More Interesting Than YouGov

The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students.

The PhilPapers Metasurvey was a concurrent survey of professional philosophers and others concerning their predictions of the results of the Survey. The Metasurvey was taken by 727 respondents including 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students.

Angels finds the idea of the metasurvey - asking professional philosophers what they thought philosophers would think - irresistible. The comments and discussion pages are weird and wonderful.  In these poll-ridden days, with their dull comments on the duller question of who can control the narrative on the outcome of the general election, predicting how many philosophers believe in a God, would you switch and let the train hit the singleton -   and how bad an action is that?, political affiliation and the existence of an external world, overestimating and underestimating the proportion who agree with you ...serves the same function of feeding the inner anorak but ranges over everything, or almost everything that's thought of.

On the trolley/train switch, I want to know more about the people on the railway lines.

What Will Really Cause a Run on Sterling

Getting het up about constitutional rules and practice is widespread just now.  There has been no alteration in the set-up.  What is different this time, and every time is different, is the character of the current Prime Minister.  The Leader of an outgoing administration is expected to advise the Head of State on whom to send for to form the new administration.  This is not the only advice-source, but an important one; the other sources are clearly preparing for some ridiculous tantrums when office must be surrendered.  Imagine:

"You must go to the Palace and advise that Mr Cameron be sent for, Prime Minister."

"Shan't."

"Mr Cameron has a majority over all other parties of 63 seats, Prime Minister."

"So what?"

"The moment you meet the House you will be voted down, Prime Minister.  Surely you cannot wish to precipitate the Head of State into political centre stage, and having to force you to meet Parliament?"

"If she can't stand the heat she should get out of the kitchen.  I am not going to have Parliament meet for the moment, anyway,  like they did in Canada.  So there."

"It is a power of the Head of State to  prorogue Parliament, Prime Minister."

"I'll tell her to prorogue it.  She has to accept my advice."

"Your advice among that of others Prime Minister. "

"It's not fair, having a monarch as head of state; she doesn't have to face elections, like me."

"Precisely,  Prime Minister.  You only hold the power of the state temporarily until the people remove it; and the Head of State acts for her people permanently, and in the interests of our system of government.  The power is held by the state, whose Head concedes it through Parliament to the democratically elected party and its Leader.  You have lost the election.  You are not  the people's democratically-made choice.  You must go to the Palace, where the power of the state is now, briefly, held, and do your last prime ministerial duty, of offering your advice to send for Mr Cameron."

"How're you going to make me?  You and whose army?"

He Walks, He Walks

And saw the skull beneath the skin
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limb
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Underpinning the Euro

Economists sometimes ignore the political content of what they know, the political content of what they regard as givens.  In launching the Euro all of the following was predicated; before Maastricht, a decade ago and, in the planning, longer:

- a European state, at least a federal state, with its own federal government and finances.

- i.e. also a federal budget and within it a fiscal policy in the form of federal taxation and expenditure and deficit and debt and debt-management. At the moment the EU has a budget of around 2.25% (sic!) of EU GDP ('based on IMF estimates of 2008 GDP and purchasing power parity among the various currencies, the eurozone is the second largest economy in the world') and it is not allowed to get into deficit (a levy on national VAT proportional to GDP is levied to balance the books in case of deficit).

- a Federal European Central Bank ready to listen to the European Federal Government as promptly and cooperatively as the Fed.

Not yet there, by a long, long stretch, no.  But the commitment, the prior agreement, the certainty on the observation of that agreement -  which was most certainly hidden deliberately from the European electorate -  was so great that a currency that is the second largest reserve currency in the world, used by 327 million Europeans, and with over 175 million people worldwide using currencies which are pegged to the euro,  could be launched without  the democratic assent of the peoples of the member-states to all the political common currency requisites listed above.

Motherhood

Birth certificates that no longer display who is the mother and who the father are being introduced shortly.  This announcement was welcomed by LGBT organisations; same-sex couples with children regarded the current form of birth certificates as discriminatory.

No-one would argue that the information on birth certificates is accurate, necessarily, in the biological sense.  It is socially accurate however: a formal, public statement of origins conferring all sorts of social statuses and claims, from birth. We pattern our society using categories of gender, age, kinship, and bind it together, order it, set up generational cultural and economic transfers with exchange.  As well as goods, we exchange women, in a special form  known as marriage.  We do it formally, and we do it informally, but from brides being given with dowries( or paid for with bridewealth) by their kinsmen, to temporary liasons engaged-in at the whim of the couple involved with the woman exchanging herself, we do it.  The grammar of social relations produces a predictable social environment and all the elaborations we introduce to adjust for passing social goals - equality, resource allocation, protection from the abuse of power etc. Many would argue that we are natural grammar generators; we do it with anything that comes to hand.

Bearing this in mind perhaps we should be wary of determinedly setting aside gender, kinship, descent, generation, and exchange.  It's one thing to act individually at choice, to declare oneself, for instance, a boy - given the advantages it's surprising girls don't insist they are boys for much longer than they do - or refuse to be organised into age cohorts and go to university at 10,  or marry your siblings, or ignore the physical markers of the natural world and make people what they say they are, dissociated from function and capacities.  But to enforce such individual choices by institutional and legal means, punishing 'discrimination', means that we are re-ordering all our social and power relations.  There are vulnerable people who are classed together and protected by society - children are the most obvious - though we can think of many others.  If we are determined to force the pace of  social evolution (and the kinds of practices thought of here are very stable, though they do slowly evolve in response to change in the world) we should expect trouble.     

A European Monetary Fund: Giuliano Amato on the Legal Basis

Angels thought this exchange of emails with Giuliano Amato (who headed up the redrafting of the European Constitutional Treaty, which was then ratified as the Lisbon Treaty), might be of interest in the discussion on the setting up of a new economic governance for the European Union; and its implications.
If anyone should know whether the Lisbon Treaty, or any earlier treaty would need  to be re-opened, or further treaties on economic government are needed to  be put in place, and can be put in place, either freestanding or as a part, or parts, of other treaties, Giuliano Amato should.

On reading in so much of the anglophone media that a European Monetary Fund (a central institution for European economic governance) was an impossibility because of  insuperable Lisbon or other  treaty difficulties,  it seemed worth asking at the fountainhead.

Caro Giuliano,

"Sorry, no EMF - can't be done" parla da sé. Tu che questi trattati li scrivi, sei d'accordo che un EMF richiederebbe un nuovo trattato? Non ho cambiato idea sulla sua desiderabilità, ma mi stupisce che, volendolo fare, richieda un nuovo trattato.
...a risentirci presto,

["Sorry, no EMF  [European Monetary Fund, ed.] - can't be done" speaks for itself.  You, who write these treaties, are you in agreement that an EMF would require a new treaty?  I haven't changed view on its desirability, but it amazes me that, wanting one, it requires a new treaty.]

Yours as ever, ....

From: giuliano.amato
Sent: Tue 09/03/2010 19:01
To:
Subject:
Re:

Non un Trattato di revisione di Roma, Maastricht, sino a Lisbona, ma di sicuro un trattato che regoli il Fondo, perchè non c'è una legal basis comunitaria per una cosa del genere.
Comunque, se parte la campagna "it cannot be done" sono più fiducioso sulla concretezza crescente della cosa....

[Not a revised Treaty of Rome, Maastricht, up to and including Lisbon,  but certainly a treaty that regulates the Fund, because a community legal basis is not there for something of this kind.
However, if an "it cannot be done" campaign has started I am more certain of the growing reality of the thing....]
G.

From:

Date Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:14:23
To:
Subject: citazione
Reply:

Caro Giuliano,

...in Grecia, tutto è bene quel che finisce bene, anche se poteva finire prima e meglio.
Sul Fondo Monetario Europeo mi avevi scritto che era necessario "Non un Trattato di revisione di Roma, Maastricht, sino a Lisbona, ma di sicuro un trattato che regoli il Fondo, perché non c'è una legal basis comunitaria per una cosa del genere". Ti si può citare? Molti commentatori inglesi sostengono che non è necessario, altri che non si può fare perché significherebbe riaprire Lisbona.  ...

[.....In Greece, all's well that ends well, even if it could have finished sooner and better.
On the European Monetary Fund you wrote to me that [a treaty] [cf email above, ed.] is necessary.  Can I cite you?  Many English commentators are arguing that it isn't necessary, others that it cannot be done because it means reopening Lisbon.

Affettuosità, .....

From: Giuliano Amato [mailto:
Sent:Sat 27/03/2010 16:11
To:
Subject: R: citazione

Si, con l'aggiunta che l'accordo ben potrebbe coinvolgere i soli stati della zona euro.

[Yes, with the addition that the agreement might well  involve only the eurozone states.]
G.

So yes, an 'accordo' is required for a European Monetary Fund.  Because, no, there is not a current community legal basis in any treaty for such a step. And that  only the eurozone countries might be involved.

Ever-Closer and Economic Union

Propping-up Brown in office had a primary purpose for much of the British political elite: the ratification of the Lisbon constitutional treaty.  That is why he was permitted to remain, for any replacement would have triggered an immediate general election with a likely eurosceptic Conservative victory.  Now that the Lisbon objective has been achieved the Brown regime is attempting to revivify that  imperative by pretending that progress towards European economic convergence requires a reopening of the Lisbon treaty, and that Brown is standing firm against any such thing, as well as standing firm against any European interference with the directing of the British economy.

The German Chancellor knows perfectly well that there is a lack of legal provision in Lisbon for the next stage of economic ever-closer union.  She knows too that it was always going to be necessary for the EU to act in tandem with the IMF if reassurance over the Greek economy was not accepted as enough by the markets.  So the IMF has been harnessed-in to provide the institutional lacks of the European currency as currently organised.  Imagine if Lisbon had attempted to include institutional provision for Europe-wide economic government; what hope would there have been for its acceptance by the constitutionally well-defended member nation states then?  There are still constitutional amendments to Lisbon being piggy-backed onto future treaties.

Further provision for European economic government will be made in future treaties.  And when Brown stated there would be no more constitutional-effect treaties for a decade, and that there was not, had not been, and never would be need for a referendum, he was wrong; or dishonest.  As usual.

A Dubrovnik Treaty

There ought to be a first law of European Union treaty-making: any treaty is pregnant with the possibilities of any further treaties.   The Conservatives understood this when  Brown Labour  sold the pass and reneged on its absolute commitments to hold a referendum on a European Constitutional Treaty; they lied that Lisbon was different.  Without power to stop Lisbon being brought into effect by Brown's regime the Conservatives gave us two effective commitments: the use of our own constitutional powers to determine the extent of Lisbon usages in our own country - the very stumbling blocks to Lisbon that more codified constitutions in other member-states had to have written in, even in a later treaty, and a referendum on any subsequent EU treaties that altered our relationship with the European Union.

The Croatian Accession Treaty  is expected to carry a lot of baggage: all the guarantees to Ireland given  to make the Irish vote Yes at the second attempt last year; all the undertakings to the Czech Republic on the status of the Czech constitution and its powers to intervene as does the German constitution for Germany;  German constitutional statuses themselves; even Labour red-line showboating doesn't compare with what has to be written into this treaty.

Letters from a Tory has pointed-up  the crucial missing piece in the Conservative guarantees that when they are in power there will be no further alterations without a referendum: the occasion that could precipitate the referendum. 

Others have noted that European economic governance would require treaty changes; they have argued that there is no stomach for touching Lisbon after the years of pressing to get the European Constitutional Treaty through.  They are right.  And so are those who assured us that indeed the Lisbon Treaty will not be touched.  The treaty that is carrying all those provisos that won over Germany, the Czech Republic, and Ireland to accept Lisbon will be, though.  It must be, by prior agreement, so very much more than a mere accession treaty for a small European candidate member-state conforming in every way to accession requirements.

Never let a crisis (or a treaty) go to waste.  Greece has been profligate and unwise in its fiscal behaviour (but haven't some others closer to home?  And all in the social democratic,  big state - high tax political-loser camp).  But it has conveniently brought down a high euro to more comfortable levels for manufacturing and exporting member-states, and it has concentrated attention on urgent, treaty-level underpinning to the single European currency necessity.

Angels would prefer the new treaty to be negotiated in Dubrovnik, the so beautiful, former Venetian colony of Ragusa di Dalmazia.  The Zagreb Treaty doesn't have the same ring; it sounds just a touch too close to the realised socialist knuckle.

Tidying Up Before the Budget

The bank warned us that we have accounts whose contents were at risk of being sequestered by the Brown Regime; they put it slightly differently - need to have activity in an account etc. -  but that's what it amounted to.  So we hunted down all the bits and bobs that have survived in places we have lived and in lives we have left, checked down the back of the sofa and the dresser drawer, and tidied them all up.

The money's all on the way to the bank-at-the-bottom-of-the-hill.  Apart from being surprised that it is no longer safe to leave anything in England (no matter how clear the original terms and conditions, property rights are being eroded and their constant reassertion is required now) the exercise triggered another decision. 

We moved  all the money still in sterling onto safer  ground - for which the euro's current brief decline has come in handy.     It's been a long fall to 1.11 from 1.60 and upwards (when the bulk of it came here) and, more damagingly, there isn't anything I've wanted to buy in the shops in London when I've gone to spend some of the Nostalgia fund, no matter how far sterling has fallen.  So it's here, safer and with lots of things to spend it on.  Or decent returns if we save it.

Angels' Law  states that if I am thinking or doing something,  lots of others are as well, indeed they are ahead of me.  Yesterday's 'Budget' confirmed it was the right thing to do.

Still Waiting

There should have been a general election not a budget.  We can be certain that today is just a propaganda event for Labour.

Despite the general air of assurance on there being an election, somehow it feels as if we have to  entice this

to come out into the open like this

so that we can deal with it.

UPDATE
BROWN ISSUES COMMENT ON THE BUDGET

"My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add thereto: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."

[These words may seem familiar but Brown has form recycling other people's remarks in his own speeches, Ed.]

Greece Knows What It Has To Do

Germany could bail out Greece tomorrow morning for less than it cost us to bail out the North East of England and their Beastly Bank  Together loans.  That Northern Rock throw-away of tax payers' money led directly to a UK debt of over a trillion pounds as our prime ministerial North Briton felt the bit between his teeth and saved bits of the Labour client state no-one else would even want to reach.

The German Chancellor has a moral compass that points to moral hazard.  Pity the Prime Minister hasn't.

Free School Dinners

School dinners are, by definition, disgusting.  The smell that pervades whatever space they are served in, soaked into the very fabric of the furniture and architecture, degrades whatever other uses that space is put to; gym,  assembly, the school play, orchestra rehearsal, examinations, they are all tainted by that smell.  Parents' evenings are inhibited by it, as  the rearing back in disgust effect is exacerbated by the wave of memories of school dinner experiences.

And now Labour is threatening to make the school dinner a universal punishment;  refusal will offend (as it so often does) so refusal will not be available.  Under the functional guise of nutritional benefit and meeting need without discrimination, the prison-house shades will close about our growing children,  in the form of swill on a plastic tray with indentations for  slop-with-gravy, and slop-with-custard.

The school day will stretch from early morning to the evening, without hope of escape into the free world from 12.30 to quarter to two.  Any expression of aesthetic or gustatory discrimination will be met with cultural aggression.

Eating with others is a very important social act, highly elaborated and often determinant in setting hierarchies and exchange relationships.  It is not a suitable activity to be imposed in demonstrably failing schools.

This is Not Antifascism. It's Social, Political, and Personal Aggression

If this woman is pregnant she is irresponsible to the point of criminality. What is she doing pretending that Unite Against Fascism is anything other than an authoritarian organisation rooted in Trotskyite 'No Platform'.

A Picture of Britain

 The United Kingdom's economic status is portrayed  in the Financial Times.  Credit Suisse has brought down the picture from the attic. Go and take a good look.

The diversionary, propaganda tactics consisting of pointing at any economy but the UK economy, of self-congratulation on not using the Euro currency, the articles on the economic problems of other countries which are not even accurate - Italy regularly gets an undeserved bad press for instance - cannot hold the line for much longer.

Nowhere else in Europe is a country in such economic distress as is  Labour Britain with its falling living standards and its rooted worklessness.

 Many have wanted the Cameron-led Conservatives to attack this dreadful failure with greater vigour, even viciousness and exposure of all the wrong-doing known to have been perpetrated.  There is no hope for some kind of orderly reconstruction to be found there.  It is, fortunately, a characteristic of one-nation Conservatism to build alliance and consent, not confrontation and defeat for any of the people caught up in this disaster.

Strikes and lockouts are the epitome of collapsed economic and social relations; but  lower levels of confrontation rather than co-operation - the singling out of particular groups for vilification and inappropriate levels of blame - all share the common purpose of producing confontation which, in the crippled thinking which hasn't gone away you know, within the Labour party, will generate realised socialism in its new, technically competent, form.

A vote is a blunt instrument:  it cannot offer access to the heart's desire of every individual.  But it is just the bludgeon with which to defend market capitalism and the rich and varied society that thrives and grows with the individualism and democracy which is capitalism's political counterpart.

Votes From Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland Shouldn't Count

Why Scotland, Northern Ireland and, though to a lesser degree of concern, Wales should be voting in the Westminster general election needs explanation.  The matters of central concern to the electorate -  health, education, housing (under whatever term building houses people can afford, with due respect for the environment and infrastructures, is currently masquerading) and working conditions, are all devolved to separate parliament or assemblies in Edinburgh, Belfast, and Wales.  Why are their electorates sending representatives to stick their noses into other people's, ie our - business?

Foreign affairs, and  Defence (or War as it has turned out to be under Labour) have also been devolved, since Lisbon, to the European Union; that the European Union Foreign Minister  happens to be English is neither here nor there (as is she);  her responsibilities are European, and policies are determined in the European institutions of governance (whatever we may think of them).

Constitutional affairs in the form of changes to the voting system, and judicial powers are already devolved so there is no basis for Scotland or Ireland or Wales having any say in what we do in England; the House of Lords is an irrelevance to their legislatures (though certainly it has to carry a large number of their troughers and placemen).

Angels would rather have interference in our governance from France, Germany, Italy et al., than Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.  At least the French, Germans, and Italians are big enough and rich enough to make their interference less humiliating and profitless.

Nietzsche for Newbies

Get up to speed with a modern view for the modern world.  (or read Nick Drew )

Power-Broking For Grown-Ups

Here's an in interesting image: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, special representative of the “quartet” Tony Blair and EU High Representative Catherine Ashton are in Moscow.  Their starter for ten is Israel-Palestine relations.  Members of the team then have discussions on follow-up questions such as  -oooh -  balance of power in the Middle East, US-Russia nuclear arms talks with a supplementary on nuclear non-proliferation international agreements, European defence relations to NATO and to Russia, with a supplementary on NATO/Russia defence agreements?

What would  Gordon and Peter give to be where these people are?  They must be eating their hearts out denying their thraldom to Unite, denouncing cases of individual tax avoidance, and announcing small grants for electric car assembly.

Subsidise the North East to Dig Coal

Would you buy an electric car? 

More specifically: would you buy an electric car from this man?

And, then, consider what he says the  the car he sells you will run on: lithium is relatively rare in exploitable quantities, found in geopolitically inaccessible places, grossly energy-consuming to extract, and even then gets turned into a battery  (don't you just hate batteries; always absent when presents are unwrapped and when they are located, and unhandily positioned, the beastly things run out before you can turn round, and then there's all the greenery-guiltily about throwing them away); who would want a car that runs on the beastly things?

Given its rarity, finding places, extraction costs, and carbon footprint, best to reserve lithium for the use of men like this, who really need it:

although someone should have warned him that lithium is  flammable and difficult to extinguish.

Vote Early Vote Often

Electoral fraud is a concern for us all at the moment. It shouldn't be, not in the United Kingdom, but it is, and has been, ever since 2005 when Labour's election fraud caused Richard Mawrey, QC, the election commissioner, to compare the behaviour to that of a banana republic.

'Electoral fraud' and the more widely-defined 'subverting the principles of democracy' can be considered as very serious threats in the upcoming general election.  You may care to read all about how it's done (well, an introduction to how it's done) and consider at least safeguarding your own vote, whatever you choose to do with it.

Wings - Not Debt, Taxes and State Control

The fixing of the electorate for the Labour Leadership is an encouraging sign.  In a travesty of democracy the Leader is elected by a tripartite college  of party members, trade unions, and the members of the Parliamentary Labour Party and MEPs.  Some electors are much, much more equal than others.   It is encouraging for a number of reasons:

first it reassures that the general election will take place shortly - too many have too much to gain from arriving in the Commons by the only route available, election (and a general election at that; by-elections coudn't deliver the numbers, now approaching 100 Labour MPs standing down) for any finagling with Parliamentary terms; 

second it demonstrates that the  claim by the current Leader that he will continue, unelected, on and on, after condemnation  at  his first electoral trial is just part of his delusional state of denial;

third it returns the Labour party to its historical status-claim that it is the political arm of the trade union movement (a claim denied, of course, by many Conservative members of trade unions, but they were shouted down by the socialist bullies long ago); and it ends for good the vainglorious Blairite claim that Labour is the political arm of the British people (a claim to which Conservatives and Liberals are an immovable refutation);

last, or perhaps 'at last', it sets the terms  of the general election (for lack of which  the Conservatives have been so unjustly saddled with responsibility).

Labour offer  big state, high tax, trade union-dominated governance without individualist, pluralist democracy, individual choice and aspiration.  They offer, too -  proven fiscal and economic incompetence; life-long debt; clumsy and inappropriate, supplier-driven, public services; authoritarian intrusion into personal and family life;  the substitution of socioeconomic caste structures for meritocratic achievement; and cultural bullying.  Labour offers  craven conformity to both the European Union and the United States'  imperatives and, where these do not conform, submission to those of the United States -  even unto immoral and unjust war.

Conservatives offer to sort out the unholy fiscal and economic mess from 13 years of Labour corrupt and incompetent maladministration, followed by leaving us all alone.  To live our lives in safety, with opportunity, and in peace.

We know, oh! how we know,  from recent experience how Labour carries through its programme. 

Angels experienced the Conservative one-nation society - access for all to housing; public and personal health; schooling and apprenticeships; for the quick-off-the-mark, universities (socks need to be pulled up there by the Tories); work. 

Angels were offered wings.