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2005 Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter, displaying an interesting sense of historical perspective. November 5th, 2005 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Some time ago, a commenter on this site made such a telling point about how to “name and shame” advocates of UK ID cards that his post was reproduced on the main page of the blog. We live in an age where it may be necessary to fight a bit dirty to halt this wretched proposal in its tracks. I was reminded of how politicians may have a financial interest in the ID card venture when I read this article by the Spectator on the political demise of David Blunkett, former Home Secretary, who resigned as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions this week in grubby circumstances:
How very interesting! November 4th, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC has an interesting piece up about Sony being sneaky:
No mention of Rootkits, according to Mr Russinovich, in the licensing agreement he signed when he stuck the CD in his computer to play it. My attitude to all such things is that the market will decide, aided by the internet, which will spread stories like this around. People copying CDs illegally, and now Sony putting intrusive software on their CDs, seem to me to be opposite sides of the same coin, the coin being the unviability – so it now appears to me – of the old way of doing things in a new time. Moralists may curse, and maybe they will, here, again. What Mr Russinovich presumably wants the market to decide is that Sony are, as this guy would put it, bastard people! And maybe it will. But maybe, instead, it will decide what Sony and most of the other Big Content and Electric Toy companies presumably want them to decide, which is not just not to copy CDs, but not, as a general rule, to allow pre-recorded CDs anywhere near their computers. That way CDs never get copied, and we all have to have two lots of Electric Toys, one lot to compute, and the other lot to play music and stuff. Although personally I do like to keep entertainment separate from computing, largely out of habit but also because when one breaks down I still want the other to work, I cannot see such separation really catching on. For me, there is a certain irony in Sony, notable pioneers in cheap music copying technology and now leading the way in do it yourself movie making – ideal for sneaking into cinemas – now trying to make disc copying especially difficult and dangerous. I guess they of all people know how easy copying has now become. Meanwhile, Adriana throws interesting light on the digital info-habits of the kind of people who will be e deciding the future of all this. November 3rd, 2005 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have visited Paris many times and have always loved that city, warts and all. I proposed to my future wife there earlier this year. I have noticed, however, over the years of my going there that the place does not have that relaxed atmosphere that I recall when I first went there in my early teens. I could not always put my finger on it. Well, people are definitely noticing that Paris is not “all right” now. U.S. blogger Roger L. Simon (who writes excellent crime fiction) has some thoughts about the wave of riots breaking out in the outer suburbs of the city. There is also plenty of food for thought via the wonderfully entitled Merde in France blog for some observations close to what is going on. (UPDATE: link to this instead of the Merde in France site. The url has changed, as spotted by a commenter. Thanks. Mea culpa). I watched the British Channel 4 news programme tonight, which devoted about five minutes to the mayhem, now in its seventh consecutive night. The report stated that at least 177 vehicles have been damaged, in some cases set on fire. Security services have been fired upon with guns. A primary school has been burned to the ground. This is the sort of thing one expects to read about in Iraq, or, perhaps the Watts area of LA back in the late 1960s. The Channel 4 programme skated over the possible reasons for the mayhem, also ignoring a number of salient facts about life in the area, such as the massive concentration of immigrants of mostly north African descent, the huge drug trade, the lack of assimilation into broader French society and the chronic and relentlessly high levels of youth unemployment. This vast housing estates are totally in contrast with the elegant, touristy bits of Paris that you see in the travel brochures. I was chatting with fellow contributor Michael Jennings about this over lunch today and he actually makes a point of going to the less salubrious bits of cities like Paris to see what life is really like. I have often noticed, either during car journeys or while taking the Eurostar train, just how grimy and cheerless the environ developments are. These are not places a sane person should spend a lot of time in, given the choice. Theodore Dalrymple wrote a fine piece about the outskirts of Paris a while back here. Definitely worth checking out. I heartily hope that order can be restored before that great city starts resembling one of the more violent parts of a Victor Hugo novel. November 3rd, 2005 | 183 comments - (Comments are closed)
P.J. O’Rourke, All the Trouble in the World (page 199). I love the punchline. November 2nd, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
2nd November 2001 to 2nd November 2005 and it is 7,220 articles and 92,741 comments later (we added comments in August 2002). Blimey, time flies. And happy blogiversery as well to Natalie and all hail to our blogfather. Cheers, Glenn. November 2nd, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a picture of front page of a benign ‘cousin’ of the infamous Pravda (or more like a foundling on the same porch). It is a local paper that covers the small area of the Old Town of Bratislava, thoroughly local, post-communist, and reflecting the concerns of the local populace. Did I mention that it was local? The headline reads: Two Bratislava districts (equivalent of local councils) have raised average wage above 25,000 [crowns]. What struck me was the active tense of that sentence � as if the local government had any control over what wages people get paid. I am told that the current Prime Minister was going around the country on a bicycle during the election campaign promising to double wages for everyone or words to that effect. Nothing extra-ordinary for a politician but people were actually disappointed after election when the wages did not double. When challenged he pointed at the fact that the wages did go up but nobody was fooled because they knew damn well that the cost increased as well. This did not seem to occur to them when the guy was making the promises though. There seems to be the perception that the government still somehow doles out the wages as well as fiddles the cost of everything. Well, they sort of do but not in a good way. I also note the difference between the West and the post-communist East � people in the former talk in terms of rising cost of living and price inflation, people here think of terms of size of salary. I think it reflects the difference in mentality � it is thinking of how much you have rather then how much you can do� November 2nd, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
It appears that prohibitionists in the United States are winding up the pressure against computer games for allegedly turning the nation’s young into violence-crazed monsters. This article in Wired nicely points to some of the absurdities involved in the position of would-be banners of such games like Jack Thompson. Another article here in libertarian monthly Reason makes an even stronger case against the moral panic brigade here. This issue reminds me of an unusual book I read a few years ago, called Killing Monsters. The book makes the argument that children – and adults – often use games as ways of acting out roles in ways that can help them to overcome fears and grapple with issues, rather than as just passive recipients of violent messages while watching a movie. This is not psychobabble. Children have played games involving rough-house action, or staged plays, or dressed up as cowboys and fighters, since time immemorial. What the moral scolds of our present age tend to overlook is that with some modern computer games, the players get to shape the plot, even down to the point of adding their own ideas to how games should be run and developed. As the Reason article points out, turnover of gaming has shot up enormously over the last decade in sales volume, from $3.2 billion in 1995 to $7 billion in 2003, while levels of youth violence in the United States have gone down. Whatever else may be going on to explain the drop in some categories of crime in the U.S., video games don’t seem to be making the problem worse. In fact, computer games may even make us smarter. November 1st, 2005 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tomorrow (Wednesday) the issue of trade justice will be topical. Free-market NGO Global Growth is looking for volunteers in London who would be willing to help with a stunt outside the French Embassy. If you are free in the middle of the day tomorrow, e-mail your details to info at global-growth.org. Please include your mobile number. November 1st, 2005 | Comments are closed
My previous article seems to have sparked off a discussion amongst the commentariat on the difference between being called a ‘subject’ or a ‘citizen’. To prevent that comment section from digressing too far, I thought it might be interesting to provide an article to revisit the topic even though I have written about it before. There are some historical reasons why the British have been ‘subjects’ (as they were subject to the laws of the Crown), whereas Americans have been ‘citizens’. The reality is that what the British are subject to are the laws of a democratically elected Parliament. As in truth the Royal Assent is nothing more than a historical curiosity, the actual differences between the way individuals truly relate to state in the United States and Britain is less than it might seem. The principle differences of significance are that as Britain is more democratic at the national level, individuals have less institutional defences against the power of the state, whereas in the United States, with its written constitution and clearer separation of powers, an individual has more structural defences against the excesses of democratic politics, at least in theory. In my experience most people tend to think they are citizens rather than subjects of whatever nation issues their passport. However I have always though the term ‘subject’ was a far more honest word to describe the relationship between individuals and the state rather than the prouder egalitarian sounding ‘citizen’. We are subject to taxes, we are subject to laws, we are subject to conscription of various sorts (be it military, educational or judicial). Sure, we ‘citizens’ are empowered via the glories of democracy, but quite how being out-voted and then being subject to some law you oppose ’empowers’ you is unclear to me, even if it is a reasonable law. To be a subject may seem demeaning but in truth that is what we are: subjects. As it happens, I think the term is even more appropriate for US ‘citizens’ given that at least in Britain and almost every other country, to avoid your particular state making ownership claims on the product of your labour, you just have to leave the country and live somewhere else. States generally do not claim to own you independent of your location, just the territory you live on and part of your labour within that territory in return for its ‘protection’ (capisce?). The United States, on the other hand, claims you owe them the obeisance of taxes regardless of where you are physically located anywhere on the planet, although in practice it often makes arrangements with other nations to only impose its demands if you make more than a certain amount (double taxation treaties). Yet the obligation to report your income from overseas and to pay the IRS is still there if they wish you to do so. So if it is not just sovereignty over a piece of land that the USA claims, it actually contends that it owns part of your labour regardless of where you live, making you subject to taxation for merely having the permission to live in America even if you choose to live elsewhere, then you sure sound like a ‘subject’ to me. November 1st, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
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