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.
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The Sun is not happy about the “First National Muslim Fun Day”, to be held at Alton Towers. The Sun says
BRITAIN’S biggest fun park has sparked a race row — with a MUSLIMS-ONLY day.
Up to 28,000 are expected at Alton Towers on September 17 when there will be no music, booze or gambling.
Instead there will be prayer areas, Muslim stalls and all food served will be HALAL.
Organisers Islamic Leisure have billed it the First National Muslim Fun Day and tickets can only be bought through their website.
Non-Muslims phoning the Staffordshire park have been refused tickets.
So far as I can see, Muslims who did not book via Islamic Leisure have also been refused tickets. “Sorry, the park is already booked.” What is so difficult to understand about that?
One, George Hughes, 19, who rang up for 15 tickets for a pal’s birthday, said: “I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s the only day we can go, yet I can’t because I’m not Muslim. Can you imagine all the fuss if there was a Christians-only day?”
I do not know the previous policy of Alton Towers, but a few years back I went with a church playgroup to Thorpe Park for “Prayers in the Park”. The children spent the day on the rides then finished with an open air service. Happy time had by all.
Back to the Sun:
George, of Crayford, Kent, added: “My Muslim friends think it’s outrageous.
“What’s the world coming to when people are being banned from flying the St George’s flag yet this sort of day is allowed? If it must be held, then why not on a weekday rather than a busy weekend?”
Maybe because Islamic Leisure paid the hefty premium that such places charge to book on a busy weekend?
The event is widely promoted on the internet and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee declared it “exclusively for our brothers and sisters”.
The lawyers ought to administer a slap on the wrist for the MPAC for saying that, which probably contravenes discrimination law. The lawyers ought, but libertarians and other people with respect for freedom ought not. Freedom of association necessarily involves freedom to exclude. Sometimes you want the party to be private. How would you feel if you hired a hall for the annual party of your local pro-abortion group and they demanded that the doors be open to anti-abortion activists? Feel free to swap the sides in this example. The point is the same.
(In fact the organisers seem confused as to whether they they actually want non-Muslims along. Some other statements suggest that the organisers feel that if non-Muslims see Muslims enjoying themselves just like everyone else it will would be good P.R. for them.)
The Sun says
Alton Towers said any organisation could hire the park for a day.
A spokeswoman said “We make no distinction regarding sexuality, religious, ethnic or lifestyle choices.”
I doubt either statement is entirely true. We will not be seeing a Nazi Fun Day for the excellent reason that Alton Towers would turn down the booking. That is their right. There are urban myths that theme parks are sometimes hired out for the day to childish but very rich individuals; if that is the booking a park wants to accept then that is their right too. It is tough luck on George from Crayford, but theme parks are not public utilities. Unless you want them to be nationalised (imagine a theme park run by civil servants and tremble) can I suggest that George try Drayton Manor?
My home town of Perth recently bore witness to perhaps the most shocking crime in recent memory around these parts – earlier this week, an eight year old girl was raped and murdered, her body dumped in the disabled toilet of a popular Perth shopping centre just minutes after she was separated from her parents. Now a strange twist has created even more public interest in the case. The individual apprehended and charged with the offence, twenty one year old Dante Arthurs, is rumoured to be one of the two boys who killed James Bulger back in 1993.
There are a number of coincidences that have given rise to the aforementioned rumour. Perth’s local rag, The West Australian, notes that
a Sue and Ron Arthurs lived in Surrey, south of London and left to return to Australia in 2002. Around the same time, the Bulger killers were believed to be entering a secret relocation program
More chillingly, The West – in its typical muckraking fashion – actually made the link between Dante Arthurs and the Bulger case last year. It put the question regarding Dante’s identity to the family then; long before he committed the offence he is currently being held for. It is quite remarkable that Dante, quizzed about his identity vis-Á -vis the Bulger case, would later go on to commit such a similar crime.
When the rumour surfaced, the Western Australian police force and justice system immediately rushed to scotch it. British authorities declared it untrue; the Bulger killers were not relocated to Australia. The Arthurs family vehemently denied that Dante Arthurs is an assumed identity, masking one of the Bulger killers. They produced a birth notice, published in The West Australian in 1984, declaring Dante’s birth. This would appear to conclusively bury the rumour, however some have pondered whether the birth notice simply illustrates the depth of Dante’s cover. Personally, I suspect it is more than likely that Dante is not a re-identified John Venables or Robert Thompson, and the startling coincidences linking the two cases are no more than startling coincidences. However, it must be noted that all the parties who have denied the rumour also have a strong interest in ensuring the confidentiality of such an arrangement, if it indeed exists. If child-killers like Venables or Thompson were released, given new identities and shipped off to foreign lands – only to re-offend there in similar circumstances – the political consequences would be enormous. It would at least spell the end of such expedient methods of dealing with society’s most notorious (but presumably rehabilitated) malefactors; a scenario authorities in Britain and Australia would rather not suffer. If Arthurs is one of the Bulger killers, I have no doubt that authorities would sooner lie about it if they think such evasiveness could head off the ensuing major international scandal that would inevitably follow the breaking of such news.
Unfortunately for any government agency attempting a cover-up, if the rumours are correct about Dante Arthurs, I think it likely that the truth will be explosively revealed here and in Britain sooner rather than later. There is so much public interest in the Dante Arthurs case that every angle of this tragic affair will be exhaustively probed by investigative journalists. No doubt they are at it now – wading through birth and death records, electoral rolls and the like, hunting for inconsistencies – whilst hounding their snouts within the public service for information. A devastating public service leak is a strong possibility; if there is anything to leak, that is. I still maintain that all the journalistic investigations will probably come to naught, as Dante Arthurs is most likely not Jon Venables nor Robert Thompson. However, I may be wrong and we could be seeing the early stages of a scandal that will shake the justice systems of Great Britain and Australia to their foundations.
Andrew O’Hagan in the Telegraph takes up the fashionable topic of ‘anti-social behaviour’:
I grew up on a housing estate myself, and I watched it go, in the course of 20 years, from being a zone of optimism and clean living to a sink estate and an unemployment black spot.
My mother lives alone and her door was kicked in by junkies in the middle of the night, just so they could steal her telly. My mother has never been the same (she moved into sheltered housing) and I recognise that the yobs who ruined our street are very different from the respectable working class of my youth, who deserved (and still deserve) every bit of support the Government and the community can give them.
But a couple of paragraphs later we have,
Miss Rooney’s street, like so many in Britain, has been over-run by people fuelled by a mad sense of entitlement, by a vast carelessness and selfishness, and violence on their minds.
Overrun? I suspect Mr O’Hagan would find the yobs, like him, grew up on the estate. The difference is they (and probably their parents and grandparents) also grew up on the state. It is the support the “Government [with the same capital G as God] and community” gave them that created the “mad sense of entitlement”. If the state teaches people that they are not responsible for themselves then those without other information will believe it.
Want to see Tony Blair getting a political kick in the cobblers?
Sweet. Agree or disagree, it is nice to see some political hardball. UKIP thrive on such confrontations. It is hard to imagine the pointless milksops of the ‘Conservative’ Party getting stuck in like that.
Such is the changing nature of that world and the ferocity of those forces, we need to adjust, to reclaim the system and thereby the street for the law-abiding majority.
That means not disrespecting civil liberties but re-assessing what respect for them means today and placing a far higher priority, in what is a conflict of rights, on the rights of those who keep the law rather than break it.
This is not the argument of the lynch mob or of people who are indifferent to convicting the innocent, it is simply a reasonable and rational response to a problem that is as much one of modernity as of liberty. But such a solution will not happen without a radical change in political and legal culture and that is the case I make today.
– Tony Blair MP, June 23 2006
As ever, the pretext is “modernity”… odd how that trope of Marxian theory crops up all the time. Things have changed, we are told. Rebalancing is imposed upon us by the sudden new wickedness of the world.
But read this in the context of other recent statements by Blair and his coterie and you can see that the PM is propounding a double fallacy in order to persuade us make a great leap backward. Ossa is the false dilemma between victim’s rights and suspects’ liberties; Pelion is the great mandarin standby, seeking ‘a balance’ – conceptualised as some mid-point between where we are now and the far extreme in the direction of the proposed policy. The Olympus the New Labour titans would storm is the fundamental western concept of trial. → Continue reading: Forward into the 14th century!
Discreet, that is. A case in point is something I observed this evening.
It was a hot day in London, by London standards. So a large, prominent office on Millbank had its back doors open. Being the sort of large, prominent, office it is, the back doors therefore had two police officers with Heckler & Koch submachineguns stationed outside, drawing attention to the place, and costing the taxpayer something over £100,000 a year, pro rata. I have seen this before. It is not an emergency procedure.
Are we to assume that the intelligence service in question was not intelligent enough to acquire proper ventilation and/or airconditioning when it took over the large, prominent, office building a decade ago? Could it be that there is no space inside the doors for an armed guard to stand discreetly? (If an armed guard were otherwise necessary on a non-descript building that was not obviously of governmental import – such as the soul-less, off-the-beaten track, south London and Euston buildings occupied by the same organisation for the latter half of the Cold War, when it had a serious job to do and took it seriously.) Or is this part of security swagger, the latest trend in government where departments impress politicians, each other, and the mulitude, with their importance and power by elaborate, even flamboyant, precaution and fortification?
Top of the Pops, a BBC programme that has shown Top-40 pop acts since the days of the Beatles, has been axed by the BBC. I grew up in the late 70s and 80s watching the show, including favourite bands of mine like the Stranglers, Undertones, Madness, Ian Dury (RIP) and the rest. Now it is all gone. Some of this must have been driven by shifting demographics. When ToTP started, there were relatively more folk under the age of 20 versus the rest of the population than is the case now, and the music industry tended to chase after what was thought to be a large and expanding number of young people with money in their pockets.
The development of new musical techologies, CDs, downloading and the Internet has also affected, and is continuing to change, the way that people listen to music and the sort of styles that get played. This is also affecting how folk come across music for the first time and how a band or act can make a “breakthrough”. The old music labels, under threat as they must be from the changing music industry, are no longer able to support something like a “Top 40” on which something like the old BBC programme could be based. This is neither a good or bad development, in my view, just a change driven by shifting demographics and technology.
So making it to “Number One” no longer has quite the same resonance now that it may have done in the heyday of the Beatles or Duran Duran. Some may regret the passing of all this, but I am indifferent to it. I increasingly hope that new technologies will make it possible for talented artists to circumvent Big Music and push their own offerings on to the Net, using such avenues as the wildly successful GarageBand route. (Uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds has written about this recently in a book).
Anyway, the demise of Top of the Pops should not lead one to conclude that a supposedly vibrant era of great music is going to be replaced by something worse. It is the error of any age to assume that whatever went before is better than what is happening now (a sure sign that one is getting old. I have just passed 40 and intend to resist that trap). This book by Tyler Cowen points out, for example, how the often wildly controversial music of the R&R era in the 1950s has taken on the mantle of classic music in the ears and hearts of many people (including me):
“Musical pessimists also have claimed that contemporary music provides an aesthetic that is overly accessible and directed at the lowest possible denominator. They view rock and roll and other genres as a succession of pop songs, well suited to catch the ear of the casual listener but of little lasting value. We should keep in mind, however, that many western creations have stood a test of time, one of the most significant indicators of cultural quality and depth. It has now been more than forty years since the release of the early classic works of rock and roll, such as Chuck Berry and James Brown.” (page 179)
Or this, (page 178)::
“Contemporary music, for the most part, encourages freedom, nonconformism, and a skeptical attitude towards authority. The totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not hesitate to permit Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Jazz, swing and blues were banned. The free and vital sense of joy communicated by these musical forms clashed too obviously with adherence to totalitarian ideals. Similarly, the communist and socialist leaders in the Eastern bloc saw rock and roll as a special threat to their authority, precisely because it was based on the personality of the individual performer.”
Rock on.
Most of us are familiar with Parkinson’s Law, the one that says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
However, a TV news report last night, discussing one of the recent travails of Britain’s Home Office in front of its recently constructed and newly occupied headquarters reminded me of another Parkinson’s Law – same Parkinson but different law – which says that whenever an organisation moves into a new, custom-built headquarters, it is likely to be not just heading for disaster but already there. Parkinson’s Law of Custom Built Head Offices alludes to the way that the process, first of deciding about the new building and then of getting settled into it, takes the attention of the people who matter away from the real job that they are supposed to be doing, and towards their own, as it were, domestic arrangements. They are celebrating past successes instead of contriving further success.
Contrariwise, people who are busy doing important and productive work that they are determined to press ahead with have no time to be fussing excessively about furniture and fittings, and they make do with whatever they have or can easily obtain from a catalog.
Once again, this law would appear to vindicated, and I can only apologise for not noticing this sooner. I’ve long known of this law. I often walk past the new Home Office, designed by star architect Sir Terry Farrell, on my way from my home to Free Market Think Tank Land, which is just the other side of the new Home Office from me. The Home Office’s very public difficulties in recent months have not escaped me. But the penny did not drop until last night.
The new Home Office was moved into in the Spring of 2005.
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
The Cereals Authority makes its hay with what is grown;
The Asset “Recoverer’s” take what you think you own;
The Office of the Regions now does what the council did;
The control of state surveillance is quite completely hid;
Elections are conditional, the Standards Boards insist;
They’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed!
Chorus:
He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed.
The BBC commentators were as doom-laden as usual for our one nil victory over Paraguay. But it was a useful victory and Lineker needs to listen to what Sven actually says.
But, watching the Italian Job afterwards with my friend and a bottle of Maltese Red, one could see how times had changed. In 2008, the coach transporting the gold to Geneva would have been decked out in white and red.
And I know the Mini chase scene would not work with this pattern…
Here is a telling quote from a recent Observer article about violence between (South) Asian and Somali schoolchildren in Birmingham:
‘This issue arises because it is a high density area,’ said Farrukh Haroon, a project worker at the YIP. ‘Communities are scrapping for scarce resources …’
Here is another:
‘It is complicated – there is not one pattern, not one trend and not one answer,’ said Simon Blake from the National Children’s Bureau. ‘But we have to bust these myths about who gets the best housing and how resources are allocated.’
Sorry, Mr Blake, but myths with a core of truth are hard to kill. Communities will always “scrap” for government resources because they are correct in their belief that if group A gets more of the pie then group B gets less. Scrapping, with or without bricks and broken bottles, is an excellent way to get more pie. Nor is it wise to hope for a day when resources are no longer scarce; in most of the country the economy is more sovietised than many countries that not so long ago were actually part of the Soviet bloc. If you will forgive an earthy metaphor, an economy based on drinking one’s own urine can only go on so long.
Laban Tall, commenting on the same article, congratulates the Observer for having finally discovered that not all racism is white on black. I am a good deal more optimistic than he that multi-racial – and even, to some extent, multi-cultural societies can be made to work. Just not where there is socialism.
God help us if the world ever becomes one multi-cultural society under socialism, as it looks as if it might. I forsee a future of low-level suppurating conflicts that never heal because the reason for their existence never goes away.
We have had a foretaste. A recent report that examined the causes of the riots in Burnley five years ago says that the government handing out “regeneration” money in the 1990s created rivalry and anger that helped create the conditions for the riots.
“Positive regeneration had an unintended side effect,” the report says. “Ironically, it contributed to social fragmentation by increasing neighbourhood rivalries …
You know what they say: first you screw up. Then you screw up again in the same way again to prove that it really was a screw-up first time round. You guessed it: Burnley’s problems in 2006 are to be dealt with by handing out regeneration money. But fear not!
Regeneration programmes now cover wider areas and are based on themes, rather than simple ward boundaries.
Themes. Assuredly these themes will make all well and no one will whisper that some communities are more thematically challenged than others and hence are getting more than their share.
However, never let it be said that government always screws up in the same way. Sometimes government screws up in new ways.
Elevate East Lancashire, one of the government’s nine housing market renewal pathfinders, is working – sometimes in the face of opposition from furious homeowners – to demolish inner Burnley’s too many terraces and provide sites for commercial builders to create new homes.
It does not say whether those “furious homeowners” are black, white or brown. It does not matter. Whatever colour their skins they will be embittered by having their homes taken from them for the greater good – the greater good of other people – and in a place blighted by regeneration it takes but the weight of the feather to tip the balance from general bitterness into racial bitterness.
The utterly flaccid David Cameron has balked at even the token gesture of pulling his ‘conservative’ party out of the Euro-integrationist EPP in the European parliament. As withdrawal from the EPP would be little more than a minor token that did nothing beyond offer the tiniest of fig leaves to the now completely naked Euro-skeptic remnants within the Tory party, is anyone under any illusions now of his inclination to ‘stand up for British interests’ in dealing with the EU?
As having the Tories ditch the EPP (whose platform includes ‘ever closer union’) was one of the planks of his pitch to win the Tory Party leadership against David Davies, will conservatives who are not pure Blairite (or perhaps even Heathite) now admit they have been screwed (and not in a fun way) and finally decamp from Cameron’s appalling social democratic party?
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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.
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