Interesting Links for 17-05-2015

[andrewducker]

I concise guide to the current UK Cabinet. Well worth a read. (tags: uk politics conservatives ) JavaScript at 20 (tags: javascript ) Exercise alone won’t make you lose weight. (tags: exercise weight ) Beware Eurosceptic versions of history and science (tags: history science Europe ) How Many Americans Are Married To Their Cousins? (And how

Comments

[steer]

The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever I'm not terribly surprised. I imagine I can sometimes come across as right wing because I correct my friends when they post articles using spurious facts or poor arguments to support beliefs I actually agree with

[andrewducker]

"were working together somehow"

I'm suggesting that both of them were working with the people behind the Better Together campaign (which, as one of them used to work for the person that runs it, seems not unreasonable).

And that this was possibly part of a general trend behind the scenes of Civil Servants working in ways that were useful for the campaign.

[steer]

I guess a conspiracy theory that is completely functionally equivalent to there being no conspiracy theory (that they were both individuals acting out of conscience against the rules of their organisation -- and that seems the more likely explanation to me) doesn't seem that much of a conspiracy.

[andrewducker]

Besides which, the point is rather more the fact that this was being done by people who were supposed to be being impartial, but either had strong links to one side of the campaign, or had actively said "I cared about this, so I decided not to be impartial about it." - meaning that you suddenly couldn't trust information from the civil service, as it was being influenced rather more than usual.

[steer]

The information leaked is the same either way whether it is leaked by someone from the Yes campaign, someone from the no campaign or a super intelligent shade of the colour blue. Compare with "don't trust the wikileaks video showing US troops shooting civilians, that leak has come from a left wing source that wants to discredit the US military."

How the information is spun may be different of course.

[andrewducker]

You're missing part of my point here. Which is when you have things like this:
He revealed publicly earlier this year that at a crucial moment in the campaign he had decided personally that in such an “extreme” case as the referendum, the normal rules of civil service impartiality “do not apply”.

This astonishing admission was made in a London lecture in January. The Permanent Secretary to the Treasury used colourful phrases during his lecture, stating that this was an instance where “people are seeking to destroy the fabric of the state”, and to “impugn its territorial integrity”.

emerging after the end of the process, when people have been saying "Of course you can trust X, the civil service were behind it, and they have to be impartial" then it makes it much harder to say "Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory - you can't expect me to believe they'd do a thing like that, they're bound by impartiality."

[steer]

I just don't find this astonishing. The thing about the whisteblower case is that the case is always "In this case I believe this information is sufficiently important that the normal rules for not releasing this information do not apply." That's a generic argument for any kind of whistleblowing.