We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
“M8 Yer Dugs A Nazi.” That link takes you to a video in which a man who wished to annoy his girlfriend trained her cute pug to lift its paw in a “Nazi salute” in response to Nazi slogans. Well, it used to. At present for me it takes me to a video of a black screen saying “This video is not available in your country”. Mark Meechan, the man who made the video, is from Scotland and I am in England, but I do not think that explains it.
From the Telegraph‘s account and even more from a swing round Mr Meechan’s “Count Dankula” YouTube channel, it does sound as if his humour tends towards the crass and tasteless. But do these words from the beginning of the video sound to you like the voice of a man committed to the triumph of Nazism?
The court heard that at the start of the clip, he said: “My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi.”
In the video, the dog is seen perking up when it hears the statements and appears to lift its paw to the “Sieg Heil” command in the video, which has now been viewed more than million times.
Mr Meechan is currently on trial at Airdrie Sheriff Court for committing a hate crime. If convicted he faces up to a year in prison. The verdict was due two days ago but has been delayed for reasons unknown.
One of the more detailed reports on the case came from the Washington Post:
The dog is also seen watching a Hitler rally during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The dog appears to raise its paw when Hitler proclaims “Sieg Heil.”
“Who’s a good wee Nazi?” Meechan praised the dog.
The video ricocheted around the Internet and has now been viewed more than 3 million times. Some found it amusing; others feel it was crude and anti-Semitic, including a woman who Meechan says confronted him, then spread dog feces on his front door.
Prosecutors say it’s a hate crime.
That April, soon after the video was posted, police knocked on Meechan’s door in Coatbridge, a town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, he told Alex Jones. The officers told him that he was being charged with a hate crime and that the video could be seen as promoting violence against Jews. They told him to change his clothes, took pictures of his apartment and hauled him off to jail.
He spent a night there and is now on trial for violating the Communications Act of 2003, which prohibits using public telecommunications to send discriminatory religious messages.
When it came out a couple of weeks ago, I managed to miss this gem from the Guardian’s “Associate Editor, Culture”, Claire Armitstead.
Literary fiction is in crisis. A new chapter of funding authors must begin
Unlike the performing arts, publishing has always been a largely commercial sector that has had to square its own circles. This is reflected in the fact that it gets only 7% of the funding cake handed out by the Arts Council, compared with 23% to theatre and 11% to dance.
Most of that money has gone to support publishers who produce poetry and literature in translation, which have never been able to pay their way. So there will be blood on the carpet if existing resources are shifted to support literary novelists.
There will be those who argue that this just shows that literary fiction is a hangover from the past, and the poor dears should knuckle down and resign themselves to writing what people actually want to read. But few would dare to make the same argument about experimental theatre or dance.
A number of the comments may have helped Ms Armitstead revise upwards her estimate of the audacity of readers outside the literary elite. A sentence or two later she makes one of the most pathetic cases for subsidy I have ever seen:
Moreover, research from the New School for Social Research in New York last year suggested that literary fiction has a measurable social value, increasing empathy levels in readers where more popular forms of genre fiction do not.
It seems unkind to the readers of literary fiction to say that they in particular are in such dire need of an injection of empathy as to justify a targeted intervention. But her profession has obliged Ms Armitstead to live at close quarters with this reclusive and marginal tribe for many years and no doubt she knows their character better than I do.
More recently, the author and occasional Guardian columnist Tim Lott shot back, which is how I came to see the earlier piece. He writes,
Why should we subsidise writers who have lost the plot?
This would not be uncommon. Worrying about plot and story has long been unfashionable on the literary scene. Style and voice are what gathers plaudits. Martin Amis wrote: “If the prose isn’t there, then you’re reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story [and] plot.” Edna O’Brien suggested plot was for “silly boys”, which might explain why men in particular are reluctant to buy literary novels.
It might also explain why, when I went to teach postgraduate students at the University of East Anglia – the foremost writing course in the country – about the fundamentals of plot, I was astonished to discover that these superbly talented young writers knew nothing whatsoever about it after years of studying the form.
Mr Lott is within the subsidy-bubble himself, hence his surprise that those studying creative writing at university were unaware of such vulgar skills as making a plot. But at least he’s in the bubble looking out.
Shocking news, despite the best efforts of voters over the years, and repeated manifesto promises, and reform of the House of Lords, all of which has been to no avail, parasites are invading the Houses of Parliament.
As Oliver Cromwell put it:
You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
This posting may not see the light of day until tomorrow, or worse, because this evening I have a date at Chateau Samizdata to see in the New Year. But, I will now try to get it posted before the end of the year that it is retrospectively about. And yes, it’s one of those month-by-month photo-postings, one photo for each month.
Unlike, say, Michael Jennings, I not only live in London but spend almost all of my time in London, and I spend a lot of that time wandering about in London, taking photos of London’s architecture, of its adverts, of its other photographers, and of its many other oddities, such as this one:
I love to discover out of the way spots in London, spots that others don’t know about, but which, if they did, they might enjoy greatly, almost as much as I do. That strange and rather funny sculpture (be patient with this link (to my personal blog) – I do believe it worth the wait), which I photoed in January of 2017, is to be found beside the River Lea, just before it does a kink on its way south. It’s a hard place to describe, because if you look on Google Maps there is little of note in the area. The best I can do is to say that to get to this place, I went to Bromley-by-Bow tube station, went east across the River Lea and then went south, past big warehouses, of the sort that have become so important in this age of computerised shopping. There’s a big Amazon shed there, for instance.
The above sculpture concerns itself with the more regular sort of shopping, and what with it being the work of an artist, she thinks that it criticises such shopping. Materialism, the badness of capitalism, consumerism, blah blah. But to me it looks more like a celebration of shopping. Whatever it “is”, I like it.
Next up, a photo which notes the fact that exactly a hundred years ago from this year, there was that Revolution, in Russia. I didn’t visit the exhibition that this poster advertises, because I feared that too many of the exhibits would be celebrations of that disastrously destructive event, and would hence annoy me. But I did photo the advert:
Thank goodness for the movie The Death of Stalin, which came out later this year, and which I did see. That is very comical, but it is anything but a celebration of Soviet communism. The horrors are not wallowed in photographically, but they are portrayed, in the form of the terror felt by all those who had anything to do with Stalin, and in the form of all the absurd events that Stalin’s most casual instructions were liable to set in motion. Although I promise nothing, I hope to be writing more here about that movie.
March, and more politics, this time in the form of a big anti-Brexit demo that I chanced upon, in Parliament Square:
It’s tempting to mock this demo as a complete farce. It happened, after all, several months after the Brexit referendum had yielded its result. But although a demo like this attracts little public notice, given that the vote it denounced was, you know, a vote, such demos do still accomplish quite a lot. There is more to politics than mere voters merely voting. Demos, much like indoor meetings (of the sort I continue to hold every month in my own home), strengthen the personal relationships which add up to a political movement, and draw more adherents to the cause, whatever it is. Thanks to this effort, and many other less photogenic efforts, the anti-Brexiteers have been able to put all sorts of political barriers in the way of Brexit, to spread all sorts of doubts in the minds of waverers. I still don’t think they will accomplish their central goal, but they are putting up quite a fight.
→ Continue reading: My 2017 in London photos
This was a real threat to the press, and our #FreeThePress campaign urged citizens to say No to both prospects. Section 40 would mean strong-arming newspapers into signing up to a press-backed regulator – ending centuries of a (relatively) free press. What’s more, the only press regulator that has been approved by the Leveson-created Press Recognition Panel is Impress, which is staffed by snobbish ‘hackademics’ and funded by tabloid-loathing millionaire Max Mosley.
– Naomi Firsht
Matthew Parris recently, in the Times (registration required):
The media and political world is in a lather about whether the (now) de facto deputy prime minister once accessed pornography in his office. Here I am, fretting — some will say nitpicking — about whether it was appropriate for a now-retired Metropolitan Police officer (1) to have gathered and kept what he claims to be the evidence for these allegations, though there is no suggestion the law was broken; (2) to have disobeyed orders by keeping the evidence; and (3) nine years later to have put the allegations into the public domain.
My acquaintance with Damian Green is slight. He strikes me as one of those necessary second-rank men (in a world of third and fourth-rank men) who combine a useful level-headedness with a dispiriting blandness: podgy and unflappable, with the advantage at least — a quality in a Tory MP to be fallen on with relief — of not being mad. So my strong sense of injustice in this case has little to do with the merits of Mr Green and everything to do with what looks like a co-ordinated police vendetta against a politician they’ve clashed with.
He concludes:
When it comes to issues of rumour and reputation I’m no dry rationalist. Every journalist knows that the appearance of things does matter, and that stern logic cannot always rescue a wounded public figure. We know too that “process” stories often fail to hold public attention, and this column’s complaint about the abuse of police powers is essentially a process story.
But behind process may lie principle. What Damian Green was alleged to have watched might be thought disgusting, but what two former Met officers have been up to is little short of sinister. Disgust can rule the headlines and may win the day, but former police officers are trying to destroy a senior minister with whom they have clashed. This is London, not Chicago. Parliamentarians, in retreat for a decade now, should unite to push back.
I hold no particular brief for Mr Green; I disagree with him on Brexit. It actually worries me that some Brexiters I know are almost gloating that a pro-Remain senior Tory has had to resign after giving, it is said, less-than-truthful answers about the matter of his computer, but the fact remains that, as Parris says, evidence gathered in a decade-ago investigation, and not remotely connected to it, was brought up for no other reason than I can think of to embarrass and damage an elected politician. The ex-copper in question, who appears to nurse a grudge, seems, as Parris says, to be arguing not that what Green did was illegal, but improper. So we are getting into the murky territory of police officers taking moral stands, they claim, about what a democratically elected political figure does. (See here, for a version of events in the Guardian.)
I remember in the early days of this blog that we sometimes used to refer to the UK police as the “paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper”, more concerned about enforcing PC doctrines, or chasing after real or alleged bogeymen of the Right, such as those saying mean things about homosexuals, Muslims, etc, than catching crooks. The recent period post the Jimmy Savile fiasco (a paedophile who preyed on people for decades) seems to have seen the police morph, perhaps out of guilt about failing to nail the old BBC presenter, into a hyperactive pursuer of alleged perverts, with due process of law taking a back seat. The recent shabby treatment of Sir Cliff Richard, the entertainer, is an example of where this sort of zeal leads.
As an aside, it appears that the Tory Party, in its enfeebled parliamentary state, is or has been unwilling to clamp down on the police, to insist on reforms and push back against the assault on Common Law principles of fairness and due process. The Met are not necessarily part of any sort of Deep State (conspiracy theory alert!) taking root but they are certainly showing a level of presumption that is dangerous in a liberal order. The police are, in some respects, out of control, and need to be reined in. Just imagine the damage that can be done if police are emboldened to chase after enemies if or when Mr Corbyn and his re-heated Marxist allies take office. Something to think about for 2018.
Signs perhaps of MPs waking up to the problem.
Sorry for the unoriginal choice of title. This is about the fourth Samizdata post with a title related to that slogan, and the umpteenth to mention it. Don’t blame us. If the authorities would stop repeatedly proving that slogan to be a cruel travesty, we would be happy to stop going on about it.
Until that day arrives, the Guardian has a good report on the latest example of what innocent people have to fear:
Police made ‘appalling’ errors in using internet data to target suspects
Police have made serious errors getting search warrants for suspected sex offenders, leading to the targeting of innocent people and children being wrongly separated from their parents, an official report has revealed.
The errors – highlighted by the interception of communications commissioner, Sir Stanley Burnton, in his annual report to the prime minister – had “appalling” consequences and related to some of the most intrusive powers the state can use against its citizens.
In one example, two children were separated from their parents for a weekend while the parents were questioned as suspects in a child sexual exploitation case. It later emerged that police had raided the wrong address due to an error on the documentation and the parents were innocent.
Digital devices belonging to innocent people were also forensically examined by police, Burnton said.
The errors identified were mainly because details were wrongly entered into software that helps police work out the location where a specific IP (internet protocol) address has been used.
But IP addresses are routinely reassigned by internet providers. Burnton warned investigators not to rely on them when trying to work out who is hiding behind the anonymity of the internet to commit crimes.
He wrote: “These [errors] are far more common than is acceptable, especially in cases relating to child sex exploitation. The impact on some victims of these errors has been appalling.”
The BBC were interviewing an ex police officer today who was complaining that it wasn’t their fault because of “cuts” and they couldn’t resource their investigations properly. This is nonsense. The cases were assigned an investigation officer. He – or she – failed to do their job properly. They also don’t need “resources” to forward all of the evidence to the defence team. They fucked up. This has much to do with politicising the police and the culture in which they now operate. They have gone from not believing the “victim” to believing them unconditionally. Somewhere along the way, they lost the ability to conduct an impartial investigation of all of the relevant evidence. To do this they need to take a neutral stance of neither believing nor not believing until the evidence determines whether there is a case to answer. Then and only then, seek to charge.
– Longrider
Of all the crimes against humanity that one can imagine, it may seem hard (or perhaps all to easy) for the visitors to this parish to imagine that, if you are an employer, offering your employees a pay rise can be regarded as legally actionable under principles of Human Rights law, and give rise to a claim for compensation. But such is the law in the United Kingdom, in defined circumstances. Those circumstances being where an employer’s principal or only motive for making an offer (regardless of it being accepted) is to get 2 or more employees to forego their rights to collective bargaining.
The situation was recently highlighted in a case involving a UK branch of a German engineering company, Kostal UK Ltd.
The employer had a ‘recognition agreement’ for a group of its workers with Unite (the UK’s largest Trade Union). This agreement is described as ‘binding in honour only’, and under it, the employer agreed to negotiate terms of employment for those covered by the agreement with the Union, rather than with the employees directly. it was not, by itself, legally enforceable. However, despite this ‘agreement’ being unenforceable as such, the Union’s ‘right’ to negotiate on behalf of its members is protected by a specific piece of legislation which prevents employers from making offers of different (including better) terms to two or more of its employees if they are (or are proposing to be) covered by a (non-binding) collective agreement between the employer and a Trade Union, if the employer’s motive is to go over the heads of the Union to reach an agreement with the employees represented by the Union.
Under this law, it is, of course, for the employer to prove what its motive was for making any offers to its employees in these circumstances, and if the motive (or main motive) is benign, there is no liability. And the risk? An award of £3,907 per employee for every offer that is made. In the Kostal case, it came out at around £422,000 per some reports, as the employer made two offers to around 57 employees. For some bizarre reason, apparently to do with its German parent company, its first offer, made in December, included a Christmas bonus, but its second offer, made in January did not, so two offers were made and two lots of compensation (at the time £3,800 per offer) was due, twice penalising what was essentially a single course of conduct.
Why is this ‘law’ in force, you may ask. The answer is that it is to protect the Human Rights of the workers, as, if an employer gets fed up dealing with a Union on pay negotiations, and tries to bypass it, so that the terms of employment of two or more employees covered by a collective agreement are no longer decided in line with that agreement, this is, according to the European Court of Human Rights, a violation of the right of freedom of association.
As the judgment in this case puts it:
…under Article 11 of the Convention, which provides:
“1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
2. No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary to a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others…”
The judgment goes on to explain the ‘reasoning’ of the European Court of Human Rights (the Strasbourg Court):
“In other words, the Strasbourg Court held that states have positive obligations to secure effective enjoyment of Article 11 rights; and if direct offers outside the collective bargaining process can be made and would lead to less favourable treatment of workers who do not accept, that acts as a disincentive to the exercise of Article 11 rights and allows employers to undermine or frustrate a trade union’s ability to strive for protection of its members.
So, lest an employer find a Union is asking for Mars and it can only offer the Moon, and it offers the Moon to Alphie and Bill, Charlie’s right to claim Mars is protected by making the employer pay compensation to Alphie and Bill for having the temerity of trying to cut them a deal, or even if the deal for Alphie and Bill is Venus plus Mars. And, lest you ask, if Alphie and Bill accept the offer, it is still enforceable against the employer.
Having met someone who went through the gates of Belsen at its liberation, it is hard not to think that Human Rights law is a sick mockery of the dead.
I am not saying that this judgment is outwith legal principles, it is starkly in keeping with them as they stand. With this as ‘law’, the UK has a long journey back to a Common Law that can be deduced from reason.
Today’s weird Guardian story is not directly political:
Surgeon admits marking his initials on the livers of two patients
A surgeon has pleaded guilty to marking his initials on the livers of two patients while performing transplant surgery.
In a hearing at Birmingham crown court on Wednesday, Simon Bramhall admitted two counts of assault by beating relating to incidents on 9 February and 21 August 2013. He pleaded not guilty to the more serious charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
The renowned liver, spleen and pancreas surgeon used the gas argon, used to stop livers bleeding during operations and to highlight an area due to be worked on, to sign his initials into the patients’ organs. The marks left by argon are not thought to impair the organ’s function and usually disappear by themselves.
The 53-year-old was first suspended from his post as a consultant surgeon at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital in 2013 after a colleague spotted the initials “SB” on an organ during follow-up surgery on one of Bramhall’s patients.
As one might expect, this is being treated as a crime:
Elizabeth Reid, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said Bramhall’s actions were an abuse of the trust placed in him by the patients.
“It was an intentional application of unlawful force to a patient whilst anaesthetised,” she said. “His acts in marking the livers of those patients, in a wholly unnecessary way, were deliberate and conscious acts on his part.”
But not everyone agrees.
Following reports of Bramhall’s suspension, his former patient Tracy Scriven told the Birmingham Mail that the surgeon should be immediately reinstated. “Even if he did put his initials on a transplanted liver, is it really that bad? I wouldn’t have cared if he did it to me. The man saved my life,” she said.
She has a point. As was discussed here yesterday there is a push (it’s called a “consultation” but no one is in any doubt what the desired answer is) for England to follow the example of Wales and institute a system in which unless a person objects in advance to their organs being donated after death their consent will be assumed.
Why, then, should Mr Bramhall not say that he assumed that his patients were OK with him putting his graffiti tag on their livers? They didn’t sign a form objecting, did they?
Today the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell launched a report commissioned by the Labour Party from GFC Economics & Clearpoint Corporation Management Ltd. I have had a quick read of it, not in any detail but enough to think that you might be interested in reading it too. Here it is:
Financing Investment: Interim Report
It is called Financing Investment but it does not say much about financing investment. I suppose a report called Let’s Put The National Investment Bank And The Strategic Investment Board And A Bit Of the Bank Of England All Next Door To Each Other In Birmingham And Mention It Twenty Times is better for votes in Birmingham. They’ll be able to put out a special Birmingham edition of Monopoly with that street collecting a massive rent.
However there is more to this report than just more swanky government buildings in Birmingham. Branch offices in Glasgow and Cardiff are also promised. And this caught my eye:
There is a risk that the disproportionate number of technology companies in London and the South East will increase, exacerbating regional inequality.
You hear that, South East? Only in Labourland is an increase in the number of technology companies in one area seen as a “risk” in itself.
But that is a mere taster. On page 47 we begin to reach the meat of the proposal. Rejoice! There is to be something called a Strategic Investment Board.
The Strategic Investment Board will sit at the heart of the economy, coordinating R&D, commercialisation and information flows
We learn that
3. The Strategic Investment Board will draw on science and technology to devise comprehensive policy proposals for investment. There will be an emphasis on R&D investment. Private sector R&D will not be crowded out. It will be encouraged.
It is nice to be reassured that private sector R&D will not be crowded out, but the very fact that the possibility is mentioned does rather imply that public sector R&D will be crowded in. Who will be deciding who gets this “investment”, and what reason have we to suppose they would be good at it? The answer is not reassuring:
5. Scientists and researchers at the cutting edge of their fields will be appointed to senior advisory positions. The Strategic Investment Board will also seek the advice of trade unionists, businesses and leading industrialists.
Ah, “getting round the table”, I remember that. I was too young to understand all the hoo-hah about Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife in 1969, but I can just about remember the series of increasingly ineffectual “Solemn and Binding agreements” and “Concordats” agreed between Labour governments and the unions over beer and sandwiches at No.10 as the 1970s wore on. None of them stuck.
(Edit: in the comments Sam Duncan says, “So they’re basically digging Neddie and the NEB out of the dustbin and bunging them in the microwave for a couple of minutes, then? That’s the Great Corbyn Plan?”)
On page 48 it says,
The Strategic Investment Board will scrutinise and advise the monetary and financial policy authorities as banks shift from unproductive lending to innovative companies.
That all sounds very nice, but why is a bunch of scientists, businessmen and trade unionists moonlighting from their proper jobs expected to be able to tell what lending is unproductive? While lending to “innovative companies” can turn out well, it is not a game for amateurs. God only knows that the banks have not always done a good job, but at least it was their job. And it is strange to see the socialists display such faith that the capitalist exploiter will act for the common good and not, for instance, draw an enormous salary augmented by backhanders to ensure that companies in which he has a well-disguised interest get all this luverly investment.
On page 49:
We suggest that the Strategic Investment Board has six permanent committee members plus two
representatives, one each from the National Investment Bank and the publicly-controlled RBS. This
will ensure a consistency between the polices of the National Investment Bank/RBS and the Bank of
England.
Wha-wha-what is the Royal Bank of Scotland doing there? They’re not thinking of using money deposited by the public with RBS for this “investment”, are they? Investment specifically directed at innovative companies? That might, er, cause queues to form outside RBS branches on the morning of a Labour election victory.
I have left the biggest question, where the money is to come from – because I really don’t think RBS can cover it all – as an exercise for the reader. The Labour party answer is “From the National Investment Bank, stupid.”
Brexit: ‘Breakthrough’ deal paves way for future trade talks
In the spirit of 1066 And All That, is this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
N.B. Do not attempt to answer more than one question at a time. (An exception may be made for the Irish Question.)
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
