Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Following on from my rather angry post yesterday, I thought I would elaborate on a possible solution to the housing problem.

By the housing problem, I refer to the fact that house prices continue to climb above inflation and therefore become more and more unaffordable. A contributing factor to this is the inability to match housing supply to demand – that is to say, we simply don’t have enough houses.

But actually, we do. Go for a walk around Clarence Dock or City Island and you’ll find them a ghost town. Nobody lives there.

A significant contributing factor to this is that a lot of people bought second homes to rent out and then the property market collapsed and so all of these people were left with properties they couldn’t rent out nor could they sell and nor did they really want. But of course people refuse to sell them at a loss, so house prices don’t go down to an affordable level, and so they continue to be unaffordable.

One way to resolve this problem is to ban the practice of buying a second home to let. Just make it illegal. This might sound crazy at first but it’s actually more common than you would think – in Japan, for example, you can only rent out a property that you own in its entirety (without a mortgage).

Because, when you really think about it, buying second homes for rent is really just taking advantage of the younger generation, or poorer strata of society. If you weren’t allowed to do this, housing companies would be forced to sell to people who actually want to live in the house and so they would have to be affordable for people – no more fat landlords buying all the properties and forcing people to pay rent to pay off someone else’s mortgage.

Received this text message.

Heya! Is this Chris? Its Charlie here, I Just wanted to know whether you got started with Dianetics? What did you think of it? Let me know! Lv, Charlie (Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre

My question is, how did they get my number?

There has been much discussion about the benefits cap recently – on one hand you don’t want to put families into poverty, but on the other hand you can argue it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a family to live on a £36,000 salary – especially given the alternative, often a minimum wage job, pays only a third of that.

One of the biggest portions of this benefit is child benefit and the argument is made that this is required because parents cannot afford to go to work because of the prohibitive cost of childcare.

One solution to this problem however, would be rather than spending all the money on child benefit, to spend the money on free, or at least heavily subsided childcare.

This would mean that parents could get access to affordable childcare and therefore be free to work. It also means that lots more jobs would be created.

Of course you could argue that if you’re going to spend money paying people to look after children, you might as well just have child benefit so parents can stay at home. But this doesn’t stack up because it’s far less efficient to have everyone staying at home looking after a small number of children.

Our office car park is located down a side road in Headingley. This makes it difficult to pull out to head into town on an evening as the amount of cars going away from town down Otley Road quickly pile up at the traffic lights.

This shouldn’t be a problem, if people were considerate enough not to stop right across the junction and instead leave a space for those of us that are turning right into the far lane, but often people don’t – sometimes people just block the junction, usually people in Audis (the new car of choice for your garden-variety wanker).

So, on the first of November I wrote to Leeds City Council highways department, asking them to paint a keep clear sign on the road so that people to remind people that occasionally, just occasionally, other people like to use the road as well.

They prompted responded to me saying they would need to investigate and said they would respond by 22 November. They didn’t quite make this, but after a chaser email they responded to me on the 19 December, stating they agreed it was a problem and that they would arrange for a keep clear sign to be placed on the road!

I’m very pleased with the outcome. It might not be world peace, but it just goes to show you that you can bring about change for the better, with a relatively small amount of effort.

We’re now ten years on from Portugal legalising drugs and all the evidence says it works. Drug use levels have plunged.

This has interesting implications for drug legislation in the United Kingdom because it shows that a more progressive attitude to drugs is clearly the way forward.

It’s not that Portugal have removed all drug laws – it is still illegal to be a drug dealer. But what they have done is switched from an attitude of punishing drug users, to an attitude of helping them overcome their addiction and giving them the support they need.

We should do the same.

Now of course, the first thing most people will say is “that’s a crazy idea, you can’t legalise doing drugs because doing drugs is wrong.” These people often drink alcohol and coffee as well as often smoking cigarettes as well. But those don’t count, even though it has been shown that alcohol is more dangerous than ecstasy.

But, you don’t even have to agree that it is the right thing to do to legalise drugs. The bar is far lower than that. All you have to agree is that the current method of dealing with drugs has failed. And it has. Drug use is ubiquitous with modern society. Everyone who has gone through the university system in the past few decades has at least tried drugs, don’t kid yourself that that isn’t the case.

What is the result of such widespread drug use? Massive amounts of crime! As DrugScore point out, an addict needs £15,000-30,000 a year to feed their habit and as a result estimate the value of goods stolen each year could be over £2,000,000,000. That is more zeros than there are people in the UK. Do the maths – that is £30 a year each of us are paying. The story is the same in the US – 17% of prisoners are in there because of of drug related crime^[1].

Much of this could be solved by relaxing drug laws. Best of all, it’s been proven to work in Portugal. Of course, chances are that anyone reading my blog already knows this.

However you dress it up, Christmas starts with Chris.

I’m currently digging through old websites, so there will probably be a few posts similar to this. I don’t know whether that is good or bad, they will hopefully be slightly amusing, though I’m sure will primarily be nostalgic for me rather than of benefit to others.

It turns out that, when I was nine years younger, I started an anti war campaign with a few friends. I don’t really remember it lol, but apparently I build a web page for it. My written English seems to have been as bad back then as it is now.

Recently, I wrote about a theory that had been put to me, suggesting that we should align the age of sexual consent and the age of voting. I founded it difficult to come up with arguments to refute it.

But there is a problem. If you just put the age of sexual consent up to 18, kids will probably just have sex anyway. It’s not like people really pay that much attention to the law as it is. Indeed, some people make the argument that the age of sexual consent should be lowered.

Of course, that isn’t necessarily an issue. Maybe you just lower the age of voting to 14 as well, but then we would probably all agree that that would be pretty crazy. Still, once you agree that people can do more harm with sexual activity than they can with voting, how can you argue that the age of consent should be lower than the age of voting?

So, what are we do to then? Do we just live with the contradiction that it doesn’t make sense to have a higher age of voting than sexual consent, except it doesn’t make sense and settle with a logically inconsistent but ultimately pragmatic approach? Maybe that in itself is logical justification? I’ll throw it open to the floor…

One question I often get asked when discussing religion with Christians is “you do accept Jesus as a historical figure, right?”

The argument goes along the lines of this:

1. There is evidence that there was a character called Jesus in historical records
2. Therefore, you have to accept that some of the Bible is true
3. If you accept the historial parts as true, why not accept the rest of it as well?

But do I accept Jesus as a historical figure? No, I don’t. Actually, more accurately, I don’t accept that the question really makes sense. I mean, what exactly are you asking me?

For example, I do accept that there was someone called Jesus. But that is misleading. I believe there were lots of people called Jesus. It’s a nonsense question. It’s like saying “do you believe in John?” in this day and age. Well, of course I believe there was someone called John, I know lots of Johns, it’s a very common name.

What you need to ask for the question to make sense is, “do you believe in this specific John?” And when it comes to Jesus, if you’re asking me “do you believe in Jesus, the son of God”, the answer is of course, no, I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in a god and therefore I didn’t believe he had a son.

I recently washed a Channel 4 documentary on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. While I had heard all about the exposing of the Iraq War Logs and a lot of the surrounding fall out, I was somewhat shocked at some of the footage shown in the documentary. I wondered how many other people had seen it, so I thought I would post the YouTube on here.