It’s the easiest thing in the world to be well reasoned and rational when the reasoned, rational argument happens to fit your own prejudices. It’s quite another thing to use reason to support an argument that you personally find uncomfortable.

The last few days have been very uncomfortable.

A man in Arizona (I won’t name him) shot a congresswoman, a judge, a kid and others. It’s a horrible, unspeakable tragedy.

And, like all other horrible, unspeakable tragedies like this, people rush to find the cause, the explanation, the reason. Depending on the circumstances blame is invariably placed on whatever pop culture the shooter might have enjoyed – Grand Theft Auto III, Marilyn Manson, The Beatles. Sometimes the blame is placed on The Media for their morbid glamorisation of other such killers. Sometimes it’s blamed on Gun Control, or lack of.

This time it is “The Toxic Violent Rhetoric of Politics” that’s to blame. Glenn Beck. Sarah Palin. They’ve created this culture. They’re to blame.

Except, of course, that’s unsupportable as a basic fact: All other Americans have been exposed to the exact same ‘violent rhetoric’ without literally taking up arms against their local politicians. And, we should remember, the shooter didn’t just kill political targets. He went on a killing spree at a town hall meeting, indiscriminately killing Democrats, Republicans, Swing voters and children.

The question we normally ask, “What makes people go on killing sprees?” has been replaced, this time, with, “what can we do about the ‘violent rhetoric’ in America?” and I despair, wondering how it came to be that this comfortable, easy explanation has been swallowed as fact so easily. We literally know nothing. Nothing. Anyone who tries to tell you what caused this tragedy not shrugging their shoulders and saying, “I don’t know” is making stuff up or echoing the opinions of others. It’s possibly only one guy that really knows – and even that’s not certain. “It was an act of Terrorism” explains what it was, but not the why.

As a nod to more rational thinking, some asking this question freely admit that Sarah Palin “didn’t actually pull the trigger” and then follow it up with a smug sounding “but”.

Yet, behind this story, there’s the seed of something else that is genuinely alarming. The rush to blame Palin and Beck for this travesty is not, in my opinion, the result of political opportunism or an organised effort to attack Sarah Palin, even if it looks like that. Even I’m not that cynical. I also think that many otherwise liberal minded and rational people are incapable of telling the difference between a mass murderer and a stereotype of a gun toting Tea Party member.

And herein lies the problem. A lot of people, quite understandably, are scared by the implications of someone being murdered for their political beliefs (even if the other victims of the shooter were murdered for simply being in proximity to someone with known political beliefs). There are real people who are genuinely scared that the bitter, twisted rhetoric that passes for political discourse in the States is turning into something that means people are going to end up dead.

They, themselves, are restrained. They understand that it’s just words, that it’s all part of the stupid game of politics. There’s no way they’d be talked into shooting a Republican, or committing some other atrocity by violent rhetoric.

But that’s the Democrats, the Liberals. They’re sensible and mature, right? But the Republicans, the Tea Party lot? They’re kind of backwards. Stupid. Possibly inbred. Poor hicks with nothing but guns and hate. You can’t trust them to understand it’s just words, that they’re not meant to literally put Democrats to death.

For Democratic politicians, the fear must be so much worse. What if they’re next? What if, in every decision they take, they’re constantly thinking about the possibility of violent reprisals from republican voters? What if they have to shut themselves away from the public behind fortress walls, afraid of facing the very people they’re supposed to represent?

But the fact that people can actually believe that Palin and Beck’s rhetoric could have turned an ordinary GOP voter into a killer is a sign that the dehumanisation of rival tribes is not limited exclusively to Republicans. The hate, the fear, the distrust – the feeling, it seems, is mutual. This sense of desperation to tone down the rhetoric has not sprung out of no-where. This idea that the rhetoric is to blame is feeding on pre-existing fears.

It’s somewhat comforting to imagine that if everyone decides that the rhetoric was to blame and things change as a result then, perhaps, something good might come out of a senseless act of terrorism. Instead what’s happening is that normal, rational people who’d laugh at any suggestion that Grand Theft Auto causes killing sprees are quite willing to accept, without any real evidence at all, that the guy went on a killing spree because of a tasteless-in-hindsight website, or brain-numbing slogans like, “Don’t retreat! Reload!”?

A collective knee jerks, and a finger points squarely in exactly the same direction it always points: The Enemy. Them.

John Prescott was the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister from the years 1997 to 2007. His name has been changed, by the Queen, to “Baron Prescott, of Kingston Upon Hull, in the County of East Yorkshire” but is, in fact, more commonly referred to by those for whom respect for authority and tradition allows as Lord Prescott.

I raise this matter because John has expressed discomfort with his new Lordly name.

“I don’t like the word Lord. It’s got a Lordly meaning to it.”

Well, yes. In many respects, that’s very much the point. The Torygraph continues:

“I’d prefer to be called a senator than a Lord. It has all these kind [sic] of implications and I get a bit embarrassed about them but it gives me a political platform. But for God’s sake let’s get rid of the word Lord and become a senator.”

Let’s see: To be a Senator would imply that the person in question had achieved their post democratically, that they were a representative of the people in some way. To be a Lord is to have done a favour for someone, or perhaps to have an ancestor who did a favour for the King or the Queen of their time.

To call John Prescott – who received his current title as thanks for his service to the previous Government – a Senator would be a lie, a fraud. John is a Lord, because that reflects the truth of the current undemocratic, favours based system that we use to fill the House of Lords.

But all is not lost, John. I share your discomfort. I’ll never call you Lord. Oh, no, please: Don’t mention it. I’m happy to help.

[Source]

I haven’t thought much about politics recently. Instead I’ve been focused on work, and for that I don’t apologise. Running a blog is a luxury for the time rich, and running a political blog with such a profoundly dull Government in charge is something of a tedious bore.

Some, of course, think differently. They protest to embarrass or intimidate the Government – those Lib Dems have to be a weak link, right? – into ramping up taxes to keep the public sector in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed, to continue redistributing jobs from the private sector to the public sector and turn Britain into the giant Day Care Centre for adult babies that seems to be the only future it really has.

Still, despite the silence I have been thinking about my own libertarianism and wondering whether my utter contempt for even the concept of a ‘class’ has blinded me to certain realities. I despise and loathe the British class system, and consider the only reasonable response to be to ignore it, to wilfully refuse to acknowledge the damn thing exists. But, what if the lefties have a point? What if a country’s very culture is a primary economic factor? Opposition to Libertarianism comes from those who look at this country with very different eyes to my own and see disaster in trusting people to look after their own self interest, see ruin in looking to the private sector and see nothing but evil at the mere mention of the ‘profit motive’. What is it they see that I don’t?

Few libertarians are interested in class. We think of people as individuals, not members of collectives whether that be race, gender or class, so we rarely think or talk about it. Why should we? As far as I’m concerned the issue of someone’s class is a matter of extreme triviality, as tedious and irrelevant to anything worth thinking about as the colour of someone’s eyes or their shoe size. “I am working class!” says you. “So?” says I.

But for all the pointlessness of the class system, I do live in a society that has a list of people it calls the “Upper Class”, which you are born or marry into and this particular class seems to hold a certain glamour and fascination. I can’t claim to be an authority on the reality of life for the aristocracy, nor do I much care. Perhaps I am not middle class enough, or perhaps it’s simply that the only people I regard as my “betters” are those with greater skills, knowledge and achievements.

I don’t measure people by the amount of land or property they own, or who their friends might be and what parties they are invited to, or where they were educated or how much money they have.

This exposes me, I suspect, of having a rather “working class” mindset, to value what one can accomplish with one’s hands and mind. And, perhaps, deep down, this is the true British sickness, the source of our malaise.

See, as a society, utter morons that we are, have placed work at the very bottom of our social hierarchy, and not working at the top. To succeed in British society is to be able to not work and we wonder why people are perfectly satisfied to live on handouts. Deep down, they’re living the British dream: To do absolutely nothing at all.

You can see, I’m sure, how this sort of thinking, profoundly and deeply ingrained into the British psyche, dooms us all? In the world of business, the person who turns up once every month and watches cash rolling in has a higher prestige and social status than the person who actually runs the organisation’s operations, as if the operations are a vulgarity. Superior still is the person who gives to another a pile of cash and delegates to them the task of turning that money into more money. In popular culture our most popular folk heroes are those who’ve managed to make of career of absolute, cretinous uselessness, famous for being famous, a new democratised, bastardised and perverted echo of Britain’s aristocracy.

We have it all backwards. We’ve got it all wrong. We seem to admire those who do the least for the most, not those who do the most* and then we’re surprised when this country doesn’t seem capable of producing a Honda, or an Apple Computers, or a Google. To produce such a company requires more than a desire to make money. It requires a desire to work, to produce something new and wonderful for its own sake.

As long as we regard work as vulgar, as something to be escaped, as nothing more than a tiresome drain on our valuable time then, frankly, Day Care Centre Britain is our future.

* … and those who think we should be looking to up those who do the most for the least are a whole other problem for another day…

I’m sometimes amazed that there’s anyone who, with a straight face and a complete lack of shame, can condone or approve of torture.

It’s part of a package of things that ‘real’ and ‘serious’ politicians feel they must subscribe to once they’re in power and they take onto their shoulders the responsibility to protect every citizen in the country no matter what it takes or what it might cost.

In abandoning morality – in the form of approving of torture, or willingness to use information obtained under torture and being willing to erode rights we won under Magna Carta – they shift the blame onto us. It’s our fault. We must be protected, and whilst they themselves aren’t happy about it, they understand their solemn duty to protect.

Yet, really, I’m pretty sure the deal is that we expect them to protect us from, specifically, foreign threats and domestic criminals within reason and, preferably without actually making things worse or becoming a problem far bigger than the threat of terrorism.

And we’re grown up about this too. We assume that we’re not protected perfectly and that, sometimes, we’ll get lucky and there’ll be a positive intervention of some kind and that’s great.

Yet the truth is that our only real protection – such as it is – are the limits on the number of people who combine the desire, the motivation and the means to commit terrorist atrocities and then manage to go from inception to completion without anyone finding out or getting suspicious, without blowing themselves up prematurely or without simply doing it wrong.

Anti-terror efforts tend to concentrate on the means – find the bomb before it’s detonated, keep the information out of the public domain, limit the supply of potentially dangerous materials – and it’s in this murky territory that the pro-torture people lurk.

“What,” they ask, “about someone who knows where there’s a dirty bomb?” Or perhaps they muse about whether it’s okay to use information already obtained.

Yet these are the great hypothetical questions and they all reduce down to the ends justify the means and it’s how people have justified every repulsive crime, horror and abuse ever committed. It’s because of this, because you can justify anything that we need to be more careful in evaluating these things. Sure, these questions are never that simple, but where is the “greater good” here?

In truth no torturer begins an interrogation certain they will extract useful information (otherwise, duh, they wouldn’t need to be torturing someone). Nor can any information obtained ever be regarded as credible without being verified and checked by other means because, again, the source is an individual under duress. We don’t admit such evidence in court precisely because it has no measurable value.

People only get tortured because someone reckons an individual is guilty of something or might, one day, be guilty of something. Lacking actual proof of guilt, the only real hope is to cause them as much suffering as necessary until the consequences of confessing seem preferable to continued torture.

The basic problem is that we wouldn’t want to torture innocent people (and really once you’ve proven someone’s guilt then torture becomes an act of sheer sadism), and yet since the time of King John we’re all innocent until proven guilty.

It doesn’t say, “well, you know, unless they’re terror suspects, in which case better safe than sorry, what ho?”

I’m willing to live in a society that ignores information obtained via torture. The increased risk – if there even is an increase that could even be measured – is a price I’m willing to pay in order to protect the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” and deny Governments the power to use physical force and psychological warfare to extract confessions out of people. I tend to believe that is the greater good, that the overall amount of harm done is actually reduced.

Let’s call it the ‘Don’t be a dick’ school of politics and let’s save torture for those who really deserve it: Reality TV Producers and contestants… um.. no… wait…

What is the Tea Party? It’s an umbrella under which US political activists, supporters and politicians can sit, marking them as supporters of the Tea Party’s mission.

The mission, as printed, to campaign for lower taxes and a smaller state. It is, officially, concerned only with matters economic. In this regard it’s quite libertarian indeed – it leaves matters of ‘personal conscience’ to the individual, exactly where it should be.

Is that it? Not really. For the true significance you have to understand a bit about how US politics actually works.

The mechanism for political change is the US Open Primary system – very different from the British party system, where anyone – literally anyone – can use the Primary system to get themselves selected as either the GOP or Democratic candidate. Traditionally the ruling bodies of these two parties – the DNC and RNC – have been able to get ‘their guys’ in place without much difficulty.

So this is what Daily Kos and the Tea Party are all about – they’re about skipping the DNC and the RNC and talking directly to the grassroots registered voters, getting them involved with primaries and getting candidates in seats they actually want to vote for. Obama was the Grassroots guy. Hilary Clinton was the DNC’s choice. In the end the DNC did not get their way – Democrat voters did.

So, in many respects, just as the Democratic Party has been transformed by grassroots activism so the Tea Party seems to be having a similar effect on the GOP. There’s enough people involved with the Tea Party, or sympathetic to it, that it has a powerful effect on primaries.

My gut feeling on this – and that’s all it is – is that it really marks a continued polarisation of American Political Life. Grassroots movements don’t campaign for more moderation and compromise with the opposition – they demand the opposite. If both the GOP and the Democrat Party become entirely controlled by their respective grassroots then I think we can expect more extreme politicians of the kind we simply couldn’t even imagine here in the UK.

Is it a good thing? Well, it’s democratic and it’s empowering, but lost in the middle are the people who don’t think that you have to choose between Big Government/Small Church and Small Government/Big Church, and that’s when things start to get nausea inducing.

Much has been written and said about the Tea Party being ‘astroturf’. The true test of a Grassroots movement is whether or not it actually works. The Tea Party does – its supporters are very real, casting real votes and influencing real elections. It’s filled a niche that people wanted filling. The source doesn’t actually matter. It’s a real political movement and the fight against it has moved on from claims of ‘astroturf’ to general queries about the sanity of its candidates.

In reality, despite – or perhaps because of – the Tea Party’s focus entirely on tax and spending and indifference to everything else, it’s proven itself to be a handy vehicle for people with (what I consider to be) theocratic tendencies to bypass the GOP’s ruling body.

Part of me thinks that the rise of religion as an important part of the American Right Wing politician’s identity is a reaction to the general belief that liberal (in the British sense, not the American sense) economics are somehow “evil” and that it’s supporters lack morals. Certainly, that’s the problem faced by the British Coalition, who by merely taking spending levels back a few years are presented as representatives of Hell here on Earth, with no moral direction and no desire to achieve anything other than to make poor people suffer as much as possible.

By presenting themselves as people of strong faith and moral convictions this line of attack is somehow neutralised or circumvented. They just need to give people a reason to feel that voting for a particular candidate is a Good Thing To Do.

And that, really, is why the Tea Party ain’t my Cup of Tea. It needs one small change – that its candidates and politicians offer the people they will ultimately represent the same freedom of conscience that the Tea Party grants them, that they will never support Government interference in people’s private lives. That means letting people choose for themselves. It means not using the public money as a means to teach Christian propaganda to children, too.

Sadly that’s not going to happen. The Grassroots will see to it. The choice for Americans is between political and religious freedom OR economic freedom. They’re moving further and further away from the distinctly grassroots, non-mainstream dream of all three.