Politics, The Final Frontier (Politics)

[Grant]

Many years ago I was listening to agony aunt Anna Raeburn on Capital Radio. "The problem with rape allegations," she said, "is that two thirds of them are lies."

Now this was about 1980 so she got away with it, but I doubt if the stats have changed much.

[Mick Harper]

The problem is that they are not lies. Yes, in a tiny percentage of cases, it is a lie. And those tiny number of cases do enormous damage, not just (just!) in the imprisonment of innocent men but in (the far greater number of) rapists going free because juries are aware that it happens. When it's 'he said/she said' and 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt' that's a mighty powerful force. It's the one that judge-only trials are designed to overcome because the fifty-one per cent already takes care of the multiple/stranger rapes, juries have no trouble convicting them. Though the police have a lot of trouble catching them.

The average (average!) rape victim is perfectly sincere in her accusations, the man is perfectly sincere in believing he's done nothing wrong. Good grief, I must be in one of the lowest percentiles when it comes to predatory sexual behaviour but, looking back on a reasonably variegated but not out of the ordinary sexual past, there are any number of times when I've staggered into bed with a woman drunk enough to cry rape the next morning. Now. Then it didn't occur to me because it wouldn't have occurred to her. It was just a case of she did/I did/we all did.

I can assure you I've never had a night of sex that came near to a one per centile possibility of doing seven years in the Wormwood Scrubs nonces' wing because for sure the police would have had no trouble catching me. The complainant had my phone number and address.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

The whole discussion on China policy was derailed simply because every talking head on view failed to point out the absolutely obvious fact that China is going to blow everyone else out of the water in the quite near future. It is totally potty talking about how we can best compete with, or curb or outspend or form alliances against China.

This kind of talk was reasonable enough when we were dealing with Russia, or before that Germany, and before that any newly arrived Great Power since the start of the nation-state era. China is a completely different animal.

PS The retired diplomatic talking head let one cat out of the bag (leastways I'd never heard of it) by referring to The Quad, a secret but ongoing mind-meld between senior officials from the US, the UK, France and Germany to keep these long-terms trends under constant review. It seemed to have been mostly concerned with the Soviets and got dissolved when they did. The dude thought it might be a good idea to revive it now vis à vis China. Whether France (because of its out of step China policies) or Britain (because of its irrelevance) should be replaced by Japan and/or A N Other he didn't say.

[Mick Harper]

A revelatory article in the Guardian mag this week, 'What my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system' by Polly Toynbee. She, for those who don't know, is best described as the Chief Spokesperson for the British Left, wheeled out on Newsnight when some fine point of ideology needs elucidating. She makes two colossal errors:

ONE When she talks about the British class system, it is nothing of the kind. Human beings are group animals and group animals have to have a pecking order that is easily identifiable and near-universally accepted. That there is a pecking order, that is, no individual in the group has to accept their place in it. Toynbee is entitled to rail about social devices that ensure people are too high (or too low) because of their parents but just to point out A is higher than B because of the 'class system' is an abuse of process. All she is saying is that that human beings are group animals smart enough to pass on more than their genes.

TWO She instances her own genetic line with a mixture of shame and pride -- the 'Red Countess', Gilbert Murray, Arnold Toynbee, one social reformer after another -- without once reflecting that her own left-wingery is entirely inherited. Not something she worked out for herself and is therefore intellectually relatively worthless, however well she can argue the finer points of it. The rest of us are entitled to point out, "Thank you, dear, but we've inherited a different set of political prejudices to you."

I mean of course 'the rest of you' since as an AE-ist I have worked it out for myself. Though I admit the unpleasant assumption of superiority on my part is largely inherited, just as Polly's is.

[Mick Harper]

The French are moving troops towards the Italian frontier. Does this mean war? No, it means Europe's daft migration policies have reached new levels of absurdity. France and Italy are fellow members of the Schengen Agreement, people are supposed to be able to flow unimpeded across their mutual borders. But then there's this

[Mick Harper]

It is side-splittingly funny watching the Labour right saying all the things that the Labour left were saying when they had the whip hand. And the poor old misery-guts Corbynites appealing to the all the finer virtues the right was bleating about then. It's word-for-word. Re-selection. Our people in the north. London elite. Sharing a platform. Worst result since... And all said with a straight face. No, a lean into camera earnest face. Why can't they just use knuckle-dusters and be done with it?

And it could be so different too. Imagine if they were in two different parties: Labour and Continuity Labour. Then they could just swap over at intervals.

[Mick Harper]

These Canadian wildfires that are causing such mayhem in the eastern United States may be a blessing. In the first place it may mean the corridor of power wakes up to the idea that the world really is in some kind of trouble, it's not something dreamt up by liberals and foreigners. Then it may wake everyone up to the idea that stupendous and widespread wildfires are here to stay and that something needs to be done about them, not least because carbon sinks are being converted into carbon before our very eyes.

In the short term, it might mean the internationalising of wildfire-fighting. I was dumbfounded to discover that only now are the Americans arriving in force with their hi-tec watering cans. You would have thought turning up to the office with streaming eyes might have led to some phone calls on day one. In the long term they might watch my deserts video and discover how to fight wildfires (or not fight them, they are essential in natural doses).

[Mick Harper]

It's that time again!

Nobody knows why the weather is going haywire. They suspect it has something to do with global warming but since global warming ought not really to affect local weather -- just, as it were, move it up and down the latitudes a bit -- they are in something of a quandary. Aside from not currently doing much about global warming. So they have turned to the academics for an explanation that gets everyone off the hook.

"It's El Nino," the academics trumpet in their usual unison.
"We thought El Nino was only every ten years or something."
"Ah, global warming is making it more frequent."
"But the weather mayhem is every year."
"There's pre-El Nino, El Nino itself, then post-El Nino."
"Surely it's a bit local though, even if 'local' is pretty big."
"Nooh. El Nino has the capacity to have knock-on effects worldwide."
"Thanks, guys, we'll tell the voters."

[Mick Harper]

One difference between us and the French is we don't smell of garlic. The other is that we are devoted to DIY and heritage

[Mick Harper]

I got involved in a contretemps on medium.com which finished with a statement by me that has got me slightly worried. It began when I read this entirely typical medium story. Informative and worthy.

[Grant]

Surely the white "racists" who enforced Jim Crow laws in the South wanted black people to live in their own areas. The last thing they wanted was black people being forced out to live goodness knows where. Maybe they'd come to your area

[Mick Harper]

There was a megally important documentary yesterday on BBC4 The Witness is a Whale. I'll itemise for those who haven't paid their licence fee:

1. Whales were critical for the spread of early humans. Whale carcasses on beaches were very common and provided sustenance for people on their travels.
2. Whales were critical for the well-being of oceans, acting as keystone species for most of its eco-systems.
3. Whales were not important in human history until (mainly American and British) whalers started hunting them commercially in the nineteenth century.
4. Whales were not endangered until steam-powered harpoons and motorised whaling boats were introduced in the twentieth century.
5. Whales' numbers crashed leading to the International Whaling Committee being set up to agree quotas.
6. Whales' numbers continued to decline, nobody knew why.
7. We now know why.
8. The Russians were conducting a worldwide KGB-sponsored hunt for whales, because Russians were short of every kind of food thanks to collectivisation. They were killing whales eighteen times over their own agreed quota.
9. In one international whale sanctuary area near New Zealand they killed fifty thousand.
10. When even Russian whalers wondered whether this was a sensible policy, the KBG told them, "Kill everything. If we don't catch the whales, the capitalists will."

[Grant]

And you've just explained the mystery of whales beaching themselves for no good reason.

Early man bred them to do this.

[Ishmael]

You may recall my speculation that early mariners harpooned their boats to whales to find new land.