I understand that it's desirable to describe a culture without judging it. But I reject any suggestion that no culture is inferior to another.
For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it.
A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I'm entirely willing to do that.
It's instructive to read letters of resignation from ministers who've resigned recently over policy differences - Jess Phillips on 12th May, and John Healey on 11th June. The common message is that Keir Starmer talks a good game but fails to deliver.
A British Prime Minister is unlike a US President in that, by construction, he has the votes in the Commons to get legislation enacted. But also, by construction, he needs to retain those votes to keep his job. Most MPs are anxious to win their seats again at the next General Election, and they want the party leader most likely to facilitate that. Before Theresa May, MPs were highly reluctant to depose a Prime Minister, but that guideline has been destroyed by Brexit and its consequences - if a PM's MPs perceive an electorally more attractive alternative, he's gone.
The British government operates under budgetary constraints which do not (yet) apply in the US - they can borrow only so much money, as Liz Truss discovered. Meanwhile, voters want more government spending, especially from Labour governments, and lower taxes, especially from Conservative governments. In the absence of economic growth, which has been crushed by Brexit, these things cannot be delivered. (I'm looking at these numbers per capita.)
Furthermore, the main categories of UK government spending are on benefits (especially the state pension), health, and education. In all of these things, static spending, in real terms, looks inadequate - see Baumol's cost disease. Debt interest and the armed forces are two more rising costs - Healey's resignation was because defence spending wasn't, in his view, increasing fast enough.
Any Prime Minister would have had a difficult time in the last two years - Rishi Sunak called the last General Election five months before he had to because he didn't want to be responsible for impending decisions on spending. Burnham will have the same challenges. In the short term the hope is that he will do a better job of presentation: he could hardly do worse.
In the medium term, the country won't get stable governments unless economic growth is restored. The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We've got to the point where that's not unimaginable.
(I've used "he" because the context is Starmer's resignation. But two of the four short-term Prime Ministers who preceded him were women.)
My guess is that Burnham will take over as Labour* Party leader, and hence as Prime Minister, during the summer recess. There are too many MPs who fear losing their seats if Starmer remains in charge for that to be sustainable.
Starmer? There's nothing to dislike about him, but he's not good at the job - a bit like Gordon Brown. Based on his popularity in Manchester, it seems plausible that Burnham will be better at making the government look good, and better at keeping his party onside.
...the homophobia stuff is primarily a Judeo-Christian thing...
The strictest laws nowadays are in Islamic countries - in Iran homosexual acts are punishable by death. Perhaps one should say that homophobia is an Abrahamic thing.
However, in the literature of the Islamic Golden Age, homosexuality was treated as normal, usually following the Ancient Greek model. Proscriptions seem to have originated in colonial legal codes. Ironically, Islamic fundamentalists who speak of restoring the Caliphate are in this respect at least wanting to restore Victorian morality.
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators
It should be a priority if the Ds win the House and the Senate to pass legislation enforcing fair elections..
access to polling stations to be made as easy as practicable, with a limit - 30 minutes say - on time spend waiting to vote, and polling stations situated with facilitating voting as the main criterion.
if ID requirements are imposed, free ID should be readily available.
Electoral boundaries everywhere to be drawn by a computer algorithm, controlled by a bipartisan federal body. Partisan advantage not to be a criterion for this algorithm: other than that each state can say what criteria are most important to it.
Voting by mail to be allowed. States may choose for themselves the deadline for posting or receiving these votes.
I suppose the Rs would fight this with everything they've got, and Trump would veto it. Make them do it, show the electorate that the Rs are against fair voting. And then pass the legislation as soon as there's a D president. Suspend the filibuster if necessary to do it.
The same rules should apply to non-federal elections. Enforcing that may not be within the powers of the federal legislature, but incentives can be given.
For once I read the grok piece, which accuses the piece of "strong anti-X, pro-Y, pro-Z bias", where I have omitted X, Y, and Z, because they don't matter.
If we rely on AI to tell us what is biased, we are lost. All it can do is assess how some analysis compares with the rubbish it finds on the internet.
The piece exhibits a strong pro-fact bias. That's all. When reality is biased, let's go with it anyway.
The GLOML, whom I talk about on here occasionally, died of cancer fourteen years ago. A part of me has been missing ever since: subsequent relationships have failed because no one can compete with a ghost, and nor should they have to.
Meanwhile I play bridge, which I recommend to anyone with an aptitude, as a social game which makes new friends, who, given enough years, become old friends. This evening I had the pleasure of getting a somewhat fortunate win against the #1 seeds in a national knock-out competition, playing with a friend I first met forty years ago. We will have a minor row at some point about one hand we got wrong, as old friends may.
In politics one has to make some compromises unless one wants to be in a one-man band. But there are compromises I'm unwilling to make. For example, I wouldn't vote for a party which intended to torture prisoners, not even if the other party wanted to torture them more.
I think the extent to which one compromises is a question for one's own conscience.
He was so bad that a long list of Republicans, going as far as Dick Cheney, endorsed Harris. Given that, given all the swing voters who rather not vote for a bullying felon who assaults women and was already known to be a bad president, the Ds should have outperformed the model prediction by a lot more than they did.
Harris wasn't particularly to blame, but the Ds should recognise that they did very badly.
I've hesitated to wade into this one, because I'm uncertain what "liberalism" (or "conservatism") mean in American English. But this is the internet, so...
wjca seems to be defining "conservative" as a follower of the principle of Chesterton's fence. But there must be more to it than that, or there'd be no difference between a conservative and a Fabian gradualist.
I suggest that, aside from being reluctant in general to change things, a conservative believes that the distribution of wealth resulting from the operation of the somewhat free market we've got is proper and just. The economically unfortunate may be helped by the government, but that's essentially a collective act of charity. Indeed, so deeply held is this belief about wealth distribution that conservatives hold redistributive taxation to be no more than the government helping itself to their money.
Whereas a liberal sees the distribution of wealth resulting from the operation of the somewhat free market we've got as partly arbitrary. We are not socialists, in that we want an economic system which encourages private production, but we believe that when that system produces great inequality of wealth, that is a defect to be ameliorated. We see redistributive taxation as a proper attempt to make good that defect.
That is, liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views of the proper role of government.
First Past the Post was a 19th century betting rule under which bets paid out according to the initial winner of a horse race, regardless of later disqualifications. It encouraged cheating.
It makes no sense to me to apply the term to plurality voting. Or it didn't, until the recent outbreak of enthusiasm for cheating in US elections, mostly from the Republican Party and its judges.
A question for those in the UK: Has there been any serious consideration of Single Transferable Vote, rather than Proportional Representation?
In the UK, Proportional Representation is used to mean any electoral system less disproportionate than plurality voting (known, for some reason I haven't grasped, as First Past the Post).
It's obvious to me that the best system, in terms of encouraging people to vote for the candidates they want, and candidates to campaign on what they believe in, is Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies (STV). (Albeit there can be geographical difficulties with multi-member constituencies in isolated areas.)
In the 2010 General Election campaign, the Liberal Democrats published a manifesto promising that they would introduce STV if elected. Shortly before the election Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister, had suggested a referendum on the use of an Alternative Vote (AV) system: that was rejected by the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg - "I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour party." (AV is called Ranked-Choice Voting in the USA: the difference between AV and STV is that AV uses single-member constituencies.)
The 2010 election resulted in a hung parliament: the resulting government would have to be a coalition. The Conservatives had won the largest share of the vote and had the most MPs: the fair result in terms of popular support would be a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Negotiations resulted in Clegg conceding on almost all policy issues, in return for becoming Deputy Prime Minister. (Because of these concessions, the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed in the following General Election, in 2015.)
The Liberal Democrats had demanded a referendum on STV, what they ended up with was a referendum on AV, accurately described by opponents as "a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Conservative party." The referendum, in 2011, resulted in a decisive defeat for AV. I voted against: if offered STV I would have voted for it.
Now that there's a UK elections thread, I want to use this one to talk about SCOTUS.
The far-right six have abandoned all pretence of intellectual respectability. The Callais decision ignores the originalist doctrine they previously relied on when in suited them, and they've rushed it into effect despite the Purcell principle they formerly used to maintain Republican gerrymanders. It's plain that the guiding theory of the six is that the interests of the Republican Party (now usually, but not always, Trump's interests) are the only thing that matters.
There's nothing left to respect in the way SCOTUS operates. There is no reason I can see not to seek radical reform. It's not just a matter of rebalancing the composition of the Court: we should recognise that the Court has too much power: the issues of the day should be decided by the legislature not by the bench.
Freedman makes a good point about the electoral system. The Labour and Conservative parties previously opposed any change to plurality voting (so-called FPTP), which was against their interests, but ought to change their view now: reform would be good for the country.
Sunak called the last General Election some time before he had to, because he knew the government would soon have to do unpopular things which he had put off for as long as he could. He was right that that would be bad for Labour, but wrong that the Conservatives would benefit correspondingly.
It's distressing for those of in the reality-based community to see Farage's party winning elections with the support of voters disaffected by the economic damage caused by the Brexit successfully campaigned for by Farage's previous party,
I don't understand: the Welsh Assembly has existed only since 1999, and in its current form - the Senedd (Welsh for "Synod", pronounced "Seneth") only since 2020.
The success of Reform in the this week's elections is disappointing in the light of Trump's unpopularity in Europe, but a natural continuation of the realignment on the right which was in progress at the last General Election here, then favouring Labour with many more MPs than its share of the vote would usually get.
I suppose Brooks was making a mangled reference to this poll which found that 17% or liberals compared to 6% of conservative say that political violence can sometimes be justified. This was shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Of course, the answer to this sort of question is going to depend on current events - I'm sure there would have be a much different response immediately after the Jan 6th insurrection. It's wildly dishonest of Brooks to quote that poll out of context, even if he'd got it right.
In reality, most of us think political violence is justified in some extreme circumstances - who, for example, would oppose on principle the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich?
For those too young to remember, one of the standard epithets used by LIBERALS *against* Ronald Reagan was...
I'm not too young to remember, nor too old, but I have no recollection of this whatsoever. An online search returns no relevant hits. Was there some reason I'm innocently unaware of for this epithet?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Monkey business”
I understand that it's desirable to describe a culture without judging it. But I reject any suggestion that no culture is inferior to another.
For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it.
A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I'm entirely willing to do that.
On “Feel the Burnham!”
It's instructive to read letters of resignation from ministers who've resigned recently over policy differences - Jess Phillips on 12th May, and John Healey on 11th June. The common message is that Keir Starmer talks a good game but fails to deliver.
A British Prime Minister is unlike a US President in that, by construction, he has the votes in the Commons to get legislation enacted. But also, by construction, he needs to retain those votes to keep his job. Most MPs are anxious to win their seats again at the next General Election, and they want the party leader most likely to facilitate that. Before Theresa May, MPs were highly reluctant to depose a Prime Minister, but that guideline has been destroyed by Brexit and its consequences - if a PM's MPs perceive an electorally more attractive alternative, he's gone.
The British government operates under budgetary constraints which do not (yet) apply in the US - they can borrow only so much money, as Liz Truss discovered. Meanwhile, voters want more government spending, especially from Labour governments, and lower taxes, especially from Conservative governments. In the absence of economic growth, which has been crushed by Brexit, these things cannot be delivered. (I'm looking at these numbers per capita.)
Furthermore, the main categories of UK government spending are on benefits (especially the state pension), health, and education. In all of these things, static spending, in real terms, looks inadequate - see Baumol's cost disease. Debt interest and the armed forces are two more rising costs - Healey's resignation was because defence spending wasn't, in his view, increasing fast enough.
Any Prime Minister would have had a difficult time in the last two years - Rishi Sunak called the last General Election five months before he had to because he didn't want to be responsible for impending decisions on spending. Burnham will have the same challenges. In the short term the hope is that he will do a better job of presentation: he could hardly do worse.
In the medium term, the country won't get stable governments unless economic growth is restored. The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We've got to the point where that's not unimaginable.
(I've used "he" because the context is Starmer's resignation. But two of the four short-term Prime Ministers who preceded him were women.)
On “Open Thread”
Some people have real difficulty processing written instructions. They might find a video helpful.
"
My guess is that Burnham will take over as Labour* Party leader, and hence as Prime Minister, during the summer recess. There are too many MPs who fear losing their seats if Starmer remains in charge for that to be sustainable.
Starmer? There's nothing to dislike about him, but he's not good at the job - a bit like Gordon Brown. Based on his popularity in Manchester, it seems plausible that Burnham will be better at making the government look good, and better at keeping his party onside.
*note the spelling.
"
I just learnt that one of the companies corruptly hired by Trump to work on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is called 'Greenwater Services'.
And the water is indeed now green with algae. No amount of lying will let the fascist buffoon conceal the nominatively determined outcome.
On “A future so bright”
...the homophobia stuff is primarily a Judeo-Christian thing...
The strictest laws nowadays are in Islamic countries - in Iran homosexual acts are punishable by death. Perhaps one should say that homophobia is an Abrahamic thing.
However, in the literature of the Islamic Golden Age, homosexuality was treated as normal, usually following the Ancient Greek model. Proscriptions seem to have originated in colonial legal codes. Ironically, Islamic fundamentalists who speak of restoring the Caliphate are in this respect at least wanting to restore Victorian morality.
On “Open Thread”
I believe the fix is for Pro Bono to go to their user profile...
Please forgive my ignorance: how do I get to my user profile?
"
The Georgia law was discussed at considerable length in this thread five years ago.
"
I recall one commentator here applauding the measure, on the grounds that it was right to make it as onerous as possible for poor people to vote.
"
It should be a priority if the Ds win the House and the Senate to pass legislation enforcing fair elections..
I suppose the Rs would fight this with everything they've got, and Trump would veto it. Make them do it, show the electorate that the Rs are against fair voting. And then pass the legislation as soon as there's a D president. Suspend the filibuster if necessary to do it.
The same rules should apply to non-federal elections. Enforcing that may not be within the powers of the federal legislature, but incentives can be given.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
For once I read the grok piece, which accuses the piece of "strong anti-X, pro-Y, pro-Z bias", where I have omitted X, Y, and Z, because they don't matter.
If we rely on AI to tell us what is biased, we are lost. All it can do is assess how some analysis compares with the rubbish it finds on the internet.
The piece exhibits a strong pro-fact bias. That's all. When reality is biased, let's go with it anyway.
On “Open Thread time”
This conversation may be informative about how the rest of the politically-conscious world is gobsmacked by the extent of Trump's corruption.
It's set up as centrist on average - Rory Stewart, the posh skinny one, is a former Conservative MP.
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
The GLOML, whom I talk about on here occasionally, died of cancer fourteen years ago. A part of me has been missing ever since: subsequent relationships have failed because no one can compete with a ghost, and nor should they have to.
Meanwhile I play bridge, which I recommend to anyone with an aptitude, as a social game which makes new friends, who, given enough years, become old friends. This evening I had the pleasure of getting a somewhat fortunate win against the #1 seeds in a national knock-out competition, playing with a friend I first met forty years ago. We will have a minor row at some point about one hand we got wrong, as old friends may.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
In politics one has to make some compromises unless one wants to be in a one-man band. But there are compromises I'm unwilling to make. For example, I wouldn't vote for a party which intended to torture prisoners, not even if the other party wanted to torture them more.
I think the extent to which one compromises is a question for one's own conscience.
"
...not, unfortunately, the worst candidate...
He was so bad that a long list of Republicans, going as far as Dick Cheney, endorsed Harris. Given that, given all the swing voters who rather not vote for a bullying felon who assaults women and was already known to be a bad president, the Ds should have outperformed the model prediction by a lot more than they did.
Harris wasn't particularly to blame, but the Ds should recognise that they did very badly.
"
...she did fairly well given a couple basic headwinds...
She did terribly given that her opponent was the worst candidate ever.
"
I've hesitated to wade into this one, because I'm uncertain what "liberalism" (or "conservatism") mean in American English. But this is the internet, so...
wjca seems to be defining "conservative" as a follower of the principle of Chesterton's fence. But there must be more to it than that, or there'd be no difference between a conservative and a Fabian gradualist.
I suggest that, aside from being reluctant in general to change things, a conservative believes that the distribution of wealth resulting from the operation of the somewhat free market we've got is proper and just. The economically unfortunate may be helped by the government, but that's essentially a collective act of charity. Indeed, so deeply held is this belief about wealth distribution that conservatives hold redistributive taxation to be no more than the government helping itself to their money.
Whereas a liberal sees the distribution of wealth resulting from the operation of the somewhat free market we've got as partly arbitrary. We are not socialists, in that we want an economic system which encourages private production, but we believe that when that system produces great inequality of wealth, that is a defect to be ameliorated. We see redistributive taxation as a proper attempt to make good that defect.
That is, liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views of the proper role of government.
On “Open Thread time”
Some comments on SCOTUS reform.
On “Rue Britannia!”
First Past the Post was a 19th century betting rule under which bets paid out according to the initial winner of a horse race, regardless of later disqualifications. It encouraged cheating.
It makes no sense to me to apply the term to plurality voting. Or it didn't, until the recent outbreak of enthusiasm for cheating in US elections, mostly from the Republican Party and its judges.
"
A question for those in the UK: Has there been any serious consideration of Single Transferable Vote, rather than Proportional Representation?
In the UK, Proportional Representation is used to mean any electoral system less disproportionate than plurality voting (known, for some reason I haven't grasped, as First Past the Post).
It's obvious to me that the best system, in terms of encouraging people to vote for the candidates they want, and candidates to campaign on what they believe in, is Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies (STV). (Albeit there can be geographical difficulties with multi-member constituencies in isolated areas.)
In the 2010 General Election campaign, the Liberal Democrats published a manifesto promising that they would introduce STV if elected. Shortly before the election Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister, had suggested a referendum on the use of an Alternative Vote (AV) system: that was rejected by the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg - "I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour party." (AV is called Ranked-Choice Voting in the USA: the difference between AV and STV is that AV uses single-member constituencies.)
The 2010 election resulted in a hung parliament: the resulting government would have to be a coalition. The Conservatives had won the largest share of the vote and had the most MPs: the fair result in terms of popular support would be a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Negotiations resulted in Clegg conceding on almost all policy issues, in return for becoming Deputy Prime Minister. (Because of these concessions, the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed in the following General Election, in 2015.)
The Liberal Democrats had demanded a referendum on STV, what they ended up with was a referendum on AV, accurately described by opponents as "a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Conservative party." The referendum, in 2011, resulted in a decisive defeat for AV. I voted against: if offered STV I would have voted for it.
On “Open Thread time”
Now that there's a UK elections thread, I want to use this one to talk about SCOTUS.
The far-right six have abandoned all pretence of intellectual respectability. The Callais decision ignores the originalist doctrine they previously relied on when in suited them, and they've rushed it into effect despite the Purcell principle they formerly used to maintain Republican gerrymanders. It's plain that the guiding theory of the six is that the interests of the Republican Party (now usually, but not always, Trump's interests) are the only thing that matters.
There's nothing left to respect in the way SCOTUS operates. There is no reason I can see not to seek radical reform. It's not just a matter of rebalancing the composition of the Court: we should recognise that the Court has too much power: the issues of the day should be decided by the legislature not by the bench.
So what, in practice, can and should be done?
On “Rue Britannia!”
Freedman makes a good point about the electoral system. The Labour and Conservative parties previously opposed any change to plurality voting (so-called FPTP), which was against their interests, but ought to change their view now: reform would be good for the country.
Sunak called the last General Election some time before he had to, because he knew the government would soon have to do unpopular things which he had put off for as long as he could. He was right that that would be bad for Labour, but wrong that the Conservatives would benefit correspondingly.
It's distressing for those of in the reality-based community to see Farage's party winning elections with the support of voters disaffected by the economic damage caused by the Brexit successfully campaigned for by Farage's previous party,
On “Open Thread time”
Labour had been in power there since 1922...
I don't understand: the Welsh Assembly has existed only since 1999, and in its current form - the Senedd (Welsh for "Synod", pronounced "Seneth") only since 2020.
The success of Reform in the this week's elections is disappointing in the light of Trump's unpopularity in Europe, but a natural continuation of the realignment on the right which was in progress at the last General Election here, then favouring Labour with many more MPs than its share of the vote would usually get.
On “It’s funny what gets left out”
I suppose Brooks was making a mangled reference to this poll which found that 17% or liberals compared to 6% of conservative say that political violence can sometimes be justified. This was shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Of course, the answer to this sort of question is going to depend on current events - I'm sure there would have be a much different response immediately after the Jan 6th insurrection. It's wildly dishonest of Brooks to quote that poll out of context, even if he'd got it right.
In reality, most of us think political violence is justified in some extreme circumstances - who, for example, would oppose on principle the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich?
On “Your choice: an open thread”
For those too young to remember, one of the standard epithets used by LIBERALS *against* Ronald Reagan was...
I'm not too young to remember, nor too old, but I have no recollection of this whatsoever. An online search returns no relevant hits. Was there some reason I'm innocently unaware of for this epithet?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.