Let’s start with Orwell’s thoughts on patriotism.

Orwell said that patriotism is about a particular place and a particular way of life. Whether justified or not, people are often afraid that immigration will take this away from them but there’s no justification for calling them racist.

Are their fears justified?

I’ve been both an immigrant in a new country and a native in a place with high levels of immigration. As immigrants to California, we tended to cluster together and cling to the culture of the old country. Eventually, we learned to like burritos and baby back ribs and — eventually — the natives began to adopt some of our habits too.

Just during the time I was there, we persuaded their kids to play soccer and their pubs to serve IPA. That was great for me as I like both soccer and IPA but many folks in the native population resented this. The first time I witnessed an American couple getting VERY ANGRY that the pub they had just entered served neither Budweiser nor Miller Lite, I quietly wondered “What have we done to this country?”.

On the whole, the USA does a great job of assimilating immigrants and by the second or third generation, the culture of immigrant families is virtually indistinguishable from the culture of native families and they share the same devotion to the same particular way of life.

Immigration should be like guests arriving at a party. If you come to my party, I’d love it if you bring a new dish or a song from the old country for me to enjoy with you. Maybe you’ll share your baba ghanoush recipe and it will become part of our culture along with fish ‘n’ chips, doner kebabs and chicken tikka masala. I might get annoyed if you sit in the corner and eat your sushi on your own but if you share it with me, we can be friends. And the party vibe should change gradually over time as new friends arrive — if it changes too quickly, the early guests will be bummed.

I might resent it too if the new folks insist we only play their music or if they bring so many friends that it doesn’t feel like my party anymore. And if you don’t like bacon sandwiches — that’s fine. But don’t tell me that I can’t eat bacon sandwiches because you don’t like them.

With immigration, there’s a question of scale. If 100 people or 1,000 people come from a country where they don’t drink beer or eat pork, we can all still get along. But if it’s 100,000 or 1,000,000, all the pubs will close and the stalls selling bacon baps will go out of business and the natives will be sad. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with racism; it might just be the culture changing too fast for the natives to adapt.

As Orwell said, the patriotic natives are devoted to a particular place and a particular way of life and they have no wish to force it on other people — but they will surely resent it if you take it away from them. This is what conservatives are afraid of.

When I lived in the East End of London in the 90s, there was a great deal of immigration from Bangladesh. When our pie & mash shops and local boozers closed one by one to be replaced by Bangladeshi restaurants, there was much sadness among the troubled natives. Fortunately, I love Bangladeshi food! I did grieve the loss of the Lord Rodney pub on the Mile End Road though when it was replaced by a shoe shop.

This sense of cultural loss is entirely understandable and ‘our side’ should respond with sympathy rather than instinctively accusing the ‘losers’ of racism. A sympathetic immigration policy should take that into account.

A tiny request. It’s so very hard to get noticed when you start out as a writer.
Please consider sharing this essay so that others will see it. Maybe even add a little comment to say why you disagree with me?

My best Billy Bragg memories include teaching Train Train to Dylan when we lived in New York. He was only a year old and he used to finish the chorus for me “Train! Train!…Hurry bring my baby back again!”.

I was once cornered by an Old Etonian and an Old Harrovian for singing There is Power in a Factory in the showers at BRNC Dartmouth. They’d never met a Labour supporter before.

The night before I was due to see Billy at the Guildhall, Rob and I saw him being arrested on the Nine O’Clock News for breaking into the nuclear base at Greenham Common. Billy was released in time though and he was brilliant. Ted Hawkins was his warm-up act and I bought all of Ted’s albums too.

Levi Stubb’s Tears is one of my favourites and I’ve wanted to learn it since I got my first guitar. This is the first song I’ve recorded in a couple of years and I’m a bit rusty. It was fun to play though.

I decided that the song needed a bit of a video to go with it so I spent a very pleasant couple of hours wandering through Flickr’s Creative Commons gallery looking for images and cramming them together in iMovie (iMovie sucks).

The Best Flute Players
The purpose of a flute is to make beautiful music. For a flute to fulfil its purpose, it should be owned by the best flute player.

Rich People
Flute prices are set by the market. The best flutes are expensive and the only people who can afford them are rich people. Perhaps the rich people with the best flutes will hire the best flute players or perhaps they’ll lend them a flute occasionally. Or perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they’ll keep the best flute in a safe place to sell for a great price later. They can do what they like because they are rich.

The State
We can’t trust capitalism to distribute flutes efficiently. It would be better if all the flutes were owned by the state which could distribute flutes according to need. Perhaps we could establish a National Flute Academy to nurture and reward the best flute players.

Poor People
It’s not fair that either the rich people get all the best flutes or the best flute players get all the best flutes. We should distribute flutes to the least well-off in society.

The Worst Flute Players
It’s not fair that the best flute players just get better and better. It’s because they have access to the best flutes. If the worst flute players had better flutes, they could be great flute players too.

The Children of Rich People
This flute has been in my family for four generations. I’ve been meaning to learn to play it but I’ve been busy you know. But my flute is my property and I am entitled to do what I want with it. I choose to give it to my eldest son.

Slovenians
The oldest flutes were discovered in Slovenia. The flutes were 45,000 years old. Flutes are part of Slovenian culture. For anyone else to play a flute… that would be cultural appropriation.

Ethnic Minorities
Flute playing is a white European thing and ethnic minorities have been excluded for too long. We should decolonise flute playing and give the best flutes to ethnic minorities.

The Best Flute Players
For any decision, we should consider which choice will result in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. If the best flute players have the best flutes, they will be happy and the rest of us will be happy to hear them play.

Epilogue

Another clown pointed out that it wasn’t obvious that the flutes were just placeholders for some limited resource. I wrote a follow up post to explore this a bit further.

I have a bunch of medals for shooting.

Our Sea Cadet unit (TS Caprice, Bexley SCC), used to compete in tournaments pretty much every other weekend – adventure training, rifle drill, orienteering, rowing, sailing, football. We won almost every time we competed and my medal drawer overfloweth. Shooting was my forte.

I was pretty good at shooting despite the fact that I was – and still am – very short-sighted and, as a self-conscious teenager, never wore my glasses. I won silver in the South-East London shooting contest and gold in the pentathlon (shooting, orienteering, assault course, shot putt and…er … <mumble> something else I don’t remember) and best of all, we got the silver medal twice in a row in the All London Adventure Training competition (codename: Chosin; named for the Battle of Chosin in the Korean War) where we, a team of six fifteen-year-olds, were dropped in the middle of snowy nowhere for a weekend of hiking, camping, shooting and various other activities related to survival in the wilderness.

I also had an air rifle that my godfather gave me. It was already ancient when I got hold of it and the barrel was rusted. It wouldn’t shoot the little pellet thingies but I had fun chewing up bits of paper and shooting them at my dartboard. Once, I wondered whether it would hurt to shoot myself in the foot with a bit of chewed-up paper. The answer? Fuck yeah, it hurts! I got a massive blister on my big toe [One day I’ll tell you about my experiment with a super-powerful slingshot, a section of hot wheels track and a dart. Spoiler Alert: it hurt exquisitely and it took me several minutes to pull the dart out of my thumb.]

After I joined the Navy, we fired all the usual Navy weapons. Most of the time we shot the standard issue SLR (self-loading rifle) but we also fired more exotic weapons like LMGs (light-machine guns), SMGs (sub-machine guns) and, once, a 9mm Browning pistol (fun fact: a NAAFI manager with an LMG was credited with shooting down a Mirage with an LMG during the Falkland’s War).

My next gun was a twin-barrelled 30mm BMARC.

This gun was my constant companion for 6 months in 1984/85 while we sailed around and around the Falklands trying to keep the Argies from coming back. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (because I love saying it), the thrill of firing that gun is something I’ll never forget.

Alarm Aircraft! Green 9-0! Elevation 2-2! Starboard guns, engage! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! (20 times per second).

My next gun presented a different kind of thrill. I didn’t get to pull the trigger but I did get to load it. With one shell fired every 2.4 seconds and with two little 18-year-olds – weighing not much more than the 72lb shells that the gun fired – tasked with making sure the firing ring was never empty, you can imagine how much fun it was when the Captain announced

Naval Gunfire Support! 300 rounds. Engage!

I think I still have the bruises on my collarbone from pulling those shells down from the top shelf in the magazine and catching them on my shoulder. With a range of 30,000 yards, the 4.5in Mk8 was the most powerful gun I ever fired but I fired other weapons that were bigger. OK. I didn’t actually fire a torpedo, but I fired practice shots a hundred times and I sat next to a dude who fired one from HMS Revenge. Did you know they were wire-guided? Pretty cool, eh?

I missed out on firing the biggest weapon of all, the Polaris inter-continental ballistic missile, by a few months. My submarine, HMS Revenge, fired a practice missile a few months before I joined her but we fired an uncountable multitude of water shots on my one and only patrol and, every time, I fired a practice torpedo too, the theory being that if you fire a Polaris missile, every Russian submarine within a few hundred miles will hear it and come to try to sink you.

I was the only crew member on HMS Revenge who was also a member of Greenpeace. When the Jimmy made his big speech about how everyone on board had to be totally committed to our mission, three of my messmates had to physically prevent me from going up to the control room to share my reservations about our nuclear deterrent with the captain.

[postscript: odd that my security clearance came up for review right after I joined Greenpeace].

So, despite my history with guns, nothing prepared me for the ongoing love affair that my adopted country has with weaponry of all kinds.

Everyone in the world knows how much Americans like their guns but you don’t really appreciate exactly how much they like them until you get here and talk to people. Otherwise-normal people have some really strange ideas about the appropriate role of guns in society.

The oddest idea is the one that a well-armed citizenry is the last bastion against tyranny. Even some of my most sensible friends believe that one — not just the crazies who think that Obama is a Kenyan, socialist Muslim who wants to take their guns as step one in a secret conspiracy to introduce Sharia Law and gulags. Even people who can speak in complete sentences.

Put aside, for a moment, the knowledge that the government has kept all the really good weapons for itself, the main flaw in the well-armed citizenry argument, for me, is an emotional one. When I close my eyes and try to imagine what tyranny looks like, the images that scare me the most are the ones that include well-armed citizens and which way they are pointing their guns (HINT: it’s not in the direction of the government). Think of Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo, Bosnia, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan… and picture the folks holding the weapons. Were they the good guys or the bad guys? Any reason to think it might be different in a future American dystopia?

I expect that the mythology concerning well-armed militias grew from a seed of truth planted in 1776 and nurtured by 200 years of 4th-grade history. Generations of elementary school kids have been taught that the bad guys from England were repelled by the good guys using long guns hidden in their barns. Not until high school do kids learn that it’s not always so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

According to Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, it wasn’t until quite recently that the Second Amendment was used to justify gun ownership.

In the two centuries following the adoption of the Bill of Rights, in 1791, no amendment received less attention in the courts than the Second, except the Third. As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma.

The idea that the second amendment has something to do with self-defence is an even more recent innovation. A few years back, writer Jonathan Safran Foer wondered how a politician might justify gun ownership without relying on the Second Amendment.

…why, after the massacre at Virginia Tech — hours after — did Sen. John McCain proclaim, “I do believe in the constitutional right that everyone has, in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, to carry a weapon”? Just what is it, precisely, that he believes in? Is it the Constitution itself? (But surely he thinks it was wise to change the Constitution to abolish slavery, give women the vote, end Prohibition and so on?) Or is it the guns themselves that he believes in? It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns. What if, hours after the killings, McCain had stood at the podium and said instead, “Guns are good because . . . “

Why do Americans see guns as intrinsically good when the rest of the civilized world has such a different opinion?

In the rest of his article, Foer explores a few potential arguments to his rhetorical question, like public safety, a favourite among my gun-toting companions.

Guns are good because they provide the ultimate self-defense? I’m sure some people believe that having a gun at their bedside will make them safer, but they are wrong. This is not my opinion, and it’s not a political or controversial statement. It is a fact. Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than to kill an intruder, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Guns on the street make us less safe. For every justifiable handgun homicide, there are more than 50 handgun murders, according to the FBI.

After a passionate fireside discussion with some pirates on this subject, I had occasion to look into the statistics regarding gun deaths in the USA. They really are appalling. Check out these stats summarized by NationMaster:

	British Crime stats	American Crime stats
Murders with firearms	14	9,369
DEFINITION:	Total recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm. Crime statistics are often better indicators of the prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.
SOURCE:	The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention)
	Ranked 29th.	Ranked 1st. 668 times more than United Kingdom
Murders committed by youths	139	8,226
DEFINITION:	Homicide rates among youths aged 10–29 years by country or area: most recent year available (variable 1990–1999).
SOURCE:	World Health Organization: World report on violence and health, 2002

The numbers are even more appalling when you factor in accidental deaths.

Foer again:

In 2004, more preschoolers were killed by firearms than law enforcement officers, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. The number of children killed by guns in the United States each year is about three times greater than the number of servicemen and women killed annually in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, more children — children– have been killed by guns in the past 25 years than the total number of American fatalities in all wars of the past five decades.

There are several theories for why America is the most violent country in the developed world. The most compelling is that democracy came too early to America. Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature points to the state monopoly on violence as a major contributor to the persistent and dramatic decline in violence over the last several thousand years.

The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.

Book review of Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature in the New York Times.

Pinker documents in excruciating detail just how much more peaceful our century is than previous ones (if like me, you are wondering how Pinker explains away the Holocaust and World War I, go read the book. It will answer all your questions, I promise).

One of the reasons for the decline in violence, as Pinker describes in this article, Why are States so Red and Blue, is that

All societies must deal with the dilemma famously pointed out by Hobbes: in the absence of government, people are tempted to attack one another out of greed, fear and vengeance. European societies, over the centuries, solved this problem as their kings imposed law and order on a medieval patchwork of fiefs ravaged by feuding knights. The happy result was a thirty-fivefold reduction in their homicide rate from the Middle Ages to the present. Once the monarchs pacified the people, the people then had to rein in the monarchs, who had been keeping the peace with arbitrary edicts and gruesome public torture-executions. Beginning in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, governments were forced to implement democratic procedures, humanitarian reforms and the protection of human rights.

In America, the sequence of events was slightly different.

The historian Pieter Spierenburg has suggested that “democracy came too soon to America,” namely, before the government had disarmed its citizens. Since American governance was more or less democratic from the start, the people could choose not to cede to it the safeguarding of their personal safety but to keep it as their prerogative. The unhappy result of this vigilante justice is that American homicide rates are far higher than those of Europe, and those of the South higher than those of the North.

How much higher?

Quoting Democracy in America at The Economist,

Murder rates are about four times higher in America than in western Europe. And guns are not the only reason; murder by stabbing and clubbing is higher, too. The murder rate is higher among blacks, but American whites are more violent than European whites. The South is America’s most violent region; both blacks and whites in the South are more violent than those in the northeast. In other words, the murder rate is highest in those states that most disdain the sovereign (“government”) and champion self-reliance.

The outlook isn’t all bad though. Even though it seems like liberal politicians are getting ever more cowardly about gun control as the NRA gets ever more powerful, rates of gun ownership are actually falling…

The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.

The New Yorker

It’ll take a while but I am confident that Americans will eventually succumb to the same civilizing influences that have tamed Europeans’ violent urges.

Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that the “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers.

New Yorker, after the Aurora killings.

I expect that, part of the solution – the transition to a society with fewer guns, will result from the recognition that the second amendment, like all the other amendments, has limits.

From the Supreme Court’s judgment in District of Columbia vs Heller, written by Justice Scalia:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

The heroes are easily recognized by their strong profiles, high cheekbones and tendency to speech rather than speak. Heroes always know the precise angle to present their bodies so that the setting sun can highlight their virtues and their flat hips while the bright red glow of morality from the furnaces blazes in their Rearden Metal brooches and their steely blue eyes.

Meanwhile, the villains, or looters (you can almost hear the boos from the cheap seats) are made of blancmange and have names like Tinky and Kip and Balph (Balph!) and Cuffy and Chick. The blancmanges don’t have profiles, they have pendulous jowls and sagging, tired features and, when they are not starting organizations with phony names like Friends of Global Progress, they stoop and they slouch and they deny everything that’s obvious and honest and true.

The blancmanges don’t have conversations either. They blubber nonsense about everything being self-evident and how it’s not their fault — it’s nobody’s fault. They have no independent thoughts of their own and they regurgitate half-digested ideas scavenged from the waste bucket of philosophy and they speak in unfinished sentences. The heroes always finish their sentences.

“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr Thompson.

“We seemed to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.

“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.

“Who permitted it to hap-” he began in a rising voice but stopped ;

“We don’t have to believe it, do we?” cried James Taggart.

The overall effect is like a child’s pantomime where the children boooo when the unshaven villain in the stripey jumper and with a bag of swag over his shoulder twirls his moustache as the lights grow dim and a badly played organ heralds his entrance.

There is no dialog in this book. In place of normal conversation, the heroes take it in turns to practice their oratory while a blancmange barfs out platitudes.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonestly; the man who respects it has earned it.”

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.

When the heroes and looters actually do speak with each other it’s like some absurd Monty Python skit where the leprous townspeople, armed only with a bowl of radishes and a pound of liver, try to do battle with the Noble Paladins in Shining Armour mounted on Snorting Stallions only to be cut down one by snivelling one by the Paladins’ Virtuous Steel Blades. Terry Gilliam could not have drawn it better.

“All you want is production without men who are able to produce.”
“That…that’s just theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme.”

Even the adulterous sex is virtuous with the moral flame of righteousness reflecting in Dagny’s chaste dampness and Hank’s thrusts like the pistons that power the engines of prosperity.

She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her. Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure? – she thought. This is a train made of steel…running on rails of Rearden Metal…moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators…it’s a physical sensation of physical movement…but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?…Do they call it a low animal joy-this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now-it won’t-but I wouldn’t care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?

Oh, wait…maybe that really was about a train. It’s hard to tell with these people — they live their whole lives in metaphor so it’s impossible to tell when reality begins… or if it ever does.

Passages like that help explain why Ayn Rand is every budding libertarian’s favourite philosopher. Perhaps they got their first hard-on while imagining that Ayn was Dagny and Dagny was Ayn and that, when they closed their eyes, Ayn stood before them naked saying “I want you <insert name>. I’m more of an animal than you think…[snip 100 pages]… If I’m asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with <insert name>.”

The reason the book is so popular among that kind of conservative is that, perhaps, around age 19, they became confused between Ayn Rand’s prescription for a new Utopian Republic and Dagny’s high breasts. Now and forever, when they think of steel production, they become aroused by thoughts of themselves as Hank Rearden driving his train into Dagny Taggart’s tunnel.

I can’t count the number of times, on Usenet and on mailing lists, when a comment about cooperation causes a shotgun response to “now go read Atlas Shrugged”. Just today, in the comments after an article about Ron Paul in the Times, someone grumbled about the fate of the dollar, sighed “Where is John Galt?” and resolved to buy gold.

I wonder how many of Ron Paul’s supporters have on their desk a framed, signed picture dedicated with “To Marcus. May you care about no-one but your self. With Love and Virtue, Ayn xxx” and a Heroines of Objectivism calendar on the back of their bathroom door? I’ll bet Greenspan had one.

I really wanted to like this book as I enjoyed The Fountainhead thoroughly. I had intended to write a mini review when I was about three hundred pages into it, while it was still just a fun ride on a moralistic steam train through Objectiville, but events conspired against me and I missed my stop. The train started to judder about a third of the way in and finally came off the rails on page 606 as Ayn, furiously shovelling coal and with the whistle blowing, described, to the rhythm of a rickety train on an out-of-control track, why everyone who disagrees with her deserves to die…

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence…

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good cause”…

The woman in Roomette, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards,by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil…

[…skipping cars 4 through 15 until…]

The man in Bedroom A, Car No.16 was a humanitarian who had said “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer”….

…and we are still only half way through our journey. After falling into a ditch, the train ploughed on through heavy mud until the publishers accidentally printed 60 pages of someone’s 10th grade homework on “Why we must fear communism”. It finally came to rest, with a final mournful sigh, about 900 pages after the ending became obvious.

Still, there is a lot to like about Objectivism. Like many political philosophies, it tries to scale a simple idea from a Personal Guide to Virtuous Life up through an ethical system for interacting with friends and business partners and, eventually, to a political recipe for Utopia.

At the personal level, Rand’s moral philosophy is spot on. Ask me “What is the Good?” or “how should I shape my hopes and dreams?” and I’ll say “Ask Ayn”. Ayn’s advice gets a little shaky when she tells us that our friends and family must earn the love we give them. It totally falls apart when we imagine a society built on the idea that captains of industry are paragons of virtue.

In Ayn’s topsy-turvy world, successful businessmen are successful precisely because they play by the rules and follow a strict code of honour. They channel their enlightened greed into production, commerce and other activities that benefit society with supreme efficiency. Ayn’s heroes would never clear cut rain forests or dump plastics in the ocean or pollute the rivers or poison thousands of Indians or do any of the things that real businessmen do.

This is ultimately where the book, and the philosophy, gets it dead wrong. Sure we can all imagine politicians and industrialists enlightened by self-interest but the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them. The James Taggarts and Wesley Mouches outnumber the Hank Reardens a thousand-fold. I am a dyed-in-the-wool elitist but even I would not trust the elite to decide who is or is not elite.

Perhaps, in 1957, when she wrote it, fear of communism and fascism and other collectivist disasters was very real and she saw herself as writing a cautionary tale warning against the submission of individuals to collectivism. But that does not explain why she seems unable to distinguish between, say, the enforced starvation of one group for the benefit of another and a government program to build schools. It also does not explain why so many modern day Objectivists equate income tax with slavery.

In Ayn Rand’s fairy tale, the collectivist Utopian dream of the looters ends in dystopia and apocalypse. It’s hard to imagine the Objectivist dream ending differently.

I have a sense that Facebook is about to score its first victory in the battle for civil liberties. Facebook has been ablaze with outrage over the new Porno Scanners at airports and their creepy human cousins, the Groping Agents. Facebook has managed to bring the issue into everyone’s consciousness the way that newspapers and the insipid dross that passes for news on the telly is no longer able to do.

I’m proud to say that I had my genitals gently brushed by a security agent before it was fashionable and, exhibitionist that I am, I’d be delighted to display blurry groin pictures to anyone who has the desire to see them.

But even though it doesn’t really bother me too much, I understand that other people are horrified by the idea of men in uniform having the unquestionable authority to touch your naughty bits and to use spy cameras to look up your crevices.

But that’s not really the point.

The point is that we the sheeple have accepted ever-spiraling intrusions without complaint and with no commensurate sense that we are getting any safer in return. I sense that the angry sheep are about to become a flock and bleat in unison and Facebook deserves a lot of the credit.

A brief history of travelling inconvenience:

• X-Ray all my luggage? Sure, whatever!
• Put my killer toothpaste in a separate little baggie? Seems like a waste of everyone’s time but I find it more silly than annoying.
• Take off my coat? And my belt? And – what’s that? – my shoes too? If it makes someone feel better, super.

But if this rigmarole of humiliation actually deters any terrorists, it’s more likely that they can’t face the long lines on the route to martyrdom than that they have run out of places to hide their explosives…

Now let’s see…I can’t hide my bomb in my shoes, shampoo, jacket or under my belt any more. Where could I possibly shove this stick of dynamite where the security dude won’t find it?

Most of the uproar so far has focussed on the indignity of having your privates prodded or flashed up on a screen but the smarter commentators are starting to wonder where all this leads.

Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinal imagines the TSA’s flights of erotic fantasy as frat party prank…

Is this really for our own good? Or are we trading what’s left of our human dignity by participating in a Kafkaesque farce that more closely resembles a college fraternity psychology experiment devised around a keg:

“OK, here’s the plan. Americans are terrified of an airplane bomber, right? So let’s see what how much we can get them to do if we promise them safety.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno, like let us touch their genitals and use scanners that show them naked, stuff like that.”

“No WAY!”

She goes on to imagine…

The idea of a stranger, even one of the same sex, foraging around my private principalities is simply unacceptable.

…

Heaven forbid the next inept, would-be terrorist conceals his flammables in his nether region. Shall soon our interior caves and corridors require exploration to ensure that the system works?

James Poulos, at Ricochet, imagines a little further.

My problem with what’s unfolding at our nation’s airports runs a lot deeper than the misfortune of genital encroachment. My problem is that we’re racing down an inherently absurd road. Set aside for a moment the dismaying way in which every new advance in security measures involves a retreat for civil liberties and traditional definitons of decency. Our logic of escalation appears to mean that every new solution actually creates a new and dramatically worse problem — one which calls, of course, for dramatically more invasive and comprehensive countermeasures.

Where does it end? As a matter of logic, it ends with a free people dehumanizing themselves in a way their own enemies cannot quite manage to do. Fortunately, we are not prisoners of logic. But the awful thing about terrorism is that it very well might keep us prisoner to fear.

How much of this process of our sheepification began, I wonder, with the RNC conference of 2004?

The decline in civil liberties is depressing enough, but some people have started to wonder who is getting rich from all this.

Ann Althouse in who is getting rich selling those see-you-naked scanners has some ideas (list edited by me):

• 2005: Michael Chertoff, as head of Homeland Security, orders the first batch of porno scanners from a company called Rapiscan Systems. After his departure, Chertoff gave dozens of interviews using his government credentials to promote the device. What he didn’t tell people was that Rapiscan was one of the clients of his consulting company, The Chertoff group.
• March 2009: The Department of Homeland Security says they will apply $1 billion in stimulus money to the nation’s airports. Senator Joe Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, personally promises to oversee the distribution of stimulus funds so money goes toward the goal of creating “4 million jobs” and not on “boondoggles”
• In 2008, former U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff authored a 38 page report warning of terrorists exploiting our security deficiencies — including air travel.
• On Christmas Day 2009, just before the “attempted bombing incident” on board flight 253, there were a total of 40 body scanners in use in 19 airports in the U.S.
• After the ‘bombing attempt’ Chertoff made a flurry of media appearances suggesting that the “attempted bombing incident” could have been avoided if all airports were using full body scanners.
• The Washington Post printed an article on January 1, 2010, calling Chertoff out for using his government credentials to promote a product that benefits his clients. It was revealed that Rapiscan Systems, the manufacturer of the naked body scanner Chertoff was recommending, was a client of Chertoff’s security consulting agency.
• Rapiscan has since received over $250 million in scanner orders.

Ann also wonders:

Now, I think this TSA issue has the potential to affect the political orientation of many individuals. How might the political parties and other political participants seize this opportunity?

and I wonder whether there is an opportunity for the less crazy tea partiers to make common cause with the Liberaltarians. I swear that a credible, non-lunatic party that can speak to libertarians of both the left and right would clean up.

This is a famous question asked by Aristotle in his exploration of justice.

Aristotle believed that justice means giving everyone what they deserve. We can figure out who deserves what by thinking about the purpose of a thing. Everything has a purpose (a telos in Greek). The purpose of a flute is to make music. The purpose of a knife is to cut. The purpose of a bed is to be slept in. If a flute is not making good music — if it is kept in a cupboard by a rich man, for example — it is not fulfilling its purpose (its telos).

Aristotle said that the best flutes should be owned by the best flute players so they can make beautiful music.

I thought it would be fun to think about other ways to answer the question. What if we distribute flutes according to their market price, for example? Good flutes are expensive! Maybe they should be owned by rich people. Alternatively, what if we give the best flutes to poor people in the spirit of egalitarianism?

Another clown in the Clown Household pointed out that it wasn’t obvious that best flutes is just a placeholder for any limited but desirable thing because there is no limit to the number of good flutes we can make. He has a point. If a lot of people want good flutes, just make more good flutes!

A better question would be ‘Who should own the Stradivarius violins?’ There are only 600 Stradivarius violins left in the world and they don’t make them anymore. Our society says that expensive violins should be owned by rich people and we don’t even question whether or not that’s the best way. Isn’t there a better way of distributing expensive violins?

The question works for any good thing, not just expensive musical instruments.

If there is a limited supply of houses for people to live in, who should have them? Would it be OK for some people to own multiple houses while other people are homeless? Aristotle might say that the purpose of a house is to be lived in so to have rich people own multiple houses and leave them empty is to deny the telos of a house.

Charles Windsor owns ‘at least seven palaces, 10 castles, 12 homes, 56 cottages, and 14 ancient ruins’ according to House and Gardens magazine. That’s enough to give a home to each of the homeless in Bristol. Our society says it’s fine for one man to own dozens of homes because his ancestors were victorious in battle. There must be a better way to distribute homes.

What about education? Who should have the best physics education? Should the kids who are best at physics get access to the best physics teachers? Or the kids who love physics the most? What about the kids who are not very good at physics? Shouldn’t they get the best teachers in the name of equity?

What about tickets to the FA Cup final? My friend Tony gave me his extra ticket for the 1990 FA Cup final replay vs Crystal Palace because he thought the ticket should go to a Man United fan. He could have sold it for a lot of money but he chose to give it to me.

What about iPhones? What about a place in pre-school? What about rides in Disneyland? I think Aristotle’s question is a good way to make us really think about the way we distribute goods and whether there’s a better way.

How about healthcare? A woman in my cancer community said that it wasn’t fair that she had paid thousands for her husband’s cancer treatment while some poor person could just waltz in and get treated for free. In some countries, it’s expected that rich people get better access to healthcare while in other countries, it’s assumed that everyone should have access to healthcare whether they have money or not. How do we decide what’s the best way to distribute healthcare?

A lot of questions in philosophy are useless but the question of how we distribute goods in society is an important one. I don’t agree with Aristotle’s answer but I am glad he asked the question.

When my car is both electric and autonomous (not long to wait now), I won’t need to allocate a big chunk of my property, or worse, a big chunk of my city’s roads, to a place for my car to rest for twelve hours a day. It’ll just head out to the big charging station on the outside of town and it’ll be back, waiting outside my door, when I’m ready to go to work in the morning. 

But wait! If it’s just going to take me to work every day does it even need to be MY car. I can just rent one for the twenty five minutes it takes to get to work. Or maybe my employer will have a pool of autonomous vehicles to round up all their employees and get them home safely. Imagine how much they’d save on parking structures. 

The most expensive part of a taxi is the driver. When the driver is gone, taxis will be cheaper than owning a car and if most people use taxis most of the time, it will be cheaper to subscribe to a service rather than pay for journeys individually. For commonly traveled routes, we’ll have larger vehicles that carry many people at a time. We will call them “buses”.

As car ownership models morph into car subscription models our city streets will no longer be lined with empty, useless vehicles. Our villages will no longer be clogged with ugly great SUVs. Imagine visiting that lovely little town in Tuscany and not finding the piazza cram-full with Fiat 500s!

Some ungodly number of cars on city streets are just driving around and around looking for parking. Soon they’ll be gone! Poof! Our cities and towns will be, for the first time in a hundred years, for people to walk in again. 

Around the world, about one million people die in traffic accidents every year. Traffic accidents are responsible for about one third of traffic congestion. The number of car-related fatalities has been falling consistently since 1952 and most accidents are caused by human error. With self-driving cars, the era of road traffic accidents will come to an end. We’ll have to find new ways to kill each other.

It has been estimated that roads can safely accommodate seven times the number of vehicles when they are autonomous rather than people driven. We could have seven times times the number of cars on the road! No! Wait! Let’s not do that. Let’s have one seventh the number of roads instead!

If this vision sounds like a wonderful science fiction, spend a few weeks in Mountain View, California and count the number autonomous, electric vehicles you see. They are coming here too. It won’t be long. 

It’s hard for AI to deal with the crazy, reckless, human drivers on our streets but there will come a tipping point when autonomous electric cars are cheaper, safer and cleaner than the old fashioned kind and the only people driving retro vehicles will be those stuck in some twentieth century motoring fantasy and old geezers in Range Rovers. Good luck finding insurance, Old Geezers!

This future can’t come fast enough for me. 

My family already got rid of  our two cars. The Zipcar only costs £3 for half an hour to drive down to the garden centre to pick up some pots that are too heavy to walk with. It’s a ten minute walk to pick up my Zipcar but, soon, it will be driving over to pick me up instead. It’s less than £100 to rent a big ol’ Vauxhall Moka to drive down to Cornwall for the weekend. 

People in cities already don’t need cars and it’s selfish to have them. Folks in villages will have to wait a few more years for Utopia to arrive but… it’s coming for sure.

Folks who commute will have to put up with awful trains and dreadful traffic for a while longer but, make no mistake, the future is just around the corner and it’s beautiful. 

Will you stand in future’s way? Or will you climb aboard?

Damore got himself into trouble for a bunch of reasons (too much logos and not enough pathos for a start) but I thought the core of his argument, restated to be more positive, could be appealing to many of the people who condemned it.

I’m going where angels fear to tread. Wish me luck!

Diversity is good for software companies. It helps us make better products.

I work at a little software startup just up the road from Google. Men are a minority at my company and I like it that way. It makes for a more pleasant work environment. I’ve worked on too many all-male teams and they tend [stereotype alert!] to be much more competitive and less collaborative. With women around, the men try — but sometimes fail — to be on their best behaviour.

Less selfishly, I think that our diversity makes us a better team. The women [stereotype alert!] really do see things that the men don’t see (and vice versa).

Men and Women are Different

Although there are differences in interests and traits between men and women at the group level, we should judge individuals as individuals, not as members of their group.

I don’t think either point is controversial, though the second might be hard to acknowledge if your blood pressure is already high from reading the first. There’s a long history of people using statistics like this for ill purposes but I hope and expect that we can avoid the mistakes of the past with a little goodwill and a generous reading of the evidence.

There’s no need to posit genetic explanations for the differences. Cultural history can explain it adequately well.

There is chronic sex discrimination in the hiring process.

I have no doubt about this and we should certainly fix it. But bias in the hiring process and discrimination in the workplace are inadequate explanations for the gender imbalance in software engineering.

Creating awareness of implicit bias during the interview process is certainly helpful but it’s not enough to fix the whole of the problem. If we want to get more women into software development (we do! we do!), we need to look further.  We need to consider other solutions too.

Vive la différence!

Men are taller than women on average but, if I need tall people for a job, I would be foolish to go out and hire a bunch of men. I can just measure the candidates. If they are tall enough, I can hire them without considering their gender.

This analogy doesn’t quite work because an objective quality like height is easy to measure. Subjective qualities of the kind we might consider when hiring a software engineer can be harder to untangle from our biases and our stereotypes — but we can try.

Once we’ve decided that our candidate is good enough (or tall enough) for the job, it’s not helpful to consider whether they have the right configuration of sex chromosomes (individuals, not groups remember?). But maybe it’s useful to think about group differences during the interview process itself?

The evidence from psychology suggests that women and men are quite different, on average, on certain traits like neuroticism and agreeableness even if there is considerable overlap between the sexes. Could those differences make the interview process more treacherous (on average) for women? I think it does, especially when you consider that most of the interviewers are men.

I don’t know of any work that looks at agreeableness as a liability in interviews but there was an interesting experiment recently at interview.io that tried to understand why women are less likely to succeed in interviews.

Make interviews more social?

interview.io is a website that gives software engineers an opportunity to practice interviewing in a safe environment. They noticed large differences in outcomes between male and female candidates.

we’ve amassed data from thousands of technical interviews, and in this blog, we routinely share some of the surprising stuff we’ve learned. In this post, I’ll talk about what happened when we built real-time voice masking to investigate the magnitude of bias against women in technical interviews. In short, we made men sound like women and women sound like men and looked at how that affected their interview performance. We also looked at what happened when women did poorly in interviews, how drastically that differed from men’s behavior, and why that difference matters for the thorny issue of the gender gap in tech.

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/

Here’s what they knew before the experiment:

Specifically, men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women.

They designed the experiment expecting to confirm a bias against female interviews but…

Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability).

They didn’t really come up with a satisfactory explanation for the failure to uncover bias but an author can speculate…

Anecdotally, it seemed like women were leaving the platform a lot more often than men. So I ran the numbers.

What I learned was pretty shocking. As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.

If women drop out so much more during the interview process, might we see the same behaviour throughout a woman’s fledgling career in software engineering?

The author speculates some more…

If that’s true, then we need 3 times as many women studying computer science than men to get to the same number in our pipelines. Note that that’s 3 times more than men, not 3 times more than there are now.  … [snip]… to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude.

Maybe the author of the Google memo was on to something when he wondered if neuroticism was significant when we look at the differences in the number of male versus female engineers? Just not in the way you thought.

Armed with this new information, perhaps we can change the way we interview engineers?

I’ve interviewed and been interviewed perhaps hundreds of times over my career. I enjoy being interviewed. But I can honestly say that my interview at Google was the least pleasant that I have ever endured. The interviewers were completely uninterested in my hopes and dreams and were actively hostile when I tried to engage them in conversation.

Maybe Google has got better at interviewing since then. If they haven’t, maybe they could try? No need to lower the bar on quality. They could start by acknowledging that there’s more to being a great software engineer than solving Big O problems.

Maybe we can make software engineering more social?

The author of the interviewing.io study suggested that we can’t fix the gender imbalance by better interviewing alone. Is there anything about software engineering itself that is off-putting to women?

Let’s first acknowledge that the sheer preponderance of men makes many women uncomfortable. Being the odd one out on a team is a high cultural hurdle to clear before we even think about differences in traits and interests. The evidence from other disciplines suggests that the hurdle is not insurmountable though.

Women now progress to PhDs as often as men in science, maths…

…and engineering and women now dominate health professions and life sciences.

If the life sciences can do it, maybe software engineering can too.

Software engineering has a poor image in the outside world. Most people think of a software engineer as a lonely introvert locked away in a a cubicle and typing code into a computer all day. Maybe Google is like that, but I haven’t worked that way for more than fifteen years.

Since I discovered Kent Beck’s crazy way of making software, I’ve come to value interactions and collaboration much more than the old process of turning specifications into code. I spend most of my day collaborating with other people.

If young women knew that software engineering was highly collaborative, might they be more inclined to give it a try?

Isn’t that just what Damore argued in his memo?

I read four or five rebuttals of the Google memo before I read the actual memo itself and I was quite surprised, when I finally read it, to find that the memo was neither as crazy nor as hostile to women as I had been led to believe.

Rather than refuting his points, most of the rebuttals were reiterating what Damore himself had said in his memo.

Now, granted, my argument is not exactly the same as Damore’s but it’s not far off. Damore would’ve done better to have saved his rant about liberal bias at Google for another day. And the rant about extra support for women and minorities would have sounded better if he had shouted it at the clouds.

He got a lot of things right though.

The psychologists at the Heterodox Academy looked at the research.

In conclusion, based on the meta-analyses we reviewed above, Damore seems to be correct that there are “population level differences in distributions” of traits that are likely to be relevant for understanding gender gaps at Google and other tech firms. The differences are much larger and more consistent for traits related to interest and enjoyment, rather than ability.

…

Population differences in interest may be part of the explanation for why there are fewer women in the applicant pool, but the women who choose to enter the pool are just as capable as the larger number of men in the pool. This conclusion does not deny that various forms of bias, harassment, and discouragement exist and contribute to outcome disparities, nor does it imply that the differences in interest are biologically fixed and cannot be changed in future generations.

…

If our three conclusions are correct then Damore was drawing attention to empirical findings that seem to have been previously unknown or ignored at Google, and which might be helpful to the company as it tries to improve its diversity policies and outcomes.

The Heterodox Academy

Most of the first round of criticism missed his point entirely. Gizmodo called it an anti-diversity screed .

Gizmodo:

Damore:

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic summarizes the misleading coverage well.

To me, the Google memo is an outlier—I cannot remember the last time so many outlets and observers mischaracterized so many aspects of a text everyone possessed.

Casually perusing “anti-diversity” headlines without reading the memo might mislead readers into thinking a Google employee had assigned a negative value to gender diversity, when in fact he assigned a positive value to gender diversity, but objected to some ways it was being pursued and tradeoffs others would make to maximize it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181

Sabine Hossenfelder at Nautilus wonders about the wider implications of his memo.

Damore’s memo strikes me as a pamphlet produced by a well-meaning, but also utterly clueless, young white man. He didn’t deserve to get fired for this. He deserved maybe a slap on the too-quickly typing fingers. But in his world, asking for discussion is apparently enough to get fired.

…

If you remove biology from Damore’s notion of “population level differences”, his critique is still nearly as powerful. And his question is still valid: “If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”

…

Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, based on woefully incomplete information he picked from published research studies. But however imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own. And what example does that set?

http://nautil.us/blog/outraged-by-the-google-diversity-memo-i-want-you-to-think-about-it

Bring your daughters to work. And keep them there.

After the last round of “Silicon Valley Is Sexist” outrage, I asked each of the very smart, very capable women of my acquaintance why they did not become software engineers. They all answered with some variant of “I can’t think of anything less appealing than the idea of working with a machine all day” or “I would hate to work in an environment where I was the only woman”.

I also asked all my male friends why their daughters were not interested in computer science. They all sighed and said “I just can’t get her interested”.

Only 18% of CS graduates are women. If we want to attract more women into software engineering (and we should – it’s a fun job; very social and pays well!), we have to find a way to get our daughters interested. We are not gonna fix the whole industry by making interviewers less biased.

There’s a tiny number of exceptionally good people. Maybe 2%. Your Gandhis and your Martin Luther Kings devote their lives to a cause bigger than themselves. Oskar Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jewish people and Greta Thunberg has committed her young life to preventing the worst effects of climate change.

Larissa MacFarquahar wrote a book, Strangers Drowning, that profiles some of the extreme altruists who decide that helping other people is more important than helping themselves. These people are not necessarily saints or good in all aspects of their lives but, in the domains where they have decided to be good, they are the best.

At the other end of the scale are the bastards and arseholes who totally fuck up our world. I’d guess that about 5% of people are like this. There are rapists and child molesters, yes. On the bigger stage, there are malevolent conmen who will corrupt a nation to burnish their reputations or to satisfy their need for gold-plated toilets or gold-flecked wallpaper. The worst of them send millions to the gas chamber to avenge a perceived slight or to fulfil some monstrous racial prophecy. The most pathetic punch old ladies in the street or lob beer cans into a neighbour’s garden. The rest of us know not to do these things, but the 5% seem to recognize no ethical boundaries at all.

There’s a scene in Midnight Express where the protagonist, Billy, discovers, in the basement of the mental prison in Turkey where he is being held, a shuffling wheel where the maddest of the mad walk endlessly around a pillar. Billy is joined in his shuffling by a Harvard-trained philosopher who explains his theory of bad machines.

Sometimes the factory makes bad machines so they put them here. The bad machines don’t know that they are bad machines but the people at the factory know.

Midnight Express

I subscribe to this idea of bad machines. The bad machines are broken. Maybe they have reasons for being broken — maybe they had an abusive father or an incompetent mother — and we should have sympathy for their plight. But they are broken nonetheless and should be removed from society. We should still show them compassion and treat them with kindness and help them if we can but the first priority should be to protect the rest of us from them. We certainly shouldn’t elect them President or Chancellor or Prime Minister.

But what about the rest?

To recap: we’ve got good people, some very good people and some very bad people. That leaves about 30% who could go either way depending on what might best serve their interests at the time.

I’m not sure what we should do with this ethically flexible 30%. Donald Trump says we should storm the Capitol, so we storm — or at least defend the Stormers. Adolf Hitler says we should round up the Jews, so we round them up — or at least deny that anyone could have known that we were rounding up Jews.

Nigel Farage says that the brown people are swarming onto our shores to take our jobs and our women and to impose their barbaric laws on our society. Of course, we should ship them off to Rwanda or, better yet, send them back where they came from.

The man on the telly says the gays are corrupting our children. We need to ban the gays. Except for that nice Ellen Degeneres and Elton John. They are not hurting anyone and Elton wrote some lovely tunes. But we should ban the rest of them and we certainly should not let them teach our children or get married in our churches.

The ethical behaviour of the easily-persuaded extends from the truly abhorrent to the merely unpleasant. Should I piss in my neighbour’s garden? Should I call this young woman on the internet a cunt? I could go either way — let me see what Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan say first. The Daily Mail said that High Court judges are the Enemy of the People for upholding the rule of law. Donald Trump said much the same thing, as did Stalin and Robespierre before him. Would the Daily Mail lie to me? Would Fox News? Would Joseph Stalin?

There’s a crazy story in Bristol 24/7 today. The building opposite ours, Invicta, has just declared that the pathway that runs along the front of the building will be closed to the public because members of the public (I am guessing around 5%) are pissing on their patios and throwing cans and pizza boxes into the doorways of the people that live there. In an ideal world, this depraved 5% would not exist and the footpath would remain open and free in perpetuity. But in this actual, fallen world, they do exist and they piss and they puke and they break. So what to do? Lock them up? The ethically flexible have other ideas.

The most common response to the article is that people who don’t want people pissing on their patio should not move in next to a pub. This ignores the obvious fact that the patio owners did not actually move in next to a pub. There are a couple of fancy restaurants down near where we live but the pubs did not actually arrive until ten years later. I am in favour of pubs though. I’m just against pissing on patios. Why do I have to choose to have neither or both? Why not allow pubs but ban pissing on patios?

At the peak of the pandemic, when all the pubs were still closed, our little corner of Harbourside was discovered as a cool place to hang out and we had around 500 people sitting on the pontoons by the dock every night with a crate of Thatcher’s Gold and an endless supply of nitrous balloons. There were no public toilets so every one of those 500 people would piss in our garden (and about 5% would shit in our garden) and every morning there would be sacks and sacks of empties and thousand of little silver canisters to clean up. The response from the ethically ambiguous was the same: if you didn’t want 500 people pissing in your garden, you shouldn’t have moved to a place where 500 people piss in your garden.

I’m still young at heart so I take pleasure in seeing the young and the beautiful getting high and swimming in the harbour but my neighbours were a little less pro-party and at times, even I struggled to defend the partiers. The people shitting in our gardens were a bit annoying and the people selling cocaine were maybe taking things a bit too far but most of the revellers were good people who took their cans and their bottles — and their shit — home with them. What was confusing to me was when something obviously bad was happening and the other revellers did nothing to stop it.

The dudes doing wheelies on motorbikes in the middle of a crowd of people were obviously ethically challenged but why did none of the others think to say “Yeah. No. Don’t do that. What you are doing is dangerous. Let’s just enjoy the cool vibes, dude.”

It’s understandable that some of those people are so broken that they think nothing of tossing their empty beer bottles into the square to enjoy the SMASH!!!! but it’s much harder to understand their fellow revellers who laugh and say nothing. When I went down to pick up the glass — and the guy from Invicta came down to help me — what were the other revellers thinking? Did they resolve to tell their friends not to smash bottles next time? Or did they resent our silent rebuke?

Smashed bottles and pissing on patios don’t amount to much in the big scheme of things but there are challenging times ahead on this side of the Atlantic and on the other. I fear the 5% with no ethical sense at all but, even more, I fear the 30% who could go either way.

Ethical? Not Ethical. Makes no difference really. I’ll do what’s most convenient for me. The politicians are all as bad as each other when you think about it. I just want things to be the way they used to be.