There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state, that which happens when you don’t do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come.
– Madsen Pirie explaining the folly of Common Error No. 61
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Iran is also the theatre of very optimistic developments. Hashem Aghajari is an Islamic revolutionary-turned-history-professor. He was one of the student activists of 1979 who later fully participated in the brutal repression after Khomeini’s coming to power. He is now challenging the infallibility of the ruling mullahs and calls upon Iranians to think for themselves instead of blindly accepting whatever is preached in Friday sermons, a piece of advice for which he has been sentenced to death. But he is now supported by the students and professors at most of the country’s universities and thousands of ordinary citizens, workers, and cultural leaders. Where Aghajari wants to reform Islam; the students want a total separation between mosque and state. He wants an Islamic Reformation, but the demonstrators are interested in the creation of a secular civil society. He is a reformer, but they are revolutionaries. – Ibn Warraq who is both optimistic (as in the above quote) and pessimistic (as elsewhere in the same piece) about whether the Muslim world can become civilised March 10th, 2008 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 [Samantha] Power is gone now – but not for the odd article this post points to. No the lady was fired because she said (to a journalist for ‘The Scotsman’) that Hillary Clinton was a monster who would do anything for power. In short the lady was dismissed for telling the truth. After all the Democrats have to kiss and make up at some point. – Paul Marks March 9th, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Even the most hard-bitten student activist would recognise its not an abrogation of his radicalism to get an ID card if it helps him to provide an assurance of his identity to those who provide services to him. – Ms Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (quoted in Computer Weekly) reacting to criticism by the National Union of Students of plans to hustle and hassle students to register themselves for life on the great and glorious National Identity Register. It is just extraordinary how tone deaf to human life, how uncomprehending of the impulses to privacy and personal liberty, this strange class of apparatchiks is. Jacqui Smith’s own concept of radical activism may not extend very far. A friend who was her contemporary at Hertford College commented:
It seems she has grown, changed, and reinvented herself – as a monstrously offensive political hack. March 8th, 2008 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
These things are only more difficult because the govt has deliberately made them so. Pushing my head underwater, then giving me the option of buying an overpriced snorkel isn’t doing me any favours. – Paul, a commentator on The Register, merely the funniest of many pertinent comments on this story: ‘Boil a frog’ ID card rollout to continue until 2012. Regular readers may gather I have been a little busy today. March 6th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. – Ronald Reagan February 29th, 2008 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
You should see an ID card like a passport in-country. – Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today. February 26th, 2008 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
Surveys about happiness also show that people say they are happier when they feel their circumstances are improving. They are less likely to profess happiness in a wealthy society that is static than in a less rich society which is advancing. It is the improvement which counts, not the actual level. Jefferson rightly pointed to “the pursuit of happiness” rather than to any given level of it. Humans are not the sort to enjoy static contentment. They seek challenges and the thrill of achievement. The peaceful calm of the Lotos Eaters is not for them, and neither are the sheep-pen and the secure pasture. Those who think of happiness as needs satisfied fail to spot that those needs include challenge and change. Humans are aspirational, seeking much more than the provision of necessities. Better a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. – Madsen Pirie reaches 39 in his Common Errors series at the ASI Blog (he has today reached 42) February 22nd, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. – Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943. February 21st, 2008 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some social critics go on about The Permissive Society, but what we are really facing is The Priggish Society currently being created by busybody politicians and other authority figures… Going out for a night in a bar with close friends is now denounced as “binge drinking”. Smoking an occasional joint means you are a “drug addict”. February 18th, 2008 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hunter did something that none of us had the guts to do – he led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have the guts to lead. To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He’d never lived his life on anybody else’s terms. – James Carville, chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign, on Hunter S. Thompson February 16th, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day. – Douglas Adams quoted (last month but who cares?) by Kevin Marks February 15th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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