The A-Level pass rate has risen for the 28th successive year.
Debasing the coinage. It’s what governments do.
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August 19th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Vicki woods writes in the Telegraph that Greek justice makes a mockery of the law. Now the trouble with cases like this is that just as one is firing up to get outraged… along comes the thought, yeah but he might be guilty. So he might. Or he might not. But the Greek justice system does not seem to be in any hurry to find out in the case of Andrew Symeou. He has spent a year behind bars without trial. Oddly enough the Greek authorities did manage to energise themselves sufficiently to issue a European Arrest Warrant. That got snappy action all right! A stirring display of how the nations of Europe can act together to leapfrog pettifogging national legal procedures! After this strong start, however, the Greeks did not quite manage to maintain the spirit of pan-European efficiency when they twice denied Mr Symeou bail on the grounds that he was not a Greek national. August 16th, 2010 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
The vile ContactPoint database, which held details about every child in England and was accessible to hundreds of thousands of professionals has been switched off. I have to say that in pulling the plug the government has confounded my gloomy predictions that no matter who won the election civil liberty and privacy would be equally poorly served. Good comment to a BBC article on the subject here:
However Simon from Doncaster feels differently:
Where did you say you worked again, Simon? August 12th, 2010 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
One Catherine Bennet has yet another article in the Guardian about that jam experiment. Hers is called Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?
Mr Eugenides says,
Ironically, price comparison websites are themselves a market mechanism for making choice easier. I say, to Catherine Bennett and the next fifteen journalists to go into an ecstasy of servility when pondering this little demonstration that some people find shopping boring, shut up about the jam already. It’s jam. The process of choosing it has no deeper meaning. Unless one is a connoisseur of jam, in which case one probably finds choosing between 24 varieties a pleasing experience, as people usually do when shopping for something that interests them. Look at it this way, Ms Bennett. You have twice to my knowledge chosen a man as mate and helpmeet. Was making that choice from all the prospective partners you could have had ever stressful? There is some literature – like about half of it – to suggest that some people find it so. Some people regret their choice. The evidence suggests that you have at least once. Can we assume that if by any sad chance you find yourself seeking a man again you are willing to let a civil servant choose for you? August 10th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
No libertarian purist is going to love London’s new public bike hire scheme but it is nearer to harmless than many other state schemes. Apparently it looks to be quite popular. The same cannot be said for Melbourne’s scheme, launched two months ago with high hopes and high rhetoric about the benefits of cycling for people’s health and the environment. The reason for these “ranks of unused blue bikes” is that another bunch of health-promoting statists had queered the pitch. Andrew Bolt in the Australian Herald Sun writes:
August 6th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The North Korean football team has aroused the ire of the Dear Leader.
It’s weird, this thing dictators have for sport. You spend decades building up your own and your dynasty’s power, and where do you end up? Wiith its continuation being significantly dependant on the outcome of some football matches, apparently. One almost feels sorry for Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, prisoners of their own despotism. Of course the list of people to be sorry for in North Korea as a result of that despotism is long, and their names come last upon it. July 30th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wish I had something new to say on the Ian Tomlinson case. I wish the new thing was “the person who was caught on video as, unprovoked, he hit a man from behind and pushed him to the ground, with the result that the man died soon afterwards, is going to be prosecuted, and the fact that he is a police officer will make no difference at all.” But of course I am not able to say that because it is not true. July 23rd, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Tomasky blogs for the Guardian on American affairs. He is a fairly left wing Democrat, and is currently feeling down. He describes in this piece how a piece of internet humour cheered him up. He was sent a letter to the Red States (i.e. the ones voting Republican in the weird American convention for political colours) that reads:
There is more if you click the link. I am not so much interested in whether the contrasts drawn in the letter are true or fair. I did not even understand many of them. I am very interested in the way that this kind of humour can no longer be kept secret from those who are the butt of the joke. Despite being in the form of a letter to the Red States the original writer of this (from the reference to stealing “this election too” it dates from before Obama’s victory and probably from just before Bush’s second term) must have known that it would be harmful to the Democrat cause to have it actually read by too many Red Staters, particularly come election time. It would arouse even more hostility from a bloc of voters the Democrats would like to reach when accompanied, as it often was, by the Jesusland map. A couple of decades back – when this sort of thing was photocopier humour rather than internet humour – such a letter would have been seen overwhelmingly by fellow Democrats and Blue State persons. Now it can be found by anyone. It can be found by anyone years after the event. It keeps on being found years after the event. At first I thought of this in personal terms: one can imagine this letter to the Red States appearing on the website of some minor political guy in 2010 and causing him embarrassment in 2020 when the Republicans run it as an attack ad on TV, or whatever has replaced TV, just as his plane lands at Texas as part of the last-minute tour of swing states. But, imagining harder, he could probably laugh it off. Some of these red-staters might even laugh with him. By then, a cultural change will have occurred. It will have emerged that everybody has multiple skeletons in their cupboard; you can not spend years on the internet without accumulating them. Bigger than the effect on any one person, though, is the dispersed effect of lots of Republicans being slightly irritated and slightly more prone to think that when Democratic party politicians come courting their votes they are laughing at them behind their hands. As indeed they are. (I could but heroically will not digress into the question of whether Republicans laugh at Democrats in the same way. You are not missing much; the term “hegemonic discourse” was in there somewhere.) However possibly that dispersed irritation also will be moderated by the coming everybody’s-got-skeletons cultural change: by then we will all know more about how everybody has multiple faces that they show in different groups. (Strange how “two faced” is an insult but “multi-faceted” is praise.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we will all be less able to ignore our knowledge of everybody’s rotating mild disloyalty to all the groups to which they belong except the one to which they are talking at any particular minute. Oddly enough the name of Michael Tomasky has come up in another context concerning stuff on teh interwebs being seen by eyes it was not intended for. American right wing blogs are fizzing about “JournoList”, this being a private internet forum for American left wing journalists, academics and think tankers, where they would work out this week’s media consensus. Tomasky was a member. So was David Weigel, a journalist for the Washington Post, who had to resign from covering conservative affairs for that paper after expressing his opinion of several leading conservatives on JournoList by means of a term that I at first thought referred to their alleged propensity to engage in illicit commerce with rats but I now deduce means to behave towards someone in an underhand manner. You will have deduced that JournoList is no longer private and that some people think that its members were acting towards the American public in an underhand manner. There will be several scandals like this. Then they will stop because everyone will have adapted. The words “private internet forum” will be regarded as oxymoronic. The politically imprudent humour will continue, though. Nothing can shut a human mouth once it has started on a joke, except possibly the prospect of saving it up for a larger audience on the internet. July 22nd, 2010 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC reports, utterly uncritically, “Kenya launches text service to stop hate speech”
Respond how, exactly? Do they mean issue a statement rebutting the hateful arguments, or do they mean arrest someone?
Because of a commendable reluctance to criminalise speech? Apparently not:
I would be interested to know who these foreign donors were, and whether they were individuals or organisations. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the EU helping Africa to try out systems to control free speech that it would like to introduce in Europe – but this is pure speculation on my part. It could be that this initiative is being misreported, and that a fashionable concern with “hate speech” has been semi-randomly stuck on the label of what is actually a police hotline for people to report mobs gathering or incitement to specific criminal acts. I hope so. Yes, I do know that Kenya has suffered severe violence after past elections. No, I do not want a repeat of this. But telling informers that their denunciations will be acted upon within twelve hours is not the way to promote civil society. It does not even succeed in reducing violence. The delator and the mob thrived together in ancient Rome. July 14th, 2010 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
My husband thought this webpage, produced by three ladies from the state of Texas, might be of interest to Samizdata readers. July 13th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Toby Young is a hate figure for lefty educationalists (i.e. 99% of them) because he is a leading figure in setting up one of these “free schools”, deregulated state schools on the Swedish model that the coalition government hopes to introduce. In this article he carefully debunks five of the scare stories the left has spread about the free schools. Though like all of us I am sure he has faults, Toby Young is a Good Thing. Free schools are not free and not perfect but are, or will be, a broadly Good Thing. The dissemination of true information in place of false is a Good Thing. Mr Young’s fivefold debunking is well worth reading if you wish to be better informed about the nearest thing to a Good Thing that has hit British state education in years. It is sad that in almost every case I would have preferred the myth to be true. Here is why I wish Mr Young’s five debunked myths were not bunk after all. Myth No. 1. “Money for free schools will come from ‘the extremely wasteful Building Schools For The Future’ budget.” Suzanne Moore, Mail on Sunday, July 11, 2010 I gather there has been some sort of row about this, which I would research if I didn’t have toenails to cut. Government money, like all money, is fungible. So long as you bear in mind that it all ultimately “comes from” – as in “is extracted by force from” – the taxpayer, you can think of it as coming from whatever government budget heading makes you happy. I would have been made happier by thinking it came from a notoriously wasteful budget. Myth No. 2. “Free schools will have to find their pupils from somewhere, preferably poached from existing local schools, shrinking their budgets and possibly leading to a spiral of decline …” Fiona Millar, The Guardian, June 18, 2010 What the hell is wrong with poaching pupils from existing schools anyway? The very word “poaching” reveals a mindset that regards the children as the property of the schools. They are not. It would do most of the local schools (“local” being next to meaningless in this context other than as a means to arouse feelings of protectiveness; every school is located somewhere) a power of good to be put in fear of losing their pupils. They might have to take desperate measures to keep them; possibly even going so far as to provide an education. And if the dear, sweet local schools cannot or will not do that then let the spiral of decline commence, though a vertical downwards arrow of decline would be better. Myth No. 3. “It’s freedom, in our view, to reduce the vision for 21st century schools to children being educated in a run-down flat over an off licence …” Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, April 9, 2010 So long as they are educated, who cares where? The NASUWT is the least worst of all the teachers’ unions but even so I suspect that the real objection here is that young people emerging from run down flats to take up a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge might suggest that the all money put into shiny school facilities does very little good. (Mind you in debunking this one Toby Young twists the knife with delicacy: “Chris Keats also said in the same speech that the Conservatives’ Free Schools policy would favour the “pushy and privileged”. How? By enabling them to educate their children in run-down flats above off licenses? This is typical of the double-think at the heart of most Free School critiques. They are going to be run by a bunch of religious nutters in nissan huts at the bottom of their gardens and, at the same time, siphon off all the most motivated learners, thereby depriving neighbouring comprehensives of a vital resource.”) Myth No. 4. Free Schools are a “vanity project for yummy mummies in West London”. Tristram Hunt, The Today Programme, May 18, 2010 Nothing could be a better omen of a project’s success than to have its fortunes linked to the vanity of a group famed for its (a) vanity and (b) success at getting what it wants. Myth No. 5. “[P]ushy parents can set up a bijou academy free of any sane inclusive admissions policy …” Steve Pound MP, The Ealing Gazette, June 29, 2010 Toby Young says, “Not true. The admissions policies of Free Schools will have to be fully inclusive…” Oh, dear. Oh, damn. This was the most depressing debunking of all. I can’t put it any better than one of Mr Young’s commenters, sevendeuce, who says,
July 11th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
… so I would advise anyone of an even vaguely libertarian inclination who gets stressed easily to read no further. This article by Felicity Lawrence, Nanny does know best, Andrew Lansley, displays the ideology of the Nanny State in an unusually pure and unapologetic form:
The Andrew Lansley for whom Felicity Lawrence is setting homework is the Secretary of State for Health. The fact that he consents to hold this position means that he too must be something of a statist, but nonetheless he recently said, “If we are constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do, we will actually find that we undermine and are counterproductive in the results that we achieve.” It is a measure of how deeply Nanny’s rule has been accepted that even this pragmatic, rather than principled, objection to government health lectures aroused fury. July 9th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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