That essential source for civil liberties issues, vigilant.tv is showing signs of life again after a long absence from the blogosphere. That can only be a good thing.
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Where do political ideas end and terrorist acts begin? Is every destructive behaviour in the name of any political ideology just dandy, fine and justified, or are some societies distinguishable from others precisely because they employ civilised means of political expression and government (voting, debate, free speech) as opposed to ruling and arguing by violent threat and patently, deliberately, terrorising violence? Call me a pro-life extremist but in my view, organisations cease to be mere political debating circles as soon as they reject real opportunities for reasonable discussion in favour of blowing people’s heads off. The United Nations does not agree. Peter Hansen, the UN relief agency chief in Gaza, says:
Israel begs to differ:
October 6th, 2004 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The other day, I snapped the following photo, in the London Underground. I tried as hard as I could to get the entire thing in my picture. Had I stepped back any further I would have been (a) electrocuted and then shortly after that (b) run over by a train.  I have not read this book, which is by Jason Burke. But: Naom Chomsky? “Rumsfeld and his clique”? Something tells me that whatever the nuances of the truth here revealed, America will get the blame for it all and Islam hardly any. William Dalrymple should not be confused with Theodore Dalrymple. Read what Theodore has to say about William (no relation), in this article, this sentence being the one that seems to me to matter most:
I did an earlier posting about William Dalrymple, and the comments there are also well worth looking at to learn more about the man and his views. October 6th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Politicians do love their Olympic Games. They make them feel so important. There are people to be expelled from their home, blameless businesses to be relocated into bankruptcy, photogenic new sports stadia and shiny new transport links to be constructed, opening ceremonies and firework displays to be arranged, all at vast public expense, and involving vast opportunities for grandiose displays of political self-importance, to say nothing of more private sorts of gain. Nevertheless, the following story about the mutual impact of the Olympics and politics takes this natural affinity to a whole new depth of creepiness. I am rather surprised that David Carr has not beat me to noticing it. I guess (see immediately below) he has other worries on his mind:
I know that it is not received opinion here to be any sort of admirer of democracy, but I actually do rather admire it, basically because it is so vastly preferable to civil war as a method of swabbing out one bucketload of politicians who have become frightful beyond all redemption, and squirting in another lot who are not yet quite so terminally disgusting. And I believe that it has other benefits, many of them quite subtle, and unexpectedly non-collectivist, despite the fact that at the heart of democracy lies the brutal and morally repulsive idea of majorities – more precisely their elected representatives – being able to do whatever they please. See for instance this New York Times article, which argues that democracy, far from depending on economic development, is actually the way to get economic development. For reasons I hope Real Soon Now to be writing about here, I am greatly attracted by this hypothesis, despite the fact that, in terms of the stark principles involved, democracy is just the latest of many negations of the idea of individual liberty. But if democratic politics is to work, even by its own crude standards, one of the most basic rules is that the rule for when the next election is to be held must be stuck to. Postponing an election, for whatever reason, is a step down a very slippery slope indeed, at the bottom of which lies naked tyranny. Has any elected politician in modern Britain ever made a suggestion like this before? Except during a major war? If any has, I missed it. October 6th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I bet that if I mention the term coup d’etat it conjures up images of heavily-armed soldiers on the streets, tanks on airport runways and besieged radio stations. In truth, though, that is precisely the means by which such things are usually conducted. But they happen in faraway, third-world countries. It is the kind of thing we have come to associate with Oxford-educated ‘Generals’ who manage to wrest power from their tribal rivals in some African shanty-nation or with bandoliered, mustachioed Bolivians firing their carbines into the air and shouting “Viva El Nuevo Presidente” while the still-warm body of the old ‘Presidente’ swings from a nearby lamppost. But this is not the kind of thing that happens in developed countries like Britain. No, this is a stable country with a proper economy and elections and democratic governments and political parties and judicial independence and free speech and the such. I suppose it is, in part at least, because complacency caused by all those institutions appearing to be extant that we are about to taken over in a quiet, stealthy and bloodless coup d’etat all of our own. → Continue reading: A very British coup October 6th, 2004 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 5th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Some may find the following comments to be unserious, in poor taste and reflecting the laddish tendencies of some Samizdata contributors. If you do reach such a conclusion, you will of course be dead right. The great Tory MP, Spectator editor, game show contestant and budding novelist (does this man have no limitations?) Boris Johnson, has contributed greatly to the gaiety of national life through such jolly japes as hiring sacked BBC journalists like Andrew Gilligan or driving cars on Top Gear. But surely among his greatest achievements was the identification of what in retrospect was obvious to all but which struck like a thunderclap at the time. In the mid 1990s, when “New Labour” was on the rise, our Boris, then a humble scribe for the Daily Telegraph, created what he called the Tottymeter. The Tottymeter aims to reflect the representation of attractive young women – preferably unnattached – in a political party. Blondes, redheads, brunettes – it does not matter. If your political party has a fair showing of the Fair Sex, then chances are that your party is headed for power rather than for Skid Row. Women, so he argued, are attracted to successful men. (Success rather than looks, given that the average political male is not exactly Sean Connery). Serious types will sneer, saying I am showing a sexist attitude, suggesting that women do not have a serious reason for joining a party. But I think when looking at success in a field like politics, you can tell a lot from the sort of folk who are joining a party as well as those who are leaving it. I found Boris Johnson’s thesis convincing. In the mid-1990s when I attended a Labour conference in the course of my job, I was struck by the relatively high number of pretty, and very ambitious young women. (Mind you, when the average young NuLab type opens their mouths, my interest disappears, even if they look like Gwyneth Paltrow). I think one key contribution of bloggers to modern political reporting should be trying to record this phenomenon and indeed analyse it. October 5th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a sad reality that racism and xenophobia have not yet been totally eradicated from our planet. To that end, Ofcom – the regulator for the UK communications industries, which claims that it “exists to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age” – has admonished a sports commentator for daring to suggest that a non-native English speaker might not speak English perfectly. According to a nameless Ofcom spokesperson:
The implications being that some ridiculous government super-regulator will inevitably smear you with the intimation that you are a racist, and your employer will be forced to impress upon you the importance of “the careful use of language”. And gosh, isn’t our country and our planet all the better for this speech monitoring service our government provides at our expense? October 5th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
On this day when the prize for private space flight was finally won I tuned in to the Conservative Party Conference – the Conservative Party is (at least since the Liberal party was taken over by radicals like Harcourt in the 1890’s) the closest thing we have to a party of private property and free enterprise in Britain. Dr Fox (the Chairman of the Conservative Party) made the first speech. “We must reclaim the colours of the national flag from the extremists [I believe that Dr Fox meant the BNP], we must reclaim the Red, White and Blue” said Dr Fox whilst pointing to the great board behind him. Unlike some people, I rather like this patriotic stuff (indeed I type this in sight of my own little Union flag). However the great board to which Dr Fox pointed was not Red, White and Blue – it was a blue board with black writing on it. Now I have nothing against blue and black, they are the colours of the Estonian flag (a nation I much admire) and, in heraldry, blue and black are the colours of loyality and constancy (steadfastness) – things that the Conservative party lost in 1989 and is now (I hope) trying to get back to. However, to the television viewers, Dr Fox and the people who cheered him in the conference hall seemed to be either colour blind or insane. I can only assume that what was seen by the people in the conference hall was different from what was seen by the people at home. Perhaps the great board was a screen and at a key moment the Union flag appeared on it, and the television cameras did not capture the key moment… a plot by the BBC?. But it was all very odd. October 4th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
BBC Radio Four (indeed any part of the B.B.C.) is not where one would expect to find support for liberty, but a few a days ago I heard, on the Radio 4 Today Program, a report on medical care. According to the report private hospitals in India (including in Calcutta) offer British people medical care at least as good as that provided by the NHS, and in wonderful conditions (marble floors, everything clean rather than the dirt, and decay one finds in British government hospitals – thousands of people die every year in Britain from infections they pick up whilst in government hospitals) and at a small fraction of the cost of the (highly regulated) British private hospitals. The Labour MP Frank Field (a man known for his honesty – hard to believe in a politician, but it is true in his case) came on to the program and claimed that a constituent of his was being left to go blind by the NHS, people are normally left to rot for long periods of time by the government medical service, but his sight was saved by sending him to an Indian hospital. The price of his medical care (not including the cost of flying to India, I admit) was £50 – in Britain the medical care would have cost (according to Mr Field) £3000. So the choices were – go to a highly regulated British private hospital (if you happen to have £3000), rely on government medical care (and go blind), or go overseas. Being a Labour MP Mr Field wanted the NHS to pay to send people to private hospitals in India (they put administrative barriers in the way of this [“it is too far”] – although they are willing to spend far more money sending people to European hospitals), but this was the closest I have ever come to hearing both the BBC and a Labour MP condemn statism in health care. October 4th, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Personally, I’d be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons. – Instapundit showing why it is wrong to call him right wing October 4th, 2004 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just ran across this quote of Burt Rutan from this afternoon on Space Flight Now:
Yes, I do believe the pigs had their noses so deep in the trough they never saw the hatchet coming. If any of them did look up they just grunted at the idea anyone could possibly ever displace them, not realizing they were not being so much displaced as bypassed and made redundant to requirements. I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells of… liberty. October 4th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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