Why are the Liberal Democrats not called the Illiberal Democrats if they are not liberals either? Maybe they should be called the Lino party, as in liberal in name only.
– Commenter Chris H
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[I]n much the same way that political control of statistical data can grant the holder control over the policy agenda, so control of an individual’s personal and sensitive information can grant dominance over the individual himself. It is precisely this that, in the information age, makes identity theft such a harrowing crime: the dual sensations of violation and helplessness arising from a realisation that one is no longer in control of one’s own life. The fact of the matter is that our personal and sensitive data are the core statistics of our own unique lives and, by extension, the wholesale collection, retention and sharing of our data by government is equivalent to a state-sponsored and thereby legitimised form of identity theft. April 7th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday’s Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil. But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:
Yes, that’s certainly how I remember the story.
I don’t think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis’s plot are strange. “Modernising Labour governments” think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can – capitalism. See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too. April 6th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not suggesting by any means that the gold standard was perfect, but if we judge it by its record, it achieved much better price stability than the disastrous inconvertible paper money standard that replaced it. Unfortunately, in the twentieth century the gold standard came to be seen as a pointless constraint against the issue – or, rather, over-issue – of currency. Economists argued that the Bank of England should be free to issue whatever amount of currency it (or its political masters) wanted. The old idea that the gold standard imposed a useful discipline against the over-issue of currency was discarded as out of date. Keynes famously told us that the gold standard was a relic of a barbarous age, and reassured us that modern governments were much too sophisticated to debase the currency. Modern governments were not like impecunious Roman emperors or medieval kings. The results were catastrophic, but Keynes was right about one thing. Modern governments were not like Roman emperors or medieval kings: they were much worse, and produced much greater inflation rates than their predecessors ever managed to achieve. There is a limit to how much inflation you can create by clipping the edges of your coins and putting them back into circulation, but the sky’s the limit when you can just speed up the printing press or add additional zeroes to your notes. – a characteristically forthright moment from Kevin Dowd’s Chris Tame Memorial Lecture entitled Lessons from the Financial Crisis: A Libertarian Perspective, delivered on March 17th, already reported on here by Johnathan Pearce, now published by the Libertarian Alliance as Economic Notes No. 111, printable out as a .pdf but (more to the point for bloggers) copiable and pastable as an .html April 5th, 2009 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The Federal Reserve…along with other central banks, is a legal counterfeiter.” Paul Kasriel, economist at Northern Trust, the US bank. He is in favour of all this “quantitative easing”, by the way, but he is far too honest an economist not to identify what that euphemism actually stands for. And he predicts that it certainly will trigger inflation later on. April 2nd, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two splendid snippets facing each other in today’s print edition of the Times. First Chris Ayres’s Los Angeles notebook:
And more substantially, Daniel Finkelstein on anti-capitalists:
He is really not doing them a disservice. The common motivation is a sort of snobbish distain about vulgar ways of enjoying the material world; and the same thing finds its head in the circles of power, too, as a sort of neo-puritan obsession with work, regulation and oversight of individuals to make sure that no-one is getting away with the sin of unapproved lifestyle. April 1st, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is perfectly possible for inertia to be beneficial and an improvement, if the alternative is poorer. It is the same fallacy as the claim of the current Government concerning the current economic crisis, that ‘doing nothing is not an option’.” – Former England rugby player and man of firm views on the sport, Brian Moore. Now a television commentator and newspaper pundit, Mr Moore sees parallels between the rule changes in rugby – some of which have been a retrogade step, in his view – and the reaction of certain governments to the credit crisis. March 30th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The cognitive dissonance you speak of is found on the right as well, it is not confined to the left. Actually, the problem is, there is no dissonance, there is an honest and fair dinkum doublethink, with no internal conflict. – CountingCats, commenting here. March 29th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Those who are incapable of earning our respect often end up demanding it.” – A commenter called Chris on this blog post. March 27th, 2009 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
What the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could never have predicted is that the citizens would subject themselves to the scrutiny of the cameras voluntarily. The deeper threat to human dignity in 2009 is not state surveillance but pathological exhibitionism. In so many respects, what Orwell foretold has come to pass — with the crucial difference that it has been embraced by consumers not imposed upon them by the totalitarian state. March 26th, 2009 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I work for the Police and I for one think this is a fantastic idea along with every other scheme that is or is threatened to be brought in ot fight this insidiuos and invisible fight against terrorism. I can’t wait to change my title from Constable to Stasi… – Robert Pangborn, a commenter on an article Social network sites ‘monitored’ March 25th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s been an open secret for years that Israel possesses nuclear capability. It’s an interesting comment on the genuine – as opposed to rhetorical – threat that the Zionist Entity is deemed to pose that it’s only now, when Iran is on the verge of joining the nuclear club, that other Middle Eastern and Arab countries get concerned about developing their own programs. March 24th, 2009 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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