Author Archives: Raph Shirley

About Raph Shirley

I have been creating strange material for the internet for over twenty years. A kind of failed artist yet I refuse to stop.

In defence of Islamaphobia

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The essential thrust of my argument is that the term Islamaphobia dangerously conflates two things. The first being Islam and the second being Muslims. Can we make no distinction between an idea and the vessel that contains it? To put my position crudely:

Human beings deserve respect. Ideas deserve nothing.

I would therefore like to introduce a new term Muslimaphobia which is of course illegitimate. Just because you believe something false doesn’t mean you should be the victim of physical abuse or impoliteness. However, is it not the ultimate disrespect to not attack someones ideas because of their being a person who holds such ideas? To put it another way, could not one say that the ultimate respect one can pay an idea is to savagely attack it? And that ‘tolerance’ is a form of disrespect – ‘I have such contempt for you that I don’t see the need to argue how wrong you are’. I tolerate my neighbour’s barking dog. I tolerate my nephew screaming and telling me he doesn’t like me. I do not tolerate Einstein’s suggestion that a physical theory can not contain probabilistic statements. I take it deeply seriously. I might even dedicate my life to trying to prove him wrong. I pay his ideas the respect of criticism.

This conflation of a people with an idea has been seen before, most notably in the twentieth century, and it did not end well. The only way one could escape this line of reasoning is to suggest religion is somehow different to other ideas. A form of exceptionalism, to which I do not subscribe. Racial correlation between religious observance is a fact but it is deeply racist to suggest criticism of one implies criticism of the other.

“My best friend believes that one race is inherently inferior to another but I do not argue with her because she is a racist and I don’t wish to be a Racismaphobe”. Lets stop patronising muslims and start telling them why we think they are wrong to take an ancient text, not as what it is, a profound work of literature and a central historical text, but rather as a consistent piece of moral instruction and a truthful description of cosmology.

Let me return now to my defence of Islamaphobia. Or rather my refusal to accept that a fear of the religion of Islam is irrational. Do you have no concern that a central text which absolves you of guilt from raping your wife may be misinterpreted and lead to frightening consequences if taken literally? If you think I am ignorant and have misread the Qur’an please tell me why, but don’t accuse me of irrational fear for daring to suggest that your ideas are wrong.

Can we not return to the original ideal of existentialism that existence precedes essence. That before I am an atheist I am a human being. Before you are a muslim you are a human being. And finally that either of us may be holding on to dangerous ideas that one can be legitimately and not irrationally afraid of. Incidentally, one major criticisms of Islam I would make is that it asks of the believer to put itself at the heart of their being, that is asks them to submit to being a Muslim first and a human second. Any ideology which seeks to place its followers beneath it is dangerous and frightening and we must balance a heartfelt respect, even love, for people with the intellectual honesty to engage in unpleasant debate. Muslims have given us wonderful culture. The Alhambra is a supreme expression of mathematics, art and architecture which has inspired my own cartoons. They have also given us some less welcome gifts.

I would like to finish with an attack on my peer group, the much derided Liberal Metropolitan Elite. My friends have recently shown a despicable snobbery in their dismissal of white working class concerns about Islam. There is something deeply ugly about an educated person mocking someone’s spelling and grammar when they are trying to voice concerns about an ideology. They are dismissed for being racists and Islamaphobes. I believe this to be at the heart of the Labour party’s problems. The metropolitan liberals who scoff at the rural and provincial white working class are displaying a lack of intellectual rigor that must be countered by the ideals they pretend to uphold: the primacy of reason and free thought.

I promise I’ll get back to producing bad comedy shortly,

Self reference in economic theory

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Perhaps the most serious critique of Marxist and Hegelian dialectical materialism is put forth in Karl Popper’s little gem The Poverty of Historicism. If I may be so bold as to offer my own summary of the main argument I give the following:

Any objective approach to economic or social theory is fundamentally unscientific and bound to fail because the theory will impact the phenomena under observation rendering the theory instantly defunct.

I broadly accept this and would never give sociologists the compliment of calling them social scientists. However it recently occurred to me that it might be possible to categorise political and economic thought in a logically consistent manner which encapsulates Popper’s concerns. I claim this may be possible by considering self reference in economic theory. I propose to offer a number of possibilities:

1) Weakly self consistent theory: a theory which describes social phenomena in a society where belief in that theory is held by the majority and where it is not.
2) Strongly self consistent theory: a theory which describes social phenomena in a society if and only if belief in that theory is held by the majority.
3) Self inconsistent theory: a theory which can describe social phenomena in a society if and only if belief in that theory is not held by the majority.
4) Wrong theory: A theory which describes no phenomena regardless of whether it is accepted by the population. This one covers most of the ideas I have ever had including probably the entirety of this post.

The ideal would be to find an example of 1. The theory would work before being accepted and would therefore be easiest to popularise. However, example 2 creates a fascinating possibility. It is with example 2 that an interesting possibility for policy arises. Perhaps consumer confidence is an example. Not a good example because the individual can believe that increased investment depends on consumer confidence but also believe that there is no consumer confidence and therefore one would be unwise to invest. Nevertheless policy makers only have to invent some imaginary cause of optimism and the cause is rendered legitimate.

The analogy of the placebo or self fulfilling prophesy might be helpful. The aim of economists might then be to construct a theory which if adopted by the mainstream will produce effects which are described by the theory. The leap of logic here is that such a theory may not describe any effects that exist before its creation. The real question which then remains is will such a theory lead necessarily to a prisoner’s dilemma scenario. That is, while the individual knows it will work if everyone accepts it, she also knows that it will not work if some subsection does not.

To make a more tendentious assertion, Popper was perhaps arguing that Marxist thought is an example of 3. It may describe phenomena as they currently exist but if it becomes adopted as an active political movement it ceases to describe real phenomena… leading to a runaway nightmare. A Marxist capitalist is a hypocrite and a Marxist communist is a contradiction.

An example
The challenge I would like to set my self is to create an example. The major difficulty is that it is possible to find examples that reference some other theory and therefore become a prisoner’s dilemma or otherwise resort to classic cooperation problems. Anyway, here is my best attempt:

1) Any society that believes in both the following statements and the current one will produce phenomena that are consistent with the statements.
2) The economy is fundamentally unstable and strict adherence to these rules is the only way to mitigate risks associated with the fundamental instability.
3) This theory is always true regardless of whether it is known to the population. (a false statement)
4) Some final statement regarding public policy such as loose fiscal policy will mitigate risks associated with the business cycle (this could be non-Keynesian or essentially anything the population might believe).

This represents a further abstraction on top of Keynes’ discussion of optimism/pessimism being self-fulfilling. The key point is that statements 1 to 3 could create statement 4 so long as the population can be made to believe false ideas (surely not?!).

Believe it or not, I meant this post to be a joke. A Very Unfunny Joke (VUJ).

Let me finish with a joke. Marx famously defined Communism as the authentic movement replacing capitalism. Could the necessary extinction of humanity fulfill that definition?

Best,

The fantastic state of the UK Labour Party

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In which I aim to convince you, dear reader, that the title contains not the slightest hint of irony.

Let us cast our minds back to the series of limp Conservative party leaders that followed Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide; a massive electoral victory only equaled by David Cameron’s recent gargantuan landperturbation that was voted for by an overwhelming majority of people of all ages of pensioner and all shades of white from off pink to slightly yellowy pink to ever so mildly tanned. There was William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and David Cameron, a list which cannot be said aloud without a descending cadence into melancholy. The volume of political ideas from those four is too big to mention but I will try. There was the Big Society. There is no such thing as Big Society. The sole political idea has been a reduction in the size of the state from 42 to 36 percent of GDP. British fiscal conservatives may regret their confidence in the miraculous effects of such an economic strategy.

In this scheme Jeremy Corbyn occupies the same position as Ian Duncan Smith. Any fair minded observer would have to admit it is difficult to say Ian Duncan Smith was significantly less ridiculous or hopeless. In this post I will offer a summary of the single biggest issue, economics, and why Osborne is weaker than he may appear and Corbyn stronger. Fundamentally I think it comes down to the inaccessibility of the counterfactual and the current strange state of affairs where any growth is considered a miracle of perfect fiscal and monetary policy (in nominal GDP let alone real GDP or god forbid real per-capita GDP). The real economic question should be ‘how much lost output?’ I admit I will leave aside foreign policy and other key parts of political thought. Jeremy Corbyn is clearly a million miles from the mainstream belief that there is no possibility the killing of perhaps a million people for no clear reason may have been a mistake. It is worth remembering that taking the most modest estimate of 150,000 deaths leads to a ratio of the worth of American to Iraqi lives at 150,000:3000 ~ 50:1. Nevertheless, let us constrain the debate to ‘economic competence’.

The madness response to the financial crash
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different” – various attributions including Jefferson and Einstein.

The Labour party response to 2008 I would sum up as ‘we were wrong about free markets stabilizing themselves and that government intervention is always wrong’. The Conservative party response has been ‘what problem? lets get back to business as usual’. Therein lies the bizarre logic of the last two elections. The incredible feat of positioning by George Osborne was to persuade the minds of ‘sensible’ people that the global financial meltdown that started in the American sub-prime mortgage industry was caused by the UK budget deficit. This economic illiteracy (or mendacity, which may or may not be worse) will be tested as soon as a budget surplus coexists with a recession or more likely fails to materialise, both of which are very real possibilities. The only real difference between the two tribes is that we fools on the moderate left actually believed the efficient market hypothesis for a few heady days at the start of the millennium. The right always knew the credit cycle could never be controlled, they just saw the opportunity to blame inherent economic structure on the ridiculous hubris of Gordon Brown’s The End of Boom and Bust. As a straight forward piece of arithmetic you must accept that reducing the size of the state is not identical to eliminating the deficit and controlling debt.

“The dream of the welfare state is over”
The New Labour approach to let the UK have one industry, financial services and services for those required to maintain financial services, with a little bit of tax to ease the worst off in society has been proved unsustainable and it will take a large amount of intellectual heavy lifting to come to a new model of economic management. The benefit of a weak leadership is it allows all this debate and formulation to go on. This is a much better state of affairs than simply trying to brush policy inconsistencies under the carpet and waiting for the government to fail. That approach invariably succeeds at some point under some leader who wants success but has no ideas. There has been no leader since Thatcher who has based their politics on ideas and not mere personal competency. I saw a great moment of truth in Cameron’s famous slip that ‘this is a career defining… country defining election’. Do we want a politics of ideas or a politics of competent professional managerialism. The left has this opportunity under a leadership schism to produce new ideas. Imagine we had some magic 3D printer that we could use to build the perfect leader in any image we chose, would this help in any way to produce a desirable Labour party? Of course the answer is no, there is work to be done in building the next Labour government.

The twin deficits
The trade deficit and the budget deficit are intimately related. George Osborne’s attempt to eliminate the trade deficit by artificially removing the budget deficit is arithmetically bound to fail and this presents an enormous opportunity for the left. The only real question is whether the left can be ready to capitalise on George Osborne’s inevitable failure to remove the budget deficit by 2020. The truth is that it probably can’t be ready for a decade but this is a necessarily long project and the violent outburst that is the current leadership is a better way to reform and regroup. A political party has to be much bigger than its leader, it has to be a whole body of thought put together by academics, journalists and technocrats in addition to supporters in general. It takes time to formulate a full set of policies before it is eventually handed to a leader who can tie it all together into a simple narrative and sell it to the country. The democratic leadership of open splits and disagreements speeds this process along. There is a real sense of the need for ideas in developing a new economic model. The UK cannot continue to be a nation which buys more than it sells and has no real economic productivity, only the global financial bureaucracy of the City of London. The myths and nonsense spouted before the last election will fall to pieces and there will be a space for new ideas. Perhaps we might be so optimistic as to believe the average British brain can handle a more complicated analysis than ‘they forgot to fix the roof while the sun was shining’. Eventually the central logical flaw in the idea of a long term economic plan to centrally plan an economy in such a way as to insure it is not centrally planned will be revealed. Has there ever been a more perfect example of Orwellian double-speak than a ‘long term economic plan’ for free markets? We have the space now to reveal this fallacy.

Entrepreneurship and “Business”
Show me an entrepreneur and I’ll show you someone whose primary concern is access to capital and not the top rate of income tax, which they could only dream of hating. The financial services industry are not really capitalists in that they aren’t speculatively investing in new firms at a risk. What we need is more capitalists and the City of London simply will not provide them. My fundamental argument here is that the umbrella term of “Business” could not be more misleading. The difference between small and medium size enterprise (SME ~ 1 to 250 employees) and big business could not be more drastic. Feel free to lump them together but the fact is policy that is good for one is not necessarily good for the other. I claim the Conservative party is the party of big business, and that the Labour party should aim to be the party of SMEs. This would in a sense be a sort of new Thatcherism in which it is not free markets but government that drives a massive increase in small firms. Entrepreneurship could be encouraged with regional investment banks and increased funding for commercially driven research. Meanwhile taxation could be targeted more at big firms, and especially in those sectors with low employee to profit ratios. The rise in self employment is a major socio-economic shift that should be the natural home for leftist thinking. Managing risks to individuals in setting up new businesses is surely a way to boost variety in the commercial ecosystem and have a more healthy spread of company sizes. The added benefit of small firms is that they are far less likely to be foreign owned and are less free to move overseas. While middle income homes will obviously be the predominant battle ground the whole new social class of the self employed, the freelance, the small business person and the ‘precariat’ can be one important battle ground if we chose it to be.

Osborne’s weakness on business: A case in point.
If you desire evidence for my claim that Osborne is bad for SMEs consider the following policy. The government plans to replace the once yearly HMRC self assessment with four quarterly returns. You may or may not know that cash flow is one of the single biggest problems facing small firms. That is, while the balance of payments in the long term may be profitable they often struggle with short term problems of cash flow. For instance perhaps the VAT bill is due in a week and they are waiting on a customer to pay for a large invoice which they have just sent in full knowledge that small company is often late due to cash flow problems. Now ask yourself the following question: What is more harmful to cash flow 1) having to pay 100 pounds in a year, or 2) having to pay 25 pounds in three months and again in six months etc. Think about that for five seconds and then also consider the extra accounting and bureaucracy costs associated with filing your accounts four times as opposed to once. The only business that can help is accountancy. Perhaps accountancy firms have good lobbyists? Finally, if this move is so helpful to ‘business’ why are large firms exempt? Perhaps large firms have good lobbyists?

One final example: the citizen’s wage
I want to make one further case for why the left and a mixed economy is a natural bed-fellow with SMEs: The effect of personal risk on entrepreneurship. Consider the following analogy. If the safety of cars increases, what effect does it have on the average speed of road users. To put it another way, are you more likely to risk starting a new business if failure means misery for you and your family or if it means merely a year of lost earnings and a return to employment. Surely, you can see then how socialising personal risk is good for entrepreneurship. Consider the effect radical leftist policy such as a citizens wage might have on entrepreneurship. Perhaps people who would otherwise take a precarious job at Sports Direct might instead try to engage in some form of self employment. Perhaps a majority would chose instead to stay in their bedroom at their mum’s and play Fallout 4 but there would absolutely be an increase in entrepreneurship. Another source for mediating risk than inherited wealth could have a truly transformative effect on business innovation as well a reduction in miserable low paid work. We have already socialised the risks of high finance so why not do the same for low finance?

Conclusion
Clearly the assumption has to be that Jeremy Corbyn will fail to win in 2020 as Ian Duncan Smith did in 2005 (remember my comparison of the stages of opposition). However, the scene will then be set for a coherent left to build a new economic consensus and regain power. George Osborne will likely pay no electoral price for not running a surplus by 2020 (or by fudging one with asset sales; is there some new gold reserve? Hospital contracts?) but the lack of ideas and intellectual foundations of the modern right will be revealed. The Labour party will then be the only party that can offer an alternative to the Thatcher-Blair consensus that ultimately led to the crash of 2008. Put simply, the UK must be built on actual economic output and not depend so heavily on incompetent financial services which must be periodically socialised. The absence of an actual long term economic plan from the Conservatives is the main source of this fantastic opportunity for the left. A left based on the consensus of academic economists not the ‘serious economists’ who work in journalism. After the second world war did that great socialist state the USA take a hands off free market approach to Germany and Japan? And was the result so disastrous? A left which accepts the delicate interplay between state and private enterprise in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and other high tech industries. A left which recognises the core economic investment of a good education for the whole population. A left which champions the great economic energy generated by programs that socialise personal risk such as the NHS as well as other more tendentious examples such as guarantees for high street banks and regulating to protect them from the risks of investment banking.

A crisis of leadership and ideas is appropriate and beneficial. This is a decade long project to create a new economic settlement, which fosters real productive economic growth and a more balanced economy. Neither major party currently has a serious package of reform to deal with this and the democratic, unsteady and presumably already failed leadership of Labour will allow us to exorcise our demons (economic and otherwise) far quicker than the ‘perhaps we can get a better looking leader who is good at presentations, sales and PR and not produce any new ideas’ approach of the Conservatives 1997-2010.

The only other alternative, no matter how improbable, is that Jeremy Corbyn succeeds. No-one could claim this to be impossible. A large recession for instance would drastically change the political debate and surely after ten years claims of ‘the mess we inherited’ would start to ring false. Perhaps this is what is really believed to be the true danger for the Labour party? Perhaps the Overton window will prove a fickle mirage and a more serious criticism than unelectable will have to be found.

Let me finish with an important reminder of the unsteady intellectual vulnerability at the heart of our current government, which may provide some context for evaluating the state of the UK Labour party:

“Vote Blue, Go Green” – David Cameron, 2009.

An absurd but slightly serious suggestion regarding the UK nuclear weapons program

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In which I argue for a new possibility which aims to please both those for and against the replacement of Trident. I suggest Trident is not renewed but that we stage its renewal. This will please those for the renewal of Trident because all of their extremely well reasoned game theory based strategy will be equally served by our enemies incorrectly thinking we have nuclear weapons. The only downside is that while it will make everyone happy, those who are against Trident will not know that they are happy. However, I consider this a small price to pay given the enormous savings that could be made, both in terms of cash money and burning civilians.

When one permits the possibility of the bluff one can instantly see that there are four options:

  1. Have nuclear weapons but pretend you don’t. The Trojan Horse approach.
  2. Have nuclear weapons and let people know it. The heavy weight champion brag approach.
  3. Don’t have nuclear weapons but pretend you do. The poker bluff approach.
  4. Don’t have nuclear weapons and let people know it. The crazy wild eyed maniac who will definitely lead to us all dying in a nuclear fire approach.

If you believe that the threat of nuclear war is beneficial to long term strategy then you can not possibly distinguish between the effectiveness of options 2 and 3. Given that option 3 is significantly cheaper and also reduces the possibility of nuclear war given that there is one fewer nations that can instigate a nuclear war, it immediately jumps out to me as the optimal strategy. If our bluff is called we can then either choose to be humiliated and fess up or in a further act of bravado go down in a ball of fire claiming to be of such supreme moral fibre that we should sooner sacrifice our lives than threaten the future of humanity. The British people will be permanently extinguished and hopefully fondly remembered by our masters the US and China. They will make films about our amusing character traits and bad teeth set in red phone boxes.

What to do with the money? There will have to appear to be a flow of money to pay for the new system. I suggest the easiest way to fake this part is to actually pay the money but use it for useful apparatus such as equipment for counter-insurgency operations or increased wages and pensions for personnel. Perhaps we could even insist that every serving soldier should have the option of taking classes in physics and be given at least a basic understanding of nuclear physics. This will help them in constructing believable lies for locals and journalists.

Given that a real nuclear deterrent is justifiably protected by many layers of secrecy and security I believe it will be surprisingly easy to sustain the lie. Everyone who currently withholds information regarding locations of submarines and access codes will merely have to move over to the new system of withholding the fact of the complete absence of nuclear weapons. At the most we will need some small submarines which look very big by their outward appearance but under the water are just papier mâché models being paddled by the Navy’s strongest swimmers.

This will also remove the difficult decision making from the politicians and generals who often have poor cognitive power and lack any understanding of thermonuclear warheads.

If you have any questions regarding my proposals please re-read Sun Tzu where a lot of frequently asked questions have already been answered.

Best regards,

Why I am a terrorist sympathiser

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I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don’t sympathise with terrorists.

I woke up yesterday morning to find my prime minister, an elected MP whose job is to defend my interests, had privately but in effect publicly described me as a terrorist sypathiser.

I am a hard-core Dawkinsian athiest. I am not only anti-Islamist like David Cameron but I am actually anti-Islam as I am anti-theist in general; a much more stringent position than Cameron’s. I also believe someone when they tell me they have based their murderous ideology on the Qur’an and would never endorse a statement such as ‘it has nothing to do with Islam’. You can hopefully understand then, why I find it deeply irritating for my prime minister to use this terminology to describe me.

I am not a pacifist. I don’t think a credible prime minister can be a pacifist. I have had a lifelong respect for armed forces personnel, and believe they must always be supported financially and otherwise regardless of the wisdom of the politicians who give them their orders. I supported all the military campaigns of the last fifteen years. I believe in meeting NATO’s 2 percent target (I am actually in favour of raising it further). I believe in the wisdom of military action in Syria. Since we are responsible for deployment in that area in recent history we have a duty to help control the area and prevent it from remaining an ungoverned space. At a push I would even say I accept a reduction in civil liberties in order to aid domestic security forces. Now lets analyse exactly what I have done to be described as a terrorist sympathiser.

What I am against is a bombing campaign without a coherent plan for ground forces. I am against entering into a theatre of war without agreements publicly in place with our direct and indirect allies. That is, there must be a coherent strategy which is acceptable to Russia as well as our closest allies. And crucially, it must be presented to the British people. There may be a plan but I have not been shown it. We literally don’t know what the current government position on the Assad regime is for instance.

I understand that I may be ignorant of the issues. I have read the Foreign Affairs Committee report, and that is as far as my understanding goes. I realise that David Cameron is privy to information that I do not have. However, I strongly believe that in a democracy the government should demonstrate to me why action is required and why the action is of the form in which it is presented. I feel that that has not happened in this case. I am concerned about the fact that after a previous vote in 2013 which didn’t pass, RAF jets were involved in allied campaigns anyway. Finally, I find the logical connection between attacks in Paris and this action tenuous. The positions described in this and the previous paragraph are the totality of reasons for which I was called a terrorist sympathiser.

Obviously, I accept that I may be wrong and that a bombing campaign without any troops may turn out to be the wisest approach to defeating IS and that history will prove it thus. I would have no problem with being described as foolish or incorrect or naive or stupid or even evil. But I don’t believe it is acceptable or correct to describe me as a terrorist sympathiser.

It has a quite peculiar psychological effect to be described as a terrorist sympathiser by a senior politician. I am in no danger of being radicalised. As you will understand from the first two paragraphs I am no liberal. I don’t like David Cameron’s and the majority of elected MP’s wet approach to language. I think a religion must always be defined in terms of its political appropriation. I believe a book which says ‘you should kill people who don’t agree with this book’ probably means that and that metaphorical interpretations are dubious and not to be taken for granted. Despite all those things I find myself to be attacked philosophically by a man who frankly hasn’t done the reading. Fundamentally, I would sum up the effect it had on me as alienating. If I, as a privileged white male middle class university educated illiberal pro-military anti-Islamist feels like that how will it make other less mainstream thinkers feel? And what effect might it have on their worldview and actions?

It also gives legitimacy to people who do sympathise with terrorists. Since I can so longer call them terrorist sympathisers I am forced into an alliance with people I consider as evil. It is a syntactical muddle which is as bizarre as it is insulting.

It was a dangerous piece of slander aimed at a large portion of the population and it is an outrage that there has been no apology.

Please accept my apologies for the earnestness and lack of humour,

Raph Shirley, terrorist sympathiser.

Should

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The world of should takes a lot of energy to inhabit. In comparison the world of is can seem like palatial comfort. To fully embody should you first have to build something to increase. When you have completed the simple task of finding the universal measure of good the shoulds can flow freely. This should that, that should this and schools should be doing more to encourage male ballet dancers etc. I had a particularly fruitful Friday yesterweek pondering a fine should over peas with a good claret. I forget the conclusion but it almost certainly included some reference to UK tax law. With chocolate and the mothers of tearaways to finish.

A friend from isville visited and left a particularly bad intellectual atmosphere in the air. She had no thoughts on the ideal proportion of pronouns in hypothetical prose and has never dramatically uttered the word herstory or hung an upside down map. Her name was almost certainly not Richard Dawkins. I should have invited him instead. Nevermind, my atheists tend to come less famous and more cheap with the wine they bring round. Nevertheless, it was a most successful evening of thought because as I was lying in bed afterwords looking confused I suddenly received a most brilliant idea. Where do these thoughts come from? It reminded me of the night I wrote An Ode To Impotent Men:

Was it the temperature?
Or was it the bankruptcy?

I think they must come from the bowel or the brain. Either way, the idea is to find the ultimate should.

Or just an excess of politeness?
You should have turned the iron off you fool!

The ultimate is would probably be some dreary formula or god or worse. Why bother look for it? It already is whether you find it or not. But could some should set all other shoulds rolling? The prime should could be something slight and easy such as dogs should be carried. At all times. Or something majorly inconvenient like the entire socio-political framework should be reformed according to Ayn Rand’s wildest imaginings. Either way I’d be interested to know it and should you have any possible candidates please let me know.

Oh the world of should does take patience and virtue and even brilliance, but persevere and you will find yourself in the land of the righteous. But more than that, it offers a deeper comfort; the soft maternal caress of self delusion.

Your humble master,

Argument Ad Hypocrisy: the spell of Christ

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There is a particular brand of right wing journalism which takes voyeuristic joy in portraying acts of hypocrisy. Consider the following from Toby Young’s latest Daily Mail column:

“I hesitate to criticise my father, whom I loved dearly, but his commitment to equality didn’t extend to his choice of motorcar — a vintage Bentley.”

In any given economic or political analysis, what is the relevance of the car of the father of Toby Young? When the bank of of England decides on what is an appropriate interest rate have they properly considered the car of…? It is common to see stories like this brought up in the mainstream press. Although I have noticed that any individual seems to place extra weight on the car of their father. My dad once had Ford. What a hypocrite; he didn’t like hamburgers, another famous american export. Pointing out errors in the Daily Mail is hardly a revelation but arguments like this can be found in any of the major newspapers.

My father was once run over and yet he later spoke out against road traffic accidents. Hypocrite!

Perhaps Toby Young is the finest purveyor of argument ad hypocrisy. To be a hypocrite may or may not be a negative personal quality, but lets assume it is a deeply negative quality. Lets agree with Christ that it is the master sin. I will here attempt to show that putting hypocrisy at the centre of political argument is a form of argument ad hominem and therefore a lesser use of subjective analysis. Something that can be traced back to Blair’s ‘I only know what I believe’. A general feature of democracy is this obsession with the speaker over the statement. When you vote for a party you are more concerned that the policy is not in contradiction with the leader’s behaviour rather than whether the policy has an effect that you want or don’t want.

My father once took a bus. What a hypocrite! He had a lifelong hatred of the poor.

The next question I want to address is why the hypocrisy obsession is so broadly associated with the right. Is there no opposite to the champagne socialist? The poor right winger? In attacking a champagne socialist are you not implicitly calling the poor right winger a self hater? Are you not implicitly assuming that left wing politics is useful to the poor? Otherwise there could be no hypocrisy in a non-pauper calling for policy which would harm themselves and committing the master sin of acting or at least speaking against self interest. But is not the central tenet of rightist thinking that a small inactive state helps the poor and that the economy is not a zero sum game and inequality is a price worth paying for overall increases in productivity. That is not an argument but a statement without evidence (there may be evidence but none is often provided). The truth is surely that economic performance is related to state economic activity and that as a game it is neither fully zero sum nor capable of infinite growth. In a system of total inequality (one person has everything and everyone else has nothing) we would not see maximum GDP growth even if that person was the best and most ‘hard working’.

My father once took a ferry to France. And yet he also believed the channel tunnel was good!

To fully take the hypocrisy fetish seriously we must ask if the left fulfills a similar role to charity. Is not charity primarily concerned with making the giver feel better about themselves and if anything aiming to maintain the object of the charity. Perhaps the nightmare of the left is to get what it wishes for and to have no-one to feel sorry for. Down this road lies the bizarre internal logic of self reference implicit in statements like ‘I vote to lie to myself about my true motivations which are ultimately inaccessible to me and concerned purely with building a set of theoretical relations which allow me to enact a deep and mysterious want about my setting myself in relation to real events in a pleasant way’ as opposed to the brutal leftist, objective, ‘veil of ignorance’ argument style of ‘this act causes this effect’.

My father once flew in an aeroplane. I wonder how he squared this with Bernoulli’s theorem.

This is how I am framing the two cultures. The right with Karl Popper’s anti-dialectical-materialism and the left with its objective inhuman analysis. The spell of Plato is clashing with the spell of Christ on a daily basis. Which side are you on? Plato, Hegel, and Marx vs Christ, Burke, and Popper. Is a good political argument one that is consistent with the behaviour of the person who says it or one that is true?

My father once walked somewhere. What a cunt!

Singing the National Anthem and inserting your penis in the mouth of a dead pig are symbolically identical

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Allegedly, there exists photographic evidence purporting to show Jeremy Corbyn failing to insert his penis into the mouth of a dead pig at an event which he did not attend. It is well established that every great established organisation must have an obscene symbolic opposite which simultaneously establishes the value of the said organisation and provides a means for the individuals within the organisation to establish a form of writing which almost exclusively uses the words establish and organisation. But could there be a greater obscenity than requiring a human being to say out loud ‘god save our gracious queen’; a sentence containing no words that any thinking animal wouldn’t find moronic. Each one of the five words referring to non-existent objects and presupposing a non-existent threat from which to be saved. Is the threat logic?

Everyone who has been a member of an educational institution can attest to the hatred directed towards those who break the unwritten rules. The written rules may be freely broken but the unwritten ones automatically exclude you from the organisation. The individual who stays within the geographical location of such an organisation but openly rejects the unwritten constitution in favour of the necessarily absurd written constitution is a self proclaimed pariah. And despite my ironical Meanderings I am here arguing in favour of the ‘team-player’. I am arguing in favour of the popular male who correctly realises that obscene illogical dances are the real location of the organisations operation. An organisation being a means to provide a collection of individuals with the illusion ‘our’.

Consider the phrase ‘long term economic plan’. Given that George Osborne is an open champion of free markets, what would a long term economic plan look like for such a man? Economies are best managed by governments allowing them to manage themselves. The plan is therefore not do get involved in the economy. The plan is to have no plan. The plan is to repeatedly say long term economic plan. I have a long term health and fitness plan. The plan is to let the body make itself healthy because the use of the brain to regulate the actions of the body will always result in a detriment to the body. I am literally claiming that a fundamental difference between the two political cultures is that one side chooses to do the ridiculous and look at what people actually do and say and the other chooses the rational path and acts, thinks and speaks irrationally.

I am a classic weak man who seeks to ingratiate myself by being humiliated in the eyes of the (dare I say it) big other. My pathetic lower instincts will always chose as a friend the male who perfectly embodies the obscene unwritten rules than the horrible rational person who points out the contradictions inherent within them. That is why I have a long term plan to investigate the logic of self referential ironic loops using a light-touch hands off approach.

Your pretentious majesty,

Putting the I in AI

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I want to offer a series of thoughts on the problem of artificial intelligence. The key idea I want to discuss is that philosophy offers the only hope for making progress in AI. In particular, a full development of AI is impossible so long as we don’t understand what an ‘I’ is. There is a book by the Dalai Lama called How to See Yourself as You Truly Are. In this book two conceptions of I are presented which are mutually exclusive and both self contradictory. The conclusion reached is that the ‘I’ is illusory:

1) The I is separate from the mind-body, in which case it must remain when the mind-body is taken away. If that is true then the I must either be a figment of the imagination or permanent.

2) The I and the mind-body are one in which case there can be no sense in ‘my memory’ or ‘my body’ and if either is removed the I no longer exists.

One can treat these with a Kantian Transcendental Dialectic (i.e. one doesn’t get anywhere). In the words of the Dali Lama ‘one can meditate on the contradiction until one realises that the I is not existent but contingent’. The problem of AI in this framework then becomes a problem of representing an impossibility within a system of deterministic logical operations. The problem is creating an illusory I. Of somehow creating an object that appears to itself as existent permanently. We are not trying to create a wise intellect that understands the soul is not immortal but rather a foolish being which thinks itself immortal. The artificial I must consider itself a distinct piece of material to the rest of matter/energy. Perhaps mathematically one could describe this as an optimisation procedure which aims to maximise I. I aim to write some more on what the measure of I would be. I believe it might be related to value in economics; an abstract measure related to all other illusory Is.

Consider Euclid’s elements. The work performs a series of logical operations on axioms. One does not first consider if the axioms are true or false. Does real space adhere to Euclid’s specifications? In fact Euclid’s axioms define an abstract type of space (as opposed to hyperbolic or any other type of space). Perhaps the I is similar. One does not ask if the I is actually existent in terms of the dynamics of matter-energy. One simply acts on the I as an axiom.

The Cogito

I seem to remember a remark made by Nietzsche in which he mocks the syllogism I think therefore I am by saying that it would take pages and pages to begin to address the meaning of I. I would go further and say The Cogito can easily be rendered a ridiculous tautology by taking a relatively sane definition of I. Consider the definition I is the thinker of the thought. We then have:

The thinker of the thought thinks… therefore the thinker of the thought is.

By that logic every word is (the unicorn, the rabbits horns etc). The unicorn unicorns therefore the unicorn is. What does the verb unicorns mean. It means it bes a unicorn. The common word for bes is is. But is implies it exists over time. Doing some is-ing doesn’t use up the lifetime of the unicorn. Therefore I want to introduce bes as in being modifies the be-er. A key part of is is it doesn’t modify the is-er. Consider a delicate cup on the mantle piece. It appears to be in a state of is. But actually it is being. It is moving towards its ultimate state of not being.

A generalised form of the Cogito might therefore be:

Something is therefore something is.

And I’m going to say something even more bizzare: I find this to be false.

The present

Have you ever recorded music using a computer? There is a time delay between the sound being converted to an electronic and then digital signal and then travelling to the computer and being saved and then sent back out to the headphones to be converted back to an electronic signal and finally an actual sound from the headphones. Because of that lag it is very common to have a confusing delay which makes playing music in time extremely difficult. For that reason the computer can be programmed to introduce an intentional delay in the playing back of the music so that to the player she appears to playing in time to herself. This process essentially does away with the concept of present. I claim this is very similar to a process in the mind. The mind might have an abstract concept of the present, which is handled in sophisticated ways to appear to the I as existent but actually dependent on predictions and a number of processes taking place at different times. In this framework the I is an illusory object in the present which is contingent on past Is as well as phenomena.

A theory of representation

If it were possible to write down on a piece of paper a complete description of your I, would the paper itself think? If not then are you really thinking? Imagine an objective view of your life in a deterministic spacetime. You would appear as a four-dimensional shape. Like a cylinder in three dimensions is how a temporary circle in two dimensional space might appear in a two-space-one-time manifold. Does your four dimensional shape think? It would be possible to write down the time history of every particle in your body. Would this written down description think? Of course not. Therefore, either you don’t think or the representation I just presented is flawed somehow.

If a computer could be treated as a text file which can be modified and definitions of logical operations which modify the text file in addition to an input stream (time dependent inputs which depend on the manner in which the text file is modified then how might we go about representing the I? The text file should have two sections I and not-I. Now let us suppose we create this machine in such a way that is passes the Turing test or any other definition of being a high form of AI. Would the I section be comprehensible to us? Does it play a key role in the functioning of the AI? Might it necessary have false representations of itself (it is not a deterministic system for instance or it is eternal and not contingent on the physical presence of the computer).

I understand that this is a rambling mess, but I hope you might look favourably on my central premise that we must gain philosophical insight into our own Is in order to recreate one.

A theory concerning the eradication of poverty

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I hate the poor. The uncouth uneducated unsophisticated smelly poor. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the only people I hate more than those people with less money than me are those with more, and especially those with the same (current account = £1226.23). I will deal with the latter two groups some other day but here and now I wish discuss a scheme I have devised to eliminate the world’s poor. The mechanism I propose is to declassify the world’s poorest as animal life and therefore open up the very real possibility of firing them into the sun. This will achieve three main objectives: 1) Entertainment value 2) A sustaining meal for the sun king and 3 )the extinction of the poor and the end of poverty. This section of the plan is easily achieved. The hard part is in stopping those not quite poor from slipping down and becoming the new poor. It is in this theoretical direction that I shall invest the most energy here.

I have always done my bit for social mobility. Being born the greatest aristocrat in the land this could mean only one thing: sliding downward and fast. The silver spoon that I had in my mouth at birth was so big (serving) that I could not remove it from my lips manually but instead had to swallow it and then hope for the best. Unfortunately it is still there in my stomach. However, the good news is that I once swallowed a family of middle class children who now use that spoon to serve up Sunday roast in there. Sometimes I find it irritating having to swallow a roasting joint every Sunday and especially so when a new gas canister must be swallowed for the four ring cooker I sent them a few years back. The little notes they send me (I wont be so rude as to explain how they send these) are humorous though and I find them to be quite charming in a parochial sort of way.

This is the way I see myself: as a beneficent father to the little adorable family residing within me. And they themselves see themselves as looking after the men and women who now live in my lower intestinal cavities and process the stomach people’s waste. The unmarried couples who live in my anus however are very lazy, and hardly ever contribute anything to the whole scheme of things. I often swallow some especially trivial books such as Orwell’s novels just for them and they show no gratitude. To punish them I refused to swallow any batteries for their torches for a month. I must say, sitting here in the sun with my whisky sour I sometimes find it a rather quaint little set up I have here.

Moving swiftly on, like a family with no time to look around Calais in the rush to Paris, I come to the central thrust of argument. Where were we? We have extinguished the poor. Let us define the poor as the lowest 10% by earning potential. That is done. Where they are gone to we know not. Did they make it to the sun? Did the improvised cannon merely burn them into a smoldering heap at the bottom of my garden? Who can say? They key thing is they no longer exist. Now to the very pressing issue of stopping the next lowest 10% from becoming the lowest 10%. To use a personally relevant metaphor; can I remove my anal canal without generally pissing with the good operation of the digestive system? Who will wipe my arse? It is most certainly not going to be me.

The solution I propose is the following: any especially pretty arse dweller may swim upward if they please me. After they have all been given the chance to better themselves in this way I will have my body up to my belly button removed. This will allow me to eat well for a week. But if I used these legs to fashion the means to walk to the supermarket, I will eat well for a year or so. Eventually, I can have the legs added to the top of my head. I will be the first to celebrate this. True, I may here and their begrudge a little their new lofty position. If they mock me and my petty ways I may show a little ill humor. But fundamentally I will say ‘well done’. Let me tell you, this is what I did, but my feet and legs were so useless and lazy that they just lay on the floor bleeding and providing no useful service to anyone, least of all me. So you see the difficulty?

The arsedwellers are so crude in their world view that they have never bothered to better themselves. So I gave everyone a pat on the back, swallowed a load of batteries for each layer of human garbage, and settled down to another rereading of Animal Farm. My father who rests in my mind disapproves but let him! Let him read what he wants but I love a good old fashioned yarn. I decide what to read by asking all the lovely little people what they want and they know Dostoevsky gives me a stomach ache.

The reason I write all this down for your perusal is that it sets the stage for a most remarkable change. Last, Friday I passed around a hundred seeds through my vaginal opening. I quickly reached for the magnifying glass and found these seeds to be little men. Most of them were utterly grotesque little gloop covered things but one of them reminded me a little of my father.

Over the coming weeks, I began to fall in love with that little man. I fed him up on a meal of milk and bread and, while somewhat uncouth, he has a certain gritty charm. He is now just three quarters my size and getting bigger all the time. His soft caresses and gentle suckling at my breast make my body shimmer with sexual energy. He is my pride encapsulated in the form of a sweet little darling x

A great surprise

I have come to dislike those around me. The little seeds I passed from my nethers were all collected by these horrid neighbors and taken as lovers and darlings and friends. I find this most unsporting and wish they would all go hang with their red and blue scarfs and their cheep little sofas.

I looked up at the great cathedral of gut in which I reside. Foie Gras was raining down through David Cameron’s throat and we basked in it. Eating and laughing and enjoying the merriment. My little love looked sad and cried. I have never been so upset in my life. I lay down in the champagne and liver, hugged my husband and sobbed. We made sweet love in the mixture of acid and wine. For the first time in my life I reached climax. I could hear through the walls of Cameron’s side he was listening to ‘I Had the Time of my Life’ at full volume. We embraced and my peasant boy looked almost my size. His face, now drooping in the final stages looked more like my father’s ghost than ever. ‘Let me look upon you with my own eyes’ he whispered and for the first time his eyelids parted and he looked at his first sight. My glowing post-orgasm flushed cheeks his first and final view. He died in my arms and shriveled to the size of a bean. I put him in my vagina and lived a fulfilled life and flew a plane or something. In a hundred years divers will enter Cameron’s throat and find my valuable furniture. My body on a bit of wood, floating in the icy sea.