Natalie Solent |
|
|
Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
Archives
November 2001
December 2001
January 2002
February 2002
March 2002
April 2002
May 2002
June 2002
July 2002
August 2002
September 2002
October 2002
November 2002
December 2002
January 2003
February 2003
March 2003
April 2003
May 2003
June 2003
July 2003
August 2003
September 2003
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
August 2007
October 2007
February 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
September 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
March 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
October 2009
January 2010
March 2010
May 2010
June 2010
July 2010
August 2010
September 2010
October 2010
November 2010
December 2010
January 2011
February 2011
April 2011
June 2011
August 2011
September 2011
October 2011
November 2011
January 2012
February 2012
March 2012
April 2012
May 2012
June 2012
July 2012
August 2012
September 2012
October 2012
November 2012
December 2012
January 2013
February 2013
March 2013
April 2013
May 2013
June 2013
July 2013
August 2013
September 2013
October 2013
November 2013
|
Sunday, November 24, 2013
'Refusal will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child's education record, which will remain on this file throughout their school career'I have only one thing to add to this Telegraph blog post by Daniel Hannan. It is this: I am glad that Mr Hannan and other newspapers have not followed the usual timid practice when reporting stories of this type and obscured the name of the culprit. A storm of public anger is about the only weapon we have against the likes of Mrs L Small, head teacher of Littleton Green Community School, Colliers Way, Huntingdon, South Staffordshire WS12 4UD. And if "our R.E. coordinator Mrs Edmonds", she being the one with whom parents are invited to "discuss this further", does not wish to join her boss in the stocks, she should direct her further discussion towards disassociating herself from the literally fascist tactics Mrs Small uses. The L stands for "Lynn", by the way. Lynn Small, head teacher of Littleton Green Community School, the one who coerces parents by threatening to harm their eight year old children. Loving the Aussies even moreAt first I thought that Tim Blair's account of the outrageous behaviour of the Australian delegates to the Warsaw UN climate conference was written for laughs. I duly laughed. Then I followed the links. It's all true; the snacks ... the T-shirts ... the pyjamas. Then of course my laughter was replaced by profound sorrow at the disgrace brought upon a once-respected nation by its so-called representatives*. *While acknowledging the limited validity of concerns about health and safety of delegates in late night negotiations. Thursday, November 21, 2013
The superior virtue of the oppressedIt’s no coincidence the MPs found guilty of fiddling are all Labour, writes Peter Oborne. The book can at last be closed on The Daily Telegraph investigation into the MPs’ expenses scandal. More than 300 Members of Parliament have paid back wrongly claimed expenses. Several of the worst offenders have stood down from Parliament. Now that the former minister Denis MacShane has at last pleaded guilty to fraud, no further prosecutions are planned, and all criminal investigation is reported to have ceased.His argument that there is "only one chance in 64 that Labour’s score of 6/6 was a coincidence" should be saved as an Awful Example for the probability chapter in a GCSE mathematics textbook, with calculation of the precise odds that he has let the Tories off far too lightly left as an exercise for the student. This part of his explanation, however, is accurate: It is especially perplexing because the party in general strongly feels itself to be the embodiment of decency and morality. Indeed Labour has always insisted that the Conservatives are the party of venality, greed and selfishness. How baffling it is, then, that only Labour MPs have been sent to jail as a result of the Telegraph revelations.Many Labour people cannot believe that anything done by the oppressed classes or their champions can ever really be wrong, not when there are Bullingdon-educated toffs who were in the Eton club out there for comparison. The jailed MPs and their supporters know in their hearts that their very sentences are part of the oppression. They take comfort as the prison gates clang behind them from the thought that when they hear that sound they join the company of heroes. Stanley Kurtz described a similar persecution envy burning in the breasts of greens and climate change activists in The Wannabe Oppressed: What do America’s college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely, a surprising number of students at America’s finest colleges and universities wish to appear as victims — to themselves, as well as to others — without the discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class, at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, “I’ll save you.” Yet deep down they’re thinking, “Oppress me.”And deeper yet, "Oppress me a little bit so that I can resist you with visible heroism safe in the knowledge that you will not actually hurt me." Wednesday, November 20, 2013
If you like your health plan you can...An entertaining story from the Guardian: Obamacare website developers rush to fix bug suggesting hacking methods Sunday, November 17, 2013
Fools and their futile appealsWhite Sun of the Desert writes on Obamacare. Parallels between the soft evils of the modern UK or US and the monstrous twentieth century dictatorships do not usually appeal to me for reasons I need not rehearse. However I think that in this post Tim Newman has made an acute psychological comparison. Time to appeal to the vozhd. Friday, November 15, 2013
A wrongheaded actSyria al-Qa'ida rebels apologise for beheading the wrong man, reports the Irish Independent: Syrian rebel fighters linked with al-Qaeda have begged for forgiveness from Allah after cutting off the head of one of their allies by mistake. Thursday, November 14, 2013
Thirty pieces of nickel-brass alloySometimes the Guardian justifies its name. This is worth knowing about:Police tried to spy on Cambridge students, secret footage shows Officer is filmed attempting to persuade activist in his 20s to become informant targeting 'student-union type stuff'Of this sort of thing is not new. A friend of mine was asked to spy on far-left groups back in the '70s. Perhaps it is inevitable; among the innumerable sects that split and reformed and split again to become the RCPBML and CPGB(ML) we all know and love this week, there were a few that really did need spying on, as do some of the Muslims who have replaced them. But "student-union type stuff"? Yup, MI5 really needs a deep cover mole in the the SUTS. And were they always such cheapskates? The officer also suggested the man he hoped to recruit would be paid expenses or other sums. "You might go to a UK Uncut or Unite Against Fascism meeting one evening, you might get say £30 just for your time and effort for doing that. That's the sort of thing you are looking at." Samizdata quote of the dayIf you don’t own your own body, I shudder to think of the implications of the tragedy of the commons. - Commenter "charles austin", here. Read about those implications here. The mills of incentives grind slow but they grind exceeding small. Sunday, November 10, 2013
On this day let us commemorate...... the victims of the French Revolution. Today is 20th Brumaire in the year CCXXII. On this day in in Year Two, 10th November 1793 in the former calendar, the Festival of Reason was inaugurated in the Temple of Reason, before and afterwards known as the Cathedral of Notre Dame. When reading his description of the first Festival modern readers may find it difficult to share the outrage expressed by the highly partisan nineteenth century politician and historian of the French Revolution, denounced alike by Carlyle and Marx, Adolphe Thiers. The Catholic Church under the ancien régime was oppressive and parasitical, and the Festival can seem to modern eyes like nothing much worse than an embarrassingly amateur charity pageant run by the Women's Institute: The first festival of Reason was held with pomp on the 20th of Brumaire (10th of November) It was attended by all the sections, together with the constituted authorities. A young woman represented the goddess of Reason. She was the wife of Momoro, the printer, one of the friends of Vincent, Bonsin, Chaumette, Hebert, and the like. She was dressed in a white drapery; a mantle of azure blue hung from her shoulders ; her flowing hair was covered with the cap of liberty. She sat upon an antique seat, intwined with ivy and borne by four citizens. Young girls dressed in white, and crowned with roses, preceded and followed the goddess. Then came the busts of Lepelletier and Marat, musicians, troops, and all the armed sections. Speeches were delivered, and hymns sung in the Temple of Reason ; they then proceeded to the Convention, and Chaumette spoke in these terms : Whatever the semblance, nothing about the French Revolution was harmless. The Goddess Reason ascended her throne two months into the Terror. When the Catholic peasants of the Vendée were so ungrateful for the blessings of the Goddess as to attempt counter-revolution, Momoro, the man whose wife had played the role of the Goddess, was deeply involved in its brutal suppression. Chaumette, too, was one of the leading enragés, and soppy modern "liberals" inclined to praise the Cult of Reason as an ancestor of their own views might like to read more about its teachings regarding women. Neither Momoro nor Chaumette had long to enjoy their status as founders. By spring of the next year Robespierre decided to replace the Cult of Reason with the Cult of the Supreme Being. From then on it was the People's Front of Judea scene from Life of Brian with real deaths. The Committee of Public Safety sent Momoro to the guillotine on 24th March 1794 and Chaumette followed him on 15th April. Robespierre himself fell from power in June and was guillotined in July. A few paragraphs later Thiers describes "restraints" being imposed on a people that he thought were unprecedented in all prior history. They were not, alas, unrepeated in subsequent history: If then we survey the state of France at this period, we shall see that never were more restraints imposed at once on that inert and patient part of the population on which political experiments are made. People dared no longer express any opinion. They were afraid to visit their friends, lest they might be compromised with them, and lose liberty and even life. A hundred thousand arrests and some hundreds of condemnations, rendered imprisonment and the scaffold ever present to the minds of twenty-five millions of French. They had to bear heavy taxes. If, by a perfectly arbitrary classification, they were placed on the list of the rich, they lost for that year a portion of their income.It was a straight road from Revolutionary France to Soviet Russia, but if you look carefully the twisty paths from there to nearly all the "political experiments" and other horrors of the twentieth century can be discerned, including the two great wars remembered today. Saturday, November 09, 2013
"Now, gods, stand up for bastards!""Those French bastards. Will they never learn?", asks Joan Smith in the Independent. And answers. By the grace of the State and in the Most Holy Name of Equality, yes! Those bastards will learn. They will be taught a lesson. There is a bunch of well-known "bastards" in France who are keen on having sex with prostituted women. Don't take my word for it: that's how they describe themselves in a declaration insisting on their right to buy sex. The "bastards" (salauds in French) are so cross about a proposed law which would impose fines on men who pay for sex that they've decided to out themselves in a monthly magazine. The "manifesto of 343 bastards" has been signed by writers, actors, and commentators who say they have used, or are likely to use, "the services of prostitutes" – and aren't ashamed of it.To my astonishment the most logical riposte from among the Independent comments to Ms Smith's last quoted non-sequitur comes from a man blogging from the bottom corner of the political diamond, conservative-socialist authoritarian David A.S. Lindsay. Mr Lindsay says, Alike in Britain and in France, by all means let it be made a criminal offence for anyone above the age of consent, raised to 18, to buy sex. And, with exactly equal sentencing, for anyone above the age of consent, raised to 18, to sell sex. Are women morally and intellectually equal to men, or not?So far as I can tell this is not sarcasm; he wants both buyers and sellers of sex criminalised. I differ, but one cannot fault his logic on the "both or neither" point. Edmund from King Lear gave me the title of this post. It is mostly there because I am incapable of passing up a nifty lit ref. However it does occur to me that there is a way it might be made relevant. Many people will particularly want to cheer the way the salauds proudly snap their nicotine-stained fingers in the faces of their would-be oppressors: Nous aimons la liberté, la littérature et l’intimité. Et quand l’Etat s’occupe de nos fesses, elles sont toutes les trois en danger.Hell, I cheered that, and I'll be in church tomorrow and I had to look up "les fesses" in a French dictionary. (By the way, does "quand l'Etat s'occupe de nos fesses" have the double meaning I think it might have?) But it would really be nice, and principled, and a bloody good strategy for those who do not cheer, for those godly folk and their secular equivalents whose skin crawls at the thought of prostitution, to also stand up for the bastards. Because as the bastards say, "Today prostitution, tomorrow pornography: what will they forbid the day after next?" Sunday, November 03, 2013
Sunday night strangeness: why does an academic book about fruit flies cost $23,698,655.93 on Amazon?Michael Eisen is a biologist, who studies the fruit fly drosophila with especial interest as nearly all biologists appear to do for some reason some of our learned readers will, I hope, explain to me. In his own words, A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).And the price was rising steeply almost as he watched. Why? I had often wondered this myself. Not that the development of the fruit fly has generally been my first choice for a riveting read, but I did once come gulpingly close to pressing the "Buy now with 1-Click" button for Connie Long's Easy Guide to Sewing Linings before noticing just in time that it was going for more than two hundred pounds. It is now down to a mere £86 new / £44 used. I was kind of hoping for under £10. I am an idle waster who noted the strangeness and passed on; Doctor Eisen is a research scientist. He duly researched and explained all. Saturday, November 02, 2013
They move among us: paedophiles and Popish plotsRemember, remember the fifth of November Gunpowder, treason and plotToday is the Saturday nearest to Guy Fawkes Night. In half an hour I will be off to a fireworks party to commemorate the foiling of a dangerous Catholic plot against the realm. My Catholic family never had the slightest compunction about burning the chief conspirator in effigy. The plot was real, feasible and evil. In the years that followed, many innocent Catholics were suspected and sometimes killed for plots that were imaginary. The cry of "Popish plot" retained its power to whip up the mob for generations afterwards. The target changes. I do not usually link to articles behind the Times paywall, but this piece by Matthew Parris, "Our need to hate creates another victim", is so timely and true that I shall break that rule. On Tuesday an item appeared on page five of this newspaper. Our treatment was typical of most of the national press: only The Independent put it on the front page. Fleet Street does not appear to have judged that readers would see this as a big story.... Every reader will be familiar with the very great difficulty we face when the burden of our advice to an anxious friend is not that a problem is imaginary but that he or she has got it out of all proportion. You are not claiming his worry is groundless; you are not even trying to make light of it. You are really just trying to get the worry into some kind of perspective. How does one strike the balance between scaling an anxiety down to size and appearing to dismiss it?... I suppose the obvious comparisons are with the 17th and other centuries’ waves of hysteria about witchcraft, and my fellow columnist David Aaronovitch once made those comparisons bravely and powerfully on this page. But (as David acknowledged) there’s a difference: the case is easier to make when the object of the public’s fears simply doesn’t exist and never did. Paedophilia does exist, and this generation’s better understanding of how widespread it can be and what harm it can do acknowledges truths that our grandparents’ generation overlooked or ignored. If we must go back centuries for our parallels in the English imagination, maybe French spies or Popish plots are better comparisons, for these were by no means always imagined. . . but those days seem so distant. Saturday, October 26, 2013
Saturday night strangeness - Hitler before his DownfallThe bloke who posted this describes it as,'The same scene everyone knows, except it is from a film called "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" starring Alec Guinness.' Presumably both this film and Der Untergang followed Traudl Junge's diaries quite closely for this scene. Tuesday, October 15, 2013
"Damn you Mrs Clinton. You have just made me like a traffic warden."Thus laments commenter James Primavesi to this Times story (paywalled, but the title tells you all you need to know): Do you know who she is? Hillary Clinton gets a ticket despite protests of her security detail. Sunday, October 06, 2013
"I thought Racism was illegal."The Daily Mail reports: Lord Sugar faced police racism probe after joking on Twitter that crying Chinese boy was upset 'because he was told off for leaving the production line of the iPhone 5'How far we have fallen. In speaking of our fall, I do not refer the belief of the complainant, Nichola Szeto, that Lord Sugar's joke was racist: stupid people have always been with us. The joke was not remotely racist. Apple might have cause to whine, at the implication that the company employs child labour, but Apple Inc. probably has enough sense to refrain from going to law at a joke and getting a tidal wave of bad publicity. Poor Ms Szeto herself nearly had the sense to refrain from going to law at a joke and getting a tidal wave of bad publicity. It did take Merseyside’s Hate Crime Investigation Unit two tries before they could get her to ruin her business and reputation: She was contacted by police on Wednesday but declined to give a statement. At 8am the next day, she was again contacted by officers who said they wanted to visit her home. Instead, she agreed to attend a police station in Central Liverpool later that day, where she spent an hour giving a statement to two officers. I do not refer to the mistaken belief of Ms Szeto that racism is both illegal and a proper noun. State schools are often not very good, and in all fairness how far can we blame someone for thinking that an opinion might be illegal, when the police evidently thought so too? Or perhaps Merseyside Hate Crime Investigation Unit thought no such thing but was just anxious to drum up trade in a slow market. You know times are hard in the hate biz when you get sales calls at eight in the morning. Funny, though, when I have once or twice called to report the old sort of crime it took Plod ages to answer the phone. Why Merseyside police seem keener on home visits to well-toned ladies upset at what someone said on Twitter than on home visits to Toxteth amphetamine addicts beating their women is just one of those unfathomable mysteries. How far we have fallen when this can be part of the normal operation of the care of a state for its citizen, in a country that once had something like freedom: However, the remark was in the end classed as a ‘hate incident’ – which means no further action will be taken, although details will be kept on file. Got that? Not even the zealous young commissars that they send to work in the Hate Crime Investigation Unit could find a enough of a crime to give the boys in the CPS something to work with. What a scalp that would have been: a Labour peer and a TV celebrity. All would have trembled at the power and reach of the law if such a man were brought down. Alas for the Hate Crime Investigation Unit, this time it was not to be. But it is still a "hate incident". Not an alleged hate incident, or a complaint of a hate incident, an official hate incident. On file, for use if need be. Saturday, October 05, 2013
That's not an insult to your parents. THIS is an insult to your parents.The man who hated Britain: Red Ed's pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country.- Geoffrey Levy, in a hit piece in the Daily Mail aimed at Ed Miliband. I am at no loss for information about you and your family; but I am at a loss where to begin. Shall I relate how your father Tromes was a slave in the house of Elpias, who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck? Or how your mother practised daylight nuptials in an outhouse next door to Heros the bone-setter, and so brought you up to act in tableaux vivants and to excel in minor parts on the stage?- Demosthenes, in a hit piece aimed at Aeschines. Discussion point: circumcisionCircumcision ruling: European bureaucrats are effectively banning Jewish boys, argues Brendan O'Neill, quoting the Jerusalem Post and unintentionally supported in his argument by the creepy quote from the Council of Europe in which it calls for "debate" and in the same breath announces what the result of said debate is to be. And this was put forward by a German rapporteur. I am not usually one for endless digs at modern Germans for evil done before most of them were born, but, Frau Rupperecht, do you have any idea of what that must look like to some of the Jerusalem Post's older readers? And yet - irreversible modification of a child's body without the child's consent. Gulp. And yet again - parents irreversibly modify their children's bodies by surgery all the time. We have discussed this several times before, acrimoniously. Any new thoughts? Any constructive reformulations of old thoughts? I have a question for medically knowledgeable readers. I gather that a far higher proportion - 79% in 2002 - of men in the US are circumcised than in the UK, yet the number uncircumcised is also huge. There must therefore be scope for large scale comparisons of outcomes. Have these been done? Does male circumcision make much difference? Thursday, October 03, 2013
Samizdata quote of the dayWe are the ones, we militants without a strategy of emancipation, who are (and who have been for some time now) the real aphasics! And it is not the sympathetic and unavoidable language of movementist democracy that will save us. - Professor Alain Badiou, in an article arguing that "We need to rediscover the language of Communism." Tuesday, September 24, 2013
A comment about banning the burqaMy comment to this Samizdata post by Perry De Havilland: It’s one of those situations where you have to laugh, because if you don’t laugh you will cry. The Establishment has, belatedly, nerved itself to say (after obligatory frantic protestations of non-racism) that burqas are, y’know, a bit, um, er, socially undesirable. This after decades of putting in place measures to make sure that any social disapproval of burqas was punishable in law. Many of you no doubt remember the discussion in the run-up to what became the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. Bad as it is, this law would have been even more repressive if not for two amendments made in the Lords. The Labour government failed by one vote to overturn these amendments. During the debate in the House of Commons, Home Office Minister Paul Goggins himself offered up as an example of speech that would be punishable under the Act the suggestion that burqas might be used to hide that someone was a suicide bomber. I repeat, that was not scaremongering by opponents but the Minister’s own example of speech he thought ought to be forbidden. Here’s the quote from Hansard: Link: Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock Chase) (Lab): A number of hon. Members have provided the Minister with example statements and asked him whether the Bill would catch them. In each case, he has said that the Bill would not catch that statement, but it would be helpful if he provided an example of a statement that the Bill would catch. That is but one example (not forgetting that although the worst few words in the Act were softened, in the main it was passed as originally intended) of the numerous laws and other types of state-backed pressure that have been used to stop individuals attempting to peacefully dissuade others not to wear the mask. In other words the Establishment laboured long and hard to stop in its tracks the sort of “pressure” that does not violate anyone’s rights and which actually works – as it did work to diminish almost to nothing the barbaric custom of putting women in black bags over the nineteenth century and the first two thirds of the twentieth century. And now, when burqa-clad women – and men pretending to be women – are known to have used the burqa to hide weapons of murder many times, to say nothing of the less drastic but more pervasive evils of the custom, the clowns of the Establishment STILL cannot move themselves to allow their fellow citizens to oh-the-horror discriminate. Like an alcoholic whose only solution to his drunkeness is another binge to stop him thinking about it, the only strategy the Establishment can think of is more force in the opposite direction, this time banning the burqa. Despair is a sin. Best to laugh. Sunday, September 22, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Friday, September 06, 2013
A song for AustraliaOver at Samizdata I reassigned the roles in the song One Day More from Les Miserables from French revolutionaries to Australian politicians. Then I was completely upstaged by the team supporting the guy challenging Kevin Rudd for his seat, who had the same idea. My version still might give a chuckle to fans of Australian politics (which as far as I can see is basically Game of Thrones without the tender moments), and I did get in a bonus rant about that irritating little brat Gavroche: Got it! I have finally settled on which character from Les Mis best represents Kevin Rudd. Gavroche. We are meant to find him loveable but he is an irritating little brat. He endlessly plays up his proletarian origins and faffs on about “what little people can do”. He denounces Inspector Javert and gets him sent off to be murdered by a People’s Court, setting the example for Children of the Revolution ever since. Then on the barricades, when the revolutionaries are offered the chance to leave, what does he do? He hams it up, sings his little song in a halting, childish treble, and basically dooms the lot of them. Go to the top of the class, little Gavroche! Or preferably go prancing out onto the top of the barricade – go on kid, you know you can’t resist an opportunity to show off – and get yourself slaughtered. Oh, you just did. Good show! Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Polly Toynbee might possibly be rightIn most ways the Pollyverse is a place where the rules of our continuum do not apply. She worships strange gods and that which she fears causes Earth-humans to rejoice. But could she be right to fear the new lobbying bill? The National Council for Voluntary Organisations publishes a report from a human rights QC warning that the bill could breach the right to freedom of speech. Lawyers for many charities warn of a legal minefield for trustees: if they trip into electoral law they must send weekly reports of all their spending during the electoral period, when any slip risks criminal charges. The government denies the bill will silence campaigners, but a letter of protest representing swaths of charities – from the British Legion to Citizens Advice – crosses the political divide. The campaign group 38 Degrees says the "proposed gagging law would have a chilling effect on British democracy". The Taxpayers' Alliance agrees: "The bill is a serious threat to independent politics that will stifle free and open democratic debate." Ironically, the bill seems to my uneducated eye to resemble the attempt to stifle free speech in the US that was defeated by the Citizens United decision, a ruling demonized by the Left. That irony might be fun to point out but the consequences are not reassuring. We in the UK do not have the protection of the First Amendment. Karl Marx was nearly rightThe quick version of something the old plague-carrier said is that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Second time as tragedy and farce would have been more accurate. Top comment: "I did not set a red line, Bush did it and you are a racist" Monday, September 02, 2013
Samizdata quote of the dayThese proceedings are closed. - General Douglas MacArthur, bringing World War II to an end as if it were a parish council meeting, sixty-eight years ago today. Saturday, August 31, 2013
Get used to it: two more minor acts of oppression in developed countriesNo one was killed, no one was injured. Do not excite yourselves. From Adrian Hilton in the Spectator: Revd Dr Alan Clifford’s ‘homophobic’ comments referred to the CPS The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 contains the offence of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. Anyone using threatening words or behaviour, or anyone displaying, publishing or distributing any written material which is threatening, is liable for prosecution. Former Conservative Home Secretary Lord Waddington won an amendment to an earlier version of the law, which established that no one might be prosecuted for stating their belief that homosexuality is sinful or wrong. It read: ‘For the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred.’ From Damien Gayle in the Daily Mail via Tim Worstall: Armed police turn up at family home with a battering ram to seize their children after they defy Germany's ban on home schooling A team of 20 social workers, police officers, and special agents stormed the home of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich because they refused to send their children to state schools. The youngsters were taken to unknown locations after officials allegedly ominously promised the parents that they would not be seeing them again 'any time soon'. George Clooney has a private spy satellite over SudanThis is old news to some but new to me, and to the Huffington Post, judging from their headline. I had thought Clooney to be the standard Hollywood "liberal", looking down from a lofty height on the barbarians below. Instead he is looking down from a lofty height on one particular barbarian below in order to deter him from atrocities and warn his potential victims. Cool. Next stop, armaments. Which might get hairy, given that some private individuals and nearly all states of the satellite-owning classes are prone to think of themselves as gods already, even without the power to strike down malefactors from the heavens. David Cameron will sleep well tonightHumiliated? As a prime minister and party leader, yes. But there are compensations. To President Obama he can say, "Sorry guv, tried to help, but the boys just wouldn't let me. We are going to remain neutral". And then sotto voce he can add, "Neutral like you are 'in terms of the Maldives or the Falklands, whatever your preferred term is'" To Parliament, and through Parliament to the voters, he can say, with great ceremony "I respect your decision" and get all sorts of strange new respect from anti-war people while not losing the respect of those who thought British support for US military action against Assad was necessary, because, after all, he did try. To Syria he can say all the right things without having to do anything. Given that it is damned difficult to know what to do, or even what is happening over there, that is a silver lining for him. In that link, Jim Miller says, "we need an explanation for the attack — whoever is responsible — that includes a motive." Assad was winning. Why jeopardize that? A member of my family suggested that Assad might have said to his henchmen something equivalent to Henry II's "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" "Destroy those rebels in Ghouta, and I don't care how you do it." Bashar Assad is an evil man, which does not make his enemies good. Was this vote a good thing or a bad thing to happen? I do not know. It is a generator of ironies, and not just for Cameron. Saturday, August 17, 2013
Samizdata quote of the dayAll suspicions which have been raised have been dispelled- German interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, referring to reassurances that Britain and US agencies "had observed German laws in Germany". It is compulsory to recite this quote in the voice of Cecil Baldwin from Welcome to Night Vale.
Blackmail plot fails by reason of sucker shortageYasuni: Ecuador abandons plan to stave off Amazon drilling Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has abandoned a unique and ambitious plan to persuade rich countries to pay his country not to drill for oil in a pristine Amazon rainforest preserve. Schemes outwardly quite like this, that ask people to put their money where their mouths are, might yet turn out to be a great way to find the balance between development and preservation that actually pleases most people as revealed by what they are willing to pay for. But given that Mr Correa has already shown, as Tim Worstall points out, that he considers payment of his country's debts to be optional, I think the required foundation of trust might be lacking for this one. Sadly there were quite a few private individuals who contributed to this scheme even though the rich world's governments prudently refrained - some of these individuals lament their wasted money in the comments to this second Guardian story. Someone else replies that it is a sin to leave a sucker in charge of his money, but there are worse things to be than a sucker. They are not the environmentalists who should arouse our scorn. Reserve that for the first commenter, who says to general approval, "If we want to save the planet, we are going to have to do this by force." Monday, July 29, 2013
A public intellectual shares her thoughts for the public goodOnce upon a time there was a wise princess. She lived in a magic castle together with her friends, who were also wise. One day, the princess, taking pity on the ignorance of the common folk, decided to go among them and teach them. Alas! Some rough people said rude and nasty things to the princess. She had to run back to her castle and issue a proclamation. This what it said: Anthea Butler: Conservatives bashed me for speaking out about the Zimmerman verdict. The princess was very sad. She even wondered if the people were worthy to go on being allowed to hear her wise words. What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work? The princess felt that she had to choose between sharing her wisdom and keeping a record of all the bad things the rough people had said to her. Why she felt that way, we do not know, but we know the reason was wise. Anyway, the princess held her head high as befitted her rank. Who cares what peasants say anyway? Then she had a good idea. She gave herself a medal. In the age of conservative grievances about education however, how many people will be willing to go through what I do every time I publish an op-ed or in order to share what they have spent a lifetime to learn? Thursday, July 11, 2013
Discussion point: the ethical issues surrounding unsolicitied sales phone callsIs it better to just hang them or should we draw and quarter first? Sunday, July 07, 2013
Is the site down or something?How odd. No one seems to be commenting or posting, but there seems to be a bit of a racket going on down our street, people shouting and stuff. Friday, July 05, 2013
On being ejected from the premises due to self-chosen body shapeThe trashtastic AOL home page instructs me to "Guess why this woman was kicked out of a water park?" "Because her bottoms were too small," claimed the staff of the water park, in opposite talk. As commenter rmsaerials put it, "She will never drown." The lady concerned, Madelyn Shaeffer, is now suing the water park. She says, "I felt like it was both age and body discrimination and I felt like I could look around me and I could see a handful of other girls half my age, wearing the same size swimming suit and not being singled out and told to put on clothes or leave." The instant I read the words "suing" and "discrimination" the sympathy I had for Ms Shaeffer evaporated - but I have condensed some of it back by mental effort. Although I support the right of clubs and other private establishments to admit and eject whom they please for good reasons or bad, those reasons ought if possible to be honestly stated in advance and predictably and consistently applied. I can see why Ms Shaeffer is angry that she was ejected on grounds of costume when other women in similar costumes are not ejected. The trouble is, both sides are pretending. Both know but do not say that the actual reason she was ejected was that her artificially enlarged breasts mean that in a bikini, any bikini, she is emitting a loud and continuous sexual signal. It is a difficult situation for the water park. I stand by my statement that it is desirable that their rules be known and predictable, but nobody can write rules in advance for every situation, which is why it has to come down to the manager's discretion in the end. I hope Ms Shaeffer loses her suit, but I also hope her entrance fee was refunded. The rule behind the rule against nudity or near nudity is a rule against unignorable sexual signalling. She was doing that, and I think she knows it. When I look at her pose I see someone who is more than ordinarily aware of her appearance. (Truly, the first thing I noticed about her picture was that her stomach was really, really sucked in, to the extent that for a moment I thought it was photoshopped.) A water park should have the right to position itself in the market as a "family" place where customers are not going to be bombarded with sexual signals. Equally, the water park down the road should have the right to position itself as the place where the hot girls go. The latter ought to have the right not to admit people for not having sexy enough body shapes, whether self-chosen or not. Oddly, this right is often honoured even in our unlibertarian society - the bouncers at many a club will not let ugly or fat people in and nobody sues. Tuesday, July 02, 2013
I always said this would happen eventuallyMongolian neo-Nazis rebrand themselves as environmentalists. Friday, June 28, 2013
Discussion point: what should have been done with Typhoid Mary?The Daily Mail has published eerie pictures of the abandoned medical facility in North Brother Island, to which Typhoid Mary was exiled by the New York public health authorities. She meant no harm, certainly had not committed the sort of crimes that usually result in a life sentence, yet she caused several deaths. What should have been done with her? Mary Mallon ended up causing more deaths by her stubborn refusal to believe that she was a carrier, and her breach of her undertaking to cease working as a cook. What should be done with someone who through no fault of their own carries a dangerous disease and unlike Mallon tries their best to act responsibly - but who nonetheless still causes deaths by their mere proximity to other people? We are horrified at the medieval leper's bell and the leper colony but our sense of superiority rests on the fact that we now can treat leprosy. New plagues might arise that we cannot treat... ...yet we can be certain the plague of tyrannical abuse of power in the name of health will always be with us. Wednesday, June 26, 2013
A light has gone from my lifeI did so enjoy contemplating the coming inevitable defeat of Julia Gillard and the Australian Labor Party. Unimportant in the greater scheme of things, I know, but just to contemplate the ululations of grief and ritual cries of "misogyny" that would have come from the Guardian the morning after the next Australian election was a little thing that gave me a few snatched moments of innocent pleasure in this hard world. Now, however... Monday, June 24, 2013
Gifted, cursed, whateverIn response to a rather gushing article by Sally Gardner, a dyslexic novelist, entitled "Dyslexia is not a disability – it's a gift", one Alftser responded that if he or she had been given that gift "I'd find the receipt and get a refund." I laughed at that. However stripped of all the self-dramatisation (a pardonable sin in a novelist) and the wishful bagging of Einstein, Steve Jobs, and any public figure who ever misspelled a word as fellow dyslexics, Ms Gardner's story is quite impressive: she is a winner of the Carnegie Medal who did not learn to read until she was 14. In a sense one cannot quarrel with her assessment that her own dyslexia has been a gift - and not just because she has been successful but because one cannot quarrel with anyone's experience of their own lives. Well, one can quarrel with it. I've known people who could quarrel with the speaking clock. But you know what I mean. Sadly, for most dyslexic people dyslexia is a pain in the part of the anatomy that I have sufficient self control to not make a joke of misspelling, because they've heard all the jokes before. Most children with dyslexia are not going to have their inner genius unleashed even when presented with positive role models because they do not have an inner genius. Humanity is like that: mostly supplied with the inner genius slot vacant. Dyslexia may indeed, as Ms Gardner suggests, promote the skill of navigating the world by other means than arranging the written word, but in most cases this skill is simply not as useful as the one it substitutes for. That's tough, but not insurmountable. Surmount it. For a minority of dyslexics and quite a few pretenders, the diagnosis is a means to get free laptops, extra time and marks in exams, and a ready made victim identity. Free stuff takes a very strong spirit to refuse. The extra marks are OK, so long as you do not end up deceiving others or yourself. But DO NOT TAKE THE VICTIM IDENTITY. It is poison. Sunday, June 23, 2013
Property rights and protests at sporting eventsMuch outrage in the Guardian because The Australian activist who disrupted the 2012 Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race in protest at government cuts has been ordered to leave the country, after receiving a six-month jail term that many thought was severe. The degree to which I shall miss Mr Oldfield's anti-elitist activism when he leaves these shores is impossible to underestimate. He should regard deportation as an opportunity to activate his home nation of Australia instead. I believe you start the process by holding hold down the "sleep" button. However the issues are wider than the question of whether he, or elitism, or the ejection of lawbreaking foreigners, is a good thing or a bad thing. One can see why the government felt they had to stomp down hard on this sort of protest. He ruined a contest for which the crews had trained for months and messed up the pleasure of thousands of spectators on the riverbanks and many more on TV. If one protester gets away with that then every sporting and cultural event is going to be liable to disruption by any fool with a grudge, particulary if, as in the case of the boat race, the event takes place on the public highway, so to speak. The cultural life of the country would be greatly diminished. Would that actually be bad? My gut reaction says yes, but my gut would like some backup from principle. Even if it would be bad, does "the country" have the right to stop it happening? Sure, the people who want the event to proceed uninterrupted are the majority, but so what? Samizdata joke of the dayWhat's the difference between Fleet Street and Hacked Off?- Solent Minor Friday, May 24, 2013
Why is Sally Bercow trending? *innocent face*...Because a backbiting and disingenuous woman has got her comeuppance. High Court: Sally Bercow's Lord McAlpine tweet was libel A tweet published by Sally Bercow about Tory peer Lord McAlpine was libellous, the High Court has ruled.Her claim that this blatant innuendo was merely a factual enquiry was always an insult to the intelligence of anyone who heard it. But should there be an offence of libel at all? Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Color Purple, fadedPrize-winning author Alice Walker gives support to David Icke on Desert Island Discs. Not a headline you see very often. For those that don't know, Alice Walker is a "an American author, poet, womanist, and activist", Desert Island Discs is a long-running BBC radio programme in which celebrities say which eight records (look it up) they would take with them to a desert island (I suppose the gramophone must be one of those wind-up ones), and David Icke is a former Green Party spokesman who believes that, among others, the Queen, President George H. W. Bush, President George W. Bush, Al Gore and Boxcar Willie are really twelve-foot alien lizards. Thursday, May 16, 2013
If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them rightRape, enslavement, child prostitution go unpunished for years. The victims' complaints are dismissed by social services. The accusations are not seriously investigated by the police. With a few honourable exceptions the politicians and the media won't even discuss the issue. No one disputes that the crimes themselves are the responsibility of the criminals, but who is to blame for the conspiracy of silence? Why, the first man to break it, of course! In the comments to my earlier post, Jaded Voluntaryist pointed out an article by Sean Thomas in the Telegraph "...which blamed Nick Griffin for the events in Oxford, since by talking about this issue no-one wants to talk about way back in 2004, he made it impossible for anyone else to talk about it seriously. Yes, I’m sure if he had kept schtum it would have all been sorted out years ago…" Here is said article: Oxford gang rape: did people ignore this sort of scandal because racist Nick Griffin was the first to mention them? Mr Thomas has wisely opted not to allow comments. They would be radioactive. He wrote, As long ago as 2001, Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was making claims about Asian grooming gangs. In 2004 he repeated these allegations in a speech clandestinely recorded by the BBC for a TV documentary, Secret Agent. He was arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred. [UPDATE 17 MAY 09.45: As those viewing Samizdata on the morning of 17 May will have seen, I tried to edit a minor error in the post and somehow deleted the text from this point onwards. A kind person has emailed me the lost text, which now follows. I will gradually reinsert the links. Apologies for this interruption - NS] Some background on “the events in Oxford” here. ...a jury at the Old Bailey convicted seven men responsible for running an underworld child sex abuse ring in the Cowley area of Oxford of 43 charges of rape, child prostitution, trafficking and procuring a backstreet abortion. Six victims gave harrowing evidence during the three-and-a-half month trial, but police believe the number of girls recruited by the gang and abused numbers more than 50. “Asian” generally means Pakistani background, although two of the perpetrators here were Eritrean. All the abusers were Muslim. None of their victims were. This was not coincidence. The men generally targeted girls from children’s homes and disrupted family backgrounds. The abusers saw their victims as promiscuous white trash, in an utterly different category from their own wives and daughters. This is the latest of a string of such cases, all following the same pattern, such that a report produced by the police-staffed Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre “found that more than a quarter (26 per cent) of suspects reported to Ceop were of Asian origin, and the majority of groups identified were Asian”. There have been other trials of similar “Asian” (specifically British Pakistani) grooming gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby, Telford and Keighley. Keighley, as it happened, was where Nick Griffin made one of the speeches that got him prosecuted. In that speech, Griffin said, “These 18, 19, and 25-year-old Asian Muslims who are seducing and raping white girls in this town right now are not particularly good Muslims, they drink and all the rest of it, but still part of what they are doing comes from what they are taught is acceptable.” It will be a cold day in hell before I vote for the Holocaust denier Nick Griffin’s literally fascist party, but I rather think that if Griffin feels vindicated that is because he has been vindicated. Thug he may be, but his “thuggish intervention” in this case consisted of stating the truth when almost nobody else would – and being prosecuted for it. The charges covered many things said by Griffin, but the opening speech by the prosecuting counsel specifically featured his claims of “paedophile drug rape” in Keighley. (The prosecution was unsuccessful. Two juries acquitted Griffin and another defendant in two separate trials.) Society did not just “feel able to ignore the scandal”, society – in the form of police chiefs, social workers, and the media – actively, cravenly dodged saying anything about it. Why? Because they were all afraid of being branded racist. As one of the few exceptions to the media silence, the documentary-maker Anna Hall, wrote, “…a senior children’s services manager said: “The men are Asian, Anna, but you’ll never get anyone on the record to say that.”” Or as Tim Loughton, the former Children’s Minister admitted, “There are clear cultural sensitivities around these cases that too often meant the relevant agencies were reluctant to intervene properly”. Or as retired police Superintendent Mick Gradwell said, “There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way [...] In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.” (H/T: Laban Tall at UK Commentators, who has followed this story for years.) Note how Gradwell described the former Home Secretary Jack Straw as “brave” for speaking out as late as 2011. He was, too, even though his fellow Labour MP Ann Cryer had been much braver in speaking out back in 2004 when she was MP for Keighley. Bravery was required to speak out because bad things were likely to happen to the careers of those who did, particularly if they did not have Cryer’s or Straw’s Parliamentary privilege. And thus the abuse continued, Mr Thomas. Incidentally, the police “requested” that Anna Hall’s documentary "Edge of the City" be postponed until the 2004 local elections were over, for fear it would send votes to the BNP. I thought the police were meant to be politically impartial. There is a grain of truth in what Sean Thomas has written. When I first saw reports that the BNP claimed that Asian gangs were grooming white girls, my eyes skated over them because claims that “their” men are seducing, corrupting and raping “our” girls have been a staple of racist propaganda through the ages. Thus far, Mr Thomas was right. But to attempt to shift the blame for even a fraction of years of sustained, repeated evasion of their duties on the part of every organ of the establishment onto Nick Griffin is… inventive. Were the social services departments of multiple British towns really listening that hard to Nick Griffin? Did the chief constables of several different police authorities check that the chairman of the British National Party hadn’t spoilt the atmosphere before giving the go-ahead to investigate? Should we assume that the fact that in the last couple of years the Crown Prosecution Service has finally started to actively prosecute these gangs (following the initiative taken by Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England Nazir Afzal, himself of Pakistani heritage, please note) is because the CPS lawyers have finally got over their sulk at Griffin making them look bad? A question for the mainstream media: aren’t you ashamed that the British National Party reported what you dared not? A question for the politicians, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service: do you now regret the prosecution of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett on charges of using words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred, specifically including his claims about Keighley? Do you acknowledge that your action in attempting to curtail and punish his free speech, in part for saying this type of crime was happening at a time and a place when it was, will certainly have deterred others from speaking out? Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Edited back into history: the martyrs of OtrantoWithin hours of the July 7 2005 bombings in London, the BBC stealth-edited its reports so that any references to "terrorists" that had initially appeared were changed to "bombers" or a similar purely descriptive, non-judgmental term. This was done in response to a memo from Helen Boaden, then Head of News. She did not want to offend World Service listeners. Given this reluctance to use the word "terrorist", suspended for a few hours when terrorism came to its front door and then reimposed, I often wondered what it would take for the BBC to rediscover the ability to use words that imply a moral judgment. One answer was obvious. It was fine to describe bombing as a "war crime" if it was carried out by the Israeli air force. But in general as the years have gone by the BBC stuck to what it knew best: obfuscation. For instance, this article from last December, describing how fifteen Christians had their throats slit in Nigeria described the perpetrators as the "Islamist militants Boko Haram". In venturing to describe the murders as a massacre, that article went further than most; the bombings of churches in Nigeria by Boko Haram are routinely described in terms of "unrest", or as "conflict" - as if there were two sides killing each other at a roughly equal rate. However, on Sunday I observed something I had not seen before. An atrocity carried out by Muslims against Christians was described as an "atrocity". It happened in 1480, but still. The BBC report says, Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony at the Vatican - a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480. A reminder that "martyr" used to mean someone who died for his faith rather than killed for it. A reminder also of a centuries-long struggle against invading Islam that has been edited out of our history. You can bet the Seige of Vienna, which proved to be the high water mark of the Ottoman tide, does not feature in any GCSE syllabus. Nor does the rematch one and a half centuries later. The epic Seige of Malta was once celebrated in song and story, but don't expect to see a BBC mini-series about it any time soon. Damian Thompson recently said a lot of what I had been thinking when he wrote about the the mass canonisation of the martyrs of Otranto in the Telegraph (subscription may be required): Martyred for Christ: 800 victims of Islamic violence who will become saints this month The cathedral of Otranto in southern Italy is decorated with the skulls of 800 Christian townsfolk beheaded by Ottoman soldiers in 1480. A week tomorrow, on Sunday May 12, they will become the skulls of saints, as Pope Francis canonises all of them. In doing so, he will instantly break the record for the pope who has created the most saints. I wonder how he feels about that. Benedict XVI announced the planned canonisations just minutes before dropping the bombshell of his own resignation. You could view it as a parting gift to his successor. Or a booby trap.Thompson continues, There are, however, good secular reasons for welcoming this canonisation. Our history is distorted by a nagging emphasis on Christian atrocities during the Crusades combined with airbrushing of Muslim Andalusia, whose massacre of Jews in 1066 and exodus of Christians in 1126 are rarely mentioned. Otranto reminds us that Islam had its equivalent of crusaders – mighty forces who nearly captured Rome and Vienna. Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Breathtakingly crass propaganda by pictureThis Comment is Free article, The Dark Side of Home Schooling by Katherine Stewart, claims that: Several decades ago, political activists on the religious right began to put together an "ideology machine". Home schooling was a big part of the plan. The idea was to breed and "train up" an army of culture warriors. We now are faced with the consequences of their actions, some of which are quite disturbing. The article mainly consists of quotes from people who have posted at a website aimed at those who are unhappy with their home schooling. We hear that some of them have suffered from "depression, distrust of authority, and issues around sexuality." It concludes that "Families should be allowed to pursue sensible homeschooling options, but current arrangements have allowed some families to replace education with fundamentalist indoctrination." In other words it is a run-of-the-mill article that uses the spectre of every Guardian reader's favourite villains to protect the class interest of teachers at US state schools. However, the picture the Guardian chose to illustrate the piece was out of the ordinary. Commenter JohnCan45 says, The accompanying photo of a shuttered home in Cleveland... reason? Perhaps the editor just mixed up a picture from this week's big story, but maybe they didn't. And that would be pretty cheap.Seriously, that is the picture chosen to illustrate this article about home schooling. Go look at it now - it may change later. It shows a picture of a white clapboard house with the windows boarded up. And in case you didn't get what that meant, the caption says, "A house in Cleveland, Ohio. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP". It does not appear to depict the white clapboard house in Cleveland, Ohio with the windows boarded up in which three women were imprisoned, raped and brutalised for a decade and in which a child was born as a result of one of these rapes and lived her life in captivity. Oh, but, wait! The little girl was "home schooled". In other words, she received whatever scraps of knowledge about the outside world that her mother and the other enslaved women could give her in the same prison "home" in which she lived her whole life. That's your connection, there. What estimate the Guardian makes of its readers can be judged by its evident belief that a smear by association of such crudity would work on them. The degree to which this estimate is correct can be judged by the readers' comments. UPDATE: Commenter WDO has pointed out that, as predicted, the picture of "A house in Cleveland" has gone down the memory hole to be replaced by a picture of "a 1950s family at home." Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Où sont les neiges d'antan?A year ago today, Polly Toynbee wrote this in the Guardian: Hollande and Europe are turning the tide. Where will it leave Cameron? Labour gains from the triumph of the French Socialist leader with his intellectually cogent rallying cry for a new direction for Europe. Look how he won with a promise to tax the super-rich at a heart-attack rate of 75%, yet the French stock market actually rose slightly. Can he now turn the great liner of the EU's disastrous economic policy? Looking at the comments to the above article "newest first", one AndyZama said, Yes Polly. Time will tell. Maybe in time you will again have to squirm with embarrassment like when you wrote articles like this. Which link, in turn, takes us to an article by Ms Toynbee from 2006 that said, Twice a year Gordon Brown fills his party's sails with pride. His tornado of facts and figures magics up images of untold national wealth and success. Sixty per cent more personal wealth! Most chancellors sound as if chunks of their speech are penned by officials, not quite convincing in their grasp of macro or micro details. But here is the man who studies everything, consuming documents with the speed of a shredder. Standing at the dispatch box, the towering superiority of his brain makes intellectual pygmies of his opponents. George Osborne's feeble joke about Granita and the green chancellor (green with envy) died on his lips: lacking authority, unlike Cameron, he also lacks the likeability to compensate. Like Old Mr Brown and Squirrel Nutkin, the big Scots brain seems not to register Osborne's presence until he bites off his tail. I do sympathise, a little. The internet holds many more failed prophecies and assessments that turned out to be spectacularly wrong than just these two. There are even some of mine in there. But Polly Toynbee is so gloriously reliable. If wrong guesses were sold like music, she'd have a row of gold discs on her wall. Friday, April 26, 2013
MPs & Guardian readers discover regulatory capture, demand more regulationSay it ain't so! Accountancy firms 'use knowledge of Treasury to help rich avoid tax' – MPs Margaret Hodge, the PAC's chair, said the actions of the accountancy firms were tantamount to a scam and represented a "ridiculous conflict of interest" which must be stopped. "The large accountancy firms are in a powerful position in the tax world and have an unhealthily cosy relationship with government," she said, calling for the Treasury to stop accepting their staff to draw up new tax laws.In other news, Margaret Hodge called for tighter regulation of the consumer credit industry, civil service procurement, welfare to work schemes, academies, and tax avoidance; and Guardian commenters demanded tighter regulation of the press. Remember citizens, Get real - get regulated. Thursday, April 25, 2013
Azathoth: crisis of trustCrisis for that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity as trust hits record low, the Guardian reports. Public confidence in the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep has fallen to historically low levels in the six biggest EU countries, raising fundamental questions about its democratic legitimacy more than three years into the primordial idiot god's worst ever crisis, new data shows.The blind idiot god encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws "could do much better if its institutions coordinated better", according to a press release issued today. Saturday, April 20, 2013
Thinking aloud on a mountainside Imagine you are mountain climbing or hill walking with a friend. Disaster strikes, and your friend is badly injured. Weather conditions are such that if you leave him overnight, he will certainly die. With great difficulty you are able to half carry, half drag him most of the way down the mountain. At last you see the road in the distance. Making your friend comfortable as best you can, you leave him, stagger to the road, and wait a long time for a car to pass this lonely spot. Eventually one does - you stop it by practically throwing yourself in front of it - and tell the driver that there is a seriously injured man some way up the hill who badly needs help. "I'm not getting blood all over the seats of my car," says the driver and speeds off. By the time another car comes it is too late. Something a little like this happened to a man called Charles Handley climbing in Scotland in the 1950s or 60s. In 1985 the BBC made a gripping dramatised reconstruction starring Gareth Thomas (Blake from Blake's 7) called Duel with An Teallach. In fact Handley's experience was even worse: despite his incredible efforts at rescue, An Teallach claimed two of his friends that day. I could watch the play again online and clarify my nearly thirty year-old memories of it, but I won't because it was one of the grimmest things I have ever seen. Have you guessed where this post is going? Tweak the story a little. Now Charles Handley has a gun. You have a gun. You can damn well make that driver help you get your friend to safety. And if that means he has to carry your friend on his back to the car so that you can keep the gun trained on him, too bad. Do you do it? Stealing his car, even without the intention "permanently to deprive" him of it, as the Theft Act puts it, is a violation of his property rights. Temporarily enslaving him to help you carry your friend down to the car is even worse. I think I would do it, even so. Afterwards I would admit the crime, pay compensation and submit to punishment. As anyone who has read Perry de Havilland's post from yesterday will have guessed by now, what I have tried to do above is make a similar thought experiment to the one used by Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute, the one pretty much everybody but me had no sympathy for. I tried to present a scenario that would appeal rather more to the Samizdata audience than Bowman's somewhat contrived one. I have tried to inveigle you into sympathising with the bad guy - the government - in Jaded Voluntaryist's excellent re-casting of Bowman's analogy: As an aside, this is not even close to describing welfarism. The people holding the gun aren’t disabled. And the baby isn’t drowning. And it isn’t a baby. And you’re not able bodied (at least not compared to the gun wielder). In fact, in his metaphor he has the relative power relationship completely backwards. The able bodied arsehole is waving the gun at a disabled man, ordering him to carry some random stranger on his back. A stranger who may be disabled, or may be stupid, or may be lazy, or may just be unlucky. The stranger’s complicity aside, none of that is the disabled victim’s fault. And yet carry him he must because he’s not the one with the gun. Will I be joining the vast majority of citizens in the countries of the developed world in supporting the welfare state, then? No. There is one crucial element of Bowman's analogy that I have kept in my scenario, but which, as Jaded Voluntaryist implied when he said the baby was not drowning, does not apply to welfarism. That element is that my story depicted desperate circumstances, which is another way of saying it was a one-off. Welfarism is a system of indefinitely repeated thefts and partial enslavements. They say that it is a continuous crisis, that as there are always babies drowning somewhere you must always be rescuing them, but the insincerity of this claim is demonstrated by the fact that "somewhere" only includes the territory of your nation, state or other tax-gathering unit. Babies outside that arbitrary circle - glug, glug, goodbye. And how can it be justified for you to be forced to spend, say, 55% of your time baby-rescuing but not 56%, or every waking hour? Overlapping this, welfarism is legitimized repeated thefts and partial enslavements. The man with the gun does not acknowledge or make reparation for his crime. It is he who decides what constitutes crime. Furthermore there are all the factors that Jaded Voluntaryist implied in his re-casting of Bowman's analogy. It is not just babies you have to keep rescuing, but adults, and once your presence is a predictable part of the system, those adults start acting like babies on the assumption that you will always be there. That is not likely to end well for you or them. I will refrain from re-stating further objections to the system of welfare. I am sure most of you have thought of them already, but all these thoughts did lead me to another topic upon which the opinions of Samizdata readers and writers are much harder to predict. Having to carry a stranger because otherwise the stranger will die is approximately the position of a pregnant woman expecting an unwanted child. A key part of the pro-abortion argument is opposition to forcing a woman to give up part of her body and her time to carry the child. Foetus. Whatever. For instance, this comment from yesterday's Guardian by commenter ZappBrannigan says, Don't let them win the battle of symbols. Don't use their terminology. They are not "pro-life". I propose "mandatory-gestation" instead.Or here is commenter Thaizinred from the same comment thread: No already born person has a right to directly use another person's body to stay alive. People aren't forced to donate their bodies, or body parts, even if someone else will die without them, even if the person who will die is their child.The latter's argument overstates the case. The pregant woman does not have to permanently give up her body or her body parts, but the general point is starkly made, and in a way that will resonate with many libertarians. I am anti-abortion with reservations and get-out clauses. So I mock the Guardian readers and other "liberals" (in the degraded modern sense) who one minute angrily make the arguments above; who denounce anyone who opposes welfare or jibs at high taxes as a callous, selfish sociopath; who would abort themselves with a rusty coathanger rather than admit that Ayn Rand ever said a good word - and who next minute channel Rand , becoming the purest of pure no-forced-assistance libertarians when the topic is abortion. Such people end up saying that you must give half your time to helping strangers in no particular danger but have no obligation to bear temporary inconvenience to save the life of a being you caused to exist. So much for them. What about you? To some, I would guess, it is very simple. You are not inconsistent. You are pure libertarians, perhaps indeed Objectivists and proud of it, and you make your stand on the property right of the woman to permanent, uninterrupted, unconstrained use of her own body. You might, perhaps, also think that the foetus is not human until birth but your argument does not rest on that, as Thaizinred's comment did not. To use another analogy, your view is that if the captain of a ship at sea sees survivors of a shipwreck clinging to wreckage, the captain can and, for some of you, ought to rescue them, but he does not have to and must not be compelled to. A minority of libertarians - including me - have views more like these guys: that the foetus becomes human before birth (I shall leave aside the question of exactly when, or if "when" can be exact) and his, her, or its parents (I am trying not to beg the question of whether the foetus is human by choice of pronouns) owe him, her or it protection whatever the inconvenience just as they owe protection to their one day old or one year old child. And suddenly I've run out of steam. This always happens when I talk about abortion and the related question of obligations to small children. There are so many sides to the question. What about rape? What about unintended conception? What about the difference between actively killing and merely withdrawing sustenance? Can I come up with a reason to forbid the Spartans to expose their babies on the mountainside that does not open the door to welfarism and all its ruinous consequences? What about this, that and t'other? Abortion is a sharp issue. Not many of us have carried out a life or death rescue, with or without force being used. Quite a lot of people have had abortions or been closely affected by them. I hope discussion won't be too acrimonious, but I think almost anything is better discussed than not. |