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If you live in Britain and you do not think crime, casual violence and the background of anti-social behaviour is mounting problems based on the evidence of your own eyes, then stop reading now and keep taking the NHS prescribed Prozac. For all the rest of you, take a look at this report by Civitas. Of course the government and police claim the truth lies elesewhere. No prize for guessing who I am inclined to believe. January 3rd, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If we can have an ‘absurdity of lawmakers’, I suppose we can have a ‘stupidity of doctors’. In the face of attempts to deregulate drinking in Britain, a nation which is unusually restrictive when it comes alcohol compared to most western nations, we have Prof Ian Gilmore, a spokesman for the Royal College of Physicians (an extreme statist professional organisation and political lobby) saying:
However he does not explain why digging the same hole deeper will make things better, given that Britain is already far more regulated than France and also has more serious alcohol related problems. Like most regulatory authoritarians, Gilmore and the RCP simply do not have either the imagination to think that perhaps the over-regulation caused the problem, nor do they have the socialisation to have the notion occur to them that imposing their views on others is immoral. If people get drunk and commit crimes, punish the criminals, not those who drink and do not commit crimes. And in any case, the true criminals are those who added times limits to drinking hours which more or less institutionalised binge drinking. 
The political class at work January 3rd, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
… no, not really, but that is scarcely less daft than the statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the calamitous tsunami made him doubt the existence of God. As a ‘shoulder shrugging agnostic’ well on his way to just calling myself an atheist, I have serious doubt about the existence of God myself but surely re-evaluating a belief in God every time someone, or 130,000 someones, die does rather suggest a lack of having thought things through in the first place. Unless we are nothing more that meat puppets dancing to a pre-ordained celestial script (which is certainly not Anglican doctrine), the fact we make use of our free will and thereby make decisions that result in us dying in a certain manner (such as, for example, deciding that we will live in a coastal community in southern Asia) neither proves nor disproves anything about the existence of God. Now I have no doubt that the Archbishop is well aware of those arguments and is just indulging in the usual Anglican tradition of fogging issues whilst sounding concerned and looking earnest as an alternative to clearly articulating easy to understand (and thereby easy to attack) positions based on long established doctrines. But then the current Archbishop is a strange bird and the things in which he has ‘faith’ suggests to me that placing too much stock in his judgement is faith misplaced. He says that he, like Tony Blair, has faith in the UN but thinks it should be reformed and improved by giving religious groups (naturally!) and nations not on the security council more power (such paragons of civil rights as Myanmar, Libya, Syria, Zaire and Iran perhaps?)…yes, he wants to have some official say over how the UN’s tax funded patronage gets doled out. And presumably in the spirit of ecumenicist tolerance would also extend that to other religious leaders as well. It is a marvel how the UN gets held up as even a potential source of moral authority by people like Rowan Williams who are supposedly in the ‘moral authority business’, when by design the UN is a club of national leaders that admits mass murderers, fascists, communists, rabid nationalists and kleptocrats of every strip into its rank. January 2nd, 2005 | 73 comments - (Comments are closed)
Happy New Year from the Editors and Contributing Samizdatistas in the British Isles, America, Australia and Europe! January 1st, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
When people criticise ‘America’ for not giving more money to help with the horrendous calamity that has overwhelmed a large part of southern coastal Asia, they really need to keep in mind that, as mentioned on James Bartholomew’s site, private aid does not get counted and that far outwieghs US government aid. Moreover, money received from a nation-state cannot be charity as the money is not freely given, whereas willingly donated private funds are true charity. December 31st, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ok, so I have been told some fruitcake stated the tsunamis were ‘Gaia’s revenge’1 (which would explain why it was only SUV driving capitalists who were drowned)… but how long before some nut job decides that the tsunami was actually caused by the Americans setting off nukes on the seabed? You just know it is going to happen! 1 = anyone have a link to this or other similar moonbatness? December 31st, 2004 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
…as many of the Samizatistas are locked in deadly contests with several bottles of excellent Port at a party at Samizdata HQ tonight Update: (from MJ) 
David Carr was particularly cutting at the party in question. (Of course, he could get ten years for this).. December 30th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an interesting article about the decline of religious belief in Britian that got me thinking. I am also one of those ‘shoulder shrugging agnostics’ yet it is not that I do not have ‘beliefs’, just not religious ones. I often wonder though if the decline of religious belief across great swathes of western society is a product of the growth of rationalism… or is it a decline in the ability to think about abstractions by millions of folks who think ‘Reality TV’ has something to do with reality? December 27th, 2004 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tory MP Patrick Mercer has tabled legislation to ‘rebalance’ the right to defend life, limb and property in favour of the victims of crime. And how exactly will that make a lone 60 year old woman safer if someone breaks into her house? Please remember that it was a Tory government which decided she will have no right whatsoever to have effective means to defend herself by restricting firearms. The Mercer Bill is welcome but all it does is make Britain a little bit safer for houses containing one or more adult males from their late teens to their late sixties who are actually capable of picking up a blunt instrument and taking on an intruder with a reasonable chance of success. The unpalatable truth is that most people are not able to effectively defend themselves against your typical house intruder (one or more young men between 16 and 35) unless they have an effective weapon. And that means a gun. “God made man but Colonel Colt made them equal” December 26th, 2004 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 25th, 2004 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. 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)
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