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This worthy project is about trying to get folks to examine their underpinning meta-context… the unspoken ‘givens’ that we all use to frame our view of the world that almost always go unexamined: well if you think that, then surely this should follow, no? … and if you manage to reach people on that level, you can change many of their conclusions about a great many things. April 21st, 2011 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I’m looking forward to spotting (and snapping) my first one of these on the streets of London. The telephoto lens and the iPhone, I mean, not the mere iPhone.  I was expecting such an add-on to be priced at well over a hundred quid, if only because it has such a rich-guy’s-toy vibe about it. But actually it’s around fifty. But, does it work well? As yet, there appear to be no reviews. But click here to read the press release. In German. My hope, and actually my expectation, is that as the years roll by and as cheap and cheerful camera technology continues to develop, my immense archive of cheap and cheerful snaps of cheap and cheerful cameras in action will get ever more fun to look back at. A drawback of this lens might be, for some, that it makes it clear that you are definitely using your iPhone to take photos. There is no doubt that many of the powers that be would like to ban photography in public places altogether, by everyone except their noble selves, either because they really would or just for something to do. Historically, one of the more significant achievements of mobile phones with cameras may prove to be that they have made it impossible for some goon in a uniform to tell if you are taking photos, or merely texting or some such thing. If challenged while doing the former, you can protest that you were merely doing the latter. Simply, they couldn’t and can’t ban public photo-ing because they can’t spot when it’s happening. April 19th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Antitrust Religion, Edwin S. Rockefeller, page 103. Well, as we can see in the case of Google, the antitrust movement still has legs today. April 5th, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The gradual but inexorable illegalisation of smoking is arriving at its end-game, as many bloggers of the sort I like have been complaining about, and no doubt as many bloggers of the sort I don’t like have been celebrating. Here is the Radio Times, describing a show done by Panorama last Monday (March 7th) entitled Smoking and the Bandits:
I saw that coming in 1987. Under the bit in that pamphlet entitled THE BENEFITS OF ADVERTISING, AND OF PROPERTY (page 3) I wrote about how gangsters would, if the illegalisation process I was writing about even then continued, soon be running the tobacco business, supplying “these now genuinely lethal products”. Not that I was alone in possessing these prophetic powers. Just about every libertarian then writing saw this coming. Illegality equals toxicity. You merely had to apply what everyone already knew about other drugs markets that already were, even then, illegal, or for that matter acquaint yourself with a one page summary of the story of Prohibition, and the pattern of future events, if they insisted on continue to bear down on smoking with the force of law. But going back to that bit in the Radio Times, where I put “…” above, it also says this:
That’s right, there goes the exact same warped logic as Natalie Solent noted in her posting earlier today, immediately below this one. No, Radio Times, depriving taxpayers is what you do when you tax them. These “bandits” are thriving because, unlike our tyrannical government, they are not doing that. It seems that the commenter quoted by Natalie is mistaken. It is not “only in the mind of Ms Lucas” that such warped thinking is being thought. March 12th, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Matt Welch, over at the Reason Hit & Run blog, comes across this piece of nuttery from the land that gave us Dan Ackroyd and John Candy. How sad and oppressive that nation appears. Of course, there is no reason for anyone else to gloat: in Britain, we have more than our fair share of censors and wannabe controllers of supposedly offensive messages. Canada does seem to be prone to a lot of this sort of nonsense. Mark Steyn, a Canadian national now living in New Hamshire, has had his problems with self-appointed guardians of what is considered to be acceptable to say and write. My old man, when in the RAF in the 50s, once nearly emigrated there to serve in the Canadian air force. You might now be reading me with a Toronto or Vancouver dateline. Oh well, Dad chose to move into farming instead. Erratum: I previously said John Belushi was Canadian. He was not. Sorry for the error. January 13th, 2011 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is furious debate in the comments to this article in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf, in which she argues that “Julian Assange’s sex-crime accusers deserve to be named”. Do they? He has been after all. I just don’t know. Neither about Assange’s case, or the general case. On a point of fact, Wolf is quite wrong in claiming that the rule of law by which the plaintiff in a rape case is given anonymity is a “Victorian relic”. Commenter “snoozeofreason” said that anonymity was introduced, for what were seen as feminist reasons, in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976. This link to RapeCrisis, an activist group, confirms that fact. It also argues in favour of anonymity for the accuser but not the accused. I reject that. The only thing of which I am sure is that the accused and the accuser should be treated the same: anonymity for both, or for neither. Naomi Wolf is an icon of feminism. In making this argument she has broken ranks with other feminists. Schadenfreude at the the sight of them rending each other is never far away, but schadenfreude does not actually give me an answer as to whether anonymity in rape cases is a good or a bad thing. I have bitterly criticised feminists and anti-rape activists in the past for their wilful denial of the possibility of false accusations of rape. I sneer at Naomi Wolf’s late discovery of this type of possible injustice. Yet she makes a strong argument: “Though children’s identities should, of course, be shielded, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must be treated as a moral adult.” Against that is a more nebulous pressure, but one with deep roots in the human psyche: rape is different from other forms of assault. The trauma of a rape victim, male or female, does not arise only from the physical injuries received. Harm is done to them by having the fact that they have suffered such a violation made public. Some victims would feel unable to come forward if it were to be made public. Yet other rape victims argue that this reluctance merely reinforces the barbaric idea that there is something shameful in being raped. We use the word shame to mean too many things. January 5th, 2011 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just before Christmas, I spent a few days in Belgrade and Budapest. It was extremely cold, and I had quite a bad cough and sore throat. As a consequence, beautiful as these cities are when covered with snow, I was inclined to stay inside. No real problem there. The Central Europeans almost invented the cafe, and the options varied from little places that you enter by stumbling down a set of stone steps that lead to a cozy basement, to huge, spacious places that have ceiling murals that appear to have gotten a little lost after being originally planned to decorate the Sistine Chapel. (These specific ones tend to be more in Budapest than Belgrade, The Austrian Empire persists). In any event, in both cities, cafes, bars, restaurants and taverns seem to invariably be filled with smoke. I am not a smoker, and although I generally prefer a venue without tobacco smoke, I am capable of putting up with it. However, with my sore throat, being in a room full of smoke led to quite a bit of discomfort. It would have been nice to find a cafe which was not full of smoke. Of course, home in London, there is a complete smoking ban in bars, cafes, and restaurants. I would have been fine, but a smoker looking for a place to smoke that was not his home and was not indoors would have been out of luck. One cannot smoke even in premises specifically designed for the benefit of smokers: smoking clubs and cigar clubs are essentially illegal. Proponents of anti-smoking laws who claim that an exception for smoking clubs would be taken advantage of to allow smoking in other venues are correct of course. In places (eg Bavaria) where there is a smoking ban and an exception for smoking clubs, paying what you think is a cover charge when entering a jazz club, and discovering later that you are now a fully paid up member of a smoking club is not an unknown experience. On the other hand, I am hard pressed to see how this matters. There is no shortage of genuinely non-smoking venues in Bavaria. When I go to Spain, I find what appears to be a far more satisfactory experience. Spanish law does not impose a complete smoking ban in bars, restaurants etc. The law there states that large venues shall be non-smoking, but there may be a smoking room. With respect to small venues, the owner of the property may decide whether smoking is permitted or not, and there shall be a clear sign near the door stating whether it is. I find this a very satisfactory outcome. If I want a non-smoking venue, I have little difficulty finding one. I doubt smokers have much difficulty finding a venue that allows smoking, either. If I am in a large party of people that contains both smokers and non-smokers, then I can be away from smoke and smokers are free to go off and have a smoke in the smoking room. If I am in a small party of people that contains both smokers and non-smokers, then we can choose our venue between us. The non-smokers can choose to put up with some smoke, or the smokers can decide to refrain from smoking indoors for the evening. Non-smokers can freely associate with smokers, or not, as they choose. However, there is still a slight problem. The Spanish legislation is far less heavy-handed than the British legislation. Requiring cafe owners to put up signs indicating whether smoking is allowed is far less objectionable than forcing a non-smoking policy on everyone, willing or not. Allowing smoking rooms is less heavy handed than insisting that entire venues are non-smoking. However, there is still coercion. The owners of private property are not entirely free to run their businesses on that private property as they please. My gut feeling is that a genuinely free market would result in a situation similar to that existing in Spain, without any coercion at all. Some venues will allow smoking, and some will not. Different customers will choose to patronise venues with different policies, and different venues will cater for these different customers. In short, greater freedom will lead to greater choice. And yet, in places like Belgrade and Budapest, this is not what seems to happen. Virtually all venues allow smoking, and as a customer I have little choice. Do cultural factors overwhelm freedom? I certainly hope not. Or are there some other regulatory or legal factors that lead to uniformity rather than freedom. I would be interested in people’s opinions on the matter. December 28th, 2010 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
An American friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge – known to several folks around here – has recently undergone a deeply unpleasant encounter with airport security types in the US, thanks to those lovely folk from the TSA. A few years back, Andrew had surgery for cancer treatment, and bears the scars of that. It seems that he suffered a lot of discomfort when a TSA character tried to pat him down, as they say. What the TSA goons may not have realised, since Andrew is not your regular stiff in a suit as he dresses more like a rocker clad in plenty of leather, is that he has some pretty weighty political connections, and will use them. There will be consequences. I am not an expert on the pros and cons of scanner technologies, or whether they flood the body with dangerous radiation, and so on. What I do know is that this sort of outrage will always happen when certain persons, such as TSA officials, have that moment of supreme power over anyone else, as in a queue for security at a busy airport. What I suspect is different, however, between the USA and the UK is that the former country, as demonstrated by the recent successes of the Tea Party movement, has not yet entirely decided to kowtow to the conventional wisdom. So there is a decent chance, I think, that Congressmen and women might try and smack the TSA down, and hard. We can only hope. Back in the UK, there seems to be scant chance of this occurring. Our sheeplike habits are now too ingrained. There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal on the same issue. And NickM, of Counting Cats, has an absolute blinder of a post on the subject. As he says, whatever excitements may once have attended air travel – at least the nice kind of excitements – are dead. The only people who can enjoy such travel these days are the mega-rich and politicians. As for the rest of us, we get the dubious pleasure of being felt up by the state’s functionaries. November 18th, 2010 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Royal College of Nursing has just won a case against a bureaucratic body in England that many may not have heard of, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The victory is a fairly minimal one: it has been ruled that the ISA must confirm to some elements of fair procedure, and may not ban people from their professions automatically without hearing. None of the professional bodies or establishment human rights organisations such as Liberty appears to be challenging the principle of state vetting in employment. They are fussing about the procedure. But to me this is an epitome of the degree of state intrusion into our lives that is now accepted in Britain as completely normal. Here, from the Nursing Times report, are summaries of the cases on the basis of which the most recent ruling was made:
For those who are unfamiliar with English criminal law, “accepted a caution” is a sort of plea bargain in the hands of the police. If one accepts a caution, one is admitting an offence in return for no further action being taken by police (except keeping a record on you, fingerprints and DNA, till you reach the age of 100). One might believe one was avoiding punishment. That would almost certainly be suggested by police (whose figures are improved and paperwork decreased by disposing of offences by caution). Nevertheless the routine admission of a minor offence can be used by distant bureaucrats (whether they give you a hearing or not) to deprive you of your career (and in the case of British nurses wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money in training). And not only that but such a decisions makes it a criminal offence for anyone to employ you in any capacity in medicine, education or social care. Mr O and Mrs W would have been barred not just from professional nursing, but scrubbing the lavatories in a school after hours, or driving a bus for the elderly. (Or even, by a bureaucratic version of magical contagion, a bus for carers for the elderly. see pdf Q.35) And cautioned for what? In the one case leaving a near teenager alone for a short while. In the other for allowing (allowing!?) one’s wife to leave the children for less than a working day. Who knew these were criminal offences? I want children to grow up to be independent. That means them learning to manage themselves as early as they can. Leaving your children on their own for short periods, perhaps overnight or for a weekend, with proper provision and knowledge of who to call in case of problems, is not criminal. It is fine. It is laudable. But we live in a state that demands you not use your judgement, that cannot bear the possibility of error and learning. It fears mistakes enough that there are now rules about how you may bring up your family, requiring all minors to be treated as needy infants. All adults, on the other hand, whether at home or in their working lives, are deemed to be cruel monsters unless restrained by the threat of excommunication from the benevolent database. The state knows what is right. The ISA was originally to use a checklist to assess lifestyles for ‘risk‘, though that has been deferred for the moment. You are either among the elect, or you are damned – and the ISA has a list saying which is which. November 14th, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Recently, I was wandering along a back street in the former Vietnamese Imperial capital of Huế, perhaps best known outside Vietnam as the site of one of the bloodier battles of the Vietnam War. This was a street full of the sort of shops that would once been have referred to as a “General Stores” in English: shops full of many goods that are likely to be useful to many people, but that sometimes seem to have a tenuous relation to one another. In such a store, I stopped and started photographing a colourful display of western trademark violating motorcycle helmets. After I had been doing this for a short while, the shopkeeper came up to me, basically just to say hello. He didn’t mind me photographing his merchandise and was not putting any pressure on me to buy anything, but he clearly didn’t get Westerners wandering into his shop to take photographs every day. Huế is a tourist destination, but despite its easy accessibility (the Americans having built an airport) it is not nearly as big an attraction as places such as the nearby ancient town of Hoi An. One does not have to walk far from the centre of town for the presence of foreigners to be rare. What happened next was more interesting. He gestured for his son to come over and pose for a photograph. The lad must have been only about two years old, but there was a serious amount of proud father syndrome on display. This gentleman wanted the whole world to see how proud a father he was. So they posed and I took a photo. Alas, the white balance isn’t perfect.  As an added bonus, the father decided that he would pose for the photograph with a cigarette in his mouth. Of course, this gentleman had no idea how many western taboos he was breaking. If he had, I am sure he would have thought we were all idiots. Quite accurately. October 31st, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Geert Wilders is on trial today for telling it like it is with his film ‘Fitna’. If you are a blogger, read up on the subject and get out the support. Europe may not have Freedom of Speech with teeth in it, but perhaps you can provide that poor benighted continent with implants. October 4th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Telegraph: ‘Koran burning’: men expect to be charged with inciting racial hatred From the BBC: Men arrested in Gateshead over suspected Koran burning. From the Guardian… nothing that I can see right now (9.45 am). This absence is being remarked upon in the comments sections of unrelated Guardian stories. Correction – upon searching I see the Guardian did have a story yesterday. The remarks I mentioned are on the absence of comment or commentable pieces dealing with this story in today’s paper. Quite right too. This is a big story for two reasons. Firstly, who would have thought it? After all that buildup, Pastor Terry Jones, the ticks-every-stereotype gun-toting American pastor, did not burn any Korans. Instead the deed was done in the car park of a Gateshead pub. The second big aspect of this story is explained in this line from the Guardian story I did not see earlier:
All usual caveats apply. I consider burning a religion’s holy book to be a nasty deliberate insult. People should still be free to do it. They should also be free to video themselves doing it and distribute the video, whether or not it spreads religious or racial hatred. I am not in favour of the hatred. I am in favour of the freedom. Anyway, I sort-of knew that the video distribution was probably illegal upon grounds of spreading religious hatred. I did not know the burning itself was. Further update: Confusingly, there is now another Guardian story illustrated by exactly the same picture as the first one but directly contradicting it in what it says about the actual grounds for arrest: Quote:
Last update, I promise: Yet another confusing aspect of this story is that according to the second Guardian story, the men have been charged with stirring up racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act, not religious hatred at all. Will the prosecution be able to make that – the racial angle – stick? Do they even want to? So far as I know, scarcely anyone has actually been prosecuted under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. One might have thought this would be an ideal opportunity for the authorities to try out the Act in the courts, if they were serious. Could it be that the racial hatred charge is intended to fail and is merely a piece of theatre to placate Muslims and protect our troops in Afghanistan? September 24th, 2010 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
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