This is just too damn funny not to draw people’s attention to:
[Y]ou have raised so many straw men in that comment you are probably eligible for some sort of agricultural subsidy.
– Commenter ‘Squawkbox’
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The other night I had a look at the 18 Doughty Street internet-based public affairs TV programme. I quite like what Iain Dale and the others in that outfit are trying to do with internet TV: breaking into the arena now dominated by BBC, ITN and Channel 4, channels that are by and large infused with the meta-context of the liberal-left. 18 Doughty Street is unashamedly pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, pro-America and anti-Big Government in its thinking. My main doubt is whether it can keep going without being able to make hard cash. Anyway, it is also attracting guests from across the spectrum, and it is an appearance by a leftist blogger on the show the other night that got my attention. Dale was interviewing three bloggers about events of the week, and one of the guests was Alex Hilton, the author of the blog Recess Monkey, a leftist site with a sense of humour that may or may not to be to one’s taste. He recently got into a bit of a pickle by posting the ‘news’ that Margaret Thatcher, whom Alex loathes, had died. She is, of course, very much alive. Iain Dale phoned up the BBC after seeing the ‘story’ and promptly Hilton had to retract and publish a rather grubby apology, albeit one with a fairly nasty sting in the tail. What a nob, I thought. Then I saw his appearance on 18 Doughty Street. Fairly boilerplate lefty, I thought, a bit cocky, not a bit ashamed of spreading an untrue story, in fact, denying that that the death of Mrs T. would be a ‘story’ at all (any newspaper editor would turn him down on the spot if he thinks that the death of a famous politician, however old, is not a story. I certainly would). Anyway, the interview went on. I was interested in how Hilton described how he came to hold the views he did, which is always interesting, in my view. His family background is working class – printing and coal mining, two industries that succumbed to the crackdown on subsidy and the trade union closed shop thanks to the Thatcher years (I strongly support both such changes, naturally). Hilton is a reminder, however, that a lot of people experienced the hard side of those changes, necessary though they were. I was a bit disappointed that Dale did not ask the question, “So Alex, are you in favour of massive coal subsidies and the old print union methods, then?”, which was a pity. But at one stage we got a really interesting admission. Hilton was talking about leftist economics bloggers, and said it was a pleasure to come across such folk, because on the whole, “economics is an emotional issue for socialists”, or some such. I certainly remember the use of the word “emotional”. Bang. For a socialist to actually admit that their views on economics are driven, not by logic, factual evidence, by reason, but by “emotion” is a big admission. It is an admission of intellectual defeat if you do not say that you have reason as your main motivator. It is to run up a big, white flag in the battle of ideas. When Marx was writing about class and the rise of the proletariat, he did not present his arguments as “emotional” – though of course they were in many respects. He used the language of science a lot. The left used to talk about ‘scientific socialism’. Their posters had big pictures of factories, machines and aircraft on them, all waxing lyrical about technology and the power of reason. The left is now a very different, post-modernist beast. Reason is out. Emotion is in. Socialism just took another little step towards its coffin on that show. Nice one Alex. Keep up the great work. Just do not try to kill off Britain’s greatest post-war Prime Minister ever again. March 31st, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Or at least he tried to, but her friends and family made sure she was never made aware of the sick actions of her daughter’s former schoolteacher. As I say in the article, there is no law against being a jerk – nor should there be – but “It is a First Amendment right” is a coward’s excuse for trying to hurt a dying woman and her grief-stricken daughter. There are lots of things in life against which there are no laws, but which are heartless, meanspirited, and downright disgusting things to do to another human being. If you consider the US Constitution your moral guidebook, you need more help than any lawyer can offer. Eliot Stein refers to himself as an “internet pioneer” (in gutless actions?) and takes great pride in the lengths he went to in order to distract Cathy from her waning health and to try to get her to focus her attention on him (“I WILL NOT BE IGNORED!”), which says almost as much about his character as you need to know. Eliot Stein, while Maia‘s schoolteacher, also posted nasty comments on Maia and Cathy’s blogs; when Maia’s school got rid of him, he came to work in a tuxedo on his last day and made sure to tell every class that his departure was Maia’s fault, which he must have known would lead to her being bullied and humiliated (which is exactly what happened). Like I said, Eliot Stein is a real peach. And yet he still persists in the belief that Cathy could say or do anything which would make him seem more unfit to be around children than his own professed actions – of which he boasts with considerable pride. Would you want your kids to spend any amount of time around this man, let alone be stuck with him as a schoolteacher? 
March 28th, 2007 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bryan Appleyard has written a piece on the inimitable Guido Fawkes, but alas he has made a whole host of gross factual errors:
Firstly, we did in fact publish quite a few of his various ‘guest post’ articles here on Samizdata… probably 70% of the ones he sent to us. And to find this out, all Bryan had to do was use the search box in the right hand sidebar of this blog to discover that. Secondly, far from me (or Samizdata) being neo-con in contrast to Paul-the-libertarian, 95% of the time you could not fit a piece of paper between my views and those of Paul Staines. And of the 5%, I suspect the vast majority of our differences would be tactical, not philosophical. So as for me being a corporate shill, well Bryan is talking through the cushion on his seat, and that is putting it politely. If I am on the payroll of big business, my cheques must keep getting lost in the (state owned) postal service. Thirdly, I did indeed turn down several of the-man-who-became-Guido’s articles for Samizdata but not a single one of them were rejected for ideological reasons. I turned down some because they were defamatory and other because this blogs does not really concentrate on party politics to the extent Paul likes to (and that is also why Guido and Samizdata are not ‘competitors’… we have quite different ‘mission statements’). Not up to your usual standard, Bryan. Consider your arse fact-checked. March 26th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Chris Lightfoot, occasional commentator here, well-known blogger, and technical wizard, is dead. It has been a confidential matter for a couple of weeks, but can now become public. I didn’t know him very well, but will miss his awesome intelligence. NO2ID will miss his capacity just to fix things while lesser techies were squabbling among themselves about how to do it. Other people, here, and here, for example, knew him better and have more valuable things to say. March 5th, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
If anyone wants to talk about ‘root causes‘ here’s one:
The full story of Abdel Kareem Soliman, a 22-year old Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam on his blog, is here. I found this together with a presentation about online censorship in Pakistan. Don’t Block The Blog is an online campaign launched by Awab Alvi and Omer Alvie on March 3rd 2006, to support free speech of Pakistani bloggers and internet free speech in general.
This is a big deal as in any totalitarian environment, and let’s face it countries with islamic population do not tolerate alternatives, governments can pay only lip service to the notion of free speech. The moment you disagree with the accepted religious, social and by extension political parameters, you are blasphemous, disruptive and imprisoned. Take your pick. Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian political refugee living in the Netherlands since 1998, interviewed Awab Alvi.
This is going to be a long campaign… and I am not talking about bypassing the ban with technology. Proxy by-pass servers and mirror sites are technological solutions, albeit essential, to a human mind problem. Unless coupled with conviction and resistance, technology can work for the other side – just ask Cisco. But there is some good news:
March 1st, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I must have missed this but according to the Heavens there has been a blogwar. Or perhaps some minor arguments amongst the British blogosphere. First alerted by Iain Dale’s misapprehensions, I checked Google News to see how far the disagreements and conflicts had rocked the mainstream media. They had not. Staying below the parapet of the media or using the wrong search word certainly demonstrated to me that if there was any retelling of these events, they were not listed as a blog war and I cannot stomach Media Guardian tonight. It was time to try Technorati, the rather slow and ponderous Technorati. You can tell I am writing this as I wait. Well, I have gone back three days and, as yet, no blog war has appeared concerning British bloggers on Technorati. Call me an old fogey but I remember the days when blog wars were real blog wars. I think that a blog war only exists if it meets the nominalist requirements and is called a blog war as it happens across many blogs. The Heavens have had a minor spat. It hardly counts as the fall of Lucifer. If you want a real British blog war, agree the terms of declaring the conflict by throwing down a stylised gauntlet and go to war. Ritualised textual combat, avoiding libel and error of fact, may be just the path to spice up our ideological differences. February 12th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last week I was interviewed by David Grossman of the BBC, on the subject of Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes. When I did the pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, we published three pieces by Paul (this, this, and this), hence the BBC’s interest. The show I was contributing to, a Radio 4 programme called Profile, was first broadcast at 7pm on Saturday night, and you can listen to it by rootling around here. The impressive thing about Paul Staines is that he has always understood the connection between political freedom – civil liberties etc. – economic freedom, and what for want of a better phrase is called lifestyle freedom, i.e. sex and drugs and rock and roll. All are but different faces of the same thing: freedom! Most self-styled enthusiasts for freedom tend to emphasise some freedoms but to downplay and even oppose others. Paul Staines always was (and now Guido is) in favour of freedom across the board. Those three LA publications – about human rights abuses around the world, about acid house parties and the efforts of bossy Conservative politicians and of newer varieties of lefty safety nazis to shut them down and to stop anyone having any fun, and about the benefits of unfettered financial markets – cover pretty much the whole spectrum of freedom. When it comes to freedom of any sort, Paul Staines is on the side of the angels. He is particularly good at distinguishing between the idea of free market capitalism, which is about how we may all do what we want with and trade with what is rightly ours, and the mere interests of particular capitalists. Not that the man himself is always an angel. He is very flawed, very human. As are all the politicians whom he now torments. Their problem being that they often try to present themselves to the world as something rather more elevated than that, and accordingly as people who know better than we do what is best for us. February 12th, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
This man writes very well and very entertainingly, but I wish he would stop using the word ‘liberal’ to describe people who want to restrict and often abolish liberty. Liberal is a good word, and we who believe in liberty should keep hold of the word tight. Calling shameless collectivists, who believe neither in economic nor ‘social’ liberty nor any other kind of liberty, ‘liberal’ will destroy this good word. When someone disagrees with you about how to protect and extend liberty, he is still entitled to be called a liberal. When he stops even bothering about liberty and starts saying that liberty is neither an important end, nor even an important means towards the achievement of other worthy ends, then what sense does it make to let him take the word liberal off with him into the tyrannical bog that he has blundered or marched into? In the USA, it would appear that the battle for this word was won and lost long ago. But on this side of the Atlantic, the word ‘liberal’ still means something far more truly liberal. We must keep it that way. This short posting is the sort of thing I am objecting to:
The point is a good one, as are so many points made by this writer. But… Liberals? I also think that describing your very sharp views as coming from the ‘House of Dumb’ is, well, dumb. He is not a bit dumb, and I am sure he has his reasons for doing this, but whatever they may be, if I learn them I do not expect to be persuaded by them. Irony perhaps? Whatever. Argumentatively speaking, calling yourself dumb amounts to constructing a huge open goal for your opponents to tap in a succession of soft goals. One of the basic rules of propaganda is: do not put yourself down. Speak out with clarity, seriousness and sincerity. By all means make trivial jokes about yourself, but the seriously wounding jokes should always be on the other fellows. ‘House of Dumb’ ought to be a blog dedicated to the idiocies of the non-liberal, anti-liberal collectivist creeps, and it briefly crossed my mind while writing this sentence that maybe this is what the man had in mind, which would have made this sentence read very foolishly. But then I remembered that he calls himself ‘DumbJon’. It is his own house that he is talking about, just as I had been assuming. And his very name, never mind his blog’s name, is a pre-emptive cringe. Right wingers bloggers do this a lot, with their I-know-what-you-think-I-am-but-I-don’t-care names. They think it is showing toughness and wit. It think it is admitting that you are wrong before you even open your mouth. I repeat, I really like how ‘DumbJon’ writes, and I agree with point after point that he scores against his hated “liberal” anti-liberals. I particular, agree with him, as many ferocious opponents of Islamism or “Islamic extremism” often do not that Islam itself is a huge problem for the West, rather than the Islam problem merely being a few nutters who take it too far. What the nutters do is take Islam seriously, just as they claim to. Anyway, having made my points about liberality and dumbness, I will leave it at that and continue to read House of Dumb with profit and pleasure. It is obviously far too late for ‘DumbJon’ himself to consider any name changes. But, to any other worthy people with ideas like his who are still wondering what to call their blogs, I say: do not be ironic about yourself if you want to be truly persuasive and truly wounding to those whom you seek to wound. Do not build the insults of your opponents into your descriptions of yourself and of your ideas. And do not hand your opponents compliments that they do not deserve. Do not, for example, call people ‘liberal’ when they are nothing of the kind. February 9th, 2007 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
And how do I know? It has passed Julian’s Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT). January 20th, 2007 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten has some more great stuff from Lebanon that you just will not read in the mainstream media. And remember he does not have a news organisation behind him, so he trips and reportage are all funded from his own pocket and from donations from readers. January 13th, 2007 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian has written about the blogosphere in a way that had me grinning by the end of the first paragraph…
Yes, the comment sections of blogs, and indeed blog articles themselves, can get a bit like that at times. Although he is writing about the ‘Arts’ blogosphere, some of what he observes also pertains to the political and punditry blogosphere… and some does not, which I also find quite interesting. However where I think Lynskey is not quite correct is where he writes…
No, not really, I do not think people care that Lynskey is in a position to say what he says. I think what he is observing here is not resentment that he has a gig writing for the ‘Grauniad’ but rather a change in the culture regarding the whole journalistic profession. People have realised that whilst they may not be journalists, they no longer need to be one in order to editorialise the news. In short, journalism is no longer an ‘institution’, it is just ‘something people with opinions do’. Some people get paid for it and other do it for free. In a sense, we are the journalists now in that we are the ones keeping journals of our opinions on the outrage-of-the-day. People who work for newspapers might be better described as ‘newspaper men’, many of whom are formatting commoditised information, or as ‘reporters’ if they are collecting information to be formatted. The editorialising role is something that the mainstream media has now largely lost their lock on. If the Guardian tells me car bomb has gone off in Baghdad or a British minister has resigned, I believe them. However I do not need the Guardian to tell me what the significance of that is as the low-down regarding what was behind said ministerial skulduggery is probably better and fresher on Guido Fawkes. However he is quite correct that criticising a Guardian article in the Guardian’s own comment section for being a ‘typical Guardian article’ is rather bizarre. What were they expecting? It is all the stranger as people in the UK have the advantage that most clear eyed British journalists make little pretence that their newspaper is not partisan (unlike in the USA when the preposterous myth of journalistic impartiality persists), by which I mean each paper has an identifiable political editorial line that colours everything it does… people understand that the Guardian is a left wing statist newspaper, the Telegraph is a right wing statist newspaper with occasional classical liberal pretensions, the Independent is the Al Qaeda House Journal, etc. etc.. Just as people do not read Samizdata and expect to be confronted with a paean to the NHS (that is the Guardian’s job), they should not expect to read an article in the Guardian calling for an end to state education (that is our job). Nevertheless, love it or loath it (one guess), the Guardian has always been far and away the most internet savvy newspaper and Lynskey seems to have a much better grasp of what blogging is about than the irascible Keith Waterhouse. January 8th, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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