the grand narrative that human greed and profligacy are changing the world’s climate apocalyptically, a sin that can only be appeased through public confession and self-sacrifice to the Goddess, Gaia -- a Grand Narrative that has now spectacularly collapsed before our eyes, even though certain politicians are as ever well behind the curve and are currently stranded alongside the professionally compromised activists who will never admit their epic error -- Stott observes that an explanation for the phenomenon can be provided by the psychological theory of Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’: As our basic needs are fulfilled and Daily Mail, 26 July 2010 As the probation service seeks to defend itself over the Jon Venables debacle, there is a wider sense that this country is simply losing the plot over law and order. Venables, one of the two children who tortured and murdered toddler James Bulger in 1993, was returned to jail last week following his conviction for downloading and distributing child pornography after nine years out of prison on licence. It is, of course, extremely disturbing that such a high-profile criminal was allowed to spiral out of control like this while under the supposedly close supervision of a senior probation officer. But even if the probation service was at fault, the failure here clearly goes far deeper. For Venables had twice been arrested in 2008 — over a drunken street brawl and for possessing cocaine. At that stage, clearly off the rails, he should have been recalled to prison. But the key point is that this whole spiral of drink, drugs, violence and paedophilia demonstrates the terrible mistake made in releasing him on licence in 2001, since, as we can now see, he was profoundly unable to live a normal, stable life. The only reason he was released was the obsessive concern that he shouldn’t be transferred at the age of 18 from a children’s home into the prison system — a concern rooted in the visceral belief that prison only ever makes bad people worse. This belief has now progressed far beyond the beard-and-sandals brigade into the heart of the political and criminal justice establishment — so much so that it has led even ministers from the party traditionally identified with ‘law and order’ to say some extremely silly things. Thus the Tory Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said there were far too many people in prison since crime was falling. When it was pointed out that crime may be falling preciselybecause so many people were in jail, he blustered that the fall was more likely to be a result of the economy booming. But that couldn’t be so either, because the crime rate fell during the recession, too. This perverse hostility to imprisonment was then compounded by the Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt’s howler that the UK locks up more people than any other European country. But the only valid comparator is the number of people jailed per crimes committed. And by that measure, high-crime Britain jails fewer people per 1,000 of the population than European countries such as France, Greece or Spain. This anti-prisons minister seems determined indeed to ‘hug a hoodie’. His proposal to restore party nights and comedy workshops for prisoners would have been beyond caricature even for the Labour government. This idea was instantly slapped down by David Cameron. But now, Blunt is reporttionedly considering reducing sentences for thousands of offenders if they make personal apologies to their victims — an idea called ‘restorative justice’, yet another fad with no proven record of success. Well might people be thinking that the entire system seems to be conspiring to frustrate any meaningful concept of justice. Last week also saw the unfortunate decision to bring no charges after the death of Ian Tomlinson, who lost his life after being shoved to the ground by a police officer during the G20 demonstrations last year. The Director of Public Prosecutions said conflicting medical evidence made a prosecution impossible. Indeed, the evidence did conflict. The first doctor who examined Tomlinson said he died of a heart attack. But although two other doctors subsequently said he probably died from injuries he had sustained, they had not examined Tomlinson’s intact body. The DPP said he therefore couldn’t bring a prosecution because he could not say the case was provable beyond reasonable doubt. To which a very reasonable response is to say that, with public concern so high over the manner in which Tomlinson met his death, that conflict of evidence should have been put to a jury to decide. But in fairness to the DPP, he had no alternative. Prosecutors have to be able to prove that a defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, because the CPS acts as a gatekeeper to the court process and cannot just leave it to a jury to decide. As for bringing a charge of common assault against the officer who shoved Tomlinson, the time spent investigating the prospect of a manslaughter charge meant the prosecution service had exceeded the time limit for any assault charge. Like it or not, those are the rules under which the prosecution service operates. And here we begin to get to the heart of what is going wrong across the whole justice system. Ironically, the prosecution service was set up in the first place only because of a loss of faith in the police arising from a string of miscarriage of justice cases back in the Eighties. These created the perception that the police were out of control and could no longer be trusted to bring cases to court. Instead of tackling headon the failings within policing culture, the government of the day took power away from the police by establishing the prosecution service to stand as a filter between them and the court process. This merely put a layer of of ten inadequate bureaucracy in the way of testing a case before a jury. Along with performance targets imposed on the police by Whitehall, it also helped to wreck police morale. The police retreated from the streets and turned into desk-bound bureaucrats instead, thus eroding their professionalism still further. In addition, among those criminals who were brought to court, fewer were given punishments that appeared to fit the crime, as prison sentences were cut because the jails were full to bursting. Governments refused to commit to building enough prisons because of an alliance between the desire to cut costs and a belief that took hold that prison didn’t work. The conviction grew instead that punishing criminals at all was merely a primitive and counter-productive instinct. The result has been chaos, resulting in the emergence of aninjustice system. People living in high-crime black spots have been abandoned by courts refusing to send criminals to jail, a probation service which seems to believe its purpose in life is to uphold criminals’ ‘rights’, and police who have had the professional stuffing knocked out of them. How can all this have happened? The fundamental cause has been a collective loss of nerve within the British establishment — and a loss of belief in law and order itself. We can see this most starkly with the belief among even some senior police officers that the main problem with illegal drugs is the law rather than the drugs themselves. Here’s the paradox. Those who take a ‘soft’ approach on prisons or sentencing or upholding the law against drugs are said to be progressive. But, in fact, they actually represent a denial of progress. Those who believe prisons can rehabilitate people, that stiff sentences uphold justice or that policing can prevent crime, all believe society can be made better. Those who think that imprisonment or laws against drugs are useless are defeatist reactionaries who have lost faith in human redemption, and believe society must instead resign itself to the harm done by crime. Unfortunately, far from addressing this profound cultural distortion and demoralisation, Conservative ministers appear to be part of the problem. When their traditional commitment to law and order appears to have become something of which they are now ashamed, what price the Big Society? Jewish Chronicle, 22 July 2010 Among those bewildered and horrified by the fact that Israel has been turned into a pariah state, it is common to hear complaints about the uselessness of Israeli PR. But this is to miss the point by a mile. Yes, there are many examples of amateurishness or inexplicable silence on the part of Israel’s hasbarah effort, although it is getting better. But the real problem is far deeper. It rests not on the presentation of Israel’s case. It is rooted instead in Israel’s whole strategy for dealing with the pressures upon it, and the way in which it has conceptualised the existential threat it faces from Arab rejectionism. The flawed way it thinks about its own situation has locked it into a vice from which it cannot escape. The problem has been elegantly summed up by Robert Aumann, an Israeli-American who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2005 for his work on conflict and co-operation through Game Theory analysis. In an article on aish.com, he suggests that Israel has fallen into the trap of the Blackmailer Paradox. Rational Israel is being forced to act irrationally, essentially through a chronic lack of confidence in its own position when faced with an implacable opponent. He uses the analogy of Shimon and Reuben representing the Palestinians and the Israelis who are dividing up a suitcase of money between them. Shimon declares unreasonably he will grab nine-tenths of the money. But, because he says take it or leave it, Reuben is forced to agree to this injustice just to avoid ending up with no money at all. The present Israeli approach is based on precisely this Blackmailer Paradox. Israel believes that some kind of agreement with the Arabs must be reached at all costs because the present situation is intolerable. But, at every negotiation, the Arabs take positions that are as unbending as they are unreasonable. So Israel is forced to yield to this blackmail because it fears that otherwise that it will leave the negotiating table with nothing. The solution, says Aumann, is for Israel to employ correctly the principles of Game Theory. This means first accepting that in the immediate future it may well leave the negotiating table with nothing and that this is better than accepting an erosion of its security. Second, it should realise that repeating a game many times changes the calculation made by each player. Israel’s refusal to compromise would thus alter the balance of power because the Arabs would realise that they might end up with nothing unless they compromise. Third, what is absolutely crucial is the player’s unshakeable stance. This not only strengthens him in his conviction that he is right but, more crucially still, it even manages to convince his opponent, too. It thus totally undermines that opponent, forcing him to act irrationally against his own interests in order to reach a compromise. This is exactly what has happened to Israel. Faced with unjust Arab intransigence, it has been bamboozled over the years into making one compromise after another. The tragic result is not only that the peace it so desperately seeks becomes ever more elusive. Israel also finds itself damned around the world for resisting an unjust Arab cause because, by failing to undermine the implacable Arab stance, it allows that cause to appear justified. As Aumann observes, the situation will be resolved only if we convince ourselves of the justice of our views. Israel should refuse to negotiate against its own interests, which tacitly acknowledges that the Arabs have a case. Instead, it should make the argument from justice and articulate the full extent of the great wrong inflicted by its global tormentors. Israel needs to reconceptualise the rules of the game it is playing. But, in order to convince the rest of the world, it must first convince itself.
Monday, 26th July 2010
The pathological hierarchy of humbug
9:47pm
The great and wise Professor Philip Stott, who has painstakingly charted the anthropogenic global warming scam since it burst into public consciousness more than two decades ago, haspenned some reflections on the cause of such epidemic derangement. Depicting it as
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Tuesday, 27 July 2010
July 26, 2010
How the British justice system lost the plot
July 26, 2010
Israel and the Blackmailer Paradox
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