Stafford Beer famously said that the purpose of a system is what it does, the POSIWID principle. Here’s an example of it (if you want some more, try my Politics of the Call Centre series). It’s fairly common for atheists to express amazement at the idea that anyone would expect religious people, especially Catholics, to…
Read More Applying POSIWIDAnd the ones who think the other kind of people ought to be exterminated. Discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s six foundations theory of politics (which argues there are six, innately determined, moral intuitions that define political identity), in which it’s suggested that they actually reduce to two, driven by the emotions of shame and guilt. Now,…
Read More There are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people…Here’s a role for a blogger that I don’t think anyone covers. The Whitehall blog. It’s a truism about British journalism, going back to Anthony Sampson if memory serves, that the newspapers cover Westminster politics obsessively but they hardly cover Whitehall at all. When they do, their service is even more conventionalised and less penetrating…
Read More Request for blogRalph Musgrave‘s economics blog makes a case for a program of time-limited payments to companies who hire the unemployed, although I’m not sure if Musgrave is thinking of it as a permanent feature of the welfare state rather than an emergency response to depression. I might quibble with a couple of aspects – for example,…
Read More an original idea? the archive is full of ‘emFrom the archive, George Pascoe-Watson in 2006, on just what a hands-off manager Rupert Murdoch was.
Read More filed for reference and indeed referred toSo I was having a minor row on twitter with Adam Bienkov the other day, about whether the Labour Party was right to put so much effort into attacking the Murdoch Party and especially the Secretary of State for Hulture. I think the London mayoral election shows I was right, for reasons that ought to…
Read More why the London election means we should…Rebuttal is futile, but sometimes it is necessary, and at least you can help people update their lists of people to ignore. Here’s Zoe Williams wilfully misleading the readers. From two completely different sources – Ted Reilly, a road safety campaigner, and Alice Bell, a lecturer in science and society and part-time Sack Boris campaigner…
Read More All mayors are not the same. All columnists, however…Well, this is interesting, both on the Bo Xilai story and also on the general theme of the state of the art in contemporary authoritarianism. It looks like a major part of the case is about BXL’s electronic surveillance of Chongqing and specifically of top national-level Chinese officials: One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing…
Read More Canalising the marshes: tidying up the peopleSo I did a business-class review of Daniel Kahneman‘s new book over at the Fistful. Of course, AFOE is a very different blog to this one, being all liberal euro-technocratic and whatnot. Therefore I thought I’d write a different review. I therefore give you, in this week of Rupert, Kahneman for Thugs – which is…
Read More Kahneman for Thugs: some bullet pointsHere’s some “why the Bradford West result means we should support my politics” that supports my politics: Next Generation Labour. Don’t take support for granted We have to realise that the wars still matter Mobilised youth are a polical force to be reckoned with Labour has to examine its relationships with Muslim communities Austerity needs…
Read More we pretend to campaign and they pretend to vote for us