Starmer to Regulate F1 in Britain?

This year, the Formula One world championship was won by Lando Norris, making him the 11^th British racing driver to win the Driver’s Championship (no country has ever managed more than 3). He was driving a British-made McLaren car, one of 11 British-made cars to win the Constructors’ Championship (no other country has ever managed more than 2).

The British are very good at motor racing, which is ironic really, since it is one of the few decent sports which was not invented by the British.

But how long will it last? The current Labour government in the UK has another three years to run, assuming that it will not have cancelled the next general election in the way that it has cancelled a number of local elections. They will soon be running out of British success stories to drag down. Pretty much everything else good about Britain has already been the target of attack:

Legal Eagle Eyes in the Brave New World

A year or so, a gentleman called Luke Yarwood expressed his views about the problem of excessive immigration following an attack in Germany. He put out a tweet expressing the opinion that violence and murder of the immigrants was the appropriate response.[1]

That policy is not new, of course, having been tried a number of times in the past, including in the relatively recent past in a number of countries, both in Europe and elsewhere. It does not, on the whole, work out well in the end, most of us would say.

It appears that there were very few people who were that interested in Mr Yarwood’s opinion. His tweeted opinion was viewed only 33 times. And we can say with confidence that none of those 33 people (it might have been less, if any of them looked at it more than once?) thought to themselves:

I was going to nip down to the allotment today, and see how my carrots are getting on. But Mr Yarwood has now persuaded me that a better way to spend the morning would be to head down to the local refugee hotel, set fire to it and murder some illegal immigrants.

Not very likely, you might think. Nor me. But that was a “yes” for Judge Jonathan Fuller, who eagle eyes spotted just such a thing. He sent Mr Yarwood to prison for 18 months.

Mr Yarwood is, I would say, a bit daft. Then again, so is Judge Fuller. Who will get to spend Christmas with his family, instead of in jail.

Go figure.

It would be funny if it were not so mind-numbingly stupid and evil to imprison people for wrongspeak.[2]

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[1] He tweeted ‘I think it’s time for the British to gang together and start the slaughter. Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MP’s houses and Parliament , we need to take over by FORCE.”

[2] Quite apart from anything else, the effect of charging and imprisoning Mr Yarwood is that his stupid post has been seen, not just 33 times, but many, many thousands of times.

Contra-Wittgenstein

To be honest, I never really understood the reason for Bertrand Russell’s disapproval of Wittgenstein,[1] who was, it seems to me, one of the saner 20^th century philosophers.

But on the subject of breakfast, I also differ from Wittgenstein. Apparently, when he arrived at his digs in Cambridge[2], he was asked by his new landlady what he would like for breakfast in the mornings. He said that he didn’t mind, as long as it was the same every day.

Personally, I like breakfast to be slightly different every day.

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[1] There is no mention of Wittgenstein at all in Bertrand Russell’s otherwise excellent History of Western Philosophy.

[2] It is a bit of a mystery why Wittgenstein chose digs at all. He was staggeringly wealthy, his father having been one of the richest men in Austria. Perhaps it was just modesty, or a desire to fit in seamlessly as possible with university life, rather than install himself in a decent hotel? Or even buy a house and hire a housekeeper?

Not Very Redacted

This is hard to believe, but true.

You can take one the Epstein documents, released in redacted form by the US authorities. Select some redacted text, copy it, and paste it into a Word document. It appears unredacted! I tried it. It works.

Here is a snip I took from one these pdf files:

And here is a snip from what I got when I copied and pasted into Word:

Albanese’s Lie about Social Media and Teenagers

As has been widely reported, the Australian government has introduced a ban on people under 16 years of age using various prescribed social media. The ban is based on the proposition – widely accepted – that social media are harmful to teenagers, and in particular, cause suicide.

So I thought I would have a look at the numbers to see whether this is true.

It is not.

The figures are at https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/resources/download-data-tables. They run from 1907 to 2023, and it is possible to extract the suicide figures for teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19. Here is a graph of those data. Blue is the boys, orange is the girls, and green is both of them.

As we can see, the numbers remained pretty constant until about 1970, and then rose quite sharply for boys until 1990. Since then, the number has gone up and down, but today, the number of teenage suicides is rather less than it was during the 1990s.