This story on the BBC news website, explaining the virtues of the new EU legislation to ban 100w incandescent bulbs features plenty of quotes from the Energy Saving Trust, who explain why Compact Florescent Lighting (otherwise known as “the shitty bulbs they’re going to make you use from now on, whether you like it or not”) are completely awesome:

According to the Energy Saving Trust, compact fluorescent lamps (energy-saving bulbs) use 80% less electricity than standard bulbs.

They could also save the average household £590 in energy over their lifetime of between eight and 10 years, and if all traditional bulbs were replaced, the carbon saving would be the equivalent of taking 70,000 cars off the road.

Good reasons.

Thanks Auntie. But who are the The Energy Saving Trust? Well they’re a ‘non-profit’ organisation 90% funded by the Government and includes as members The Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, The Secretary of State for Transport, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and The First Minister for Scotland. It gets 2% of its funding from the private sector, and boasts the membership of most of the utilities and energy producing interests, all of whom seem terrified of being perceived as un-Green by consumers.

So when the BBC reports the views of the Energy Saving Trust like this, they’re not really quoting an independent, reliable source – it’s the Government advising the Government – again. It may be factually true that energy saving bulbs are cheaper to run, but ‘equivalent to 70,000 cars taken off the road’ is a completely bollocks statistic – and even if it were true, I have one simple question to ask:

So what?

In fact, I reached the end of the story wondering why, exactly, there’s this overwhelming need to take political action against the humble light bulb.

Handily the Government is on hand to explain to us what our criticism of this plan should be (because they’ve got a response pre-cooked for it, unlike, say, ‘hey, you’re taking away my decision to choose for myself, you authoritarian shits!’)

Claims of poor lighting were also untrue, [a Government spokesman] said.

“The light is bright and clear and tests conducted by the Energy Saving Trust suggest that the majority of people cannot tell the difference between the light of a new CFL and an incandescent bulb.”

Right, let’s rip this to pieces nice and quickly : ‘the majority’ (anything over 51% of the sample) couldn’t tell the difference in a trial. In other words, anything from 49% of people in the trial could tell the difference. The spokesman makes no reference to what their test subjects said about their quality of the light or which one they preferred. How do they get from ‘majority couldn’t tell the difference’ to ‘claims of poor lighting are untrue’? The mind boggles. It’s a piece of political propaganda and a conclusion not supported by data.

The reason all florescent lighting is inferior to incandescent lighting is simple: Normal bulbs emit the full spectrum of visible light, whilst Compact Florescents don’t. You get the full spectrum from the Sun, and you get partial spectrums from things like televisions – that eerie glow when a television is left on whilst the lights are turned out.

I used to do a lot of 3D Computer Graphics, and one of the hardest things to simulate is human skin. That’s because skin isn’t just ‘skin’ – it’s multiple layers of different types of tissues, and light is diffused and scattered around underneath the surface, each layer handling photons in its own way. Put your hand over a powerful light source and your skin seems to glow bright orange. In computer graphics it is fantastically difficult to get right, and is the main reason why it’s almost impossible to create a truly photo-realistic human in a computer.

What I learnt from this is that how we look is very much dictated by the light that illuminates us. The partial spectrum light from Compact Fluorescents makes skin look very different. I can’t explain it. It just feels eerie. Whenever I’m in space lit only by Florescent lighting I feel like I’m in a dystopian horror, as if we’ve crossed some invisible line in creating artificial environments for ourselves.

Yet despite “claims of poor lighting being ‘untrue’” the EU wants to have a go at reducing the perceived quality of lighting from the old style bulbs regardless, by making it illegal to sell a standard bulb that tints or diffuses the light. Hmm. Does this not suggest that someone, somewhere, is concerned enough about a difference to warrant legislating against it?

And once again I’m brought back to wondering why. Why do this? Presumably the answer is “because the market has failed! People are still buying cheap bulbs that give off better lighting instead of expensive bulbs that aren’t as good. We must do something!”

Yet the market hasn’t failed. The market’s working perfectly well. People aren’t switching because the new bulbs aren’t better and cheaper than the ones that came before. I mean, even if you decide that 100w bulbs are wasteful and it’s not enough that people simply waste their own money paying to run them, why make it illegal to sell a bulb with diffusion or tinting?

This is purely to rig the competition and deny us the ability to choose for ourselves.

So the EU, a ‘Free Trade Zone’, is deciding that the manufacturers of energy saving bulbs are to be favoured (they’re produced by Great Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) and the manufacturers of incandescent bulbs are to be fought against. It is economic planning, without question – done on an EU wide level, using The Environment as the excuse for restricting yet another personal and economic freedom.

Is there any wonder that Green is the new Red?

Still too busy to think straight, although the end is in sight – at least I think it is. In lieu of interesting original content, I direct your invaluable attention towards Mr Thompson who, sadly, really did need to write a blog post explaining why admiring one aspect of a person doesn’t mean you automatically agree with everything that person says.

That the quality of political debate is being reduced to such a pathetically dismal level – these desperate, clawing attempts to land any sort of wound on your opponents, no matter how utterly spurious or inane your argument really is – is a source of continued angst for me, and makes me want to get my spanking bat out.

It’s depressing that anyone would accuse Dan Hannan of dog whistle racism – although I don’t really know enough about Hannan to know about his specific attitudes, but one the really interesting features of liberalism, especially classical and libertarianism (in which category Hannan places himself) is, as a rule, most of us are lovers of Free Trade. Free Trade explicitly demands free movement of people, which means we’re quite often the most pro-immigration people in the room.

One of the other interesting things about individualists is that your race, gender, sexuality, physical ability are usually completely irrelevant – it may decrease the odds of you meeting, but when you do meet you’re going to be taken on your merits. Now if you haven’t got any merits and want a head start because you’re male, white, hetero-sexual and gosh darn it British then you can, pardon my french, obtenez baisé. It works the other way too, though – no special favours for anyone is the nice easy way of treating people equally.

But, away from theory and into the nitty gritty of winning elections, you’d think with immigrants being public enemy number one there’s more populist mileage in condemning Hannan for that. In fact, let’s check the pulse of the majority, for a second:

Free movement of Capital: Evil.

Free movement of Goods and Services: Evil.

Free movement of People: Ultimate Evil.

Seems to me the best way to defeat libertarians is to focus on the ‘soft on immigration’ aspect, which is why the Conservatives will never be a libertarian party, and which is why I’ll never be a Tory, and why, obviously, I’ll never be Prime Minister. Free Movement of People? I may as well club baby seals for all the votes that’d win.

Hmmm… did I accidently write a blog post here?

Update: The “Not Labour Honest” Conspiracy blog has an interesting take - condemning Hannan for not being a proper libertarian. This tickled me.

Having had the door to free universal access to all data everywhere slammed in their faces, the Government have gone round the back and are now shimmying up the drain pipe. Matt Wardman has more.

The Gist: Quentin Tarantino experiments with War Propaganda.

Who’s in it: Brad Pitt. Sort of.

Who made it: IMDB is your geeky friend but the headline is this: It’s Tarantino.

So the trailer for Inglourious Basterds (Or ‘Custards’ as they said on Radio 5 Live yesterday) promises Brad Pitt on a comedic Nazi killing adventure in France. If that’s what you want to see, you’re going to be disappointed. Just like the trailers for Home Alone actually gave away all the funny jokes, so the trailers for Basterds reveal most of what is actually a small aspect of the overall film – the Basterds themselves.

The real film? Well, it’s War Propaganda, something Tarantino isn’t afraid of rubbing in your face. You want to see Hitler getting pwned? The whole Nazi machine getting horribly killed to death? Well, Tarantino’s going to deliver – but because he’s not a stupid hack like Joel Schumacher or Michael Bay, he’s going to make sure you know you’re no better than the Nazis who loved Nazi propaganda showing heroic exploits against the Allies if you laugh, if you enjoy it.

Like all Tarantino’s great films, it’s the characters and dialogue that sets his work apart – Basterds is no exception. The Nazis themselves are almost like villains from a Joss Whedon series – personable and charming on the surface, which makes them all the more creepy and threatening. Only Hitler is excluded from the ‘charming Nazi’ treatment, being portrayed, from the start, as an vain, angry, idiotic buffoon. The star is the deliciously evil SS guy known as the ‘Jew Hunter’ – the most charming and personable of them all, and yet the most terrifying too. Hitler excluded, Tarantino’s Nazis are chilling in a way you’ve never seen before.

As you’d expect from Tarantino the violence is brutal, and when it happens it’s shocking and sudden. That’s because most of the film is not violent at all. It’s long, long, long scenes of conversations interspersed with very occasional, very bloody, violence.

If I judge this film against what it’s advertised as, the film fails. These days film trailers are becoming increasingly misleading (or perhaps I’m just noticing it more), which I find depressing – they’ve successfully hidden the fact that this is a subtitle heavy film, that this is really mostly about a young jewish woman who escapes murder then stumbles on a way to get her revenge, that the Basterds hardly feature at all.

The way they’re selling this film is an issue because the film goes out of its way to mock a German propaganda flick that looks like what Basterds is sold to be. In other words, if you like the adverts and go to see it, and you reach the final act feeling a bit cheated, Tarantino’s going to mercilessly take the piss out of you until you squirm in your seat.

During the final act I said, “oh you clever bastard” out loud as the penny dropped. I loved Basterds. It may even be, as he  suggests himself, his masterpiece.

This is the ultimate fuck you to people who think Americans can’t make decent World War II movies. Tarantino’s just proved you wrong.

If you’re itching for the next big online philosophy argument, Jonathan Calder’s Eight Sceptical Theses on Moral Rights might be just the ticket.

The New Sophists over on Heresy Corner hauls the new Anti-Atheists over the fiery coals of reason.

Letters From a Tory dares question the mighty Wikio… and has a point.

Finally, Costigan Quist tells us not to use Mill as an “I Win” Button in arguments.

Quote of the day goes to Sunny Hundal, who seems to have made a breakthrough in understanding why fascists and socialists are always able to easily recruit from each other’s ranks and why, for both, liberalism is their true enemy:

Look, nationalism is collectivism in its basic form. It’s about social solidarity – these are pretty much basic leftwing ideals.

At least Liberal Conspiracy have the sense to go on the defensive about the threat that comes from socialists invoking nationalism as an appeal to the lowest common denominator populist sentiment. Government Ministers, on the other hand, have no shame when it comes to exploiting “good” nationalism:

The dividing lines are now clear. The Tories are for localism. We are for national standards.

Can’t quite bring himself to just come out and say:

We are for nationalism

… but you get the subtext. He does of course clarify:

Labour’s job is to speak up for the N in NHS – for national standards, national pay and national accountability

National pay? Says it all really, doesn’t it?