The article offers many other points of interest. For instance:

By guaranteeing a minimum price, Fairtrade also encourages market oversupply, which depresses global commodity prices. This locks Fairtrade farmers into greater Fairtrade dependency and further impoverishes farmers outside the Fairtrade umbrella. Economist Tyler Cowen describes this as the “parallel exploitation coffee sector”.

Coffee farms must not be more than 12 acres in size and they are not allowed to employ any full-time workers. This means that during harvest season migrant workers must be employed on short-term contracts. These rural poor are therefore expressly excluded from the stability of long-term employment by Fairtrade rules.

In other words, it’s mostly a marketing gimmick.

(from marginal revolution blog)

It isn’t only astrology enthusiasts who insist upon their right to believe whatever they like. Type “I am entitled to my opinion” into a Google search and you will see that it is a standard riposte of the frustrated debater, on topics as diverse as politics, religion, music and football.

The idea that everyone is entitled to his opinion is one of those truisms so often repeated that it now goes without saying. Like many truisms, however, it is false.

It is also usually irrelevant. Let us suppose that Jill disputes Jack’s opinion that free trade causes poverty in the Third World. Jack may defend his opinion by producing evidence connecting trade and poverty but he cannot help his case by insisting that he is entitled to his opinion. How could that show that free trade causes poverty in the Third World?

The entitlement would be relevant only if it guaranteed the truth of your opinions. But it can’t do that, because it is an entitlement supposedly enjoyed by everybody. And people disagree. Jack and Jill are both entitled to their contradictory opinions about trade and poverty, but they can’t both be right. So insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate.

Especially since there is no such entitlement in the first place. We do not have a right to our own opinions.

To see this, we need only understand one basic point about rights: namely, that rights entail duties. I don’t mean to endorse the new Labour slogan “No rights without responsibilities”, which is supposed to justify policies whereby the Government imposes good-behaviour conditions on the receipt of social welfare. I mean something much more fundamental about rights: they are defined by the duties to which they give rise.

The law gives us all a right to life. Your right to life means that everyone else has a duty not to kill you. This is not something that the Government may or may not decide to associate with your right to life; it is that right. A law that did not impose on others a duty not to kill you would thereby fail to establish your right to life.

Does your right to life mean that others have a duty to feed you, to house you, to provide you with medical care? These are hotly debated questions, but no one doubts that the answers to these questions about others’ duties are what define and delimit the right to life.

So when anyone claims a right, the first question to ask is what duties this right is supposed to impose on others; that will tell you what the right is supposed to be. It also provides a good test for whether there is, or should be, any such right. For it will often be clear that no one really has the implied duties, or that it would be preposterous to claim they should.

I once heard an Australian government minister claim that every child has a right to be loved. But who could possibly have a duty to love every child? Or even a duty to love a single child? Of course, it would be nice if every child were loved. But that is irrelevant. That something would be nice to have — such as long eye-lashes or £10 million — does not mean that anyone has a duty to provide you with it. Nor, therefore, that you have a right to it.

What, then, are the duties that the right to your opinions might entail? What am I obliged to do to respect this right? Let’s start from the boldest possible demands and work down to the more humble.

Does your right to your opinion oblige me to agree with you? No, that would make the duty impossible to perform. For I too have a right to my opinion, which you must respect. If we disagree, I must change my opinion to yours, and you must change yours to mine. But then we disagree again, and must change our opinions again. And so on forever, never managing to do our impossible duty.
Does your right to your opinion oblige me to listen to you?

No, I haven’t the time. Many people have many opinions on many matters. You cannot walk through the West End of London without hearing some enthusiast declaring his opinions on our Saviour Jesus or on the Zionist conspiracy or some other topic of pressing concern. To listen to them all is impossible and not therefore a duty.

Does your right to your opinion oblige me to let you keep it?

This is closest to what I think most mean when they claim a right to their opinion. They do so at just that point in an argument when they would otherwise be forced to admit error and change their position. This is also the weakest possible interpretation of the right and thus the most likely to pass the test.

Yet, it is still too strong. We have no duty to let others keep their opinions. On the contrary, we often have a duty to try to change them. Take an obvious example. You are about to cross the street with a friend. A car is coming yet your friend still takes a stride into the road. Knowing that she is not suicidal, you infer that she is of the opinion that no cars are coming. Are you obliged to let her keep this opinion?

I say no. You ought to take every reasonable measure to change her opinion, perhaps by drawing her attention to the oncoming car, saying something like “look out, a car is coming”. By so doing, you have not violated her rights. Indeed, she will probably thank you.

On matters such as whether or not a car is about to crush them, everyone is interested in believing the truth; they will take the correction of their errors as a favour. The same goes for any other topic. If someone is interested in believing the truth, then he will not take the presentation of contrary evidence and argument as some kind of injury. He will not invoke an imaginary right that protects him against the revision of his opinions.

It is just that on some topics, many people are not really interested in believing the truth. They might prefer it if their opinion turned out to be true — that would be the icing on the cake — but truth is not too important.

Many of my friends, though subscribing to no familiar religion, claim to believe in a “superior intelligence” or “something higher than us”. Yet they will also cheerfully admit the absence of even a shred of evidence. Never mind. There is no cost in error, since the claim is so vague that it has no implications for action (unlike the case of the oncoming car). They just like believing it, perhaps because it would be nice if it were true, or because it helps them get along with their religious parents, or for some other reason.

But truth really is not the point, and it is most annoying to be pressed on the matter. And to register this, to make it clear that truth is neither here nor there, they declare: “I am entitled to my opinion.” Once you hear these words, you should realise that it is simple rudeness to persist with the matter. You may be interested in whether or not their opinion is true but take the hint, they aren’t.

Jamie Whyte is the author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking

My fellow guests on my latest outing were a local businesswoman and a senior trade unionist. I was asked whether I saw lower paid workers being brough into the tax net in the budget. I said it was an unfortunate inevitability given the state of the nation’s finances but far from desirable. From the texts coming in, it’s clear that many workers feel they would be better off on the dole.

The unions continue to compaign for higher taxes in preference to spending cuts. We went through this in the 1980s, trying to tax our way out of recession and ‘protecting the most vulnerable’ (but we must also preserve middle class handouts – child benefit and free university fees for millionaires). Result last time: mass unemployment and emigration. This time will be different…

I pointed out on the show that only 3,000 turned up for the public sector day of action last week in Dublin. From what I pick up, most private sector workers have scant sympathy for public sector unions, who had a veto on change under man of de people Bertie. Arguably, they are only doing their job (most public servants are on modest earnings) and the fault really lies with weak politicians. The reaction from the budget next month will be interesting – expect outrage from those affected but quite likely a rise in FF opinion poll ratings if they finally show decisiveness. The signs are that Lenihan is prevailing over the cabinet ostriches.

2. There used to be so much snow up here, you could strap a board to your feet and slide all the way down.

3. Televised contests gave cash prizes to whoever could store the most data in their head.

4. Well, the screens were bigger, but they only showed the movies at certain times of day.

5. We all had one, but nobody actually used it. Come to think of it, I bet my LinkedIn profile is still out there on the Web somewhere.

6. *

7. Our bodies were made of meat and supported by little sticks of calcium.

8. You used to keep files right on your computer, and you had to go back to that same computer to access them!

9. Is that the new iPhone 27G? Got multitasking yet?

10. I just can’t get used to this darn vat-grown steak. Texture ain’t right.

* Translation: “English used to be the dominant language. Crazy, huh?”

I once had a patient who had had the words ‘Fuck off’ tattooed on his forehead in mirror writing. When I asked him for the reason for this, he said that it was to wake him up in the morning when he looked at himself in the glass. It never failed, he said.

Newspapers perform more or less the same function for me. There is always something in them to irritate me profoundly, and there is nothing quite like irritation to get the juices circulating and the mind working. Oddly enough, only the print version of a newspaper, not the online one, has this tonic effect upon me; perhaps this is a conditioned response. I am like one of Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated at the sound of a bell. I have only to hold a newspaper in my hand to feel a pleasant frisson of outrage coming on.

Whenever I am in France, I read the French newspapers (the French read fewer newspapers than any other nation in the western world, by the way). There is always plenty in them to infuriate me, and so they are well worth the reading; for it must be confessed that indignation is one of the most rewarding of all emotions, as well as one that automatically gives meaning to life. When one is indignant, one does not wonder what life is for or about, the immensity of the universe does not trouble one, and the profound and unanswerable questions of the metaphysics of morals are held temporarily in abeyance.

The other day – well, on Saturday, 5th September, to be exact – I opened Le Monde to the page called ‘Debates.’ The page was devoted to prisons in France, where conditions are acknowledged by almost everyone to be very bad. The prisons are overcrowded; there is much violence between prisoners; the staff, according to Dr. Dominique Vasseur, who wrote a best-selling book about her time as a doctor working in the largest prison in Paris, are callous and often corrupt. If her book is to be trusted – and no one, I think, has suggested that she was lying or grossly exaggerating – prisons in France are far worse than those across the Channel, which themselves are by no means always model institutions.

Prison reform is an honourable cause; and while I don’t agree with Churchill, that a nation’s level of civilisation can be gauged by the way in which it treats its prisoners, I have always opposed the brutality that can so easily pervade what Erving Goffman called ‘a total institution.’ In the prison in which I worked, I insisted to the staff that their ascendancy over the prisoners must be moral rather than merely physical; and that, while they could be sometimes stern, they must always be fair. Moreover, they should always remember that, in prison, small things become large; and therefore, if they have promised something to a prisoner, they must always fulfil their promise. For otherwise the prisoner will be eaten up by a sense of grievance, and there is nothing like grievance to prevent a man from examining his own responsibility for his situation.

But half the page of Le Monde was taken up with a plea for the greatest reform of prison of all: total abolition. It was written by a teacher of philosophy at a lycee, one of the elite state schools of the country; and if it were not for the fact that many young people tend to believe exactly the opposite of what their teacher teaches them, I would have said that he must be a corrupter of youth. It is odd that a man who presumably has spent a large part of his life on abstract questions should show such little capacity for critical thought. In him, at any rate, the Cartesian spirit is dead.

The article’s title is: “An absurd system in a modern democracy.” The headline continues: “Over and above humiliation, it has become more murderous than the death penalty.”

The evidence for the latter assertion is that, since the abolition of the death penalty in France de facto in 1977 and de jure in 1981 (incidentally, you’d think it was BC 1981, the way Europeans look down on countries like India and Japan that retain he death penalty), at least 3000 prisoners have committed suicide in prison. And this fact alone is taken by him as indicating that prisons should no longer exist in France.

He writes:

The abolition of the death penalty brought about by the Left appeared logically and sociologically unavoidable; but it was only paralogical and paradoxical. It must be recognised: suicide kills more in prison than the death penalty ever did.

Only the abolition of prison, of course, will prevent suicide in prison. I leave aside the question of what ‘unavoidable’ means.

The malign influence of Foucault is everywhere in the article. Foucault has demonstrated that the end of cruel public punishments consecrated the arrival of the modern state which manifested its power hidden from view.

Personally sado-masochistic, Foucault tried (using an entirely bogus historiography) to demonstrate that humanitarian reform was actually nothing of the kind, but the replacement of one kind of raw power by another, more hidden and therefore dangerous and sadistic power.

Using precisely Foucault’s paradoxical thinking, the author writes:

The abolition of the death penalty therefore constituted less the symbolic accession of the left than the event that signified the defeat of its thought. Far from resolving a moral and political problem under the banner of the rights of Man, the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 sanctioned and sanctified punishment as incarceration. The left ratified a vast tendency in society in which squeamishness vies with hypocrisy.

The argument seems to be this: that the abolition of the death penalty led to an increased number of prisoners, which in turn led to an increased number of suicides among prisoners. Therefore the abolition of the death penalty was not a humanitarian measure.

I will not comment on the empirical evidence, or lack of it, for the assertion that the number of prisoners increased because of the abolition of the death penalty. Nor will I ask whether the increase in suicides after the abolition of the death penalty was predictable, as it would have had to have been if the abolition is to be designated as hypocritical. (We can blame people for not knowing that there are unpredictable consequences of their acts, but not for not knowing what those unpredictable consequences are.) Nor will I point out that there are rather obvious moral differences between an execution carried out by the state and a suicide, even that of a prisoner in the state’s care.

Let us, for the sake of argument, accept what the author claims. It would seem to entail the rather odd conclusion that a restoration of the death penalty would be a humanitarian measure. It would reduce the total number of deaths by reducing the prison population, and therefore the number of suicides in prison (assuming what is highly probably, that the rate of suicide among prisoners is higher than it would have been if they had not been imprisoned). On this view, the death penalty is a kind of expiatory sacrifice made on behalf of the whole population, rather than just a punishment properly so-called.

This, of course, is not the conclusion that the author draws. Rather, he wants the abolition of prison. As we shall see, he even wants something even more radical that that.

One thing that is notably absent from the article is any notion of crime or of the effects it has both on individual victims and on society as a whole – in the sense that a lot of crime causes fear and alters the mentality and behaviour of almost everyone in the direction of mistrust, caution and loss of freedom. It is as if only the criminal, and neither his act nor his victim, were of any interest to the author.

He suggests liberating prisoners ‘who can leave prison only humiliated, raped or desperate.’ For him, prison should be nothing but a therapeutic institution, one that does the prisoner good; if it fails to do that, it fails to do anything.

Again, I will pass over the question of whether humiliation is always and everywhere a bad thing. After all, the prospect of humiliation is one of the things that keeps us upright, as a cane keeps many a rosebush upright. We are social beings because we have a capacity to feel humiliated – or it might be the other way round. Be this as it may, there could be no prospect of humiliation if there were no actual means by which we might be humiliated. I am not particularly criminally-inclined, no more than average I would say, but I have often been kept on the straight and narrow path that leads to respectability by fear of humiliation. However, let us leave aside the interesting question of the necessary dose of humiliation necessary for the maintenance of society.

What would our author have instead of prisons? He says that he would build institutions designed by men and women who really wanted to look after wrongdoers, not institutions built by ‘betonneurs,’ those who construct in raw concrete. (Here, in his contempt of those who build in concrete, I agree with him.) But what kind of institutions would these be?

Here we come to the heart of his outlook, and that of many like him. He says that those prisons that are salubrious as buildings should be converted into ‘places of social reintegration,’ not only for those who have committed a crime, but for those ‘socially disintegrated people’ who have committed no crime: tramps, perhaps, or schizophrenics in need of rehabilitation. In other words, criminals are not to be marked out from any other people with difficulties of one sort or another, or treated differently from them.

The desire to blur limits and boundaries, in order to overturn society, has long marked out a certain kind of leftist. Because in social phenomena there are always borderline cases, they wish to undermine the very idea of categories. They are like people who would deny that anyone is tall because there is a fine gradation between tallest and shortest. Thus, because some things were considered crimes that are so considered no longer, and some things that were once legal that are now deemed criminal, they deny that the crime is anything other that an arbitrary social construction. A criminal is someone who merely has difficulty in his relations with society as some men have difficulties in their relations with their wives (and vice versa). What more natural, therefore, than that they should all attend the same day care centre, where they will be cured of their difficulties by psychological means?

‘It is necessary,’ says the author, ‘that the punished person should understand his mistake.’ Prison is obviously not the place for this; he comes out with as little understanding of his ‘mistake’ as he went in with. He therefore needs some kind of psychotherapy until he gains the requisite insight. We can see the Socratic paradox underlying this: that no man does wrong knowingly. There is no such thing as a wicked man.

This does violence not only to our knowledge of the behaviour of others, but to our self-knowledge. Which of us has never done wrong knowingly? Indeed, under most jurisdictions, a person is not guilty of a crime unless he has the requisite mens rea, a guilty mind, which implies the ability to have acted differently if he had so chosen.

There is no recognition whatsoever in the article that the purpose of the criminal law is to protect the population from criminals, not to make criminals better people. Of course, it would be nice if they became better people, as indeed they often do with the passage of time; but criminal justice is not group therapy. It is, moreover, preposterous, and deeply condescending, to suggest that criminals do not know what they are doing, and that what they need is therefore some kind of help to know it. As for calling crimes a ‘mistake,’ equivalent, shall we say, to putting the wrong postage on a letter or forgetting to put salt in the soup, it empties the world of all moral meaning whatever.

There is in the article a moral exhibitionism, which is generosity of spirit at other people’s expense. This, I think, is one of the sicknesses of our age, the desire to appear more-compassionate-than-thou. I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, the author does not believe a word of what he says: a common thing among intellectuals.

This is classic Roche – smearing the opponents rather than dealing with the issue. Then he accuses the No side of using scare tactics!

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• ”The 120 Days of Sodom”—Average Reader’s Rating: Five stars. OK, so I like totally pre-ordered this book based on the author’s name, which just happens to be the same as my maiden name—Marquis de. Yeah, a sketchy reason to buy a book, but I was pumped. But when it got here I didn’t understand it at all. It just didn’t go anywhere. It just kept repeating itself. I went through it a few times more, searching for some deeper, awesome meaning, but just ended up totally bummed. Actually, some parts of it were kind of gross.

• ”Oedipus Rex”—Average reader rating: Four stars. Sophocles is a satisfying author who writes in clear, snappy prose. Youngsters in particular could learn a lot by imitating Mr. Rex, until he goes a bit off the rails toward the end. Nothing earth-shattering here, but zippy stuff. Have to admit I’m still puzzled by the weird subplot involving Mr. Rex’s mother.

• ”The Aeneid”—Average reader’s rating: Two stars. Whine, whine, whine! Okay, so your hometown burnt to the ground and your family got wiped out, but do you have to keep bellyaching about it? Where’s that gonna get you, Mr. Grumpy? Basically, Virgil is a poor man’s Tacitus. He goes on and on about Priam and Dido and Zeus, when all the reader wants is to get to the good part when the Trojans defile the Vestal Virgins. And talk about a rip-off: He doesn’t even include the story about the one-eyed giant who can turn pigs into Greeks!

• ”On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres”—Average Reader Rating: Three stars. Those who have read my countless reviews elsewhere know that I am a mathematician, astronomer, polyglot and philosopher in my own right, and therefore uniquely qualified to discuss everything from Zeno’s Paradox to Gordian’s Knot. Mostly, I think my fellow polymath Copernicus has done a pretty solid job here. The thing most laymen don’t realize—unlike mathematicians/ philosophers/astronomers/polymaths like me (as those familiar with my numerous other reviews can tell you)—is that people like Copernicus are really good with numbers. Just as I am. Really, really good. (Me, that is.) Readers seeking more of my unique insights can reach me at Igor@mymommysbasement.com.

• ”Deuteronomy”—Average Reader’s Rating: Three stars. I don’t get it. I’ve read most of the books in this series, and they totally kick butt, but this one leaves me scratching my head. Is there a story here? Am I missing something? Why so much talk about clean and unclean beasts? The author really got on a roll with Genesis and Exodus, and I was on the edge of my seat when I read The Book of Numbers. But this one runs out of gas early. Now I’m glad I skipped Leviticus!

• ”Mein Kampf”—Average reader’s rating: One star. Lively writing, but just too, too depressing. Why does he keep using big words that normal people can’t understand, like lebensraum and oberkommandant? Hey! I own a thesaurus, too! And what’s up with the Jewish thing?

Ireland’s position in the EU is in grave danger – a position that owes much to the neglect of complacent politicians, writes DAN O’BRIEN

IN ARTICLES in recent weeks, Garret FitzGerald concluded that Ireland’s conduct of its foreign policy has been in stark contrast to its poor record of economic management. This conclusion is wrong. Just as in economic affairs, the foreign policy failings that were submerged under the high tide of prosperity are now re-emerging into view.
Most pertinent is Europe. Should the forthcoming referendum sink the Lisbon Treaty once and for all, Ireland will place itself in the path of a historical dynamic of enormous momentum. There should be little doubt about what will happen if that irresistible force meets the fragile object that is Irish rejectionism. That the country is in such a perilous position owes much to the neglect and complacency of the political class.
There were abundant signs before the first Nice Treaty referendum in 2001 that the vote could be lost. Those risks were ignored and Nice I was defeated. If the political class could claim to have been blindsided in 2001, no such claim can be made of the Lisbon Treaty campaign in 2008. The failure yet again to step up to the plate during the campaign has resulted in one of the smallest member states becoming the largest obstacle to the implementation of reforms agreed by 27 governments. This is a dangerous position for a small and powerless country to be in.
But it is not only in leading and informing public opinion on Europe that politicians have been found wanting. In December 2003, on the eve of Ireland taking over the rotating presidency of the EU, then taoiseach Bertie Ahern conceded that Ireland was perceived as having drifted to the periphery of Europe.
That the man at the country’s helm for the previous six years could observe such drift, in the manner of a casual bystander, says much about the importance the political class attaches to foreign matters and the unwillingness and inability to pursue the country’s vital interests.
European engagement is a core national interest for Ireland; guaranteeing security is an eternal interest for all states. And here Ireland’s record is unique. When Nato was established in the aftermath of the second World War, Ireland remained neutral.
But unlike those other European countries who voluntarily chose that stance – Sweden and Switzerland – Ireland made no effort to guarantee its neutrality. Where the Swedes and the Swiss committed resources to their militaries, Ireland left itself undefended because it knew that its allies would protect it.
This is called free riding. No Irish person should be proud of it. But rather than being clear about this, self-deception took hold.
Non-participation in the Atlantic alliance came to be portrayed as noble aloofness from the conduct of the cold war. Implicit, if not explicit, in this position was that alliances among states for the purpose of enhancing security were in some way morally suspect.
Sustained self-deception more often than not has serious consequences. It certainly has for Ireland. As the EU logically expands its role in the provision of security, the decades-long failure of the political class to educate, persuade and lead comes home to roost. Fantasies abound of the EU morphing into a war machine and of Irish youth being press-ganged into some Euro-imperial army.
Ireland ties itself in knots with triple locks, protocols and opt-outs to appease the peddlers of these fantasies. The result is growing marginalisation from this increasingly important dimension of the EU.
The failure to meet security challenges extends to energy. Despite the intensification of global competition for resources and the need to find new sources of energy (Britain, Ireland’s main source of supply, is rapidly running out of North Sea oil and gas), far too little is being done. One of the few real options, nuclear, has been shied away from by successive governments since the 1970s, and in 2007 an energy White Paper explicitly ruled it out. Nor have renewable sources of energy been prioritised. In the energy mix, they account for just 3 per cent of the total – one-third of the EU average. If there is ever a crunch in the world’s supply of energy, the lights will quickly go out in Ireland.
Economic security has suffered even greater neglect. Multilateralism is the organising principle that every small country wishes to see operate in world affairs because it internationalises the rule of law. The weak benefit most from enforceable rules because they provide protection from the arbitrary actions of the strong. The World Trade Organisation is the most effective global multilateral construct that has ever existed.
The interests of any small, politically powerless country that is highly dependent on foreign trade dictate that it support ardently that organisation. Ireland does the opposite; consistently working against its own interests. Each time an effort is made to advance the Doha round of trade talks, Ireland is the most vocal opponent among the EU 27.
This position is seen abroad, by those who care to look, for what it is – the granting to a small vested interest (in this case farmers) of the power to determine policy to the detriment of the wider economy.
If trade policy was long ago surrendered to the IFA, aid policy has been victim of domestic mismanagement. After the 2002 election, when excessive pre-poll spending necessitated post-election cutbacks, the commitment the then taoiseach had given the UN, of reaching that organisation’s aid target of 0.7 per cent of national income, was postponed. The current chronic fiscal crisis means it will not be met for at least a decade. This is bad not only for those who benefit from Irish aid, but for the country’s reputation as a reliable partner on development issues.
What accounts for these failings? One must look first to the calibre of the country’s politicians in general, and foreign ministers in particular. The current Iveagh House incumbent is a school teacher. His four immediate predecessors were, respectively, a solicitor, a solicitor, a barrister and Ray Burke. None had any background in international relations or diplomacy. None had ever lived, worked or studied abroad. None had ever worked for a foreign company in Ireland. No other developed country entrusts its foreign relations to unqualified amateurs with no experience of the world.
In recent decades the international political and economic environment has been benign for Ireland. The years to come will be far more challenging. The most parochial and least cosmopolitan political class in western Europe has not been up to the task of conducting a strategically coherent foreign policy in the good times. One must fear for how it will fare in the stormier times ahead.