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It is no secret that I am opposed to conscription of any sort, be it military, judicial or educational. I am all for having armies, juries and schools, but not ones which depend on forcing the unwilling to become chattels of the state. Not only do I think it is morally indefensible, it produces strange results when people are compelled to do things they never agreed to do. Most people can be convinced that getting an education is a good thing, but to force who cannot see that to attend a school just means that they will disrupt the education of those who are willing to be there. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. Moreover, state schools seem to bring out the most control obsessed aspects of people who run such places.
So children are going to be dragooned into coming to this place under threat of law but “Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored”. Might I suggest arrogance and stupidity in equal measure. Might I suggest that they will indeed be bored and the way they will let of steam will be to trash this nice new school and run wild in classes… I sure as hell would. May 8th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
 France has elected Sarkozy and I must say I am curious to see what happens next. In the short term, will the anticipated riots in the banlieue happen? In the long term, will Sarko be France’s Thatcher and solve the serious structural problems created by decades of intrusive statism? Or will he be a disastrous Ted Heath, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with no real understanding why things are so bad? Does he even have the perspectives needed to change the right things and move France in as more market/liberty oriented direction? And even if he does, will the System simply defeat any attempt to change it? I am dubious to say the least about the willingness of French society to break its addiction to other people’s money but we will see. What do you think? May 7th, 2007 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
To have a free and prosperous country, it is important to have strong institutions underpinning things like contract and property rights. Yet all too often we forget the roll of social attitudes and world-view in creating wealth and its handmaiden, liberty. There are two interesting articles in The Telegraph today (on the same page in the print version in fact) that shows that places like Russia and China may be vastly wealthier and freer than they were under the darkest days of Communism, but both those places have yet to develop either a culture that expects liberty, understands the implications of state money (they are hardly alone in that) or accepts the usefulness of profound outside influences. The Chinese government is trying to lure foreign educated Chinese back to China, which suggests at least the people at the top are aware that there is value in the way the rest of the world does things..
Which is interesting as that means most people still cannot live and work where they like, requiring internal passports and state residence permits. How can a place with such restrictions on a person’s ability to sell their own labour ever hope to become affluent and truly dynamic? Can they not see the link between the ability of individuals to make fundamental choices and the effectiveness of markets?
Which makes me wonder, do most Chinese people not realise how much more affluent the First World is than they are? I am guessing they do but this is trumped by the cultural imperative for Chinese-ness… the sort of mindless nationalism that is thankfully largely dead in much of the Western world. This suggests to me that regardless of how China’s leaders tinker around, if Chinese culture is that obsessed with China-is-always-best attitudes, there are serious limits to their ability to grow into a prosperous and civil society. Also in Russia, most of the institutions associated with advanced nations (courts, property rights, contract law etc.) are not known for their robustness or independence from politics. But also I wonder how much the culture in Russia allows people to imagine things any differently?
Which is interesting. But then…
I am sure Professor Kozlov is a very smart man, yet I wonder if it even crossed his mind that perhaps his Academy should respond to Putin’s power grab by refusing to take any more state money. If they are a centre of excellence as claimed, surely there must be companies and institutions around the world which would love to fund them and allow them to be truly independent of the state. Yet the notion that everything must happen top-down with the blessing of the state is probably so deeply ingrained that the reality of what is involved with making yourself independent does not track at all. May 6th, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a very interesting article in The Weekly Standard by Stephen Schwartz called The Balkan Front, describing the struggle between Saudi backed Wahhabi Islam and the very moderate Bektashis and Rumi Sufi traditions in various parts of the Balkans. These are forms of Islam antithetical to the Wahhabis, and they are in the majority in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina (I have gotten drunk with enough Bosnians to know). Supporting them politically, financially and militarily, plus encouraging them to evangelise in areas infested by the Wahhabi pestilence, is surely a strategic move that should be supported by anyone who sees the spread of intolerant radical Islam as one of the major threats to civilisation in the world today. This is a subject on which the Serbian, Bosnian and Albanian governments, not to mention peoples, should be making common cause. It is in the interests of everyone who wants stability in the Balkans to oppose the presence of corrosive Wahhabi Islam and the Islamo-fascist politics that come with it. Tolerating Saudi money flooding into the region is like someone prone to cancer smoking cigarettes but given the areas fratricidal recent past, perhaps the malign Saudis can do a service by providing the Balkans’ fractious factions with something long needed: a legitimate and loathsome common enemy. May 5th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is understandable that many Russians view World War II era war memorials as being about resistance to the Nazis. Yet it is equally understandable the monuments to the Red Army have altogether different connotations in the countries conquered by the Soviet Union. The fact that Estonia has removed a statue of a Red Army soldier from downtown Tallinn, leading to violence and intimidation by ethnic Russians in Estonia and the Estonian embassy in Moscow being placed under a state of virtual siege, it does suggest a lot of Russians have not reconciled themselves to the fact the Soviet Imperium is a thing of the past. How can any of Russia’s neighbours ever trust Russia and allow mutually beneficial trade relations to develop if the Russian state feels it has any legitimate role in telling the former victims of Moscow’s rule what sort of symbols are appropriate for displace in a city centre? It is not hard to see why trade between the Baltic Nations and Russia has so quickly diminished in importance and been replaced by rapidly expanding commercial ties with the European Union. May 3rd, 2007 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ok, so the defeat in North America in 1782 did not result in catastrophe (unless you happened to be an American Tory of course) and that somehow tells us something about Iraq circa 2007 according to the former General. But Vietnam? Thirty years of communist totalitarianism are not a catastrophe? Presumably the Boat People were just Vietnamese tourists looking for Disneyland and everything was really just peachy after the fall of Saigon in 1975. What would constitute a catastrophe, I wonder?. A couple Croatian chums of mine had the dubious pleasure of meeting Michael Rose in Bosnia (which is a story I would love to tell but do not feel I can) and they told me some rather uncomplimentary things about him and they certainly felt they got the better of him ‘professionally’. If that is his ‘take’ on Vietnam, he does not sound like someone whose judgement I would much care to rely on, that is for sure. May 3rd, 2007 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wish I understood Turkish politics better than I do. There was a large pro-secularism rally in Ankara, which is surely a good thing. The fact these people are backed by the army is an even more encouraging sign.
EU politics however, I understand just fine. The usual halfwits have moaned that the Turkish army is interfering with democracy because they made it clear they will not tolerate Turkey becoming an Islamic state. Yet strangely all manner of constitutional limitations on the democratic will of the majority exist in many countries (the USA and Switzerland, for example) and yet that does not seem to attract the displeasure of the fools who live off our tax money in Brussels. In Turkey, the army is probably the best bulwark against Islamism and the fact the same €uro-spokesmen allegedly responsible for working towards integrating Turkey with the EU want to weaken the role of the main opponent of Islamist political aspirations in the country is… astonishing. April 29th, 2007 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sean Gabb has written a fine piece called Defending the right to deny the Holocaust, stating why censorship undermines our ability to decide what is and is not true.
Read the whole thing. April 29th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Groups like ‘Alcohol Concern’ like to use the force of the state to make people act the way they want. They do not care about making an argument and convincing people to act a certain way, they want prison and truncheons to make people tow their particular highly debatable line.
You know what I would like to see? Whenever someone threatens me with force if I do not modify my social behaviour more to their liking in my own damn home, I would like them get arrested and thrown in jail. And I would like to see them beaten with truncheons if they do not comply with the cops just like they want for others who do not comply with their wishes. Such people are addicted to using force to impose their will on others and so why not “send a stronger message” that threatening people via the political system is really no different to threatening them with violence via some other institution, like the Mafia, for example. If ‘Alcohol Concern’ want to convince people that they should not allow their children to drink (which is bullshit, I might add, as I suspect that encourages alcohol abuse in later life), well fine, let them take out adverts and evangelise their views like civilised members of civil society. However when they want the violence of law to impose their views, they should be regarded as anti-social thugs calling for the destruction of yet more civil society. Such people want to see society replaced with ever more politically derived formulae for personal behaviour. And of course such nonsense is unenforceable other than by family members denouncing each other a la the Communist model, which no doubt is what a group like ‘Alcohol Concern’ would like to see happen … which is literally anti-social. It is not enough to reject the message of groups like ‘Alcohol Concern’, people who want to impose their views on every household in the country need to be held responsible on a personal level for advocating the force backed destruction of civil society. Such people are part of the problem of modern Britain, not part of the solution. April 29th, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just heard David Cameron on the news tonight saying that under Gordon Brown, Britain will just be getting “more of the same” of what it got from Blair. In other words, Gordon Brown is a Blairite. Just like David Cameron then I suppose. If you are going to vote, and you want a conservative alternative to Blair’s populist creeping regulatory authoritarianism, vote UKIP. Otherwise just expect “more of the same” from both Brown and Cameron. April 29th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was looking at the Telegraph and saw a very odd story titled Cameroon threatens to jail urine drinkers… my immediate reaction was “ok, now that is moderately revolting, but why the hell does David Cameron feel the need to pronounce on what is hopefully a fairly uncommon activity in the UK? Is there nothing this busybody does not want to regulate?” And then I read it more closely… April 25th, 2007 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
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