A little something I’ve been working on…

Publish and be damned

– Attributed to Arthur Wellesley

 

The Important Election Question

I’ll try and keep this short.

The reason politics matters is not that we can change it, it’s because it can change us.

I’ve seen more walls erected in the debates over the US Presidential election and Brexit this year, than Trump could ever hope to build as President.

I’ve also been finding continual surprises in the way my friends have been/are voting.

Probably the most commonly used phrase this year has been “I can’t understand why anyone would vote for…”.

Maybe it’s time we did.

Because that same person will still be there after the election is done.

Some Quick Thoughts on #EURef

How half the country will feel in 48 hours

I’d been meaning to make this post ages ago, and have it all complete and referenced and linked and stuff, but, as usual, I delayed and procrastinated and now the time has run out, so this will have to do.

So tomorrow is the UK’s referendum on its membership of the European Union.  Many I think, me included, will in part breathe a sigh of relief when it’s all over.  That said, I do think this is a significant decision, so I think I feel I have a duty to make my position plain as I actually think this is just the beginning, whichever way the referendum itself goes:

• Why this decision needs a referendum

There has been some talk that this decision should never have been put to a referendum at all.  The most famous example of this is, I think, by Richard Dawkins, and it exemplifies one of the great misunderstandings about what it is we’re actually voting about.  His appeal that lacking a degree in economics or history somehow disqualifies his views is based on the assumption that we’re making an exclusively economic or historic (whatever that’s meant to mean) decision.  It is not.

This is a question that has broad ramifications for who has ultimate decision-making authority for the UK.  A referendum on such an issue is the very essence of ‘Consent of the Governed’, and the idea that it’s a decision for our ‘betters’ (with tongue-firmly-in-cheek) is as anti-democratic a notion as I can think of.

• The campaigns

Oh my word, kill me now!  I thought referendum campaigns couldn’t get much worse than the AV referendum, but yet again I underestimated the political class.  From everything getting compared to Hitler at some point, to the scaremongering (either of the risks of leaving or the threat of immigrants), to the dodgy numbers (£350m anyone?) to the petty personal politics – we are not voting on whether Boris Johnson should be Prime Minister, people! – the media campaigns have been appalling.

And then there’s the tragedy…:-(

I have to say, though, I’ve been impressed, for the most part, with my social media friends on all sides who have, for the most part, honestly tried to grapple with the issues and, also for the most part, kept it cordial.  In or Out, if we are to survive as a nation, this is a skill that must never be lost.

• The economics

I’m just gonna come out and say this and you can judge me if you want: No, I don’t take the prognostications of a profession that specialises in being wrong seriously.  What sort of a silly question is that?  More seriously, leaving aside the issue of the strange assumptions that all these doom-laden forecasts have been based on, there’s a strange sense of deja-vu about having a large swathe of economists recommend a course of action with regards to Europe.  Quite simply, the track-record isn’t great.  Common-sense credibility is in short supply…

That’s not to say there aren’t risks associated with a Brexit, but they mostly stem from the idea that the rest of the EU is more interested in ‘making an example’ of Britain than the welfare of their own citizens (which is a topic I’m going to leave to last).

• Immigration

I’m only going to make one observation here, and it’s a more broad point really.  There’s much hand-wringing over attitudes to immigration, and certainly there is some justification in that and a desire to change it, but a word of caution.  You can’t enforce friendship with the sword.  The idea that political unity overcomes cultural divides is, I think, a dangerously wrong idea.  Wrong, because it ignores the limits of democratic legitimacy, and dangerous because it predisposes political discourse to grant greater and greater powers to government in an attempt to solve a problem that, in fact, it is incapable of solving.

The other caution is that it does not help the cause of anti-racism to conflate immigration concerns with racism.  This has been an issue in political discourse for a long time and is counter-productive.  It may make you feel good, but its main effect is to delegitimise the voices of those with genuine grievance and as Kennedy said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”  Maybe not quite so extreme as that, but hopefully you get my point.

• Democracy and scope of government

If there’s one thing that I think the Eurozone debacle shows, it’s that the kind of halfway house between a federation and a loose association of nation states that currently exists is unworkable.  The traditional EU answer to any such difficulty has always been ‘more and bigger’, and I don’t see much evidence of that changing (with the possible exception of Donald Tusks recent comments – probably sparked by what he sees as the end of Western Civilisation; no, that’s not an exaggeration, that’s actually what he said!!)

I’m of a different opinion.  I think historical experience has shown that there are natural limits to the size and scope of legitimate governments and I think the EU is quickly exceeding them.  It’s not even about the way the EU is structured, although I think there are serious problems there.  You simply reach a point where things become too large and cover too many people to be either wieldy or meaningfully representative.

People have been talking about the risks of Brexit, but I don’t see how remaining in this structure is a particularly safe choice.

• Democratic Deficit

To me though, the main problem in terms of representation in Europe is the way our national government interacts with it.  I really could have done with starting this post earlier to try and explain this better but here goes.

The phrase that I remember hearing most from my Uni days whenever I heard parliamentary debates was something along the lines of ‘we have to do this because it’s an EU directive’.  It seems the truth is that the government was totally happy at the EU level to make these directives and then ‘play dumb’ before their own parliament.  It is this, more than anything that makes this referendum a valid one for me, because governmental structures matter, and they matter because the form absolutely affects the function.

The sad truth is that I think successive governments support the EU because it makes their own lives easier.  It gives them a bogeyman to deflect blame onto, while they actually get what they want regardless of the public, and that is not a situation I want our own politicians to be able to exploit, and I don’t believe it can meaningfully change while we are part of the EU.

• A vision of the future

While I think it’s meaningless to ask the Leave campaign as a whole for it’s vision of the UKs future relationship, it’s certainly valid to ask individuals what they are hoping for.  So what am I hoping for?  I mean, apart from the obvious pipedreams.

First, I think I’d be okay with the EEA option as a good compromise position, or something approximating it, and I certainly think it’s possible to achieve.  It takes us out of the more obviously damaging parts of EU law (like the CAP and VAT harmonization), while giving much more scope in our own affairs, but to be honest, I actually think the hard work in British politics only begins with a Brexit.  As many on the Remain have rightly pointed out, many of our problems are actually self-inflicted, but I think they misunderstand the remedy.  I think our biggest problem is that we no longer really know where ultimate responsiblity lies, and as long as that’s true, politicians will do what suits them, and cover for each other if it helps them.

What happens next though, depends very much on us, we will be left without excuse, but I will be voting Leave because I have faith that my fellow Britons are up to the task.  Even if you think this Tory government is terrible (and I wouldn’t even say you’re wrong), you’re still looking at 2 years before Brexit would actually happen and then we’re in election season.  You’re not giving Cameron (or Johnson or whoever) free reign here.

• Malicious Lunatics?

…and if it turns out that the rest of the EU are hell-bent on making ‘an example’ of us?  That they would rather burn Europe to the ground than admit that a giant supra-national government actually isn’t that great of an idea?  All the more reason to get out now.  If the lunatics really are in charge of the asylum, they can do far worse to you if you stay than if you go.

Adventures in Openness #7: The Quotable ‘Fraggle’s Journal’

Wrote this in my journal yesterday and felt impressed to share it here, for whatever it’s worth: [emphasis in original; hyperlinks added, obvs]

I understand the appeal of giving up.  There’s a certain finality to it, which when you’re in the middle of something that as far as you know will never end can seem like deliverance in itself.  Where there is no vision, the people perish.  The question is whom do we trust to supply the vision?  That answer seems to be the most important.

Conference Report – Oct 2015 Edition

I’ll say this straight off: For me, this was the most important General Conference I’ve ever seen.  It’s not every 6 months that you go with a question and have nigh-on every talk touch on it in some way, and, like pieces of a puzzle, form a map to an answer.

I also think this conference is significant as a culmination of a certain urgency that I’ve been detecting in recent conferences.  The question before us is “Who do we trust as our guides?”.  This conference has laid out a guide to preparing for the trials to come, if we will accept it.  Otherwise, we may let our insistence that the Lord do things our way lead us to follow another path, and lack the necessary preparation.

Paradigmatic Pluralism – #1: Introduction & Overview

[I’ve had a series of posts bubbling in my head for a while, and now seems like a good time to actually start the process of getting them out of my head.  I don’t know how long it will take to fully layout my thoughts, but as my ability to go months without posting is well-established, feel free to poke me from time to time and say “Where’s your next post, you slacker?!”.  But now to begin…]

Universal opinions are often mistaken for universal principles

– Seth Czerepak

You can’t change the fruit without changing the root.

– Stephen R Covey

I should start by describing what I mean by Paradigmatic Pluralism.  As I have mentioned before, a paradigm is the set of metaphysical assumptions we hold to as we receive stimuli from the outside world.  These assumptions are so fundamental that we can (and often do) go great stretches of our lives without even realising that we hold them.  For example, the very idea that there is an outside world is a metaphysical assumption, but when was the last time you questioned whether there indeed was an outside world?  Whenever you find yourself in a debate and you’re wondering how the person you are debating is so idiotic as to completely miss what you are saying, it is possibly because the paradigm that person has is so different that they think you are saying something quite different to what you think you are saying.

Pluralism is about having multiple things at the same time.  Multiculturalism, for example, is a form of pluralism, where multiple cultures inhabit the same space.

Putting the two words together denotes having multiple views of what is real.  In a ‘days gone by’ political context, this would be referred to as Religious Freedom, but I find that people are confused by the use of the word ‘Religious’ here.  This is not simply about who, what, how or even whether to worship.  This is about what we perceive to be reality itself and its meaning and how that relates to the structure of societies and governments.

Over the following posts I hope to explain how I think we have, as societies, destroyed the very ideals about pluralistic societies that we think we uphold, what we have determined to be universally true and the perils of the course on which such determinations take us.

Here’s a rough outline of where I’m planning to go with this, which will probably change as it goes on:

#1: Introduction & Overview (You are here!)
#2: Why Anarchism is False
#3: The Myth of Secular Neutrality
#4: The Modern State Religion
#5: The Wall of Separation
#6: Good Fences as a Federal Metaphor
#7: Summary & Conclusions

‘Twas the night before polling…

Soooo…..General Election tomorrow…

I spent today looking at manifestos. It hasn’t helped much – although I’m intrigued to know how the Tories got Nicole Kidman to pose for theirs (page 10 btw) – and neither does the knowledge that Alistair Burt has essentially already won this seat.  Don’t worry, I’ll still be down the polling station in the morning, but a spoiled ballot is still the most likely outcome.

I sometimes wonder if the only way to find a candidate I’d vote for is to become one.  That thought is still a long way off overcoming the primal sense of ickiness I have about election campaigning and the way politicians inevitably wind up speaking about things.

Anyhoo, what actually moved me to post tonight was a Facebook comment on the LVT group about this article:

It is also the case that a lot of the chronically homeless have substance abuse issues or mental health issues which may be improved by Housing First.

But interestingly, when there’s no free land, the general rate of wages is determined by a bit of a race to the bottom.

Consider the Irish potato famine. The Irish didn’t merely choose to eat only potatoes. They were economizing in order to keep their heads above water in lieu of rack-rents.

And the more they economized, the more average disposable income was available. So once the practice catches on the landlords immediately raise the rent in response because they can. Just like they have in Silicon Valley and Williston North Dakota and anywhere else when average disposable income rises.

Thus, wages are in large part determined by how uneconomical people are.

If all the drug addicts in the world stopped wasting their money on drugs, they’d soon have to waste it on rent.

So thank every person with wasteful spending habits for keeping your rent low.

Smokers, gamblers, etc. Here’s to you.

The ‘lowest that workers will accept’ part of Ricardo’s Law has always been the vaguest part of it to me, but the statement “wages are in large part determined by how uneconomical people are” triggered a bit of a lightbulb moment.

Turns out the 2nd Law of Temping* has greater application than I first realised.

Yes, Wages can sometimes be higher because labourers simply cannot conceive of being paid less.  If they ever do find a way to make pay stretch better, the efficiency gains wind up in Rent eventually.  The faux-libs would normally claim victory at this point “See!! It’s all voluntary!! Stop being a statist, you filthy statist!”  They miss the point.  This behaviour is in response to an inequity, not a cause of an inequality.

So we can add ‘self-reliance’ to the list of things that the Law of Rent corrupts….

*Fraggle’s 2nd Law of Temping reads: There is no reward for Efficiency.

What I learned in the last 12 months

If it should be … the will of God that I might live to behold that temple completed and finished from the foundation to the top stone, I will say, ‘O Lord, it is enough. Lord, let thy servant depart in peace.’

– Joseph Smith

Today I was set-apart as a counsellor in the Bishopric of my church congregation, and thus also ordained a High Priest.  While this could rightly be considered a significant personal event, it’s not normally something I would specifically mention on here (let alone announce!), but I do so because it provides a bookend for what has been a remarkable chapter personally that has taken place over (exactly) the last 365 days.

Much that has transpired I will not relate (and I doubt I ever will), but there are some things that I’ve learned from the experience that I wish to share and hope that it may be of benefit to you, dear reader!

• We are fundamentally broken

Part of the reason we are to forgive all of everything is because if we didn’t we would spend our whole lives being offended.  Look closely enough and you will find the faults of others that you seek.

Part of the reason we are counselled against pride is because we do not see ourselves clearly.  To do so would probably be the ultimate demoralisation.

If you find yourself disheartened at your personal struggles, take comfort that everyone else is struggling too, in ways that do not show.

• There is a long list of people in my life that I have let down and there’s nothing I can do about it

Because I (along with the rest of you) am fundamentally broken, there is much in my life I have not done that I should have, and this will continue to be the case for a long, long time.  I apologise in advance.

We are going to let each other down.  We simply are, and we won’t be able fix it.  We may not even know we broke it.  But take heart…

• Both of the above are OK….as long as….

The wonder of the atonement and power of Christ is that it and He takes the broken and the wounded and, by degrees, leads the soul bearing the corruption of this world through the water and the fire and makes them fit for the kingdom of heaven and thus eternal union.  And this can all happen without people seeing it, or acknowledging it.

One of my new favourite scriptures is Helaman 3:29-30:

29 Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word of God, which is quick and powerful, which shall divide asunder all the cunning and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the man of Christ in a strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepared to engulf the wicked—

30 And land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right hand of God in the kingdom of heaven, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers, to go no more out.

• Priesthood keys are real

For all the faults of the ones holding them (and I know plenty about *that*!), God established an order and when a thing requires the involvement of keys, trying to work around them or avoid them will. not. work.  Just so you know!

• We wink at the commandments of God at our peril

So much that the Lord asks us to do requires faith, because the consequences are, at best, non-obvious and at worst firmly counter-intuitive under our paradigms, but the results of ignoring that guidance are and will be devastating.  The worst part is we will do our level best to pretend that it didn’t really happen, or it’s no big deal.  That will be a lie.

• We will confess at judgement that the Lord is just

At the last day, when we stand before God, we will bring our excuses, our theories, our rationalisations, even our Strong Reasons(TM) against Him, and watch in horror as they crumble to dust before what really is.

Picking that sort of fight is a hiding to nothing.  And we get nothing out of it.

• Jesus stands at the door and knocks……….and waits…………

“For all of this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still”

Wherever you think you are, whatever you think your faith is like, whatever you think you have done, whatever you think *others* have done, the Saviour calls to you.  While we need to open the door, He will be there when we do, even if no one else is.

 

A bit of a disjointed hotch-potch pot-pourri, to be sure, but I couldn’t let today go without saying it.

Time for a grand adventure, methinks.  Let’s see what the next 365 has in store…

Human-readable Data (or lack of)

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

So for work-related reasons far too boring to mention, I’ve been thinking about databases.  You’re excited already, I can tell!

Anyway what started me off on this post was this suggestion from IndieWebCamp that you shouldn’t use databases for web application data storage, but rather use the native filesystem.  Now while IWC seems to be heavily focused on blogs and other small-scale social stuff as far as I can tell, I think there is a general principle waiting to be drawn forth, but I don’t think it’s what the author(s) here intend.

The page refers to this post bigging up 2d text arrays as a means of data storage and it’s at this point that I had a little realisation.  More specifically where it starts waxing lyrical about the wonders of such intuitive, user-friendly tools as grep and sed, and I started wondering if I was reading the musings of a masochist.

But yeah, my realisation.  Yes, databases are a nightmare, but they needn’t be, they’re just a tool being used at the wrong level.  When the people at IWC talk about human-readable data, they forget that as soon as you start talking about computing, there is no such thing.  You can’t take apart your hard drive and have a quick peek at your appointments for next week.  It’s all in code.  The reasons we think of some codings as being human-readable is because all the infrastructure to convert that code into a usable form (all the way from magnetic charges on a drive to ASCII) is standardised and ubiquitously transparent.  We don’t have to think about how it happens, it just does, and until we can do that with databases, they will always be black boxes full of hardship and corruption, and we will not gain the full benefits of their powers.

So how do we get databases to the level of transparent ubiquity that ASCII files enjoy?  Well, one part (standardisation) may yet prove itself beyond the wit (or more specifically, the pride) of man, but I have a suggestion to begin with.

Consider: Filesystems are data storage…..Databases are data storage…..Can I make it anymore obvious?…..oh….well….I guess I can…

No-one (well, nearly no-one) talks about filesystems anymore as rampaging beasts out to devour your precious data anymore, like they do databases.  Filesystems are reliable, because they’ve had to be – everything relies on them, including databases!  If databases want to go to the next level, they need to be the new filesystem.  And I mean that literally, make a kernel driver and run your OS from it!  Then, and only then, can databases take over the world.

I just want to know…

If you are the person who found this blog using the search term ‘lord fragglegate’, I would LOVE to know what in the world you were actually searching for, and more importantly, did you find it?  I tried that search and got nothing meaningful…