|
|||||
|
Bishop Hill comes up with a list of the legislation that an incoming UK government should get rid of to restore some of the civil liberties lost over the past decade or so. As he accepts, this is probably only scratching the surface of the issue, but still. The sheer quanity of the legislation that has been brought in, and its scope, is pretty startling even to a grizzled veteran of chronicling such outrages. Maybe the simple solution is to repeal all the acts in one go. February 18th, 2009 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I just picked this out as a potential SQOTD:
However, follow that last link and you will learn that the Conservative Party, in the person of Chris Grayling, may be retreating, a bit, from its former public position of craven retreat, so the Conservative bit of this story is not over yet. Yes, ban Wilders, says Grayling, but ban lots of others also. The Conservatives may well split on this, and I for one do not give a damn. Two further quick thoughts: First, I find all this elaborate condemnation of Geert Wilders by the Right-On tendency rather nauseating. We abominate what he says, but free speech is sacred and therefore he should be allowed in rather than being given the oxygen of publicity, but if he has broken the law then, blah blah blah, he should not be allowed in. This seemed to be the default position on Question Time last night, which I semi-watched. Usually there is only one but in these kind of weasel statements, but in this case there have often been two buts, with the second but being the but that craps all over everything before it, including whatever less ignoble turds emerged from the first but. But according to Guido, Wilders has not broken the law. And what Wilders says is that Islam is a huge problem because it preaches violence to those who do not submit to it. Which it does. Read the Koran, like this guy did. It is a vile piece of writing. People who grumble and splutter about statements like that are either Muslims or cowards or both. They just do not want to have to think about it because if this is true, which it is, it is all just too depressing. Second: democracy. What we are witnessing here is democracy, not some perversion of it. If enough voters threaten violence, then the state will cave in, and nothing like fifty percent is required. Half a percent threatening to dig up pavements or set fire to things is more than enough, provided another five or ten percent, sprinkled around all those marginal or potentially marginal constituencies, are willing to back, defend, not condemn, such threats with their votes. Votes, in other words, are violence. I fondly remember an ancient black and white movie telling of how, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plebs of Britain got votes. A key moment was when a brick came crashing through the window of a room where some political toffs were discussing it all. Either we get this organised, they told each other, in other words either we have more democracy, or the bricks will keep on coming. I am still for democracy, for the usual Churchill reason of it being better than the alternatives, but it is messy. Personally, I am grateful to Geert Wilders, and even a little bit grateful to whichever coven of scumbag politicians it was who banned him from coming here. Some life has consequently been breathed into an argument which, while being just as important as ever, looked like it was becoming, what with all these Credit Crunch dramas, a bit passé. February 13th, 2009 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reading Johnathan’s piece on ‘the precautionary principle’ below, I was struck by the way both it and the comments fail to come to grip with the fact that people who support precaution simply do not share the attitudes and values that those arguments take for granted. Both sides are unintelligible to the other. All sides, in fact, because there are more than two. I am thoroughly persuaded by the distinction made by cultural theorists between two sorts of precaution promoters, the heirarchists and the egalitarians. The interaction between those two types in a media democracy very well explains how we get to the regulation of virtual risk. Egalitarians expect difference and change to be threatening; heirarchists value order and system, and hate absence of rules. Regulation promises egalitarians safety, that is – the minimisation and control of change and choice – in return for granting heirarchists power and order. Collective nightmares and regulatory bedtime stories are both the stuff of news. The people advocating the precautionary principle adopt it because it is a neat encapsualtion of the preconception that all change is danger, or because it is a procedural pretext for change to be subject to approval so that it not be permitted to disrupt social order. That is how it is a principle so completely incapable of application. It is not intended as an axiom of rational construction for policy but to legitimate an approach. The commentator who compared it to Pascal’s Wager had it precisely wrong. It is an inversion of Pascal’s Wager, an anti-rational argument for refusing to make any bets. February 8th, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The whole point of tolerance is to tolerate things you find repugnant. Tolerance does not mean acceptance however, so just because you tolerate something ignorant or repugnant, that does not mean you need to refrain from heartfelt criticism of it. However tolerance needs to be conditional: tolerance of intolerance is irrational when that the aim of that intolerance is to deny tolerance to you. And so whilst I am ambivalent at best about bullfighting, and I did watched a few in my younger years, I found myself shouting “¡Olé!” after reading these remarks by an 11 year old matador Michelito Lagravere Peniche:
I would not mind if all bullfighting opponents did was to be vocal critics, but the moment they started to try and use the law to ban this ancient Mithraic sport, they crossed the line from being critics to being thugs. January 25th, 2009 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Random link-chasing brought me here. “Leg-iron” writes:
There is more, please do read it. I should explain for foreign readers that British cigarette packets must by law bear an anti-smoking slogan such as “smoking kills” or “smoking causes impotence” and often, these days, a repulsive picture showing the bad consequences of smoking. I do not smoke so I do not often need to look at these pictures, but nothing about their appearance repels me as much as the fact that our laws force people to publish material designed to humiliate themselves. Truly, that does repel me. I neither like nor dislike cigarette manufacturers or those who work for them as a category, but when I imagine whichever bureaucrat thinks up these rotating slogans sneeringly transmitting the latest one to some servile flack in a cigarette company along with orders to start the print run – then I feel a faint echo of the shame someone living in Mao’s China must have felt at the sight of a wretch bearing a placard saying “I am an enemy of the people.” I scrolled down Leg-iron’s blog and found another good post on the same topic: → Continue reading: “Choose freedom?” That would be nice. January 21st, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
A court in the Netherlands has ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, for daring to express his opinions. Wilders is the author of Fitna, a critical polemic against Islam.
This judgement completely destroys the myth of both Dutch civil liberties and the nation’s reputed tolerance for differences of opinion. It seems you can have a difference of opinion just as long as it is not inconvenient to the state for you to express it. Yet again, the Dutch state proves that when the going gets tough, the Dutch state has a backbone of rubber. So here is Fitna for you to watch. And to the authoritarian thugs in their court in Amsterdam… up yours. And as a little bonus… January 21st, 2009 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via the indispensable Bishop Hill blog, is this scary Henry Porter article about how many Britons, including professional photographers, are being arrested for taking photos of supposedly “off-limits” buildings. I also notice in the article that yet another Tory MP has been arrested. The police seem to be developing quite a taste for arresting MPs on dubious charges these days. But at least some judges are beginning to tighten the screws on coppers demanding to arrest or search people in “high profile” cases. But what about the rest of us plebs? January 8th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UK Culture Gauleiter, Andy Burnham, gives an interview in the Telegraph today in which he says:
Actually the people who ‘created’ the internet did it so that parts of the state could stay in touch after a nuclear attack… the idea the net does not need the government was an emergent realisation that came later. And of course there is nothing a government hates more that being thought irrelevent, which is what this is really about. Internet censorship is never ever about ‘protecting’ people, it is about extending and maintaining state power. That is the whole reason why advocates of censorship pretend child pornography is vastly more prevalent than it actually is. And you may be sure kiddie porn will be wheeled out yet again in this latest attempt to expand the power of the state.
Which of course is indeed a naked, direct and unambiguous attack on free speech.
Yes, no doubt Andy Burnham dreams of marching forward with The One across the internet in a sort of virtual Operation Barbarosa, presumably with UKGov in the roll of the Loyal Ally. But then unlike Barbarosa, this attack comes as no surprise to the ‘enemy’ (i.e. folks like us) and there is that pesky ‘First Amendment’ on the other side of the Atlantic sitting like 20,000 T-34 tanks waiting at Kursk. There is a reason Samizdata is hosted in the USA and not on this side of the puddle. This crass power grab needs to be opposed on every level and not just attacked on the sheer technical difficulty of making it happen but also assaulted morally and politically. But I agree when he says “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.” Yes we do need to revisit that and remind everyone that if the history of the previous century teaches us anything, it is that governments cannot be trusted. Free speech cannot be left to the sufferance of political systems and venal politicians like Andrew Burnham. We need to smite any attempt to encroach on the internet at every level and distribute technical ‘solutions’ to every initiative the state comes up as widely as possible regardless of what laws they pass. We simply will not cooperate. December 27th, 2008 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
Henry Porter, who to his immense credit has been telling it like it is on the civil liberties issue in Britain for several years, has a strong article in the Guardian on the arrest of Damian Green and the government’s miserable behaviour since. As he puts it, the arrest of one of their own has finally woken MPs up to what is going on. It is hard not to feel a certain bitterness at MPs’ complacency on these issues for many years, but better late than never. The arrest of an MP in such circumstances must count as the ultimate “canary in the coalmine”. What a way to mark the State Opening of Parliament. At the time of writing I do not know if the Speaker of the House of Commons has been sacked yet or resigned. December 3rd, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
As someone who has certainly conspired with Damian Green (and LibDem MPs too) to embarrass the Government and the Home Office. I spent some time Thursday and Friday making provision in case I were to be arrested and my property searched. The reaction from the media and parliamentarians in the Green affair has been so strong that I don’t now think it likely. But it does seem possible. Before Thursday night I would have laughed at someone who suggested things had got so bad. I was misinformed. Nick Cohen in the Observer picks up a case I should have known about:
As I noted for US readers over on another thread, none of this of course required a judicial warrant. Though the charges were thrown out when a trial finally came, the process is the punishment. And someone searched under these conditions might easily end up being prosecuted for something else, if police find evidence of any other offence in the course of it. After all, a lot of very common conduct is now illegal. November 30th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the terrible events in Mumbai have reminded us – I have some ex-colleagues who work there – terrorism remains an ever-present threat. Even while the economic stories dominated our news headlines in recent months, I had a nagging worry that the jihadis were not going to pass up the chance to strike, particularly with a new US president on the way. So terrorism is back as a topic in the most awful way imaginable. So it is all the more extraordinary that counter-terrorist police, instead of actually trying to deal with terrorists, were instead employed in the highly dodgy arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, who had received leaked information on immigration into the UK and who, like any half-competent politician, was trying to use this information to add to the debate on immigration. Now whatever one thinks about immigration – and Samizdata has gone over this issue many times – it seems deeply sinister that a man who had received leaked details about the numbers involved should find his collar felt by Pc Plod. Considering all the vast numbers of leaks out of the government, which sometimes have direct impacts on markets and livelihoods, this is bad. This is the first time I can recall that a senior MP has been arrested on what looks suspiciously like an attempt by the authorities to shut up a political party. No wonder that Tory leader David Cameron is demanding action on this. Whether he gets it remains to be seen. Mr Green’s actions are not remotely in the same bracket as the very serious allegations of receipt of oil-for-food funds that have been levelled against the Saddam apologist, George Galloway. At least in the latter case one could see why Galloway should, at the very least, have had a little chat with the police. As for Mr Green, his treatment looks downright sinister. When people throw around the words “police state” to describe what Britain has become, it all too easy to roll the eyes. But if this case does wake this country up a bit, it will have served some purpose. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph agrees. Update: Old Holborn puts up this graphic, via Guido Fawkes. Suggestion to the Tories: refuse to turn up for the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday. Seriously. Do not turn up, but tell the government to go and boil its collective head. Things have really got that bad. Can a no-confidence motion be far off? November 28th, 2008 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening. – David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars’ meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday. (Hat-tip: The Register) November 20th, 2008 | 19 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. |
|||||