Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef and cockwomble, has decided to introduce a soda tax in his restaurants “to send a powerful and strong message to government”. He claims that he will give money raised to the state-funded sock-puppet charity Sustain, who are agitating for a soft drinks tax that will cost taxpayers £1 billion a year. If Oliver feels so strongly about fizzy drinks he could simply stop selling them, but that would hit his bottom line so he’d rather gouge his customers to fund a campaign for a state-sanctioned ‘level playing field’ that will rip off his competitors’ customers too.
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Nonetheless, environmentalists’ newfound enthusiasm for papal encyclicals is a little strange. After all, the Catholic Church isn’t too keen on abortion or contraception, which seems at odds with the green movement’s Malthusian concerns about overpopulation. The Church’s old-school attitude to homosexuality, and particularly gay marriage, flies directly in the face of the liberal leanings of many greens. Yet environmentalists have been happy to talk up the importance of the pope’s intervention, hoping that a bit of religious pressure will twist the arms of the world’s leaders into overcoming their silly worries about the effect that limits on carbon emissions might have on economic growth. June 19th, 2015 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight. Indeed, all of this race balkanization–with such extreme emphasis as belonging to this or that race–only further divides us, as race baiters like Al Sharpton well know. So why not accept the progressives’ terms of the debate–that our gender and race is all simply a matter of self-identity–and identify as a member of races that are favored/more protected by law? After all, no one can ever really know what lies in another’s heart. Does Bruce Jenner sincerely believe he is a female, or does he simply like to dress up in women’s clothes? Does Rachel Dolezal sincerely believe she is black? No one can possibly know the answer, perhaps not even Mr./Ms. Jenner and Ms. Dolezal. What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent? June 13th, 2015 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
I suppose my biggest beef with Hilton’s book is that it identifies an endless stream of ideas for decentralising government, in order to make the statist beast better behaved, when I’d just kill it. You can’t personalise Leviathan. It doesn’t do cuddly. Or as we have been saying here since November 2001… the state is not your friend. June 11th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Much like Germany has been forced to grapple with its past — it can neither ignore it, nor celebrate it — Australia’s treatment of Julia Gillard should never be hidden, and certainly not for reasons such as “Everyone hates Julia Gillard”. – Caroline Zielinksi, quoted by Tim Blair. June 10th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Barry’s sin was to misgender Caitlyn – misgendering being secular societies’ equivalent of blasphemy – and to ask why a one-time athlete’s decision to have a sex change, or whatever it’s called these days, has become such massive international news. ‘FFS’, he tweeted. ‘Why in heaven’s name is he such big news?’ In those nine little words, Barry committed two great crimes. First, he referred to Caitlyn/Bruce as ‘he’, which confirms that he is in thrall to the insane idea that people who have penises are men. And secondly, he dared to ask why a man having breast implants and a makeover for the cover of Vanity Fair made waves worldwide, hitting the headlines everywhere and causing Twitter to go into meltdown. – Brendan O’Neill writing about what happened when someone admits he is puzzled, as I am, about the bizarre amount of international media coverage over some Yank I had never heard of until recently getting his bits snipped off or whatever he did to warrant calling himself ‘Caitlyn’. Yeah whatever… but it appears applause is mandatory. June 7th, 2015 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some might say “I don’t care if they violate my privacy; I’ve got nothing to hide.” Help them understand that they are misunderstanding the fundamental nature of human rights. Nobody needs to justify why they “need” a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can’t give away the rights of others because they’re not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. But even if they could, help them think for a moment about what they’re saying. Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. June 1st, 2015 | 101 comments - (Comments are closed)
Presented for your consideration, two quotations and a hyperlink: “I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism.” -Hugo Chávez “I have said it already, I am convinced that the way to build a new and better world is not capitalism. Capitalism leads us straight to hell.” -Hugo Chávez Venezuelan Bolivar now worth more as toilet paper than as money. May 26th, 2015 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
“With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies….I’m a physician, that means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me, it means you believe in slavery. It means you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the assistants, the nurses…There’s an implied threat of force, do you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away, and force me to take care of you? That’s is ultimately what the right to free healthcare would be.” I came across this quotation via Facebook, which in turn had been posted up by someone on a sort of “celebrity” website. The person who put up the posting in the first place is clearly traumatised at the statement of principle by Rand Paul about the bogus “right” to healthcare. RP is to be congratulated for spelling out in the clearest fashion what is wrong with notions of claim rights where what is involved is not the classical (correct) notion of a right to be left alone, but the contrary attitude about a “right” to demand that others give you something even if those others haven’t taken it away in the first place. This sort of confusion, famously skewered many years ago by Isiah Berlin in his essay about two concepts of liberty, still persists. I often find Rand Paul’s sort of argument particularly powerful when putting the problem with such “rights” in human terms. May 23rd, 2015 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
If we wanted to be “together” in the ways Obama envisions, then no force would be necessary. If public schools were any good, people would not flock to private education the minute they could afford it (and sometimes even when they can’t.) The same with other government-mandated activities or programs. People would voluntarily, en masse, “invest” and “come together” and do all the other things that Obama, and other progressive statists like him, believe we should do. It seems that in the final year or so of his dreadful presidency, Obama is becoming ever blunter in his public pronouncements, disparaging business and America’s individualism. It reminds me a bit of that scene in the Fountainhead where Elsworth Toohey, the arch-villain, confesses to his powerlust. Remember: the world’s most powerful country voted for this shit – twice, and by handy margins. May 18th, 2015 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Price ended his life as a free man because he was willing to defy laws that said he was nothing but the property of other people, to be disposed of as they wished. He got a nice helping hand in maintaining his freedom from other people who were willing to not only defy laws that would compel them to collaborate in Price’s bondage, but to beat the hell out of government agents charged with enforcing those laws. May 15th, 2015 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would have had this as today’s Samizdata quote of the day if I hadn’t already done one earlier:
I plan on using that. It is from an interview with Carly Fiorina by Jennifer Rubin, for the Washington Post. The rest of it is well worth a read also. I have no idea what chance Carly Fiorina has of being the next President of the USA, but the nearer she gets to it, the happier I will be. Vice President maybe? Or would that be to underestimate her? May 14th, 2015 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
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