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]
|
I for one was delighted when I heard Salman Rushdie was going to be knighted… which might sound odd given that I regard the puffed up popinjay as a caricature of the very worst traits of the ‘meejah’ class, truly an example of how the empty vessel makes the most noise (though I cannot fault his taste in crumpet).
But the fact UKGov did something that was so obviously going to put one in the eye of the Islamists is a good think in and of itself regardless. Like the Mohammed cartoons incident and its aftermath, the reaction across the Muslim world to this serves as a very useful reminder that the ‘moderate Islam’ is a myth (for a superb account of this ‘from the inside’, I recommend Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and that not only helps in the battle against intolerant Islam directly, it helps in the culture war closer to home against Islam’s host of useful idiots in the western world.
…Abolish it. That is what the latest Libertarian Alliance press release demands and I find it hard not to agree.
In this era of channel fragmentation, cable, satellite and the rise of the internet as a method of distribution, what on earth is the point of the BBC? If I want to see what the other side is thinking I can watch Al Jezeera or read the Independent.
You really couldn’t invent this if you tried. Or at least I couldn’t. It is real ad, from the Guardian Online:
Smokefree Coordinator
Organisation: ENFORCEMENT JOBS
Salary: £26- £28 p/h
Date posted: 31 May 2007
Closing date: 30 Jun 2007
A formidable position has a risen for a Smokefree Coordinator.
The role will involve the implementation of the smoke free action plan. This will involve report writing and presentation, training, giving advice and information to stakeholders of council primary care trust (PCT), and the business community. Preference will be given to candidates who have previous projects experience.
The ideal candidate will have excellent communicative and interpersonal skills and be confident in delivering a project plan.
We require candidates who have been a Environmental Health Officer or other Health Practioner. Otherwise a professional with a history of working within a council. A good understanding of the enforcement issues around Environmental and Consumer Protection Law. Must have knowledge of current developments around smoke free legislation.
The contract is for a 6 month period, due to the level of experience required for this is paying between £26-£28 p/h.
Enforcement Jobs is a member of the Red Snapper Recruitment Group and acts as both an Employment Agency and Employer .The Red Snapper Recruitment Group is an equal opportunities employer
The government scheme to ban smoking in public places in Britain is currently reported as about £100 million over budget, at somewhere in the region of £1.6 billion. But I am not sure that counts local government expenditure, which this is.
The book is now officially open…
Muslim radicals burned an effigy of Queen Elizabeth Tuesday as Pakistan summoned the British ambassador over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood and Iranian hardliners turned their fury on the monarch.
…so time to place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.
Will the British government buckle? Yes or No?
I missed this sharp and wise article by US columnist Jonah Goldberg a few days ago – but I had the excellent excuse of being on holiday – but his piece, which nicely sums up what is happening in Britain from a US perspective, demonstrates how some Americans are waking up to what a nannied country Britain now is. Of course, north American readers of this blog have been aware of this progressive infantilisation of the UK adult public for some time.
The question that keeps coming up, and which makes an appearance in Jonah’s article, is exactly when will the conveyor belt of nanny-state interference in our liberties stop? When, exactly, does the excrement hit the fan? Just how bullied do we have to be before something snaps?
I am still none the wiser as to whether we really know the answer to those questions.
Not only is innocent until proven guilty on the way out. The idea of limited and defined punishment for crime is too.
It appears the Sex Offenders Register which is supposed to…. well, I am not really sure what it is supposed to do, other than provide meat for the slavering tabloids, creates an ad hoc police power to get you banned from performing on TV. The BBC reports Police alert over TV contestant, in which a police spokesman says:
“There were concerns that with him being on the programme he might be seen by his victim or the victim’s family and there would be consequences from that. Lancashire Police spoke with the producers and suggested that it would not be in anyone’s interests for him to continue with the programme.”
One does not suppose the “victim or victim’s family” could remain unaware after an entirely predictable national media alert. And the consequences for the man concerned of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who had no reason to know being told in the broadest terms he is “a sex offender” and the rest left to the mob’s squalid imagination? While ‘sexual offences’ is a broad category, from thought-crime, to bad manners, to genuinely consensual but officially barred conduct, … to the most serious violent crimes, one can be registered for any of them, even if there is no trial and no other punishment. The public obsession runs only one way, however.
Among the rank-upon-rank quangocrats and glorious anomalies of the Queen’s birthday honours, I was struck by an example of the coyness that draws attention to itself:
OBE – William Anderson; Grade B2, Ministry of Defence; London.
No citation. No location. All other London awards carry the postal out-code (e.g. “SW1A”, “W8”) of the recipient or their office. Grade B2 is a junior executive grade, and one usually only gets an honour for being head of something, even in the civil service. This all stands out as odd.
So why do it? If Mr Anderson’s work is too secret to mention, then it seems just a tad silly to go to great lengths not to mention it in this ostentatious way. It would have been easy to invent something boring that insiders would know to be a cover story (most fellow OBEs are getting the award for work in organisations no-one outside them will have heard of before). Or the honour itself could have been made secretly.
Getting on-line in Ethiopia is a nightmare and so it has taken me a while to comment on a strange article in the Financial Times that had me choking on my breakfast of injera and zil zil tibs.
Peter Hambro, executive chairman of Peter Hambro Mining, an Aim-listed company that is one of Russia’s biggest gold miners, said the claim from Tony Blair that western companies could shun Russia unless it shared democratic values “ran the risk of being damaging” for British businesses in Russia. […] Hans Jörg Rudloff, chairman of Barclays Capital, said the government was mistaken when it publicly expressed concern about the growing risks of investing in Russia, ahead of last week’s G8 talks. “Their approach looks unbalanced,” Mr Rudloff said. “Russia’s transition to a market economy has been successful and cannot be undone.”
And later in the article, readers are reminded that Royal Dutch Shell was forced last November to sell control of its $20bn Sakhalin-2 oil and gas venture to state-controlled Gazprom and BP’s flagship Russia venture TNK-BP is now being threatened with the loss of its licence to develop the east Siberian Kovykta field. So how exactly are these de facto nationalisation (in reality seizing assets for the benefit of members of Putin’s clique) a sign that “Russia’s transition to a market economy has been successful and cannot be undone”? Seems to me that Putin is doing an excellent job of undoing it.
This is a rather gloomy public service announcement.
I wrote about the Serious Crime Bill in January. Since, it has proceeded quietly through the House of Lords, almost unchanged. Yesterday, so suddenly that I did not know it had happened, and was talking today about how NO2ID should brief MPs for its appearance, it received its Second Reading in the House of Commons. It is amazing that there has been no large scale protest about this
If you live in the UK (or are a voting ex-pat), you have a few weeks to write to your MP before it becomes law.
Update:
In response to popular demand, some more information. Here are:
On Part I of the Bill, a briefing note on Serious Crime Prevention Orders from the Conservative Liberty Forum.
On Part II, a somewhat more technical briefing (pdf)on the mindboggling abolition and replacement of incitement at common law from Liberty.
On Part III, A briefing I wrote (pdf) on the data-sharing aspects for NO2ID.
Which may collectively clarify what I’m going on about. Or not. But take my word for it, this is very bad indeed. Worse than ID cards. If you have an MP, write to them.
It is a story told of more than one matinée idol, and no doubt actionable, so let us call him The Star.
The Star was rumoured in a big Hollywood prostitution case to have been one of the most regular [I almost wrote “biggest”] clients of the latest martyred madam. An interviewer caught up with him.
– “Mr Star, is it true you hired call-girls.”
– “Now I’m not going to comment on the case, and I never had any contact with Miss X; but it is no secret I have used call-girls plenty of times in the past.”
– “But Mr Star, you are known as one of the sexiest men in the world. You could surely have all the girls you want for free. Why pay anyone for sex?”
– “I didn’t pay them for sex. I paid them to go away afterwards.”
It seems our madly interfering government now wants to police our private lives a bit more closely, and thereby make them a bit riskier. According to The Times:
Unmarried women and men will be able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.
The reforms are to be published by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body. It is expected to drop any proposal for a time stipulation, so that only couples who had lived together for, say, two years, could bring a claim; or any bar on childless couples.
Plans that would have made it harder for the partner who stays at home to lodge a claim have also been dropped. Courts will no longer have to be satisfied that the unmarried couple jointly decided that one of them should give up their career and stay at home and that the decision was not made just by one of them. […]
The reforms would apply to both opposite and same-sex couples in “an intimate relationship.” But the Law Commission emphasises that the plans are about granting individuals a remedy, not rights, when they split, and says that the measures will not undermine marriage but make the law fairer.
A marriage or civil partnership is a clear, deliberate, decision. I don’t think the state should control the form of family that is possible, but at least those particular controlled forms are optional, and formally delineated. This opens the way for officialdom to delineate and the courts to investigate any relationship for an actionable degree of intimacy, and for divorce lawyers to open a whole new field of speculative actions. Divorce lawyers will just love the idea that there’s no minimum length of ‘intimate relationship’ involved, and that unilateral reliance by one party can create a liability for the other. And they’ve been agitating for it for years (e.g. in Solicitors Family Law Association, Fairness for Families: Proposals for Reform on the Law on Cohabitation, 2000 – sorry, can’t find that online).
It would be an impressive feat on behalf of the state to make both marriage less attractive (some of its appurtenances – for those who want them – would come free) and at the same time to make sex and friendship outside marriage more risky – and possibly more risky the more affluent you are.
It might do some good of course, undoubtably there are people who are mistreated by partners or mistaken about their rights. But to punish every other single person in Britain for the cruelty or ignorance of a few is an appalling way to go. The parade of motivated winners tells you what you need to know: mad clingy girlfriends, scrounging scrubs of boyfriends, family lawyers, smug marrieds, investigators, officialdom, and prurient tabloids.
I can see a spin-off gain for the proprietors of anonymous, deniable, premises for lovers’ assignations. (Brighton?) Perhaps the Argentinian or Japanese speciality hotel businesses would get emulated here. But that would still be risky for the rich and famous. The only people certain to come out with improved credit (in both senses): proper, professional, prostitutes.
If you are not regularly reading Michael Yon, you are really missing out on something interesting.
I am not particularly in favour of sucking up to the Saudis, or of political subsidy for the British arms industry; but can someone please explain why this is vicious nasty corriuption that ought to be internaltionally banned even if it is the custom where the deal is done, and this is a UK local government policy raising a mere £2,500 million a year, in extortion bribes grateful contributions from property developers (on top of which HMRC now is trying to arrange to take a further20% rake-off supplement)?
|
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.
|
