From an unexpected source I found the following:

Only in England do people write books with titles like The Middle Way, elevating the argumentum ad temperantiam into a guide for public policy. The Liberal Party used to make a career of the fallacy, regularly taking up a position midway between those of the two main parties, and ritually denouncing them for extremism. The main parties, in their turn, contained this threat by bidding for ‘the middle ground’ themselves.

(Madsen Pirie, How to Win Every Argument, P.129)

The author contends that the appeal to moderation is a fallacy, but one that the British seem uniquely susceptible to – we go out of our way to prefer a compromise between two extreme positions.

In the Liberal Democrats we still maintain the ambition of equidistance, which is not difficult. A cigarette paper to the left and a cigarette paper to the right.

This mindset, however, is what leads us to believe that you can achieve a – and it is desirable to see a – compromise between socialism and capitalism, even though both are two mutually contradictory solutions to the same problem (who gets what) – solutions that cancel each other out.

Same goes for attempting to reconcile the liberal idea of freedom and the socialist idea of freedom – one leaving individuals free to find their own way, and the other giving the state the ‘freedom’ to direct the affairs of the nation in favour of specific interest groups.

I’m not a moderate, compromising sort of person, which is why I don’t seem to hold our party’s constitution in high regard – being, as it is, a masterpiece of equivocation and contradiction defended with the argument, ‘yes, it’s difficult and a challenge reconciling these things, and that’s what we want to debate and talk about’ with seemingly no recognition of the difference between ‘difficult’ and just plain impossible. The objective is harmonious relations within the party rather than a clear message to communicate to those outside.

That the source of that contradiction was the Social Democratic Party isn’t true – the Liberal Party began seeing Socialism as the natural successor to Liberalism much earlier that that. I understand that now. It was, however, a painful and eventful mistake to make – one that’s destroyed liberalism in this country over the last 100 years, resurfacing only briefly in a distorted form as a conservative reaction against the seemingly inevitable march towards Socialism after the war – which seems to have served to stigmatise classical liberalism even further.

I’m beginning to think that libertarians (or classical liberals) need not be too fussed, at this stage, with persuading the public of the threat of collectivism and the advantages of individualism – how it robs us of things that we currently take for granted and denies us things we don’t even realise we have.

Nope, the job is much simplier than that: The trick is persuade Liberal Democrats. They believe in freedom, you see, and everything they do whether they’re from the left or right comes from that. The trick, I think, is to win the argument that socialism and/or social democracy does not offer freedom and never can, that the things we cherish – such as freedom from conformity and progress – only come from individualism, and get the party to vote accordingly at conference.

Whether people recognise this or not, we are all currently coerced into working towards the grand designs of this particular state, and for too long the Liberal Democrats have been playing the same game – offering their own alternative ‘vision’ rather than fighting for the people’s right to have their own vision of their own lives (i.e, the duty of the state not to impose it’s vision on individuals)

Yet progress comes not from states and their grand visions but from individuals being able to do their own thing – getting together themselves to work or working alone on whatever it is they want to work on, being free to sell whatever they produce at whatever price they can get for it, and that’s what freedom is – and the benefit of freedom is human progress. Slowly, perhaps, but that is what it achieves whether people like it or even expect it.

This country doesn’t believe that any longer, and that’s why liberals, libertarians, classical liberals and even many conservatives need to come together to stand up against this particular tyranny of the majority.

I look at Jo Swinson’s recent attack on airbrushing and I despair. Is this what the modern liberal movement really represents? Is this really what we’ve been reduced to? How did it come to this?

Thing is, if you can persuade the Liberal Democrats you can persuade anyone, and suddenly you have a powerful political ally on your side. It would also mark the end of ‘compromised liberalism’ and perhaps, just perhaps, a possible end to the ‘bad politics’ of the 20th Century.

Here’s the problem: The advertising model for online content isn’t very good – at least, it’s not sustainable. Most people are perfectly capable of mentally filtering out the spam so that they hardly notice it at all.

To make money you need a lot of traffic and next to no costs. That’s why Guido can make a profit whilst the mainstream media loses money on their their online outlets: the costs of running an online edition of a newspaper are unlikely to be recovered from advertising alone.

From Murdoch’s point of view, the cost of generating the content along with the bandwidth costs is being paid for by the company, resulting in multi-billion dollar losses. Boo hoo, you cry – and I’m with you on that – but you can’t realistically expect News International to bankrupt itself giving away it’s content for free. That’s not a viable business model – the hope that content could be paid for by advertising along has turned out to be a pipe-dream.

The same content being available online could be one of the reasons for drops in sales of newspapers – from personal experience I’ve often wondered what the point of spending money on a paper when the same content is available for free on the Internet.

So, again, from Murdoch’s point of view charging for online content has some instant benefits – it means that his own newspapers are not competing with free versions of themselves. It means he’s not paying the bandwidth costs of serving up pages to millions of daily readers. It also means he’s going to attempt to brand his online content as ‘premium’ content. There’s enough people in this world that will willingly choose the pay per view option over the alternative if it’s better (or they think it is) – consider Sky vs Freeview, for example.

If Murdoch is successful and manages to halt the losses then expect the other newspaper groups to follow his example. If he fails then things are going to get even sticker for the news industry.

If something has value to us, we should be willing to pay for it (we do pay for BBC News Online already) – and that goes for news, too.

So we’ve had the voting for the Total Politics Top Blogs thing which officially opened Blogosphere Navel Gazing season. Next up, it’s the Bottys – Lib Dem’s official Blog of the Year awards. If you’re not a Lib Dem you’re going to want to skip this post. Trust me on this.

One of the quirks of the Bottys is that bloggers can’t win twice. This should be fantastic for long established bloggers that haven’t yet won. These include Millennium Elephant, a much loved blog and Liberal England by Jonathan Calder – one of our most well read and highly regarded bloggers.

Of course, new blogs appear all the time that makes the competition tougher:

Jennie Rigg has shown how you can run a political blog that attracts a mainstream, non-political readership by writing in a completely unpretentious style, mixing the personal and the political. I would love to see Jennie win, because it would demonstrate that the judges can look beyond normal expectations about what a political blog should be.

Then there’s Costigan Quist, who’s been demolishing bad journalism all year by actually reading the reports that journalists don’t – with a healthy dose of humour, well written prose and smut thrown into the mix. This horse has legs.

Relative newcomer to the Lib Dem blogosphere Mark Thompson has gone from nothing to being everywhere in a matter of months. His post revealing a link between the safety of an MP’s seat and the likelihood that they would abuse their expenses showed how a blog could actually make the news, not just echo it.

There are some really nice/good/clever/funny blogs out there that don’t often get much attention that would really benefit from the boost they’d get from being short-listed or winning. Does Irfan Ahmed deserve a nod for sheer punky chutzpah, even though he’s apparently ruled himself out? What about blogs like Caron’s Musings, or Cobden’s Comments, or Cicero’s Songs, or Moments of Clarity? All of these blogs are excellent in their own way, and these are just the handful that spring to mind.

These blogs – and all the other unsung blogs that I don’t even know about – need your help. It only takes just one single nomination to be considered by the judges, so you’re better off nominating the weird and wonderful over and above the well known.

For LD bloggers who want to boost their chances now is the time to go through your archives and pull out a selection of your own best posts (NOT posts written by other bloggers!) for consideration for ‘post of the year’ and to give the judges a nice easy ride through your Best Of. I am, essentially, tagging the whole LD Blogosphere with this, because that’s the kind of evil sadist I really am. Good luck

“Are you still planning to beat up women when you grow up, Tarquin?”

Ah, so the Daily Mail seems to be going a bit mad at the moment. Harriet Harman is back in the news after announcing she wants children as young as 5 being taught, in school, that men beating up women is wrong.

Great. After that, perhaps they can also explain that chasing cats into locked cat flaps is cruel, that using a lighter in combination with an Aerosol can is unforgivably naughty, then can teach them not to call the black child in the class a nigger, and they can tell them not to call the kids with glasses Speccy Four Eyes.

The Daily Mail objects because it’s a waste of teaching resources and on the grounds that it’s something that parents should be teaching their offspring, not the state. They’re wrong – well, wrong to assume this is the most important objection.

I object because it’s planting the idea in the heads of children who do not, themselves, come from violent homes that men beat women – and then tells them that they shouldn’t do it themselves later.

I do not believe that you can assume that this will actually help.

At this point I’d like very, very much for someone to consult some qualified psychologists, especially child psychologists – is there any evidence to support the idea that teaching children that men grow up into violent wife beating monsters helps them overcome this particular ‘inclination’ later in life, or could it have the opposite effect? Does making young boys neurotic about when they might turn into wife beaters (does it happen overnight? Is it related to body hair? Oh no!) actually help?

I’m not dismissing the domestic violence issue. Far from it – I know all too well that if someone wants to do a bit of fighting then the easiest way to get away with it is to beat up your spouse or your children. The biggest problem with Domestic Violence is securing prosecutions. It’s all done behind closes doors and the victims are rarely willing to press charges. Once someone starts hitting you, it’s very easy to get stuck in a self-destructive mind-set, where the beatings destroy your self esteem to the point where you start thinking you actually deserve it. It’s not them, it’s you… which is all manner of screwed up but it’s a natural human reaction, so what do you do?

It’s also worth noting that women also beat men, which to this day is mentioned only in passing, giggling, as if a big strong man should be able to protect themselves easily against weak little women. Clearly it’s the exception rather than the rule for domestic violence, but it’s still an important exception and one that still, to this day, challenges the belief that men are always big, tough, strong and violent and women are always weak, harmless and helpless.

But this to me says that the the emphasis on men beating up women only perpetuates the idea that it’s impossible for women to hurt men, which isn’t true – people laugh when they see a woman beating up a man, which is really really patronising, and really really dangerous. Ask a bouncer, they’ll tell you how it is ‘on da streetz’.

I prefer the indirect approach – if we’re going to do anything at all it should be channelling children’s aggression and energy into something vaguely constructive (or at least not dangerous) and I think it should apply equally to boys and girls, so that we’re not actually reinforcing the idea that men are all violent monsters. The point is that the mark of an adult is self control, and that’s something schools can teach.