*Shock in the blogosphere as it is revealed that rightwing Tory newspaper does not hold rightwing Tory politicians to same standard as leftwing French governments.*

Slow news day?

Where has the edit button gone?

I need to remove “left wing” from that post.

Grr…

Either it’s okay for BOTH the French AND the Tories to use the term, or it’s okay for NEITHER.

The Times find it inexcusable from the French, some here find it acceptable from the French but inexcusable from the Tories.

That, for those unfamiliar for the actual meaning of the word, is what ‘hypocrisy’ means (from the Greek for ‘play acting’)

(For the record, I don’t give a shit in either case, any more than if the French or Tories has used ‘mental’ or ‘retard’.)

John Stuart Mill put it a little differently in a letter in 1866:

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”

What about Boris Johnson using the same sort of terms as abuse?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6888959.ece

As an Autistic man myself, I think they all deserve the best that the LC can throw at them.

Presumably, in an autistic fit, Boris missed the seminal significance of Alan Greenspan’s testimony on 24 October 2008 to the US House of Representatives Oversight Committe:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122476545437862295.html

The recent systemic crisis in financial services – verging on a global scale – is a hugely magnified version of the earlier Savings & Loan Association crisis in America in the 1980s and 1990s:

“The US Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of several savings and loan associations in the United States. More than 1,000 savings and loan institutions (S&Ls) failed in ‘the largest and costliest venture in public misfeasance, malfeasance and larceny of all time.’ The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around USD$160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government, which contributed to the large budget deficits of the early 1990s.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_Loan_crisis

My insight into that crisis came from reading Donald Campbell: Incentives (Cambridge UP 1995, rev. 2006)

Sadly, the authorities seem not to have drawn the appropriate lessons from the earlier systemic failure.