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 have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk?
The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science.
The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
There is an article by Simon Heffer with the simple title of Doing nothing in Iran is not an option which seems to be stating the obvious to me. Given the leadership of Iran are self-declared apocalypse enthusiasts, I for one do not regard just waiting until Tel Aviv gets nuked as acceptable and I rather suspect the Israelis heartily concur. The shit is going to hit the fan soon, that much is certain and no amount of risible European diplomacy will change that.
As for something that could be done more or less immediately, it was gratifying to see Mark Steyn has come around to my view on how to apply pressure in ways that might really destabilise this regime… do to the Iranians security services exactly what they are doing to British troops in Southern Iraq: fight a proxy war with them, only do it openly and without apology.
Fact is, Britain is already at war with Iranian backed forced in Iraq and has been for months. So the government just needs to take this to its logical conclusion and escalate the war so that the Iranian state finds itself at war with British backed Iranian insurgent forces in Iran. It is not like there is any shortage of Iranians who want to be rid of their theocratic nutters. Sounds like a nice convergence of interests to me.
So if the United Kingdom is in the grip of a “Blairite Tyranny“, what is the proper response?
After all, few would question the ethics of assassinating Adolf Hitler. The main complaint about the attempt on Hitler’s life is that it took as long as it did to be set in motion.
Even today, the ‘Third World’ is full of dodgy dictators whose death by tyrannicide would not be condemned by many, least of all their own victims.
However, few would actually argue that Tony Blair’s conduct of government, while authoritarian in operation and intention, merits his actual death by murder. If merit is involved, in my opinion, Blair deserves a sound thrashing from the Headmaster’s office, and ostracism by civilised members of society, and in any case, violence should always be a last resort in political life as in everything else.
But this begs the question: at what point does a ruler’s conduct become so vile and repulsive that tyrannicide becomes a morally plausible response? Does the democratic process increase the threshold, or lower it? Tyrannicides were applauded in ancient Greece; should we applaud them in this era?
[Editors note: please read this article carefully before commenting. It is NOT suggesting or even discussing whether or not Tony Blair should be assassinated, but rather is a discussion of how to deal with lesser variety tyrants. Comments suggesting Blair et al should be done in will be deleted as both unhelpful and seditious]
To see a term like “Blairite Tyranny” bandied about on a blog like this by people who think things like civil liberties actually matter, is to be expected.
However to see those words in print at all in the mainstream media is quite remarkable! More of the same please.
Commenting in The Register on the Government’s defeats in the Lords on the Identity Cards Bill, John is looking ahead:
This potentially sets up a battle where disclosure of costs is seen as a constitutional matter, and both sides claim the constitutional high ground. Given that Ministers of this administration now claim commercial confidentiality as a matter of routine when withholding information, the Lords would have a good moral case for standing its ground here.
This would of course be likely to trigger a real constitutional crisis, but as this Government has done so much to destroy the constitution already, it seems only reasonable for other people to be allowed to join in.
It would be a lot funnier, if it weren’t so true.
It would be fair to say that telling the truth often makes you no friends, and thus the need to protect ‘whistleblowers’ from being penalised for telling what they know is an issue that should be close to the heart of any who value truth above all else. It is often only people on the inside who can reveal the dirty deeds and malfeasance that would otherwise never come to light. Therefore when I read of a person losing their position because not only did they tell the truth, they refused to allow the truth to be forgotten, it just makes me sick as a parrot.
It is not much fun being nearly sixty, but it does have some advantages, one of which is that you can just about remember political debates now long dead, of a sort which younger people may have little idea about.
And during the nineteen fifties, I recall, there was a debate, at any rate in Britain, engaged in by diehard free-marketeers, about the long term consequences of the Welfare State. The name of Anthony LeJeune springs to mind, but most of his recent writing nowadays seems to have been reviews of crime stories. Anyway, these diehard free-marketeers said that the Welfare State would corrupt the working class and turn then from the upstanding citizens that they then mostly were into barbarians. Diehard non-free-marketeers genuinely could not imagine this happening, and dismissed such fears as absurd. Most politicians, similarly unable to imagine that times might seriously change, concurred with the diehard non-free-marketeers.
Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.
I consider the Prime Minister’s somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point. → Continue reading: Abolish the Welfare State and restore some Respect
“As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighbourhood, avoiding macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it’s none of our damn business.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (page 416), hitting some practitioners of Modern Art between the eyeballs.
William, Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times says:
In Parliament, particularly in the House of Lords, there is a growing reaction against such social control [as identity cards]. Most of us think policemen should not be turned into busybodies, warning people not even to discuss adoption by homosexual couples; arresting them for any trivial offence; threatening smokers and publicans; and galloping after fox-hunters. We resent this on behalf of the public, but we also resent it on behalf of the police.
In the history of Britain there have been many periods when liberty was threatened. The immediate threat is a government with a lust for control, with little respect for liberty or for the House of Commons, but enjoying the opportunity of using new technologies for social control. The British are certainly less free than we were in 1997 or 2001. The fightback will be laborious and difficult, but there is a new mood.
There is small sign of such a new mood on the Government benches. Is there one in the country?
This story is old hat by now, but it reminded me of an unusual anomaly when I was in China recently. Most readers are probably aware that some time ago China erected a firewall that censors parts of the internet it deems too sensitive for ordinary Chinese to view. Consequently, the more uncontrollable realms of the internet (like Blogspot.com) that could be exploited by computer users with a dissenting streak – as well as sources of critical news and the like – cannot be accessed within China. Wikipedia is also out of bounds.
Whilst in the Middle Kingdom, I visited a Sinophilic friend of mine. I would go so far as to say he has a case of the old rose-tinted glasses regarding China and the nature of its administration – needless to say we enjoyed a number of discussions about the direction China is heading in. Apart from being a China enthusiast, he is also an Apple Macintosh fanatic, and he owns one of those rather handsome new and expensive Apple Powerbook laptops. In one of our debates about Chinese freedom – or lack thereof – I parried with an example of China’s neutered internet access. Why, I was not even able to access my own (and now defunct) Blogspot blog in the country! Rubbish, cried my friend. He read my blog all the time on his Macintosh.
Of course, I had to see for myself, and sure enough it was able to be accessed on his computer. I know that sometimes the firewall does not work and once in a while you can view sites that are normally off limits. Then the firewall kicks in again and the illicit page is unable to reload. However, I accessed a number of different Blogspot sites on his Mac several times over a period of days without the slightest bit of hindrance, even though all Blogspot sites I tried to visit were blocked across the country on computers that ran Windows platforms. I even tried using a different browser – Firefox was no different to MSIE. I would have liked to have been able to test the theory further and Google up some Falun Gong links, but this did not seem prudent on someone else’s machine, given the Chinese government’s attitude to that group.
The above got me thinking – when the story broke about Microsoft shutting down that Chinese blog, I wondered if Microsoft and the Chinese government had colluded in the construction of the Great Internet Wall. In the eyes of the computing world, this would surely be a far more heinous crime. Since the Windows platform enjoys considerably less competition in China than it does in the MS-dominated West, ensuring Chinese Windows machines cannot access sites the Government disapproves of means the job is pretty much done.
I admit, if China and Microsoft did work together to construct the wall, it seems like an unusual and inelegant solution – relying on the software of the end user to filter out content. Surely some specific backdoor entrance would need to be engineered into the programme. I am certainly no computer expert – there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the above, and there are some pretty switched on people who comment here. Ideas?
Crime in Britain is a serious problem even though people will contest the figures and trends. The present government, no doubt aware that the issue remains a hot-button matter for voters, is determined to be seen to be doing something about it, however ineffectual.
In the process, rather than push for tougher sentencing and allowing people to defend themselves, the administration’s approach is to overturn centuries of checks and balances in the criminal law.
This is the latest:
Lord Falconer, the Constitutional Affairs Secretary, and Mike O’Brien, the solicitor general, are drawing up proposals to bypass the court process in as many as half the cases heard by magistrates every year.
Defendants who plead guilty to offences such as shoplifting, theft and criminal damage would have their punishment decided by the prosecutor, in consultation with the police, instead of going to court. Ministers believe that about half of the two million cases heard annually by magistrates could be handled in that way.
The plan would represent a revolution in the criminal justice system which has always been based on the principle that sentencing should be weighed in court, with the defence entering a plea in mitigation in response to the prosecution’s case.
The article goes on to say that the government aims to save money from this bracing and exciting new approach to law enforcement. Up to £350 million a year is spent on Legal Aid to court defendants appearing before magistrates. 350 million pounds is a large dollop of money although chickenfeed compared with what the government may end up spending – and we paying for – on ID cards. ID cards are likely, I confidently predict, to be largely useless in reducing crime, and I very much doubt that cutting public spending is a great priority of this government.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments