The only thing I believe in print these days is the date.
– Sienna Miller
Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.
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November 24th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 You cannot trust any agency with people’s personal data. The quote of Britain’s political week. There is a massive breakthrough in the public understanding of the database state, and the Government is finding it a real struggle to contain it. BBC journalists (Eg. Newsnight, The World Tonight, etc) are making an explicit connection between the three real monsters: the National Identity Scheme, Connecting for Health, and ContactPoint. My personal touchstone for success is when Criminal Records Bureau disclosure starts to be criticised in the public presses. Bonus quote:
Now is not a time to rest. November 22nd, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word. – Daniel Villey, “Economique et Morale”, in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing. November 21st, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“You could argue, indeed, that the great lesson of the 20th century – desperately hard learned in less fortunate countries than Britain, but tough to swallow even here – is that the state does not have the answer to human problems in the way that so many hoped so naively for so long.” – Martin Kettle, at the Guardian. I love his expression “you could argue”. There’s no argument, Martin. The failure of the state is so total, so widely proven, that it is quite astonishing that it has taken some folk a while to catch on. November 20th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
But Mark wants freedom for unhealthy things! – one of the Liberal Democrat leadership candidates on today’s BBC Politics Show. November 18th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The stock market is pure capitalism. The stock you buy doesn’t know if you’re white or black, male or female, old or young, American or French. Prices are dictated by supply and demand and nothing else. It’s global, efficient, wildly volatile, always surprising: raw and beautiful.” Ken Fisher investment management chief and Forbes columnist. November 17th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 16th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Muslim is somebody who believes that a man called Muhammad… passed on certain revelations and instructions directly from God Himself. By logic, a non-Muslim is somebody who does not accept that Muhammad was any such prophet, and thereby rejects his teachings as not having come from God… If, contrary to Muhammad’s claims (assuming he has been represented correctly), we do not believe that he was any such prophet from God, what do we truly think of the man? The answer must be one of three possibilities: either Muhammad was a liar, or he was deluded, or he was mad. These are the only possible conclusions of the intellectually honest non-Muslim. Let us ponder one of the three possibilities – that Muhammad was a liar. Would it be unreasonable then to posit that a man willing to deceive many thousands of people, perhaps out of hunger for power or self-aggrandisement, could be labelled as ‘evil’? If so, on what basis do we object to an extremely negative portrayal (either graphic or prose) of such an ‘evildoer’? Whether or not such a portrayal may appear ‘gratuitous’ or provoke widespread anger, it would nonetheless be a justifiable expression of dissent. Therefore, to place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal ‘non-Muslim’ free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one’s position in any significant detail without committing the act of blasphemy. – from On the Right to Give Offence by Steve Edwards quoted today by David Thompson November 15th, 2007 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
“My faith in airport security has never been the same since I noticed that the man confiscating the shaving foam in my hand luggage (while leaving me with the razor) had the word HATE tatooed on his knuckles.” November 14th, 2007 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 13th, 2007 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
And anyway I wanted to see what it would feel like ordering a three hundred quid starter – Giles Coren, reviewing the St James’-Ukrainian restaurant Divo for The Times. The capacity at will to do something improbable (and quite possibly stupid) in order to find out what it feels like is to my mind the measure of a society worth living in. Mr Coren did not have to consult religious authorities about that starter, and no government inspector determined for him whether it was fair or appropriate fo him to do so, or insisted on him having counselling first, or afterwards. He is not confined in a fixed universe of approved experiences. For how long? The vigilantes are abroad, though they are coming for the poor first. And everyone ought to be free to be daft, not just oligarchs. November 11th, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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