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Wife of Pi
May. 11th, 2009 01:53 pmSome of you may recall a piece early on in Yann Martel's enjoyable book Life of Pi when, in referring to anti-zoo campaigners, Pi's father says that it is all nonsense. How would you feel, he asked, if some alien came along, opened all the front doors on the street, removed you to the open air and then said "Voila! you are free!" before demolishing the houses on the grounds that they are "cruel to humans".
I was always attracted to this kind of argument, not least because it is vaguely contrary, and also because it is a neat example of much of the bollocks spouted these days by the liberal left. The good that was proposed by the heroes of the 1960s has been diluted and bastardized by the lawyers and health & safety officers of the noughties. More regulation is good because it makes us safer, is the line. Never crossed is the philiosophical concept that, well, perhaps a bit of danger is fun, and giving up freedom for "security" isn't much of a good deal when you don't particularly want security.
I have yet to see a cogent argument in favour of seat belts and crash helmets. I choose to wear one, but I'd like the right to choose not to wear one. Any argument in favour of compulsion inherently follows two lines: (a) that safety is better than danger and (b) that we the lawmakers know better than you the general public. It could be far better argued that if seat belts and crash helmets were banned, people would drive more carefully.
Anyhoo, back to the animals. I was delighted to read the story of the orang-utan in Australia who escaped, went for a walk, and then half an hour later walked back to his pen asking to be let back in. If ever the anti-zoo campaigners had their entire argument shot to shit, my friend the orang-utan was the shooter. "I just wanted to see what the view was like. And, on reflection, I think that I prefer the view from where I was".
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The Telegraph exposure of politicians pushing through expenses for anything and everything has its own political agenda, and it doesn't address the fact that the whole problem arose because of newspaper pressure on politicians not to increase their basic salary, but that doesn't detract from the gleeful joy of seeing a bunch of self-righteous divots being made to look fools. I would think that the politician most delighted at the Telegraph exposure is the fantastically hopeless Jacqui Smith. Indeed, she should surely be a prime suspect in seeking the identity of the leak, since she can now calmly point out that, if you thought that she was useless, just look at the morals of the rest of them.
The most galling part of the affair for me has been the ability of MPs, in some kind of Kafkaesque madness, to designate a home as their main home (for MP expenditure purposes) and their second home (for Capital Gains purposes) at the same time. Once you head into this kind of Alice In Wonderland economics, the politicians have lost, because it is simply funny. If one more MP says that he or she acted "within the rules", all that we do now is laugh at them.
On Friday an MP (a Conservative, as it happens) said on Radio 4's Today that it was "human nature" to push expenses as far as you were allowed to go.
Hmm, I thought to myself. Well, I don't. Indeed, that statement said more about the MP than any action by him could have. It defined his attitude, and his belief that this was the accepted norm.
In the US it's virtually impossible to become a Senator in Washington without being a multi-millionaire. In the UK, in the days before MPs were paid, there was a similar "don't bother if you aren't rich" attitude. The path downhill probably began when they introduced salaries and "expenses" at all. Perhaps that Conservative MP got it right. The very nature of the job will attract people to whom the statement "I acted within the rules" explains all. That is why, whenever any MP says such a thing, they deserve to be subject to mockery with extreme prejudice.
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I was always attracted to this kind of argument, not least because it is vaguely contrary, and also because it is a neat example of much of the bollocks spouted these days by the liberal left. The good that was proposed by the heroes of the 1960s has been diluted and bastardized by the lawyers and health & safety officers of the noughties. More regulation is good because it makes us safer, is the line. Never crossed is the philiosophical concept that, well, perhaps a bit of danger is fun, and giving up freedom for "security" isn't much of a good deal when you don't particularly want security.
I have yet to see a cogent argument in favour of seat belts and crash helmets. I choose to wear one, but I'd like the right to choose not to wear one. Any argument in favour of compulsion inherently follows two lines: (a) that safety is better than danger and (b) that we the lawmakers know better than you the general public. It could be far better argued that if seat belts and crash helmets were banned, people would drive more carefully.
Anyhoo, back to the animals. I was delighted to read the story of the orang-utan in Australia who escaped, went for a walk, and then half an hour later walked back to his pen asking to be let back in. If ever the anti-zoo campaigners had their entire argument shot to shit, my friend the orang-utan was the shooter. "I just wanted to see what the view was like. And, on reflection, I think that I prefer the view from where I was".
++++++++
The Telegraph exposure of politicians pushing through expenses for anything and everything has its own political agenda, and it doesn't address the fact that the whole problem arose because of newspaper pressure on politicians not to increase their basic salary, but that doesn't detract from the gleeful joy of seeing a bunch of self-righteous divots being made to look fools. I would think that the politician most delighted at the Telegraph exposure is the fantastically hopeless Jacqui Smith. Indeed, she should surely be a prime suspect in seeking the identity of the leak, since she can now calmly point out that, if you thought that she was useless, just look at the morals of the rest of them.
The most galling part of the affair for me has been the ability of MPs, in some kind of Kafkaesque madness, to designate a home as their main home (for MP expenditure purposes) and their second home (for Capital Gains purposes) at the same time. Once you head into this kind of Alice In Wonderland economics, the politicians have lost, because it is simply funny. If one more MP says that he or she acted "within the rules", all that we do now is laugh at them.
On Friday an MP (a Conservative, as it happens) said on Radio 4's Today that it was "human nature" to push expenses as far as you were allowed to go.
Hmm, I thought to myself. Well, I don't. Indeed, that statement said more about the MP than any action by him could have. It defined his attitude, and his belief that this was the accepted norm.
In the US it's virtually impossible to become a Senator in Washington without being a multi-millionaire. In the UK, in the days before MPs were paid, there was a similar "don't bother if you aren't rich" attitude. The path downhill probably began when they introduced salaries and "expenses" at all. Perhaps that Conservative MP got it right. The very nature of the job will attract people to whom the statement "I acted within the rules" explains all. That is why, whenever any MP says such a thing, they deserve to be subject to mockery with extreme prejudice.
_______
