A Japanese electronics firm has invented a high-tech pint glass that tells bar staff when it needs refilling. The glass is fitted with a radio-frequency coil in its base that emits a signal to a receiver when it is empty. The glass has been invented by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Strikes me that this is the way for Japan to get out of its current economic mire. Is technology wonderful or what?
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You can sometimes overdo the business of defining your terms. Often the trick is just to get ahead and use them, and everyone can get your point clearly enough. But sometimes it is necessary to focus in on exact meanings. Words to look out for especially are those crafted and launched into regular use by Marxists, of the ex-, sub-, gutter- or plain generic brand variety. Often the entire point of these words is to create confusion – typically to bundle together two ideas that ought to be kept separate and then to use the muddle to accuse opponents of thinking what they don’t think, of liking bad stuff and opposing good stuff. “Exploitation” for example. Does that mean people using you in a way that is to your advantage? Or does it mean people using you nastily, against your will, for a lousy wage you haven’t agreed to? Big difference. You’re using me to spice up you dreary life right now, and you’re paying me nothing, you skinflint. But do I mind? No I do not. Exploit away. Multiculturalism. Now there’s a word. Does it mean people from different cultures? Or does it mean people remaining in separate cultures? If from, then I’m all for it, in the sense of multicultural people coming to live and work in Britain. If remaining in, then I’m flat against it. I want the British melting pot to melt us all into a new culture – but just the one new culture please – where we can all get along contentedly, which won’t happen if we all stay stuck in ghettoes. So again: big difference. This difference matters hugely. If you are arguing against “remaining in” multiculturalism, then you are liable, if you just carry on using the word “multiculturalism” uncritically, to come over as opposing “from” multiculturalism, in other words as a racist. But suppose, perhaps because you are determined above all else not to come over as a racist, you support “multiculturalism”. Then you risk supporting, without meaning to, the project of keeping ethnic minorities herded into ghettoes and exploited (in the bad way, nastily) by “multiculturalist” politicians like slaves exploited by plantation owners. So, before you support or oppose “multiculturalism”, make it entirely clear which version you are talking about. That’s it. I’ve said my bit. I love blogging. You can say in twenty minutes what it would take hours or even days to say in an “article”. April 4th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation, April 4th, 2002 | Comments are closed
UK Transport isn’t a blog name to make the heart race, or so Perry and I have been telling Patrick Crozier. Transports of Delight? Freedom Wheels? Libertarian Travelblog? But UK Transport by any other name would smell just as sweet, for just as long as he can keep it going and keep it coming. For example, among several nice things there was a beautiful little piece there yesterday (Wed April 3) entitled Safety Costs Soar. I know: yawn. But read it. Says Patrick: “There is something of a shifting of the tectonic plates going on in government circles at the moment.” Trust me, this is about more than safety. It is but the grain of sand in the molecular depths of which a whole world is revealed. April 4th, 2002 | Comments are closed
…when the law you break has no moral basis. In 1991, a crime was committed in New York. The UN imposed an arms embargo on all of the former Yugoslavia and all the national governments who voted for that resolution were parties to that crime. At the same time as this crime against the peoples of Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina was happening, Argentine Economics Minister Domingo Cavallo was conspiring successfully to sell Argentine weapons to Croatia via a series of dummy companies and third parties. Now I am under no illusions that Mr. Cavallo was motivated by any desire to right the wrong done by the UN when it tried to prevent the poorly armed Croatian and Bosnian peoples under attack by the Yugoslav Army from defending themselves. Nevertheless, that was exactly what the results of his self-serving actions were. We were able to fight and survive and eventually prevail. Yesterday Domingo Cavallo was arrested under the orders of politically motivated judges for his part in that entirely moral series of arms sales between 1991 and 1995. Argentine congressional deputy Elisa Carrio, an independent anti-corruption campaigner, welcomed the ruling that resulted in Cavallo’s arrest yesterday saying “Truth and justice will prevail”. Guess what, Elisa… it already has and you would not know what either looked like if they bit you in the behind. And so, Domingo, whatever else you may have done and deserve to be punished for, I hope you beat the rap on this one because there was no moral reason for you not to have done it and several excellent reasons to do so. And given the state of the Argentine economy, I hope you stashed your end of the proceeds in Zürich, not Buenos Aires. April 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, socialism the equal distribution of misery April 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
The EU has decided in all its brilliance in order to make sure to avoid facism in Europe it has to be have like the Nazis in the 1930s. It yet another gross breach of liberty and individual rights the EU is trying to bring in legislation to ban “racism and xenophobia”. Neither is illegal in the UK. To add to this outrage, it will be possible to be prosecuted by other EU countries for offences committed in another EU country. So some nosy German know-it-all (yes, I know that is a tautology) (mis)hears me making some derogatory comment or joke about the Germans. He then goes home and reports me to his local black shirt (er, sorry, policeman). This policeman can then issue a warrant for my arrest in the UK and I can be dragged to Germany for a trial. This law could pretty much cause the arrest of every comedian in Britain as well as most of my friends. I am sure we can expect the French to use this to prosecute any Briton who dares question French behaviour towards the Jews during Vichy. There are also worries that this will be used to quiet criticism of the EU in Britain. For years there have been attempts made to paint any Eurosceptic/Realist/Phobe as a racist and a xenophobe. In short, this law is outrage on everything that is right and true in the Anglosphere. One hopes, this is yet another nail in the coffin of Britain’s membership is the 4th Reich/2nd Holy Roman Empire/EU. Lagwolf  April 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
I suppose it was predictable that I would get a wide range of e-mails regarding my article about Israel called The Palestinian Götterdämmerung. One reader seems to feel I am a “crypto-authoritarian supporter of Jewish racism” whilst another accuses me of regarding Israel as ‘evil’ and yet another claims that by holding Israel in any way responsible I am “indifferent to the possible annihilation of all Jews in the Middle East”. Still others have written to me in such a manner that I can only speculate they read some different article altogether. Although this is actually one of my least favourite subjects, I will clarify and expend a few of my views seeing as so many people seem to take exception to them or want clarifications on what my views are. I do not think Israel is ‘evil’ just because I feel there is a section of Israeli society that is far from blameless. Neither am I a crypto-authoritarian because I believe that Israel is entitled to defend itself. I think the state of Israel has been led by a series of people who have pursued disastrous policies derived from their collectivist mind sets rooted in the complex reasons and events that lead to Israel’s founding, the consequences of which are all too obvious today. The conflict within Israel between socialist collectivism, religious collectivism and capitalist (and sometimes even religious) individualism has, as in so many other western societies (for that is what Israel really is), resulted in a schizophrenic mess. However I think Israeli society does indeed have the right, in fact the moral duty, to do what it has to do to defend itself. However that fact does not absolve the leaders of Israel who allowed this situation to come about of guilt, any more than any Israeli provocations absolve the morally deranged Palestinian extremists from what they have done and are still doing. I do not make any moral equivalence, far from it in fact, for a damnable litany of mistakes on one side may explain a torrent of evil on the other without at the same time justifying and excusing it. My sympathies are with Israelis for whom a visit to a pizza parlor can end in being blown to bits by the young girl standing next to them… and also with ordinary Palestinians who cannot build on their own property for fear of Israeli soldiers with bulldozers enforcing discriminatory ‘planning regulations’… and yet if they sell that property to an Israeli, houses will spring up there like mushrooms. Yet my big problem with Israeli policies is not so much settlement, which if handled differently might not have been so provocative, but that regardless of the letter of the law and claims to the contrary, it has been made clear that there is no genuine wish to treat non-Jews as equals economically or judicially. Policies should have been aimed at fragmenting, factionalising and de-collectivising the Palestinians, co-opting them economically and culturally and pointing out that Western style Israeli institutions are vastly superior to their corrupt counterparts in surrounding Arab countries, rather than ghettoising the Palestinians and then using them as a nice source of cheap wetbacks. Every time the state of Israel made life harder and harder for entire communities of Palestinians with heavy handed policing, every time entire communities found themselves unable to travel to work in Israel or even the next town in the occupied territories because of the actions of a few, in fact every time they came in contact with the official face of the Israeli state, individual Palestinians discovered that they are not being discriminated against because they supported Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah personally, but because they are Palestinians. Not surprisingly more and more of them started to see no reason not to support Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah. That is the ‘forcible collectivisation’ process of which I wrote, driven by the collectivist strain of thought that was present at the very foundation of Israel and which has been in conflict with the more rational individualist/capitalist ethos also present in Israeli society ever since… and then to make it so very much worse, Israel makes sure that the psychopathic Arafat ends up the uncontested leader, rather than bending over backwards to encourage rational economically oriented moderates to oppose him. I think that absorption and co-option of a significant chunk of the Palestinian population, giving them a genuine stake in Israel’s secular capitalist future, rather than leaving them with (on the West Bank) a GDP per capita of $1,500 per year, was the way to undercut the toxic forces represented by the ghastly Arafat. I realise that many within Israel understood that but for every rational Nathan Sharansky, there was a bigot like Rehavam Zeevi working to very different ends. A visible measure of the utter failure of Israeli policy is that Palestinian Christians, surely a natural factional ally of Israel and once a marginalised and often despised Arab minority, are now united with their Muslim confreres by their collective loathing of Israel. Likewise the stark example of the fate of pro-Israeli Lebanese Arab militias inside the former buffer zone showed what can happen when the going gets tough to those who throw their lot in with Israel. Now people who do believe that these are all grossly unfair characterisations of the reality of the state of Israel’s policies will never be convinced otherwise and I do not propose to even try to change that. I do not purport to have my own unimpeachable sources of news from the region but I have known many Israelis and a few Palestinians and feel my grasp on what has gone on is reasonably sound. But at least I hope some people who feel the need to write long strident e-mails will try to see that my dismay at Israel’s policies over the last few decades springs not from hostility to Israel so much as dismay that things could have gone so terribly terribly wrong for what is clearly in many ways an admirable western society with which I share much in the way of meta-context and values. But of course now, none of the sort of policies I wanted to see over the last 30 years are even an option any more and I realise that. That is why I wrote ‘Israel must do terrible things to survive’. The errors have been made, compounded and have now come due. To quote Talleyrand (or Joseph Fouché, I have seen it attributed to both), it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. That is why I want the people responsible for those compounded mistakes ‘to be damned’ when the time to tally up the final toll comes. However if I was an Israeli right now, I would be more concerned about personal survival but eventually the inevitable consequences of the influence in Israel of those with a profoundly collectivist ethos are going to have to be faced by every single person in Israel. Israeli society is going to have to decide just what living within ‘The Jewish State’ actually means and what it should mean in the future. I wish them luck for I do not envy them that task. April 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
As I write, Britain’s Parliament is speechifying about the recently deceased Queen Mother. It occurs to me that her death may in time come to symbolise a change in the style of British public life, and in particular an end to the extraordinary episode of generational/emotional warfare initiated by the death of Princess Diana. This untimely event, together with the memory of the unhappy life that preceded it and with the lamentations that followed it, provoked praise of a more theatrical style of public emotional deportment. Stoicism, dignity and emotional reticence in the face of loss was held up to bitter and strident ridicule, most especially in connection with the public demeanour of the Queen. Emotionally I am a true son of my late father, or at any rate I try to be. In his capacity as a Posh Lawyer he met the Queen Mother a few times, and, in common with most men and women of his time and type, he adored her. Like the Queen Mum, my father was a stoic. Life was a pleasure to be enjoyed, if necessary an ordeal to be endured, and a duty to be done. Pains and pleasures were both keenly felt, but both to be kept in proportion, at arm’s length so to speak. Being my father’s son, I miss the days when footballers would score goals and then nod in modestly happy acknowledgement, instead of (as now) being mobbed like victorious streetfighters. When Halle Berry embarked upon her emotionally incontinent Oscar acceptance speech not long ago (made all the more repulsive to me by the suspicion that she may have been deliberately exaggerating the emotional incontinence of it all) I switched off my television as if killing a nasty insect. Many of Princess Diana’s performances were like that, both in their emotional revelation and in the sense you got that it was all rather calculated. Emotional style matters. Style provokes, constrains and conditions actions. Devotees of the Emotional Incontinence school of public deportment are liable to make rasher, more impulsive decisions. My father and the Queen Mum lived to be ninety and a hundred respectively, and made themselves thoroughly useful and appreciated throughout their lives. When their contemporaries and emotional confreres died young or otherwise came to grief, they mostly did this while winning a world war. Princess Di got herself killed, pointlessly, in her thirties, in a car crash. April 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
The current worrying increase in crime in Britain, with its spate of shootings, muggings, burglaries, as well as the continued rise in general boorishness and incivility, is one of the main topics of public debate in this country. Predictably, our political masters have reacted to this by proposing such illiberal and largely useless “solutions” as restricting the right to trial by jury, state ID cards, and so forth. So it is encouraging to know that an earlier generation was able to tackle what was by then a relatively unruly society withouth raining all over civil liberties. It has been done before and it can be done again. I refer to that much misunderstood and maligned period – The Victorian age. They brought about a substantial drop in the crime rate without raining all over civil liberties. And one interesting feature of that period was that the school-leaving age was lower than it is now. Of course this is a complex subject, but I cannot help thinking that some of the current bout of delinquency among youngsters is that many of them are bored out of their minds at school and could be spending their lives more usefully elsewhere. April 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
It was not so much ‘love at first sight’ as ‘love at first philosophical exchange’ April 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
An article in Computerworld responds to the fears for privacy as a trade-off to security after September 11th. Jay Cline lists a number of scenarios that would signal that privacy and American’s civil liberties are in danger and actually being reduced.
The Patriot Act, passed in October last year giving the FBI new powers to monitor the e-mail of suspected terrorists, is mentioned in a relaxed manner:
There are two reasons for drawing attention to this article. First, I have blogged about privacy and security before where I applauded an article in the same magazine for pointing out the dangers of the drive for security at the cost of privacy. To balance that concern, the inefficiency inherent in governments and their bureaucracies often seems more tangible to me than extensive and elaborate conspiracies. Secondly, I would welcome any information about measures that do pose a definite threat to privacy as a result of September 11th and indeed any comments regarding privacy versus security issue. As they say, the truth is out there.  When the state watches you, dare to stare back April 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
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