Author: anomalyuk

Nick Clegg Forgets to Pretend

Nick Clegg is in the papers, appearing not only vague but unconcerned about “who is running the country” while Cameron is away. (Nick Clegg ‘forgot’ he was in charge of the Government this week) (dead link)

One of the most interesting things about politics in the last decade or so is that the fictions are breaking down. That is also the theme of Mencius’ latest post, where he wonders if he is being made redundant by the openness of the USG’s intervention in Egypt, and by Wikileaks.

The notion that the government of Britain is “run” by a handful of well-known politicans has over the last hundred years gone from being somewhat true, to being something often deviated from in practice, to being an earnest pretence, and finally a flimsy charade.

Now Clegg, who as a Liberal Democrat is somewhat more isolated from the continuity of political office than his predecessors in cabinet, seems to be unaware of the tradition of paying lip-service to the idea. If someone really needs for some bizarre reason to ask the Prime Minister something, they have his phone number, and anyway Clegg is thinking of taking a day or two off.

Jeremy Paxman in his book “The Political Animal” quotes an unnamed Tory ex-minister:

‘Once we lost the 1997 election,’ one of the best-known Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s told me, ‘I knew it was over for me. What was the point of standing up in parliament and lambasting the Labour government, when I knew exactly how limited the options open to them were? It was all empty and pointless.’

It’s a very interesting book. While its aim is to look at the character of politicians, in the process it has to show the environment in which they act in more detail than we normally see.

As an opponent of democracy, I am constantly irritated by the suggestion that there are no practical alternatives. The book reminds us that mass democracy as we understand it today is something that appeared in Britain within living memory:

“In April 1925, for example, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, announced that Britain was to return to the Gold Standard, whereby the value of sterling was guaranteed by allowing pounds to be exchanged for gold. This momentous (if ultimately unsuccessful) decision had been two months in preparation, involving heartfelt arguments on both sides of the debate. Yet not a word of it appeared in the newspapers. Indeed, it was hardly heard outside the confines of the Treasury.”

Decisions were being made by an establishment, and if ministers were part of the process, that was because they, coincidentally, were also members of that establishment. Paxman also describes what happened when ministers were elected from outside the establishment, quoting from the diaries of Hugh Dalton, from the period of the Labour administration of 1929-31.

The Cabinet is full of overworked men, growing older; more tired and more timid with each passing week. Pressure from below and from without is utterly ineffectual. High hopes are falling like last autumn’s leaves. There is a whisper of spring in the air, but none in the political air. One funks the public platform, and one wishes we had never come in. We have forgotten our Programme, or been bamboozled out of it by the officials. One almost longs for an early and crushing defeat.

We have there an explanation for why Britain has got off so lightly from democracy: the parliament of 1925 was elected under a restricted franchise (women under 30 did not get the vote until the 1929 election), and as we saw above major policy debates occurred without reference to the press. Once outsiders started to be elected, they were largely powerless in the face of the establishment. Dalton presumably became more influential in later administrations, but I suspect that was due not so much to the power of the establishment waning, as to the establishment moving closer to the Labour party’s views.

This is the important but subtle point I’ve made before — elections are not what they are claimed to be, but neither are they irrelevant. The establishment rules, but it is not unanimous, and politicans are able to exert crude broad-brush influence where the establishment is divided. Because the politicians are motivated by elections, the influence they exert tends always to be in the same direction. In the period before politicians were answerable to the mass media, the influence of the electorate was lessened.

Anonymous versus HBGary

I don’t think the HBGary story has had the amount of attention it deserves from the mainstream.

It’s worth reading just as drama: Security researcher takes on the “Anonymous” hacker group, and loses so spectacularly it almost defies description.

It’s important for what it says about any organisation’s IT choices and their security implications. HBGary used Google Apps. Cloud services are enormously convenient, particularly for an organisation that does not really have a physical “home”, but using them means losing perimiter security altogether.

Perimiter security has a bad name, because in the old days it was all there was, and today it is not enough. But the things that are possible even if you try to protect your perimiter are much easier if you don’t even have one.

A basic IT risk assessment question for anybody is, “how much damage can an attacker do with one password?”. With one password, Anonymous downloaded all of HBGary’s corporate email from Google and posted it on the internet. They did more than that — the highlight for security commentators was the social-engineering attack on rootkit.org via a Nokia engineer — but the email was enough by itself, as well as enabling the other attacks. They got the email admin password from an ad-hoc CMS with a SQL-injection vulnerability, as it happens, but if your whole company can be destroyed with one password then you’re doing it wrong. (Damn, it’s so hard to avoid lapsing into dialect on this story).

And the third interesting angle is what is to be found in the data Anonymous posted. The company was proposing to feed fake data to WikiLeaks to discredit it, and to pressure journalists who defended WikiLeaks. There is chatter about government involvement in this, but I haven’t seen that actually substantiated. It may be in there somewhere. The HBGary Federal projects aimed at government clients seem to be standard network monitoring / intrusion detection stuff.

In case anyone gets confused, I’m not here to defend Anonymous, or for that matter to attack them. They exist. If they get caught they’ll get the book thrown at them, which is understandable, but I’m more interested in what the world looks like with them in it. Whereas Assange attempts to define his aims, and appeals for support, Anonymous claim only to be “in it for the lulz”, which is not open to disputation.

Update: Intriguing piece on HBGary government work on rootkits and penetration tools. In principle this should be verifiable from the email dumps, but I haven’t checked.

Fascism and Democracy

Since I’ve been discussing fascism, and since it is topical, at least round here, because of the imminent arrival in Luton of the English Defense League, I will look at it in more detail.

I don’t mean to imply that the EDL actually are fascists — I don’t know what they are, and it really doesn’t matter at all. Their enemies, who control the media, all political parties, and every arm of government, will call them fascist, so any discussion of them is a discussion of fascism, whatever it is that they really believe.

I side with the fascists against many liberals in that I don’t see dispersed political power as a desirable end. It’s not that I’m in favour of concentrated political power as an end — I would happily accept dispersed power as a means if it advanced good ends, but I don’t think it does. Concentrated power, for me, is a means towards government that will protect peace, prosperity, security, freedom etc.

I think many fascists, possibly including Schmitt, would not have listed peace as a good end, as I have done. So on that score I oppose the fascists: other things being equal, peace is better than war.

The bad things associated with fascism are excessively aggressive foreign policy, persecution of selected minorities, economic collectivism, omnipresent dishonest propaganda, and a clampdown on opposition.

The belligerence, persecution, collectivism and propaganda all derive from the requirement for a broad popular base. This differs slightly from a democracy: democracy requires the acquiescence of a large majority, fascism requires the active support of at least a large minority. The similarities are close enough, however, that in the last 60 years the democracies have taken on levels of collectivism and propaganda that are indistinguishable from those of 1930s fascism. (George Street is still strewn with the purple streamers of “Luton in Harmony“, a fairly typical government propaganda exercise). Collectivism is part of the mix because it enables the government, by controlling economic activity, to reward support and punish dissent in a subtle but sustainable way that a laissez-faire government cannot.

The direction of the democratic propaganda is of course opposite to that of fascism; this reflects the difference between the popularity requirements of democracy and fascism. Luton in Harmony is supposed to generate a diffuse low-level hostility to opponents of the regime across as wide a base as possible, whereas Fascists need to stir active fear and hatred among a a smaller group who will maintain the regime in power — what Dsquared elegantly paints as “arseholes”. That is the reason why democracies are generally less unpleasant to live under than fascist parties. The ability of the regime to survive on no more than passive acquiescence of the population is the real advantage of democracy, though it only exists because people believe other good things about democracy that aren’t true. It is the feature of democracy that needs to be held onto through a transition to a better system.

Comparisons between democracy and fascism on the foreign policy side are interesting. Britain has operated an aggressive foreign policy over the last decade, but that appears on the face of it to have arisen despite the demands of democracy rather than because of them — it does appear to have been driven by the personal convictions of Tony Blair. But just possibly that is missing the point. The link between war and popularity is not necessarily that war is popular; it is that the people are more inspired by a leadership personality who displays the characteristics that are likely to lead him to war. Hitler and Blair, then, were popular not because they had war policies, but because they had the conviction and charisma of crusaders. That conviction is what then produced the war policies.

Or maybe Blair was just weird. After all, many other democracies are less belligerent. I’m not really convinced either way on this question.

As for the curbing of opposition, I have no problem with it. The reason why it is generally considered proper for a government to tolerate opposition is that it is generally believed that the need to compromise and satisfy opponents pushes government policy in a beneficial direction. I believe the exact opposite: that nearly all governments, good or bad, are made worse by opposition. All competent governments treat sedition as a crime. Politics in the real world is a matter of life and death, and those who perpetrate it must accept the risks.

That is not to say that opposition to any government is bad: even if all governments become worse when they are opposed, they may be replaced by something better if they are actually overthrown. But I don’t expect bad governments to cooperate in their own overthrow.

Concretely, if the current events in Egypt result in regime change, that could possibly be beneficial (though I would be surprised). But if they don’t, any “reforms” that the current regime is driven to will make things worse. True revolutionaries understand this — they want concessions not for their own value, but because concessions further weaken the regime, bringing its fall nearer.

So to strengthen my earlier post, which was slightly equivocal, I reject fascism. It relies on mass popularity, and therefore fails to improve on democracy, but going further, because it has to win more positive support from the population than democracy does, it has the problems of democracy in a stronger and more dangerous form. One of the worst things that can be said about democracy is that, particularly in it’s young form, it has a tendency to devolve into fascism. A young democracy is little more than a battle between competing fascisms — each party is the active street-fighting kind, rather than the passive tick-in-the-box democratic kind.

That actually explains a mystery that troubled me in the past: why it is that there is such an exaggerated fear of fascist or near-fascist organisations like the BNP, despite their appearing laughably weak and incompetent. At some level, the regime must recognise that in intellectual terms fascism is the obvious response to democracy, however irrelevant a particular party might be. I think it’s fair to say that if fascism had newly appeared twenty years ago, without the baggage of history, it would by by now be popular enough across Europe that it would probably have taken over most of it.

Carl Schmitt

Tyler Cowen linked to a New Republic article about political thought in China

The first point is that the Chinese take politics really seriously — something that looks strange to those of us who live in democracies, where politics is mostly fantasy, and goes some way to explaining the Chinese regime’s unnecessarily serious take on such idiocies as the Nobel Peace Prize.

More interesting, to me, is the summary of the thinking of Carl Schmitt.

“Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary… If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, ‘absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics'”

That last point is what tore me away, finally, from classical liberalism. You can establish, as the libertarians have done, that politics is basically harmful — that it would be better if it did not exist. That is true, and it gives useful insights. But by itself, it doesn’t actually get rid of politics, any more than declaring any other crime to be a crime gets rid of it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. We would be better off without politics, but classical liberalism offers no way to achieve that, and I suspect it is not possible. If I am resigned to living in a world with politics, the question of what form of politics is least bad presents itself, and classical liberalism supplies no answers.

Schmitt, who I was not previously aware of, did not merely point out the problem with liberalism. He did something about it. Specifically, he joined the Nazi party.

Fascism is a fairly obvious answer to the problems of liberal democracy. Get rid of the liars, the elections, the corrupt influences of guild, agency and business, and lets just have a Leader who makes the decisions and is answerable to nobody but God and history. That’s pretty much what I’ve been saying for a while — am I a fascist?

That’s a tough enough question that I’ve been sitting on this draft for several weeks while I work it out. Clearly, I’m not far away — certainly not far enough to be respectable. I want quite a few of the things the Fascists want. But then, when people sit around spouting political theories, they frequently want much the same things: prosperity, security, personal freedom… it’s means, rather than ends, that cause most disagreements.

The easy answer is “No, fascism is way too democratic for me”, because fascism relies on a mass party, which is a form of demotism even if there aren’t necessarily regular fair elections. But that’s a bit glib, given that I don’t have a clear path forward, and it’s possible that in some circumstances fascism could be a path to something I would approve of.

The real answer is that arguing about theories of government in the abstract is meaningless and irrelevant. If I did not believe that, I would still be a libertarian. I am not likely to actively support any real fascist movement, because I am a passivist, not an activist. If I supported fascism I would be committing politics, and becoming part of the problem. When the time is right for a responsible government to exist, there will be no need for a movement with supporters, because the people will acquiesce in the new regime as they now acquiesce in democracy. The new order will not be imposed by an ideological struggle, but by a straightforward business transaction, which at the time will seem inevitable and even minor.

I am not saying the new order is inevitable — just that if it happens it will become inevitable first. Any order that is installed by a struggle is obviously political, and therefore doomed.

[Update: fixed link, corrected source to New Republic, not National Review. Thanks Kalim Kassam]

Belgium under Royal rule

Great news from Belgium: after three months without the country managing to elect a government, King Albert has started making policy. Possibly an actual crisis isn’t necessary, and a mere mechanical hiccup is enough to start the transition from democracy to responsible government.

More likely not: at some point the politicians of Belgium will presumably manage to cobble together a democratic government, and he will be expected to hand over. However, if that takes a while longer, the idea will start to implant itself in some minds, that there is an alternative. He is in charge now, and the reason really is that it might as well be him as anybody else, and at least it solves arguments. And that is the whole reason for monarchy. As people come to realise that the problems caused by competition for power, even when mediated through an electoral process, are inevitable and finally catastrophic, any reminders of how to settle on an easy choice will be useful.

John Gray on Rights

Kalim Kassam has found a fascinating book review by John Gray in The National Interest.

The review is of Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which sounds pretty interesting.

Gray fleshes out some detail of what he wrote about in Black Mass, which I discussed here in 2008. I was put off Black Mass by what I thought was excessive generalisation, a misplaced attempt to force a grand unifying thesis on events.

Dealing with a specific, that problem does not arise, and I have little to quarrel with here.

The first point is the recency of the dominance of the idea of primary universal human rights — Moyn dates the idea to the late 1970s, and Gray blames it on John Rawls. He identifies the key flaw in Rawls’ theory, which is that it simply takes for granted a state structure that cares somehow for the well-being of its subjects in a fairly broad way, and only suggests how such a state should best define and pursue that aim. How such a historically unlikely state can come to exist and be preserved is not addressed.

(That is also, of course, the flaw that has separated me from most forms of libertarianism, which is an alternative —indeed superior— program resting on the same unwarranted assumptions*).

Best quote: But if human rights are artifacts that have been constructed in specific circumstances, as I would argue, history is all-important; and history tells us that when authoritarian regimes are suddenly swept aside, the result is often anarchy or a new form of tyranny—and quite often a mix of the two. Human rights as artifacts echoes what I and David Friedman have said; the anarchy and tyranny following revolution is just what I was talking about in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize. The neatness is slightly marred by the use of that unfortunate word “authoritarian” again — here it seems to mean “anything other than modern liberal democracy”, which is at least less mysterious than Assange’s version.

The review also serves as an example of Mencius Moldbug’s claim, that the common assumptions of today are the Harvard ideas of two generations ago.

Obviously the claim of inherent human rights is not entirely new — I vaguely recollect some mention of “all men … unalienable rights” in an old document of some kind. What is new, according to Moyn and Gray is the moral primacy of human rights; not endowed by a creator but independent, the starting point of a moral system.

Gray’s piece also contains what could be seen as a response to my criticism of Black Mass; he constrains what he calls “utopian” projects to those where it can be known in advance that its central objectives cannot be realized. The question of what can be realized and what cannot is, of course, usually the centre of political controversy to start with. “Politicians make promises they can’t keep” — there’s a shocking new idea.

*This is unfair to some libertarians, including David Friedman. Separate post to follow.

Climate Roundup

Most of the commentary on the cold winter has been too stupid to discuss, so I haven’t. Certainly, cold winters do not prove that the climate scientists are wrong, though it does suggest that alarm is overstated: not only is weather not climate, but climate variability is so dwarfed by weather variability that it is not remotely possible to actually notice whatever climate variation there might have been over the last hundred years. The actual weather changes in any given place from year to year or decade to decade are vastly bigger than any global climate change we have seen. As I say, that doesn’t make climate change wrong, but it does make it less relevant.

But most stupid are the desperate attempts to claim that cold winters are caused by global warming. Not because that is impossible, but because there has been scant regard for facts. I have been informed by one earnest physicist that snowy winters here are to be expected, because global warming increases the amount of water in the air. That would be sound logic if English winters were normally cold and dry, but they are not – winter conditions here are normally that if there is a clear night, there is frost, but if there is cloud cover, that keeps the ground too warm for frost, and it rains. We have snow this year because it is colder, not because there is more moisture.

Some random genius on Twitter takes the biscuit for claiming that the cold winter is to be expected, because global warming has melted icecaps, changed ocean salinity, and diverted the Gulf Stream. Again, logically sound, but the ocean salinity has not changed and the Gulf Stream has not moved. Apart from that, good try…

Monbiot’s theory, that warming at the pole has disrupted atmospheric circulations, bringing cold weather down, is at least not obviously contradicted by the facts. It might be true. But there was certainly no consensus predicting it.

What has made this issue worth mentioning for me is the excellent collection of articles gathered by hauntingthelibrary, of the climate mainstream explaining that mild winters in Britain are the result of Global Warming. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the classic UEA “snowfall a thing of the past”, but he shows that that was not one random nutter.

* Less snow and rain for islands (Hadley Centre)
* Warmer and Wetter Winters in Europe and Western North America Linked to Increasing Greenhouse Gases (NASA,Nature)
* The recent warm winters that Britain has experienced are a clear sign that the climate is changing (James Hansen)

The point is not that they are wrong. The fact is that the climate system is so complex, and the climate signal is so faint against the weather background, that there is no possibility of being right. If global average temperatures really have increased by a degree or so over the last fifty years, and I cannot see that there is any way to tell whether they have, then what the results are is equally unknowable. Weather is just too big a thing to see around.

The other point is the sheer lack of restraint in putting forward ad-hoc climate theories without the slightest thinking-through in response to any weather. Journalists do journalism, but this kind of speculation is what scientists were traditionally so unwilling to do that, 25 years ago, there was a popular stereotype of the scientist who couldn’t commit himself to anything because “the evidence is not yet complete”. That change is the most significant element in climate science.

Friedman (D) on Rights

Some of you may remember my two posts on the nature of rights in 2008. If so, you can now forget them, because David Friedman has made the argument more completely and much more eloquently.

Rights in human societies, including modern ones, are based on the same pattern of behavior as territorial behavior in animals or enforcement via feud and the threat of feud, even if less obviously so. Each individual has a view of his entitlements and is willing to bear unreasonably large costs in defense of them.

Yup, that’s what rights are.

Cable and the Cables

I can’t help thinking that the Vince Cable story is a knock-on effect of Wikileaks.

The biggest effect of wikileaks may not be either the secrets that it tells, or even the fear of the secrets it may yet tell. It may be the secrets that others tell, because of the feeling, “when all that is already in the newspapers, why am I keeping X a secret?”

Is it a breach of confidence to secretly record what an MP tells a “constituent” that he has never met? It’s pretty thin… it is just a politician talking to a voter with no extra qualification; if he tells one voter something, what right does he have to keep it secret from other voters? But nobody did it before.

And, of course, the current story is based not just on the Telegraph’s secret recording, but on a leak of that recording — the Telegraph, perhaps for business reasons, chose not to reveal Cable’s claim to have “declared war on Murdoch”. So someone at the Telegraph leaked it to the BBC.

I rather suspect that norms as to what is publishable and what isn’t have changed suddenly.

"Egalitarian Monarchism"

Reading Richard Spencer’s criticism of John Médaille’s form of “egalitarian monarchism”, I was initially moved to leap to the defence of Médaille. There is indeed a sense in which the advantage of Monarchy is its egalitarianism.

What I mean is that the modern democratic state shares many of its problems with the feudal societies of the first half of the last millenium. Power is divided between many competing blocs (in the old world, aristocratic families, in the new, agencies and guilds) whose domains are variable and unclear, and much of what passes for policy results from conflicts between them for power.

The medieval problem was solved by the growth of Royal versus aristocratic power. The Tudors and the Bourbons (for example) were able to dominate the aristocracy.

This can be seen as an egalitarian reform — the vast power blocs weakened, and the ordinary subject becoming more equal, at least in terms of political power, with his Lord who, like him, is under effective authority.

There are many institutions that today have too much power. A true royal restoration would make the government agencies, the quangos, the media, the universities, the unions, the banks, all bereft of political power. Opinions may legitimately vary as to which of those bodies most urgently need their wings clipped, and the Steel Rule means that I do not assert my own view, but the point is not so much that they all will be subservient to the Sovereign, as that he will be subservient to none of them.

One of the most important characteristics of personal power is that it is the power to get things wrong and then fix them. I do not in fact have confidence in the wisdom of some randomly selected King to know which of the above groups perform useful functions, and which are parasites perpetuated by their own acquired power.

I do think that only personal power is a recipe to eventually find the right answer — all forms of collective decision-making are too easily swayed by the subjects themselves, with the result that the first decision made becomes irrevocable.

So, to summarise, the advantage of more monarchism, either in the hypothetical future or in the 1500s, is the stripping of power from the oppressors, and that can be (though I certainly wouldn’t insist on it) seen as a kind of egalitarianism — even as a kind of democracy if you really want to stretch.

Unfortunately though, Médaille is still utterly wrong. Actually looking at his pieces on Front Porch Republic, he makes an argument not for the ruling monarch of the later middle ages, but for the very confusion of competing political power groups that I see as analogous to the current mess, and which was superseded by what he calls “Regalism”.

Once terms like “Tyranny” start to be thrown around in American publications, it becomes necessary to look at what the issues were at the time of the American rebellion. The rebels were certainly not out to free themselves from an absolute monarchy, since no English King had held such power for a hundred years. The Whigs had first made an alliance with William of Orange in order to remove the Stuarts, who were the last Kings who even aspired to really rule England, and with the importation of George I and his reception at the docks by the dignitaries of the Kit-Cat Club, the alliance became completely one-sided and the Whigs established their permanent dominance. (All English politics since that date has consisted of conflicts among Whigs, with the term Tory being revived from time to time by more radical Whigs as an insult to throw at their less radical colleagues).

George III did attempt to re-establish some kind of Royal power, though I am not sure he set his sights as high as the power Charles II had, let alone that of Elizabeth. (If I find out he did, I will adopt his banner as mine). The American rebellion was the Whigs’ way of putting him in his place. The small gains he did achieve mostly lasted into Victoria’s reign, but were finally expunged by the advent of universal suffrage and the acceptance of purely democratic theories of government in the 20th Century.