastards on your behalf.<br />
<br />
But perhaps you wish to claim that "extraordinary" carries some technical legal sense in this context, that I am missing. OK. Well, <a href="https://www.aerlingus.com/media/pdfs/LEGALDELAY.pdf" target="_blank">your own website</a> helpfully doesn't define "extraordinary circumstances" beyond:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Compensation can be claimed where you are delayed in arriving at your final destination by more than three hours and that delay arises from causes within our control (rather than extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided by taking all reasonable measures).</blockquote><br />
As luck would have it, though, we're talking about well established law here with <i>loads</i> of precedent, so lots of other people, including the courts, have fleshed that out a bit more than you. For example, <a href="https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/delayed-or-cancelled-flights/compensation" target="_blank">here's British Airways</a>, one of your sister airlines, apparently:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>If your journey was affected by extraordinary circumstances such as air traffic control decisions, political instability, adverse weather conditions or security risks you may not be able to claim compensation.</blockquote><br />
Hmm. It doesn't mention opening hours. Perhaps an oversight?<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.euclaim.co.uk/extraordinary-circumstances" target="_blank">EU Claim says</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>An ‘extraordinary circumstance’ is a situation in which the airline is not responsible for the problems with the flight. This includes the following situations:<br />
<ul><li>Extreme weather conditions during the flight, such as heavy fog or a storm</li>
<li>Natural disasters, such as a volcanic ash cloud</li>
<li>Strike action by air traffic control</li>
<li>Medical emergency landings</li>
<li>Acts of terrorism</li>
<li>Situations with passengers on board the airplane</li>
</ul>Situations which are <i>not</i> seen as extraordinary circumstances are:<br />
<ul><li>Technical faults on the airplane</li>
<li>Crew shortages or sickness</li>
<li>Strikes by airline personnel </li>
</ul></blockquote><br />
OK, it's not explicitly addressing the normal published opening hours of an airport, but I have to say this isn't looking much like what you claim it is.<br />
<br />
How about <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/transport/sites/transport/files/themes/passengers/news/doc/2016-06-10-better-enforcement-pax-rights/c%282016%293502_en.pdf" target="_blank">the European Commission's own published guidelines</a>?<br />
<br />
<blockquote>In accordance with Article 5(3) of the Regulation, an air carrier is exempted from paying compensation in the event of cancellation or delay at arrival if it can prove that the cancellation or delay is caused by extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken. In order to be exempted from the payment of compensation the carrier must therefore simultaneously prove: <br />
<ul><li> the existence and the link between the extraordinary circumstances and the delay or the cancellation, and</li>
<li>the fact that this delay or cancellation could not have been avoided although it took all reasonable measures.</li>
</ul></blockquote><br />
Well, that first point is interesting, isn't it? Because your flight was badly delayed <i>before</i> you diverted it to Dublin. The only reason that Belfast City closing affected this flight is that <i>it was already late</i>. So I would be particularly interested to see your proof that the flight was delayed as a result of the airport's closure, as such proof would necessarily reverse time and break the laws of physics.<br />
<br />
While I am rather enjoying the opportunity to be sarcastic, let's not forget that I have something genuine to be sarcastic about here. Your staff quite thoroughly ruined my day through their utter obnoxiousness, your customer service team can't even be arsed going to the minimal effort of mentioning any of that in their mealy-mouthed mendacious non-apology, and you're refusing to pay the compensation which you are legally obliged to pay. You are clearly hoping that, if you fob me off, I will give up and go away. Good luck with that.<br />
<br />
Yours determinedly,<br />
<br />
Joseph Kynaston Reeves<br />
<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-57403741708330861912019-08-06T21:52:00.000+01:002019-10-16T23:14:49.558+01:00An open letter to Aer Lingus on the occasion of their quite dreadful service.Dear Sir or Madam,<br />
<br />
I was unfortunate enough to be on your delayed flight EI937 from Heathrow to Belfast City on 19/7/19, so am writing to complain about the delay itself, the way you made the delay worse, and the way you treated your passengers. I fly twice a week and have very low expectations of airlines, generally putting up with the whole awful experience that you all offer without complaining. That Aer Lingus have managed to do so much so badly in just one flight that I am prompted to write this letter is some sort of perverse achievement.<br />
<br />
Firstly, as you are aware, since arrival at Belfast City was over six hours late, I am entitled to compensation under EU regulation 261. Please arrange that promptly.<br />
<br />
Your flight was scheduled to leave at 19:20. When the boards in the airport showed that it was delayed till (if I recall correctly) 22:40, I went to find some Aer Lingus staff to ask for vouchers for food and drink. Since you are obliged to provide your passengers with food and drink during this delay, of course I should not have to go searching for them: you should be making an announcement over the PA and seeking out your passengers to provide them with what you are legally obliged to. But no. <br />
<br />
Your staff directed me to the Aer Lingus customer service desk. There were only five people in front of me in the queue, yet I reached the front some forty-five minutes later. You had just one member of staff on this desk, dealing with all sorts of different queries. Handing out food vouchers takes seconds. I was "lucky" enough to be near the front of the queue; by the time I reached the front, there were dozens of people in it: unless it sped up considerably, those at the back were going to be waiting there more than two hours. <br />
<br />
After I got my food vouchers, I asked your employee which airport my flight would now be landing at, since, as you know, Belfast City has a curfew at 21:30. She told me that it was still scheduled to land at Belfast City. I pointed out that the flight was now planned to take off from Heathrow more than an hour after Belfast City had shut. She replied that it was still scheduled to land at Belfast City and that it was too early to know whether it might be redirected, and that such information would not be known until after take-off. I strongly object to being treated as stupid enough to believe that your flights ever take off with no known destination airport — i.e. with no flight plan. Presumably, whether you have enough fuel is mere guesswork and hope. Does the Civil Aviation Authority know? However, this was not the only ridiculous lie your employee told me.<br />
<br />
In light of the unacceptably slow progress of the long queue, and in the hope of improving matters for the benighted souls further back than me, I asked your employee whether she might consider calling any colleagues to help. She informed me that she was the only member of Aer Lingus staff available. This was a brazen lie. I responded that there were lots of other Aer Lingus staff in the airport: two had directed me to this desk, for instance; there were others at gates; others wandering around chatting; some I could see from where I was standing. She continued to insist that she was the only member of staff and absolutely refused to consider getting someone else to help your passengers. I pointed out that people in the queue were going to be waiting two hours or more and asked her whether she thought that was a reasonable way to treat people who are paying for this. She replied "Do you think I like doing this?" Perhaps you could explain to your staff that there is a substantive difference between a customer who has paid Aer Lingus for a service and an employee who is being paid by Aer Lingus to provide a service, and that those two groups are not all in the same boat, equally inconvenienced by your delays. I could not care less whether your staff are enjoying making your passengers' lives difficult, and do not expect them to tell me. And if they are so poorly trained as to tell me, I will not sympathise.<br />
<br />
I should not but apparently do need to explain to you that the purpose of providing food and drink to your passengers is to make a bad experience — a severely delayed flight — somewhat less bad. Forcing your passengers to stand in a queue for hours in order to earn the privilege of asking for vouchers makes the bad experience worse. That is the opposite of compensation.<br />
<br />
My vouchers, incidentally, had "We regret the inconvenience you have been caused and would like you to enjoy Breakfast with our compliments" printed on them. That is the right sentiment and the right attitude. Perhaps whoever wrote the blurb for your compensation vouchers could explain their thinking to your customer service staff.<br />
<br />
Still inexplicably wanting to know where I was actually going, I phoned your call centre to ask. The conversation got off to a bad start when your employee initially insisted that she could not give me any information without the booking reference which is not printed on your boarding passes. I had to explain to her that the booking reference was immaterial to my question as every passenger on your plane would (one can only hope) arrive at the same airport, and of course because I didn't even need to be a passenger to request this information — I could be a friend or family member trying to arrange to pick a passenger up after they landed. Destination airports are supposed to be publicly available information. Quite why your staff would choose to have an argument over their obstructive refusal to disclose that information is beyond me.<br />
<br />
Anyway, your call centre employee eventually relented, and, like your airport employee, also insisted that the flight would land at Belfast City — although, unlike your airport staff, she at least treated me with enough respect to believe me about Belfast City's curfew and go and double-check. That she double-checked and still gave me the same information tells me that your computer systems were at this point still showing a destination airport that you knew to be impossible. I would appreciate an explanation of why whoever was responsible for updating your flight plan (and surely this person exists) chose not to record that information on your systems so that even your own staff couldn't access it.<br />
<br />
I should not but apparently do need to inform you that it is absurdly unprofessional for an airline not to be able to tell its passengers — and, indeed, to give every impression of not even knowing — where their flight is going.<br />
<br />
I would love this complaint to end here, but somehow your service contrived to get worse.<br />
<br />
Despite your refusal to tell me where your plane was going, I was assuming it would be diverted from Belfast City to Belfast International, as is standard practice. After the flight was eventually belatedly boarded, your pilot announced that it was going to Dublin. This information had of course not been revealed until after all your passengers were in their seats, as it is easier for you to control passengers and more difficult for them to cause you difficulty once they're strapped in. When Aer Lingus are inconveniencing your customers through your own actions, you need to learn that the problem is not that a customer might annoy you by complaining, but that you have given them something to complain about in the first place. The destination of Dublin should have been announced at the gate, if for no other reason than basic politeness. But also, of course, some passengers' friends or relatives were to pick them up at the airport, and many of those people could have driven to Dublin — if you had informed your passengers of the destination when they still had time to contact their friends, rather than after your command to everyone to disable their phones. And there is another reason you should have announced the destination at the gate, which I shall come to.<br />
<br />
Your pilot's explanation for diverting to Dublin was that a few other flights had been diverted to Belfast International that evening and that this would, for some reason, cause such severe delays that going via Dublin would be quicker. Belfast International is a half-hour drive from Belfast City; Dublin at least a two-hour drive. Your pilot therefore expected us to believe that, were we to land at Belfast International, it would take more than an hour and a half to get us off the plane, merely because some other flights had landed there that evening. I admit it is possible that he left out some vital detail that could cause this otherwise farcical attempt at an explanation to make some sort of sense. I would very much like to hear that detail.<br />
<br />
Your pilot also announced, as is usual but nevertheless wrong in such circumstances, that we should be incredibly grateful to your amazing flight crew for working late to get us to our destination. I see no reason why I should particularly care whether your staff are working late. I know that Aer Lingus are not the only airline guilty of this insulting nonsense, but insulting nonsense it is. To reiterate: your customers are paying for this and are having their leisure time destroyed by you; your staff are being paid while at work. These are not remotely comparable circumstances. Indeed, contrary to the inflated opinion of themselves flight crew like to maintain, it is they who should be congratulating your hard-done-by passengers for putting up with such inconvenience without shouting at them, which would be an entirely reasonable reaction to their treatment. If I were in a restaurant and my food were two hours late, I would not expect to be asked to give the staff a round of applause for working late to bring me my food — and of course no restaurant would be stupid enough to ask me to. Since I was travelling for work, I was in fact working extremely late myself thanks to your delay. Your staff did not congratulate me on my heroism.<br />
<br />
These two facts — that your staff stressed to us how late they were working and that no sensible explanation was offered for the diversion to Dublin — lead me to conclude that the reason for flying to Dublin rather than Belfast International was so that your crew could get home to bed, at the expense of further inconveniencing your passengers. Since that is the most reasonable conclusion from the information you provided, as far as I'm concerned, the onus is on you to dissuade me of that.<br />
<br />
After landing at Dublin, I was then shocked to pass through Immigration. As luck would have it, I had my passport with me, but I am certainly not obliged to carry it when travelling from one part of my home country to another. There were people on that flight from outside the EU. I shall leave it to them to complain to you on their own behalf, but suffice to say that unnecessarily diverting a domestic flight to a foreign country is an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. I understand there may be occasions where it is unavoidable: this was not one. Your staff had every opportunity to inform your passengers before they were on the plane and it was too late, but chose not to. I know people who are allowed into the UK but not Ireland. For all your staff knew, I was one such myself — no-one thought to ask. Had your staff announced the destination of a foreign country at the gate, such passengers would have had the opportunity to make their situation known, and you could have made appropriate arrangements, such as putting them up in a hotel before flying them to Belfast the next day. That you did not was unprofessional and grossly irresponsible. <br />
<br />
Further progress through Dublin Airport was not exactly well organized. Rather than being directed to the bus, I was told to follow a man who was already a hundred yards away and was walking as fast as he could away from me. I move pretty fast, but I lost him, and had to find the bus by luck. <br />
<br />
And, after all this, is it really too much to ask that you drive me the two hours to Belfast City on a bus with air conditioning? This may seem a relatively minor problem compared to the litany of obnoxiousness that led up to it, but your bus ride was twice as long as your flight, and it was hot, sweaty, and thoroughly uncomfortable. Your bus dropped us off at the entrance to Belfast City, leaving me to carry my luggage across the car parks to get to the taxi rank. Every little helps.<br />
<br />
I reached Belfast City sometime around 03:00 on 20/7/19. Such a massive delay and deprival of so much sleep obviously had a knock-on effect on the rest of my weekend.<br />
<br />
As I said at the start of this letter, you are, as you know, obliged to compensate me for your delay. I ask you to compensate me further for the appalling service I received from your staff, who, at every single stage, contrived to make the whole experience unnecessarily worse, particularly your employee at Heathrow, who was obnoxious and who lied twice to my face, and especially for the decision to add an extra one and a half hours to the delay (of a one-hour flight) by diverting to Dublin instead of Belfast International for no good reason.<br />
<br />
I await your reply with interest.<br />
<br />
Yours faithfully,<br />
<br />
Joseph Kynaston Reeves<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>Update:</i></b><br />
<br />
Aer Lingus did reply, with this laughably insulting missive:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Dear Mr. Reeves,<br />
<br />
Thank you for contacting Aer Lingus.<br />
<br />
I was sorry to learn you were affected by the disruption to flight EI937 on July 19, 2019. Please accept my apologies on behalf of Aer Lingus.<br />
<br />
The EI937 was diverted to Dublin due to BHD curfew. Aer Lingus deems this an extraordinary circumstance and wish to invoke Article 5 Paragraph 3 of the European Regulation 261/2004.<br />
regrettably, there is no compensation due.</blockquote><br />
I've been too busy to respond to this. <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2019/10/another-open-letter-to-aer-lingus-on.html" title="Another open letter to Aer Lingus on the occasion of their laughable reply to my earlier one.">Until now.</a><br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-60860089240301099452019-05-09T23:31:00.001+01:002019-05-09T23:32:46.451+01:00Fear and loathing and the mob.I haven't blogged in a very long time. I've had plenty of things to say, but can't face writing them in public. The reason, quite simply, is fear. <br />
<br />
A lot of us had high hopes of the new media when it was born. Blogging was a revolution as big as the printing press, they said. The barriers to publishing your opinion worldwide became negligible. Experts in all sorts of fields gave their knowledge and commentary to the world. Dan Rather lost his job.<br />
<br />
Had Rather knowingly presented false evidence to the world ten years earlier, he'd have got away with it. Instead, hundreds of experts tore his "news" to shreds, for free. And a news media that had held a monopoly on received opinion for decades suddenly discovered that they could no longer control the narrative. <br />
<br />
So it comes as no surprise that the old media do all they can to undermine the new.<br />
<br />
I can't say I'm happy that Rather was sacked. Cynic though I am, I believe in redemption. Everyone should be given a chance to recognise that they were wrong and to improve. To be fair, Rather preferred to double down, do-you-know-who-I-am-ing like a dowager duchess. And, of course, lying to the pubic when you work in the news is a bit of a big deal. TV being what it is, he probably had plenty of money put by. But a livelihood is still a hell of a thing to lose. Rather was fine, of course. But most of us wouldn't be. What better threat to wield than loss of livelihood? It was the successful test case that set a horrific precedent. If the new media can take the scalp of one of the most influential men in America, what chance does some schmuck from Coventry have?<br />
<br />
So it comes as no surprise, sadly, that the old media have so enthusiastically embraced the new model of enforcement: public shaming by the social media mob.<br />
<br />
I'm not going to waste time discussing whether Danny Baker is a racist, partly because anyone with the remotest acquaintance with his career over the last forty years knows damn well he isn't, but mainly because that's not even the point, and, there being so many other victims of this same vindictive spiteful shit, <i>he's</i> not even the point. Right now, the media, old and new, contains literally millions of people picking apart and analysing the details of a simple glib unsophisticated joke. Why? Because the stakes are so fucking high, that's why. <br />
<br />
The question isn't one of guilt; it's about process and punishment. The Labour movement was founded, above all else, on the need to protect people from capricious punishment by their employers. Still today, we have idiot libertarians spouting the mantra that a private company should be free to employ or to cease employing anyone it chooses for any reason, as if providing someone's ability to live — and thereby wielding the power to destroy their life — carries with it no responsibility whatsoever. The power to destroy livelihoods is huge, and it is that massive imbalance of power that led to the creation of the Labour movement, who rightly stopped bosses sacking their minions for getting uppity, for not voting the way they were told, or for being female and married, and who gave those minions the power to appeal such life-changing decisions.<br />
<br />
And now here we are. The "progressive" identitarian Left that grew out of that Labour movement aggressively campaigns to get people sacked, with no due process, no impartial judgement, no right of appeal: just the angry mob, the Horde of Squealing Shitheads that is Twitter. Then, when they succeed — which they usually do — they gleefully crow over their victim and, of course, their victim's dependents. I'm pretty successful, but, if I lose my job, my kids will lose their home. No matter what you might think of my opinions, is that not taking things a bit far? Apparently not: I've yet to see evidence of the mob experiencing any moral qualms. The New Left are using the threat of destitution and poverty as a weapon to enforce ideological compliance, right down to having the correct approved sense of humour. And they're somehow <i>proud</i> of this, of what they're doing to the world. <br />
<br />
Well, fuck that. I don't want to live in that world. And, sooner or later, its cheerleaders will realise that they don't want to either. Saying something that some other people don't like will eventually happen to them all — how can it not? And, whilst I may believe in redemption, they will find that my sympathy well has run dry that day.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-11054830338712943722018-05-02T22:48:00.001+01:002018-05-02T22:57:23.438+01:00What's wrong with Black Panther.<i>[There are a few mild spoilers in this. They were all either in their respective films' trailers or in their first few minutes or are frankly trivial and don't matter, so nothing major. Don't read if you don't want to risk it.]</i><br />
<br />
Superman is the dullest of all superheroes. He's just too damn super, forcing the writers to come up with yet another way for a bad guy to get hold of some of the frankly implausible amounts of weaponized kryptonite that are lying around, again and again and again. The writers themselves realised this pretty fast, which is why every subsequent superhero is markedly less super and pointedly vulnerable. Until Black Panther.<br />
<br />
The opening of <i>Black Panther</i> tells us about the African nation of Wakanda, built on huge deposits of that old favourite of scientifically illiterate comicbook writers, magic super metal (in this case, apparently, "vibranium", but really, who cares?), which makes absolutely any plot device possible, because it is so super it's magic. The Wakandans have built their civilization on this stuff and make their amazing tech out of it and even weave it into their clothes. This makes them an entire nation of Supermen. Which makes them dull.<br />
<br />
For a plot to be engaging, there needs to be jeopardy. It doesn't have to be physical: in a romantic comedy, boy meets girl and they proceed to utterly fail to get together for most of the movie. We have to believe that there's a real chance that Harry and Sally <i>won't</i> end up together, or where's the entertainment? In disaster movies, some of the main characters die, so there's always a chance our favourite will be one of them. In a sport film, we have to think the athlete might lose — and Rocky did. In action films, we have to believe the people we're watching are in danger.<br />
<br />
Of course, with CGI and so on, that's getting harder and harder to do. Jackie Chan does it by sticking out-takes at the end of his films, in which we get to see him fuck up and even injure himself, so we know he and his stuntmen really do the stunts we see on screen. That knowledge invests us in what we're watching. Prachya Pinkaew has taken the same approach, to great effect. Dan Bradley is a master of putting actors in the middle of insane action and pulling the audience in after them using sheer inventiveness — getting a cameraman to jump off a roof being my personal favourite of his moments. It doesn't really matter whether it's the actors or the characters in danger. It just matters that we believe in the danger.<br />
<br />
With superheroes, this is doubly important, because they're going to spend most of the film being super. This is why <i>Iron Man</i> starts with Tony Stark bleeding to death. <i>Thor</i> starts with his hammer being taken away; <i>Thor: Ragnarok</i> starts with it being destroyed. Captain America starts out as a wimp. Dr Strange starts out by being crippled. <i>Ant Man</i> opens with Scott Lang being punched in the face and bleeding. Peter Parker gets bullied at school. <i>The Incredibles</i> starts with every superhero having to go into hiding from a public that hates them. It is important to establish early on that these characters are capable of being beaten and hurt.<br />
<br />
<i>Black Panther</i> starts with a James-Bond-type scene in which it is made abundantly clear to us that <i>this</i> hero is <i>never</i> going to get hurt. He jumps out of a plane without a parachute, lands safely, and then ignores being shot at point-blank range with a machine-gun. In case we thought it was only him who can do this stuff because we hadn't paid enough attention to the introductory spiel about the magicsupermetal, his sidekick Okoye joins in. Soon enough, we see Wakandans thrown hundreds of yards through the air onto rock or tarmac, caught in explosions, etc, and shrug it all off. Wakandans can all do this. An entire nation of Supermen. <br />
<br />
This is a real blind spot with the writers, Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole. One of the things the Wakandans have invented using magicsupermetal is a universal remote control for all vehicles: chuck it onto a car or a plane or whatever, and someone back at base can do the driving using the interface of their choice. This is meant to impress you with the Wakandans' astounding technology, and it succeeds — but it also means that the driver in the car chase is never in any danger: they're not even there. Contrast that with Jason Bourne smashing his way through the Lefortovo Tunnel and limping away afterwards.<br />
<br />
And it's not just physical jeopardy they fail to convey. Black Panther has a love interest. Is she interested in anyone else? Nope. Does she not love him back? No, she obviously does. At first, she seems to think their getting together would be a bit inconvenient. I don't think this fooled anyone. <br />
<br />
There are precisely two points in the film in which any of the good guys are in any real danger: when Black Panther has to ritually abandon his powers for a few minutes to have a fair fight. In both cases, the person in danger is Black Panther himself, and we know he's going to be fine because the film's named after him and was preceded by a trailer for <i>Infinity War</i> with him in it.<br />
<br />
I like the character. I like Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o and the rest of the cast, especially the criminally underused Winston Duke. I just wish I could have believed for one second that everything might not work out just spiffingly for these people. But I couldn't.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-78646768665262268232017-09-29T01:55:00.001+01:002017-09-29T01:55:46.595+01:00On punching Nazis.<b>The problem with Fascism is not political.</b><br />
<br />
There's been a lot of debate (well, "debate") lately about whether <a href="http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Yes-its-ok-to-punch-a-nazi-like-spencer-in-the-face.png" target="_blank" title="The Independent: ''Yes, it is ok to punch a Nazi like Richard Spencer in the face''">it's OK to punch Nazis</a>, because apparently <i>that's</i> the kind of world we live in now. Those lovely people in Antifa, of course, say that it is — and, helpfully, define "Nazi" as "anyone I've just punched". Saves a lot of confusion, that. My experience in the mires of the Web tells me that plenty of people who are nowhere near as extreme are still staunchly in the Nazi-punching camp. I despair.<br />
<br />
Such people are well-intentioned, of course. Who wants to see the rise of Nazism again? What decent person doesn't wish someone had killed Adolf Hitler in, say, 1928? Surely beating him to death before he really got stuck in would have done the world a favour. Surely.<br />
<br />
There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, and most obviously, punching Nazis isn't a new idea. Some Germans actually thought of it in the 1920s, and gave it a go. In other words, the only reason we're even discussing whether punching Nazis works is that punching Nazis didn't work.<br />
<br />
But it's the second problem I want to talk about.<br />
<br />
The problem with Nazis was not their antisemitism. It wasn't their economic policy — as a free-marketeer, I'm full of criticisms of it, but nations are often run by people who are wrong. Hundreds of nations had bad economic policy at the time, but most of them were not problems in the way Germany turned out to be. The problem with the Nazis wasn't their social policy, or their nutty racial theories (I say "nutty", but they were shared by rather a lot of the planet's respectable scientists at the time), or even their invention of <i>[shudder]</i> the communal holiday camp. The Nazis could have believed everything they believed and just been bastards. That's not a compliment, but it's not one of history's greatest evils either. Bastards are with us always.<br />
<br />
What tipped the Nazis over the edge from bastards to... well, to fucking Nazis was their belief in the rightness of the use of violence against their enemies. Antisemites who use the word "yid", who complain about the International Jewish Conspiracy™, and refuse to have Jews round to dinner are annoying in all sorts of ways, but are not on remotely the same planet as slaughtering six million innocent people.<br />
<br />
In the alternative universe where European Jews systematically round up and kill six million innocent Aryans — even Aryans who believe they are the chosen master race and Jews are inferior and the root of all the world's problems — the Aryans aren't the bad guys, and the Jews aren't heroes. That universe's Holocaust is every bit as wrong as our own. The ongoing argument about whether National Socialists were really Socialists is immaterial: what they did would still be evil if done in the name of Liberalism or Conservatism or David Icke's lizard people or preferring The Stones to The Beatles. The underlying reasons don't matter. It's the replacement of civilized argument with violence that matters.<br />
<br />
Now, I'm not a pacifist. I'm not anti-war — especially not the war fought to defeat and destroy Nazi Germany. The proud Nazi-punchers like <a href="http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/285/790/034.jpg" target="_blank" title="Alt-left, violently coming at the alt-right, circa 1944.">to compare themselves to the Allied forces who stormed Normandy</a> and claim that they're just doing the same thing: using violence against Nazis. Apart from their bizarre aspiration to turn our societies into Omaha Beach, I wonder how far they're willing to strain that logic. If you burn down a house with a family inside, aren't you just doing what the RAF did when they dropped incendiary bombs on German cities? Surely, as long as the parents are <i>on the wrong side</i>, it's OK to incinerate them and their kids. Right?<br />
<br />
Well, there are wars and there are wars. War has reasons and it has aims, and it is by them that we must judge it. The aim of the Allies in World War 2 was pretty clear: to prevent the wholesale destruction of European civilization and its replacement with the Fourth Reich, accompanied by the mass slaughter of hundreds of millions of humans. We like to tell ourselves that we fought the Nazis to defeat their ideology, but did we, really? <i>All</i> of their ideology? Well, no, obviously not. The Nazis gave food and shelter to the unemployed and the homeless. They opposed Catholicism. They opposed global trade and Capitalism. They believed private enterprise should work for the good of the community, not for profit. They believed the state should provide healthcare. They controlled food commodity prices through a quota system, just like the EU. The Nazi policy of "creating" employment through massive state-sponsored infrastructure-building schemes is popular with Labour, the Conservatives, and Barack Obama. Antisemitism is, sadly, a bit of a vote-winner these days. Even <a href="http://www.lifenews.com/2015/06/15/company-uses-child-with-down-syndrome-to-promote-test-that-could-lead-to-aborting-them/" target="_blank" title="Company Uses Child With Down Syndrome to Promote Test That Could Lead to Aborting Them">the improvement of the race via the forced removal from the gene pool of inferior specimens</a> is a horribly popular idea to this day, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden" target="_blank" title="Originally the aim of the sterilisation policy was explained as protection of society. The law targeted the so-called feeble-minded individuals or other people who were considered ''unfit for the society''.">involuntary sterilisation of the mentally unfit was state policy in Sweden into the 1970s</a>. You may note that, deplorable though that was, no-one went to war with Sweden over it.<br />
<br />
There are people on the Right who delight in producing lists like this to draw attention to the myriad ways in which the Left agree with the Nazis, and thus to imply that the Left <i>are</i> Nazis. I am not one of them. The point I'm making is quite the opposite: that a lot of Nazi policies were actually OK, and that agreeing with them on some of these points is perfectly respectable. I disagree with most of them, but <i>not enough to go to war over</i>. Most of it was just wrong or misguided or inefficient or a matter of opinion, not <i>evil</i>. Most of it. But the small core that was evil, well... it was <i>everything</i>.<br />
<br />
The reason we had to fight the Nazis, the reason that they represented an existential threat, was not any one of their preferences within the realm of politics, but their belief about what that realm should encompass, about <i>what politics itself should be</i>. They didn't just reject democracy — which is bad, but not necessarily all that bad. They didn't just reject the principle that the strong have a duty to protect the weak — a principle with less of a historical pedigree than we might like to think. No, they inverted it: they embraced the principle that the strong have a duty to <i>destroy</i> the weak — and, of course, that the good should destroy the bad. Once they'd done that, the definitions they came up with for "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" were immaterial: the results were going to be just as evil regardless, and any society they built was going to be a hell. In their early days, it was street brawls; once they got power, it was genocide; but they're just two points on the same continuum: if you start with the principle that the former is right, you're on the path to the latter. Of course their target was the Jews — it's always the Jews — and of course it wasn't only the Jews — it never is. But the Nazis would still have been evil, and it would still have been necessary to destroy them, had they picked on someone else.<br />
<br />
If, for instance, they'd taken to the streets to punch Nazis.<br />
<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-21144161940362982182017-05-24T00:51:00.003+01:002017-05-24T00:51:54.502+01:00Nothing changed yesterday.I've seen a lot of claims that what happened yesterday in Manchester represents some sort of new low.<br />
<br />
It doesn't.<br />
<br />
Mark Steyn wrote this in 2004, after Beslan:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children. <br />
<br />
But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.</blockquote><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-52381806998139449782017-05-23T02:00:00.002+01:002017-05-23T02:07:41.560+01:00Apparently, we need to explain the difference between Jeremy Corbyn and John Major.Brendan O'Neill, a man who usually talks a great deal of sense, <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/corbyn-and-the-ira-an-infantile-scandal/19844#.WSNksIWcFPZ" target="_blank" title="Corbyn and the IRA: an infantile scandal">has ceased to do so:</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote><b>Corbyn and the IRA: an infantile scandal</b></blockquote><br />
O'Neill has been saying for months that one of the great things about Brexit is that, now our political class are having their scapegoat taken away, our politics is now much more about proper issues that matter. And he's right about that. But now he's annoyed that people might care whether the Prime Minister of a country supports or opposes the murdering of that country's citizens. What issue could be less infantile?<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Right now, nothing better sums up the moral infantilism of the opinion-forming class than its obsession with Jeremy Corbyn and the IRA.</blockquote><br />
Nothing, he says: <i>nothing</I> is more infantile than this silly little concern over murdering people. Not even <a href="https://www.facebook.com/brendan.oneill.79/posts/1358783317545091?pnref=story" target="_blank" title="Those who would exchange democracy for cheaper mobile roaming charges deserve neither">mobile phone roaming charges</a>, presumably.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>You don’t have to be a fan of Corbyn to find this incessant IRA talk childish and irritating. It captures the media and political class’s preference for gotcha moralism over serious debate about the important issues of today, in Brexit Britain, <i>20 years</I> since the Provisional IRA last detonated a bomb.</blockquote><br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/15/belfast-prison-officer-dies-targeted-new-ira-car-bomb-attack-adrian-ismay" target="_blank" title="Prison officer injured in New IRA car bomb attack in Belfast dies">They murdered Adrian Ismay with a car bomb just a year ago.</a> <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2010/02/that-bang.html" title="That bang.">They blew up Newry Courthouse seven years ago.</a> But sure, let's leave the splinter groups conveniently to one side and say O'Neill's got a point. So what does he say to the victims of the Omagh Bombing whose case against the last suspect only collapsed last year? "It was nearly twenty years ago so get over it"? Breda Devine and Maura Monaghan were only one year old when they were blown up. I'm betting twenty years doesn't seem like water under the bridge to their families.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Anyone who knows anything about the Troubles, which started in 1969 and ended with the first Provisional IRA ceasefire in 1994, knows British officials were talking to Sinn Fein and the IRA in the same period Corbyn was meeting with them. </blockquote><br />
O'Neill is particularly adept at calling out politicians' bullshit, which makes it so much more disappointing that he's helping spread Corbyn's disingenuity here. No-one's accusing Corbyn of <i>talking</I> to Sinn Fein. He's accused — correctly — of <i>supporting the IRA</I>: supporting both their strategy and their tactics, and wanting them to win.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>John Major himself okayed these discussions between officialdom and the IRA’s Army Council. If Corbyn is a nutter unfit for public life because he talked to the IRA before it stopped its campaign, so is John Major.</blockquote><br />
Is there a single person anywhere on the planet who genuinely believes that John Major commenced negotiations with the IRA because he was a keen supporter who celebrated their killings? Really?<br />
<br />
The talks between the Major Government and the IRA were fraught, because they were between opposing sides — enemies, in fact. The talks were very difficult and took many years, because the two sides disagreed with each and largely hated each other fundamentally. Corbyn's "talks" with Sinn Fein were not fraught, because they didn't disagree about a single damned thing.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The Queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness, IRA man turned first minister of Northern Ireland. Ah, but that was in 2012, not 1988, and that makes the world of difference, say Corbyn’s haters.</blockquote><br />
Firstly, yes, obviously the time makes a difference, just as there's a teensy bit of a difference between meeting the President of Turkey in 1916 and in 1930. McGuiness clearly disagreed with O'Neill here: there's no way on Earth he'd have shaken the Queen's hand in 1988. <br />
<br />
Secondly, this sort of thing is the Queen's job. <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2012/06/thought-on-occasion-of-queen-elizabeth.html" title="Heads of state are like in-laws: obliged by their position to meet each other and smile about it no matter how they may feel about it. Their subjects are more like neighbours: they can pick and choose which ones to socialise with, and report the psychotic ones to the police.">She has to shake the hands of some truly awful people.</a> If Recep Erdogan visits the UK, she'll probably have to shake his hand. That doesn't signify that she or anyone in the Government supports him. <br />
<br />
<blockquote>Is Mandela beyond the pale, too? Should we take down his statue in Parliament Square? Will Arlene Foster attack him in her next speech? Of course not. He isn’t Corbyn, and they’re out to get Corbyn, not to be consistent or principled.</blockquote><br />
Is Nelson Mandela standing for election to be British Prime Minister? What is O'Neill suggesting here? That we can't criticise someone who is standing for election without also criticising every historical figure with comparable views? Needless to say, O'Neill doesn't follow that rule himself.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Then there’s the warped moralism of the constant demand that Corbyn should condemn the IRA ‘specifically’.</blockquote><br />
Yes, obviously, since it is <i>specifically</I> the IRA that he has actively supported. O'Neill is being disingenuous again. No-one has ever suspected that Corbyn might be a UVF fan, so there's really no need for him to clarify his position on them. Similarly, no-one is asking him for his views on <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1982/03/27" target="_blank" title="This classic Bloom County got bowdlerized, sadly.">nun-beating</a>. And?<br />
<br />
<blockquote>If Corbyn is ‘pro-IRA’ for refusing to single out the IRA as the worst group, are these people pro-UVF, pro-UDA, pro-the Shankill Butchers for refusing to single out loyalists, and even worse for effectively saying: ‘Stop condemning loyalists, just condemn the IRA alone’?</blockquote><br />
See, the trouble with starting with a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand is, before you know it, you've followed your own logic and wound up talking complete bollocks. (And I should know.)<br />
<br />
Because really, what on Earth is O'Neill on about? Is he suggesting that the Conservatives support the UVF? They don't. Is he suggesting that mainstream British political parties have a history of failing to condemn the UDA? News to me.<br />
<br />
There was official recognition, both in the UK and Ireland, that the Loyalist paramilitaries wouldn't have existed without the Republican paramilitaries, and that therefore stopping the Republicans was the strategic priority. And one can have legitimate problems with that position, sure. But I don't remember a Tory leader ever <i>praising</I> the UVF's bravery or supporting their tactics. Maybe it slipped my mind.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>DUP officials did more than whip up a climate of violent contempt for Catholics. Some of them had links with groups that worked with loyalist death squads.</blockquote><br />
O'Neill's point about various DUP bigwigs' dodgy history is well taken, but is again disingenuous. The point of a peace process is not that it magically turns bastards into nice people but that it ties the bastards up in constitutional politics long enough for a couple of generations to get out of the habit of violence. Those of us living in Northern Ireland have to put up with having some murderous hateful bastards in government for a while, which, it seems, is a price most of us are willing to pay for the peace. But Corbyn isn't a part of that. He's a Londoner. We don't have to put up with a terrorist-loving leader of the British Labour Party in order to preserve peace. There's no trade-off there: he just supports terrorists, and in return we get supported terrorists. Arlene Foster, whatever you may think of her, is not Corbyn's counterpart; Theresa May is. And, unless Brendan O'Neill is sitting on the scoop of the century, I don't think she has a history of torturing Catholics to death.<br />
<br />
Jeremy Corbyn didn't negotiate with the IRA. He didn't even — as O'Neill claims — merely talk to them. He supported them. <a href="https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/jeremy-corbyn-should-not-be-allowed-to-rewrite-the-history-of-his-support-for-the-ira/#" target="_blank" title="Jeremy Corbyn should not be allowed to rewrite the history of his support for the IRA">Alex Massie has a handy list:</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>No-one who was seriously interested in peace in the 1980s spoke at Troops Out rallies. The best that could be said of those people was that they wanted ‘peace’ on the IRA’s terms. In other words, they wanted the IRA to <i>win</I>.<br />
<br />
If that had not been the case, if they had been interested in an actual settlement, they would not – as Corbyn did – have opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement. They would not have denounced John Hume and the SDLP as craven sell-outs. They would not have insisted that the armed struggle was a vital part of getting the Brits out of the northern Irish statelet.<br />
<br />
But these people did do that. All of that and more.<br />
<br />
....<br />
<br />
[In 1993], Corbyn was a member of the board of <i>Labour Briefing</I>, a fringe magazine for diehard leftists that unequivocally supported the IRA’s bombing campaign. Corbyn organised the magazine’s mailing-list and was a regular speaker at its events. In December 1984, the magazine <i>“reaffirmed its support for, and solidarity with, the Irish republican movement”</I> ... <i>“Labour briefing stands for peace, but we are not pacifists”</I>. Moreover, <i>“It certainly appears to be the case that the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it”</I>. That being so, discussions with the SDLP and the Irish government were, at best, a distraction. Only Sinn Fein and the IRA spoke for Ireland. Labour Briefing explicitly opposed the SDLP, preferring instead to endorse the republican terrorist campaign.<br />
<br />
This was published a few weeks after the Brighton bombing. ... Condemning the bombing showed that the Labour party had lost its <i>‘political nerve’</I>. The Corbynite left, however, was made of sterner stuff. As Labour Briefing had previously written: <i>“We refuse to parrot the ritual condemnation of ‘violence’ because we insist on placing responsibility where it lies…. Let our ‘Iron Lady’ know this: those who live by the sword shall die by it. If she wants violence, then violence she will certainly get.”</I></blockquote><br />
<i>That</I>, for the avoidance of doubt, is what Brendan O'Neill is referring to when he talks about <br />
<br />
<blockquote>the time [Corbyn] took tea with the leaders of Sinn Fein and said a few critical things about Britain’s actions in Northern Ireland.</blockquote><br />
Tea.<br />
<br />
You can take the boy out of the Revolutionary Communist Party....<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-59528088453514119272017-01-11T21:24:00.003+00:002017-01-11T21:24:51.455+00:00Trump derangement syndrome.In the light of the latest completely unhinged accusations against Donald Trump — accusations so utterly hingeless that even I won't dignify them with a link — I have this to say.<br />
<br />
Donald Trump is not only an easy target; he's an easy legitimate target. He genuinely and obviously is so bad in so many ways that it should be really really easy to criticise him. And yet the Left keep coming up with these stupid convoluted and often false accusations, which both help Trump by making his opponents look insane and him reasonable in comparison, and force me and anyone else who may not support him but does value truth into the position of having to defend him. <br />
<br />
Stop it. I don't want to defend him. He's a wanker.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-44664564314737602462016-11-17T00:08:00.001+00:002016-11-17T00:08:16.308+00:00A conflict of interest.The news was on in the background, as it always is at work, and I saw that a committee of MPs are calling for the RSPCA to be stripped of the right to prosecute. Why? Because, they claim, for the RSPCA to prosecute cases of animal cruelty is a conflict of interest.<br />
<br />
I admit to having been utterly baffled by this. What conflict of interest? Do the RSPCA somehow make a profit out of prisons or something? So <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37987213" target="_blank" title="RSPCA should be stripped of prosecution powers, say MPs">I looked it up.</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>The Commons environment committee said there was a "conflict of interest" between the charity's power to prosecute and its role in investigating cases, campaigning and fundraising.</blockquote><br />
A conflict of interest between investigating cases and prosecuting them? What the <I>what</I>? Couldn't we say the same about the criminal justice system?<br />
<br />
But read on a bit and suddenly this nonsense all jumps into focus.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Last year the RSPCA spent £4.9 million on legal fees and cases. [David Bowles, the RSPCA's head of public affairs] said that represented about 3% of the charity's budget. <br />
<br />
....<br />
<br />
The charity's prosecution success rate is 98.9%, according to 2014 RSPCA figures</blockquote><br />
Ahhhh, so the CPS are moving to stop the RSPCA from prosecuting criminals because they're so damn good at it they're embarrassing the hell out of the CPS.<br />
<br />
The RSPCA is a charity, supported by private donations. With a mere 3% of its budget, using independent solicitors rather than professional Crown Prosecutors, it is achieving a 98.9% success rate in prosecutions. And our MPs want this <I>stopped</I>? <br />
<br />
I have a better idea. Let's let the CPS continue to handle the incredibly important cases of people being obnoxious on Twitter, and hand the responsibility for prosecuting assault, rape, and murder cases over to the RSPCA. The country should be crime-free by Christmas. <br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-21498539401588798712016-11-10T23:48:00.003+00:002016-11-10T23:48:46.238+00:00Win-win.Over the last couple of days, I've realised that an election in which both viable candidates are absolutely fucking awful is absolutely the best kind of election. I'm really happy that Clinton lost. She deserved to lose. But, if she'd won, I'd have been really happy to see Trump lose. He deserved to lose too.<br />
<br />
Course, one of them had to win. And that was bound to be a bit of a problem. But then it always is. Every bloody election, no matter what happens, we end up with a politician in charge. It's an annoyance, but one I've got used to over the years.<br />
<br />
And there's just <i>so</i> much more pleasure to be derived from seeing a politician lose than there is misery from seeing one win, it's not even close. Truly, in an election like this, there is really very little downside.<br />
<br />
Mind you, if you're one of those people who believes that one of the human calamities on offer deserved to win, that the world would be a better place if they won, that they're even <i>a nice person</i>, I can see how the wrong result might be upsetting. <br />
<br />
But that's just crazy talk.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-26618777895774429782016-11-10T01:27:00.002+00:002016-11-10T01:27:59.664+00:00Upbringing.I keep reading accounts of children being distraught and crying about the election result. And that makes me wonder, what the hell is wrong with their parents?<br />
<br />
Your job as a parent is, yes, to prepare your children for the world, but also not to needlessly frighten them. I live in Northern Ireland. We have politicians who are literal murderers, who have ordered the kneecappings, torture, and deaths of innocent people in cold blood, sometimes even doing the deeds themselves. And I'm not telling my kids horror stories about that so that they can lose sleep over it. We'll explain the history of the Troubles and the Peace Process to them one day, when they're ready for that kind of information and capable of dealing with it. To tell them before they can deal with it would simply be cruel.<br />
<br />
Yet apparently there are Democrats in the US, and left-wingers across Europe, frightening their kids so badly the poor things are in tears, and for what? Because a murderer has seized power and declared martial law? Because a terrorist has performed a coup d'état? No: because a politician was elected who's quite rude and a bit of a buffoon, and — horror of horrors! — is a Republican.<br />
<br />
If you are frightening your kids over a fucking election result, you are a bad parent. Grow up.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-58452910454978490942016-11-09T13:23:00.000+00:002016-11-09T13:23:12.016+00:00Hey, it's a theory.<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals" target="_blank" title="Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there">Thomas Frank in <I>The Guardian</I>:</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.</blockquote><br />
Maybe?<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-88051616195713603822016-11-09T11:30:00.003+00:002016-11-09T11:30:41.086+00:00Corruption.They were both truly awful options. But the blatantly corrupt one lost. And I do like to see corruption lose.<br />
<br />
Of course, Trump is probably corrupt too. He runs a casino-cum-strip-joint, for God's sake (though if he were properly corrupt, perhaps it wouldn't be going bankrupt). But he isn't <I>blatantly</I> corrupt: he recognises that corruption is supposed to be hidden, so makes some attempt to hide it. Clinton's attitude to the public has been one big "Yeah, I'm lying to you and taking massive bribes, and what the fuck are you going to do about it?" She didn't even attempt to make her lies believable:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>"Did you wipe your server?"<br />
"What, like, with a cloth?"</blockquote><br />
At least, when you try to fool people, you accept that they are worth fooling. When you make your lies so obvious that it's impossible to believe them, you ask your listeners to join you in the deceit. You're telling them up front that they're as bad as you are and you know it.<br />
<br />
I'm cynical enough to accept that there's bound to be some corruption and indecency at that level of politics. But I also believe that the public's refusal to accept that corruption when it's discovered is a necessary check on its extent. That was the thing about Clinton: not just the corruption, but the <I>blatancy</I>. I'm sure Trump has taken and given a lot of back-handers in his time. Clinton turned them into front-handers.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-46723720473381539602016-11-09T11:00:00.000+00:002016-11-09T11:00:06.371+00:00Probably my favourite political speech of all time.Sadly, this doesn't seem to be on the Net anywhere. I heard it on the radio, on the morning of the 2nd of May, 1997. John Major would go on to make a proper — and perfectly decent — official concession speech later on, but his impromptu one was better. <br />
<br />
You could hear all the assembled Tories had been drinking through the night. Much rumbling and kerfuffle and laughter. Then a lot of ssshing because the now-ex-PM was going to speak. Everyone quietened down. And Major said, quite cheerfully — even over the radio, you could hear his smile — "Well, we lost." And the assembled throng of Tories immediately burst into drunken cheering.<br />
<br />
He then went on to give a rather good speech. But it is that excellent beginning that stuck in my head, and the cheering of the losers that greeted it. At the time, I just thought it was fun. In retrospect, it turned out to be an all-too rare example of how to lose decently.<br />
<br />
If you've just lost, and you want to look good, and perhaps you fancy persuading people you're not a narcissistic tosser, have a drink and a laugh and celebrate.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-23613913468679069292016-11-09T09:28:00.004+00:002016-11-09T09:29:33.042+00:00Told you so.Just after the Brexit vote, <a href="http://blog.squandertwo.net/2016/06/democracy-and-bastards.html" title="Democracy and bastards.">I wrote this:</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>There is only one alternative: first, choose an elite, then have that elite define the group they don't wish to listen to, then ensure that that group have no say — either by outright denying them the vote, or (as the EU did) by designing a system that gives them a vote but ensures that vote has no power. That latter option, seductively tempting though it be, has a huge bloody great downside: it always leads to the disenfranchised group hitting back, hard. Always.</blockquote><br />
Yes, there's lots of talk about how Trump talks for certain classes of underdog who've been ignored and brushed aside by the American political class for too long, and there's something to that. But I'm really thinking here of the behaviour of the Democratic party towards Bernie Sanders' supporters. They were blatantly, brazenly told that their votes could just fuck off.<br />
<br />
How's that working out for you, Hillary?<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867015.post-32865328459185015992016-10-28T12:07:00.000+01:002016-10-28T12:07:23.630+01:00Overnight success.I used to be a Mac fan. Many years ago, they made better machines with a better operating system than the competition. As they became more popular, they started making overpriced crap. And their influence forced Microsoft to up their game in the OS stakes.<br />
<br />
I've had a Surface Pro for a couple of years. It is a really really damn nice machine. It's the sort of thing Apple would have made once upon a time but don't any more. They've just launched a new phone and laptop, and, due to the incompatibility of the connectors, you can't charge the phone from the laptop. They've famously got rid of the headphone jack from their phones: they claim that their new connector provides better audio. Their new laptop still has the old headphone jack — i.e., according to their own hype, inferior sound. I think it's fair to say that Steve Jobs wouldn't have stood for this sort of sloppiness.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Microsoft's new Surface Studio looks amazing. A square aim at Apple's core market, there. And a bloody good aim, too. The Dial is bloody cool. I'd be amazed if half the developers on the planey haven't already started thinking of ways to integrate it into new things. Could be a really interesting gaming controller, for a start, and perfect for music-making software.<br />
<br />
The interesting thing about the Surface was the way it was derided as a flop when it first launched. Apple have built so much of their reputation around the business plan of launching a product and selling a bazillion inside a week that the entire tech industry has decided that that's the only way to do things. Microsoft took a completely different approach: launch something quite cool, watch it to see how it does, listen to feedback, tweak, repeat. They were quite open about not caring whether the Surface made a profit in its first couple of years, while tech journalists derided the "flop" and insisted the Surface was a failed project that would have to be abandoned. They didn't care when they had to write down a load of inventory. They didn't abandon the project. Just kept tweaking. And now the Surface is considered a cool and desirable machine, just like a Mac. I find it has wow factor, too: when geeks see me using one, they ask to have a look.<br />
<br />
I'm glad Microsoft succeeded in this way — not just because I like my Surface, but because, even if I didn't, I think it's healthy for the industry to be reminded that a successful gadget doesn't have to go from nothing to everywhere overnight. Good things can be built slowly.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0