Spanish
life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Life
in Spain
- Cataluña 1: Here's Lenox of Business over Tapas with his solution to the problem - in Spanish. Essentially, beefing up the importance of Barcelona.
- Cataluña 2: Some observers are seeing signs that the regional/national government won't go nuclear tomorrow. Possibly having been chastened by the reaction of corporate Cataluña. One can but hope. But, if so, the Spanish right wing will be triumphant, making the dawn of common sense chimerical.
- Cataluña 3: Meanwhile, the non-secessionists fight back.
- Cataluña 4: Good point. Catalonia is sometimes compared with Scotland. But the economic and financial situations are quite different. If Catalonia seceded from Spain, it would be more like London seceding from the UK.
- Buying property in Spain: HT to Lenox for this article on the additional costs you're likely to have to cough up.
The EU and Cataluña: Catalan separatism also
poses fundamental questions for the EU. For believers in the extreme
integrationist version of the EU project, nation states are due to be
dissolved and the identities of their populations are similarly set
to fade away, as people identify themselves as Europeans rather than
German, French or Spanish. . . This change of identity and transfer
of allegiances away from European nation states to the EU was
supposed to be fairly easy because in the modern world such
traditional identities and allegiances are in the process of
dissolution anyway. Yet Catalan separatism marks the revival of an
ancient identity. If this strength of feeling is replicated across
the nation states of Europe then shoehorning people into a common
European identity is going to be next to impossible. As I've been saying for years. Which is not to say I'm right of course.
The
curse of modern politics, says a UK columnist, is an epidemic of good intentions and bad
outcomes. Policy after policy is chosen and voted on according to
whether it means well, not whether it works . . . But this elevation of intentions over outcomes is not entirely a monopoly of the left. See below this post for the full article.
Galicia: HT to my friend David - but which one? - for this article on wine tours there.
Finally . . . I ordered a book on Liverpool from Amazon 2 days ago. Yesterday my Facebook page featured ads for various things related to this great city. As far as I'm aware, there's no corporate connection between Google or Amazon and Facebook. So, presumably one (or both) of them is selling information to FB. Who'll be selling it on to advertisers. Nice to know. Here's a relevant article on Google's practices.
Today's cartoon:
Warning for snowflakes: This cartoon is politically incorrect. If this worries you, be an adult and refrain from looking at it . . .
THE ARTICLE
Politics is obsessed
with virtue signalling: Matt Ridley
From the climate
accord to badger culling, we increasingly judge policies by
intentions rather than achievements
The curse of modern
politics is an epidemic of good intentions and bad outcomes. Policy
after policy is chosen and voted on according to whether it means
well, not whether it works. And the most frustrated politicians are
those who keep trying to sell policies based on their efficacy,
rather than their motives. It used to be possible to approach
politics as a conversation between adults, and argue for
unfashionable but effective medicine. In the 140-character world this
is tricky (I speak from experience).
The fact that it was
Milton Friedman who said “one of the great mistakes is to judge
policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their
results” rather proves the point. He was one of the most successful
of all economists in getting results in terms of raising living
standards, yet is widely despised today by both the left and centre
as evil because he did not bother to do much virtue signalling.
The commentator James
Bartholomew popularised the term “virtue signalling” for those
who posture empathetically but emptily. “Je suis Charlie” (but I
won’t show cartoons of the prophet), “Refugees welcome” (but
not in my home) or “Ban fossil fuels” (let’s not talk about my
private jet). You see it everywhere. The policies unveiled at the
Conservative Party conference show that the party is aware of this
and (alas) embracing it. On student fees, housing costs and energy
bills, the Tories proposed symbolic changes that would do nothing to
solve the underlying problem, indeed might make them worse in some
cases, but which at least showed they cared. I doubt it worked. They
ended up sounding like pale imitations of Labour, or doing political
dad-dancing.
“Our election
campaign portrayed us as a party devoid of values,” said Robert
Halfon MP in June.
“The Labour Party now
has circa 700,000 members that want nothing from the Labour Party but
views and values they agree with,” lamented Ben Harris-Quinney of
the Bow Group last week. I think that what politicians mean by
“values” is “intentions”.
The forgiving of good
intentions lies behind the double standard by which we judge
totalitarians. Whereas fascists are rightly condemned in schools,
newspapers and social media as evil, communists get a much easier
ride, despite killing more people. “For all its flaws, the
Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big,” read a New
York Times headline last month.
“For all its flaws,
Nazi Germany did help bring Volkswagen and BMW to the car-buying
public,” replied one wag on Twitter.
Imagine anybody getting
away with saying of Mussolini or Franco what John McDonnell and
Jeremy Corbyn said of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. The reason for
this double standard is the apparently good intentions of communist
dictators: unlike Nazis, communists were at least trying to make a
workers’ paradise; they just got it wrong. Again and again and
again.
Though Jeremy Corbyn is
a leading exponent, elevating intentions over outcomes is not
entirely a monopoly of the left. It is something that the coalition
government kept trying, in emulation of Tony Blair. Hugging huskies
and gay marriage were pursued mainly for the signal they sent, rather
than for the result they achieved. (Student loans, to be fair, were
the opposite.) Indeed, George Osborne’s constant talk of austerity,
while increasing spending in real terms, was an example of the gap
between intention and outcome, albeit less sugar-coated.
I can draw up a list as
long as your arm of issues where the road to failure is paved with
counterproductive benevolence. Gordon Brown’s 50p top tax rate
brought in less tax from the richest. Banning foxhunting has led to
the killing of more foxes. Opposition to badger culls made no
ecological sense, for cattle, hedgehogs, people — or badger health.
Mandating a percentage of GDP for foreign aid was a virtuous gesture
that causes real inefficiency and corruption — and (unlike private
philanthropy) also tended to transfer money from poor people in rich
countries to rich people in poor countries.
Or take organic
farming, which has been shown repeatedly to produce trivial or zero
health benefits, while any environmental benefits are grossly
outweighed by the low yields that mean it requires taking more land
from nature. Yet the BBC’s output on farming is dominated by
coverage of the 2 per cent of farming that is organic, and is
remorselessly obsequious. Why? Because organic farmers say they are
trying to be nice to the planet.
My objection to wind
farms is based on the outcome of the policy, whereas most people’s
support is based largely on the intention. There they stand, 300ft
tall, visibly advertising their virtue as signals of our commitment
to devotion to Gaia. The fact that each one requires 150 tonnes of
coal to make, that it needs fossil fuel back-up for when the wind is
not blowing, that it is subsidised disproportionately by poor people
and the rewards go disproportionately to rich people, and that its
impact on emissions is so small as to be unmeasurable — none of
these matter. It’s the thought that counts.
The Paris climate
accord is one big virtue-signalling prayer, whose promises, if
implemented, would make a difference in the temperature of the
atmosphere in 2100 so small it is practically within the measuring
error. But it’s the thought that counts. Donald Trump just does not
care.
One politician who has
always refused to play the intention game is Nigel Lawson. Rather
than rest on the laurels of his political career, he has devoted his
retirement to exposing the gap between rhetoric and reality in two
great movements: European integration and climate change mitigation.
In his book An Appeal to Reason, he pointed out that on the UN’s
official forecasts, climate change, unchecked, would mean the average
person will be 8.5 times as rich in 2100 as today, rather than 9.5
times if we stopped the warming. And to achieve this goal we are to
punish the poor of today with painful policies? This isn’t “taking
tough decisions”; this is prescribing chemotherapy for a cold.
Yet the truth is, Lord
Lawson and I and others like us have so far largely lost the argument
on climate change entirely on the grounds of intentions. Being
against global warming is a way of saying you care about the future.
Not being a headless chicken — however well argue your case —
leads to accusations you do not care.
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