It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
– David Hume, one of the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment. I wonder what he would have made of our own times?
|
|||||
|
I see that the Labour Party has decided to bash the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, using the image of a chameleon riding a bicycle. Ouch. I am not sure what is more damning: the chameleon image or the bike. Of course, this blog has already vented a fair deal about the supposed limitations of Cameron, so I will not tarry long on this point, other than to say that some of the fizz seems to have gone out of the Cameron charge of late, although it may be that he is simply waiting and watching while Blair, enmeshed in scandal and policy paralysis, meets his political Waterloo. I am still unconvinced whether Cameron will play a convincing Wellington, however. April 18th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Nice to see that those superannuated rock legends, the Rolling Stones, brushed aside the dictates of Chinese censors and bashed out some of their naughtiest tunes at a concert in China. Mind you, I cannot really see these guys going on much longer. April 9th, 2006 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Economist magazine, about which James Waterton wrote a few days ago (it is getting a new editor), has an interesting cover article ‘Soft Paternalism’, chronicling the growing trend of governments to devise ways to make people behave in certain ways, usually in order to meet some supposedly desirable objective, such as losing weight, saving for a pension and so forth. I do not think the Economist hits the issue nearly hard enough but I absolutely love the picture associated with the article. I rather like this quotation in the final paragraph:
Some people, including libertarians, are a bit hard on the Economist, which often veers away from its historical attachment to free markets, liberty and limited government. I occasionally find its tone condescending but on the whole that magazine is a force for good. Let us hope that under its new editor, the Economist continues to beat the drum for classical liberalism in an era when liberty is all too often on the back foot. April 8th, 2006 | 107 comments - (Comments are closed)
April 3rd, 2006 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
While I am on the subject of lists, check this out for the world’s 10 weirdest keyboards. I think I might give myself a serious physical injury trying to use some of them. (Hat tip: Catallarchy). April 3rd, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Forbes magazine has a nice series on the 20 most important tools that Man has ever devised and used. For some inexplicable reason, it does not include the Swiss Army knife or the Callaway golf driver, but I am sure that was an oversight. April 2nd, 2006 | 73 comments - (Comments are closed)
18th Century statesman and essayist Edmund Burke, arguably the greatest Irishman to have ever lived. I wonder if Tony Blair or Dave Cameron have heard of him, or read him? April 1st, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Boycott these bookstores the next time you go looking for a book. They have just invited more intimidation against critics of violent islamists. Yes, I can understand the desire to protect staff, but this is a bad message to send out from a major firm. It says: we will give in if you act violent enough. I have used Borders in the past, but will not do so again. (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds). March 30th, 2006 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story from the BBC is beyond parody:
How jolly nice of our political equivalent of a head girl at school to let us unwashed plebs have some input into how much we get to pay for a service that, er, ahem, we have to pay for regardless of whether we watch it or not. Seriously, though, this is the sort of thing one might expect of life in the former Soviet Union, where workers at the local tractor plant were urged to suggest ways to make the machines work even better down at the local collective farm. Well, Ms Jowell might as well know what my preferred size of a licence fee is: zero. March 30th, 2006 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jesse Walker has a nice piece in Reason magazine about whether U.S. state agencies like the FCC should ban cinemas from trying to jam calls to mobile phones. Seems a pretty clear-cut case to me – so long as the jamming is made clear to customers before they buy a ticket, then the cinemas, if they are commercial entities and privately owned, are entitled to do this. Cinemas that are privately owned can set whatever rules on the behaviour of customers that they like, including telling them, on pain of expulsion, to turn mobiles off or to silent, to observe minimal standards of dress code, and whatever. In my own cinema-going experience in Britain and the United States, I have hardly ever been inconvenienced by mobile users, although I may have been lucky. Once, in a stifling hot cinema in Chelsea, I sat next to a rather annoying French couple, one of whom insisted on phoning her friends several times and who finally shut up after another customer told them to do so. Most people seem to get the message to turn the things off or to silent mode. I guess what this story tells us is how people are almost surgically attached to their phones (one day that may literally be true, perhaps in a few decades time). I have occasionally gone out from my flat without a mobile phone and felt almost naked without it, but also experienced a certain freedom of being out of reach for an hour or so. It is almost as if I have forgotten what it is like not to be contactable instantly via these machines. A final etiquette point is that I notice people are often less punctual for meetings sometimes because there is this assumption in the back of folks’ minds that they can just “phone ahead” and say that they are going to be late. Before mobiles existed, if people did not keep an appointment, it did not happen. Perhaps one side effect of mobile phones then is to make us less rigorous in sticking to a schedule. It is not a good or bad thing, but that seems to be the pattern. March 29th, 2006 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
It appears my faint optimism of yesterday was misplaced. The House of Lords has agreed a compromise on ID cards which means they will go ahead. This Reuters report makes it clear that the cards are the most ambitious such cards to be attempted in terms of the data to which they draw access. They will prove a costly and oppressive fiasco. Perhaps that is Blair’s main legacy. March 29th, 2006 | 72 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||