The Right to Bear Nukes

Since the American right-wing gun fetish that kills lots of kids is seldom out of the news, this bit of serious textual analysis will always be relevant. Well, unless there's an outbreak of sanity on the issue. I find constitutional arguments and legalistic malarkey somewhat tedious, but this one has a great payoff. American citizens may well be allowed, under their constitution, to own nuclear weapons. Fortunately the expert who penned this piece regards that as absurd. But...

Surely, we can come up with reasonable limits on the right to keep and bear arms. To impose these restrictions correctly and legitimately, we would need to enact a Twenty-Eighth Amendment that fleshes out the Second. Perhaps we could limit the right to keep and bear arms to those weapons with destructive power equivalent to the best heavy weapons of the late Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Centuries. This would permit citizens to arm themselves, but not with weapons so capable of killing vast numbers of other people that the risk would outweigh the benefit. This framework might draw the outer boundary at, say, a mid-size howitzer, a backpack sized flamethrower, a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile, or an anti-tank mine. Such weapons are destructive, to be sure, yet still comparable to the power wielded by a militiaman of two hundred years ago, standing behind an artillery piece or on the bridge of a privateer’s ship, firing at a crowded enemy troop vessel. Therefore, these weapons should be suitable for private ownership.

So, in conclusion, every US citizen should be allowed to buy one of these, if s/he can afford it. I'm sure I can't imagine why the American right is a universal target of mockery.

(HT Primly Stable on Twitter)

The wrong sort of equality

This, exactly. Robin Ince nails our lousy UK media and its deliberate tearing down of scientists who have the temerity to know more than the average ignoramus.

We should not trust people just because they are experts, but if we are not prepared to put the time and effort in to understand something, to take a step beyond that column we read in The Guardian or “what my friend Phil told me”, than we are placed in a position where must defer and try and make the best decision we can as to who we should defer to. If you are really interested in an issue, then you must take time to read and investigate it, to learn how to ask the best questions, to interrogate with interest, open-mindedness and rigour. A good society, a healthy democracy, is not based on complacency and whining.

The absence of this clear-headed thinking in our far-from-professional media that puts Andrew Wakefield, notorious autism fraudster who is no longer allowed to practice medicine in this country, on the front page of a national paper during a measles outbreak that was the direct result of his greed and dishonesty. Because he has a fucking 'opinion'. And ooh, look, it's all controversial and stuff. Great.

The Telegraph/Mail/Sun/Express/Times on Lady Thatcher's divisive legacy

Three Little Words

North. Sea. Oil. The so-called Thatcher Revolution was a fake, a fraud, a thing of smoke and mirrors. She was a consummate politician, but all she loved was power, and she resorted to many interesting - if, at times, nationally destructive - gimmicks to get it and keep it. Far from genuinely turning Britain around and ending a period of post-imperial decline, all Thatcher achieved was the appearance of rather patchy economic growth in some English regions, while consigning others - like much of the North of England, much of Wales, much of Scotland - to permanent welfare-dependent stagnation.

And it's all down to a windfall. North Sea Oil came on tap in the late Seventies and government revenue from oil peaked in the Eighties. It was at the beginning of the Thatcher that the UK became, for the first time in its history, a net oil exporter. This means hundreds of millions of pounds of 'free money' for every Thatcher Chancellor. No comparable economy in Western Europe was so lucky. To compare the UK to France or Italy and say: 'Oh, look how badly those irresponsible foreigners are doing' is rather like a man who's won the lottery decrying his neighbours' lack of fiscal prudence.

Of course saying that Britain simply struck it lucky in the Eighties thanks to a geological accident doesn't fit the Thatcher myth. But it's true. If Ted Heath and/or Harold Wilson had had vast amounts of spare cash to play with from 1970 onwards, does anyone doubt that the UK would have avoided most of the industrial unrest of that decade? In the end, 'stopping their mouths with gold' may seem crass, but it's a proven method.

Oh, and good housekeeping? Thatcher didn't believe in it. Her government didn't do as the Norwegians did. Those pesky social democrats across the North Sea took a hefty slice of their oil fortune and invested it for a rainy day. A few years ago that rainy day came, and Norway has done rather well. By contrast, Thatcherism pissed Britain's oil billions up the wall. Much of the cash went on putting millions on the dole, then more went on putting a sizeable chunk of them on long-term sick benefit so as to reduce the dole figures. It was utterly irresponsible, and pure Thatcherism - it got the jobless total down.

Then of course there's democracy - the thing Thatcher advocated for foreigners and socialists. But democracy was just another weight in the handbag she wielded. She had no interest in promoting it within the Tory party. When she became leader, it was because elusive, sober-suited men decided she should be given a chance. And when the same men decided she was going, frankly, a bit barmy over the Poll Tax, the same men quietly drew their plans against her, and threw her out. Oh, the irony. If only she'd really cared about giving people a say, giving people a vote. But she didn't. She loved power, had no life outside politics, and believed herself to be infallible. She was the living embodiment of humourless hubris.

Imagine if every Tory party member - the members who paid their dues, put up posters, delivered leaflets, held fundraisers - had had a vote in a leadership election. She would not have been ousted - the rank and file loved her. But she never extended the franchise to her most ardent supporters. Throughout her leadership the Tory party remained a thoroughly traditional institution - a classic instanceof Us and Them, in which the common ruck have no say in the doings of people who really matter. And so, in a coup that left the poor old dear understandably baffled and bitter, she was unceremoniously ejected from Number 10.

The myth of Thatcherism is that she changed many things for the better, when in fact all the real, measurable changes were for the worse. The thuggish, politicised police, the fantasy that house price inflation equals real economic growth, the absurd belief that Britain would become resurgent through deregulating the City and forcing millions into low-skilled, low-wage, and therefore welfare-dependent service industry jobs...  None of the nation's real problems were tackled, or even acknowledged. Most notably, Thatcherism set the corrosive precedent for making state education the plaything of misfit ideologues with axes to grind. Small wonder state schooling generally fails to produce model citizens or a skilled workforce.

'Oh well, at least she broke the power of the unions.' Yes, she took on greedy, irresponsible men who had (supposedly) held the country to ransom. Unfortunately, thanks to her, a bunch of greedy and irresponsible bankers recently held the country to ransom - and got away with it. The same goes for all those nationalised industries. In the Seventies, they were money pits - badly-run, failing businesses. How very bold and wise of Maggie to close the shipyards and steelworks and so forth. But quite a few banks were also badly-run, failing businesses, and yet a whole generation post-Thatcher politicians say that throwing taxpayers' money at the problem is the only solution. Perhaps if bankers had broader vowels and ate chip butties our leaders would have favoured sending mounted police to break their heads instead?

I could go on. I could point out that her triumph in the Falklands would never have happened if Thatcher's government had not blundered into war by showing weakness in the run up to Galtieri's invasion. Oh, and she made drastic cuts to our armed forces immediately after the war, because her flag-waggling was just another bit of opportunism. Her recognition that climate change is real and dangerous is as nothing compared to her absurd, short-term, and entirely political decision to dispense with clean coal technology along with coal resources we will probably, one day, be forced to start extracting again.

Overall, far from breaking the mould of post-war politics, Thatcher was the apotheosis of that era. Like Wilson or Heath, she was a chancer with no long-term solutions or genuinely radical ideas. Unlike them she enjoyed good luck; luck that she rode with great skill. She benefited not only from North Sea Oil, but from a demoralised and divided opposition, and of course the support of the right-wing press that peddled lies and distortions most effectively on her behalf (as in the case of Michael Foot's 'donkey jacket'). Add to all those advantages the fact that the Tories always have more money to spend on campaigns than any other party, and it would have been truly remarkable if she'd lost an election in the Eighties.

But for all Thatcher's political success, her era was a shoddy one and its legacy seems more threadbare by the year. And that is because she was simply a self-absorbed egotist and no real patriot - she didn't make any serious attempt to fix 'broken Britain'. She instead adopted a very familiar approach, and bodged together a few superficially impressive repairs. All bodged jobs fall to pieces in time, of course. I'm not sure I want to be around when we have to call in a real professional, at considerable cost, to fix the place up properly. His first question is bound to be: 'What cowboy did this, then?' I think I know the answer.

A plague of dangerous parasites

This is satire, I think. Probably. 

Harold’s police service has been swamped with residents demanding that they be arrested because they are scroungers and moral degenerates who refuse to work and have no moral compass. 

‘I had winter fuel allowance and a cold weather payment,’ Ruby Butler (83) told the Evening Harold. ‘Now I’m part of what A.N Wilson called “the bleak and often grotesque world of the benefit scrounger” along with most of the rest of the Mothers’ Union. Please take me off the streets before I start selling crack.’

As if you ever doubted it

Capital Ships and Wasting Assets

You know that the British government is spending a lot of money on aircraft carriers? There's been a bit of fuss about them not actually carrying any planes for the first few years of their service lives, which seems a tad wasteful. Well, here's another interesting fact that isn't being so well-publicised. Aircraft carriers are useless against any real opposition. Let the War Nerd explain:

The truth is that they have very feeble defenses against any attack with anything more modern than cannon. I've argued before no carrier group would survive a saturation attack by huge numbers of low-value attackers, whether they’re Persians in Cessnas and cigar boats or mass-produced Chinese cruise missiles. But at least you could look at the missile tubes and Phalanx gatlings and pretend that you were safe. But there is no defense, none at all, against something as obvious as a ballistic missile.

So it doesn't matter one god damn whether the people in the operations room of a targeted carrier could track the Dong Feng 21 as it lobbed itself at them. They might do a real hall-of-fame job of tracking it as it goes up and comes down. But so what? Let me repeat the key sentence here: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.

Interesting. You might ask, quite reasonably, why the most powerful nation the world has ever seen spends such a lot of money on carriers, given that they are, apparently, useless in 'proper' naval warfare. The War Nerd (aka Gary Brecher) has that one nailed. It's because the US elite love their Top Gun jets, even though the planes they fly them off are just floating targets. Rich boys must have their toys:

The most obvious example is European heavy cavalry trotting into longbow fire again and again. Crecy demonstrated that knightly charges were suicide against the longbow in 1346. But the French aristocracy had so much invested in prancing around on their damn steeds that it took another demonstration, at Agincourt in 1415 to even start to get them thinking about it. I’m no math wiz but I think that 1415 minus 1346…yup, that’s 69 years between catastrophes. Lessons learned? None. 

These dodos always have one thing in common: whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they've been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn't turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren't about to let it go.

One think of the British cavalry generals of 1914 and the geniuses who, at the start of both world wars, decided that convoys - a concept of proven effectiveness since the year dot - simply weren't needed. We have a very long tradition of chinless wonders in fancy uniforms making stupid decisions.

Obviously there are quite a few rich, dumb pilots in the Royal Navy (and RAF). I mean, seriously, our armed forces are as meritocratic as the rest of the British society, aren't they? And that means, pretty much class-based, with posh boys getting most of the plum jobs. But I suspect the main reason we are spending a fortune on flashy carriers we'd never dare send into a real war zone is simply this: that instead of having a coherent defence policy of our own, we try to copy the Americans. We can't afford to copy them well, so the Royal Navy of the future is going to be what the US Navy of today would look like if it lost a battle with China. And if that's upholding a great naval tradition, I'm a Dutch East Indianman.