HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well not really, because it's their institution it hardly seems like a blow against liberty to impose rules on what is their own property. The point is that is hardly undermines the overall posture and messaging of the British government throughout the pandemic, which absolutely recognised the gravity of the decision being taken.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
You think that the those, even the gulags, aren't widely known or taught? The latter two are less well known, sure, but if anything that simply seems like a product of the fact that for Westerners they were and are too remote to care all that much about. How many Americans could even find Cambodia on a map?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it
That was pretty small fry all things considered, and not really a major imposition - after all, in the case of schools in particular they are a governmental institution, so imposing requirements there hardly seems like a grievous blow to personal liberty.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Partygate was mostly bad because Boris lied to the House not because the infringements were all that bad. He got the fine in the end for a very mild offence indeed, one that I suspect most people were guilty of at some point during the pandemic. It's still unacceptable, but it hardly undermines the point that, in general, they too were subject to the rules.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
There's plenty of things that happened in history that were plainly evil, that people will swear up and down they don't support, but don't teach about how evil they were. My suspicion is they don't find them evil.
Such as?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied
Certainly not 'apologise for their crimes' because obviously an apology for a 'crime' would imply they are wrong anyway, but politicians absolutely constantly stressed that these decisions were not being taken lightly and were only demanded by truly extraordinary circumstances.
Perhaps the most important thing though is that they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding) - how many high-ranking Nazis subjected themselves to the concentration camps?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide
Would they? Especially given that SS members were presumably self-selected to be ideologically committed Nazis, it doesn't seem at all implausible that many were sufficiently untroubled by genocide as to partake in jollity in their spare time. After all, depending on when these photos were taken, they might also not look like people staring down the barrel of total defeat in the war.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns.
This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
That's a reasonable sentiment, but then you have to accept that suggesting the EU is hurting the 'hands that feed them' is just a complete nonsense, whatever the Netherlands does on fertilisers. If we want to preserve agriculture for the sake of heritage or whatever, one cannot then turn around and act like such farmers are an oppressed class, if their existence depended/s on everyone else subsidising them.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Even if say China and Iran went from signing a 25-year cooperation agreements to Chinese nationals chanting "Iran delenda est"?
What are you on about. Are you really suggesting the decisive factor in Iranian-US relations is the influence of Jews? Yes, I am sure nothing happened that may have impaired those relations in the intervening period between close co-operation and now.
Or is this about somewhere else?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation. The point is where is the marginal dollar or pound currently best spent, and I think the evidence indicates policing rather than prisons at the moment.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is just not the case. Every now and again such a case (like the recent gollywogs one) will come around and the usual suspects will have a (sometimes justified) moan, but when Starmer or whoever talks about crime they always focus on the impact of austerity on serious crimes.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The EU is trying hard to figure that out and to privilege the feckless layabouts intellectual elite at every turn over the hands that feed them the uncultured swine
Bit late but I was wondering what you're referring to here; it seems an odd comment in light of massive agricultural and fishing subsidies being the single largest item of EU spending. Relative to the whole budget they have been falling but iirc not in absolute terms, either way the idea that the EU is somehow unfriendly to agriculture is surely absurd. Of course there are regulations, but there is no question that the EU is a huge net benefit for farmers, half the reason it exists is to keep French farms afloat.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Because most of the literature points in the direction that a high chance of being caught and effective is by far the most important factor in determining deterrence rather than severity of punishment. Criminals are not paragons of rationality, breaking out their calculator to work out the expected returns before committing the offence. Quick and reliable punishment creates a much stronger link between offence and punishment in the mind than the occasional criminal being caught and spending years in the slammer. Which it to say that you cannot simply assume that in practice deterrence is sentence length x chance of conviction.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat
I don't think your views on crime, though I personally wouldn't subscribe to all of them, are at all in tension with social democracy, indeed if one considers policing to be a public service which it surely is, then ample police funding is surely the 'more' social democratic perspective. Hence why in Britain, where policing has not been caught up in culture wars as it has in the US, even Corbyn attacked the Tories for cutting police funding.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The point about market mechanisms though is that they don't depend on all individual managers/employees being relentlessly profit driven, rather the point is that eventually less efficient firms will be driven out. Now, of course I accept that this is not a perfect mechanism, especially once they get large firms will have a certain inefficiency carrying capacity that they can manage without losing their position, but in general I think that it's safe to assume firms try to maximise profits unless there is compelling evidence otherwise. There is certainly precedent for controversial culture-war adjacent advertising campaigns being a success. These things are hard to gauge but it does seem that Nike sales increased in the wake of the Kaepernick advert controversy.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
everyone that shows up and the natives don't matter
This is not a fair representation of what happened. While the vast majority Syrians who made it to Europe were accepted (under their current international obligations European nations didn't have a great deal of choice, they could hardly start refouling them to Syria), most applicants from nations like Nigeria and Pakistan were rejected, as well as about half from Sudan and others. Overall I think about half of all asylum applications were rejected in the peak of the crisis, which considering that somewhere in the region of half of all asylum seekers were Syrians, Afghans or Iraqis is hardly a scandalous figure.
I also think public opinion was not so decidedly anti-migrant as some imply. Over the 2015-2017 period ESS, Ipsos Mori and BES all have opposition to migration decreasing, (all slightly different wording) the former two with figures of under 50% for every year since 2014.
in a technical sense.
In the technical sense that nearly 100,000 soldiers left 2009-11, with remaining forces mostly there for embassy/consulate protection?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Oh come on that's hardly analogous. Those elections, as you well know, only allow government-approved candidates; there is no choice or consultation. It's ironic you should say that given that, as Skibboleth notes, it is often nominally Marxist regimes and their defenders that deploy the argument that liberal democracy is a farce that thwarts the real Will of the People, which can only truly be fulfilled by an authoritarian leadership.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Yeah I suppose there was the possibility of extension of presence/disregarding of the agreement but seems unlikely. As to the stars needing to align for the 'common people' to get their way; I'm not sure this is a useful statement generally because very rarely are the 'common' people so united as to say reasonably that they speak with one voice. On Afghanistan, I suspect your average American did not see it as a particularly important issue either way by the Trump era.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well in all of his other affairs/experience as a politician/legislator/governor (as in someone who governs, not literally a 'governor'). In fairness though on some skim re-reading it doesn't seem that on Afghanistan there was that much thwarting. After all he got it done in the end.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Having read about that now it seems fairly small fry. Leaving under 8-900 troops where they led Trump to believe it was below 4-500. They still probably shouldn't have done it but hardly a grave subversion of democracy.
Anyway, this makes the whole idea unfalsifiable
I don't think so. Successful apparent 'deep state hindrance' of an otherwise competent politician would be genuine cause for concern, whereas there is plenty of other evidence to indicate that Trump was just an idiot.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The people are never intentionally consulted about important issues, and when they are and vote against the wishes of the elite, their will is ignored in practice or slow walked to oblivion.
Perhaps not intentionally, but elections are a de facto consultation on the biggest issues anyway. The latter part of the statement just isn't so universally, or even generally, true as you suggest. Take immigration. Every election in a European nation was a consultation around the time of the refugee crisis; Germans could have voted for AfD if they felt that strongly, but they mostly didn't so more Merkel it was.
Concerning EU integration I assume you are referring to the Denmark Maastricht referendum, but I don't think it proves your point. As a result of the referendum they negotiated several crucial opt-outs including on defence and currency, then they put that changed agreement to another referendum and won fairly comfortably. So score one for liberal democracy, if anything.
Also; Obama did end the Iraq war? So not sure what the 'foreign entanglements' bit is about. If it's referring to Trump, them that isn't evidence of deep state interference, just of the fact that Trump is a moron who had no idea how to work the levers of power.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Not sure what the point of this is. 'The Roman Republic collapsed, therefore the collapse of American liberal democracy must be near at hand!' What?
True, but this surely just narrows the question to those who don't qualify for that, either because their origin country doesn't recognise it or they are third generation (so no Syrian national parents), or something else. Also, even if technically you could deport a second generation immigrant to Syria (I mean really they couldn't because that would presumably turn them into an international pariah, the costs of which would surely exceed the costs of just putting them in prison in Sweden), that is surely very cruel, to deport someone who has never even lived there to a country in active civil war?
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