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In the (Glasgow) Herald, Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf writes,
New Hate Crime Bill extends protection of people
Odd headline. Make that some people.
This week Parliament will consider further amendments to the Hate Crime Bill before a final vote on our proposed reforms
By “Parliament” Mr Yousaf means the one with him in it, i.e. the Scottish Parliament. The SNP love this rhetorical trick of pretending the Scottish Parliament is the only one of any relevance to Scotland. Wishing this to be so is a perfectly legitimate goal, but pretending it is already so is premature. Of course all the Scottish people have to do to ensure that the Parliament with Mr Yousaf in it becomes the sole decider of what laws they live under is carry on voting for Mr Yousaf’s party in the numbers they now do.
The new Bill will modernise and consolidate hate crime law and provide clarity. It brings together various piecemeal additions and changes to the law made over time, while also recognising the need to clamp down further on this all too pervasive, damaging behaviour.
As a person of colour the law has protected me, for the last 35 years, from anyone stirring up hatred against me due to my race.
The law cannot have done a very good job of protection, given that he said in the previous paragraph that hate crime was “pervasive”, and that he complains a few paras down about all the hate he receives.
This Bill now extends that protection to people in relation to their age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variation of sex characteristics (previously known as intersex).
The legislation has come a long way. As Parliament has been considering the detail of the Bill the Government has listened – making changes and reflecting on concerns to improve a piece of powerful legislation that I believe is fitting of the Scotland we live in.
That being the Scotland where race hate crime is pervasive.
Robust Parliamentary scrutiny has been essential to the process.
Concerns over the impact that stirring up hatred offences could have on freedom of expression were raised. And these have been listened to and are being acting upon. We have made a number of significant changes already, including ensuring that any successful prosecution for the new offences must prove that the person intended to stir up hatred. We have also inserted a “reasonable person test” to clarify that when determining if behaviour is “threatening or abusive” an objective test is applied.
By “we” Mr Yousaf means that the SNP reluctantly accepted one amendment from the Scottish Conservative MSP Adam Tomkins. That link takes you to a Guardian article that also notes that “Tomkins and fellow Conservative Liam Kerr failed to secure an amendment that they argued would protect disagreements, for example, at the family dinner table.”
Mr Yousaf continues,
The Justice Committee has offered critical scrutiny and recently held constructive discussions on a freedom of expression clause that would further protect everyone’s right to freedom of speech.
You don’t say whether these discussions led to any action, Mr Yousaf. Hint: they didn’t. His only reason for cooing about how constructive the discussions were is to conceal the fact that the this clause that would theoretically further protect everyone’s right to freedom of speech was not actually constructed, just talked about.
I am confident that our proposed amendment on this now strikes the right balance between protecting groups targeted by hate crime and respecting people’s rights to free speech.
A number of national Women’s Organisations, such as Scottish Women’s Aid, Engender and Rape Crisis Scotland have raised concerns over the inclusion of a Sex Aggravator.
I’m not surprised. They should never have let a Sex Aggravator sit on a parliamentary committee. → Continue reading: The Hate Crime (Scotland) Bill is due to pass tonight
Inflation, like sin, is an inevitable consequence of choices people make. But to strategise it as a policy is wrong. It undermines confidence not just in the money supply of the moment, but in the nature of money itself. This government, via the Ponzi scheme of “quantitative easing” is pumping inflation into the financial structures of the UK. This is a deep subversion of the concept of money itself.
– Sean Walsh
But instead of this, I am facing enormous pressure to get a vaccine in order to recover my basic rights as a citizen. And even then, those in charge are saying, I will still have to run around with a completely useless, breath-robbing and personality-canceling mask on my face.
And all this for a disease that, even before the introduction of vaccines, gave those infected by it a roughly 997.5 out of 1,000 chance of survival.
The civil authorities have decided, in effect, that fully indemnified pharmaceutical companies, whose pasts are obscenely littered with fraud, and the calculated creation of crises in order to up revenues on their products (OxyContin anyone?), have the de facto “right” to force me to take an experimental vaccine that, in the very, very best of circumstances, will only match what my apparently well-functioning body has already given me without any side effects.
And this, while straight out telling me that even if I submit to their government-coerced medical experiment I will probably still not get my full constitutional rights back.
This is an important issue that needs to be addressed much more vigorously than has been the case up until now.
– Thomas Harrington
The following is the text of an email that I and all the many others on the Adam Smith Institute email list received today, from the ASI’s Eamonn Butler:
Today marks 245 years since the publication of The Wealth of Nations, one of the most important books ever written.
Smith revolutionised our understanding of commerce. He explained how trade enriches our lives and his works laid the foundations of a whole new field of study: economics.
Today though, Adam Smith’s legacy is under threat from those that would rewrite history.
Smith’s grave and statue have been linked to “slavery and colonialism,” according to Edinburgh City Council.
The grave and statue are being reviewed by the SNP-Labour Coalition Council’s Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group. Their claim rests upon a quote by Adam Smith that said “slavery was ubiquitous and inevitable but that it was not as profitable as free labour“.
This is an extraordinary mischaracterisation.
Smith not only argued that slavery was morally reprehensible, but also provided intellectual ammunition to the abolitionist movement. The link Adam Smith has to slavery was as one of the authors of that vile practice’s destruction.
Smith, writing in the 18th century, thought slavery would continue. He could not have foreseen humanity’s subsequent liberal turn.
But it is abundantly clear that Smith thought slavery was grotesque. Smith wrote, in no uncertain terms, that slave owners’ “brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”
Smith also argued that slaves are inefficient workers, because they cannot keep the fruits of their labour. His arguments against slavery were used by abolitionists.
Smith was on the side of the angels, holding humanist views well ahead of his time.
The links, all in the original email, are well worth clicking on.
As Eamonn Butler says, it was liberals, which then meant people who prized liberty, who put slavery on the defensive. It never completely went away, and socialists, national and otherwise, gave it a whole new lease of life in the twentieth century, although lease of death might be a better phrase. And in doing this socialists provided several more mountains of evidence that Adam Smith was right about slavery’s inefficiency, as well as about its brutality and baseness.
In an earlier posting here just after Christmas, I solicited compliments, to cheer me up after I’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. Commenters on that posting said nice things about my blogging here over the years, and I thanked them. But older friends and acquaintances, who had been sent an email with the same news of my probably much shortened lifespan, remembered an earlier time in my life, from about 1980 to 2000, during which I was a libertarian activist and pamphleteer. Since this was before the arrival of the Internet, the key items of technology, in addition to the then still primitive but fast developing personal computer was, rather surprisingly, the photocopier. But there was another circumstance, mentioned by many friends, which was of far greater importance to me than any personal computer or photocopier. That circumstance was an individual human being, Chris Tame:
That is a photo of Chris Tame that I recently chanced upon in the vast accumulation of more or less meaningless paper that passes for my filing system.
Three years after Chris Tame died in 2006, I did a talk about his influence and legacy, about how much of a difference Chris Tame made, to all the libertarians whom he got in touch with and whom he put in touch with each other from his 1980s nerve centre at the Alternative Bookshop and then on into the 1990s. Here and now, I want to emphasise what a difference Chris made to me personally. Had it not been for Chris I would probably not have bothered being any sort of active libertarian at all, because without him that would have been just too difficult. Now that I am asking people to praise me, I realise that I want to praise Chris, publicly and in writing and at quite some length, far more than I have yet praised him before.
→ Continue reading: Chris Tame (1949-2006): A personal memoir
Death in America is acquiring new terrors.
It was already understandable if a dying Republican feared rising from their grave to vote Democrat, like a vampire harming what their life valued. (A democrat who voted “early and often” could anticipate this too, of course, but without dreading it – their undeath would echo their life.)
But now, even the politically correct must wonder what very different character they will acquire after death.
– In the 1940s, Dr Seuss author Theodor Geisel urged writers to avoid racist stereotypes, but the dead Geisel has been resurrected onto the public stage in the 2020s as a racist. His book ‘If I Ran the Zoo’ shows two visiting Africans in native African garb! What racism!!! (?) Everyone knows it is terribly racist not to portray Africans in culturally-appropriated western garb because African dress is so inferior to western, er, um, what I mean is because it’s so hurtful to remind Africans of their pre-colonial, er, well, er, that is, um, maybe I should avoid trying to explain the subtle critical race theory involved lest I travesty it – or, worse offense still, summarise it more clearly than the original.
– Sidney Poitier spent many of his 94 years defending his race – and had better cling to life because he is scheduled for resurrection as (too) white. He looked pretty black to me in ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’ but Critical Race Theory makes it hard to be black enough.
– Adam Smith wrote that slavery was ‘cruel’, slaveowners ‘contemptible’ and blacks in the Americas not innately inferior to their white owners – and taught the economic superiority of free enterprise over slavery. But his grave is the resting place of an appalling racist who despicably recorded that slavery in his day was almost universal, being absent only in the British Isles and parts of western and central Europe.
I’ll let readers decide which is the worst fate – and which of Smith’s writings, Sidney’s films or Seuss’ cartoons represents the most extreme case of “Who you gonna trust? Wokeness or your lyin’ eyes.” The doctrine that you must confess racism but can never be absolved of it no longer has a “this side of death” exit clause – and it seems to be getting more inclusive. In the old song, the corpses warn the living that no matter what they do in life, they will all look like the dead when they too are dead – just as rotting and skeletal. Likewise, no matter how hard people serve the cause or cringe to it in life, when they are dead, they will all look like racists to the next generation of woke, as past generations do to the current one – because this PC war on the past, on past authors like Geisel and past actors like Poitier and past thinkers like Smith, isn’t about the past. It’s about the future – who gets to rule, and under what terms. As ‘1984’ put it:
He who controls the present controls the past.
He who controls the past controls the future.
A decade ago, Orwell would have been unpersonned for not saying ‘She or he who…’ but that wouldn’t have saved him for not saying ‘Ze who…’ today.
In your experience, dear readers, has any comment you have seen in media, whether mainstream or alternative, that refers to “neo-liberal”, “the one per cent” or “globalisation” accurately described free enterprise, the case for free trade and the advantages of severally-owned property? Because in my experience such terms almost always suggest that the metacontext (a trademarked term of this parish) of the commentator/writer is collectivist/statist to some degree. As an example, I came across someone describing today’s UK as being governed by “neoliberalism”, and was not in the least put off by my pointing out that the State now grabs almost half of UK GDP and regulates a goodly portion of the rest of it.
Here is an article from six years ago from the Institute of Economic Affairs that challenges the idea that there is much that is very “neo-liberal” about today’s UK.
“Secret Pontins blacklist prevented people with Irish surnames from booking”, reports the Guardian.
For the benefit of readers not from either the UK or Ireland, Pontins is a company that runs holiday camps, and 90% of British or Irish adults who read that headline understood without reading another word that it was not the Irish in general that Pontins wanted to blacklist, it was Irish Travellers. (The Travellers, or Mincéiri as the current term is, are a separate ethnic group to the Gypsies or Romani but are often grouped together due to their similar way of life.) Reports of this incident from several sources, such as this later Guardian article by Séamas O’Reilly that I saw after most of this post had been written, confirm that people with those names were not banned from Pontins outright, it was rather that Pontins staff were told to check their addresses against the postcodes of Traveller sites before allowing them entry.
The Guardian continues,
Outrage over anti-Traveller list of ‘undesirable guests’ that was sent to booking operators
A blacklist circulated by the holiday park operator Pontins telling its staff not to book accommodation for people with Irish surnames has been described as “completely unacceptable” by Downing Street.
The list of “undesirable guests” was sent to booking operators, who were told: “We do not want these guests on our parks.” It said: “Please watch out for the following names for ANY future bookings.”
The list, which included names such as Carney, Boylan, McGuinness and O’Mahoney, was an example of “anti-Traveller discrimination”, a spokesperson for Boris Johnson said. The document had a picture of a wizard holding up a wand and staff declaring: “You shall not pass.”
The Guardian did not open comments for that story. As I said in 2011, that is because it knows perfectly well that Guardian readers hate gypsies and travellers.
However the Times did allow readers to comment on its report of the same events, “Pontins had blacklist of Irish surnames”. The comments, as I knew they would, consisted almost entirely of personal accounts of being the victims of theft, violence and intimidation at the hands of Travellers. This outpouring reminded me of something, but I could not put my finger on what. Then it came to me: the #MeToo movement. That came about when women compared notes about their bad treatment by predatory men. Exchanging their “Me, Too” experiences gave these women the knowledge that they were not alone and brought forth a demand that men in general should examine and change their behavioural norms. The #MeToo movement for women was celebrated by modern society, even when it degenerated into condemning men as a group without trial or investigation. Take note of both halves of that sentence. To forbid people to speak of their bitterness only embitters them more. But the historical record of “Speak Bitterness” movements should terrify anyone who cares about justice.
One of the most highly recommended comments to the Times article came from Patrick Joseph Maloney, who said,
As an Irishman with a name that might have made the list, I sympathise with companies that have to walk this tightrope of exclusion and inclusion.
Not all Irish Travellers are guilty of bad behaviour but a sufficiently large enough minority are.
I understand that the Chinese government recently introduced classes for their tourists on how to behave abroad?
Perhaps Traveller rights groups might consider similar moves as an alternative to simply waving the race and discrimination card? The problem is not one of race….. but behaviour.
The government says it wants to end prejudice against Travellers and passes laws to forbid discrimination against them. Mr Maloney’s comment illustrates how spectacularly that effort to bring about goodwill by law has failed.
Some readers, particularly those new to libertarian ideas, will find it hard to believe that anyone could have any other motive than hatred of Travellers for saying that it would be better for all parties, including the Travellers themselves, if there were no such laws. I can only beg such readers to ask themselves if our current policy is working. People who have done nothing wrong being turned away merely for appearing to belong to a certain ethnic group is clearly unjust. But that is not a description of the bad old days before the Race Relations Act 1965 and the many anti-discrimination laws that followed, it is a description of life in Britain in 2021 with all the laws in place. All that has been achieved by more than half a century of ever-increasing punishments and social pressure is to ensure that these days the “undesirables” are usually excluded by means of a nod and a wink. Whichever Pontins employee wrote that list was unusually careless to put it on paper. But the fact that they did put it on paper, complete with jokey reference to The Lord of the Rings, shows how accepted anti-Traveller hostility is. You don’t put Gandalf clip art on top of an announcement that is likely to be met with outrage. The writer assumed that the staff would accept what he or she saw as the obvious need to keep Travellers out. Evidently most of them did accept it: the blacklist operated for quite some time before someone blew the whistle. I do not consider it wicked to ask what experiences brought the Pontins staff to this state of mind. I assume that there was an implied “after what happened last time” there.
Open prejudice is less cruel than secret prejudice. The sign in the boarding-house window saying “No blacks, No Irish” can be argued against. The quiet word to a member of staff about those people cannot be. A company that openly refuses the custom of members of certain groups purely on account of their race can be challenged – and they lose the custom. But turn them away with a smile and a lie and it can go on forever.
For some, that outcome is fine. What they object to in the anti-racism laws is not that the laws make racism worse but the laws put them to the inconvenience of having to lie. To be clear I object to these laws in principle (people should be free to associate with whom they please) and because I want to see a world where people are judged on what they have done as individuals, not on what someone else with the same surname did. True, there is evidence that the crime rate among Travellers is statistically high, and it is no more wrong to suggest that they need to ask themselves what they should do to change those parts of their subculture that are harmful than it is to urge that males or whites should do the same. But before you condemn the Travellers as a group remember that, like all of us, they have been moulded by their history. Ach, why repeat myself? I said it in my post of 2011 as well as I ever will:
“Welfare” has continued its steady work of ruin. I read a very fine article in the Telegraph about a decade ago which I cannot now find. It described with sadness rather than hostility how, although gypsies had lived half outside the law since time immemorial, there had at one time been countervailing incentives to build relationships of trust with settled people. The gypsies had regular circuits and seasonal work. They needed pitches, employment and customers. They needed people to remember them from last time as good workers and fair dealers. Welfare has eroded that, and their former means of making a living have gone the way of the cart horse and the tin bucket. Nor is the difficulty just that technology has moved on, it is also that the bureaucratic net of form-filling and taxes has tightened so that the casual jobs they once could do within the law must now be done outside it. As in the drugs trade, in illegal trade in labour where there can be no redress for swindling on either side, such swindling is commonplace.
In that post I also said much more hated Travellers and Gypsies had become in my village since I first came to live there. Since then it has only got worse. But, as I also said back then, “I really don’t think it is the gypsies themselves who have changed so much. What has changed in the last few years is that they have become a state-protected group. God help them. State protection is better than state persecution as cancer is better than a knife in the ribs.”
Nine years later the cancer is further advanced. For all that, I do not think it is incurable. Human nature is immutable, but laws are not. For now reversing the spread of “equalities” legislation seems politically impossible, but as the years go by and ever-multiplying laws against hate never seem to reduce it, people of goodwill will start to wonder if it might be time to try another strategy.
Interviewer: It is striking how scientific studies, also in this corona crisis, reveal very diverse results. Based on these results, scientists can defend almost diametrically opposed theories as the only truth. How is this possible?
Mattias Desmet: The research on corona is indeed brimming with contradictions. For example, regarding the effectiveness of face masks or hydroxychloroquine, the success of the Swedish approach, or the effectiveness of the PCR test. Even more curiously, the studies contain a huge number of improbable errors that a normally sane person would not be expected to make. This is still the case in terms of establishing the absolute number of infections, while a schoolchild knows that this means nothing as long as the number of infections detected is not compared with the number of tests taken. Obviously, the more tests you carry out, the more likely your infection rate will increase. Is this so difficult? In addition, it should be kept in mind that the PCR test can yield a large number of false positives, because the technique is widely misused for diagnosis. Together, this means that the inaccuracy of the figures distributed daily by the media is so great that some people understandably suspect a conspiracy, albeit apocryphally, in my opinion.
Again, this phenomenon is better placed in an historical perspective, because the problematic quality of scientific research is not a new issue. In 2005 the so-called “replication crisis” erupted in the sciences. Several committees set up to investigate scientific fraud cases found that scientific research is teeming with errors. Often the stated conclusions are of very dubious value. In the wake of the crisis, several papers appeared with titles that leave little to the imagination. In 2005, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medical Statistics at Stanford, published Why most published research findings are false. In 2016, a different research group wrote about the same topic, in Reproducibility: a Tragedy of Errors published in the medical journal Nature. These are just two examples of the very extensive literature describing this problem. I myself am well aware of the shaky scientific foundation of many research results. In addition to my master’s degree in clinical psychology, I earned a master’s in statistics. My doctorate dealt with measurement problems in the field of psychology.
– Patrick Dewals: The Emerging Totalitarian Dystopia: An Interview With Professor Mattias Desmet
Original text here.
Once the continent of innovation, art, democracy and non-conformity, Europe has been laid low by a heady brew of bureaucracy, over-regulation, over-taxation and debt. A crisis of political leadership has in turn produced a deficiency of bold, innovative ideas, a shortage of vision and a huge expansion of government intervention. Nowhere is this clearer than in the EU’s ill-fated monetary misadventures.
– Nikola Kedhi
Lord Sumption: Our status as a free society doesn’t actually depend on our laws or our constitution, it depends on convention. It depends on a collective instinct as to the right way to behave. There are many things governments can do which it is generally accepted they should not do. And one of them, until last March, was to lock up healthy people in their homes.
Interviewer: So, do you think we have taken an irreversible step towards being more Chinese, more dirigiste?
Lord Sumption: I very much fear that we have
– From an Unherd interview titled: Lord Sumption: mass civil disobedience has begun
I do not agree with Sumption on every point by any means but this interview is well worth your time.
If you need a bit of a giggle, not to mention some informative bricks to throw at certain people, occasionally take a peek at the Extinction Clock.
Blog it, Gab it, Fakebook it, Twatter it, email it to green-inclined folk you know. This is absolutely perfect for dinner party discussions and family gatherings as well, as you do not need to explain it, just get them to read it and stand back with a smug expression saying nothing 😁
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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.
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