How magnanimous. Harriet Harman, the acting leader of the Labour Party, has granted Diane Abbott a mercy nomination. They don’t agree with each other politically, but, heck, they’re both women. That should obviously override any and all other considerations, right?

Despair, thy name is tokenism.

Ed Balls has joined in too, eager to prove his pro-diversity credentials. He’s already got his 33 nominations, so he’s asked MPs intending to nominate him to nominate Diane Abbott instead. I think this demonstrates not so much good sportsmanship on Ed Ball’s part but rather just what sort of threat he considers Diane to be. That’d be “absolutely no threat whatsoever.”

Perhaps I’m being a little cynical. Perhaps after yesterday’s piece about the uncomfortable morality of positive discrimination I’m being overly sensitive to this rather public determination to ‘get a black woman on the ballot’ to make Labour look like a more woman and ethnic minority friendly party when the truth is that Labour’s parliamentary party have done little more than pat Diane on the head for standing and then utterly disregard her presence in the contest.

There is, after all, another left wing back-bench rebel trying to get on the ballot. This candidate has actually got more nominations, so in terms of ensuring there’s a broad spectrum of political opinion in the contest, this candidate might actually be the sensible one to pick. But this candidate is a white male. An old one, at that. No-one’s asking other MPs to give John McDonnell a nomination. He’s left to stand – and fall – on his own two feet, and if you want people to be truly equal that’s how things should be for Diane Abbott too.

I don’t think I’m ever going to understand this sort of logic, but then I’m not the kind of person Labour is trying to appeal to with this sort of highly public display of some-of-my-best-friends-are-black-ism.

So, my message to Labour MPs is this: Don’t you dare. Don’t nominate her just because she’s a woman. Don’t. You won’t be helping. Not really.

I don’t envy you. You’ve set yourselves up as the party that reflects the diversity of the nation, but when it really counts, when it really really matters you’ve looked to Oxbridge educated White Males to lead you, and that’s just plain embarrassing isn’t it? Would it really be so unthinkable to simply assert that Diane hasn’t been nominated because, well, she’s a bit crap?

Would that be so, so, so unthinkable?

This needs saying again, doesn’t it?

Positive discrimination is still discrimination. Just adding the word “positive” doesn’t make it so, but then not all discrimination is negative.

We discriminate constantly, all the time, if we have any sense. We discriminate against brands that we’ve had bad experiences with. Had a Ford that’s conked out on you? Well, you won’t buy a Ford again. That’s discrimination. You’re discriminating against Ford, and the result is that you end up with a better car. If you don’t, if you decide all brands are the same you risk repeating the same mistake over and over, wasting more and more money.

We discriminate against what things we’ll put in our bodies. We decide that a little bit of chocolate is okay, but getting frobble-jammed on Heroin isn’t. We discriminate against things that are bad for us, and the result is that we act in our own self interest. If we don’t discriminate then we risk our lives and sanity.

We discriminate, if we have any sense whatsoever, between those who are willing and capable and those who are not. If you’re looking for someone to build a website, what matters is whether or not they can build that website. Failure to discriminate here, to instead pick someone based on perhaps their appearance, or how much they might need the job, would be a complete disaster and a waste of everyone’s time and money. You can discriminate perfectly legally and to the mutual benefit of you both by discriminating against the incapable and the unwilling.

We discriminate between what sort of entertainment we like, based on the level of pleasure, relaxation or escapism it gives us. If we decided instead to discriminate based on what we think other people want us to enjoy, or what we think we should enjoy versus what we actually do enjoy or simply refuse to discriminate at all and passively take in whatever happens to be around us, we deny ourselves the opportunity of maximising our own pleasure. It is your duty in life to discriminate here.

The point is that discrimination, or ‘decision making’ is neither good or bad. The measure is the quality of the decision making and the criteria.

Positive discrimination is, simply put, very bad decision making forced upon someone else, with a cuddly word added to the front. I get that it’s nice to have role models in important positions, that some people benefit from being able to see success in others like them. But, you know, it’s not success. Not really. Who’s really won, when the intervention has been to force bad decision making on someone else? The individual who gets the job, perhaps, but at what cost? How does it feel to win a job or position by using powerful friends to rig the game in your favour?

I tell you how it feels: It feels shit. Role models that sell a lie as truth – which is all positive discrimination achieves – aren’t worth a thing.

Having to be better is hard. It’s unfair, too, that someone of equal ability might not be given the same chances in life based on something as arbitrary as race or gender, and that really, really bites. It does. The world doesn’t work the way I want it to.

But, in the long run – the really really long run – this necessity to be ‘twice as good’ as straight white men? That’s something that pushes everyone harder, makes us all better. I can live with it… certainly, I can live with that far more comfortably than having a job I haven’t earned handed to me on a plate.

With the help of the superb Jack of Kent blog, I have (like many of his readers) become much more interested in the details of the Gary McKinnon case. Gary, if you recall, was the man who is alleged to have hacked into over 90 US computers belonging to their Army, Navy and NASA over a period of months. According to the US’s indictment, McKinnon used readily available tools to identify vulnerable computers, and, having found them, used these computers to find other such computers. He found a lot.

He installed various pieces of software to facilitate this access, and appears to have deleted log files (in order to cover his tracks) and, most damaging, user accounts. The US says he caused real operational damage, but most damaging for McKinnon himself is the message he left behind on one of the computers:

US foreign policy is akin to Government-sponsored terrorism these days … It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year … I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels …

Having looked at the details, I’ve realised, belatedly, that the portrayal of Gary as some sort of teenage savant searching for UFOs is, simply put, fiction. In techie circles, Gary appears to have been something of a “Script Kiddie,” a derogatory term for people, usually teenage males (but, Gary, as has been pointed out, wasn’t at the time), who use tools and scripts programmed by others to attack computer systems and they’re something of a right royal pain in the arse. They’re not “leet hackers”, but they certainly like people to think they are. A proper “leet hacker” would have understood what they were doing properly and only have taken the risk if they could be sure they’d be able to successfully cover their tracks. Gary stood on the shoulders of giants and, in doing so, got his head chopped off.

Having said that, Gary has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which I’ve also been doing a lot of reading about today – specifically how it might relate to ‘diminished responsibility’. It works like this: While someone with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) may know and understand that it’s wrong to cause harm, they may not actually understand that what they’ve done has actually caused harm due to an impairment in empathic understanding. Unlike psychopaths – who also demonstrate really rather severe inability to comprehend how their actions impact others, AS sufferers don’t have the same superficial charm and ability to manipulate. AS suffers, as part of their diagnosis, simply don’t understand social interactions, norms and rules well enough to ‘fake it’ like the psychopaths can. Importantly, AS sufferers are typically far more likely to be victims of crime than they are perpetrators as a result of their impairments.

It’s argued that AS sufferers are significantly easier to manipulate into becoming accessories to crimes than many other types of people – they are, in many respects, those ‘vulnerable adults’ we often hear so much about. I worry that rather than the ‘leet hacker’ he’s portrayed as, Gary is someone who seems to have found a bunch of websites with tools and instructions, read a few conspiracy theories and simply started using these tools, without really understanding the risks he was taking with his freedom or the damage he was doing to the computers he infiltrated.

But no attempt on his behalf has been made to suggest that he’s not fit for trial, or that his criminal responsibility has been diminished. Instead his team have concentrated on – with the help of Professor Baron-Cohen – on the disproportionate suffering that Gary might endure (see para 28) having to serve time in a US prison, as a result of his Asperger’s Syndrome.

The Courts have not been impressed and, legally speaking, it hasn’t given anyone strong enough grounds to prevent his extradition. The US authorities have reassured the British courts that they’ll treat any medical condition he might have properly, and that’s that. I hope this is true.

I think, having looked at all this, I’m still no clearer about whether or not I want to “Free Gary”. What he’s done is serious, and there’s no doubt paying the price will not be easy for him. At what point can Gary be seen to have made amends for what he’s done? A year? Two years? 5 years? In the UK the same crime carries a life sentence, after all.

The whole thing strikes me as yet another horrible, senseless waste of human life whichever way it works out in the end. I may not be an especially compassionate person myself, but it seems as though there’s something wrong with our extradition arrangements here that the Home Secretary seemingly has no discretion or choice in the matter. Then again, even if she did, it’s hard to see whether the Asperger’s factor would be enough.

If Gary was your own son, you’d probably regard his crime as simple, reckless, juvenile stupidity (except involving computer software rather than spray cans of paint) deserving of little more than a clip round the ear. If you’re responsible for the security of the US’s computers, watching systems come down and operations being disrupted you’re viewing Gary as a malicious menace determined to cause trouble who needs banging up for as long as possible as a warning to others.

The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in-between.

Update: Thanks to Al Jahom for pointing out that Gary was born in 1966, and wasn’t a teenager despite what it says all over the flippin’ internet. Grr!!

You know, before I became one, I thought libertarians were like the survivalist gun freaks from the much loved B-Movie classic, “Tremors.” They were people who, generally speaking, wanted to go live in the middle of nowhere, cut themselves off from the rest of the world with a heavily armed fortress and generally sit around cursing and waiting for the end of the world.

Actually, as it happens, most of the libertarians I know have more in common with IT nerds (which, in fact, they often are) – people who live their lives in the domain of the unrestricted, unregulated free world of the internet where all that matters is skill, ability to deliver and giving people what they want. And everyone, it seems, gets what they want from the Internet. Libertarians look at this, and they compare it with the way the flesh and blood world works, how stifling, rigid and controlled it is and they find the comparison unflattering.

But, it’s true, there’s still an association between libertarianism and guns, and the shootings yesterday and the announcement by the libertarian alliance that they want significantly less gun control has opened this little kettle of soon to be boiled fish all over again.

The argument usually breaks down like this: Criminals get guns no matter what, and they’re more willing to use them when their victims are not likely to shoot back. Ergo an armed citizenry is safer than one where only criminals are armed.

Yet if we accept that an armed population is a population less likely to be victims of crime, this somehow doesn’t come across as a compelling argument in favour of gun liberalisation for most. The debate isn’t even about proving it might work – it’s that most believe that gun liberalisation is not an acceptable means of reducing crime, end of story, case closed, shut up and stop being a nutter.

For the lives saved by gun control – and I don’t actually doubt there have been lives saved – gun control has resulted in a population legally bound into helplessness, creating a toxic environment of fear of crime which drives increasingly irrational responses from Governments – egged on by the Tabloids – to deal with it. When it comes to crime the only option left to the Government is to increase their control and monitoring of us – something we’ve struggled to fight against with the last Government and will no doubt continue to fight all future Governments over too.

So by closing down one particular line of debate and inquiry, one particular approach to maintaining law and order, we leave something just as objectionable and awful – perhaps worse, in fact – as the only option left. Are we really utterly convinced, beyond reasonable doubt, that we have the perfect solution here? Is it really beyond the pale to even question it? The more people say, “You can’t say that” the more I feel the urgent need to say it. Is a sane, rational debate about Gun Control really so impossible? Has the well been poisoned so much that one seriously cannot even discuss it without having to defend accusations of compromised mental health?

No, no subject is beyond debate. No line of inquiry should be ruled out.

We need to understand that whenever a Government steps in and says, “You can’t do this” it changes the population, it has an impact, and that impact is nearly always a mixture of some good with a great deal of negative unintended consequences which demand yet more “right, okay, er…. you can’t do this, either” and round and round, forever and ever. It seems unthinkable that people can believe that gun control is exempt – it’s not.

As a sort of postscript, I’d like to say that the dream of a peaceful society free from guns isn’t achieved simply by passing a law. The law creates a pleasant, reassuring fiction – nothing more.

If we’d truly become that sort of society, if we’re really changed and evolved beyond the need for violence, such regulation wouldn’t be necessary at all. It’s only considered necessary because we’re not civilised enough, not mature enough, not sane enough to be trusted enough to take the decision ourselves. It sends a profoundly cynical, depressing message about what kind of people we really believe ourselves to be.

Derrick Bird met up with his friend Peter Leder last night and told him, “You won’t see me again.” The next day, this popular, well liked, normal man armed himself with a gun and killed one of his friends. He then got in his car and drove across Cumbria shooting people out of the window. He killed 12 and injured another 25 before finally taking his own life.

I’ve been wondering what to write about this – if I should, in fact, write about it at all.

I suppose I do have something to say – something that politicians can’t say, even though they really, really should – and that’s this:

Disgusting travesties like this happen. They’re rare. Very, very rare, but when they happen they’re shocking, appalling and we naturally feel compassion and sympathy for those have have lost their lives and loved ones.

No doubt over the next few weeks people will search for answers: What ‘pushed him over the edge’? What can we do to make sure this never happens again? Perhaps gun laws will be tightened still further, or perhaps there’ll be another gun amnesty, or perhaps they’ll be a high profile campaign to get arms off the streets.

But this sort of thing will happen again, no matter what we do today or tomorrow.

Sometimes, and we don’t really know why, one person out of the 60 million of us, perhaps every 10 years or so, will simply do something beyond forgiveness, redemption or understanding. It’s the price, I suppose, of being the type of creatures that we are. The only sane response is to accept it, to understand that we can never be protected against some nutter deciding, out of the blue, to murder strangers for no other reason than the fact that he’d decided to do it.

We simply hope it won’t happen to us – and for most of us, as near as possible all of us, it won’t.

But these things will never make sense to the sane. We shouldn’t even try. We mourn, if we wish, and we move on.

These things, you see, just happen.