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What do you want? – The Prisoner (intro written by George Markstein, as far as we know) [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zalndXdxriI&w=420&h=315]
November 17th, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I’m surprised – I didn’t think we would see these calls for more unchecked government surveillance until the start of the new week. But hats off to Dan Hodges – by publicly freaking out in his newspaper column and calling for the Investigatory Powers Bill to be passed, he has opened the door for Theresa May, David Cameron and a parade of GCHQ ex-chiefs to hit the TV studios and make the same demands. Of course, what Dan does not do is explain how new government surveillance powers would a) have prevented the Paris attacks of 13 November, or b) might realistically prevent any future attacks. And if you pushed him, I doubt that he could explain the scope of current surveillance laws in any detail, or describe the ways that the British security services currently do or do not make use of those powers. November 15th, 2015 | 68 comments - (Comments are closed)
When Corbyn is challenged on his beliefs and his record, he tends to respond by characterising a political challenge as a personal attack. He treats it as intrusive, rude and vulgar. In so doing, he accomplishes three things. He paints himself as the innocent victim of unjust aggression; he avoids responding to the detail of the challenge; and he bolsters the distinction between the good people inside his tent and the bad people outside of it. Howard Jacobson writes: There was something ‘How very dare you’, about Jeremy Corbyn’s recent temper tantrum in rebuttal of the charge that the company he kept reflected badly on him. ‘The idea that I’m some kind of racist or anti-Semitic person is beyond appalling, disgusting and deeply offensive,’ he said (Jacobson 2015). ‘Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour,’ observes Jacobson. When Jeremy says he doesn’t do personal what he means is that he will not deal with criticism in the normal way. He will not respond to it by means of reason or argument; he refuses to enter into serious engagement over worldviews, over ideas or over his record. He is less interested in trying to persuade than in making criticism appear as personal insult. ‘Jeremy doesn’t do personal’ does not mean that he refrains from insulting others; it means that he refrains from responding to that which he is able to construct as insulting. My thanks to the invaluable Mick Hartley for flagging up Hirsh’s paper, entitled “The Corbyn left: the politics of position and the politics of reason”. November 8th, 2015 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’d stick something on Samizdata if I wasn’t so worn out from laughing at these Million Mask March ‘anarchist’ wankers who want, well, government to do more stuff. – Perry de Havilland November 6th, 2015 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
If the Conservative Party really still believed in national sovereignty, a strong defence, smaller government, less regulation and helping people to improve their own circumstances, they would look at the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the return of political ideology and see it as license to start espousing their own philosophy instead of continually apologising for their beliefs. That so many conservatives are desperate to stick to the centre ground and view Jeremy Corbyn as a clear and present threat to Britain says a lot more about the soft Right than it does about the Labour leadership candidate. November 5th, 2015 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Journos: UK officials don’t want to “ban encryption” — they want to ban encryption that *works*. November 4th, 2015 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 29th, 2015 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The whole system is clearly a tax-collection scheme masked as justice. In the end, what this court wanted was money, and the people it squeezed were the least able to pay. What I saw rivaled the worst forms of petty tyrannies I’ve read about in history books: how tyrannical kings would use every trick to pillage the population of their meager resources. I very much doubt that there is anything unusual about what I saw. It probably goes on every day in your town, too. October 28th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Liberal economics, wanton consumerism, or an overregulated and brain-dead citizenry — zombies can epitomize whatever alleged mindlessness the critic most strongly objects to October 27th, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The United Nations is truly an amazing organization. Dictators and authoritarians from around the world can work together to solve their common problems, like how to keep their own citizens under control. A solution to this serious problem has been found, Cyberviolence against women is the new justification for the police state. Terrorism just isn’t cutting it anymore. October 26th, 2015 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
None of the real difficulties are to be discussed. And yet it is just now, in Islam’s encounter with Western democracy, that discussion is most needed. Muslims must adapt, just as we all must adapt, to the changed circumstances in which we live. And we adapt by putting things in question, by asking whether this or that belief is true or binding, and in general by opening our hearts to other people’s arguments and attempting to meet them with arguments of our own. Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them. If the government is to succeed in its new measures to eradicate Islamic extremism, therefore, it should be encouraging people to discuss the matter openly, regardless of who might take offence. October 25th, 2015 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
Brussels is effectively offering landowners money to advertise the EU. Then again, that’s the reason that a lot of people in Britain agree to support the EU: NGOs, charities, big corporations and universities. October 24th, 2015 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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