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]
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I suspect that we all hear a lot about discrimination by employers against people on the basis of sex, race, disability, religion and age, but there is also under the Equality Act 2010 (all 90,000+ words of it) in Great Britain protection against discrimination on the basis of philosophical belief, or the lack of it. Or rather, you have a means of legal retaliation against your employer.
The main case in this area came from an employee who had a profound belief in ‘man-made climate change’, but a recent legal case involving a Mr Harron has shed a bit more light on the issue. Mr Harron apparently had a problem with his employer, for which he sought legal redress, he had:
a belief (which the Employment Tribunal thought genuine) that public service was improperly wasteful of money
He worked for Dorset Police.
One might think that this sounds like a vegan putting himself on the boning line in a slaughterhouse. However, all we know is that Mr Harron though waste of money improper, not public service. It is not clear from the case how it was (or was alleged) that this belief led to Mr Harron suffering at the hands of his employer. Poor Mr Harron has also had a Tribunal waste public money holding a hearing listening to his case and getting the law wrong, and now he will have to go back and re-argue his case all over again.
At least we do know that in order for a ‘belief’ to qualify for legal ‘protection’, there are 5 criteria to be met.
(i) The belief must be genuinely held.
(ii) It must be a belief and not,… …an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available.
(iii) It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour.
(iv) It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.
(v) It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.â
Note that if your ‘belief’ is evidence-based (or even reason-based, like economics), as per (ii) above, your beliefs are not protected, but if you have a belief in an Flying Spaghetti Monster, your beliefs might be ‘protected’. But sacking a libertarian because he did not believe in climate change would be unlawful as it would relate to the ‘absence’ of a belief, rather than the holding of it.
Of course, no libertarian would be seen dead suing his employer over discrimination, so may we say that those of us of a libertarian bent would not sue if fired or harassed at work for being a libertarian (of whatever shade or degree)? In fact, claims of this sort seem to be quite rare.
For information, membership of a political party per se does not qualify one as holding a ‘philosophical belief’, which is an inadvertent judicial recognition of what is fast becoming the ‘bleeding obvious’ with some parties. And ‘Jedi Knights’ will find that the Force (of the law) is not with them.
When I was a child Northern Ireland was rarely off the front pages. That has changed, and thank God for that. Back in the ’90s, I did not expect the peace process to work. This just papers things over, I thought; it has done nothing to solve the fact that the two sides want incompatible things. But the years have gone by and that layer of paper appears to be holding up the whole house.
Why? I am happy it worked, but why has it worked?
Maybe the two sides stopped wanting incompatible things. Or to be accurate, one of them stopped caring so much and the other almost stopped caring at all. In 2011 I saw a few scattered reports about this survey that said 52% of Northern Irish Catholics in the sample wanted to remain in the UK. Given all the blood and ink spilled about that question the reaction to this was curiously muted. Sinn Fein, its raison d’être gone, continued to do pretty well in elections to the NI Assembly, local elections and EU elections.
Today’s Observer has another such story, equally little regarded. Malachi O’Doherty and his subeditor have done their best. They gave it a dramatic headline: “The nationalist identity crisis that could change Northern Ireland for ever”. Yet at time of writing it has a grand total of 54 comments while the umpteenth opinion piece in which a Labour guy with some connection to reality laments the unelectability of Corbyn has 3,882.
Yet Mr O’Doherty’s story records a development that no one would have dared predict twenty years ago:
The easy assumption about politics in Northern Ireland is that it is a contest between two ideas of sovereignty. Unionists see the place as British; nationalists see it as Irish. And the Good Friday Agreement, in effect the constitution â according, as it does, sovereignty rights to each â is the best interim solution to the old quarrel.
This election has signalled a change in the old model of two mirror-image communities at odds with each other
But one of these two blocks is not sticking to the old template. Nationalism â if we can even call it that any more â is diversifying. And the strongest evidence of that is the fact that in the assembly elections Sinn FĂ©in has taken its first reversal in its traditional heartlands of Derry and West Belfast. The party was outflanked on the left by People Before Profit, an anti-austerity party that has also put economic policy before ending partition.
Not just on the left,
And Sinn FĂ©in wasnât the only nationalist party to suffer. The SDLP lost seats in both cities, too â and one of those, held by Fearghal McKinney, was fought over the question of whether abortion should be legalised. McKinney had allowed himself to be photographed beside strident anti-abortion campaigners â and paid for it.
The issue had risen to unexpected relevance with the prosecution of a young woman who had self-administered abortion pills. Both Sinn FĂ©in and the SDLP are now caught in a dilemma over this issue and stand to lose voters whichever way they move. They can placate the conservative Catholics by holding fast to âpro-lifeâ positions and lose the newly secular liberals; or they can go with them, as the Green party did to its advantage, and lose the religious.
Yet even among conservative Catholics who do want a united Ireland, some have put their moral causes before the constitutional question. In East Derry last week, a group of conservative Catholics campaigned for the DUP as the party most likely to resist abortion reform and the legalisation of same-sex marriage.
I am not trying to get anyone to cheer for the unionist or the nationalist side, just observing that a significant change has quietly taken place.
Farewell the plumĂšd troops and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! Oh, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Joveâs dead clamors counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone.
Politicians from all sides lined up to condemn the Conservative Party tactics in the race, but in the aftermath, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon refused to apologise.
“In the rough and tumble of elections, you get stuff said, questions asked,” Fallon told the BBC. “I think it is right that candidates for some of the most important offices in Britain do get scrutinised about their past associations.”
And Fallon is right to refuse to apologise, because apologising for highlighting Sadiq Khan’s vile associates would be like apologising for highlighting the past associates of some ‘right-winger’ who had shared a platform with members of the KKK.
What the Tory Party should be apologising for is running a twattish zillionare green like Zac Goldsmith as a candidate.
Following in the foetid footsteps of Ken Livingston, as expected it looks almost certain that racist judenhass Sadiq Khan has won against Zac Goldsmith. In other words, the Labour Party’s best buddy of a who’s who of islamofascism, has beaten the chĂąteau bottled shit on the far left green lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, all with the blessings of that shrewd political operator, David Cameron. The Evil Party faced the Stupid Party, and the Evil Party won.
It is a bit like the Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump contest across the puddle, writ very small and without anyone getting their hands on nuclear weapons: the two parties competing to see which of them could run a more loathsome candidate.
Tom Peterkin of The Scotsman reports:
Revealed: what can happen when a Named Person reports on your children
The Named Person scheme is to be rolled out across Scotland in August but one fatherâs experience of the pilot rings alarm bells for its many opponents
The handwritten note on an official form read: âMr Smith feels it is impossible to stop his youngest son from sucking his thumb as he needs it for comfort. Did not appear to take advice on board fully.â
The words, written by the two-year-old thumbsuckerâs Named Person, sent a shiver down the spine of Andrew Smith [not his real name], a father-of-two young boys and a respected academic at one of Scotlandâs leading universities.
Contained within a 60-page document that had been compiled about his family, the note referred to a blister which had appeared on the toddlerâs thumb as a result of the childhood habit. It also suggested Smith contact his GP if the blister became âhot to touch or very redâ.
Smith, whose name has been withheld to protect the identities of his children, grew more alarmed as he leafed through the document, the vast majority of which had been redacted.
The surviving extracts appeared to indicate that the minutiae of his family life had been recorded in painstaking detail for almost two years, under a Named Person scheme which has been introduced in his part of the country ahead of its final roll-out across all of Scotland in August. A separate note made by the Named Person charged with keeping an eye on the academicâs two little boys was concerned with nappy rash.
It says elsewhere in the story that someone – exactly who was redacted – had reported this man because his kid had a snotty nose. It is a standing joke how quickly you go from tut-tutting at that sight to sympathizing with the parent once you have children yourself. As one of the commenters to this story, “Badenoch”, says,
There is a lot in this act which gives control over a child and it contain some ‘deceptive’ language with words like ‘wellbeing’. What does that mean legally?
Excerpts from the act.
“the wellbeing of a child or young person is being or would beâpromoted, safeguarded, supported, affected, or subject to an effect.
“assess the wellbeing of the child or young person by reference to the extent to which the child or young person is or, as the case may be, would beâSafe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible, and Included.
If a child picking blackberries falls into a shallow burn and siblings, friends or parents laugh at the child’s misfortune. Has the child been placed in danger, poorly supervised, bullied and excluded? Or Has it been encouraged, active, nurtured and included? Who decides and once written down, and read by a third party, can it then change into something sinister ?
The left has never properly come to terms with its past, and has never fully accounted for its history of anti-Semitism (which today goes under the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’). As the critic and filmmaker Jamie Palmer has written: ‘Soviet anti-Semitism was diligently and uncritically reproduced in the communist press and thus made its way into the ideological bloodstream of the left’. Unlike the very public repudiation of racism on the mainstream right, no similar detoxification has taken place in the ‘bloodstream’ of the left. Properly rooting out anti-Semitism begins by challenging fanatical anti-Zionism. It is perfectly possible to oppose the human rights abuses of the Israeli government without completely dismissing the Zionist project, which in its most basic interpretation means simply the preservation of Israel as a Jewish state. If the anti-Zionists wish to be consistent, they should be equally scathing about other movements for ethnic and cultural self-determination â such as that of the Kurds or the Palestinians themselves. The fact they rarely are should worry anyone calling themselves a progressive.
– James Bloodworth, International Business Times. I probably share very different political and economic views from the author, but he is right to call out the vileness of those who defame Jews.
Ken Livingstone really is a scumbag.
Being a libertarian, I defend the right of people to say what they want, however offensive or daft, but it is worth pointing out that much of the Left and certainly people such as Livingstone have made part of their careers out of criminalising “hate speech”, so it would be deliciously ironic if such lowlifes were criminally prosecuted for some of this nonsense. In so many ways, the Left resembles a circular firing squad.
I find this self-evident:
Patrick Minford, a professor of economics at Cardiff University, said Britain should rely on tariff levels agreed at the World Trade Organisation, and that scrapping the EU’s external tariffs would lower consumer prices by 8 percent, and boost gross domestic product by 4 percent after around 10 years.
The benefits of bilateral trade deals were overrated and a lot of foreign investment was drawn to Britain by its underlying competitive strengths rather than its access to the rest of the EU, Minford said at a news conference in London organised by economists who support a so-called Brexit.
“There is no need for us to go off chasing a million trade deals with the rest of the world. They are irrelevant,” he said.
But given the flood of pro-EU scare stories that Reuters tends to run, I was a bit surprised to see it get some pixels there.
The referendum on Britainâs membership of the EU has thrown many things into sharp relief. It has made more visible the fraying of the Tory Party that has been brewing for a few decades now. It has demonstrated that the politics of fear is everywhere, being peddled by both the Leave and Stay campaigns, and even being openly celebrated by one pro-EU columnist on the basis that âfear alone has a purity you can trustâ. But most strikingly, the referendum campaign has confirmed the death, or at least utter exhaustion, of a left that believes in democracy, in change, in people. In throwing its weight behind the Stay campaign, having historically been suspicious of the EU, the left has completed its journey from demanding democracy to supporting technocracy.
– Brendan O’Neill
With that in mind, it seem positively hilarious that he appears to be unaware of the Streisand Effect!
You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh đ
Mars, owner of Dolmio and Uncle Ben’s food brands, is labelling its products to tell people which ones they should only eat once per week. It is something to do with trying to get people to eat less sugar, for some reason.
Nutritionist Jenny Rosborough from Action on Sugar told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme: “It’s great that they are pushing forward this responsible labelling and raising awareness. “But the challenge we have with it is that only the health conscious will look at the labels in the first place, therefore it’s not going to hit the people who need it the most.”
By which she means poor people who are too stupid to be allowed to make their own decisions. And who are Action on Sugar anyway? The writer of the blog Hemiposterical has found that they are the same people as Consensus Action on Salt and Health, funded largely by the mysterious Marcela Trust. What motivates them, I wonder? (Incidentally, even the NHS is very lukewarm about the harmful effects of salt, when pressed.)
And where did this new war on sugar come from? There is a sugar tax. There is even an app. Made by a quango. It is like a conspiracy of very boring illuminati. And even evil multinational corporations are going along with it. Very strange.
Perhaps it originates from inside the World Health Organisation, who last year urged “countries” to reduce people’s sugar intake by half to 25g per day for adults because sugar causes bad teeth, obesity and diabetes. Yesterday I drank a 330ml bottle of lemonade containing 33g of sugar. I am not obese, do not have diabetes and still have all my teeth.
Put yourself in the position of the head of a government agency. You have an amorphous blob of population and you can poke it with various sticks (such as advice, regulation and taxes) and observe the effects (such as the amount of money spent on certain medical treatments). You can vary the pointyness of the sticks and the amount of poking and get different effects. You keep doing this until you get the effect you want. The truth of the stick is irrelevant. Individuals have no reason to think that there is any truth in government advice. It can be ignored (ignoring taxes is harder). What surprises me is that I observe people making some attempt to follow the advice and berating themselves for failing.
The recent controversy about the potential closure, by India-headquartered Tata, of the steelworks in Wales (formerly owned by Corus) has revived old memories of when the UK government (ie, the taxpayer) owned steelworks. It was an unhappy episode. The picture of middle-aged men, in “tight-knit communities” (the cliches write themselves) losing their jobs with not much immediate prospect of getting another job (such men are, apparently, incapable of doing this), is politically toxic. (Interestingly, the role that anti-carbon policies, enacted to prevent global warming, have played in hurting such industries isn’t getting all that much attention as far as I can see. Does. Not. Compute.) Never mind that tens of thousands of bank staff (not all “fat cats”) have been given their P45s in recent years – when steelworkers are given the bullet, it has a visceral effect on the public imagination of a kind that is very different. People can easily visualise the value of making steel, used as it is in many modern industrial products; they cannot so easily figure out the worth of people processing interest rate swaps transactions, for example. Also, the bank bailouts of 2008-09 mean that for a new generation of voters, the idea of bailing out a failed set of institutions, while unpleasant, isn’t off-limits. If we must bail out banks, so the argument goes, let’s bail out steel. (Just as, in the US, the same kind of logic was used to justify bailing out GM, shafting GM creditors in the process.)
Momentum is building for the current government to nationalise the steel factories, a prospect that no doubt would have appalled the late Margaret Thatcher. The present Business Secretary, sometimes billed as a future Conservative Party leader, has said that part-nationalisation is an option. One of the arguments used to make the prospect more palatable to people otherwise wary of the whole notion is that Britain needs a core capacity to make steel, because we need to be able to build weapons in times of war, for example. (A similar argument is sometimes used to defend protection for forms of agriculture; the UK imports many foodstuffs but has been vulnerable to blockades and attacks on shipping in previous world wars.)
But if this military-need argument really is as strong as is made out, then there is a case for saying that the most cost-efficient (from the point of view of free market economics and taxpayers’ interests) isn’t nationalisation, or the alternative of just shutting down plants, but a sort of strategic reserve. To some extent, in a free market where there are futures and options markets for commodities such as iron, etc, those much-maligned speculators will hoard steel/other during a market glut and wait for prices to rise before selling, and vice versa. If there is a more pressing military requirement that cannot be easily slotted into this market argument, then a “strategic steel reserve” might be an idea, as the investment advisor and former Comservative Party parliamentary candidate Douglas Hans-Luke says. (I don’t endorse all of his views, I should add.) It is an idea worth considering, and arguably, just as an individual should keep a first aid kit, flashlight, water purifier, set of knives, screwdrivers and fire-lighting items and other emergency tools handy, and learn how to use them, so should a country. It is, arguably, a basic requirement of even a minimal state to have that “emergency toolkit” in the cupboard, just in case. Even better, in a healthy civil society, the public should have these things, and be encouraged to learn how to use and store them. And of course that includes firearms and types of working knives, a subject about which the UK lost the plot years ago. It is, I understand, a crime to carry a Swiss Army knife in your pocket in the UK, for instance. Ironically, such things are made out of high-grade steel from places such as Sweden.
An emergency steel reserve sounds a lot easier to defend than nationalisation, not least because it is rational on its own merits. I’m ready to be convinced otherwise. How about every schoolkid gets taught how to make steel and weld during science class?
The Telegraph reports,
Turkey demands Germany prosecute comedian for Erdogan insult
Angela Merkel is facing a political dilemma after Turkey demanded one of Germanyâs most popular comedians face prosecution for insulting its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The row could jeopardise the EUâs controversial migrant deal with Turkey.
The German government confirmed on Monday it had received a âformal requestâ from Turkey over the weekend indicating it wishes to press charges in the case.
If Mrs Merkel agrees to allow the prosecution, she will face accusations of limiting free speech to placate the authoritarian Mr Erdogan.
But if she refuses it could put the migrant deal with Turkey, which she personally brokered, at risk.
Jan Böhmermann, one of Germanyâs most successful young comedians, faces up to five years in prison over a poem in which he referred to Mr Erdogan as a âgoat-f*****â and described him as watching child pornography.
Insulting a foreign head of state is illegal under German law, but a prosecution can only take place if a foreign government requests it.
Any prosecution also requires the express authorisation of the German government â leaving Mrs Merkel in a difficult position.
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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, âPorcupinesâ, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty FrĂ©dĂ©ric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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