Political typecasting

It is a well-known phenomenon, that some well-known actors find themselves too prominently identified as themselves to be appreciated as the character they are playing. So it is, I think, with Boris Johnson in his new role as foreign secretary. The BBC and other news outlets ran headlines yesterday saying

Boris Johnson to meet with EU counterparts.

For an instant I was genuinely puzzled. You’re supposed to understand this as

UK foreign secretary to meet with foreign ministers of other EU countries.

But I could only read it as “Boris Johnson is to meet with pompous upper-class clowns who are somehow similar to him in other EU countries”, which somewhat stymied me in trying to think of an example.

Metathreats

Even in America it is illegal to attain political ends by threats of violence. But what about threats of threats of violence? From Florida:

A south Florida mosque that has served as a polling location since at least 2010 will no longer receive voters thanks to complaints and threats from local residents.

“We began receiving complaints from voters,” she said Wednesday in an email to the Post’s editorial board. “Some felt uncomfortable voting at the Islamic Center. When we received a call that indicated individuals planned to impede voting and maybe even call in a bomb threat to have the location evacuated on Election Day…

I suppose this is familiar as a kind of protection-racket negotiating stance. “We’re just having a friendly chat here. Nobody is making threats. If you want to make threats, we can also make threats, but there’s no need for any of that.”

Big notes

I remember reading, back in the late 1990s, an article in Spiegel, about the dubious decision of the Euro finance ministers to create a 500 euro banknote. Since the only people who use cash in significant quantities in this millennium tend to be shy people eager not to be singled out for their achievements by prosecutors, the question was raised, why would you want to create a unit of currency that enables law-abiding citizens (and others) to pack five times as much currency into a suitcase as the former favourite $100 bills?* The answer given by Edgar Meister, one of the directors of the Bundesbank, was that Germans had gotten used to having a 1000 Mark banknote, and that if the largest Euro banknote were worth less, people would think this new currency was a weakling.

Eine Währung, die es sich leisten kann, mit so hohen Noten herauszukommen muß wertbeständig sein.

A currency that can afford to produce such large banknotes must be solid.

As everyone knows, that’s why Germany produced this 50 million Mark note in 1923: Continue reading “Big notes”

Refer madness

Shortly after the EU referendum, someone asked me why the EU referendum was made to allow such an enormous change from a simple majority. After all, many countries have either supermajority threshold for referenda, or requirements that a majority be attained in a majority of regions or states. The answer, of course, is that

  1. The point of this referendum was to settle a conflict between two wings of the Conservative party. This was not an election, but a sporting contest — though sooner or later, in Britain, everything turns into a sporting contest — and it would have been completely unacceptable if both sides did not feel they had a reasonable chance of winning.
  2. There wasn’t any threshold at all. As many have pointed out, this wasn’t a referendum in the normal sense of the word. It was an opinion poll. The relevant law, the European Union Referendum Act 2015, orders only that the question be asked, and describes eligibility for voting. It says nothing about how the result is to be interpreted or enforced. (The most intricate part of the law seems to concern the question of which hereditary aristocrats are eligible to vote.)

There is nothing inevitable about concluding that the UK should withdraw from the EU because 52% voted that way in the referendum. Most democracies would not make it so easy for one group of citizens to deprive another group of citizens of cherished rights — particularly when the groups really are clearly defined social groups, whether age groups or semi-autonomous component nations (Scotland and Northern Ireland).

In principle, there’s a good argument that the government is constitutionally obliged to get clear authorisation from Parliament before pulling the Article 50 trigger. And if they do that, the MPs could reasonably point to the national divisions, or just the lack of an overwhelming majority, as justification for avoiding such wrenching change.

They won’t, though. Because it’s a sport, and nothing is more important to the British than appearing to be “good sports”. They call this “democracy”, and there have been any number of articles from left-wing Remain supporters, arguing that a commitment to democracy requires that they get behind the Brexit project now. The people have spoken, and any other response is an elitist insistence that you know better than the unwashed masses.

Where does that leave us, the foreigners? I am reminded of the work of David Blight and other historians on the “Lost Cause” historiography of the US Civil War. Americans of the North and the South decided to come together in a spirit of reconciliation, requiring that the Northerners agree to look past points of dispute, like the civil rights of African Americans. They — that is, the white people — pretty much all agreed that this was the charitable and democratic thing to do. Similarly, Britons are divided by economic and class differences, but they can all come together in agreement that the real problem is the foreigners. This is something I noticed when I first arrived here.

Things aren’t so bad in Oxford — though we all know people who have at least been menaced in public in the last couple of weeks for speaking a foreign language — and those of us with good professional jobs have a fairly easy out, if we want it, by acquiring UK citizenship. At least, that gets us to the other side of the rope line in terms of formal legal harassment. Elsewhere foreigners have to be thinking imminently about being driven out of places where they have resided for decades, and where they mistakenly thought they were at home.

More damned statistics

The news website Vox published this chart last year, by Dara Lind, based on FBI data on people killed by police during arrest. The most chilling thing about it is that refined statistical analysis on people killed by police is possible, with all kinds of elaborate subgroup analyses. That’s because there were 426 cases in that year. In general I’m all in favour of more data, which makes it possible to study problems in a more refined way, but I’m happy that the statistics gathered by the Independent Police Complaints Commission don’t have much to work with: In the same year there were 15 deaths in or following police custody in England and Wales.

UPDATE:  I thought the US number seemed surprisingly small — only about 5 times the UK number on a per capita basis, despite the fact that British police don’t routinely carry firearms. In fact, The Guardian’s documentation of all police killings in the US lists 1146 people killed by police in 2015. I presume this has to do with the fact that the FBI statistic only counts people killed during arrest.

Damned statistics

At a conference talk on the “reproducibility crisis” in psychology, the speaker quoted a relative issuing the commonplace anti-statistics apothegm “You can prove anything with statistics”. It’s a funny sort of claim, because it is self-undermining. Outside of a seminar on Popperian scientific philosophy no one would say “you can prove anything with numerology” or “you can prove anything with astrology”. Those who are not in thrall to these methods of divination find them either entertaining or ridiculous, but 

Is it because statistics is too abstruse for ordinary people to criticise? No one says, you can prove anything with quantum mechanics. Or, for that matter, mathematics.

Statistics is sufficiently precise and rigid and generally reliable to be authoritative, but leaves enough flexibility for experts to disagree and for manipulative misapplications to still hew close to standard procedure, and sufficiently abstruse that most people can’t figure out whether they’re being manipulated.

An interesting parallel is the Shakespearean dictum “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”

Don Quixote on sampling bias

Continuing my series on modern themes that were already thoroughly treated in Don Quixote, here is the passage where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss whether it is better to be a knight errant or a monk:

“Señor, it is better to be an humble little friar of no matter what order, than a valiant knight-errant; with God a couple of dozen of penance lashings are of more avail than two thousand lance-thrusts, be they given to giants, or monsters, or dragons.”

“All that is true,” returned Don Quixote, “but we cannot all be friars, and many are the ways by which God takes his own to heaven; chivalry is a religion, there are sainted knights in glory.”

“Yes,” said Sancho, “but I have heard say that there are more friars in heaven than knights-errant.”

“That,” said Don Quixote, “is because those in religious orders are more numerous than knights.”

Cervantes on objectification of women

For those inclined to be too optimistic about the pace of progress in recognising the validity of female perspectives — the way an objectifying male perspective has been perniciously treated as a default and inherently valid — I note that Cervantes in Don Quixote made this point more than four centuries ago. In satirising the tradition of courtly pickup artists who stalk their fair damsels remorselessly, Cervantes allows a woman to speak at the funeral of a man whose friends furiously attribute his death to her “cruelty” in rejecting his advances:

Heaven has made me, so you say, beautiful, and so much so that in spite of yourselves my beauty leads you to love me; and for the love you show me you say, and even urge, that I am bound to love you. By that natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it; besides, it may happen that the lover of that which is beautiful may be ugly, and ugliness being detestable, it is very absurd to say, “I love thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly.” But supposing the beauty equal on both sides, it does not follow that the inclinations must be therefore alike, for it is not every beauty that excites love, some but pleasing the eye without winning the affection; and if every sort of beauty excited love and won the heart, the will would wander vaguely to and fro unable to make choice of any; for as there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love, I have heard it said, is indivisible, and must be voluntary and not compelled. If this be so, as I believe it to be, why do you desire me to bend my will by force, for no other reason but that you say you love me? Nay–tell me–had Heaven made me ugly, as it has made me beautiful, could I with justice complain of you for not loving me?

I am reminded of the joke about the holy warrior who is struck down at last after many grim battles. He arrives in the afterlife and is ushered into a room where waits a plain woman who proceeds to abuse him verbally and physically. “Lord,” he shouts out, “I expected, for all my service, that I would be rewarded with a beautiful virgin when I was carried off to heaven.” And the woman says, “Heaven? You’re not in Heaven. I’m in Hell.”

The worst form of government

One of the key points of indictment of the EU, favoured by those in the Leave campaign chary of venting raw xenophobia in public, was the “democracy deficit”. “Take back control” they said. Decisions about Britain need to be taken by the British parliament, rather than by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. The British people need to show they are capable of governing their own fate.

Well, apparently we need to put Britain on the list of those countries whose culture is not yet ready for democracy:

Electoral services workers have reported calls from people asking if they could change their decision after Friday’s result became clear, while some publicly admitted they intended to use a “protest vote” in the belief the UK was certain to remain in the European Union.

Among those who “democratically” chose to take us out of the EU was

Mandy Suthi, a student who voted to leave, told ITV News she would tick the Remain box if she had a second chance and said her parents and siblings also regretted their choice.

“I would go back to the polling station and vote to stay, simply because this morning the reality is kicking in,” she said.

“I wish we had the opportunity to vote again,” she added, saying she was “very disappointed”.

My email inbox is full of solicitations from friends promoting a petition for a second referendum. That’s not how it works, I’m afraid, even if the petition has gathered close to 3 million signatures. It’s done.