Cummings' blog, to which I have linked on a few occasions, is of course the primary source for understanding him. It's not all Bismarck, physicists and abuse of MPs: he compares Jeremy Heywood to Michael Quinlan, he quotes from Citizen Kane, he tells you about Colonel Boyd and the Apollo Program. It's not to be missed.
What you need to understand about Cummings is that, unlike the vast majority of politicians, he is interested in how to make things happen in politics. Do you remember the Blair Government getting all worked up about they pulled levers in Westminster and nothing happened? Cummings' life's work is all about not repeating those mistakes. That is why he cares so little about media/political commentary - all about making oneself look good - and cares much more about data.
So, e.g., "The measures were devised by the prime minister’s senior aides who have spent the summer in their Downing Street bunker war-gaming how to respond to potential parliamentary manoeuvres by MPs determined to block no deal. The rebels, by contrast, spent the August holidays debating whether they would back Ken Clarke as a potential caretaker prime minister in an unlikely government of national unity." Well, quite. (To be fair, they also spent some of it wondering whether Caroline Lucas' fantasy all-female cabinet was sufficiently ethnically diverse.) At a very basic level, what are you trying to achieve and how can you achieve it - and do you have the will and discipline to do what it takes? Remember that it was Parliament, stuffed with Remainers, that voted itself 6 weeks off when it could have been plotting against Leave. Parliament failed, says Vernon Bogdanor. And largely because it did not properly plan.
Another example: I read that “Cummings is trying to goad Grieve and co - he says the more they appear babbling on TV, the stronger the support in focus groups for the prime minister to end the nightmare on October 31”. Absolutely. Dominic Grieve is the Remainer-Remoaner from central casting: "the son of Percy Grieve, QC (the MP for Solihull 1964–83), and of an Anglo-French mother, Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain (d. 1991), maternal granddaughter of Sir George Roberts, 1st and last baronet. He was educated at the Lycée français Charles de Gaulle ..., Colet Court ... and Westminster School. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford .... He was the President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1977 ... Queen's Counsel in 2008". You can't make this stuff up: Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain - descended from a baronet - went to more posh schools than most Leave voters can even name? He is Jacob Rees-Mogg without the charm! He gives TV interviews from his holiday house in France! Just as David Cameron was (rightly, from the point of view of Remain) keen to make Farage the face of Leave, making the face of Remain be a bunch of people like Grieve who get worked up about proroguing Parliament rather than anything of any concrete concern to real people is just what Leave needs.
(To digress for a moment: what was the right response to the famous bus with £350m a week and the NHS on it? As I understand it, the canonical response from Remain is (a) it's not £350m a week, it's really about £250m and (b) even if you were to eliminate the net payments to the EU budget then that money would not be available for the NHS because the overall reduction in the UK's GDP as a result of leaving the EU would result in a reduced tax-take in excess of the savings from the budget contributions. Did you even stay awake to the end of that?
How about this reaction instead:
- this £350m figure is rubbish and they know it
- but this campaign has shown divisions in the country that we in Remain want to deal with
- as we have been telling you, EU membership is really profitable for the country, particularly the City of London
- so, the day after the referendum, there will be an extra £500m a week for the NHS paid for by a new tax on the City - the EU Membership Dividend Tax!
- that money will disappear if we vote to Leave
- and that is real money, not the phantom money that Leave is promising you?
At least it would have been an offer to the voters. Leave had offers and Remain had nothing but threats.)
Anyway, back to Cummings. The people that Cummings reads are interesting, e.g. Slate Star Codex, perhaps the single most consistently interesting thing on the internet. This guy has also spotted that fact: worth a read for someone who understands where Cummings is coming from and yet disagrees with him on his own terms. (But yet he considers small blips in GDP growth to be equivalent to head-on car crashes ...)
Cummings = Varoufakis? There is something to this too.
Friday 30 August 2019
Thursday 29 August 2019
Details
1. "... nobody believed me whenever I said I was broke. I usually kept this to myself during my time in college, but sometimes, in strange circumstances, it would come up.
Once, I was shamed in front of a crowd for not donating to a society—even when I had donated a different gift just a day ago—and I confided my feelings to a close friend. His response: “What, so you’re upper-middle-class?”
In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”
...
And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account."
4. But at least we British have a sense of humour. "Once, it would have been absurd to claim that humor was the most prominent British characteristic, as if we archly established the world’s biggest empire, wittily squashed revolutions, and humorously prevailed in two world wars. But ..." "It has often been suggested that the British desire for Brexit has been driven by imperial nostalgia. I think Brexiteers are more nostalgic for its decline — for that little period of history where the establishment was strong enough to maintain order but weak enough to seem essentially comic. A time when Britons were not powerful enough to be imperial but self-assured enough to make fun of others as well as themselves. Looking back to when the market was strong enough to offer people comfort but not pervasive enough to have a stranglehold on life." From here, apropos of John Cleese. Is it fair to say that both Leavers and Remainers are nostalgic for the time when John Cleese was funny?
5. Also on the subject of Britain, The Old Vicarage, Emneth is for sale. You know, where Rev W. Awdry lived. And yes, there are toy trains there.
Once, I was shamed in front of a crowd for not donating to a society—even when I had donated a different gift just a day ago—and I confided my feelings to a close friend. His response: “What, so you’re upper-middle-class?”
In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”
...
And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account."
From this often interesting article, which is really about the deplorable lack of noblesse oblige among the modern meritocracy.
2. Also on the meritocracy:
2. Also on the meritocracy:
"At one elite northeastern elementary school, for example, a teacher posted a “problem of the day,” which students had to solve before going home, even though no time was set aside for working on it. The point of the exercise was to train fifth graders to snatch a few extra minutes of work time by multitasking or by sacrificing recess."
"In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days." From here.
3. If you do very well in the meritocracy then you get to go to this nameless conference.
3. If you do very well in the meritocracy then you get to go to this nameless conference.
4. The people who do very well are in the 1%. What a shame Britain is so horrible and unequal, not like Germany, those lovely Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. What's that you say?
Oh. (See here.)
4. But at least we British have a sense of humour. "Once, it would have been absurd to claim that humor was the most prominent British characteristic, as if we archly established the world’s biggest empire, wittily squashed revolutions, and humorously prevailed in two world wars. But ..." "It has often been suggested that the British desire for Brexit has been driven by imperial nostalgia. I think Brexiteers are more nostalgic for its decline — for that little period of history where the establishment was strong enough to maintain order but weak enough to seem essentially comic. A time when Britons were not powerful enough to be imperial but self-assured enough to make fun of others as well as themselves. Looking back to when the market was strong enough to offer people comfort but not pervasive enough to have a stranglehold on life." From here, apropos of John Cleese. Is it fair to say that both Leavers and Remainers are nostalgic for the time when John Cleese was funny?
5. Also on the subject of Britain, The Old Vicarage, Emneth is for sale. You know, where Rev W. Awdry lived. And yes, there are toy trains there.
Friday 16 August 2019
The world we live in
1. MEPs. You might have missed the fact that the South East of England now has more MEPs called Alexandra Phillips (i.e., 2) than either Labour or Conservative MEPs. One Ms Phillips is a Green and one is in the Brexit Party. Brexit Party MEPs also include Christina Jordan, who "came to the UK from Malaysia in 1985. She completed her nurse training at Winchester General Hospital before working there as a staff nurse" and Henrik Overgaard Neilsen, "a Danish citizen who has lived in the UK for over 20 years with his British wife and two children. He has worked as an NHS dentist, becoming a senior trade union official representing 30,000 UK dentists". I'm not the first to note that the Brexit MEP candidates are a pretty diverse bunch, and here is Lance Forman noting that "Amongst our eight London candidates we have white and black, men and women. // We are three Jews; one person of dual Jewish and Bahá'í faiths; one Hindu; one half-Muslim of Pakistani descent; and two Christians – of African and Northern Irish origin." Before the euro elections, "Of the 17 MEPs of an ethnic minority background, eight [were] from the U.K.", and the Brexit Party became a further major contributor to ethnic diversity in the European Parliament after the elections.
2. On a related theme but on the other side of the world: "What Singaporeans need to understand better is that, under present circumstances, there may be no sweet spot we can occupy that will keep both the Chinese and the Americans simultaneously happy. There is no silver bullet, and it is a fool's errand to look for one. // Neither can we just lie low and hope for the best. You may not look for trouble but trouble may come looking for you. And trouble is all the more likely to seek you out if either side thinks you are, or can be, intimidated. // Our more complex domestic politics is a complication. I see still faint but distinct signs that some section of our population - how large, I do not know - either for transactional economic reasons, or unthinking ethnic sympathies, or sheer chauvinism, is beginning to look at the current US-China tensions through a racial lens. // As US-China competition heats up, this tendency may be accentuated. This is the greatest danger to Singapore in this new phase of US-China competition. It is still at a nascent stage and must be checked, if necessary by the prophylactic exercise of the coercive powers that are the legitimate monopoly of the state, before external and internal forces act and react with each other in a vicious spiral downwards."
3. On a different note: "Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore. ... We could have a Hurricane Katrina five times a week, every week – imagine how much attention that would receive – and it would not offset the number of annual lives saved by the decline in heart disease in the last 50 years."
4. "Hard left protester who screamed ‘Nazi scum’ at Donald Trump supporter as he was covered in milkshake is company boss selling private services to the NHS". That's my entry for most 2019ish headline of 2019 anyway.
5. Leavers in Bristol have found a safe space.
2. On a related theme but on the other side of the world: "What Singaporeans need to understand better is that, under present circumstances, there may be no sweet spot we can occupy that will keep both the Chinese and the Americans simultaneously happy. There is no silver bullet, and it is a fool's errand to look for one. // Neither can we just lie low and hope for the best. You may not look for trouble but trouble may come looking for you. And trouble is all the more likely to seek you out if either side thinks you are, or can be, intimidated. // Our more complex domestic politics is a complication. I see still faint but distinct signs that some section of our population - how large, I do not know - either for transactional economic reasons, or unthinking ethnic sympathies, or sheer chauvinism, is beginning to look at the current US-China tensions through a racial lens. // As US-China competition heats up, this tendency may be accentuated. This is the greatest danger to Singapore in this new phase of US-China competition. It is still at a nascent stage and must be checked, if necessary by the prophylactic exercise of the coercive powers that are the legitimate monopoly of the state, before external and internal forces act and react with each other in a vicious spiral downwards."
3. On a different note: "Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore. ... We could have a Hurricane Katrina five times a week, every week – imagine how much attention that would receive – and it would not offset the number of annual lives saved by the decline in heart disease in the last 50 years."
4. "Hard left protester who screamed ‘Nazi scum’ at Donald Trump supporter as he was covered in milkshake is company boss selling private services to the NHS". That's my entry for most 2019ish headline of 2019 anyway.
5. Leavers in Bristol have found a safe space.
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