Want to see a splendid example of verbosity when the simple word arse (or even ass) would have sufficed?
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November 10th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tony Blair, asking MPs to support police detention without charge for up to 90 days. Never believe anything until it has been officially denied. November 10th, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
“So promoting wealth creation – at home and abroad – means changing the climate of opinion so that politicians and bureaucrats who argue for measures that damage business and economic competitiveness are less likely to succeed. In short, we need to campaign for capitalism. To promote profit. To fight for free trade. To remind, indeed to educate our citizens about the facts of economic life. The message is simple – you cannot win the battle against red tape unless you win the intellectual and cultural battle for open markets.” November 10th, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Joel Kotkin, in a fine article at the Wall Street Journal, draws out these telling facts on the European economy’s lousy job-formation record in recent years:
Kotkin goes on to contrast the lack of entrepreneurial (good French word, ironically) vigour in countries like France with that in the United States. There are plenty of other statistics to back up his points, but you get the general idea. As the French rioting has gone on, I remain to be completely convinced that we are seeing some sort of European “intifada”, as a number of commenters on this blog and other blogs say. Islamist radicalism may not be the primary cause, though it is a contributing factor, no doubt. I do certainly see the frightening potential for radical Islamists to exploit the situation and turn it to their own ends. This may already be happening. But I think the primary problem has been a refusal of the EUropean political elites to realise that the Big Government, and a highly protected labour market is a recipe for disaster and alienation. Coupled with the slowing dynamic of a greying population, falling economic growth and so forth, you have a serious problem of a stagnant economy. For example, the article I cite goes on to point out that hundreds of thousands of young Europeans now work abroad, in the U.S. and in Britain, since the work opportunities are so much better. Left behind is an increasingly state-dominated workforce and a huge population of tax-eating bureaucrats and welfare recipients. Not a great foundation for social peace. Magnus Linklater, meanwhile, points to a worrying trend in Britain of young thugs hurling stones, firing rockets and other projectiles at firefighters in the course of their work. There have been hundreds of these incidents, many of them hardly reported in the media. Only a few years ago, firefighters were heroes, widely praised by all. Now they are almost routinely attacked in the tougher parts of this country. November 9th, 2005 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Amazing as it may seem the government has today banned ‘gay clubs’ as a result of campaigning from the gay lobby. According to the Times:
How stupid can these people be? Many gay businesses survive as such only because they can so explicitly discriminate, especially in their advertising. This ridiculous new law will be a very serious threat to the continuation of a ‘gay scene’ in many towns across the country. It is tricky to foresee all of the unintended consequences of this one. Gay clubs operate varying degrees of explicit discrimination depending on the locale or type of club. The strictest hard core gay cruise clubs generally operate a ‘men only’ door policy, which does the trick, but this itself may be or may become illegal – who knows what horrors of forced integration are still to come? However many of the more general gay dance clubs operate what they advertise as a ‘gay majority policy’ which is usually employed to refuse entry to large parties of girls only. Gay clubs are often the best clubs in a particular town and tend to attract groups of girls who want a night away from predatory straight men. Of course the large numbers of unwary girls in these clubs itself attracts the straight men and before long the club has lost all appeal for gays. In the case of hotels there are lots of hotels in various, often remote, parts of the country that offer gay only accommodation and advertise as such. Will such advertising be illegal? In the short term after this absurd bill is passed clubs, bars and hotels will continue to operate discrimination informally but all it will take is some petulant activist or a council with a bee in its bonnet or some obsessive bureaucrat to stick their oar in to ruin some particular venue or business. November 9th, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
The headline really says it all: But I will copy and paste the first few paragraphs of the story anyway:
Whereas, we happy persons who do not smoke may confidently expect to live for ever. Oh yes. My thanks to Mark Holland for the link to this piece. This argument reminds me of the one that also rages about contraceptives, ‘safe’ sex, and so on. On one side you have people saying that surely safe sex is better than just plain old sex. On the other, you have people blaming contraceptives, because these are by no means totally safe, and only serve to excuse and encourage the evil thing itself, sex intercourse, with all its attendant dangers. Both arguments have some force. But if you think that with that comparison I am trying to put all obsessionally controlling puritans in the same box, labelled “Obsessively Controlling Puritans”, you are quite right. Still, I suppose it is better to have people roaming the earth pursuing their moral equivalents of war than to have people actually fighting wars. You could argue that we here at Samizdata do the same, but that we just pick on different sinners, such as obsessionally controlling puritans, and different sins, such as obsessionally controlling puritanism. The difference is that we are correct! Oh yes! All violations of freedom of choice are dangerous, and it is no excuse to say that you have found a way to violate freedom rather less than before so that’s alright then! Oh no! Let virtue reign unsullied!! Amen and have a nice day. November 9th, 2005 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seventeen people have been arrested in Sydney and Melbourne and charged with various offences with relation to an intention to commit terrorist attacks on Australian targets. Police found chemical stockpiles in their raids which were similar to the sort used in the London bombings in July. There is no indication as yet as to what the terrorists had in mind as targets, but it does appear as if the groups had reached an advanced stage of planning. As a result, a co-ordinated surveillance effort of 18 months was turned into a massive police operation involving domestic security services, the Australian federal police and state police forces. They swooped in co-ordinated raids to apprehend the suspects. The suspects all appear to be followers of one Abdul Nacer Benbrika, a radical Muslim cleric based in Melbourne. This is a major tactical victory against terrorists in Australia, because it demonstrates the ability of police and security agencies to effectively counter bomb-making efforts before they have a chance to succeed. Islamist extremists who wish to strike in Australia now clearly know that they will have to devote greater efforts to security and that in turn means less efforts can go into creating mayhem. This in turn means that international groups are less likely to devote resources like bomb-makers, money and propaganists towards a ‘hard’ target like Australia. In the long term, though, it is nevertheless of concern because this affair reveals that even in faraway Australia, Islamic hatemongers can find willing tools that can be manipulated into fulfilling their murderous fantasies. Until the hatemongers are stopped, it seems that the terrorism will continue, with all the loss of life, liberties and humanity that follows. November 9th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
As masters of their estates, the rioters cock their legs and piss molotovs to provide the reek of burnt plastic that serves as their territorial marker. November 9th, 2005 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
If I were a member of the alienated army that shared Guy Fawkes night with the French on November 5th, as part of their general celebration and indulgence, wouldn’t cars present an opportunity to joyride? How clear that these hotheads, raised in a political culture of entitlement and spectacle, now turn against their patron and paymaster. Schools, buses, hospitals and cars are destroyed to preserve their imprisonment and immobility. As masters of their estates, the rioters cock their legs and piss molotovs to provide the reek of burnt plastic that serves as their territorial marker. The puzzled onlooker will wonder why it took a damp November rather than a hot July or August. Everyone gets more attention during the busy autumn when some of the French population deigns to work for a living. Now the lighthouses of punditry highlight hubris expunged from the once proud Gallic rooster and the smart riots of the European intifada. Some may fly the flag of Eurabia as their singular explanation for this tinderbox. Yet the answers lie in crappy suburbs where the height of social mobility is raking money as a drugs and dole prole. The state is an absent employer, white, French and a danger to profits. Where economics provides motive to keep out the state as a threat to the monopoly of drugs and Islam, politics and terror will probably follow. November 8th, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, you read that correctly. And moreover he states that presidents do not create jobs, entrepreneurs do… Mister Bleeding Heart himself, Alan Frigging Alda! Follow the link and read the whole thing, I kid you not. I am chastened as clearly I must reappraise my views of the man and repent a few of the things I may have said about him in the past. Any moment now I fully expect to see a flock of pigs flying past my window! November 8th, 2005 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the splendidly politically incorrect Ray D. puts it:
Heh. November 8th, 2005 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ever-perceptive Harry Hutton makes a good point:
The filleting haddock thing is explained thus:
I have never liked the “it gives it a false glamour” argument against banning drugs, for precisely the reason Harry pinpoints, which is that the same thing applies to bank robbery, arson, and so on, and they are falsely glamorous but so what? I prefer the simple “it’s wrong to ban something that isn’t an aggressive attack on the rights of others” argument. Terror is an attack on others’ rights. Fare dodging is stealing, ditto. Haddock filleting on a wooden surface you can avoid, by not doing it, and by avoiding restaurants where they do it, if you really mind it that much. Personally I think that the old ways of preparing food are less poisonous than the kind that the EU now demands, and I think those figures that Harry Hutton links to back that up, as he implies. But why has reported food poisoning abated since 2001? Have people stopped bothering to report it? Have some of those vulnerable to it died off? My guess is that the restaurants that poisoned their customers have been identified and shunned by those wanting a meal. After a period when new and safer rules were introduced and new and safer food preparation methods mandated, which was obviously extremely dangerous, the worst excesses of the new regime are now starting to be avoided, but obviously not yet as successfully as happened before the new and safer safety regulations were introduced. If there must be laws against food poisoning, let them be laws against actual food poisoning, rather than against practices which, in the opinion of EU officials who just want to regulate stuff for the pure pleasure of it, might be poisonous, although less poisonous than any imaginable alternative. The other argument I like to use about alleged crimes without actual victims which ought not to be crimes is the practical point that these are harder for any policemen to find out about. If you commit the crime of filleting a haddock on a wooden surface, and you and your dinner guests happen to prefer haddock filleted thus, why would any of you inform the authorities? Laws against victimless “crimes” are easily broken, by otherwise law abiding persons, and thus lower general respect for the law. The trouble with that argument is that many real crimes are a source of shame to their victims, and they will not tell the police for that reason. Banks, for instance, do not want the fallibility of their security systems to become too public. Many property thefts are, as our current Government never tires of telling us, our own fault, and we are justly punished for allowing such thefts to be committed. Dare we bother the police with news of our trivial and self-inflicted misfortunes? But that is insufficient reason to make stealing that the victims are ashamed of legal, even if in practise that is pretty much how things are. November 8th, 2005 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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