MPs are planning to introduce a new law specifically to allow them to remove a protester who has been living outside the House of Commons for more than two years. With all previous attempts to remove Mr Haw having failed – a High Court judge last year ruled that his protest was an expression of freedom of speech as defined by the European convention on human rights – the MPs are now recommending passing a special law which would ban protesters from permanently demonstrating outside Parliament without permission. The move has, however, been labelled “draconian” by civil rights groups.
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Here’s news of a portable phone that can view through your home webcam. Now that REALLY sounds like the democratisation of surveillance to me. Who says your “home” webcam has to be at home? What happens when webcams get REALLY small? They’ll be everywhere, accessed by who the hell knows who?, is what. Via boingboing. “Self-surveillance”, Xeni Jardin calls it. Xeni Jardin is missing the bigger picture. July 12th, 2003 | Comments are closed
 Last night I gave a talk at the Tim Evans household on the theme of “Which Does Freedom Better? Ideas or Institutions?” I followed my usual practice of trying to organise my thoughts during the day of the talk, but this time the procedure didn’t go smoothly, because my thoughts remained stubbornly disorganised throughout the day and remained so on the night. So instead I just flung out as many disorganised thoughts as I could – enough to provoke a dozen postings here, another half dozen at White Rose, and a dozen more at my Culture Blog – and enough to make a decent evening of it for those gathered, if not such a decent talk. Here is just one idea that I alluded to last night, and I apologise if you think it’s a rather obvious one. This – to me anyway – fairly obvious idea is that the Internet has surely shifted the balance of power away from the defence of particular institutions and towards the proclamation of universal, “disembodied” ideas. (That word “disembodied”, cropped up a lot last night, as did “embodied”.) → Continue reading: On the particular and the universal – how the Internet has shifted the balance July 12th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Glenn Reynolds is off to see the Granny today but left behind this bombshell from an article in the Tennessean written by a former boss of his:
The statement is by Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He is currently with an ABA judicial-assistance mission in Iraq. July 12th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Clare Short, who resigned as international development secretary in the aftermath of the Iraq war, said Mr Blair should pass on the leadership before things got “even nastier”. Christopher Lee must have died and gone to heaven, when Peter Jackson offered him the role of Saruman, in Jackson’s stupendous Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Having read the book, many times, Lee will have appreciated every single nuance, every single eyebrow movement, and every single evil grin, of the grotesque Saruman character, as this Maian angel descended into a Sauronian hell, within the mortal clutches of Middle-Earth. Like many other sad people, sexually unfulfilled in the desperate years of teenage, I also wade through the pages of the masterly Lord of the Rings, every year, to try to cure myself from the terrible memories of all those laughing girls, who walked away from the spot-ridden boy. Or at least, every other year; I now alternate it with the Silmarillion. → Continue reading: Clare gets nasty July 12th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Conservative party does not want Britain to leave the European Union. We want to make it work. Anyone who says differently is telling a lie. July 12th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Bush administration may be in the process of revolutionising America’s foreign policy but, on the domestic front, it seems like business as usual:
And, of course, his predecessor was no better:
Proof that, regardless of who is sitting in the hot-seat, the absurd and insane ‘war on drugs’ just has to go on and on and on. [My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.] July 12th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our Glorious Leader has been setting out his vision for the future:
Even Mr.Blair now has to admit that the fabian socialist dream of services being free at point of supply is now unsustainable and new arrangements have to be made. In future, people have are going to have the buy the services and commodities that, hitherto, they believed were going to be supplied by the ‘gubbament’. Well good. That is as it should be. Provided, of course, it is matched by a commensurate and hefty decrease in taxation. But it won’t be and that is the big catch. Instead taxation levels will continue to rise in order to fund a ballooning state bureaucracy. In other words, everybody (but especially the middle classes) is going to be forced to pay twice. The British keep voting for politics and now they are going to have to pay the bill. July 12th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
— mysterious but always enjoyable Australian blogger Professor Bunyip. He’s quite right, but if he writes an anonymous letter to the tax office suggesting I be investigated, he ain’t my friend by any stretch of the imagination either. (Link via Scott Wickstein). July 12th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been claimed that French President Jacques Chirac negotiated de facto immunity from prosecution for the second greatest post-WWII war criminal in Europe west of the former Soviet border, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, in return for the Bosnian Serb military releasing two captured French pilots.
If this is true, then Chirac is nothing less than an accessory after the fact to mass murder. The fact that both General Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have both remained at large does rather suggest this report is true. Oh… and where are these two indicted mass murderers at large? In the French controlled sector of Bosnia, of course. Britain has its own amoral creatures like Douglas Hurd who disgracefully equated murder victims with their murderers in the Balkans, so it would be fair to say that this particular shit sandwich is large enough for much of the political class on both sides of the English Channel to take a bite… but next time your hear a member of the French establishment lecture anyone about anything on ‘moral grounds’, tell them to drop dead, preferably in Srebrenica. July 12th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is Friday evening and blogging about British politics and the Conservative Party was the last thing on my mind. However, this post appearing on Samizdata.net below cannot be left without a calm, measured and reasoned response it deserves. What the f***?! Conservatives?! Libertarian?! A viable alternative?! After checking the post for any undercurrents of sarcasm, I am still confused. This is due to the words Conservatives and libertarian appearing in the same context. The Tory party is a bunch of stale, narrow-minded and arrogant statists who believe that if everyone was a good chap…there, there…things would go just swimmingly and they would not have to try too hard and use their brains. Libertarianism is a dirty word to them, diversity means more illegal immigrants, freedom is predicated on the fact that everyone just comes round to their point of view and their confidence is based on arrogance. In case you missed it, I do not rate the Tory party highly. There is very little difference between them and the New Labour, apart from the latter being much better at public relations and spin. Philosophically, the Tories are as libertarian and exciting as a schoolmaster on valium. Their position on Europe is still confused, their views about taxation not very inspiring, what with NHS and education still being considered bottomless pits for taxpayers’ money, the BBC would be untouchable if it was not biased against them and individualism is something that does not happen to most people. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as fixed political competency, i.e. if one political party goes bad, the other improves. And so, as the Labour party is stumbling into a disaster of its own making, the Tories are certainly not meeting them on the way up. I do not know what the alternative to Labour is in the current political layout, but the Conservatives are certainly not it. And for all those concerned, Samizdata.net shall never be a slave to any adjectives. July 11th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some good news for once: The House of Lords has supported repeal of Clause 28 of the local Government Act. An amendment seen by many as an attempt to preserve Clause 28 was defeated by 50 votes. In theory Clause 28 doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals, merely against using public money to “promote” homosexuality. In practice this wide ranging and ill-defined prohibition has resulted in a climate where low-level institutional discrimination has become commonplace. Decent people have been forced to discriminate through fear of breaching Clause 28. Clause 28 was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. It was a massive attack on the civil liberties of a significant minority of British citizens and has been the jewel in the crown of British homophobes. The fact that a single group was specifically targeted in this way meant that apart from anything else it was simply bad legislation. Good riddance. Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe July 11th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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