Utopia, you are standing in it!

Part III

Accession to the British Throne.

Though both England and Scotland recognised Anne as their queen, only the English Parliament had settled on Sophia, Electress of Hanover, as the heir presumptive. The Parliament of Scotland (the Estates) had not formally settled the succession question for the Scottish throne. In 1703, the Estates passed a bill declaring that their selection for Queen Anne’s successor would not be the same individual as the successor to the English throne, unless England granted full freedom of trade to Scottish merchants in England and its colonies.

Georg-Ludwig, Elector of Hanover

At first Royal Assent was withheld, but the following year Anne capitulated to the wishes of the Estates and assent was granted to the bill, which became the Act of Security 1704. In response the English Parliament passed measures that threatened to restrict Anglo-Scottish trade and cripple the Scottish economy if the Estates did…

Book Review

Jason Brennan, Why Not Capitalism? (Routledge, 2014) 120pp.

In 2009 G.A (Jerry) Cohen’s short book, Why Not Socialism? defending socialism was posthumously published by Princeton University Press. Jason Brennan’s book, just published by Routledge, is a response to Cohen. A more accurate title for the book might have been Why G.A. Cohen is Wrong. However, as Brennan is defending capitalism, and no doubt with an eye on sales, his own choice of title more suits his purpose.

While Brennan’s book can be read and understood by those without the background, it is a work of political philosophy and will be more appreciated by those with at least an elementary background in the work of twentieth century political philosophers, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, and G.A. Cohen.

A similarity between Cohen’s book and Brennan’s book is the cover design. If a book defending socialism can have a single red…

This is a cross post. It was originally published on Harry’s Place on July 2nd 2012, 2:27 pm

Roger Rosewell had been a full-time worker for International Socialists, the forerunner organisation to of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), for five years in the 1970s.  He knew how the Party operated because he had been an operator. He used to direct shopfloor members and shop stewards in how to manipulate disputes between workers and management. He ultimately defected from the party and in 1982 his booklet, Dealing with the Marxist Threat to Industry, was published. It was here that Rosewell accused Trotskyist groups of “systematic, undemocratic, elitist manipulation” of workers. Reporting on this publication, John Ezard for The Guardian described the tactics that  Rosewell explained that the SWP and other Trotskysists used:

• Positioning shop stewards so that only they could see and count a show of hands.
• Deliberate cramming of indoor meetings into insufficiently large halls without seats so that workers could not see around them and could…

On March 23, 2017, I gave a talk to the philosophy society at Birkbeck College, University of London on feminist epistemology.  My talk was mainly about the feminist theory of domination and power as outlined by Catharine MacKinnon.  While I did not read my talk, had I read it, what I would have said would have been what is on the PDF below.

Ezra – Feminist Epistemology – An Expose – Talk – Birkbeck 170323

Not the latest model
Obviously bribery is thought to be the only way, short of coercion, to appeal to reluctant drivers who see clearly enough the various disadvantages and high cost of EVs they were never asked if they wanted to buy. Under cover of the virus situation they plan to pour more public money down their ideological drain to appease the greenblob.
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It has been reported that Boris Johnson is considering launching a car scrappage scheme to boost the automotive industry, says The Shropshire Star.

Motoring and environmental groups have welcomed the prospect of a new car scrappage scheme encouraging motorists to switch to electric vehicles.

The AA described it as “fantastic” while Greenpeace said it would be “moving in the right direction”.

One of the misguided goals of the recent protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd are the calls not just for “defunding” police departments, but to abolish them entirely. Now it’s often not clear what “defunding” means, but sometimes protestors conceive of it as diverting money from the police force to social programs.

In the disturbing video below, Jacob Frey, the impossibly young mayor of Minneapolis (he’s 38), is asked by a protest leader if he’ll commit to defunding/dismantling the city’s police department. When he says he can’t commit to that, he was booed and driven away (this despite his promises to make “deep structural reforms” in the police department and admission that the city’s police culture was imbued with systemic racism). This is what happens when you try to compromise with wokeness. There is no compromise, and perhaps a mayor can’t commit to stuff like that with a…

Rishi Sunak is having a relatively good crisis. The Chancellor and his team certainly deserve plenty of credit for the way the Treasury has shielded the large majority of businesses and jobs during an unprecedented slump in economic activity. But this task has been made easier by the broad consensus on the appropriate policies and by the seemingly unlimited amounts of public money that the Government has been willing to spend. Now, the context is changing.

In particular, the focus of economic policy is shifting towards supporting the recovery as the lockdown is lifted. This is likely to open up tensions between those who think the best way to revive the economy is for the Government to spend and borrow even more – which seems to be the political instinct of some at No.10 – and the Treasury’s traditional caution.

We appear to be getting a taste of this already…

Part II

Though George has his mistress Sophia-Dorothea had her own romance with the Swedish Count Philip-Christoph von Königsmarck. Threatened with the scandal of an elopement, the Hanoverian court, including George’s brothers and mother, urged the lovers to desist, but to no avail. According to diplomatic sources from Hanover’s enemies, in July 1694 the Swedish count was killed, possibly with George’s connivance, and his body thrown into the river Leine weighted with stones.

George I of Great Britain

The murder was claimed to have been committed by four of Ernst-August’s courtiers, one of whom, Don Nicolò Montalbano, was paid the enormous sum of 150,000 thalers, about one hundred times the annual salary of the highest-paid minister. Later rumours supposed that Königsmarck was hacked to pieces and buried beneath the Hanover palace floorboards. However, sources in Hanover itself, including Sophia, denied any knowledge of Königsmarck’s whereabouts.

George’s marriage to Sophia-Dorothea was…

by William Quinn (Queen’s University, Belfast)

A special issue on the Tricentenary of the South Sea Bubble was published on The Economic History Review as open access, and it is available at this link

Edward Matthew Ward (1847) The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in ‘Change Alley in 1720. Available at Tate Gallery

In 1720, the British Parliament approved a proposal from the South Sea Company to manage the government’s outstanding debt. The Company agreed to issue shares, some of which would be bought using government annuities rather than cash. The Company would then pay the government a reduced rate of interest on these annuities. The government’s debt burden would be reduced, and in exchange, the Company believed it had gained the opportunity to establish itself as a competitor to the Bank of England (Kleer, 2012).

Superficially, the scheme didn’t make much sense. How would the public be convinced to…

For the last few nights, my wife and I have binged Netflix’s Medici series.*  It brought me back to Garrett Mattingly’s classic, RENAISSANCE DIPLOMACY which argued that the relationship and machinations between Italian city-states was a microcosm of the 20^th century in terms of actions resulting in numerous wars and plots.  It piqued my interest in one of the most important figures of the Renaissance, Lorenzo de’ Medici the subject of Miles J. Unger’s superb biography,  MAGNIFICO: THE BRILLIANT LIFE AND VIOLENT TIMES OF LORENZO DE’ MEDICI which argues that the Florentine leader was able to navigate the Italian city-states and Papal states surviving Papal, domestic Florentine, and other external plots by a Pope, a king, and a duke by employing his charm and diplomatic skill augmented by the occasional use of violence to preside over Florence, a city-state that supported and exhibited artistic brilliance in addition to the…

A reader shared this with me (thanks MP), I was unaware that it was online. From 7 years ago …

Recording of a debate held at the Institute of Physics, 4th Feb 2013. Co-organised by Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex and the UCL’s department of Science & Technology Studies.

Policymakers often talk up the importance of evidence-based policy, with increasing calls for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as the best way of testing whether particular interventions work. But finding and applying evidence in policy is anything but straightforard. Evidence alone rarely wins complex political arguments. Often this merely shifts the locus of debate to what counts as evidence.

Speakers: Roger Pielke Jr, Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder; Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet; Georgina Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems, University College London; Jonathan Breckon, Alliance for Useful Evidence.

Chair: James Wilsdon, Professor in…

Let’s continue with the open letter from the energy company Eneco (see previous post), in which its CEO complains that his company “felt obliged” to shut down some of their windmills despite it was windy. It is framed as the result of the “inflexibility” of nuclear power that pushes wind aside and, most importantly for this post, as a choice for better air and cleaner electricity (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

Renewable energy could provide half of our consumption. In itself this is a good prospect: better air and cleaner electricity from wind & sun. We should all be pleased with that.

The framing in the open letter made me wonder how much wind power was curtailed exactly? Also, assuming that nuclear power would get turned down a notch during the lockdown, how much cleaner would electricity production then get?

George I (George-Louis; German: Georg-Ludwig; May 28/June7, 1660 – June 11, 1727) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1 August 1714 and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover) in the Holy Roman Empire from 23 January 1698 until his death in 1727. He was the first British monarch of the House of Hanover. Under the old Julian Calendar (OS for Old Style) George I was born May 28 1660. When the Julian Calendar was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar (NS for New Style) his birthday was recognized as being June 7, 1660.

George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Imperial Elector of Hanover and of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

George was born in the city of Hanover in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the eldest son of Ernst-August, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and his wife, Sophia of the Palatinate of the Rhine…

So when global temperatures failed to behave as models expected due to inevitable but hard to predict natural variation, they were forced to re-think – or just think? The GWPF concludes, at the risk of stating the obvious: ‘The lesson of the hiatus is that we do not understand internal climatic variability as much as many think we do, and our predictive power is less than many believe.’
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Researchers from the Universities of Princeton, California, Tokyo, Kyushu and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, say the recent hiatus in global temperature increase has led to a surge in climate science.

The global effort to understand the global warming hiatus they say has led to increased understanding of some of the key metrics of global climate change such as global temperature and ice-cover.

Searching for an answer to the hiatus, they say, meant that the scientific community grappled…