Two months...

Wow, it's over two months since I blogged about anything.  Life has not fallen apart.  Work has been frantic to be sure, but it's not as if there's been nothing to blog about.  Still, with a new semester under way, lots of interesting modules and discussions to report on as well as the usual crap coming out of our politicians to criticise, there's plenty to write about.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep it up for a while at least.

But first, a few things from the last few weeks that have caught my eye, and often my ire:

Andrew Mitchell: silly bunt.  But all the furore about "gate-gate" is just as silly.  The very act of standing for office (yes, I know, I've done it, and got over it), let alone those who achieve high office, to me indicates that one treats others with a certain amount of contempt (as in "the plebs need me to manage their affairs").  And as for the police - sometimes they are nice guys and gals when you are dealing with them as outsiders, but put a foot wrong and they certainly treat us with contempt.  None more so than ACPO. All these people are supposed to be our servants not our masters.  Would that any of them behaved that way.  By the way, does calling it "gate-gate" mean we now have to find a completely different way of referring to scandals?  Watergate's had a good run I suppose, but now it's gone self-referential, "gate" is a useless word for scandal :) Like supposedly Googling Google causes the world to end or whatever.

Prison for tee-shirts, tweeting, or whatever:  I am an absolutist on free speech.  The apparent zeal with which prosecutions are being well, er, prosecuted, for free, if ill advised, sometimes shocking, and usually distasteful expression of one's thoughts is extremely alarming. I don't really believe in "incitement" either.  The agents of violence, for example, are always the people wielding the stick, no matter who said something to them to make them think that's okay to wield the stick.  Our law on assault recognises that assault does not always mean actually being physically assaulted, just the "imminent apprehension of force" is sufficient.  We do not need laws to shut people up.  And we are on a very slippery slope prosecuting people for not shutting up.

Using your pensions for your poor kids' property: Nick Clegg, who on earth suggested that to you?  This nearly made me resign your party, having only just been persuaded to increase my subscription to help you replace those members who have fled.  Now I am thinking again.  It is sheer lunacy (especially for someone calling himself a liberal) to think that the way out of the inability to buy property on the part of much of a whole generation is to help stoke property values by finding new sources of money to fan the furnace.  You know the bloody answer: you're a vice-president of the one organisation in your party that's been campaigning on the issue for decades.  Find your liberal spine and do something about it.

Lib Dems against planning reform/relaxation: Yes, I know George Osborne's idea for increasing the size of permitted development on your own home is a pretty pathetic reform of planning and will do very little in reality to help either the housing situation or the construction business.  But liberals, who the hell are you to think you have a right to dictate what someone can or cannot do with their property.  Building controls and the risk of being sued for causing actual damage to someone else's property should be enough to control egregiously bad extensions, but you don't have any moral right to prevent people doing what they want with their property.  It's just more middle class rent-seeking and protectionism again.  I am ashamed to have you in my party. And Green Belt reform - I think you haven't got the first idea about quite how little additional land needs to be "made available" for land values to start falling properly, and desirably, to more affordable levels.

Benefit cuts/restrictions: You know, I don't really believe in welfarism (well, without a state it *would* be down to each of us to help our unfortunate neighbours, family and friends) but I am getting sick to the back teeth with this government's ideas on cutting benefits or restricting what they can be used for.  So Nick Clegg will not support an extra £10bn of welfare cuts.  Let's sit down and work out the tens, probably hundreds of billions of corporate welfare we could cut, making the vast majority of us better off.  Yes, Housing Benefit needs to go at some point (it is, after all, purely additional rent going to landlords in reality), but to do so you will need to free up planning to reduce land values to a level everyone can afford.  Land values are, after all, welfare that flows from those without property to those with property.  And this ground rent is worth a whole lot more than the paltry benefits cuts that are hurting some of the weakest.

Examination boards: You utter arse, Gove, we should have more competition not less.  You'll maybe not recall, being a Scottish educated little boy, that when you were doing A levels we had at least a dozen competing exam boards at GCE level and more than two dozen regional bodies for CSE.  If there has been a decline in standards, it can be traced to the merger of boards into three, or was it four, mega-boards which were effectively unaccountable QUANGOS, not really competing on quality at all as the previous ones run by university syndicates were.  As for your curriculum reforms, again, we should have more competition as to what kids learn, not less.

Voting intentions (1): I discovered this week that I was the only person prepared to put up their hand and say "I don't vote on principle" (most opt the rest of the class of course not having been of voting age last time there was more than a forty per cent turnout election in the UK).  Time to convert a few more of them perhaps.  We spend a lot of time moaning about politicians, and then go back time and again to perform some silly idea of a "civic duty".  As P J O'Rourke's book puts it: "Don't Vote, it just encourages the bastards."

International development: a module that has caused so much difficulty even getting onto my programme thanks to the inability of computer systems or human operators to recognise that when a module leader says "yes" to a request he knows the facts and means "yes".  It's a subject I'm very interested in.  As preparation though, I was reading a series of Peter Bauer's lectures on the subject.  Both lecturer and text books are almost parodies - they say exactly what Bauer says they would about international development: "colonial guilt", "poverty trap", "western/northern greed" and so on.  More on this soon.

Voting intentions (2): I'd encourage all Americans to sit this one out.  But if you must vote for one of the two Dempublicrat candidates, let it be Obama, just to prove that what is useless at four years is still useless at eight years.  Maybe eventually you'll get it!

Nasty, brutish and short?: I discovered also this week that I probably mostly agree with Thomas Hobbes' subjectivist ideas on what is good and right and bad and wrong.  Of course, I don't share his view that such anarchy would be "nasty, brutish and short" nor that the answer to this is to endow some equally incompetent human being with the monopoly power to decide for others what is right and good.

Internet and other surveillance: see "Prison for tee-shirts" above. Fuck off!  Just fuck off!  And that means you at GCHQ especially. There's a good reason your building is shaped like a sphincter.

Abortion: I am generally sympathetic to the "pro-life" position.  But rarely talk about it.  But what I want to know from "pro-choice" people is if someone thinks something amounts to murder, what would you expect them to do about it? Just sit back and say "oh well, it's their choice"?  Is that the line you take with, say, war crimes? Oh well, c'est la vie, chest la guerre?

Jeremy Hunt: see "Internet and other surveillance" above.

Enough for now.  That's got a few little things off my chest.  I'll get back to blogging properly very shortly, I hope!