The political far right love blogs. That’s a truth universally acknowledged, to misquote Jane Austen.
And what is staggering is how irrelevant what they write is. Take an example. Earlier today I wrote about the things that tax pays for — and referred to roads. So this comment came back from a regular far right contributor:
Toll roads and Turnpikes (any place called a Turnpike used to be one end of a toll road) used to exist in the UK, people would pay for the directness and security (because they would be patrolled (remember that this is before Robert Peel formed the modern Police)) that they offered over ‘common’ roads. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_road_association So Private roads to towns, villages and hamlets do exist
There are also Toll roads in the US that are almost always faster, more direct and better maintained because it is in the interest of the owner that the interest of the customer is fulfilled.
The other day another of the breed, to make his point that democracy is not linked to the existence of society referred to anarchists in Catalonia as if the fact that a group of them existed for a while proved his point.
The arguments are typical of the offering of these people. It’s as if they really are dedicated to the extremes. A simple diagram helps:
Yes, that’s the normal distribution — a widely recognised statistical phenomenon. As Wikipedia says of this diagram:
Dark blue is less than one standard deviation from the mean. For the normal distribution, this accounts for about 68% of the set (dark blue), while two standard deviations from the mean (medium and dark blue) account for about 95%, and three standard deviations (light, medium, and dark blue) account for about 99.7%.
What this says is that if you observe a phenomena (almost any phenomena) most results cluster around something that might be called normality. But there will always be so data which is way out of the normal range.
Now I don’t ignore stuff way outside the normal — Black Swan theory teaches the importance of that — but equally, and quite candidly, the vast majority of the time we can identify the outliers in any population (like toll roads and Catalonian anarchists) and say they are absolutely irrelevant to the formulation of policy that is likely to have any consequence for real people right now living their lives in the normal range of expectation. Or to put it another way — we can safely ignore this stuff.
Not apparently though if you are from the political far right. This stuff is their stock in trade. The more the stuff they can find to fuel their arguments is from the far fringes of relevance the happier they seem to be.
But as such we can and should treat them as we do the data we knowingly dismiss as irrelevant.
Which is just what I do.
And thankfully the UK political mainstream does.
It’s a shame more blogs don’t do the same.
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I am almost touched Richard.
Normality is relative Richard, one size doesn’t fit all. Certain elements of the ‘far-right’ and ‘far-left’ are aware of this and more people are becoming aware every day, “The centre cannot hold”.
You are rather conservative in thinking that the status quo will remain so.
This is by far and away the strangest refutation of *anything* I’ve seen.
@Bobski
and
@BenS
Glad to see the far right turning up
On cue
And in Bobski’s case suggesting the overthrow of society as we know it
Hey ho – at least you’re predictable – and show your true colours on occassion
@Richard Murphy
I can only conclude that you’re incapable of debate.
@BenS
Of course – that’s why you and several thousand others turn up here every day 🙂
Or could it just be that I think you’re utterly irrelevant to political discourse?
This comment has been deleted. It failed the moderation policy noted here. http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/comments/. The editor’s decision on this matter is final.
@Richard Murphy
I didn’t say that society was going to be overthrown Richard, you are just exaggerating.
But change comes to all things, nothing in the universe is static and the political views of the people will change. A hundred and fifty years ago people would have considered the Labour party absurd but it happened. Change happens.
I wish that you would stop using the ‘far-right’ as a pejorative, I am economically ‘far-right’ (but it an age where the Labour party is considered ‘right-of-centre’ what does right and left really mean?) but I am also socially liberal. So the conventional use of ‘far-right’ as a pejorative shouldn’t apply to me and mine.
Also – you make a post about a comment I made then act as if it was part of some great plan… messiah complex much?
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Re toll roads:
(Just to prove that the moderately normal can do tangentially relevant)
The French have them too. Except in Brittany, where an ancient royal decree forbids that tolls be levied on roads. You might therefore expect that the fast, well-maintained dual carriageways stop as they cross the provincial boundary.
They don’t.
In fact the truth is the other way round: certain companies operating toll roads have in the past gone bust and had to be bailed out by the State.
Thank God for taxation, I say.
I recall reading a great novel some years back (may have just been ‘airport fiction’) in which the protagonists were controlled by a mysterious group that comprised reps from both the far right and the far left as they had more in common than either did with those in the ‘centre’ – and by collaborating they were able to purse their radical agenda for a change of the world order.
(It was along time ago and I may have remembered that wrong. Or it may be a common plot line….)
You have said before Richard that progress depends on unreasonable people, who are presumably out on the fringes.
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@Mark Lee
Really good point – one of my old history teachers at school used to say ‘the political spectrum is more like a horseshoe’. By which he meant, I think, that the BNP-style far right and the old CPGB far left had quite a lot in common.
But I’d say there’s less common ground between the ‘red-green’ environmentalist left (which I support) and the libertarian right. The left (rightly) wants redistribution of income and wealth, for example, whereas the libertarians are implacably opposed to it. The left recognises the limits of the free market whereas the libertarian right think any problem can be solved by deregulation. And so on.
There is also a danger (or a hope, depending on your POV) that today’s fringe argument may become tomorrow’s orthodoxy. For example, privatisation was seen as crazy in the 1960s but within 20 years had moved to the mainstream. In other words, Richard’s distributional graph describes a particular point of time, but over time the distribution can shift. So it’s always worth taking on the right in case they do threaten to become more influential (particularly under the current UK Government). Although of course Gordon Brown was also influenced by some of the right – for example he used to talk regularly to nutters like Irwin Stelzer, and swallowed a lot of neoliberal claptrap about the economy, along with almost everybody else at the time!
“Toll roads and Turnpikes (any place called a Turnpike used to be one end of a toll road) used to exist in the UK, people would pay for the directness and security (because they would be patrolled (remember that this is before Robert Peel formed the modern Police)) that they offered over ‘common’ roads.
There are also Toll roads in the US that are almost always faster, more direct and better maintained because it is in the interest of the owner that the interest of the customer is fulfilled”.
What idiocy; the author of this destroys his own argument by pointing out that such a situation existed before the establishment of the modern police. So in other words, before the establishment of a public service funded by taxes for the general good, travel by road was physically dangerous. Brilliant!, stop levying taxes, get rid of all public services and return to a society where you couldn’t physically get from A to B in safety.
And as the second point, even if it’s true that such roads in the US are faster (and a lot of the right have no hesitation in posting downright lies if they support their arguments) and better maintained, it doesn’t take a genius to work out why. They’re toll roads, so demamd payment at the point of use. So they get less traffic than the equivalent public roads, hence less congestion and less wear and tear.
“The other day another of the breed, to make his point that democracy is not linked to the existence of society referred to anarchists in Catalonia as if the fact that a group of them existed for a while proved his point.”
That was my comment and it did prove my point. You claimed “without the state there would be no society” (note the reference was to the state, not democracy, as you incorrectly claimed here). In order to disprove your claim, I only have to provide one example where it doesn’t hold. As it was, I provided more than one, none of which you contested.
You do, however, get comedy bonus points for mentioning my comments about anarchist Catalonia and then describing me as being on the far right. I’m sure I’m not the only one who had a good chuckle at that.
Dear Richard
I love every bit of this blog and comments… it is both hilarious and a masterclass in how to deal with those ‘certain sorts of people’ who are behave like bullying infantile bores in order to crush opposition to their right wing agendas. I wish other blogs would expose them too. Thank you for making me laugh.
I find it tasteless that you brand BenS and then delete his further comments. In acting so, you are losing the moral high ground.
@Jason
Lines can be crossed
And they were, in my opinion
@Richard Murphy
Except that you pushed the line very far to start with by calling the guy “far right”. One wonders what he could have written that could have caused him to go beyond that point.
@Jason
I think ‘far right’ is objective
His comment was not