by liberal japonicus
Well, the King of the North gave his policy speech, which you can hear here. One of the big through-lines in the speech was devolution, and there was an idea to make a ‘No 10 North’, which had me think about CamelCase and how it might be related. Below the fold, come on down!
If you don’t know CamelCase, it is taking two words, removing spaces, but keeping the capitals. True CamelCase is actually with only the second word of the pair capitalized (camelCase) but the first uncapitalized, and is also known as dromedary case. When you capitalize both words, it is called Pascal case (because it was used in the computer language Pascal). Other possibilities which I learned today are snake_case (words connected by underscores) and kebab-case (words connected by hyphens). I became familiar with CamelCase in getting students to make wikis, where it was used as a deliberate shortcut to automate hyperlinking and was known a WikiLink, but I thought it was one of those things that popped up, but was pretty much dead.
So what is the relationship between CamelCase and devolution? Well, I kind of assumed that CamelCase was something that was pretty much confined old wikis and didn’t see it being used anywhere else. But Gemini set me straight, pointing out that perhaps the first historical antecedents was chemical formulas (think of table salt as NaCl) and that it was adopted for trademark and brand names (CinemaScope, AstroTurf). Gemini also pointed out that it was common in family names outside the English tradition (MacDonald, LeBeau, VanderBilt) but when they got chewed up by US immigration officials, this was often ignored.
So, just like CamelCase, devolution is a possibility that does raise a few new problems, but is primarily available if we could just get over our damn selves and make it happen. So devolution runs up against human nature. Sigh…
To get a taste of the human nature, red in tooth and claw, you can listen to this. Andrew Neil has the Private Eye nickname of Brillo (because of his wiry hair) but I would have had something like bullying toad. Some reasons include:
- Supporting the war in Afganistan, while calling opponents either wimpy or treasonous (labelling The Guardian as The Daily Terrorist and the New Statesman as the New Taliban)
- Supporting Gulf War 2, calling Bush and Blair’s call for war as ‘masterful)
- Rejected climate change as a hoax
- Pushed, as editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times, the theory that HIV did not cause AIDS.
- He hired David Irving, Holocaust denier
- He tweeted that Carole Carole Cadwalladr was a “mad cat woman.”
So I guess his bullying on devolution with his argument being that devolution failed because Scotland and Wales have experienced a surge of growth, is of a piece. While Neil wasn’t a Brexiteer, I wish the Labour politician could have referred to the fact that if Scotland could have done what Northern Ireland had done, it might have had better growth.
Devolution is interesting because examples don’t readily come to mind, but it has been done and has been helpful. Kenya did it to deal with endemic corruption in Nairobi, while Indonesia did it to deal with separatist provinces, Aceh and Papua. Spain also did it, originally to deal nacionalidades históricas (Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia), but was then expanded under the phrase café para todos, with the whole country divided into regions, and it has worked out relatively well.
On the other hand, trying to “de-capitalize” a country has been a bit fraught. A list of examples to chew on
- Naypyidaw is a ‘successful’ transfer, where the junta secretly built the city and then gave the civil servants less than 2 days notice to move. One way to do it, gentlemen!
- Japan has tried to move government functions to Tsukuba, which was largely unsuccessful, (the city had the highest suicide rate in Japan in the late 70’s/early 80’s, so high that it because a place to study suicidal ideation) but the city has successfully become a global science hub, though the idea of moving capital functions never really flew.
- South Korea would really like to move government functions from Seoul to Sejong City, a purpose-built city, not only because Seoul is too big and is basically a magnet for young people, hollowing out the rest of the country, but also because it is only 40 km away from the border, prompting a North Korean negotiator in 1994 to say on live television that they would turn the city into a ‘sea of fire’ (Seoul bal-bada/서울 불바다). But they still can’t convince lots of people to relocate to Sejong.
This leads me to think a lot of the resistance to devolution is actually resistance to breaking down London. Of course, devolution is going to ultimately result in something resembling de-capitalization, but I feel like there are differences. Curious what you lot think.