peterms

Shall I take your answers to those questions as no, no, no and yes respectively, then?

The Swedish authorities didn't regard this as a serious matter having carried out a preliminary investigation, and originally dropped the case. You may be aware that the women went to the police to ask if he could be required to have an STD check, not to report a rape. It was reinstated, with a different prosecutor. There was involvement from a politician and lawyer who had facilitated rendition to the US. The UK later secretly pressured Sweden not to drop the case, asked them not to interview him in the embassy (we were told it was not legally possible, which was a lie). Emails between the UK and Sweden on the case have been destroyed. If you've actually followed the case, other than reading the stuff the Guardian have been printing, you will know this. The US has been in the background all the time, and more recently have spied on Assange's meetings with lawyers and medics. "Tin foil hat" is a remarkably unthinking response, and along with "conspiracy theory" is a sign of wishing to accept an official version of something without going to the bother of actually reviewing available facts. It's disappointing to see it.

If I happen to notice the Guardian or the Mail reporting on this, I'll be happy to link it. Perhaps you might look out for them covering it as well? Meanwhile, do you have any reason for doubting what it says? Have you tried spending 15 seconds on a websearch to see if other sources confirm the links of her husband and son with military and intelligence firms? Or do you prefer to disbelieve anything coming from sources other than mainstream, as a default position?

Thanks for your contribution. The art of reasoned argument is not dead.

If you're suggesting the information is false, please share your basis for thinking so. It would be so helpful.

Some info here.

It was only ever a pretext to detain him for the US to get their hands on him, as many people said at the time. And now he is being kept locked up by a magistrate who has very significant conflicts of interest. His medical condition is reported to be such that he can barely speak coherently. The whole thing is utterly shocking.

Sounds about right.

I took her to mean some kind of creature that causes accidents, but I note this passage: which perhaps is the clearest descrition yet of the intimate details of their relationship.

They couldn't have made it clearer that they have no remorse, no regrets, no rethinking what they did in coalition. Appalling.

The same is true of food. The difference is the infrastructure required for distribution. It's the ease of delivery via pipes, and the lack of efficiency in having multiple competing sets of pipes going into a home, that makes water infrastructure a more obvious candidate for monopoly supply of infrastructure than food. Though of course there is massive waste, duplication, inefficiency and environmental damage in the way food is distributed - the answer to that wouldn't have to be taking distribution into public ownership. Yes. And provision of rail infrastructure can only sensibly be done on a monopoly basis. A comparison with buses is interesting. There's no requirement for an infrastructure monopoly with buses (I mean of vehicles, not roads, which is already a publicly controlled resource), but deregulation and competition for profitable routes and neglect of less popular routes suggests that even with timetable management, central control will produce better outcomes than letting the market do its thing. That could be done via regulation rather than ownership, of course. To the extent that broadband requires physical infrastructure that needs to be laid, maintained, renewed, I suppose it's much less disruptive and intrusive, cheaper and more efficient to have one lot rather than many, so I imagine there are practical reasons for treating provision as akin to a natural monopoly. The argument for having provision socially controlled however seems largely about the poor outcomes we have seen compared to what other countries have achieved, the increasingly important part this service plays in people's lives, and the need for intervention to deliver better and more equitable outcomes.

The discussion, both here and in the twitter threads you linked, has been about the broader issue of public vs private ownership and control of infrastructure but also using broadband as a very current example, rather than about any technical or structural issues that might make broadband a special case distinct from other types of infrastructure (do you think there are any? I wouldn't have said there were). If the case of broadband really is significantly different from other types of infrastructure and the issues of ownership and control are consequently different as well, then a discussion about only broadband might sit better in another thread, as a more technical and less political question?

Very interested to see the tories bringing out racist immigration stuff in response to their declining lead in the polls and Johnson's bumbling and inept campaigning performance, and Labour promoting a pro-immigration video of the kind the Blairite party would never have countenanced.

Thinking of health and education as examples, I can't see that introducing private ownership of infrastructure has been helpful. Shoddy design and build arrangements, locked into costly loans and overpriced service contracts...if a publicly owned service thinks there are advantages in contracting with another provider, eg a health authority commissioning a particular service from a specialist agency or company, it should be able to do so, without handing over ownership and control to private companies. Much of our infrastructure has been turned over to rent-seekers, and we are paying more for a worse service as a result - rail and water being examples. As for broadband, there's an argument in this thread for a different model than the one Labour propose, but I'm not clear how it might work in practice, and whether it would be as good as he suggests.

Beyond his point about it not being unusual to have this stuff owned by all of us, why would anyone want our national infrastructure to be in the hands of large companies, or foreign governments? Apart from the people who think they can get their hands on rent-seeking profits at the expense of the rest of us, of course.

If we want to understand how the economics profession has developed over the last 30 years or so, the entrenchment of one approach in university departments and the exclusion of others, the disregard of the history of economic thought, the adherence to models based on fiction and which plainly and unarguably failed to explain the biggest economic issues of our time, then anthropology is a more helpful approach than economics itself. Graeber's discussion of money creation is a case in point. Textbooks have long been reproducing explanations of money creation which were simply fantasy, and people who didn't share the accepted view struggled to get articles published, or get positions in university departments. The publication in 2014 by the BoE of a more accurate description (which economists from 50 or 100 years ago also knew, but which disappeared from sight more recently) was a seminal moment, illustrating that a significant part of what the prevailing orthodoxy was punting was simply false. The way in which such a false account could have held sway over most of the profession, and then have come to dominate the thinking of policy-makers and have become the dominant framing for any discussion in the media, is fascinating. But it's more about groupthink and how people select mutually reinforcing views to the exclusion of others, and that's where anthropology, sociology and psychology offer more insight than what economists have had to say.

There's an interesting discussion by David Graeber here about this and other old myths in economics.