Self defence, wrote William Blackstone, the 18th-century jurist, is a “natural right that no government can deprive people of, since no government can protect the individual in his moment of need”. This Government insists upon having a monopoly on the use of force, but can only impose it upon law-abiding people. By practically eliminating self defence, it has removed the greatest deterrent to crime: a people able to defend themselves.
– Joyce Lee Malcolm
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December 23rd, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Home Office minister for race equality, Fiona Mactaggart refuses to condemn the fact Sikhs have used intimidation and violence to force the closure of a play they find offensive because…
So British culture is better off because rioters have forced the closure of a play they disagreed with? Britain is clearly governed by people who are either immoral or demented or both. But I am curious… would the ‘minister for race equality’ have thought it an equally healthy sign that British theatre is alive and well if a mob of angry white Scotsmen has stormed the theatre, smashed windows and forced the plays to close because they found something in the works of a Sikh playwright offensive? Well given that Fiona Mactaggart is the ‘minister for race equality’, I guess she would take the view that all races are equally permitted to use violence to prevent freedom of expression, right? Right? I mean, the races would hardly be equal if only when Sikhs riot is was “a sign of a lively flourishing cultural life”. December 22nd, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Although I knew this day was coming, it is profoundly depressing nevertheless. It is now the law that ID cards will be imposed by force in Britain, with the support of the Leaders of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. They have won and as far as I am concerned, the guttering flame of the culture of liberty in Britain just blew out. I do not expect a truly repressive state to be implemented for many years yet (hopefully), but the infrastructure of tyranny is now well and truly in place, all of which came to pass with a soundtrack of a faint bleating sound of an indifferent public in the background. You might as well flip a coin to figure out which party will usher it in but a authoritarian panoptic state is coming. If this is what the majority of British people want, then may they get exactly what they deserve, but I am out of here. For those of you who will be happy to see me go, trust me, the feeling is mutual. I realise most people will just shrug their ovine shoulders and find my worries inexplicable, crazy even, as it is not like Blair and Howard are setting up Gulags, right? No, of course not. Who needs those when there is a camera on every corner and your every purchase and phone call will eventually be logged on a central government database? As far as I concerned, the war is over and my side lost. I have to try and speed up my business ventures and get out as soon as I can afford to do so. I shall try to be out of Britain and have my primary residence in the USA by 2007 at the latest to avoid being forced to submit to this intolerable imposition… and I shall be taking my wealth generating assets with me. I cannot say I am looking forward to winters in New Hampshire but I do not really see that I have much choice anymore. I do not see the United States as a paragon of civil liberties (to put it mildly), but at least it is a place in which the battle can be fought within the last bastion of the Anglosphere’s culture of liberty. Damn it. 
December 21st, 2004 | 113 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Sikhs who used violence to prevent free speech in Birmingham yesterday and truly the children of the Politically Correct generation. They see that force, be it of law or of the flying milk bottle, is the accepted way to respond if your feelings are hurt and thus have forced a play that they find offensive to close. Tolerance for dissenting views would appear to be a thing of the past and obviously the state is not the solution. If it was, it would have responded to this affront by the rioters against the basic right to express yourself by meeting force with force. The correct ‘dialogue’ with the rioters would be to crack a number turbaned heads open in the same manner those people are expressing themselves.
And so Mohan Singh demonstrates he opposes a pluralist civil society. Presumably when some people decide they find something he values ‘offensive’ and elect to start throwing bricks to prevent it from happening (for example, say some militant atheists, or more probably militant Muslims, find his religious services offensive to their sensibilities), or perhaps it is decide, as in France, that turbans will not be permitted in school under force of law, Mr. Singh will just shrug his shoulders and accept that being forced not to do things other people dislike is just the way of things. And if he does not accept that, why should he expect anyone else to care about what he wants? December 20th, 2004 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, I am glad a few people in the Conservative party have the backbone to stand against Michael Howard and refuse to back the imposition of mandatory ID cards. Yet the truth is than they are outnumbered both by those in the party’s authoritarian faction and in the others who say they opposed ID cards, such as possible future leader David Davies, but place their political careers above both their principles and what they presumably think would be best for the nation. Still, I suppose we should thank Michael Howard for making it clear to all but the most blinkered that they offer no alternative to Labour in any substantive way over an issue that offers much downside and no clearly explained upside. If you ever want to see an effective opposition in this country, vote for the one party who can deliver that by destroying the Conservative party once and for all by making it permanently unelectable, thereby showing the true cost of Conservative ‘moderation’ on the EU and civil liberties. Only once the last bitter hope that the Tories might ever form a new government has been removed by 10 to 15% of their vote defecting for the foreseeable future can something better emerge from their ashes. Vote UKIP. December 20th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hard to believe! That Tory leader Michael Howard, the second most repressive Home Secretary in living memory, should support mandatory ID cards is hardly a revelation, but that up to 40 Tory MP’s, including some on the front bench, might vote against or abstain regardless of the demands of the whips, well that is quite a pleasant surprise.
I know exactly where it is heading…  December 19th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Democracy is a remarkable thing. It gives an illusion of a state being governed ‘by the people and for the people’ whilst at the same time entrenching a ‘public service’ class (with ‘service’ being very much used in the farming sense of the word) that operates almost entirely for its own benefit. That this can go on in nation after nation in much the same manner is a testament to the dementing and infantilising effect that democratic politics has on a large proportion of the population of the planet. And so when we get an article in The Times called Purge of e-mails will deny the right to know (people outside the UK may not be able to access this link due to the idiotic policy of the Times), which alerts us that it just so happens that 11 days before freedom of information laws come into force, millions of e-mails will be deleted from government servers, it should be clear to all but the most wilfully blind that the state will always place its institutional interests before those who are comically led to believe ‘own’ the state: that mythical thing called ‘the people’.
And that is why it cannot be pointed out too often that the state is not your friend. December 18th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is very instructional to see what happens when Islamic institutions are confronted directly with the barbaric realities of their faith. The Prince of Wales has been in discussions with leaders of the British Muslim community about the fact Islamic law demands death for any guilty of apostasy (i.e. when a person who was a Muslim converts to another faith). This is not an idle intellectual issue of interest only to the theologically inclined as in many Muslim countries around the world people are indeed executed every year for turning their back on Islam. One expects enthusiastic support for violently imposed Islam from groups like Al-Muhajiroun (which has allegedly ‘closed down’, though ‘re-branded’ would probably be more a accurate description) but what of so-called moderate Muslim leaders? Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these ‘moderates’ insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these ‘moderates’ prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little ‘problem’ or would they be proscribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight? Islam is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread ‘moderate’ support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Islam’s savage excesses, then ‘Islamophobia’ (literally ‘a fear of Islam’) is the only rational response to their religion by any who are not Muslims (or who wish to stop being a Muslim). Taking a military approach to dealing with the political manifestations of their faith will increasingly be the response they get from the rest of the world given that there is clearly no serious mainstream internal desire to see Islam change in ways to make it compatible with a broader pluralistic secular society. They have no one to blame for that but themselves, though of course they will continue to blame everyone but themselves. December 18th, 2004 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective. And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons. Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish ‘accessible credibility’ and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about. For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as ‘Brown Sugar’. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau. There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog. December 17th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Evening Standard published a letter to the editor by me today in the print version of the newspaper (in slightly edited form). Here is the full text:
December 17th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The leader of the neo-fascist British National Party has been arrested by West Yorkshire Police on ‘suspicion of incitement to commit racial hatred’. Now let us ponder that for a moment. Incitement to commit racial hatred. He has been arrested for trying to get someone else to hate non-white people. Now if he had incited someone to hate Manchester United supporters, the Old Bill in West Yorkshire would not have hauled him off for questioning, so clearly we are still permitted to suggest to others that they should hate some folks without being dragged into court, just not folks of a given race. But please note he was not arrested for ‘incitement to violence’ against some racial group, he was arrested for inciting hate. He was arrested for trying to get people to think and feel, not act, a certain way. He was arrested for leading people into thought crimes. So they have outlawed certain emotions (i.e. hatred) and have moved to enforce that law against the racial collectivist Nick Griffin, because the hatred he incites is directed towards a certain classification of people. Well I also happen to loathe, yes loathe, certain other classifications of people: communists, fascists, theocrats, some paleo-conservatives, members of Al-Qaeda and many flavours of socialists. I do not necessarily think all such people need to have violence done against them (well, members of Al-Qaeda excepted…) nor should they be arrested for thinking the things they do, but I do indeed think such people should be regarded with a fair degree of detestation. Moreover I have no hesitation inciting others to feel the same way towards such because those who would take away our liberties should indeed incur the hatred of those whose rights they would abridge. I wonder how long I have left before I have to live somewhere else other than Britain if I wish to continue to have freedom of speech and stay out of jail. December 14th, 2004 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
It does exactly what it says in the tin. You either have it or you do not… and judging by many of the letters to the Telegraph, many on Britain would rather you not have it. In response to an interesting article by Charles Moore, we see…
For a start, ‘Muslims’ are not a race, they are a religion. But that aside, if I wish to poke fun at the muslim religion, or any equally daft belief in invisible imaginary friends, I will damn well do so. At least the good Doctor is not calling for Moore to be prevented by law from saying what he wishes and that is an important thing to note. The fact Dr. Shihabi is free to respond in the Telegraph is proof enough that the deck is not stacked against him. However…
What we have here is a touching naivety about the nature of states and laws in general. The law may be aimed at the “kill the infidel” brigade (I have my doubts) but that means other remarks which disparage and insult the muslim faith will be illegal and to just assume ‘people like us’ (as opposed to ‘them’) will not have the law enforced against them is preposterous. Making insulting remarks about any religion is like shooting fish in a barrel but the right to say what you will is vastly more important than some imaginary right to not to be offended. Without freedom of speech the whole damaged edifice of liberty really is in the gravest peril and if not enough British people realise that then we are in serious, serious trouble. December 13th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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