What are some of the most common misconceptions you encounter from non-gun owners? Do you identify, politically, with other gun owners? Do you feel misrepresented by the media? Tell us and we’ll feature your responses on the Guardian.
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May 3rd, 2013 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Dave is going to wake up one morning and find that the Conservative Party website, and any other right-of-centre source of information, is going to be shut away behind an “Over-18” “hate-and-porn” firewall and he will be too stupid to work out what happened. – Samizdata commenter Rob April 26th, 2013 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Sweeney’s undercover report on North Korea for Panorama on the BBC contains this steaming turd of a quote from a contributor – one Bryan Myers – a “Professor”, we are assured:
North Korea Undercover from 4:00 to 6:00 if you can bear it – do not feel compelled to watch the whole thing, it is superficial pap. Another witless bozo who can not seem to grasp the logical outcome of putting the state in the driving seat, whatever the superficial branding/flag colour/exact nature of dynastic succession. Of course, the Panorama editorial team seem more than happy to include this statement – you would almost think they worked for a state broadcaster 😉 April 16th, 2013 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was struck by a particular contrast between two opinion columns that appeared in today’s Guardian. Both made reference to crimes in which many children were killed. The first column I would like to look at, written by Zoe Williams, refers to the crime described here. Mick Philpott had lived in a ménage à trois with his wife, Mairead, his mistress Lisa Willis and the eleven children the two women had bore him. When Lisa Willis walked out on this arrangement, taking her five children – and their welfare benefits – with her, the Philpotts and another man set a fire at the Philpott house with the aim of framing Ms Willis for it, which would help him regain custody of their children and the income stream that came with them, and also so that Philpott could be seen to rescue the other six children who still lived in that house. It would also aid him in his custody battle to be hailed a hero. As it turned out, he could not rescue them. All six died in the fire. The three conspirators have been jailed for multiple manslaughter, with Mick Philpott receiving the longest sentence as the dominant figure in the group. The Daily Mail published an article headed “Vile product of Welfare UK: Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them.” Zoe Williams of the Guardian was deeply angered by this. Her Guardian column has the title “Don’t get mad about the Mail’s use of the Philpotts to tarnish the poor – get even.” Ms Williams writes,
The readers’ comments share Ms Goodman’s outrage, as does a similar comment piece about the same crime by Graeme Cooke which says,
The second, contrasting Guardian column, by Amy Goodman, referred to the gun massacre of twenty children and six adults carried out by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. That crime and its legal and moral implications were discussed at length in this blog at the time it occurred. Amy Goodman’s column has the title “It’s time for the majority to move on gun control” and includes the words:
I do not wish to simply jeer at the inconsistency of the reaction of the Guardian’s writers and readers. They could quite fairly throw the same jibe back at us – I assume that most readers of this blog oppose gun control and objected to the demonisation of American gun owners because of one grotesque crime on much the same grounds as Ms Williams objects to the demonisation of British welfare claimants for one grotesque crime. I post this to ask, not answer, the question, when is it offensive and when is it a moral necessity to make political capital over the bodies of dead children? April 4th, 2013 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is only one question that needs to be asked in the debate about Welfare Benefits…and that is ‘What can we afford?’. When there is ‘no money left’ what can we afford? That seems to have escaped the BBC who continue to question Coalition welfare reforms and the need for them on the basis that we have an endless supply of money. The BBC et al ask only ‘What do they need?’ with no requirement as to answer how to pay for those ‘needs’. That may seem easy for an organisation that doesn’t have to work for its funding but in the real world that’s a model that is the stuff of dreams… imagine being able to force your customers to pay for your goods even if they don’t use them…and in advance as well. April 3rd, 2013 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
After Hurricane Sandy struck last fall, “Today” reporter Jeff Rossen did an exposé on how some contractors were “preying on” homeowners. How? By performing repair work without the proper licenses. Rossen found several contractors who lacked home-improvement licenses, but only one consumer who had been taken advantage of – and that was two months before Sandy struck. His big story boiled down to the fact that some Sandy-related tree removal and home repair work was carried out without prior government permission. But wait – does Rossen have a license to practice journalism? Does he think journalists should be licensed? I reached out to Rossen by email. “What can I do for you?” he wrote back. But when I put those questions to him, he never responded – much like the unlicensed contractors he caught on camera. How scandalous! April 1st, 2013 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a very interesting article over on dropsafe about several people meeting with #HackedOff this evening regarding the Leveson Royal Charter… ie state regulation of the news in Britain. To say Alec was not impressed would be a masterly understatement:
This will not end well. The thingie below was kindly sent to me by Guido Fawkes. Sign the petition and tell them to Blog Off! March 21st, 2013 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just to weigh in with my tuppence on the UK attempt to regulate the media, which is proving to be grimly fascinating in the manner of a slow-motion car accident, this item by the Guardian newspaper points out that the local UK media, such as regional newspapers and the like, could be crippled by the prospect of “exemplary” damages and a cumbersome complaints procedure. It is, I suppose, a bit late in the day for a leftist newspaper such as the Guardian to notice that heavy regulatory moves weigh particularly on smaller firms. That sometimes is the point – so that big firms can flourish. Notice how bigger firms tend to be more pro-European Union than smaller ones, for example. In the UK’s financial sector, the wealth advisory industry has been put under what is called the “Retail Distribution Review”, which is designed to stamp out use of commission on sales and force up standards for advisors. A result has been that hundreds of advisors have gone out of business, or been forced to sell their firms to rivals, and so forth. The cost of purchasing financial advice has risen, putting it out of reach of often the very people who need it the most. Result! There comes a point where one grows weary of fighting against this period of sustained lunacy. When an entire political establishment, such as the current one in the UK, feels determined to lash out, the results are terrible. Eventually, one hopes, this nonsense might get overturned, as may happen as court cases concerning the press regulation show it to be the pile of dog-mess that it is. Nick Cohen explains what a legal minefield this will be. There appears to be no clear idea of what sort of internet-based publications will be affected. I suspect that those organisations that are not already hosted outside the UK will move, as will some of the people involved. The UK government has, along with the the opposition side, just given another reason for anyone with a love of liberty to get out of here while they still can. People overseas have noticed what a joke the UK is becoming on this issue. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Mr Obama ideas. March 19th, 2013 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
If asked which groups posed the greatest threat to individual liberty in modern Britain, I would unhesitatingly cite two groups. These groups are, broadly, the medical profession and those who are generally called ‘celebrities’ – pop stars, film stars and so on. – “Whig”, at the Adam Smith Institute blog.
March 18th, 2013 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The three main parties are all deciding how they will kill off the last vestiges of freedom of the press in Britain.
We will know soon enough exactly how they will do this, but do it they will. And you can be sure they will present it as protecting freedom of the press. March 12th, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I do certainly hope that Guido Fawkes is correct that Lord Leveson’s atrocious proposal for statutory regulation of the press gets no-where, particularly now that it seems some of the supporters of Leveson now realise what dangerous folly it is. Of course, I am not getting my hopes up too much, but it would be a relatively rare good piece of news from UK politics to see this idea shot down, hopefully for a long time. Here are related thoughts of mine about the Leveson process.
March 5th, 2013 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
From about 1990 until about 2005, I held speaker meetings at my home in London SW1, on the last Friday of each month. I began them because I was a libertarian and we wanted such meetings, and because, having acquired a settled home, I could. And I ended them because their main purpose for me had been to stir up writing for the Libertarian Alliance, which by 2005 I was no longer doing. When the internet arrived as a mass experience, available to anyone with a computer, a telephone line and a few quid a month to spare, around the year 2000, I ceased being an editor of paper writings for an organised group, and became instead a citizen of the blogosphere. Most especially, I became a regular contributor to Samizdata. Suddenly, the blogosphere was where the action was, where the big opportunity was, and it supplied more than enough food for thought and for writing. But now, my Last Friday of the Month meetings are to resume. Partly, I have discovered that their incidental benefits to me personally were more real than I had realised. Basically, I felt that, very gradually, I was losing touch with people who were in that vital social hinterland between friends and strangers. But there is also a more public – altruistic, you might say – reason for me to crank these meetings up again. In retrospect, I think we can now see that the arrival of blogging was a most unusual time for us libertarians. Libertarian notions had spread rapidly during the years just before the internet and then blogging arrived among us. But because the number of libertarian enthusiasts involved was small compared to the population at large, these ideas had found few outlets in the late twentieth century mass media, which meant that we libertarians reacted to blogging like drowning sailors encountering a lifeboat. Meanwhile, our statist adversaries, many of them comfortably ensconced in what were clearly now the old school media, could at first only grumble about how their seemingly God-given intellectual hegemony had been so insolently challenged. At first, these hegemons behaved as if enough bitching by them about the new media, in the printed pages and on the TV chat and comedy shows of the old media, would send us amateur upstarts back to the oblivion from which we had so rudely emerged. When that didn’t work, they tried linkless fulminating in their, at first, very clumsily electrified newspapers. Only when it became clear even to them that the “new media”, and the new voices enabled by them, were here to stay, that anyone could say to anyone whatever anyone wanted to say, did at least some of the old school journos and organs start seriously adapting. → Continue reading: A libertarian meeting at my home on the last Friday of this month January 4th, 2013 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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