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I am currently being held hostage in the Hollywood Hills by Samizdata.net’s favourite pinko, Brian Linse. 
The Bad Dude holds forth from behind a politically incorrect cloud of smoke… The Bad Dude’s predilection for things Cuban has nothing to do with any admiration for the murderous tyranny running that hapless island, but rather for their very fine cigars. March 6th, 2005 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 In an article titled The Fall and Fall of Blogging Debate in Britain, fellow Samizdatista Jackie Danicki puts the boot in (though in a quite measured way) regarding ‘expert’ views on the nature of blogging and how it relates to journalism. She attended a high profile event at the London School of Economics called The Fall and Fall of Journalism and was clearly deeply unimpressed with what she heard. Read the whole thing. March 2nd, 2005 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Labour Party continues its retreat from being ‘New’ Labour by offering to force companies to give new mothers more maternity pay. Quite apart from the folly of making British business ever less competitive since they took office (making Blair a true ‘European’ it must be said), it is morally revolting the way the state interposes itself into contractual relationships and forces one group of people to give money to another in the hope of getting a net increase in votes for itself (not that the Tories are much better, it must be said). Speaking as a British businessman myself, it is exactly things like this that make me never even consider employing people directly in Britain. It is also one of the reasons why the company in which I am a partner outsources our web production overseas as it simply madness to employ people in this country if you are a small business. But of course Mr. Blair could not really care less about that as all he cares about is short term political advantage because by the time true costs of his policies are felt, he will be long out of office. February 28th, 2005 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many have condemned the ghastly Robert Mugabe for the outrageous policy of seizing land from white people in Zimbabwe. Yet even in Britain it is now possible for a group of people to use the political process to take the property of others against their will. In what it nothing less that state sanctioned robbery, people on the Scottish Western Isles will be voting to take the property of long standing owners with no more justification that than they want to benefit from it and the state says they can use the force of law to do so. This is nothing less that mob rule of the grossest sort motivated by straightforward greed, abetted by politicians who see their political power benefiting from presiding over legalised land invasions. A local woman is quoted as saying:
… by which she really means “take control of other people’s destiny” by taking away their property. But she is certainly correct that this is democracy in action, which is why I am so ambivalent about unconstrained democratic politics. Robbery is no more excusable just because the people who benefit from it do so using the force of the state rather than just running the legitimate owners out of town with pitchforks. Remember this the next time you hear some hypocritical Labour or LibDem politico wringing their hands about the behaviour of Robert Mugabe as he dispossesses farmers who have worked lands for several generations. Disgraceful. February 26th, 2005 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The threat to civil liberties in Britain posted by the Labour government, with laws that make the Patriot Act in the USA seem like a mere trifle, is finally regularly getting the sort of attention it deserves, at least in the Daily Telegraph. The notion that a politician would dare to try and take powers to deprive people of their liberty without recourse to courts and without even presenting evidence because they ‘know’ that they pose a threat is astonishing. It should also should answer all those people who shrug their shoulders and say “why get worked up about ID cards? We can trust the state.” House arrest without trial and without the ability to confront your accusers… and of British subjects on British soil. And the people who want to do this expect to just be trusted without at any point being required to present proof of a crime or threat to national security. If this is allowed to stand then truly, Britain stands on the brink of something truly dark. February 23rd, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is the question asked by Anthony Daniels over on the Social Affairs Units blog. His article conveys the sense of mounting unease that I certainly share. Read the whole thing. February 22nd, 2005 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I thought a few more images from the splendid Capitalist Ball last week in Brussels would not go amiss… 
And whilst in the Heart of Darkness, there were some anti-Bush protesters in town (well, I know most of the people who work for the EU fall into that category but that is not what I mean… and as a result security was somewhat tighter than usual. Someone I always imagined Berlaymont, the HQ of the European Commission, as being a place that has a great deal of barbed wire in its future.  The interesting things about the protesters for me were…  … firstly their very small number and secondly, their fascinating choice of protest placards which decried US military action against a mass murdering fascist regime in Iraq, a mass murdering fascist regime in Yugoslavia, in support of a democratic regime in Bosnia, against a right wing dictator in Panama … Very revealing, would you not agree? February 21st, 2005 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Leon Trotsky’s views on the role of arts were well known. He argued that art in all its forms existed to convey political messages to the masses and that any other use of the arts was bourgeois nonsense. The idea that it was acceptable for the arts exist to express the personal views of some artist or to simply ‘entertain’ in a non-political sense (not that anything is really non-political to a statist) was just preposterous to Trotsky. Thus if the state wished to advocate or depreciate something, it was the role of the arts to assist with that process. A modern day example of this would be, say, the relentless demonization of smoking. Which brings us to the views of the Orwellian sounding Centre for Tobacco Control. This group of lobbyists is infuriated that their calls for smoking to be censored by the British Board of Film Classification (who were once simply known as the Film Censors) has been rejected.
And so we discover that this lobby thinks is the ‘moral responsibility’ of the state to impose standards on entertainment to make them more in accordance with the wishes of our technocratic betters (them, of course). Not only do they wish to make it as difficult as possible for you to make your own non-coerced choices as to what stresses and chemicals you expose your body to, they wish to prevent you seeing images which do not conform to the message they wish to indoctrinate you with. I would be curious to know if Professor Hastings also supports forcing people to take favoured chemicals? February 11th, 2005 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
… is also sauce for the gander, so the old saying goes. The preposterous EU proposal to extend the ban the symbols of the German Worker’s National Socialist Party that is already law in France, Germany and elsewhere, has prompted a move to also ban communist and socialist symbols. So now let us also ban Imperial Roman symbols (they were a slave owning political system), Christian symbols (Inquisitions, religious wars and sundry other nastiness), Confederate Flags… oh hell, let’s just ban all symbols except the ‘peace symbol’ and the EU symbol. 
Via Rex Curry. February 7th, 2005 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
The cover of print version of The Economist is titled ‘Taking Britain’s Liberties’ and the issue discusses many of the very serious abridgements of our civil rights that have recently taken place.  But rather than link to any specific article, what interests me is that the truly grave situation is finally ‘front page news’ in a fairly mainstream publication. It is nothing less than amazing that it has taken this long for the seriousness of the situation to reach the collective editorial consciousness of any significant element of the media outside the blogosphere and other elements of the activist fringe. February 7th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil company, is reporting very healthy profits which the Daily Express sensationally reported as £300 per second and there has been a chorus decrying this as ‘obscene’ (sundry Labour MPs) and according to Martin O’Neill (chairman of the trade and industry select committee) ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’. So let me make sure I understand this… of the approximately 80p per litre (about $5.70 per US gallon) charged for gasoline at the pump in Britain, only about 16p is what the oil company charges: the rest is all tax. And the politicians, who are responsible for four fifths of what is paid by British motorists to fill up their fuel tanks, are stamping their feet and threatening additional ‘windfall’ taxes on the companies responsible for the remaining one fifth of what is paid. These politicians and their baying supporters are so wrapped up in a culture of value destroying appropriation and predation that they cannot see the true obscenity. To see that they need do nothing more than look in a mirror. The company should have a large sign on the forecourt of every single petrol station they own in Britain with the following message:
The problem is not Big Oil, the problem is Big Government. February 4th, 2005 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
…an angry digital lynch mob. Many fellow bloggers have been attacked by waves of trackback spam by some thieving vermin peddling online ‘texas holdem’ to idiots stupid enough to click those links and part with their money. We have been hit by over 450 trackbacks (which we de-spam swiftly via MT Blacklist every time they change their payload URLs). What is to be done about this? If left unchecked this will simply destroy the trackback system and the beneficial network effect it brings. Presumably the spammers are being directed by companies to drive traffic to target sites, so if a digital lynch mob was to attack those target sites (who are presumably owned by the ones at the end of the chain who pay the spamhaus to do the dirty work), it might impose some cost on their actions, which at the moment involve stealing bandwidth and defacing private property with impunity. As the people involved in this are criminals, it seems to me that the best way to discourage them would be to hurt their ability to make their money. Any ideas? February 3rd, 2005 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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