Holidays

Last day of term.

Thank.

Fuck.

For.

That.

Teaching: like sandpapering your scrotum; really good when you stop. I'd imagine.

Arguments up in smoke

Smoking bans: like so many things in life, the anticipation of it is worse than the actuality. This was certainly my experience and I sense this will prove to be the case with many of you Englanders. Because some of you are getting so worked up, and using so much hyperbole, it's almost enough to make me defend the damn thing. And I wouldn't want to do that. Here's Neil Clark, for example:

"The death of liberal England has been predicted many times over the past decade. But on Sunday, England, for long regarded (rightly) as one of the freest countries in the world, will finally mark the end of its long history as a liberal country as the government's draconian smoking ban comes into force."

Nothing less than the death of liberal England - wrought not by the erosion of habeas corpus or the right to silence, or restrictions on free speech, but the smoking ban. Clark's reasoning?

"There is no liberal case whatsoever for the ban; if you support it you may be many things, but please, don't have the audacity to call yourself a liberal. The argument for restricting smoking in public on account of the possible health risks caused by passive smoking is an argument for having separate smoking areas in pubs, cafes and restaurants and not for a blanket ban, which will encompass even private clubs where members have assented to a pro-smoking policy."

This is an impeccable liberal argument indeed. No, seriously. Because while smoking in public places might be considered to violate the harm principle, there is indeed no liberal case whatsoever that can be made for disallowing smoking in public places where only consenting adults may be affected, so I entirely agree. But why then doesn't Neil Clark mark the death of liberal England from 1971, when a whole lot of other self-regarding actions were banned? Or from the point where we were obliged to wear car seat-belts?

Clearly feeling a surplus of hot air, Clark then goes on to evoke, yes, the Nazis:

"Comparisons to Nazi Germany are often tedious, but in this instance it speaks volumes that the first country to introduce bans on smoking in public was the Third Reich.

Isn't it sad that 60 years after playing a decisive role in the defeat of the Nazis and their loathsome, intolerant ideology, Britain, in its illiberal attitude towards smoking and smokers, is now aping them?"

When the Scottish Executive did their wanky 'consultation' on the smoking ban, I made the point that while Hitler hated smoking, Martin Luther King was, apparently, a secret smoker. Thing is, I was only being silly, something I often like to do to pass the time when I'm supposed to be working. If I'd been serious, I'd have been committing the genetic fallacy.

I'll stop now because I'm starting to sound like Paul Evans or something. All I'm saying really is relax - it isn't that bad, and I say this as a hardcore smoker.

However, in the interests of balance, I do feel bound to say that the smoking ban sucks a big one - and all of you who support it are complete bastards.

"World public opinion"

Lenin argues that the "World Public Opinion Survey [pdf]" has only managed to arrive at the conclusion that "support for globalization is remarkably strong throughout the world" because the questions are 'loaded'.

I'd suggest - since his argument is that 'globalisation' is used in a reductionist way here - that the problem for him is that the questions are unloaded, in the sense that simple questions of this nature can't do justice to the complexity, ambiguity and contestability of concepts like this.

But opinion polls can do no other: quantitative measures like this are achievable only by a simplification of certain concepts. This can always create problems. At university one example cited by my tutor was that if you asked people if they favoured 'nationalisation', a majority responded in the negative. Ask them if they believed in 'public ownership', on the other hand, and a majority answered affirmatively - the latter term not so 'loaded', as it were, with associations drawn from the experience of the stagflation and strikes of the seventies.

You can try and correct for it but ultimately when conducting a survey, the pollster cannot control for the myriad of connotations a term like 'globalisation' might hold in the mind of respondent. Thing is, given the bad PR 'globalisation' seems to have had, I'm astonished the results were so positive. Lenin asks:

"And what must the pollsters think of those substantial minorities in places like Russia and Mexico who actually think that it's a bad idea? Retrograde, superstitious peasants, surely?"

We don't know what the pollsters think, so we have no evidence that they imputed ignorance to the Russians or the Mexicans. Russia was one of the few countries that didn't show a majority for the 'mostly good' assessment of 'globalisation'. Frankly, I'm astonished that more didn't give a 'mostly bad' response to the question because you might have thought the drastic contraction of the Russian economy in the nineties would have yielded an even less positive response.

Other than Russia, another part of the world where I think it is most difficult to argue that globalisation has been an unalloyed success is Africa. We don't know how Africans would have responded to these questions because on this occasion no-one has bothered to ask any of them. Therefore, instead of trying unsuccessfully to demonstrate that the questions were particularly 'loaded', simply because you didn't like the answers people gave, a more straightforward criticism of this survey of world public opinion would have been that it is not a survey of world public opinion at all.

"The healthy debate over Cuba's medical care"

It's a title of a piece in the Scotsman - prompted, I assume, by Michael Moore's forthcoming film Sicko. While I am likely to agree with many of Moore's criticisms of America's bloated and fantastically unequal health care provision, I'm not sure if much of the 'debate' over Cuba's health care system is healthy at all. I've got a couple of problems with it:

1) The over-emphasis on longevity and infant mortality as indicators of how good a health care system is. Apart from mass vaccination programmes, historically medical advances and the expansion of health care has been much less important for life-expectancy than more basic aspects of public health, such as the provision of a clean water supply, efficient sewerage, and improvements in diet. It is the last of these, for example, that is the most likely explanation as to why Americans - despite spending something in the region of 26 times more on health care than Cubans - have only a marginally higher life-expectancy.

2) Those using the Cuban example aren't making a narrow point about the superiority of socialised medical care; it is being used to make a wider point about the deficiencies of liberal capitalism and in some way to rehabilitate a one-party dictatorship. I get the sense that people trying to nail this down are failing slightly because they're making the wrong point. It may well be, I wouldn't know, if Cuba's health care system isn't all it's cracked-up to be - but that isn't the point. As no fan of America's private insurance model, I have no problem at all believing that the Cuba system works better and gives a more equal provision. But so what? It certainly cannot be taken to vindicate more widely the Soviet model, as economic history has shown - still less that living under a Brezhnevian regime in the sun is preferable to liberal democracy.

If people disagree, they should say so; if not, they should really stop using Cuba as an example. For what is it an example of, exactly - if not what some people imagine to be a benign dictatorship? Showing that it isn't benign in any respect is almost certainly inaccurate and misses the point anyway. It should be sufficient to point out that it is a dictatorship.

Journalists for Jihad

A new low, this time from Tony Parsons:

"Lest we forget - The Satanic Verses inflamed the Muslim world for mocking all it holds sacred. Millions were spent protecting Rushdie. This was not some academic debate about freedom of speech. People died. More may yet die. Others, like William Nygaard, have injuries they will carry to the grave.

In the clash of civilisations that resulted in 9/11 and 7/7, The Satanic Verses was the opening shot, a gratuitous insult of Islam by a big-mouthed luvvie who despised the country that gave him a home."

The opening shot! Have you ever? Was 9/11 return fire for the Satanic Verses in Parson's palsied imagination? Where I would agree with him is when he says this isn't just an academic debate about free speech. You either think it is reasonable for people to be killed for writing books or you don't. That Parsons thinks it is can be the only conclusion one can draw from his ludicrous and viciously stupid piece. One of the boasting philistines without a doubt.

Via