Even though the world went mad

This was where he meant to live when he retired: surely in this place a man could live at peace; even though the world went mad, this hill country might keep its ancient dower of quietude under the northern stars.

E. C. R Lorac - The Last Escape (1959)


Not so easy now, life under the northern stars could be as mad as anywhere else and possibly madder. Escape routes closing - it’s a characteristic of our times.

Seismically Bamboozled

Blackpool South by-election: Sir Keir Starmer hails 'seismic win' as Labour takes seat from Conservatives

Chris Webb wins the constituency with a majority of more than 7,000, as the Tories only just beat Reform UK into second place.


Wikipedia

A 2012 paper by six American political scientists called "A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics" challenged the idea that Republicans want a low-information electorate and argued instead that both major American parties do. Noting that 95% of incumbents in the highly polarized House of Representatives win re-election despite voters' preference for centrist representation, the paper theorizes that voters' infrequent penalizing of extremist behaviour represents not approval, but a lack of attention and information. This, the paper says, is supported by the fact that when congressional districts and media markets overlap to create more informed electorates, extremist House members are at much greater risk for defeat. The paper proposes that in the American political system interest groups and activists are the key actor and that the electorate is uninformed and bamboozled.

Missing

 

A message from autocue world

'No right to cause chaos': Biden speaks out for first time over US university protests

President Joe Biden has spoken out for the first time following violence and arrests during demonstrations at multiple US universities, saying: "There is a right to protest but not a right to cause chaos."...

There have been clashes between pro-Palestinian activists and counter-protesters, as well as between demonstrators and police.

Speaking at the White House today, Mr Biden said "order must prevail".

He continued: "Dissent is essential for democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder."

It isn't easy to see how trying to jail your main political opponent fits in with dissent being essential for democracy, but apparently it does in Joe's autocue world.

Intelligent and modern, but nonsense all the same.

She sat at the head of the table, serene, with an amused, indulgent smile on her lips as she listened to their scatter–brained nonsense; it was not stupid nonsense, mind you, it was intelligent and modern, but it was nonsense all the same.

W. Somerset Maugham - A Woman of Fifty (1946)


Stories from the Golden Age of detective fiction often describe the Scotland Yard detective as having an intelligent face. Even an apparently bovine and unintelligent face was often betrayed by the keen glances he flashed into every nook and cranny of the murder scene.

The idea of intelligence is still used of course, in spite of being a somewhat slippery notion, but modern life seems to have made it less useful and even more slippery than it was in the comparatively recent past.

Intelligence was never more than a somewhat fallible idea anyway, because supposedly intelligent people have always been capable of stupidity. Yet it could be used as an ideal, as a contrast with stupidity, but like an old Polaroid photo the contrast has faded.

Intelligence is still a usable idea, but not particularly usable when it comes to abstractions and political entanglements. It fails to capture the prevalence of so much misinformation, distortion, exaggeration and simple falsehood.

To take a topical example, there seems to be little point in describing Net Zero as an unintelligent policy. It certainly is unintelligent, but to say so doesn’t capture the nature of the beast, the political nature of it, the creepy tentacles reaching into every corner of life. If anything, the idea of intelligent and unintelligent actions has a decided tendency to evade the problem, particularly the magnitude of it.

Hyperintelligent pandimensional beings

These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Lab mice are getting their own back by deliberately messing up experiments

Dr Kishore Kuchibhotla, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times: ‘It can be quite frustrating. You’ll be doing an experiment and the [mice] just don’t seem to be getting it. You’ve done everything correctly but they still seem to be making lots of errors.’...

They created an experiment where thirsty mice could hear one of two sounds. When one sound was played, they were supposed to turn a wheel to the left using their front legs, and for the other sound, they had to turn the wheel to the right.

When the mice did this correctly, they were rewarded with a drink of water, and when they spun the wheel the wrong way, they were given nothing at all.

The researchers tracked mouse choice, response speed and accuracy, and noticed that over time the mice got better at the task, but at points, the mice would stop following the rules, and do things like spin the wheel in one direction, no matter what sound they heard.

The researchers then stopped rewarding the mice for their correct answers, and soon the rodents began responding to the sounds more accurately.

The researchers believed the mice knew what they were doing the whole time, and were purposefully giving up the reward to explore their environment by doing experiments of their own.

Of course not

Khan not taking knife crime seriously, says Badenoch after Hainault stabbings

Sadiq Khan has been accused of not taking knife crime “seriously” following a sword attack in east London.

A 14-year-old boy was killed and four people seriously injured during the incident in Hainault on Tuesday morning when a man armed with a sword went on the rampage.

Cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch said on Wednesday the incident demonstrated the need for stronger enforcement, accusing Mr Khan of failing in his responsibilities as London’s mayor as the capital experiences an increase in violent crime.

Of course not, shifting the focus away from bad news on their patch is what politicians do. He probably does take it seriously away from the political arena, but what is a career poseur to do?

It does appear to highlight how much bad news voters are prepared to take before they abandon their party allegiances though. Far too much is the answer to that one.