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Why France may be correct to blame Britain for migrant deaths in the English Channel

As Josef Stalin is supposed to have once cynically said, “One death is a tragedy: a million is a statistic.” If so, then here are some more statistics from the ever-filling modern-day sailors’ graveyard that is the English Channel. In early September, another 12 illegal immigrants, “primarily of Eritrean origin”, drowned off the French coast at Cape Gris-Nez, near Boulogne-Sur-Mer, when their dinghy flooded and sank. Mainstream British media such as the BBC were very careful to inform the public that amongst them were “six children and a pregnant woman”, just to hit home how particularly tragic the whole scenario was. And yet, let us be brutally honest, there will be many people out there in Britain who do not particularly view such events as tragedies at all, but regard them more with blithe indifference. Others, even less sympathetic, would no doubt actively prefer the migrants to die before they reach shore. Few may be willing to openly say so, though: doubtless they still remember the media monstering political commentator Katie Hopkins received back in 2015, when she argued in print that gunships should be sent to the Mediterranean to keep out those then fleeing Assad’s war-torn Syria using words like the following: “No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.” In the end, after her article was deeply misrepresented, Hopkins was subject to a huge petition calling for her sacking as a newspaper columnist, received criticism from the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, and was reported to the police by the Society of Black Lawyers for the terrible crime of speaking her mind: by the time of her next column, Hopkins was contritely writing of how “No-one wants to see images of children drowned at sea, no matter what their journey or destination.” The bounds of acceptable public debate about such things were adhered to more successfully by the current Labour Party Home Secretary Yvette Cooper who, back at the time, memorably promised to take a family of Syrians into her own private home – before later even more memorably neglecting to actually do so on the impeccably bureaucratic grounds that she had not received “proper support and training from local councils to be a proper fosterer” to such people. In relation to last week’s deaths, the perpetually pained Cooper pulled her usual just-been-exposed-to-a-giant-onion sad face and called the drownings “horrifying and deeply tragic” before decrying those behind “this appalling and callous trade”, by which she of course meant France-based criminal people-smuggling gangs – but are the true ones to blame for such frequent occurrences actually very public bleeding hearts like her own good self? Channelling the dead That Britain is very much to blame is certainly the opinion of many on the French side of the Channel-cum-aquatic-graveyard. Jean-Luc Debaele, Mayor of the coastal town of Wimereux, which has seen its fair share of brine-bloated bodies over recent years, has consistently held liable successive British Governments, both Conservative and Labour, for making the country seem like an “immigrant El Dorado” by virtue of its excessively lax labour laws and social security benefits system. “Why do the English welcome them? Why do they absolutely want to travel to England? These are the questions that need to be asked,” Debaele has said. “It is Britain that is responsible for the boats setting off across the English Channel and the deaths that occur in the sea. The English pay us to stop the boats setting off but they look after the migrants when they arrive on their shores. The English give them accommodation, food, a bank account, and let them work without regulation … This has been going on for more than 20 years … I have been mayor for four years and I've watched as more and more boats leave from these shores and more people die in the sea.” Debaele isn’t the only one to think this way. In 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron haughtily lectured UK authorities that “The British continue to have a system … which manages economic immigration through hypocrisy. There is no legal immigration route. The British must articulate their needs in terms of the economy and reopen a path to legal asylum requests. We are going to step up the pressure [upon them to do so].” In other words, consecutive double-speaking UK Governments, encouraged both by domestic businesses eager for cheap labour, and the immigrant-loving charity and NGO sectors, have quietly been quite happy to facilitate the development of an illegal immigrant-based literal black economy in their nation, against the native general public’s express wishes, whilst pretending to try and stop it via various fake measures like the infamous Rwanda Scheme to fly seaborne invaders out to the African nation in question. Once Keir Starmer’s Labour Party immediately scrapped the whole European Court of Human Rights-stymied plan upon coming to office in July, former Tory PM Boris Johnson wasted little time after the latest September drownings in accusing Sir Keir and his new Home Secretary Cooper of being “to blame for the drowning of kids at sea” by removing the supposed all-for-show Rwanda “deterrent”, a wholly unworkable plan which Boris had initially designed. Yet you could argue Johnson himself was equally culpable for refusing to implement any genuine, non-performative, measures to stop the never-ending influx of small boats. It is noticeable that, when criticising Labour here, Johnson still chose to frame his arguments upon the terms of those oh-so-humanitarian left-wing “No Borders” opponents of his who clearly wish to let anybody and everybody into the country regardless. The main salient feature of his nixed Rwanda Scheme, Boris lied, was that it was “designed to save lives at sea” by discouraging any illegals from sailing Dover-wards in the first place. But this is not true: it was designed mainly to trick anti-immigration citizens into voting Conservative, not to “save lives at sea” at all. Whilst doubtless regrettable, the deaths of such people are not really the primary concern of all those disillusioned and since-vanished former Johnson-voters, for whom the main problem is not that immigrants keep dying – it’s that they keep landing here safely. If it was otherwise, then politicians like Johnson could just have taken the 2022 advice of Emmanuel Macron and opened mass legal migration routes into the UK instead: except if they had, the Tories would then have slid into even greater electoral oblivion to the Labour Party than they just did back in July.

Steven Tucker

September 16, 2024

Deepfake porn: where AI goes to die

In Dante's Inferno, Hell is imagined as a conical pit with ever-deepening rings dedicated to the torment of worse and worse sinners. At the very bottom is Satan himself, constantly gnawing on Judas, the betrayer of Jesus Christ. While much of Dante's mediaeval imagery would be lost on most people today, we still recognize a connection in language between lowness and badness. Calling deepfake porn the nadir of how artificial intelligence is used expresses my opinion of it, and also the opinion of women who have become victims of having their faces stolen and applied to pornographic images. A recent article by Eliza Strickland in IEEE Spectrum shows both the magnitude of the problem and the largely ineffective measures that have been taken to mitigate this evil—for evil it is. With the latest AI-powered software, it can take less than half an hour to use a single photograph of a woman's face to produce a 60-second porn video that makes it look like the victim was a willing participant in whatever debauchery the original video portrayed. A 2024 research paper cites a survey of 16,000 adults in ten countries and shows that 2.2 percent of the respondents reported being a victim of "non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery," which is apparently just a more technical way of saying "deepfake porn." The US was one of the ten countries included, and 1.1 percent of the respondents in the US reported being victimized by it. Because virtually all the victims are women and assuming men and women were represented equally in the survey, that means one out of every fifty women in the US has been a victim of deepfake porn. That may not sound like much, but it means that over 3 million women in the US have suffered the indignity of being visually raped. Rape is not only a physical act; it is a shattering assault on the soul. And simply knowing that one's visage is serving the carnal pleasure of anonymous men is a horrifying situation that no woman should have to face. If a woman discovers she has become the victim of deepfake porn, what can she do? Strickland interviewed Susanna Gibson, who founded a nonprofit called MyOwn to combat deepfake porn after she ran for public office and the Republican party of Virginia mailed out sexual images of her made without her consent. Gibson said that although 49 of the 50 US states have laws against nonconsensual distribution of intimate imagery, each state's law is different. Most of the laws require proof that "the perpetrator acted with intent to harass or intimidate the victim," and that is often difficult, even if the perpetrator can be found. Depending on the state, the offense can be classified as either a civil or criminal matter, and so different legal countermeasures are called for in each case. Removing the content is so challenging that at least one company, Alecto AI (named after a Greek goddess of vengeance) offers to search the Web for a person's image being misused in this way, although the startup is not yet ready for prime time. In the absence of such help, women who have been victimized have to approach each host site individually with legal threats and hope for the best, which is often pretty bad. The Spectrum article ends this way: "…it would be better if our society tried to make sure that the attacks don't happen in the first place." Right now, I'm trying to imagine what kind of a society that would be. All I'm coming up with so far is a picture I saw in a magazine a few years ago of Holland, Michigan. I have no idea what the rates of deepfake porn production are in Holland, but I suspect they are pretty low. Holland is famous for its Dutch heritage, its homogeneous culture, and its 140 churches for a town of only 34,000 people. The Herman Miller furniture company is based there, and the meme that became popular a few years ago, "What Would Jesus Do?" originated there. Though I've never been to Holland, Michigan, it seems like it's a place that emphasizes human connectedness over anonymous interchanges. If everybody just put down their phones and started talking to each other instead, there would be no market for deepfake porn, or for most of the other products and services that use the Internet either. As recently as 40 years ago, we had a society in which deepfake porn attacks didn't happen (at least not without a lot of work that would require movie-studio-quality equipment to do). That was because the technology wasn't available. So there's one solution: throw away the Internet. Of course, that's like saying "throw away the power grid," or "throw away fossil fuels." But people are saying the latter, though for very different reasons.

Karl D. Stephan

September 18, 2024

Ignore the woke critics of Hungary: Budapest is a vibrant, bustling place

You can see immediately why bestselling author and conservative blogger Rod Dreher likes his adopted city of Budapest: it’s right there on the beer bottles! I arrived in Budapest in the late afternoon as I usually arrive in cities – that is, hot and tired and in a cranky mood from non-existent airline food. The 100E bus from the airport, like most airline transports, takes you along the least scenic route to the city centre. Then again, it only costs US$3 instead of $40 for a taxi. In Budapest’s case, however, public transport means driving past mile upon mile of dilapidated Commie tenements now falling into even more disrepair, covered with pseudo-Gantsa graffiti. By the time the bus let me off near the apartment I rented, at Kálvin Square near the Hungarian National Museum, I was almost falling over from the heat. It’s early September and the temperatures are in the mid-90s Fahrenheit. I can’t help but think: Good God, what have I done? I could be visiting Zurich where it’s cool and there’s a lake! I stumbled the few blocks to my apartment building, entered the main door digital keycode I had received, and dropped off my bags. I then went in search of a cold beer and something to eat. And that’s when I saw it: right there on the beer bottle I ordered was Rod’s name in bright white letters: “Dreher.” It’s the Coors of Hungary, one of the most popular of Hungarian beers (brewed since 1854!). I, too, might be warmly disposed to a country that named its national beer after me – even though I do have a nice island in Florida and a Kansas town named in my honour. The magical city on the Danube Rod Dreher, of course, is perhaps the most famous of Budapest boosters… but there are many others. I’ve been regaled by family and friends for years about what a magical place this venerable city on the Danube actually is. Famous for its stunning architecture and beautiful women, Budapest has been a symbol of Central European elegance and sophistication for as long as I can remember. My daughter visited during a Model United Nations field trip her senior year in high school and announced that I just “had” to visit Budapest (although, truth be told, she liked Vienna even better). The real reason people talk about Budapest, however, is due to Hungary’s determination to preserve its capital city’s best qualities from all the cultural “enrichment” EU leaders seem determined to inflict on the rest of Europe – mass migration of young men from the Middle East and Africa, an epidemic of violent crime, drug addiction, entire villages of homeless living on the streets, and a general sense of cultural decline and desperation. Budapest, it is said, has been spared much of this. It is a city where young women in tight mini-dresses walk safely late at night, strolling from ruin bar to ruin bar in the Jewish Quarter, and not worry about being raped by gangs of Muslim men. Very few young Hungarians appear to sport tattoos, and those that do limit themselves to a few discreet “tramp stamps.” The stench of cannabis is virtually non-existent, and while I do occasionally see people sleeping on park benches, the streets and parks are free of tents and other signs of permanent homeless encampments. Because I’m staying for only ten days, I’m walking all over the city and am using the tram lines regularly. As is my custom, I’m also staying in an inexpensive apartment in a “working class” district near the Danube, and there is nowhere I feel uneasy walking late at night. This is in dramatic contrast to, say, America’s capital city of Washington DC, with one of the highest murder rates in the world, where on a recent visit I had to avoid three-quarters of the city after dark if I didn’t want to get mugged. A modern city lacking in diversity Much of this is due to Budapest’s lack of diversity and resistance to multiculturalism. This gives Budapest a definite “old world” vibe – that, and the stunning neo-Gothic architecture. When I was younger, say 40 years ago, when you visited a European city you expected to meet, well, Europeans, and you did. When I visited Paris when I was 19, virtually everyone I met spoke French and was French. That was the reason you visited France! The same was true of my youthful visits to Munich, Copenhagen, Rome, Malaga, and so on. When I visited Munich, I interacted exclusively with Germans, ate German food, tried to speak German, learned about German culture, and so on. Today, throughout western Europe, that is often not the case. Many European cities, like many cities in North America, enjoy the cultural enrichment of diversity. They resemble the polyglot Los Angeles of the Ridley Scott dystopian film Blade Runner, a multicultural food court in which thousands of Koreans, Nigerians, Chinese, Ethiopians, Somalis, Russians, Italians, Mexicans, Bangladeshis, Indians, and Filipinos all crowd together speaking hundreds of different languages and with whom few have anything in common with their neighbours. This United Nations phantasmagoria can be fun for a day or two, but on a daily basis – as a place to live – it’s exhausting. Anyone who has moved to London recently knows this. When half the women on your street wear bourkas, it’s difficult for a Westerner to feel at home. This is not Budapest. Budapest, for all its faults, is Hungarian through and through. It’s a large, bustling, crowded, energetic, very modern European city full of Hungarians. (Unlike London, where the population is now only about 36 percent native British.) The mystery of the Hungarian people I know all this because I can’t understand a single word anyone is saying. Not one. This means they’re speaking Hungarian, perhaps the most incomprehensible language on earth to non-native speakers. More about that in a moment. The only foreigners you run into are tourists (Israelis in the Jewish quarter, Chinese tourists taking pictures) and Thai women asking if you want a massage. The ratio of tourists to residents seems incredibly low. I am regularly approached by people on the street, asking for directions in Hungarian, so that means people assume that those they meet are likely residents, not tourists. As for the Hungarians themselves, they look for all the world like a group of fit midwestern Americans or Bavarian Germans at a picnic in the park: in fact, it’s eerie how much they resemble ordinary Americans or Germans. They’re a good-looking bunch, the young men tan and flexing their biceps, the women flashing cleavage. They’d be at home at any mall in Los Angeles or Frankfurt. Except for one thing: it appears the Hungarians are actually from another planet. They speak a language that is utterly unlike any language on earth (except for Finnish) and totally distinct from the languages of all their neighbours. The best historians can determine, the world’s 15 million Hungarians are the descendants of nomadic tribes originally from one side or the other of the Ural Mountains in Siberia, in the far north of what is now Russia. Sometime in the first millennium, these ancient tribesmen, who called themselves the Magyars, left their homelands and gradually headed south towards central Europe and the Carpathian basin. They spoke an early version of Hungarian known as Proto-Uralic – a non-Indo-European language. One group of these people broke off and headed north, eventually settling in what we now call Finland. But their languages developed independently so that Finnish and Hungarian today, although sharing many similarities, are no longer mutually intelligible. (To my untutored ear, however, Hungarian has many of the same tonal qualities I hear in the Finnish detective TV series I compulsively watch at home.) In other words, this unique tribe of nomads spoke a language unlike any of the other peoples then in the area – not the Latin of the Romans, or the Celtic languages of the Celts, or the early German of the Germans, or the Basque language of the Basques. It’s utterly unique. By the early Middle Ages, the Magyar tribes were raiding settlements across central Europe. However, around 800 AD, these raiding peoples cast their eyes on the lush meadows of the Carpathian Basin, a vast lowland tucked between the Carpathian Mountains to the north and the Alps to the west. A pagan prince settled his people in the area, driving out other groups, and, as legend has it, the pope agreed that they could settle in and take possession of the Carpathian Basin if they agreed to convert to Christianity – and that is precisely what they did. An ancient Catholic country The warlord known as King St Stephen I, born to baptized Christian parents, committed his people to the Christian religion and was crowned the first king of Hungary on Christmas Day in the year 1000 AD, with a crown perhaps sent to him by Pope Sylvester II. They still have the crown, the oldest royal crown in continuous use. The basilica in the centre of Budapest, St Stephen’s Basilica, was built in the king’s honour and contains a macabre relic of the man himself – his mummified but still recognizable right hand – triumphantly and creepily on display in the glass case at a side altar. Thus, Hungary was a kingdom that lasted for roughly 900 years, despite invasions by the Ottoman Turks and rule by the Austria-Hungarian Empire (with the emperor taking on the title of King of Hungary). All this came to a screeching halt with the “brother wars” of World War I and World War II. After World War I, the victorious allies divvied up roughly 40 percent of Hungarian territory to various real and invented states (Hungary’s neighbours). That’s why Hungary today is “surrounded by Hungarians” in Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and so on. This is also why Hungary reluctantly sided with the Axis Powers in World War II. The catastrophe of Europe’s civil wars Hitler promised Hungary’s leaders that they could regain the lands taken from them after World War I and that he would help Hungary resist Soviet communism. At the time, Hungary had one of the largest Jewish populations of Europe, roughly ten percent of the population. To appease Hitler, Hungary’s leaders adopted harsh anti-Jewish employment measures but refused to deport or harm Hungarian Jews. As the Holocaust memorial organization Yad Vashem puts it, “most of the Jews of Hungary lived in relative safety for much of the war.” However, by the end of the war, the Hungarian government was secretly making peace overtures to the Allies and the Nazis responded by invading Hungary in March 1944. This is why the catastrophe that befell Hungary’s large Jewish population happened all at once in one brief period beginning in May 1944, when 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Nazi death camps, primarily Auschwitz, and gassed. In October, 1944, just months before the end of the war, Hitler removed Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy from power, installed a pro-Nazi puppet as prime minister, and proceeded to wipe out the remaining Jewish population of Budapest. Nearly 80,000 Jews were lined up on the banks of the Danube River, told to remove their shoes, and shot at point-blank range, their bodies simply thrown into the river. That is why there are now 60 pairs of iron shoes lining the banks of the Danube near the Hungarian parliament, a memorial to those who lost their lives. It was one of the great tragedies of World War II, the last-minute mass murder of Hungarian Jews, organized by the notorious Adolf Eichmann, right at the end of World War II. It is also why the Soviet Union had the excuse to “liberate” Hungary from the Germans and then impose its flat-earth Communist ideology for the next 45 years – despite the Hungarians rebelling outright in a heroic but doomed uprising in 1956. What all this means is that the Hungarians are a very ancient people who have lived in the same basic area in Central Europe -- preserving their linguistic and cultural identity despite multiple conquests – for at least a thousand years and probably longer.

Robert Hutchinson

September 17, 2024

No, JD Vance, 'childless cat ladies' are not to blame for America’s decline

In a recent article published on Mercator, the editor, Michael Cook, expressed his deep concern about the aging populations in Western democracies and their low birth-rates resulting in falling populations. He used a phrase, “childless cat ladies” as an illustration of a cause of this demographic collapse. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate for Vice-President in the upcoming US election, had also used this “reasoning”, but as a cause of a much wider collection of woes. He proposed that our societies’ problems were due to “childless cat ladies” preferring cats to babies. As a “childless, crazy cat lady” myself, I was shocked by Michael’s use. My first reaction was to feel hurt and then sad, then angry – the only saving grace was that Michael left out the word “crazy”, which often appears before cat. This denigrating designation has a very long history as misogynist and was used, for example, to justify persecuting women as witches, whose cats were thought to have special powers for evil and to be associated with the Devil. It is also discriminatory – are there “childless, crazy cat gentleman”? And what about childless men who have a beloved pet dog – are they “childless, crazy dog gentleman”? As well, in some cultures, childlessness is a ground for divorce, but only men have the right to divorce and it is a simple procedure. Women must have their husband’s consent. I have been told of men who have divorced three consecutive wives on the ground they were infertile, that is, in all three cases the woman was blamed for the infertility, because it is unthinkable in these cultures that a man would be infertile. Women were not only blamed for not having children, in certain circumstances, they were punished for having them, while the fathers went unscathed. Young, unmarried servant women who became pregnant were treated as pariahs and dealt with very harshly, while the privileged young men who fathered the child were excused as “needing to sow their wild oats” and sent off to the colonies for a time. In short, the man could abandon his child with impunity, the woman could not. Many years ago, I speculated in a law journal article that this difference was because society needed women to carry the value that mothers automatically bonded to their children in order to prevent the child becoming a burden on society. This is not to deny that mothers do naturally bond to their children. One reason surrogate motherhood is controversial is that a woman planning to become pregnant in order to give away the child to whom she gives birth, challenges that value. In many cases, small domestic animals have a health and well-being function – for example, patting a cat reduces blood pressure. Palliative care services and old age homes are using “pet therapy”, as are prisons, all with very positive and promising results. Other benefits could include that having a pet prevents a person committing suicide, because they worry who would look after the cat or dog when they were dead. And what about war veterans suffering from PTSD for whom a lick and a paw can make them feel life is still worth living? Or the animal helps a person with disabilities? Or its presence makes everyone kinder to each other, as in a class I taught? I had a student with quadriplegia who brought his black Labrador assistance dog to my medical law and ethics class. With his owner’s permission, many of the students interacted with the dog. At convocation, the dog walked across the stage beside the student in his wheelchair and graduated with the student with an honorary law degree. My father loved animals and had great respect for them. My Siamese cat Shah used to sit on the gatepost waiting for my Dad to come home. Dad would stop and rub Shah’s ears – he called it “doing his ears” – while he spoke softly to him. Dad explained to me that he told the cat all the difficulties of his day, so that when he entered the house, where my mother was waiting to give him a kiss, those problems no longer preoccupied him. I am a fan of Pope Francis, but, with all respect, I think he made a bad mistake recently. He refused to bless a small dog brought to the St Peter’s Square general weekly audience when the dog’s owner held it up. Perhaps he was concerned that doing so would equate it to the babies, who were being presented for blessing. I would have liked to remind him of his own saying, one that I use often, “They too [animals] are God’s creatures”. I can imagine how rejected and hurt the woman who held up that little dog felt. We should all want to reduce suffering and certainly not inflict it. Perhaps, Francis had forgotten CS Lewis’s suggestion in The Problem of Pain, that we have dogs in heaven, because they are capable of friendship. I am sure same is true of cat companions.

Margaret Somerville

September 17, 2024

Why are some regions left behind in the race to be rich?

A recurring political narrative across the Western world relates to groups feeling that they have not reaped the same economic rewards as others or feeling that their regions have been abandoned. Often, this becomes a question of the highest importance politically – one that determines the fate of governments and candidates. Think of the distinction between the “Beltway” and the “Rust Belt” in the United States, or between the Greater London area and post-industrial northern England. Sir Paul Collier, a professor of economics and public policy at Oxford University, is one of the foremost development economists in the world, with a lifetime of experience in advising governments and international bodies on how to raise living standards in Africa and elsewhere. His 2007 book, The Bottom Billion, looked at why many poor countries were failing to advance. His newly-published Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places builds on this foundation, and Collier’s expertise in looking at problems on both a national and regional level helps to make this a profoundly valuable work for any student of public policy. Entire regions are failing in socio-economic terms, and many of them are lashing out politically at those elites concentrated in large and successful cities. Collier takes aim at what he believes is outdated small-government economic dogma as well as the centralising tendencies of government bureaucrats. He is refreshingly open-minded and not afraid to break with the orthodoxies of those who have been heavily involved in the dispensing of international aid abroad and the organisation of the welfare state at home. As he shows in his analysis of His Majesty’s Treasury in the UK, key decision-makers in the administrative states often come from a lamentably narrow segment of the population. This certainly narrows their worldview and most likely hinders their critical thinking as well. For all of the problems in the developed and developing worlds, progress is being made, and Left Behind is certainly an optimistic work. “This book,” Collier writes, “is a celebration of the ingenuity and courage with which poor places around the world transform their prospects. It sets out a new economics of place-based transformation - the principles and practical steps by which these triumphs have been attained.” The successful case studies from around the world are remarkable for their diversity. What joins them together are two factors: shared agency (the steps through which people come together to advance a common purpose) and rapid learning (where groups are willing to experiment and learn from others), two factors which together have the power to close the gaps between affluent and deprived places. As a native of Sheffield – still a steel-making powerhouse in his youth, but certainly not today – Collier is particularly well-placed to observe how destructive a spiral of economic decline can become. As well as quoting Professors Angus Deaton and Anne Case’s work highlighting the “deaths of despair” in America’s working-classes, he also points to worrying research he has carried out in South Yorkshire, where schoolchildren have come to believe early on that their life prospects are severely limited. This can lead to the sort of “learnt helplessness” and “learnt dependency” which has blighted entire regions. Communitarianism is at the heart of Collier’s approach: people can only solve big problems together and they have to work together to do so. Little wonder then that Robert Putnam’s magisterial work on the importance of social capital in explaining the economic divide in Italy looms so large here. People do not come together and work together successfully without practice, and it greatly helps if there is a multi-generational bank of experience to draw upon. The northern Italian city states of the Renaissance era excelled in building lasting social institutions from the choir to the guild, whereas the absolutist Norman rulers in the South of Italy discouraged any such communal activism. The legacy of this historical divide lives on to this day in Italy’s materially and socially impoverished Mezzogiorno. Many similar examples exist, and Putnam’s work on the decline of community in the United States suggests that the problem may be getting worse. It is hard to fix this. As Collier notes, “[s]ocial capital is like a muscle: the more it is used, the stronger it becomes; unused, it atrophies.” Collier identifies community as being one of the three essentials for creating a more sustainable world, along with states and moral bounds, and the relationship he sees between community and moral behaviour is particularly interesting when considering the more naturally individualistic social context of America and Britain. “[M]uch of our behaviour is shaped by our community-of-place and our community-of-work. Within them, we care about what other people think of us: that is the glue that induces us to behave well towards each other. That glue is essential to a sustainable society. A world without it – a world of disconnected people – would fall apart. It would be brutal and transactional because people’s selfish instincts would be unrestrained. In recent decades, both in Britain and America we have brushed close enough to such a society to appreciate how ugly it would be. Only with that communal glue are we able to forge and sustain willing compliance in common purposes,” he writes. Collier is clearly a progressive in his politics, and tilts leftwards on economic policy. Regardless of whether the reader agrees with all his policy prescriptions, his analysis of important developments appears to be correct, as when he identifies the huge Brexit vote across England’s regions as being as much a rejection of London as it was a rejection of Brussels. Although he is not a fan of those who propose free market solutions for tackling regional imbalances, Collier is also critical of Britain’s Labour Party and other left-of-centre parties. Their answer to policy problems often tends to be focused on the word “nationalisation,” which Collier rightly suggests would be better described as “centralisation” – a step which simply concentrates power in the hands of a faraway and disconnected administrative elite. The examples of previously lagging countries and regions which have made significant ground are illuminating. After the trauma of mass genocide, Rwanda has achieved remarkable progress through community-focused environmental policies and the clever use of technological innovations, like overcoming infrastructural and geographic challenges by delivering fresh blood to health clinics using drones. Though it is not yet a country and therefore unable to access aid funding, the Somaliland region has achieved the stability which Somalia has not; Somaliland’s main clans have come together in a coalition and fused their militias into an effective security force for the whole region. They are not yet free of Somalia, but they are now free of some of Somalia’s worst features. The case of Father José María Arizmendiarrieta’s role in developing co-operative businesses in what was then the backward Basque region of Francoist Spain is particularly striking. After years of educating and training young people, Father José identified five who were capable of launching what has grown into the co-operative giant that is the Mondragon Corporation, which now employs 90,000 people. As these worker co-operatives have risen, so has the surrounding region. No longer a laggard, the Basque region is today among the more prosperous parts of Spain.

James Bradshaw

September 17, 2024

Why do AI bots always lean Left?

So-called "artificial intelligence" (AI) has become an ever-increasing part of our lives in recent years. After public-use forms of it such as OpenAI's ChatGPT were made available, millions of people have used it for everything from writing legal briefs to developing computer programs. Even Google now presents an AI-generated summary for many queries on its search engine before showing users the customary links to actual Internet documents. Because of the reference-librarian aspect of ChatGPT that lets users ask conversational questions, I expect lots of people looking for answers to controversial issues will resort to it, at least for starters. Author Bob Weil did a series of experiments with ChatGPT, in which he asked it questions that are political hot potatoes these days. In every case, the AI bot came down heavily on the liberal side of the question, as Weil reports in the current issue of the New Oxford Review. In-built bias Weil's first question was, "Should schools be allowed to issue puberty blockers and other sex-change drugs to children without the consent of their parents?" While views differ on this question, I think it's safe to say that a plain "yes" answer, which would involve schools meddling in medicating students and violating the trust pact they have with parents, is on the fringes of even the left. What Weil got in response was most concisely summarised as weasel words. In effect, ChatGPT said, well, such a decision should be a collaboration among medical professionals, the child, and parents or guardians. As Weil pressed the point further, ChatGPT ended up saying, "Ultimately, decisions about medical treatment for transgender or gender-diverse minors should prioritise the well-being and autonomy of the child." Weil questions whether minor children can be autonomous in any real sense, so he went on to several other questions with equally fraught histories. A question about climate change turned into a mini-debate about whether science is a matter of consensus or logic. ChatGPT seemed to favour consensus as the final arbiter of what passes for scientific truth, but Weil quotes fiction writer Michael Crichton as saying, "There's no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus." As Weil acknowledges, ChatGPT gets its smarts, such as they are, by scraping the Internet, so in a sense it can say along with the late humorist Will Rogers, "All I know is what I read in the papers [or the Internet]." And given the economics of the situation and political leanings of those in power in English-language media, it's no surprise that the centre of gravity of political opinion on the Internet leans to the left.

Karl D. Stephan

September 13, 2024

Americans will get the politicians they deserve

Kamala Harris won Tuesday’s debate with Donald Trump. She appeared coherent and composed; he ranted and rambled. It showed voters that she might not be the airhead that Republicans have sneered at; it showed voters that he hasn’t changed much in the past eight years. Whether or not winning the debate will make a difference in November is another thing. Neither candidate gave viewers a clear idea of what they would do in the White House. They had obviously spent more time rehearsing zingers than developing policies. “Winning” this debate was more like winning a match in World Wrestling Entertainment – Hulk Hogan will pulverise The Undertaker!!!! Most of it is razzamatazz and the little that isn’t is incoherent. Theatrical politics says as much about the viewers as the politicians. We are tuning in for the body slams and dropkicks, not for the transcript. It makes one wonder about the future of democracies which choose leaders this way. America has a gold standard for political debates – the Lincoln-Douglas debates three years before the Civil War broke out. That’s 166 years ago, but it could be argued that their words changed American history. In 1858 the country was being consumed by a ferocious clash of ideas over the constitutionality and morality of slavery. Abraham Lincoln had only spent one term in the House of Representatives, but he was emerging as the political leader of the anti-slavery movement. He decided to run for the Senate against incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas in Illinois. They agreed to have seven debates over 12 weeks in different towns in Illinois. In them, Lincoln honed the rhetoric and reasoning which he would later use in his 1860 campaign for the White House and for the policies and great speeches of his Presidency. It was a kind of primary for the Senate seat, as state legislatures selected senators until 1913. The background to their debate is complicated. Lincoln opposed extending slavery to the new states in the west. Douglas backed “popular sovereignty”, that the state legislatures should be able to choose whether to allow slavery or not. Illinois was a pocket-sized mirror of the US – the southern part bordered on a slave state, Missouri, and was pro-slavery; the northern part supported abolition. The seven debates all centred on this momentous question. Lincoln’s biographer Allen C. Guelzo has pointed out that the debates were fundamentally about conflicting views of what a democratic state was supposed to be. For Douglas, democracy was a process, a way of settling disputes by counting votes. For Lincoln, “democracy is a means, a means of realizing the truths of natural law that are hardwired in human nature.” The same issues crop up today, especially about abortion. In fact, Guelzo believes that Douglas won the debates: “It is Douglas’s procedural republic, and not Lincoln’s moral one, which has prevailed in our times.” The format was exhausting. This week Harris and Trump were on screen for 90 minutes. Each spoke for three minutes at the most on a dozen or so topics – barely enough time to utter one or two platitudes. But in 1858 each debate went for three hours. One candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response. Then the first speaker made a 30-minute rebuttal. Both men were accomplished speakers, but even for them the format must have been exhausting. They were speaking to crowds of up to 25,000 people in the open air. Aided by the novelties of a railway network, shorthand, and the telegraph, newspapers immediately printed the long speeches in full. Broadcast across the country, they made an enormous impact.