Back in September I went to a Fringe at conference called Democracy Dragon's Den. Richard Reeves was there, and he quoted John Stuart Mill. It was something about the truth being forged in the fires of heated debate or something, and it made lots of sense to me, such that I assumed it was a famous quote, and didn't bother noting it down. And now I can't find it.

The actual quote with where it's from would be lovely, if any of you have it to hand.

Thanks in advance.

I think really, that what my posts over the last couple of days boil down to is this: condemning other people because they are different from you, whatever direction that difference might be in, is wrong.

If they are hurting you? That's different.
If they are hurting someone else? Condemn away.
If all they are doing is doing things differently from you, and nobody is being harmed? Back that truck the fuck up and stop being a judgemental arsehole.

Now, I admit that there are legitimate debates to be had on the subject of what constitutes harm, and issues of education and informed consent and such, but the basic principle is easy: people should be able to do whatever they like as long as it doesn't harm others. If you condemn someone for doing something non-harmful, you are being a twat, and I will call you out on it. I hope that you will do the same for me.

Banning things is illiberal, yes? I don't understand why some people find this difficult to grasp. Sometimes you have to decide between liberalism and safety, or liberalism and religion, or the liberty of two different and conflicting groups in order to decide what is MORALLY RIGHT, but morally right and Liberal are NOT synonyms (sadly) and using them as such confuses people into thinking it's possible to ban a book, or a foodstuff, or whatever (because books and foodstuffs are bad and wrong and people must be saved from themselves by having them banned!) and still be completely liberal. It's BLOODY WELL NOT.

The idea of Liberalism is that you decide what is right for you, and you allow others to decide what is right for them. If you don't think it's right to eat pork, don't eat pork. But banning OTHER people from eating pork is not liberal. If you don't want to read a book, don't read the book. Try to discourage others from reading it if you want. But banning others from reading it because YOU think it's immoral? That's the very definition of illiberal.

FFS, people, read some Mill. It's not like it's not freely available on the interwebs; if you're reading this you can read that.

1, Happy Celebrate Bisexuality Day.
2, Why aren't you all reading pink_weasel? She is awesome.
3, Skientific proof of John Stuart Mill's maxim that although not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are conservatives: only conservatives are more likely to believe a lie after it has been comprehensively debunked, and the more proof you give them that they are wrong, the more they will insist that they are right.

Since Liberal Conspiracy started there have been people complaining that you CAN'T be Liberal AND left, and that the conflation of the two terms is a bad thing for linguistic accuracy. I agree with the latter part of that, but not the former: I think that saying the former shows a misunderstanding of both terms. Left is an economic marker; liberal a social one. If you are in the bottom left quadrant of the Political Compass, you are both. This is why I don't have a problem with Sunny using both terms in the description of the site (although, for the record, I don't think Sunny is a Liberal anywhere near as much as he is a leftie).

Anyway, Liberalism can be both right or left or neither. That does not make it any less Liberal. Liberalism is about a small state and freedom and a lack of intervention in the lives of individuals, yes, but that is by no means incompatible with the idea that the state helps to level the playing field FOR the individual against enormous powerful corporations, however unfashionable that opinion might be these days (mostly because the two main political parties are paid for by enormous powerful corporations...). Both the left and right can be authoritarian (indeed, in Britain, both the main theoretically left wing and right wing parties ARE authoritarian, no matter what their posturing), too.

John Stuart Mill was a leftie, and so was Adam Smith. I'm not ashamed to call myself a leftie economically, because (in my view) one cannot HAVE individual freedom without some constraints on the corporatist juggernaut, unless it is the freedom to starve. The thing is, in terms of what is important to my personal philosophy, leftieness is a tiny proportion of the whole. It's kind of leftie feminist liberal. I share Charlotte's disquiet with seeing the word Liberal in red, but I disagree that the solution to that is to abandon the term.

Being a Liberal is very important to me, and (rather like feminism) I would rather challenge people who use the term wrongly than let it be lost to authoritarians as it has been in the US.

Stuart Weir has a post on LC about the real public view on 42 Days.

Amused Cynicism gives the lie to the idea of Britain as a broken society.

Dr Beren has rewritten the end of the most recent series of Who. Can someone get her a job as showrunner, please? She's WASTED on Brain Doctorin'.

Feminism is good for men too, and they ought to remember that. The man in my icon certainly knew it :D

Hot on the heels of Boris' banning of alkyhol on the tube (with, as Chicken Yoghurt says, entirely predictable results), the government has resurrected its idea of prosecuting parents who let their children touch alcohol in public.

Oh, just NO. Responsible attitudes do not grow from wrapping people in cotton wool. You do not learn how to handle alcohol by not even being allowed a sniff of it before your 18th birthday. Responsible attitudes to alcohol grow, like any other skill, from slow controlled exposure under the supervision of someone more competent than oneself. To my mind it's far better for parents to let their kids have a bit of alcohol under controlled conditions than it is for them to bar them from touching it, so that on their eighteenth birthday they go out and get lathered and cause problems for other people because they have no idea what their limits are.

But then, the government doesn't just want to dictate to adults what their kids should be drinking, it wants to dictate to the adults themselves, against all the medical evidence about what is a healthy level of alcohol consumption... Does anyone else think this is not so much about wanting people to be healthy, but about wanting to tell them what to do and how to behave? Perhaps it's because I have On Liberty engraved on my heart, but if I want to drink myself into a stupor, is that anyone's business but my own? I'm having similar responses to this campaign to the ones I had to the anti-smoking adverts I occasionally saw when I watched ITV. Nothing made me want a fag more than seeing the preachy, puritanical spewings of Saachi and Saachi and their little friends, and nothing makes me want a drink more than knowing that Gordon Brown doesn't want me to have one. I know that this is somewhat childish, but I'm afraid it's the way I work, reactionary old bag that I am.

Of course, I'd be less depressed about the direction of the government if members of my own damn party hadn't bought into this new puritanical bollocks. I'm with Mortimer on this: the right to get rat-arsed is an inalienable liberal principle, and I shall fight to keep it.

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I emailed my first Casting the Net to the 'Ead 'Itter of Liberal Conspiracy at about 1 o'clock. Admittedly it was a little late, but given that I didn't wake up until after the deadline of 11 am had passed...

* nervous wibbling *

The Perceptual Differences of Students - purple_pen is frustrated that students seem unable to remember she's a Doctor, when they are quite able to remember that her male colleagues are Doctors. Evidence that perceptions of what women should be are more deeply ingrained in us all than we realise?

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Road Tax for Motorbikes - I've blogged about this before, but nobody seemed able to answer whether or not it was true, so this is a "just in case" measure. I don't think it's too much to ask that we simply get the same treatment as cagers car drivers. Via uk_bikers

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The Outlawing of Extreme Porn - I can understand outlawing pictures of actual illegal things, even though I think it's counterproductive. But I can't understand outlawing pictures of people pretending to do illegal things. It smacks of I don't like it, and therefore it ought to be banned. It's at this point I'd remind everyone of John Stuart Mill: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. I don't like extreme porn. I don't find it titillating, and I don't want to look at it. But if other people do want to look at it, and nobody is hurt in the making of it, then I do not think it should be banned. I've heard enough tales of what goes on in the porn industry to think it ought to be better regulated to make sure that actresses and actors are consenting, and I also wish with all my heart that there was at least some porn that I didn't find dull and/or misogynistic and objectifying; but it seems to me that the solution to this is not to make porn even more shameful and restricted.

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The Realities of a Non-Monogamous Relationship - many people seem to think that if a person is in a non-monogamous relationship of some kind that they must necessarily be shagging about like billy-oh. This is not necessarily the case, as is ably detailed in this article. What does happen though, is that a lot of the pressure and stress and panic of relationships is instantly dissolved. Those of you who can't get your heads around the idea of non-monogamous relationships might find that this helps. It might not, too, like, but it might. Via minnesattva

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For any Democrats still to vote in the primaries, this entry on PoliticalBetting.com might be of interest. I found it quite interesting, anyway. I suspect tinuvielberen is right when she says that a lot of this is personality-based.

And, if I was American, apparently I would be green:

What's Your Political Philosophy? created with QuizFarm.com

Green 100% Old School Democrat 100% New Democrat 75% Foreign Policy Hawk 40% Libertarian 40% Pro Business Republican 25% Socially Conservative Republican 0%

Predictably, all I can think now is Kermit the frog:

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For those who haven't been following the Arse Bishop of Canterbury's horrendous cock-up of wording, dear old elephantfeed has the best entry I have seen on it so far, if you can parse his faux-child style. Some of his understanding of the legal concepts involved is a little simplistic (as one of the commenters has said) but his understanding of the legal philosophy is absolutely correct:

When it comes down to it, most Law is there to settle disputes between PEOPLE. In CRIMINAL law, the dispute is between ALL OF US and someone who is doing harm – because we cannot operate as a society if we let people do harm to others. But mostly it is because two people have a disagreement and they need someone to sort it out.

There is NOTHING to stop them going to their Priest or Vicar or Rabbi or Imam or Militant Atheist Baby Elephant and asking them to help them decide. Arbitration is to be ENCOURAGED and, so long as both sides are happy with the outcome, it would certainly cut down on all the cases that are clogging up our judges' calendars.

But what happens if the Vicar and the Baby Elephant have DIFFERENT answers?

[A: Nobody is a bit surprised?]

That is when you end up in court.

It's just no good if you have MULTIPLE legal systems, not all of which are based on equal protection for all parties. People will be unable to settle their arguments if one person insists on one law and the other demands the rights to use another.

That is why you need ONE set of laws.

Dead on, Fluffy cheeks, dead on.

At the end of the day, though, I'm quite glad that Rowan said what he did. That was a huge flash of true colours right there, and EVERYONE has seen it. He's made it perfectly clear that not only does he think that discrimination on religious grounds is acceptable, he thinks it is "unavoidable". Uh, no, Rowan, it will be quite easy to avoid. Disestablish your increasingly anachronistic church, prevent people from acceding to our legislature just by being bishops, stop any religion from having influence over our legal system disproportionate to the number of believers, and let the secular majority live their lives in peace without being beaten with the "white Christian country" stick every time one of us suggests something you (or any of your other Misogynistic Bearded Sky Pixie Cult friends) don't like.

Why can't we all just listen to JS Mill? He was bang alongside the English law principle that you should be able to do anything you like as long as it's not specifically outlawed. Religious codifications always tend to go the other way, and this is fundamentally illiberal.

caseytalk is 21 again today! Happy birthday, and may you have many more. We may not always agree, but I always enjoy debating with you, you thoughtful intellectual.

There now follows a non-birthday-related miscellany:

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Got some BPAL swaps in the post today. A couple of bottles, and four frimps. Three of the frimps are ones I haven't tried before. D'you know what the fourth is? Do ya? BLACK FRIGGING LOTUS!! AGAIN!!! I am being stalked by this scent, and I detest it! I'm not a huge fan of florals in general, although some of them I can put up with if they are blended with other things I like, but Lotus, even as a minor note, makes me feel queasy. As the major note? Bleargh.

Obviously, I keep giving it away myself and perpetuating the horror, but... This is the fourth imp of this stuff that has passed through my hands, and I have not yet doubled up on any other scent without expressly meaning to. Oh well; I am making up a package for someone else soon; it may end up with an imp of Black Lotus in.

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It are snowing! Am really really really amused by the fact that we have seen knack all snow all winter, and then on the day when we celebrate the end of winter (today is Imbolc, fact fans) we get a nice thick blanket o'white.

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Christians have some really odd attitudes to sex, right? No sex before marriage, heterosexual only, no groups, missionary position and lights out, right? Well, the last one on that list is certainly being dealt a blow by this guy... Note to male readers: The advice he gives on making your semen taste nicer is fairly valid, but I would (after extensive empirical experimentation) add the following: avoid drinking too much coffee and eating red meat (vegetarian semen tastes LOTS nicer) and for the love of all that's tasty, don't eat asparagus. And I say this as someone who really likes asparagus.

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fryblog is fast approaching John Stuart Mill levels of hero worship in this house. Today he writes in squeeful tones about the Eee. I really really want one, and if it hadn't have been for the fact that I had just bought the little HP beauty that I am typing on right now when the Eee first became widely touted, I'd probably have one. But I am watching its progress with interest.

I hope he's right about the death of Window$, I really do.

* waxes lyrical about a utopian open source future in a lengthy and misty-eyed manner *

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And finally, a word to the (un)wise: if you're going to breach copyright and try to make money off it, don't do it to my mate pmoodie. That would be verging on suicidal. (I'd link you but it's f-locked. Trust me, though, his smackdowns are as hilarious as they are accurate) Although if you need some illustration work doing, do get in touch with him. He can do everything from fantasy Doctor Who characters to werewolves to medical drawings, and is veryveryvery talented [/gratuitous pluggage]

Am feeling much less pukey this morning, but only slightly less angry. So here we go, kicking off with a quote from my favourite philosopher, Liberal, Feminist, economist, and all round cool person, John Stuart Mill:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

One could quite easily argue that pointing and laughing and calling a person "weird and freaky" is not an exercise of power. One would be quite wrong in doing so. When one obviously belongs to an "acceptable" majority, pointing and laughing and hurling insults at someone who is Not One Of Us is palpably an exercise of power, and (either consciously or not) an attempt to disempower the non-conformist. I happily take tinuvielberen's point that people will quite naturally respond negatively to something they are not used to seeing. I do not think that this is an acceptable excuse for someone who is trumpeted by his political party as a great Liberal.

It's something I have noticed among Lib Dems before: the tendency to look down their noses at people who are Not One of Us. In fact, it's something I have had directed at me before. In some ways, the fact that it appears to be endemic in the party is a comfort; it's not just me that gets to be the butt of the sneering disapproval, it's anyone who doesn't conform to acceptable dress code standards. However, it's not a massive comfort, because if there isn't a place for people who dress in a non-conformist manner in the bloody Liberal politisphere, what the hell hope is there?

Of course, trying to disempower people by characterising them as weird is not a trait that's exclusive to Lib Dems. Dear old David Cameron likes to indulge in it too. And there's the old Demon Eyes poster of Blair. And the repeated characterisation of Michael Howard as Dracula. But it does disappoint me that a party which prides itself on radicalism and removing itself from traditional party political mud-slinging seems more or less exactly the same as the other two in terms of behaviour the longer I look at it.

If those who keep failing to understand why I haven't joined the party yet are still looking for reasons, they might want to consider that fact.

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Still, there is some comforting and cheering news today. I have spam mail from Dennis Skinner inviting me to a fabulous night of passion, and Virgin Galactic have unveiled their passenger spaceship. So, if the worst comes to the worst, I can always save up and go colonise Mars, with Dennis Skinner as my hot concubine.

So, apparently some of the colonials are celebrating something called Thanksgiving today. susanne_est_moi posted a list of things that she is thankful for, and (to cheer me up because matgb is travelling away from me as I type, soon to arrive in the Land of the Wombles) I thought I would follow suit:

I am Thankful for:

- matgb, without whom... Well, without whom Life would be a lot less interesting and less fun. I love him so much I'm going to marry him. Who could have predicted that a year ago?
- shrublette, for similar reasons (well, apart from the marriage bit). Also, shrublette's dad. Although we are not together anymore, he's still her dad, and if it wasn't for him I wouldn't have her.
- Liberty. OK, I'm not free to do everything I want to, due to constraints of finances and travel and stuff, but I am free to think what I want, wear what I want, read what I want, talk to who I want to, believe what I want... It's more freedom than many have in this world, and I'm grateful for it.
- Having a roof over my head and food to eat and beer to drink. Which is, again, more than a lot of people have.
- Byron, and Pugsley, and Ceara.
- My friends and family. A more wonderful, selfless, caring bunch I could not have dreamt of.
- Tim Berners-Lee, for inventing t'intarwebz, which allows me to write this blog, email and keep in touch with all of you lot, shop cheaply without having to get dressed, etc., etc..
- John Stuart Mill, Shami Chakrabarti, and all the other great Liberals I admire.
- Radio Four.
- Books. Being able to read them, and smell them, and how they feel in your hand and the knowledge they impart. Books are awesome.
- Science Fiction, and all the great writers thereof (ILU Isaac Asimov!); also HP Lovecraft and Dorothy L Sayers and John Mortimer and PD James and Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie and MR James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ruth Rendell and HG Wells and all the other fabulous authors of fiction who have made my world a better place.
- The NHS. Yeah, so it's got it's flaws. But I'm grateful for it none the less.
- Stephen Fry.
- My education.
- Vincent Price. And Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. And Roger Corman.
- The many and varied wonderful kinds of food and drink which I am able to enjoy thanks to being (just about) financially solvent and living in a place where I can obtain them fairly easily (tee hee amusing pictures of my friend John on that link).
- Yorkshire. From the innermost inner city of Bradford to the wild desolation of Saddleworth Moor; from the top of Snake Pass to the shores of the North Sea; from the tops of the treetops in the woods to the bottom of the deepest coal mine. I love every square inch of my home county. I love the landscape, I love the architecture, I love the people. I love going out into the woods and feeling my roots stretching back for generations; I also love that I can meet people from practically every country on earth here. Best of all possible worlds.

I could go on forever here, but I think that's a long enough list, isn't it?

ETA: nearly forgot, but the day was saved thanks to gominokouhai: Happy Birthday Doctor Who!. Now there's something to be grateful for ;)

OK, so whenever some media dude interviews a Lib Dem (there's another Chris 'n' Nick debate going on on the telleh right now) they always want to know which of the two main parties the Lib Dems would ally with in the case of a hung parliament.

Now, obviously, no sane Lib Dem would say "Tory" or "Labour" because you then automatically alienate a subset of voters (as Millennium Elephant explains in detail here). But can anyone explain to me why they can't just say We'll vote how we want to vote on whatever issue comes up, and they can choose how they are going to ally with us.? Why does it always have to be an organised coalition? Why can't it be an issue-by-issue, sometimes we agree with one, and sometimes we agree with the other, and sometimes we agree with neither thing? I mean, that's what it actually is, isn't it? In policy terms, sometimes the Lib Dems agree with Labour, and sometimes with the Tories, and sometimes with neither. So why can't they do that in a hung parliament?

(also? Nick is doing better in cosy sofa interview setting than he did on Question Time, but I still prefer Chris. He's being more substantive and detailed and less soundbitey and... Oh dear. Chris just admitted that he has no idea where a briefing document that supposedly came from his office came from and he's not seen it before. He's doing a passable save, but...

At least they both appear to be having some passion today. Nick is now doing his very attractive ID Card spiel, and looks better than Chris on that issue...

* sigh *

I'm really glad I aren't a party member, and I don't have to decide between two options I'm not really attracted to. I'm also leaning towards the view of lots of other people. Can't the Lib Dems junk them both and keep Vince? I like Vince.

* polishes Vince's head affectionately *)

ETA: James Graham at Quaequam Blog has a good dissection of the Lib Dem leadership contest so far. Plug plug. I am linking because I liked the line about Mill at the bottom.

So, yes, Mister Mat has been asked for his thoughts on (with a view to contributing to) Liberal Conspiracy because he are a famouse Liberal blogger (not as famous as Millennium Elephant, but just about as cuddly). I did some half-hearted whinging about this last night when we were talking, along the lines of "how come it's always you that gets picked up for these things and not me when I get twice as many readers as you?" I do as much political blogging as Mat does, if in a slightly more disorganised way, I have a much bigger readership (on the personal blog at least), I am passionately Liberal in a classic Millian millieu... But because Mat gets linked to by "prominent bloggers"^# he gets picked up and I don't.

His suggestion is that it's because I blog on LJ, and nobody else in the blogosphere pays much attention to LJ because it's bad for technorati links etc. This annoys me. Partially for selfish reasons - "why doesn't anyone pay attention to ME?!" - but also for Angry Feminist Reasons. "Prominent Bloggers" are almost always male. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that men seem to be better at the whole having separate blogs for separate things deal. This means that political blogs which only have fifty or sixty readers are counted as prominent blogs because they are just political blogs, and journalists don't have to wade through huggins of personal stuff to get to the political meat they are after. But I think it might also be because of the blog platforms we women choose. LJ is roughly 70% female.

I like LJ for two reasons. One is the friends list, which lets me read all the things I want to read in one place. The other is threaded comments, which mean you can actually have a conversation with your commenters in a way that you can't on most blog platforms. It leads to debate. It leads to interesting information being exchanged. Threaded commenting is a good thing. Most blog platforms don't have threaded commenting. The quality of discussion you get on the comments pages suffers for this. I have tried other blog platforms, and I always come back to LJ; and given the above statistic that LJ is 70% female, it seems I'm not alone among members of my gender. Annoyingly, it seems this may be a bad move.

Hey ho. It's not conscious sexism, so that makes it all right, I suppose. We do have a couple of prominent bloggers (male ones, natch), on LJ now, in the form of matgb and nwhyte, so who know, the worm may turn.

In slightly less dispiriting news, tinuvielberen has found a fantastic SteamPunk Dalek:



And it's ihavecake's birthday. Happy birthday, Good Twin. Your Evil Twin wishes you much serene sitting on clouds and strumming of harps while I sit here in the flames poking at prominent bloggers with my pitchfork ;)
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^# You know, the sort of people who win awards at the Lib Dem conference for having about a quarter the readers that Mat does, which is apparently a HUGE readership... bitter, me? Never!

It hardly seems like two years since I made this post. To quote Billy Bragg: the times that we all hoped would last/like a train they have gone by so fast/and though we stood together at the edge of the platform/we were not moved by them. Time has moved on so quickly since I made that post, but it seems to me that very little has changed in our great nation. We still Labour under a government that seems determined to clamp down on our remaining freedoms in the name of protecting us from terrorism. There are still those of us who labour under the happy delusion that if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

At this point I would usually go into a rabble-rousing tirade about how something must be done, probably quoting John Stuart Mill, but I think that this year I shall leave the rabble-rousing to my lovely fiance. He's right, England has never tolerated tyrants for long. We're not good at revolutions here (tending to leave that to our cousins across the channel), but we are good at quiet, steadfast refusal to obey unjust rules. We're good at stoicism. We're good at soldiering on, keeping a stiff upper lip, and prevailing in the end. And then getting absolutely rat-arsed afterwards ;)

Lets hope it's not much longer, eh?

Tonight I shall be going to a Bonfire hosted by my friend and colleague, Imogen. I hope you will all join me in the spirit of the evening, which is definitely the one after the poetry in the H2G2 entry on the subject ;)