Needing fewer apologists, and more apologies

"Say what you like about that Mr. Hitler, at least he made the trains run on time" is the stereotypical viewpoint ascribed to a closet Nazi. Certainly, there are people who try to argue that the Nazis were good for Germany's economy, although for nothing else. I deny even this: but then, I don't think GDP per capita is the be-all-and-end-all of the economy.

So imagine my surprise when I read over at the Guardian that Vaclav Havel was a wicked man for opposing communism (src, via). Clark claims that,

the regimes in Eastern Europe [had positive achievements] in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights.

For sure, everyone was employed: anyone unemployed was put to work burying the chap who arrived in the gulag just before him. And there was wonderful equality. It's easy to be equal when everyone is equally destitute. Women's rights were as far advanced as men's: nowhere to be seen. And as for education, don't let's get started: you were very well educated, if you didn't mind only knowing what the Party deemed necessary for you to know.

Imagine my further surprise when I discovered that the same writer had written in the New Statesman in January, praising the last dictator in Europe, Aleksandr Lukashenko, for little more than making the trains run on time (src). So here, again, is the Excors Utilissimus:

After last month's presidential elections - in which Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to serve a fourth term with almost 80 per cent of the vote - the arrest of opposition candidates and hundreds of their supporters led to the reappearance of the old "last dictatorship in Europe" headlines. But shocking as the scenes of police beating protesters were, it would be a mistake to equate Belarus with Burma, or Lukashenko with Joseph Stalin.

"Hey, guys, I know it's Europe's last dictatorship, but the fact that he wins unbelievably high percentages of the vote, that he arrests political opponents, and that he gets the cops to beat up protesters is just a misunderstanding! I mean, keep a sense of perspective: it's not like this is Burma or anything, right? And he's not as prodigiously evil as Stalin, so just let him alone, won't you?"

You could re-write my opening quotation for your average Communist dictator, and this would be a decent enough summary of Clark's perspective on the world: Fraudulent elections? Who cares! Suppression of individual freedom? So what! Rejection of any sense of the private? A small price to pay! The gulags, the systematic murder of millions, collectivised slavery, liquidations of political opponents, social conformity to the Party's will? Bugs, not features!

It is an interesting thing to see that while an apologist for the Nazis would be excoriated, probably even in the Mail (okay, probably); even so, this apologist for Actually-Existing-Now brutal tyranny is invited to write for the Guardian. You can't praise the Nazis (a sound editorial policy), but praising Uncle Joe and his trigger-happy chums is just fine (not so sound editorial policy).

So, given Stalin systematically murdered millions; given Mao, Pol Pot and countless others were equally bad; given Kim Jong-Il starved his own country in his vicious and twisted ideological opposition to an economic private life; given the gulags, the collectivisations, the clamping down on any organisation independent of Party or State; given all that and more besides, why on earth do apologists for communism get a free ride from our media?

On the side of the ones and twos

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

(William Hughes Mearns, Antigonish; wiki)

Matt Ridley at The Rational Optimist makes an important point in his latest blogpost:

Lobbied by big companies, politicians do bonkers things like rewarding innovations that increase the cost of fulfilling a need — such as putting up the price of electricity to subsidise wind farms and claiming it “creates jobs”. Any hairdresser, unable to make a new hire because of his electricity bill, could tell them that it does the opposite. (src)

The jobs which are created in the windfarm and solar power industries are obvious. They are made in marginal constituencies depressed areas in large numbers, and of course one has to be glad for people who find a job.

But the jobs which are not created in other workplaces because of increased electricity bills are not obvious. They aren't created in ones and twos, rather than in large numbers. They aren't created across the whole country, rather than being concentrated in depressed areas marginal constituencies. The people who don't get the jobs which aren't created never even realise they didn't get them. They don't go on marches complaining that they didn't get a job which wasn't created. There isn't a trade union for people without a trade; there isn't a confederation for British industries-which-could-have-existed-but-don't.

Sticking up for the market means sticking up for the idea that the ones and twos matter. That's the difference between pro-market and pro-business. Last month, Simon Goldie at Liberal Vision argued that the Liberal Democrats should push hard on sticking up for the little people, and rightly too (src). They don't get much smaller or more local than the job which didn't happen because the government pushed up taxes, or forced electricity prices to rise sharply, or monkeyed about with interest rates.

There is, or can be, a rhetorical force to the argument that good things are not happening because government is interfering. Who will stick up for the business which never opened, or the job which was never advertised?

JC on JC

Jeremy Clarkson this week attempted a joke about balance on the BBC. In order to make it, he necessarily embodied two opposed views on the strikes, with a segue between the two about there needing to be balance on the BBC. Apparently, it is offensive to trade unionists to satirise the BBC's apparent addiction to getting two people with opposed view to shout each other down and calling the result 'balance'. Who knew?

Yes, I heard Mary Bousted point out that in some parts of the world trade unionists are shot even nowadays; obviously that is a great wickedness to be deplored. And I know Jeremy Clarkson tries to get attention with idiotic and sometimes over-the-top insults. But equally, we all know what 'taking someone outside and shooting them' means and it's hardly 'Come the Revolution, comrades', and the people who were offended at this particular comment were mostly the people for whom Jeremy Clarkson is a bit of a hate figure anyway.

So to help us think through this one, here's someone else who is probably a hate figure for that sort of person. I've been reading through John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion on my commute, and read the following passage in only the last week or so. It seems topical.

If from unseasonable levity or wantonness, or rashness, you do any thing out of order or not in its own place, by which the weak or unskillful are offended, it may be said that offence has been given by you, since the ground of offence is owing to your fault. And in general, offence is said to be given in any matter where the person from whom it has proceeded is in fault.

Offence is said to be taken when a thing otherwise done, not wickedly or unseasonably, is made an occasion of offence from malevolence or some sinister feeling. For here offence was not given, but sinister interpreters ceaselessly take offence.

By the former kind, the weak only, by the latter, the ill-tempered and Pharisaical are offended. Wherefore, we shall call the one the offence of the weak, the other the offence of Pharisees. (Inst. III.19.xi)

The question, I suppose, is whether offence was given or only taken? Put it another way: do those who are making the running out of being offended here sound more like the weak, or more like the Pharisees?

The Now Show's futurology

There was an extended segment on The Now Show about how the Chancellor's 'cut' to fuel duty wasn't really a cut; it was just cancelling a projected increase. This is very true: presentation is always key. So presumably we'll not hear anything else from The Now Show team about the government's public spending 'cuts', given that they are merely reductions (and not even full cancellations) in projected increases.

I'm not holding my breath…

Damned lies at the Telegraph

I allude, of course, to the famous categorisation of lies, damned lies, and statistics. Here is a Telegraph subheadline:

NHS doctors are failing to inform up to half of families that their loved ones have been put on a scheme to help end their lives, the Royal College of Physicians has found. (src)

Now, you might think that this was a widespread problem. But in fact, the sub-editor is lying prodigiously.

Firstly, the Liverpool Care Pathway is not a 'scheme to help end life'; it is a palliative care programme designed to give dignity to those who are dying. The sub-editor has phrased this to sound like some kind of crypto-euthanasia, when in fact it is quite the reverse. But what is worse is the blatant twisting of figures. The body text, on which the sub-editor is meant to base their top matter, tells us,

In one hospital trust, doctors had conversations with fewer than half of families about the care of their loved one.

'In one hospital'! A single datapoint! Writing the subheadline on the basis of one datum is not simply poor statistics, it is in fact lying: it is outright damned lying. You could take a single uninformed family and make the claim that up to 100% of families are not informed; or a single informed family, to claim that up to 100% are informed. It is every bit as (il)legitimate.

The real story is that on average no more than six percent of families are not informed. (Since the count is 94% of families are documented as informed, the figure could be lower than six percent.) That is still, clearly, six percentage points too high (xkcd) but it is nowhere near the 'up to half' claim. Still, what does the truth matter when you have a subheadline to write, eh?