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Greetings from Samizdata HQ and best wishes to friends of liberty everywhere.  Tonight we feast on a roasted beast upon which Adriana has worked her sorcery, celebrating all the wonders that our modern technological society has wrought. Wishing a year of champagne for our real friends, and real pain for our sham friends. Have a splendid Christmas, be it Godly or godless, as is your wont. 
Perry de Havilland, Alec Muffet, Adriana Lukas, Michael Jennings & Brian Micklethwait behind the camera December 24th, 2009 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Mr Rudd made it clear that the deal had been an exercise in saving the international climate change process. “As of 24 hours ago, these negotiations stood on the point of total collapse … at midnight last night, we were staring into the abyss,” he said. He said the “big step forward” in the talks came with rich and poor countries agreeing to the goal of containing global warming to 2ºC. Hmmm… Staring into the abyss… and then a big step forward. Not often you hear a politician speaking the truth! (via Francis T, quoting The Australian) December 21st, 2009 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 20th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet another intellectual gem from a senior member of the Church of England:
Could not the same have been said about the formidable soldiers of the Waffen SS? But how is ‘conviction’ and ‘loyalty’ in the service of evil somehow admirable? And how is noting this quality in an enemy going to “help the situation”? And what if the nature of the enemy simply precludes any possibility of a “peaceful solution”? This is the Taliban we are talking about. Well in a way he is right I suppose… we should note that they are loyal to their faith and to each other, and understanding this, it should be understood that no accommodation can possibly be reached with fundamentalists, be they Nazi ones or Islamofascist ones. They need to be confronted, culturally, politically and when needed, militarily when they wander “off the reservation”… precisely because of their “conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other”. Getting that set in people’s minds would indeed “help the situation”. December 14th, 2009 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 13th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian displays the jarring sensibilities that comes inevitability from holding the sort of fuzzy authoritarian statist views that prevail these days. On the subject of the Swiss ban on new minaret construction…
Actually it is about ‘urban planning’, just not for the sort of reasons the writer approves of. But what makes me laugh is that Ash has no problem whatsoever using the force of the state to make people build in ways he approves of. It is clearly axiomatic to him that the state gets to have planning regulations over what you can build on your own private property, even over mere aesthetic issues (i.e. he likes the fact the political trumps the social completely when it comes to your property). He just wants what people like him thinks is ‘desirable’ to be allowed. Yet somehow when that political process he accepts as axiomatic produces something he does not think is ‘desirable’ to his Guardianista sensibilities, I doubt it occur to him that maybe it is his acceptance of people exerting force backed political power over others in pretty much every aspect of life where the problem lies. Muslims in Switzerland wishing to build minarets on buildings dedicated to praising the words of their mass murdering Dark Ages warlord only have the problem they now face because people like Timothy Garton Ash think it is perfectly alright that the state to be allowed to ‘plan’ what people can do on their own property. December 10th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I realise that for any US politician to seriously court the US conservative vote, they have to ‘do the God thing’, but I cannot help wincing when I hear people like Sarah Palin, who I think has much to commend her, say things like “the United States should rededicate itself to seeking God’s will“… whatever the hell that means. I think what really offends me most about this sort of proclamation is the notion of the need for ‘unity’ rather than just a simple commonality of interests: if I am going to support someone politically, I am damned if I will to seek in that politician an additive “whole world view”. If Sarah Palin wants to trim the intrusive regulatory state, as she seem to want to do, well that is splendid, but I would rather not hear about how she thinks others need to include some anthropomorphic psychological guy-in-the-sky construct in their decision making processes. Perhaps it is my English sensibilities but I am deeply suspicious of anyone who cannot keep their religious sentiments to themselves. I am willing to tolerate the religious views of others but, like most vices, religion is something best practised behind closed doors with other consenting adults as can be very unedifying when indulged in public. December 5th, 2009 | 105 comments - (Comments are closed)
Are nation states more trustworthy now than in previous times? I am of course asking a rhetorical question. No, they are not more, or less, trustworthy. People, in particular the sort of people who seek political power or to in some way wield the authority of the state, are essentially the same sort of people who have always sought such things. And so, when the Scottish state tells us that the venerable prohibitions against double jeopardy, being put on trial more than once for the same crime, must be abolished due to improvements in methods of forensic science, they are actually saying “we, the state, can be trusted with the power to just shuffle the deck and try again if we do not like the outcome of a criminal trial because of course our motives could never be anything less than a relentless search for truth and justice, right?”… That is in actually what they are saying, because DNA cannot possibly be planted or falsified and our priestly class, sorry, I mean scientific experts are always simply concerned with the dispassionate facts (like say, the good folks at the CRU). What could possibly go wrong with being able to keep retrying people until the “right” result is gained, eh? December 2nd, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
So Baron Pearson of Rannoch has become the new leader of UKIP. I can only hope that he has a better grasp of real economics than Nigel Farage, who although he was very sound on a great many issues, was clueless in that respect in that he basically was offering more of the same deranged Keynesian bollocks being proffered by both the main parties. Well we shall see I suppose. I once heard a very good pro free-trade diatribe by Pearson some years back which is an encouraging sign and his support of Geert Wilders on the Fitna issue was glorious and suggests he may well be dependable on civil liberties. November 27th, 2009 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is beer… and then there is Tactical Nuclear Penguin (what an exquisite name for a beer). I must confess I have a soft spot for any company that can also make a low alcohol beer called Nanny State… and as ‘Goat in the Machine‘ pointed out (what an exquisite name for a blog), any outfit that can outrage an arch-statist lobby like ‘Alcohol Focus Scotland‘ is certainly going to get my business once I am no longer sick as a parrot (being ill for coming on a week has allowed my blood/alcoholic levels to fall to zero… the horror, the horror). November 27th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is no secret I am no great admirer of some aspects of the US legal system and the corrupting influence of the US trial lawyers lobby, but then along comes a particularly stark example of why the US really really really needs a UK style ‘loser pays’ system to discourage preposterous actions like this…
This is a clear indication of a legal system is in dire need of radical reform. I do not know if Stanley Hilton is in fact deranged, but any legal system which allows him to do what he is doing certainly is. November 19th, 2009 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet another example of the vileness of the culture which pervades the management of the public sector…
But this is also an example of the fact civil society still has at least some life left in it, because the paramedics on the scene said “screw it” and just called the people they needed directly themselves… and of course those lads came immediately, teacup in hand no doubt, regardless of the rules and regulations that the South Western Ambulance Service Trust and the union think are so damn important. [via Reason] November 19th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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