Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that a bus company acted unlawfully by failing to do more to enable a wheelchair user to board the bus. The claimant’s complaint was that a young woman and buggy had been occupying the designated area for wheelchairs. Many have focused on the court’s conclusion and celebrated the ruling as a blow for disability rights. But the true significance of the case is that who sits where on the bus could become an issue of law. The rule of law now extends to regulating issues of politeness.
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So now we know what Theresa May’s industrial strategy is going to be. It might even be Greg Clark’s. He’s in the report too. The strategy, alas, is one that proves the British state simply cannot learn from past mistakes. Indeed, it seems to consist of doubling down on those errors. The report shows plainly their inability to realise that our economic problems more often stem not from what government is doing, rather than what it isn’t. The solution, shouldn’t be to dream up more things to do, it should be to stop doing what’s causing the problems. January 23rd, 2017 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 That’s a line that the Rod Steiger character uses in the the 1970 film Waterloo. And it’s a line I have been repeating to myself again and again over the last few months. My enemies in the Establishment, whether it be the media, communists, social justice warriors or the last-ditch Remainers have been obligingly making error after error. I could point out their mistakes and laugh but there is that danger – however remote – that they might listen and learn. You see, I don’t want them to learn. What I want them to do is to keep the gas pedal pressed down hard as they can as they drive the juggernaut of bad ideas over the cliff and into oblivion. In such circumstances it is best to keep ones counsel. Even so, when Prince Charles co-authors a Ladybird book on climate change I feel obliged to comment. You see, I am rather fond of our vestigial monarchy. Don’t ask me why, I just am. But for the heir apparent to involve himself in a political argument at a time when his side is losing is madness.
It’s a Ladybird book. It’s aimed at children. That makes it indoctrination. I loved this from one of his co-authors:
Keeping the pedal to the metal and beyond. There are times when I think that Brenda’s main motivation in staying alive is to prevent her son doing irreparable damage to the monarchy.
January 22nd, 2017 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the kind of protectionism that Trump appears to crave creates even more – including the very people it is intended to help. Consumers pay more for goods. Less wealth is created. The arteries of exchange, of innovation, of prosperity, become choked. To her great credit, Theresa May grasps these truths – hence her refashioning of Brexit this week as a chance for Britain to turn its face to the world. To his great discredit, Donald Trump does not. (Although there are any number of CapX articles that could enlighten him.) In that farewell address, America’s first President expressed his faith “that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal… and that, although we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to the right path with more avidity”. On many issues, Donald Trump has yet to choose his path. But on trade, it is crystal clear that he is going down the wrong one. January 21st, 2017 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Onion remains America’s Finest News Source™. Quoting today’s masterpiece in full, though you should click through for the picture:
January 20th, 2017 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
From Wales Online:
The very unpopular reduction in frequency of bin collections is widely seen as being a result of an EU target that 50% of household waste must be recycled by 2020. It is actually more complicated than that because the good boys and girls in the Welsh and Scottish governments had separately set their own “more ambitious” reycling targets. But those targets aren’t popular either, certainly not in Wales as their practical effects begin to show. As reported by today’s Daily Mail,
Nor did it make the EU target any more beloved when it was reported that, perversely, the UK could face millions of pounds in EU recycling fines because it has reduced consumption of paper and cardboard and so produces less paper waste to recycle. January 20th, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Although I fully expect to spend the next four years of the Trump Era rolling my eyes (or maybe eight years, given the complete lack of understanding by the establishment of their role in making Trump happen), I must admit I am looking forward to hearing the sound of a great many heads exploding during the Entrumpment tomorrow 😀 January 19th, 2017 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Iran is a country full of hot women forced to wear binbags on their heads by religious fascists. – Samizdata Uber driver of the day January 18th, 2017 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit just linked to something calling itself An open letter to Trump from the Press Corps. I clicked on the link, because I thought it might be a masterpiece of self-parody. It is. No comments allowed on the open letter itself, but I clicked on the Instapundit comment thread, suspecting that there might be some entertaining and quite well crafted abuse to enjoy. Again, I was not disappointed. An odd thing about this open letter is that it seems so lacking in the very knowledge which you might expect the “Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review” to know quite a lot about, namely how the technological context of journalism has altered in recent years. He says to Trump: You need us to say nice things about you! You need us to get your messages across! But everything that Trump has said and done since he first got into his stride as a seemingly long-shot candidate has said, right back at them: “No, I don’t.” It will be interesting to see if Trump’s current anti-social media heckling of his Obama-worshipping media opponents keeps happening. I suspect that he’ll start being more polite to them, but only if and when they start being more polite to him. But that could just be wishful thinking on my part. More generally, one of the things I notice about effective people, including me at those times in my life when I have been effective, is that effective people often do things that they “can’t” do, but which actually, they can do, and which if they do do will serve their purposes very well. “You can’t do that” actually only means that until now you couldn’t do that. And it often also means: Now that you can do that and now that you are doing it, we want you to stop. Until recently, no President of the USA could tweet back at his media critics, very quickly and cheaply and easily, without in any way having to beg from them any right to reply to their criticisms, and without irritating anyone else who isn’t interested. Now, the President can. The claim that he shouldn’t, because “proper Presidents don’t behave like that” needs him to be persuaded of this claim. But if ignoring this claim is a major reason for his effectiveness, why would he be persuaded? January 18th, 2017 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here are two contrasting articles from the Guardian: Watching porn in public is not OK. It’s harassment – Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Pussy Riot celebrate the vagina in lyrical riposte to Trump – Luke Harding It is no discredit to the Guardian that different writers for the paper have said contradictory things, although none of the dozens of comments I read to Ms Cosslett’s article brought up the the difference between the views of old and new feminists on whether it was liberating or deplorable to shock the public. Many Libertarian-ish people would say that incompatible preferences across different groups of people regarding what should be seen in public could be solved by property rights and competition. Each shopping mall and bus company could set its own rules, some catering to the puritans, some to the libertines. That would be nice, but until we find the door into Libertopia we must deal with the major regulator of such things being the State. What do you think? How should people behave here and now? Do the existing laws come first or ten millionth on our list of things to oppose – or should we support them? Is there more of a problem than there used to be, now that people can watch R18 movies on their Kindles on the bus while a twelve year old sits next to them? Or is this just another moral panic that could be solved if people kept their eyes to themselves? By the way, consider this blog post to be a a venue where, as they say on the cinema screens, “Strong language may be permitted, depending on the manner in which it is used, who is using the language, its frequency within the work as a whole and any special contextual justification”. January 17th, 2017 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few years back one of my children introduced me to the glory that was Star War The Third Gathers: The Backstroke of the West. Now I see that Mark Liberman of Language Log has flagged up this piece by Patrick Shanley for the Hollywood Reporter:
You can view either edited highlights of this semi-accidental masterpiece or the whole thing by following the links in the Hollywood Reporter piece. Back at Language Log, one of the commenters, Jonathan Smith, rightly says that, “This latest editor’s genius was to get voice actors to read it with straight faces.” However I cannot endorse Mark Liberman’s view when he writes, “I’m skeptical of the machine-translation idea, because I seriously doubt that there has ever been an MT system that rendered “the Jedi Council” as “the Presbyterian Church”. Doesn’t he know what happens when you say things like that about Star Wars? January 16th, 2017 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
By definition, a customs union is an agreement between countries to embrace tariff-free trade between members but impose common tariffs on goods imported from non-members. At an EU-level, this means a Common External Tariff (CET), a dizzying array of over 12,651 different taxes (and some quotas to boot) imposed on goods from the rest of the world. The long and short of it is that the EU is internally trade liberating but outwardly protectionist. January 15th, 2017 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
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