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Politics, The Final Frontier (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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Oh no! The Northern Ireland Protocol is back in the news. It made second story on Al-Jazeera so it must be important. Except it isn't. Just to remind you of the two salient facts:

(1) Brexit and the Belfast Agreement are incompatible. One requires a customs border, the other forbids it. It's nobody's fault, that's just the way it is.
(2) There is no requirement for a customs border between the UK and the EU. All the goods going back and forth are zero-rated for tariffs and all of them are subject to identical manufacturing standards.

Sure, there are bits and bobs and sure the bits and bobs might grow more divergent over time but, given goodwill, a bit of give and take and the European Court of Justice keeping everybody honest, the whole thing can be be presided over by a bloke with a stop/go paddle and a copy of the Racing Post. So, you are asking, why are 20% of goods entering the single market that are hoiked out by EU goons 'for inspection' happening to be the less than one per cent of goods going from Britain to Ulster? It's because

(1) Boris Johnson was the ideal bloke to solve (1) above. He just lied, got everything through and trusted that other people would pull his chestnuts out of the fire when the chickens came home to roost. Which is precisely what is going to happen when the smoke has cleared. We'll be OK.
(2) The EU don't want it to get about that (2) above, their vaunted single market, is a load of bollocks in a mostly tariff-free and common standards world and that they are actually a political project, pure and simple, and currently a bit the worse for wear. They'll be OK.

PS I'm glad Northern Ireland is not OK. They demanded and got a billion pound bribe in the early stages when they held the balance of power in Parliament. But as soon as they have lost a billion pounds in economic underactivity, they can have everything they want as far as I'm concerned. Not that anyone knows what that is but give it to them anyway to stop their yapping.
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Grant



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Years ago imported goods were transported in ships in barrels and sacks. Men lifted them off the ships, often stealing a percentage for themselves. Thousands of pounds of ropes and pallets were used on every ship. Now they get transported using containers, one of the greatest inventions of the last hundred years.

Prior to COVID you could import a container from China for less than £2,000. Whether the tariff is 1% or 10% is almost irrelevant, unless you’re a journalist or a remoaner.
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Mick Harper
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Why are scientists left wing?
To be objective is to determine the difference between correct and incorrect, right and wrong, in an unbiased manner. Scientists are leftist because they have weighed the parties objectively and found one less wrong than the other. Simple as that. Being objective does not mean being neutral when there is a clear right answer and a clear wrong answer.

An important milestone had been achieved here. A leftist acknowledging that leftism can be wrong.
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Mick Harper
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The above, a comment plucked from Medium.com, is a fairly standard assumption. I put in a fairly routine AE comment and it led to some interesting exchanges. This is me

I don't mind scientists being left wing any more than I mind, say, airline pilots being right wing. As long as they can do the job. I do object though to academics in the sociological subjects being overwhelmingly left wing. It means, collectively, they won't be doing their job.

which led to the original poster of the story (not responsible for the previous comment) to answer me. It's a bit long-winded but interesting in a 'how-they-think' kind of a way

Erik Engheim wrote:
Being of a particular political persuasion doesn't mean you cannot be objective however. I don't think sociologists being right-wing are likely to do any better job than sociologists being left-wing. In fact if I was going to speculate I would assume a left-wing sociologists would on average do a a better job. Why? Because to analyze various human societies, culture and relations you need to have a pretty open mind about other people. That is more common among leftist political ideology.

Right-wing political ideology tend to have a higher chance of having people who are disapproving of people of other cultures and traditions. Many are often strictly religious and reject anyone with another religion as lesser than them or more immoral. I don't think you do a good job of being a sociologist if you are being judgemental, which is more common on the political right.

You find more people on the right being judgemental towards other religions, people with other sexual orientations than themselves, I experienced exactly the same while living in the US. American conservatives I met tended to be far more critical of other societies, while liberals tended to be more open minded about other societies. I had conservatives tell me America was better place to live than my native Norway time and again without actually knowing anything about Norway.

Mind you I never started a debate about which place was better. It would just pop up in conversations that I was Norwegian and I was studying in the US, but planned to go home to Norway soon. Conservatives typically found it very strange that I was willingly leaving the US. They insisted the US was the best country in the world and that nobody in their right mind would want to leave. I don't [think] people with that kind of attitude are well suited to studying other cultures and communities
.

I thought I had better do my duty

You have made two obvious errors. Firstly, being of a ‘particular political persuasion’ is proof in itself of a lack of objectivity in matters sociological. But I was not objecting to left wing sociologists, I do not know whether they are better or worse than right-wing ones, and nor do you. However, it is a cause for concern if they are all left-wing since the subject itself will then quickly become left wing, with all that entails in terms of paradigms, models and evidential sources.

There's more!
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Mick Harper
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Erik Engheim wrote:
Everybody has a political persuasion. The key difference is some acknowledge it while others pretend they don’t. What matters is to what degree you manage to be objective and professional when required. Even if I am strongly opposed to religion, I am still capable of acting civilized around religious people. But the fact that I can be respectful towards religious people doesn’t mean that I have changed my particular political persuasion. What you do and what you believe may not always be the same.

We had a priest as prime minister of Norway some years ago. He never argued his politics by invoking God. He managed to separate his religious views from the job he had to do as a professional. This is different from e.g. somebody like George W. Bush who was unable to separate his religious convictions from his job as president. That was a case where a person was unable to be professional. The problem was not that Bush believed in God, but that he could not put that aside while acting as president.

Mick Harper wrote:
I don’t have a political persuasion. It’s perfectly possible though I agree you have to work at it. I have never met anyone who pretended they don’t. The human brain is not capable of setting aside ‘what you believe’ though politicians (and everyone else) constantly do things they do not believe to be right but know they have to do them anyway. President Bush carried out no ‘Christian’ policies that I know of. However, because he was right wing, left wing people were always accusing him of doing so.

Erik Engheim wrote:
Of course you do. You just don’t want to admit it. If I asked you about abortion, women’s rights, abortion, immigration, gun ownership, universal health care, global warming etc you would quickly give away your political persuasions. You have already given a lot of clues in your characterization of George W. Bush.

Ir was getting personal...
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Mick Harper
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Mick Harper wrote:
You know me better than I know myself. And after such a short acquaintanceship! I’m impressed. And you know my opinion of Bush. That is nothing less than long distance telepathy.

Erik Enheim wrote:
I didn't say I knew you. I said that if I had asked you about your opinions on a range of subjects, I am sure I could have pinpointed you in the political landscape. There is nothing impressive about observing that everybody has a political persuasion. That is simply to observe that you are human. As a human you have values and preferences. You are not Jellyfish.

That you yourself don't believe you have political persuasions, I cannot tell why. I don't know you well enough. Perhaps politics means something very different to you. Perhaps all it means is that you don't consistently vote Republican or Democrat. That makes you think you are non-political. Or perhaps you think you don't belong to any kind of political ideology, because you never vote or take interest in the political questions of the society you live in
.

Mick Harper wrote:
Since you say you don’t know me (though you did imply you thought I was a Bush supporter) let me assure you I have never voted in my life, that I am a complete political junkie and that if you managed to pinpoint me on the political landscape I would give up my entire political philosophy in despair. Good talking to you.

I was a bit lame and he stood his ground well but the significant thing is Erik's belief that 'to be human is to have a political position'. This is not a left wing assumption but a universal one (aside from practising AE-ists). Nor is the accusation that I personally fall short of the AE ideal a left wing position, Ishmael is always accusing me of left-wingery. But that is because he is right wing just as Erik is left wing. There's no pleasing folks!
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Grant



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We have to realise that the whole panoply of ideas people like Erik espouse - wokeism, women’s rights, immigration, global warming - is a new religion taking shape to meet the needs of atheists to have a religion. We have this instinctive need to believe which cannot be filled by Mick Harper’s call for applied epistemology.
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Mick Harper
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I noticed, Grant, that you didn't include the right wing in this castigation. Any special reason?
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Grant



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I was trying to be brief but of course right wing political ideas sometimes morph into religions. Nazism was obviously a religion, and Hitler its Messiah
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Grant



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It fascinates me that at any period in history human beings have always believed in crazy ideas.

Your fundamental principle of AE tells us that the past is like the present, but it surely works in reverse. Virtually everything we believe in is just as nuts as anything we believed in the past.

So what crazy ideas are the modern version of yesterday’s religions? Just watch the news tonight. You’ll be told that women can have penises, that a vital gas which makes up 0.02% of the atmosphere has become a menace, and that white people have founded the most successful societies because they were “privileged.”

It’s tempting to say we’ve gone mad, but we’ve always been mad. But just occasionally the madness works in our favour and allows rationality to poke its head over the parapet. At the moment rationality is hiding.
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Mick Harper
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I was trying to be brief but of course right wing political ideas sometimes morph into religions. Nazism was obviously a religion, and Hitler its Messiah

Let me see if I understand the position as of now. Current left wing people have elevated their beliefs into what is tantamount to a religion. Some right wing people, notably the Nazis, have done the same thing in the past. However, right wing people of today, such as yourself, have not done this.

This is obviously important. You must tell us how you avoided the pitfall so we can let those of our members who happen to be on the left know, and they will be able to do likewise.
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Grant



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I never said I was right-wing. I’ve actually voted for at least four different parties.

I’ve also fallen for the religion nonsense. When I was a teenager I was a Marxist until I found Milton Friedman. But Friedman was also developing his own religion of free market capitalism together with his own disciples.
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Mick Harper
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It fascinates me that at any period in history human beings have always believed in crazy ideas. Your fundamental principle of AE tells us that the past is like the present, but it surely works in reverse. Virtually everything we believe in is just as nuts as anything we believed in the past.

This is encapsulated in the AE principle "All paradigms are of their nature false". This is assumed because all the paradigms of the past have turned out to be wrong except the ones we currently hold that, we assume, haven't been shown to be false yet.

So what crazy ideas are the modern version of yesterday’s religions? Just watch the news tonight. You’ll be told that women can have penises, that a vital gas which makes up 0.02% of the atmosphere has become a menace, and that white people have founded the most successful societies because they were “privileged.”

You have committed the mortal AE sin of the 'bogus list'.

It’s tempting to say we’ve gone mad, but we’ve always been mad. But just occasionally the madness works in our favour and allows rationality to poke its head over the parapet. At the moment rationality is hiding.

You have committed the mortal AE sin of cobbling together gobbledegook but presenting it in a faux 'we are all guilty style' that you don't really mean.
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Mick Harper
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I never said I was right-wing. I’ve actually voted for at least four different parties.

It is just as bad lurching from one fixed position to another. Unless you are saying you voted for parties on the strict basis of 'who has got the best set of administrators at the moment'. Let us see...

I’ve also fallen for the religion nonsense. When I was a teenager I was a Marxist until I found Milton Friedman. But Friedman was also developing his own religion of free market capitalism together with his own disciples.

This is entirely acceptable for youthful minds. Where are you at the moment? Specifically, how can you tell whatever it is isn't a kind of religion?
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Grant



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My religion is there is no religion. I don’t even follow the religion of Attenboroughism, the idea that we can gain some purpose in life by worshipping Mother Nature. Or Dawkinsism, which states that the study of Science will provide us with solace before we die.

I live for my 1) family 2) me and 3) people who look like me. I occasionally show an interest in 4) people in the world who don’t look like me, but it’s pretty weak.

With that sort of personality I lean towards Trump, but appreciate that he’s a weak individual who cared more about popularity than actually achieving anything. And I have voted Tory twice in thirty years.
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