What seems to be developing into an open revolt in Iraq by Shi’a Islamists could be a Godsend to the coalition and secular elements of Iraqi society in the long run… in openly taking up arms against the coalition and its Iraqi supporters, radical leader Muqtadar al-Sadr has changed the equation: what could have been a long term intractable political problem has been turned onto a military problem with a fairly obvious and direct solution.
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Blair is a liar. But of course the notion any politician does not utter more than the occasional porkie pie is a very uncontroversial one. But as I said in the wellspring of lies yesterday, one can but marvel at the bare faced effrontery of it when our political masters stand up and state something is true when any person not wilfully blind (or David Blunkett) can see it is patently untrue just by reading a few newspapers or one of several thousand blogs and websites.
Risks antagonising? Civil rights campaigners no longer object to the idea? Excuse the French, but, what the fuck? Blair is a bare faced liar. The only other alternative to that is that he is so ignorant of goings on outside the cloistered world of 10 Downing Street as to be completely deluded. I will try my damnedest to refuse to get an ID card and I will openly declare that I do not have one when the sun rises on that evil day. I urge as many people as possible to not just resist but to do so openly when the time comes. They will try to make it very difficult to live without one so we must make the system unworkable by using whatever civil disobedience and intelligent resistance is needed. Do not cooperate with your own repression. Time to get creative, people. Time to get angry.  Cross-posted from Samizdata.net April 2nd, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Blair is a liar. But of course the notion any politician does not utter more than the occasional porkie pie is a very uncontroversial one. But as I said in the wellspring of lies yesterday, one can but marvel at the bare faced effrontery of it when our political masters stand up and state something is true when any person not wilfully blind (or David Blunkett) can see it is patently untrue just by reading a few newspapers or one of several thousand blogs and websites.
Risks antagonising? Civil rights campaigners no longer object to the idea? Excuse the French, but, what the fuck? Blair is a bare faced liar. The only other alternative to that is that he is so ignorant of goings on outside the cloistered world of 10 Downing Street as to be completely deluded. I will try my damnedest to refuse to get an ID card and I will openly declare that I do not have one when the sun rises on that evil day. I urge as many people as possible to not just resist but to do so openly when the time comes. They will try to make it very difficult to live without one so we must make the system unworkable by using whatever civil disobedience and intelligent resistance is needed. Do not cooperate with your own repression. Time to get creative, people. Time to get angry. Cross-posted to: April 2nd, 2004 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nothing any political body says can be taken at face value. On that point I doubt many would demur. In days gone by when the state had a large measure of control over information flows, this was only to be expected and was easier to do. In modern times, this is a bit harder to pull off and requires ‘spin’ and other psycho-media exercises in obfuscation to muddy waters, confuse issues, bamboozle and generally misdirect people from politically inconvenient facts. Nevertheless, in this information rich interconnected world in which we now live, one can but marvel that some political creatures seem to act as if they operate in a universe in which the official pronouncements carry the same weight they did in, say, the 1920’s. A remarkable and even bizarre example of this is the summary which has been attached to the factual European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia‘s report on anti-semitism in Europe. This EU publication comes out against the screamingly obvious backdrop of Islamic youths running rampant in some communities in many countries. And the summary of this report states what exactly?
Huh? I mean, did they expect that no one would actually read the actual main text? The report clearly says that by far the major source of ‘anti-semitic’ (meaning anti-Jewish) violence is other semites… Muslim ones. → Continue reading: The wellspring of lies April 1st, 2004 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state’s often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators. You think not? Well that is what Georgia’s political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than ‘citizens’) even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA’s interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia). Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends. (via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis) March 31st, 2004 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently a commenter here on Samizdata.net used a term that I think sums up modern regulatory statism in the Western World rather well.
Whilst Google shows that the term is not exactly new, it does seem both little used and particularly apt. The banning of smoking on private commercial property seems a classic example of this in action. Let’s start calling a spade a spade and stop letting the statists of all stripes hide behind euphemisms. Spread the word. March 29th, 2004 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
A new nationwide police agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has been created in Britain.
And thus people will simply stop asking for legal opinions just in case their shyster runs off to the police in order to cover their rear ends and thereby ensuring a steadily increasing climate of fear, distrust and uncertainty. The Blair-Blunkett government are nothing less that populist authoritarians. March 29th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Barbara Amiel is someone I frequently find disagreements with but when she is right, boy, is she right. Whilst I am usually rather prone to point the finger of blame at the state as the font of all evils when things go wrong, Amiel makes the reasonable point that even with the best intelligence in the world, the prevailing zeitgeist in the United State (and elsewhere) on and before September 10th 2001 meant that there was very little support for anything which could really have stopped Al Qaeda’s infamous arrival onto the world’s front pages.
All too true. Read the whole article. March 29th, 2004 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Gerhard Schröder is calling companies who outsource ‘unpatriotic‘, after Ludwig Georg Braun, the president of the federation of chambers of industry and commerce, advised German businesses to seek opportunities elsewhere. So, Gerhard Schröder, the man who has presided over yet another interventionist government whose policies have made Germany progressively more and more uncompetitive over the years, brazenly refuses to accept his personal responsibility for imposing the very policies which are driving businesses to seek to invest elsewhere. But then I suppose as the prerequisite for any professional politician is to be able to look an entire nation in the eye and tell them black is white and up is down, and then ask to be applauded for saying that… and what is more, more often than not, that is exactly what happens. Whatever. Reality always has its way with vainglorious politicians in the long run because people, and their capital, will eventually go where their interests are best served. And that place will not be Gerhard Schröder’s Germany. March 29th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the reasons for slightly less output on this august blog is that two of the editors and the inimitable Gabriel Syme were off meeting other sinister Illuminati in Prague for a fine Czech beer or six. 
No prize for guessing where the Illuminati meet in Prague Prague, like Bratislava, is known for its splendours… 
Hot… steamed in fact One of the upsides of the dire weather was that many of the usually crowded tourist attractions were almost deserted.  We meet one of the leading central European bloggers, Tomas Kohl (on the right)… 
Tomas sinks some fine Czech Pilsner with Adriana and Gabriel Syme March 28th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
To say that legislation can bring about an end to child labor is akin to saying that someone’s fever could be cured by dousing his thermometer in ice. March 23rd, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, no surprise there… China fears everything it cannot control, and thus it is stomping on China’s blogosphere.
We tried to see if we could get banned in China and it did not take that long to get us shut off from Chinese readers a while back (I have not checked recently to see if we are still a China no-no). The linked Vigilant.tv article at the top of this entry even helpfully provides a link to his wonderful Invisiblog system to allow Chinese bloggers to deftly avoid the best efforts of the Chinese state’s attempts to silence them. Yet in the long run it will avail them naught. As the Chinese state increasingly liberalises its economy in order to provide more wealth that it can tax, which of course means assuming less state control over that most entrepreneurial of people, the Chinese, that very process will eventually cause alternative power centres to appear as a direct consequence of creating more wealth without directing where that wealth is created. March 21st, 2004 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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