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The SNP’s plan should worry us all. Juryless rape trials will set a dangerous precedent. This elite suspicion of the public could erode the right to trial by jury in other cases, too. After all, if members of the public are assumed to be incapable of taking jury duty seriously in rape trials, then why allow us to be jurors at all? Scotland’s lawyers are right. This is indeed ‘a deeply troubling attack’ on the criminal-justice system. Women must not allow justice to be destroyed in our name. May 21st, 2023 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Making it harder to evict residents is only likely to make it harder to rent. Landlords will inevitably be more selective about who they offer properties to and charge higher rents when they cannot quickly evict bad tenants. That is likely to disproportionately hurt those who are poorer, younger, and from minority communities.” – Matthew Lesh, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, commenting on measures by the current “Conservative” government, to make it more difficult for landlords to evict tenants in certain cases (there appears to be some issue about the details). The impact is the same as making it harder to fire workers. Other things being equal, fewer people get hired. (Look at Italy, where firing people is hard and produces bizarre effects.) The inverted quotes around “Conservative” are, as you might guess, there for a reason. May 16th, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I worry when I read stories like the business secretary Kemi Badenoch complaining that she cannot deliver her party’s manifesto plans to scrap all EU laws due to Whitehall intransigence. It makes me wonder who exactly is in charge of public policy: elected ministers or their unelected officials? There is an attitude among senior officials that they know better than these’ here-today-gone-tomorrow’ ministers. The old dictum of ‘advisers advise, ministers decide’ seems reversed. We have unintentionally ended up with a self-propagating bureaucracy who are either averse to change, or who feel they are above the democratic decision-making process. May 15th, 2023 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
For three years, I’ve been reluctant to say anything about the elephant in the room, the near-complete failure of libertarians to stand up to the lockdown and mandate regime. It was a moment in history that was tailor-made for them. Everything in their training taught them to be suspicious of government power and relentless in the defense of liberty. Instead they mostly went silent. Worse, they became the Praetorian Guard of the lockdown Caesars, giving them cover when they deserved it least. The “radical” libertarians defaulted to a completely conventional careerism, even to the point of manufacturing rationales for terrible attacks on the most vulnerable. May 13th, 2023 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
“In recent years, the Guardian has devoted considerable time and energy to exposing the truth about Britain and slavery, as if we didn’t know it already. The fact that a British government was one of the first to outlaw the practise in Europe and the Royal Navy helped end the trade worldwide was to the Woke Left too little too late – which it was. But that was then and this is now, which makes it a little galling that the dead of Bristol and Liverpool and, naturally, the City of London, are being put in the dock for events that took place when ships were still propelled by sail and a woman could be hanged for stealing a sheep.” The great thing for a while, in the minds of some, about atoning for the sins of people decades/centuries ago is that there is no real cost to oneself, although in the case of proposed reparations to the alleged descendants of slaves, the bill could be very large indeed. The absurdities and injustices this will cause, and the way it undercuts notions of personal responsibility by suggesting a whole nation should pick up a bill for something done by people a long time ago, are too obvious to need explaining in these pages. (Douglas Murray is good on the subject, as he is on most things.) These are, as the late Robert A Heilein said, the Crazy Years. May 11th, 2023 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reporters without Borders seem to be of a similar mindset — they don’t know how anyone could object to these laws either and can’t see how anyone could consider them limiting. Is their assessment of our level of press freedom wrong? As of today, it’s probably not. That’s not to say that a wide variety of different opinions are available in the mainstream media or that dissent is encouraged; more that things restraining dissent and argument are philosophical and held in place by an unspoken consensus amongst the powerful. Hate Speech laws will, ironically, change that. Suppressing speech through arrest that you were mostly successful in suppressing through consensus might prove a tactical error. Who knows what next year’s rankings will hold? May 10th, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Myers clearly regards Bridgen’s claim that the mRNA vaccines may be doing more harm than good to be nonsense, but in fact it is well-supported by evidence. For instance, British Medical Journal Editor Dr. Peter Doshi along with Dr. Joseph Fraiman and colleagues examined the data from the vaccine clinical trials and found that, compared to controls, the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 10.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Pfizer and 15.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Moderna. When combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated, or 1 in 800. Note that the adverse events they looked at included those from COVID-19 itself, meaning the findings imply that among trial participants the vaccines were doing more harm than good. Similarly, Dr. Kevin Bardosh and colleagues – hailing from the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Edinburgh and Washington, among others – found that for every COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented by boosters in previously uninfected young adults, 18 to 98 serious adverse events occurred, including 1.5 to 4.6 cases of booster-associated myocarditis in males. That’s more harm than good, at least for healthy young adults. Nice fisking, read the whole thing. May 5th, 2023 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The major retailers fleeing the city’s downtown have been so numerous that last weekend the San Francisco Chronicle felt compelled to publish a map so readers could keep track of the exodus.” – Wall Street Journal. ($) May 4th, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh, how we wish the laws of thermodynamics could be altered, in our favour. Air-source heat pumps, which included the “mini-splits” popular in warmer climates, will provide less and less heat, the colder it gets outside, and less and less cooling, the warmer it gets outside. And in both cases, will use more and more electricity to produce less and less heating or cooling, as the outside temperature rises or falls, respectively – if you see what I mean. In other words, the more you need them, the less effective and efficient they are – the perfect government solution. You couldn’t make it up. – Commenter llamas accurately describing the lunacy of heat pumps, which really are the perfect analogy for government: the more you need them, the less effective and efficient they are. April 30th, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Those who would change every aspect of our economic lives are using environmental collapse as the excuse. April 29th, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
In late 2021, Wired, the formerly libertarian magazine that now champions surveillance and censorship, called for spying on private messaging in the name of preventing harm. Encrypted messaging apps “are intentionally built for convenience and speed, for person-to-person communication as well as large group connections,” wrote Wired. “Yet it is these same conditions that have fueled abusive and illegal behavior, disinformation and hate speech, and hoaxes and scams; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users. As early as 2018, investigative reports have explored the role that these very features played in dozens of deaths in India and Indonesia as well as elections in Nigeria and Brazil.” The Omidyar report explicitly argued against the right to privacy in text messaging. “Privacy is essential to building trust, but it is not a singular standard for safety,” wrote Omidyar Foundation authors. “We believe online safety is the result of trustworthy technology and enlightened regulation. While the shift toward adopting end-to-end encryption has reinforced trust between users, the technological architecture that encourages scale, virality, and monetization has ultimately facilitated the rapid and large-scale spread of dangerous, distorted, and deceitful content.” It is a shocking statement to read, especially when you realize that Omidyar, with a net worth of $9 billion, has long claimed to be a champion of free speech and privacy. He even bankrolled the online magazine, The Intercept in response to revelations by Edward Snowden that the U.S. government was illegally spying on American citizens. What is going on here? Why is the censorship industry now trying to spy on and censor our private messages? April 27th, 2023 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Months after Zweig published his report on the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi published a separate deep dive exploring the Virality Project, an initiative launched by Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. The project, which Taibbi described as “a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs,” is noteworthy because officials made it clear that a goal was not just to flag false information, but information that was true but inconvenient to the government’s goals. Reports of “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway,” “worrisome jokes,” and “natural immunity” were all characterized as “potential violations,” as were conversations “interpreted to suggest that coronavirus might have leaked from a lab.” In what Taibbi describes as “a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content,” the Virality Project began analyzing millions of posts each day from platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Medium, TikTok, and other social media sites, which were submitted through the JIRA ticketing system. On February 22, 2021, in a video no longer public, Stanford welcomed social media leaders to the group and offered instruction on how to join the JIRA system. In contrast to Twitter’s previous internal guidance, which required narratives on Covid-19 to be “demonstrably false” before any censorship actions were taken, the Virality Project made it clear that information that was true was also fair game if it undermined the larger aims of the government and the Virality Project. April 25th, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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