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In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman. – Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host. To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading “Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March”: That’s certainly why I’m supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us? January 20th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple: Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie. Mr Devil’s Kitchen didn’t mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply. I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all. I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us? January 7th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
So how is Zimbabwe doing these days? According to this article, linked to yesterday by Patrick Crozier, things are actually improving. Patrick quotes this bit:
While reading this article, I could not shake the feeling that I was really reading a piece of libertarian science fiction. Could they really have done anything so very sensible, and could things really be improving so definitely? The piece does appear to be genuine, so far as I can tell, but if it turns out to be fantasy-fiction, this paragraph will get me off the credulity hook. File under maybe true but maybe too good to be true. Meanwhile, if the piece really is true, the best bit of all in it is that there is now no “lender of last resort” in Zimbabwe. Could it be that libertarian economic policy – in particular libertarian banking policy – is about to get a serious test, which it will pass, and hence another serious showcase, highly pertinent given the world’s current banking woes, to educate the world with? How will socialism and state-centralism get the credit for that I wonder? If genuine, this piece reminds me of a vivid British recollection from way back. Someone on the telly asked a City commentator, just after Black Wednesday (the day in 1992 when John Major’s economic policies collapsed in ruins), what the prospects were now for the British economy. Well, he said, now that the government has not got a policy, rather good. November 12th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Snapped by me a fortnight ago, at the LA/LI Annual Conference at which Anthony Evans was the final speaker. I’ve straightened and sharpened it as best I could. A copyable, pastable and more readable version of the text from which this is taken may be read here. More photos of the speaker taken that same day can be viewed here. November 8th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Researchers are claiming that there is a link between individualism and depression. Some may take offence to this notion but it does not surprise me at all. That said, I am far too cynical to automatically assume that the ‘researchers’ are not grinding some ideological axe, but nevertheless I find the basic idea quite believable. Frankly collectivism is a form of mass delusion, an ‘opiate for the masses’ method of replacing profane objective truth with sacred, subjective ‘acceptable’ truth… i.e. ‘truth’ is what the collective wants it to be. Indeed I would say much of the allure of collectivism is relief from the weight of individual responsibility, the sense of moral externalisation that comes from outsourcing choice to a ‘higher power’. Individualism on the other hand is a more lonely path without a nebulous ‘them’ to absolve you from consequences and that can be stressful. And so it comes as no surprise to me that some collectivist societies may be less anxious (at least for those who actually buy into the collectivist meta-contextual assumptions) because collectivism depends on a view of the world that filters reality through the comforting, blame deflecting, wilfully ignorant lens of what is politically tolerable… and ignorance is bliss. 
Collectivists… happier apparently November 6th, 2009 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is swear-blogging, and then there is this:
That’s way too far over the top of the top for me. Maybe I’m getting old. It’s in a posting in response to a posting here by Johnathan Pearce on Saturday, about how giving women rights at work will make them more expensive to employ and consequently cause women to be employed less. I’m genuinely in two minds about this swear-blogging thing. (See also this blog.) On the one hand, as with the passage quoted above, I think it can be horribly offensive by almost any standard and liable to make a lot of people think badly of something I value, namely the libertarian movement. (If you look under affiliations, you see that DK is affiliated to the Libertarian Party.) I can foresee a time when such passages as the above will be quoted in evidence against us all. If anyone points out that “they” (i.e. us libbos) were writing things like that, and none of “them” complained, well, I did. And if this posting alerts enemies of the libertarian movement otherwise unalerted and it all blows up in our faces, then the sooner the better, I say. Get the argument about swear-blogging over with. On the other hand, this kind of language does at least communicate just how angry people get about the plundering and bossiness of politicians. If you are similarly angry, read on, Devil’s Kitchen is for you. You are not alone. It libertarianism was only written calmly and dispassionately, something important would be lost. One thing I do know is that if Devil’s Kitchen was nothing but the above offensiveness, I wouldn’t give a … flip … about him. It is because he writes good stuff about important topics, in among the effing and blinding and sometimes worse, that I now ruminate upon the wisdom or lack of it of how he writes. Whatever I end up thinking about this, I am not now recommending and never will recommend that what I might consider to be excessively sweary swear-blogging should be illegal, to read or to write. October 19th, 2009 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
An unusual little back page story…
Sweet. The world needs more people like Rukhsana Kausar. And an addition ‘bravo’ to all the people across the globe to held up the Mighty Forks and protested the obscene ‘celebrations’ of the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party taking power. Fight the power. October 1st, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometimes when problems need to be worked out, the people trying to work it out keep trying to whack the problem over the head with the very thing that caused the problem in the first place. Gay marriage… or even gay ‘marriage’ if you prefer… is one such issue. Some argue that if the state recognises heterosexual marriages, then it offends against natural justice for the state to discriminate against homosexual marriages (or ‘marriages’/unions whatever). And of course the people who say that are right. This naturally does not appeal to people who oppose the ‘morality’ of homosexuality or just feel gay marriage, or gay anything really, is ‘yucky’ and thus dislike the idea of the state they support with their tax money adding its imprimatur, at their expense, to something they find repugnant. And of course the people who say that are right. So the obvious solution lies in the root of the problem… the state actually has no compelling need being in the marriage business at all as marriage is just a contractually relationship between two people that requires no involvement of the state at all. Stop the state rubber-stamping any kind of marriage and the problem goes away. And likewise an issue of separation of church and state in the USA…
OMG!…hmmm… bad choice of exclamation… a religious symbol on state land! The state has no business allowing displays for this or that religious faction showing their symbolic whatnots on state land! And that is indeed right. But others say that if this is also a object of real historical significance commemorating the dead of the First World War, then it would be Taliban-style barbarism to simply destroy it or even rip it from its historical context! And that is indeed right. So… stop it being state land. Make the land the private property of someone who will safeguard this object of historical interest. The problem is not the cross, it is that this land does not actually have any business being ‘state land’ at all. There are some problems that simply getting the state out of the picture will not solve. However for the other 90% of things… September 29th, 2009 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
Presently people are very angry about Barack Obama’s speech to young children (with the, now withdrawn, “how you can help your President” stuff), but the real damage is done in the ordinary days of propaganda – ordinary school days, and ordinary school textbooks, that parents do not even notice. For example, American and British schools teach the “Herbert Hoover and his free market policies” legend. Barack Obama has given the enemy a face – but what matters more is the collectivist movement (that which has for more than a century worked to gain influence in all institutions in the West). Yet many people can not see past the bogey man Obama and ignore the vast movement without which he would be unimportant. Just a Marxist son of Marxist parents – making impassioned speeches in parks (to no one in particular). It was the movement that made sure he went to the best universities, it was the movement who gave him the comfortable positions on the boards of the various charitable trusts, it was the movement who supported him in his various campaigns for political office. Sometimes the movement can become a parody of itself – for example when the “mainstream media” try to cover up for a loud mouth like Van Jones. Being a Communist is fine, but going around telling people what you are is not fine at all – it is astonishing that Van Jones was picked for high office for he lacks basic self discipline (the ability to keep his mouth shut about what he is), a quality Barack Obama has so much of. Nor is Van Jones alone: The “Diversity Officer” (Commissar) who goes around praising the Venezuelian regime, and explaining (in detail) his evil plan to destroy free speech in the United States, violates the first rule of being a bad guy (do not tell your potential victims what you are planning to do to them – at least not till they are tied up in your underground laboratory): The science Commissar going on record gloating about the prospect of forced abortions: The health Commissar musing about how the old are useless and do not enjoy life and therefore… Too many of the Commissars go about thinking they can say anything they like without it getting to Homer Simpson (who they see as the typical American voter) – because the mainstream media (both broadcasting and print) will never tell the bald, fat man what they intend to do him and his family. But the mainstream media do not have a monopoly of information these days. The movement should have made clear to Obama that he should not pick people who have film and audio records of what they have said. That he should only pick people who have learned to keep their secret plans… err… secret. However, overall the movement is very effective – on a totally different level from the pro liberty side (who are like a bunch of cats – moving in all sorts of directions and with plan of campaign, more chaos than cosmos – although it is cosmos, non forced cooperation, that we are supposed to believe in, against the taxis, forced order, of the movement). Still economic law (the nature of reality itself) is the great enemy of the movement – and it may save the West yet, in spite of the chaotic nature and crass incompetence of the defenders of Western civilisation. September 15th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tom Palmer on the late, Marxist philosopher, G.A. Cohen, who died a few days ago:
They say it is wrong to speak ill of the dead, or at least, recently deceased. But given the enormity of the evil associated with Soviet Russia – the millions killed, starved to death and generally immiserated – that I consider it to be a moral failing not to call out those who chose to look the other way, or make excuses, for what that regime represented, and what it did. G.A. Cohen was more honest that some Marxists/egalitarians in at least recognising the force of the classical liberal critique of his views; he did, for example, appreciate that the Lockean idea of Man as a “self owner” and the associated right to pursue the acquisition of property was a serious challenge to collectivism. But in the end he brushed it aside. I did not realise that Cohen was an apologist for the Soviet Empire in the way that Palmer describes. That came as quite a shock. By the way, G.A. Cohen’s arguments are nicely and civilly dissected by Jan Narveson’s splendid book, The Libertarian Idea. And Tom Palmer’s own book looks also to be well worth checking out. August 8th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Regular consumption of between 3 and 4 units a day by men of all ages will not accrue significant health risk. – ‘Sensible Drinking: The Report of an Interdepartmental Working Group’ (Department of Health, 1995) My emphasis. —-
– Patient UK There is a desperate desire for binary certainty in the authoritarian mind. ‘Safety’ is not just small risk; it is the absence of any known or projected risk. What is not defined as safe is dangerous. No possibility of a risk is permissable because if anything goes wrong the system could be blamed for not preventing it. That would be a threat to order. What is not expressly permitted is forbidden. August 4th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has often been said that one of the more important functions of blogs like this is to get ‘memes’ (or ideas, as I prefer to call them) started and then spread around virally. In the spirit, I think it behoves us to begin spreading this idea: that people who work in the public sector should be exempt from having to pay tax. All tax. And, no, I am not proposing to do them a big favour, though expect that many in the public sector will see it as a favour and that is all for the good. No, what I am proposing is the stripping away of a fig-leaf that disguises the very important distinction between tax-payers and tax-consumers. Currently, only those who earn their living in the private or voluntary sector are tax-payers and while public sector employees do file tax returns and, on the face of it, pay their taxes too, this is a mere bookkeeping fiction. They are the recipients of tax, adding nothing to the public purse. The number of people who fail to understand this distinction, holding instead that “we are all taxpayers” is alarmingly high. By forcing the public sector to lead tax-free lives, we make their true status not just clearer but undeniable. It is high time that we made it crystal clear as to who bears the burden of taxation and who enjoys the benefit; who produces the wealth and who gets the wealth handed to them. It is a cheap and easy means of dramatically changing the dynamic of all economic and political debate. If you like this idea, then tell someone else. Let’s start spreading it. July 26th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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