Comment Archives for Paul Evans
Living in London but working all over Britain and Ireland. A left-leaning Labour Party member and blogger. I'm on twitter as @paul0evans1 and I blog mainly at the Local Democracy blog though I'm in lots of other places as well. I'm a massive fan of Google Reader - please follow me and share the better posts from your feed?
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Books
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Lessons in Cute Hoorism: “Graft was accepted, for you were taking from the British…”
I’ve been catching up on some reading, recently. Most pleasantly surprised by John Drennan’s latest opus from Gill and Macmillan, Cute Hoors and Pious Protestors… It’s early days yet, but I was struck by this paragraph, part of a dissection of Fianna Fail near the beginning: One of the more fatal consequences of our colonial [...] read our review »
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Do Words Matter?: Book Review of Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution – Debating Peace in Northern Ireland
I share many of the concerns of Andy Pollak, whose recent post ‘My Response to the Slugger Begrudgers’ zeroed in on the ‘relentless flow of negativity’ of some Slugger commentators. Pollak’s post was largely concerned with the medium of the blog. Indeed, I think the anonymity of the online world encourages extreme discourse and allows [...] read our review »
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Talking to a brick wall: how to make politicians listen?
It took me a long time to warm to advertising agencies. The first time I worked with one I was working in sales management on Fairy Washing Up Liquid. I was due to attend a meeting at which I was to be told what consumers really thought of the brand. I remember my reluctance to [...] read our review »
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Comment on #Euro2020: Philosophy Fooball Solidarnosc Ireland tee shirts…
on 24 May 2012 at 1:18 pm
I reckon the association with Solidarnosc is going to be the least of your worries. If you look like a football supporter in the wrong place at the wrong time, all the usual rules apply.
The question of ‘will they make a fine judgement about solidarnosc before kicking seven bells out of me for being Irish’ reminds me of that incident in ‘Decline and Fall’ by Evelyn Waugh:
“Out of the night Lumsden of Strathdrummond swayed across his path like a druidical rocking stone. Paul tried to pass.
Now it so happened that the tie of Paul’s old school bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club. The difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Strathdrummond was likely to appreciate.
“Here’s an awful man wearing the Boller tie,” said the Laird. It is not for nothing that since pre-Christian times his family has exercised cheiftainship over uncharted miles of barren moorland.”
Paul Pennyfeather was relieved of his clothes at this point, and as a consequence, his life descended into a vortex of paedophilia, imprisonment and murder. It’s very funny ….
Wear the shirt over there though – you’ll be fine!
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Comment on Artless protest? Or a disappointing protest that hasn’t yet occupied the agenda of the public or the church?
on 28 February 2012 at 1:00 am
@Alan – sorry – forgot to answer your second point. With all due respect to NICVA (and I’m not being backhanded here) they’re not setting out to address the bigger ideological character of the current crisis. It wouldn’t be within their remit to do so either.
It’s the subject of a book rather than a blog-post, and it’s also a view that I’m forming (as opposed to one that I’ve formed) but I’d argue that the progressive movements and the left have mistakenly diagnosed ours as a ‘neo-liberal’ age when we are, in fact, in a Managerial one. And we should be more annoyed with the Managerialists than we are at the moment.
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Comment on Artless protest? Or a disappointing protest that hasn’t yet occupied the agenda of the public or the church?
on 28 February 2012 at 12:56 am
@Alan,
I’d disagree more with you if we’re not talking about the ideology of anarchism, but more the unstructured deliberative thinking seen in the Occupy movement. Here are two compelling tributes to lesser-structured thinking:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?pagewanted=all
… and http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/915
… and one of the things that the Occupy movement has been roundly praised for has been the interesting deliberative dynamics that have made it more capable of adapting to its adversaries than the traditional ‘Democratic Centralist’ organisations of the vanguardist left.
Here for example: http://genealogyofconsent.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/real-democracy-negotiating-difference-within-consensus/
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Comment on Artless protest? Or a disappointing protest that hasn’t yet occupied the agenda of the public or the church?
on 27 February 2012 at 10:18 am
“… anarchy isn’t a very fertile breeding ground for a well thought out and incisive message that influences large numbers of people and changes attitudes…”
I’m not sure that’s true. Propaganda can be thought-provoking and it can result in changes in political culture. It’s quite frustrating watching critics of the Occupy Movement attacking it for not knowing what it wants. It kind of begs the question of it’s accusers: “What do YOU want then?”
Either way, the Occupy Movement may include Anarchists, but it’s hardly an Anarchist movement.
Any three-way slanging match between the broader left, the Occupy Movement and the church on this question is like watching three bald men arguing over a comb. What is missing, at the moment, is an accurate critique of the current economic impasse that we’ve reached, along with a response that fits that critique.
I no longer believe that the concept of ‘neo-liberalism’ provides that critique, so any response based on it is likely to be futile. That it also appears to be futile may help to build my argument.
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Comment on Euro crisis: “It is a debt crisis but a crisis, too, of legitimacy.”
on 15 September 2011 at 1:45 pm
Pete,
Annoyingly, it’s behind The Times paywall, but Anatole Kaletsky’s piece yesterday suggesting that the Eurozone could survive – but with Germany out of it – is worth a look (if only to get the brain turning over).
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Comment on POTD – Head of the Band
on 21 August 2011 at 2:31 pm
“Edwardian Britain was a remarkably free and civilised place.”
Beggars were, indeed, remarkably free to drink Champagne.
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Comment on POTD – Head of the Band
on 21 August 2011 at 2:29 pm
Quincey / Millbag,
I’m curious about this: my limited recall of this tells me that *all* militia in Ireland were formally illegal in 1912 and there’s little question that the UVF were a militia as defined in the act. That it wasn’t prosecuted as such was a different matter, surely?
From what you’re saying, it seems I’ve got this wrong Quincey? When you say they weren’t illegal, are you referring to a bit of sophistry on the part of a government that had drafted general legislation to deal with a particular sort of (nationalist/catholic) threat, or is there something I’ve missed here?
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Comment on The future of Irish media lies in the evolution of new business models…
on 30 June 2011 at 10:00 am
I don’t completely buy this….
“….misunderstanding the Journal.ie as a product. It does, and has, cannibalised some of the material from mainstream media. But as Susan says, that should be sending traffic to the Time and the Indo. If those papers are not picking up revenue from it, then the fault lies with the established papers, not the aggregator.”
…it’s one of these things that’s been passed around so often without being intelligently challenged (by anyone with the resources to do it) that it’s become accepted.
If I pay to produce content, someone else who takes a very liberal (in their own interest) approach to fair-use to ‘aggregate’ (i.e. take the essential information and appropriate it) on the grounds that it *might* generate some traffic to my website and it’s my problem to work out how to monetise that traffic….?
Personally, I think that the paid-for-print media needs to come up with a dedicated browser similar to Spotify so that it can start licencing content properly – like Spotify, or even the offline equivalent, PRS with music. The reason this isn’t happening, I suspect, is that there’s a divergence between the interests of the people who actually do the work (journalists, in this case) and the people who appropriate their surplus value under the old models (people who own newspapers who have bigger fish to fry than to worry about good quality sustainable content).
On the wider point of Kildare St (like They Work For You in the UK) opening out parliamentary proceedings, again, I don’t completely buy the argument that more transparency = a more participative politics. When Westminster started being broadcast in the late 1970s (on Radio) and later on TV, the net effect was that newspapers stopped covering parliament properly because they felt their public service obligation had been met elsewhere.
We don’t have a duty to go along with every ad hoc or guerilla technique that the changes (mostly lower barriers-to-entry) make possible. I know it always seems a terrifically liberal thing to do, but it’s never that simple.
I’ve gone into a bit more detail on this argument here if anyone’s interested?
http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk/2011/06/14/council-meetings-blogging-and-web-casting/
and
http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk/2009/03/16/counterproductive-demands-for-transparency/
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Comment on Slugger’s Big Heid Coont Breakfast 2011
on 10 May 2011 at 12:51 pm
Apropos of Lee’s promo for The Political Brain, I’d also push ‘Don’t Think of An Elephant’ by George Lakoff. It’s expressly written for a centre-left perspective rather than the DUP’s target but I found reading the two together to be very instructive.
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Comment on AV Referendum: Don’t vote – it only encourages them! #meh2av
on 5 May 2011 at 7:53 pm
Hmm – “overstate the case.” I think that the slide into populism that’s biting a lot of places within the the EU is a potential catastrophe that is being ignored – maybe I’m wrong there, in which case you’re right.
The way out of it is for people to make a positive case for the right kind of participative and deliberative democratic innovations.
I don’t think the public will continue to buy the once-every-five-years democratic settlement any more and they have raised expectations of interactivity that are met in other aspects of their lives.
So we’re going to be asked what policies government should be following more. Alongside the positive case, referendums highlight very real dangers that could become a much more regular phenomenon.
Attacking referendums is an important part of that.
On your ‘vote no to send the message’, it will only forestall ANY future votes on voting systems.
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Comment on AV Referendum: Don’t vote – it only encourages them! #meh2av
on 5 May 2011 at 6:21 pm
It was a rigged question. I wouldn’t respond to a rigged question.
Reminds me of that scene in ‘No Country for Old Men’ when the killer forces the shopkeeper to call the toss of a coin. Why should anyone answer a question that they don’t want to be asked.
If I were to concede that referendums are a legitimate way of asking for the public’s settled view on something (and I don’t) I’d want to be asked which voting system I’d prefer and not have only two barely-different options.
And the Lib-Dems – we’ve seen how deep their understanding and concern for democratic reform is from three things here.
Firstly, they were prepared to allow this question to be decided in a very anti-democratic manner
Secondly, they were prepared to go along with a rigged question that didn’t include the options that even *they* wanted on the ballot
Thirdly, they went into a campaign that they were certain to lose (if they’d ever thought about referendums, they’d know that this one was hopeless) in a way that will be allowed to rule out their central political demand for a generation.
John Stuart Mill described the Tories as ‘The Stupid Party’. I suspect he’d find a better candidate for that title if he were around today.
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Comment on AV Referendum: Don’t vote – it only encourages them! #meh2av
on 5 May 2011 at 2:00 pm
Sorry – should have included this link: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/02/18/av-does-not-necessarily-produce-coalitions-and-may-not-help-smaller-parties/
Can’t find John Curtice’s view on this quickly but I know that he made the point on TV.
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Comment on AV Referendum: Don’t vote – it only encourages them! #meh2av
on 5 May 2011 at 1:14 pm
DC: I’ve not seen much to suggest that AV will address “the issue of representation which is behind the Yes vote to AV.” The Yes2AV campaign focussed on an anti-politics argument that I don’t buy.
If I were to concede that there may be marginal benefits I’d still ask why are we co-operating with a project that expressly excludes options that would improve it a great deal more? The fact that this is being agreed by referendum means that we *can’t* have the outcome that a more deliberative process would give us. I’m amazed at how relaxed people are about this travesty.
If you don’t agree with this argument, maybe you will once the results are in?
@joskipp I’d argue that it’s a great deal more apathetic to go along with this farcical exercise without challenging it. Putting a cross in a box is hardly activism, is it?
@AGlassOfHine Thanks for reading the post before commenting. Oh wait… you haven’t. Why sour grapes? I’m agnostic on AV v FPTP debate. BTW, the jury is out on whether AV WILL result in more coalition government anyway – I think we’ve established that claims from the No campaign don’t bear much examination. John Curtice has argued that it it’s not a foregone conclusion and he’s probably the most authoritative commentator on this particular issue.
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Comment on AV Referendum: Don’t vote – it only encourages them! #meh2av
on 5 May 2011 at 11:50 am
There are plenty of alternatives to a referendum in making a decision. 99.9% of legislation is made without one. At the top of this article I linked to a post outlining why referendums were a less-good way of making decisions than those made by elected representatives.
This vote (the fact that we’re having it, and the outcome – either outcome) will not extend our democracy at all. How will it do so? It will result in an unrepresentative minority imposing a decision on the rest of us and then the result will be framed by an unaccountable press into something that it isn’t. Many of those voting will be expressing a view on a question that they haven’t been asked in the first place.
There are plenty of inclusive deliberative processes that you can use to legitimise decisions if you choose not to make them through Parliament. I understand the argument that the one thing Parliament shouldn’t vote on is the system of voting that elects it – declared interests and all of that. So lets use one of these processes. Citizens juries, athenian democracy, demand-revealing referendums – all alternatives to a highly framed question where a binary choice is offered but where a proportional system isn’t.
In being asked to take part in this vote, we’re being treated as idiots and patsys. If you want to vote in such a plebiscite, I’m not stopping you. I’d just suggest that you stop yourself.
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Comment on Prediction competition – results #ge11: And the winner is….
on 8 March 2011 at 11:19 am
Correction: It seems that The Dissenter ticked the ‘no publicity’ box by mistake and is in no way shy about people knowing who was closest to the money!
http://sluggerotoole.com/profile/thedissenter/
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Comment on Prediction competition – results #ge11: And the winner is….
on 7 March 2011 at 5:47 pm
Sorry – one thing that occurred to me after posting this: I think that the most common predictive failure was an overestimate of FF’s final number of seats. Earlier entries *averaged* a prediction of 35 for FF and we’d had over fifty predictions in before someone under-estimated FF’s seat-count.
Just speaking for myself, I figured that there’d be the equivalent of the ‘guilty tory’ that was noticed in 1990s opinion polls – people who quietly voted (sometimes ‘tribally’) who didn’t like to fess-up to pollsters about their dirty secret.
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Comment on Election day open thread #ge11
on 25 February 2011 at 6:50 pm
PaulT,
“Poor response from Slugger”
You seem to be making a bit of a common error. Slugger doesn’t have an editorial line. Everyone has a few of the regular posters who routinely annoy them – so what?
Comments don’t get ‘passed by the mod’ – there’s a ‘flag as offensive’ button if you want to use it and you have the option to rebut anything that appears on a comment thread. I’d find a short article about how post-moderated group blogs work if I were you.
SF is a party that’s strong in the north – where most of the readers are from. It’s got plenty of detractors there so of course there’s a lot of beefing about them. So what?
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Comment on Election day open thread #ge11
on 25 February 2011 at 1:34 pm
PaulT you must have missed a fair amount of positive coverage that SF have had on Slugger from John O’Neill and Chris Donnelly among others. Is this some kind of cultivated victimhood here?
Interestingly, other Slugger readers haven’t been as misled as you pretend to be – their predictions (40 of them) are quite in line with what pollsters are expecting.
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Comment on Election day open thread #ge11
on 25 February 2011 at 11:30 am
Rory,
I think there are two possible reasons for this. It’s either a cock-up on their part, or – more likely – that they’ve counting the one ‘uncontested’ seat as ‘incumbent wins’. And I’m so ignorant of Irish politics, I don’t even know who the speaker is or what party s/he represents.
In the Westminster elections, John Bercow stood as an Independent (and by convention, he was unchallenged by the main parties) so maybe the speaker is one of their projected ‘independents’?
Happy to be corrected on any of this.
*Update* Seems Mark has the correct answer posted at roughly the same time as me – above
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Comment on Jude Collins, Eoghan Harris & an ill-conceived wager
on 24 February 2011 at 10:34 pm
10/1 though! What an idiot!
You sure he didn’t say 10/1 on?
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