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Sweden’s Multicultural Centre Expert on Islamophobia Joins the Daesh Islamic State. And I love the remark at the end:
Ouch 😀 February 24th, 2015 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Play the audio in this story and see if you can suppress an involuntary wince of sympathy: Incredibly Awkward Interview With Natalie Bennett. (Ms Bennett – a Samizdata commenter – is currently leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.) Kudos to Nick Ferrari who can evidently do what so many media folk cannot: order-of-magnitude mental arithmetic. Life is unfair. If The Boris had been on the hot seat he’d have said, “Oh cripes, you’ve ker-splonked me there!” and everyone would have loved him all the more. February 24th, 2015 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Internet is working well, so it’s not obvious that the FCC needs to help it. American companies own 10 of the world’s 15 largest websites (Google, Amazon, and Facebook to name an obvious few); the United States has greater access to advanced cable and fiber networks than any large country except Japan; it was the first to deploy advanced 4G/LTE mobile networks; it has more smartphones than anywhere else in the world; and it exports more digital goods per capita than any other nation. These facts are indisputable, so they’re simply disregarded by the Internet regulation advocates campaigning for net neutrality. Among the arguments they use to make their case are that some foreign cities and small nations have built extremely speedy residential networks; many of these offer Internet services for a fraction of U.S. prices; rural American communities have slower and less reliable networks than cities do; and many older people have no interest in venturing onto the Internet at any price. A core problem with these arguments is that they are, in truth, unrelated to net neutrality. The FCC says it’s not passing new rules in hopes of improving the Internet but to preserve it as it is with “light touch regulations.” The agency is taking action because courts have voided all but a sliver of its three previous sets of rules. And President Obama raised the stakes by publicly urging the FCC to impose the “strongest possible rules” on the Internet to fill the regulatory vacuum.
“Oh cool, lets drag this fascinating item of modern art inside our gates! February 24th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
So argues Mary Dejevsky in the Guardian. Her piece could have done with a clearer separation of the several different issues involved; freedom of speech, freedom of movement, state surveillance of all travellers, targeted spying on individuals, and above all the question of what difference it makes when the potential recruits to ISIS are minors. Nonetheless I broadly agree – the British state should not seek to prevent adult citizens leaving the UK merely because it suspects they wish to become members of ISIS – or to kill members of ISIS. Whether state assistance in the form of weapons or subsidy should be available to the latter admirable group, or whether any of the former group seeking to return should be allowed to do so in exchange for cooperation with MI6, are questions that even the purest of libertarians might find worthy of debate. The crimes of ISIS have been so flagrant and atrocious that the world is entitled to see any adult, male or female, volunteering to live under its standard (let alone bearing arms) as hostis humani generis and to exterminate them without any fuss about human rights – but wait till they get there. It is the burnings, beheadings and rapes that are the crimes, not getting on a plane to Turkey. February 23rd, 2015 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Obama administration has made it clear it wants to shove India into not producing more affordable power. After all, the poorer India stays, the lower its carbon footprint, right?
Obama losing six hours of his life? Well I agree that is horrible but at least it is better than nothing. February 23rd, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a gentleman from the University of Valencia developing a doctoral thesis, which focuses on the effects reading political blogs may have on the adoption of a more participative political position. If you would like to complete a questionnaire to lend a hand, please click here. February 23rd, 2015 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many of you will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging from a hundred years ago as much as I used to. This is mainly because my source material, The Times, isn’t what it used to be. It is much shorter – 16 pages instead of 24 – and much less accurate. In wartime you do not and often cannot know what is going on. Here, however, we do have an accurate report, from the front line no less:
He goes on:
Before getting indulging in some light sarcasm:
The thing that really strikes me about this letter is that it pulls no punches. I have often heard it said that the people at home had no idea what life was like at the front. But if letters like this were getting published on a daily basis I wonder if that’s really true.  The Times 25 January 1915 p9 February 22nd, 2015 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I haven’t time for a lot of commentary on this but thought I should at the least put up a link to this long, very important Atlantic Monthly essay about ISIS, or whatever else the would-be creators of a global Islamic empire, aka Caliphate, want to call it. The article makes it clear that the people involved most definitely DO regard themselves as serious scholars of Islam. While it might be comforting to dismiss them as hoodlums or chasers after the glamour of violence (not that these are not true), the people involved are much more. They are deadly serious and don’t regard themselves as aberrant or innovators in their faith. Whatever other issues get mentioned here (AGW, tax, Ukraine, etc) this – the need to utterly defeat such people, and crush and humiliate them in the eyes of any would-be admirers, is the dominant issue of the age. February 20th, 2015 | 82 comments - (Comments are closed)
In episode two of Our Guy In India, truck mechanic and Isle of Man TT racer Guy Martin visits the biggest slum in Mumbai, Dharavi. He is surprised to find how nice it is. Most of what we see of Dharavi in the programme appears well looked-after: clean and tidy and with lots of decoration. There is also a lot of commerce. The people are well dressed; the children well fed. There are refrigerators and large televisions. The walls and floors are decorated with “right fancy tiling”. Some residents are more middle-class than might be expected: Guy meets a man who works as a backing dancer, choreographer and dance teacher. The narrator explains that Dharavi generates £300 million in trade per year, though I am not sure how this is measured. He goes on to say that 85% of residents have a job; that anyone can set up a business; only 3% of Indians pay income tax; and many slum businesses are (unsurprisingly) unregistered. We see one business that grinds spices, another making tread plates for stairs, another selling phone calls (though mobile phones are more common). Guy visits the Children’s Education Society’s Banyan Tree English School, which the sign says is a computer education center authorised to teach a course called MS-CIT. Also available here are free medical checks and treatment for children under 12. It’s not all good. Some areas are so densely built-up that it is dark at street level in the daytime, though we see inside a house here and it is not unpleasant. And there is no running water or sanitation, though people are managing somehow. I also suspect the programme does not show the worst of it. What I do see is life getting better for poor people in India. The programme is currently viewable online, at least in the UK, though I do not know for how much longer. February 19th, 2015 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
So writes Brendan O’Neill. He’s right, of course, about the vileness of this but doesn’t really drill down into how this state of affairs came to pass. I put the rise of such “identity” politics, with its insistence that being “offended” about X or Y is sufficient reason to ban or harm said, down to a long process that to some extent has its origins towards the end of the period known as the “Enlightenment”. We saw early stirrings in the so-called “Romantic” era and the elevation of feeling and emotion above supposedly “cold” reason. The process really got under way, in my opinion, with the rise of post-modernism and with notions of relativism. We have even seen such nonsense as “feminist” science as opposed, say, to science per se. The very notion of there being an external, graspable reality that one cannot wish away is all of a piece with this mindset. (For more on the many horrors of post-modernism, I recommend Stephen Hicks and Raymond Tallis.) Allied to this is the way in which notions of self respect or self esteem have become conflated with a demand that others respect us and make us feel good regardless of any objective merit or otherwise. And for some people, they want to be respected not for any individual achievements or qualities (which might require a bit of work) but for simply being. That a figure from the left such as Peter Tatchell has come in for the hatred of the PC, identity-politics left is richly ironic. I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, but on certain issues, not least in his brave approach to Zimbabwe, he is morally and intellectually in a different class to many of those on that side of the spectrum. February 19th, 2015 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to show their true colours: morris dancing has been made compulsory for every able-bodied male between the age of 30 and 85; in ruthlessly enforced union flag street parties, brown-skinned people are made to show their loyalty by eating red-, white- and blue-coloured Battenberg cakes until they explode. And what is that acrid smell of burnt fur now polluting Britain’s hitherto gloriously carbon-free air? Why it is all the kittens that Nigel Farage and his evil henchmen are tossing on to beacons from John O’Groats to Land’s End in order to demonstrate that Ukip are the masters now. – James Delingpole. You don’t have to be a UKIP fan (I am not) to be unimpressed by the tendentious nature of the Channel Four spoof documentary that Delingpole writes about here. Meanwhile, JD imagines what a spoof on the Greens would be like. In reality, the chances of Channel Four, a fairly leftist news channel, doing some sort of job on the Green Party is remote, but it should, given the fluorescent idiocy, authoritarianism and often just sheer ugliness of what that outfit wants to do in practice. See its latest manifesto. February 18th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nice work by Bellingcat showing what anyone not wilfully blind or on the Kremlin’s payroll already figured out, that Russian forces have been firing across the border into Ukraine. February 18th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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