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Guido Fawkes, the blogger who focuses on political sleaze in Britain, can claim a fair measure of credit for exposing the odious Peter Hain’s financial misdeeds. Guido is on the BBC Newsnight programme. It starts at 10:30 tonight. I hope he handles it a bit better than last time. In terms of sheer effectiveness, Guido is probably far more deadly than Private Eye is these days. If I were Ian Hislop, the Eye’s editor, I would start to wonder whether it was time to pack it in. January 24th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ian Fleming, former Reuters and Sunday Times journalist, intelligence officer, and creator of 007. Quote taken from this book, on page 171. Pretty good guidance. Suffice to say that this applies just as much to women as men, of course (Mr Fleming was not what you would call PC). January 23rd, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
How’s this for a title and opening for an article:
The howls of outrage that framing an article in such terms would cause is easy (and rather fun) to imagine. If ever there were two things that should not have have an impact on whom a person votes for, it should be the genetic characteristics of skin colour and gender. Dare I suggest that ideology and honesty might trump those two non-factors every time? And yet this article will most likely pass without the slightest murmur from a great many people.
But if it is reasonable for black women in South Carolina to vote on the basis that someone is black or female, presumably they cannot object if other people decide to vote for candidates on the basis they are white or male. After all, it does appear that framing the choice on whom to support on the basis of racism or sexism is perfectly acceptable to the mainstream media. And there I was mistakenly thinking that those things were the cardinal politically incorrect sins of our day! Who knew? January 22nd, 2008 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
To this piece by Frank Fisher:
Britain is not a free country. It is free-er than most perhaps, but at most free-ish; and moving steadily towards a free-esque pantomime freedom. For the inevitable commentators who think I’m whinging about nothing because I’m able to write these lines, consider this: Britain also has an historically low murder rate. Yet generally homicide is still deplored, and we would like less of it. No politician would dare stand up and call for more gang-violence because ‘known criminals’ being murdered is a good thing. January 18th, 2008 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seeing as we have been talking about Tom Cruise and Scientology earlier today, there is an interesting ruckus brewing on Gawker, who have posted a rather interesting (in a ‘huh?’ kind of way) video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology. The Church of Scientology’s lawyers have demanded they take the video down and in response fearless Gawker VP Gaby Darbyshire politely invited them to go rotate, citing ‘fair use’ (Gaby is delightful and rather hot, by the way. I met her at Les Blogs in Paris a few years ago). I take no conclusive view of the legal merits of the case (certainly if extracts of a proprietary video are used, it is a ‘fair use’ slam dunk… not so sure about using the whole thing), but I am much taken by Gawker’s sheer bravery going up against the deep pocketed Scientologists, who are prone on the slightest pretext to sue people who cast aspersions on, or even reveal the details of, their religion. Does that remind you of someone else? The Scientologists deserve every brickbat they get for their strong arm tactics against detractors. However I do not really understand the intellectual animus directed at the Scientologists for their religious beliefs. Their key myths do not strike me as any more preposterous than those of other more mainstream religions. It seems to me that their only big mistake was going into too much detail, thus in their case it is harder to fog the issue with the ‘allegorical interpretations’ that help us avoid tears of mirth when reading the literal word of other holy texts, ones which were not written by L. Ron Hubbard but rather by his more time hallowed equivalents in antiquity. January 17th, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Muslim lawyer in Canada is trying to use the profoundly illiberal notion that ‘contempt and hatred’ should be criminal offences (which are by definition ‘thoughtcrimes‘), to silence Mark Steyn for his critical remarks about Islam. Bizarrely, the move to sanction Steyn is being billed as a ‘human rights’ action. That said, I suppose it is indeed a ‘human rights’ action in the perverse sence that the intention is to abridge Steyn’s human right to express his opinions in favour of allowing Islamists to have a veto over anyone printing anything they dislike. Well, that sort of fascistic behaviour makes me both hold the likes of Faisal Joseph and the Canadian Islamic Congress in utter contempt and to hate them. I suppose I better give my lawyer a heads up then. Or then again, as it is their behaviour which makes me hold them in contempt and hatred, can I sue them for making that happen? Would that actually be any more unreasonable than what they are doing? Just askin’. Of course do not kid yourself that thoughtcrimes do not get prosecuted in Britain, or that it is only something Islamofascist lawyers do to us non-believers, because sadly nothing could be further from the truth. December 8th, 2007 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Spectator magazine is allergic to the city of Liverpool. Now, having never been there, despite some distant family connections to its 19th Century history (one of my ancestors helped to erect the magnificent St George’s Hall), I cannot comment on whether Liverpool is the sort of place that the Germans should have obligingly finished off in 1939-45 or a place full of cheeky, merry Scousers all singing Beatles tunes and watching Everton and the Reds. Sorry, no idea. But there is something – even to my non-PC eyes – rather grating about how the likes of Rod Liddle, the Speccie’s House Yob, never fails to lob a literary hand grenade at the city. Here it is again:
Ah, those sentimental scousers. They are such thickies, aren’t they?
She may not be the brightest light in the harbour, but I would love to see Rod Liddle put in an Islamic slammer for two weeks. The benefits would be salutary.
Quite possibly, Rodney, she is as dumb as a stump. Naivete might be the worst thing she can be accused of (I must agree to sharing his nagging worries about the sort of folk who are schoolteachers these days). But this sort of gratuitous name-calling against a person imprisoned and threatened with flogging for something so batshit insane is beyond the pale. But hey, let us not turn up the chance to take the piss out of those sentimental scousers. His article does move on to better ground here, however, where I think Liddle has a decent point:
Quite possibly true. It may be the case that the sheer, oh-my-god-how-mad-can-they-be craziness of the teddy bear-as M. has made even the more ardent Muslims wonder whether certain regimes are taking their professed religious beliefs a step too far. He may be right. December 6th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Gary Rosen has been out in China, burning his boats, the ones that might ever take him back to China in the foreseeable future. Good for him. My thanks to the ever useful Arts & Letters Daily for the link. I particularly liked the bit about how the Chinese regime censors the awkward stuff, and I offer no apology for quoting it at some length:
Which is about as excellent an exposition of the imperfect correspondence between the ideals of democracy and of liberty as you could ever hope to encounter, don’t you think? Rosen continues:
You seldom read reportage like that from China, or from any other efficiently administered despotism with a definite future, do you? And the reportage itself explains why. The exception that explains the rule, you might say. November 29th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 24th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
In this weeks edition of The Economist, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, is attacked for ‘spending’ money by promising to reduce taxation in a targeted way so that people can better afford to send their children to independent schools. We are also told that “professionals and economists” (no names are given) hold that the money would be better spent on increasing the government school budget even more. So tax reductions are ‘spending money’, as if all money belonged to the government and allowing taxpayers to keep a bit more of their own money is ‘spending’ it, and the solution to the problems of government education is to increase government spending on it even more than it has already been increased. In recent times I have attacked the Economist for pretending to be pro free market whilst, when one reads it closely, not really being so. Articles like the one on the Australian elections mean I can no longer fairly make this charge. The Economist having now ‘come out’ as an openly leftist publication. November 18th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a recent visit to the local library I had a look at this week’s edition of the Economist. There was a forty page section on Central Banks (government, or government backed, authorities that control the money supply – such as the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Union Central Bank, the Federal Reserve system, and so on) and couple of other articles on the same subject. In the few minutes I spent looking at the material there seemed to be little on the money supply. Neither proper definitions of the various measures of the money supply, or information on their growth rates in the various countries over time. Of course, as an arch reactionary, I do not support the existence of Central Banks, but if was to write about them I would give most space to the primary function of these things – rather than just writing about interest rates, price rises (the modern definition of ‘inflation’), unemployment and so on. Unsurprisingly the rate of growth in the money supply may well effect these other things, but to write about them, in the context of Central Banking, without much examination of the record of various Central Banks and Central Bank like institutions in controlling the money supply is rather like writing about a room without really dealing with the elephant standing in the middle of it. Of course there were other things in this week’s edition of the Economist, but some of this content was also rather odd. For example, we were informed that the Democrats were presently taking a harder line on controlling government spending than the Republicans in the United States. Now it is quite true that over the last few years the Republicans, led by President Bush, have increased government spending wildly. However the Democrats denounced them for not spending enough money on X, Y, Z, over the same period. Also the article was about now, not the last few years, and presently the Democrats are pushing for vastly more government spending. Not just the Democrat candidates for President of the United States, but the Democrat controlled Senate and House of Representatives as well. These demands for more government spending are far greater than what the Republican candidates for President of the United States or the Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are suggesting. The article said that the Democrats support a “pay as you go” rule. But this has nothing to do with limiting increases in government spending, all it means is that massive increases in government spending should be matched by massive increases in taxation, and, sure enough, the Democrats support both. I can only conclude that the person or people who wrote the article either do not know very much about the current situation in the United States, or do not know what the “pay as you go” rule is about – or both. There does seem to be a basic knowledge problem in the Economist, even on British matters. For example, only last week there was an examination of the pre budget statement. It was not really a big increase in taxation, the Economist declared, – for example there were “many winners” from the changes in Capital Gains Tax. An examination of the facts should have told the writer or writers of the article that the changes in Capital Gains Tax would mean far higher tax for most payers of it – and that this and the other tax changes did indeed mean higher taxes overall. Why does anyone buy the Economist when it neither understands the relation of Central Banks to monetary policy or understands the fiscal situation in the United States or even its home country? October 21st, 2007 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
With infuriating credulousness, the BBC has taken as its top story (on radio as well as the web) the launch of a report from the ‘All-Party Committee on Identity Fraud’:
(Such as the Identity and Passport Service, local planning authorities, the Department of Health, ContactPoint, DVLA…and all the other branches of the caring data-sharing state? Just asking.) So far so hopeless. The usual call for for more officials and more powers rather than any attempt to analyse the problem. The committee itself is not quite that stupid, even if it has not taken a particularly fresh look. It rightly blames the indifference of institutions and the foolishness of the public for much of it. What is really damaging to the BBC’s credibility and to the honesty of public debate is what is next.
“Surveys” by whom? I wonder if the reporter knows. I can guess: Experian. But I can not readily find where this headline comes from. It appears in a more nuanced version on the National Identity Fraud Prevention Week site as… “A quarter of the UK population has been affected by identity fraud or knows somebody who has.” My emphasis. Not remotely the same thing. I know several Catholics quite well. My catechumenacy is a distant unlikelihood. YouGov did a proper poll a year ago on behalf of NPower and found one in ten claimed to have been a victim in some way – without themselves providing a rigorous definition or checklist. The difference ought to indicate to anyone with the remotest curiosity that something is screwy about all these figures. You have to be suspicious of anything described as a “survey” – do BBC reporters not learn that in training? And worse, they persist in quoting the entirely spurious “government figure” for identity fraud of £1.7bn a year. Anyone working in this field ought not just to ask, “What is the source for this figure?” and then check it. They should know that the Home Office report has been utterly discredited… … but it keeps coming back time and time again, as if you can make a fact by repeating a lie often enough. There is no agreed definition of ‘identity fraud’. There are few useful figures, and in the circumstances there can hardly be. Meanwhile several interested parties – Experian, the only organisation linked to from the story on the BBC site, being one, and the Home Office being another – are engaged in a sustained campaign of hype for their own benefit. That is a scandal in which you would expect the news media to take an interest. It is (at least) disappointing that the BBC apparently uses no critical judgement or background knowledge – or even Google – in reporting these things, but sees fit to reprint the gush of press-releases, as if it were a cheap fashion magazine handling a cosmetic company’s announcement of the latest face-cream. For all its admitted corporate culture problem in editorial matters, this is one of the world’s most widely trusted news sources (which, unless you take Fox or Xinhua to be gospel, you may say only shows how appallingly untrustworthy the others are). But it is starting to give the impression of not caring about the integrity of basic, readily-checkable, facts. October 6th, 2007 | Comments are closed
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