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February 26th, 2025 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
 February 25th, 2025 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
I did not think I could be shocked any more but this Mail on Sunday story shocked me: “Knock knock, it’s the Thought Police: As thousands of criminals go uninvestigated, detectives call on a grandmother. Her crime? She went on Facebook to criticise Labour councillors at the centre of the ‘Hope you Die’ WhatsApp scandal exposed by the MoS”
You can watch a video of the visit of the two detectives to her house here: “Helen Jones, 54, had a visit from 2 detectives from the Manchester Police”. The person who can be heard speaking from inside the house via an intercom is Mrs Jones’ husband, Lee. The video ends with the detective who was doing the talking saying (at 1:12), “OK. OK. We’ll give you a call on your phone. I am not going to stand out here if you are not going to speak to me.” So far as I can tell Helen Jones was indeed “spoken to” by phone, not at her door. That does not negate the intimidatory effect of having the cops turn up at your door because of something you said on Facebook about an elected official. The Mail on Sunday continues,
So what were her exact words? We know that she called for the resignation of Councillor David Sedgwick, but was there something beyond that that has not been reported? I have not been able to find out. But it is acknowledged by Greater Manchester Police that no crime was committed. Later in the report, a spokesman for Greater Manchester Police is quoted as saying, “We are under a duty to inform her that she is the subject of a complaint.” As Caroline Farrow – who speaks from bitter experience – has pointed out, there is no such duty, and if there were a letter would have sufficed. The cops knew what they were doing when they called at Helen Jones’s door, and Councillor David Sedgwick knew what he was doing when he sent them there: “Had Helen Jones continued to post criticism of Councillor David Sedgwick after being informed of his complaint, the police could claim she could reasonably predict that her posts would cause alarm and distress.” February 24th, 2025 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Let’s be clear, we don’t have blasphemy laws in the UK.’ So said Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary and premier solicitor impersonator, to the BBC earlier this week. Reynolds was pushing back against US vice-president JD Vance, who gave European leaders a very public dressing down at the Munich Security Conference last week for censoring their voters, and Britain for criminalising its Christians. Of course, Reynolds’s denial was about as trustworthy as his CV. You needn’t alight, as Vance did, on the vexed issue of ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, which have led to Christians being arrested for staging silent protests / prayers, to see that blasphemy laws have made a horrifying comeback in Britain. Easily a more vivid example is that, a day before Vance addressed the global great and good in Munich, a man was arrested for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in central London. Another man, who slashed at the Koran-burner with a knife, was also arrested. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where we ‘don’t have blasphemy laws’ but you can be arrested – and stabbed – for desecrating a holy book. Maybe Reynolds could finally put that legal training to good use and explain the difference to us. February 22nd, 2025 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Daily Telegraph (£) today:
Oh dear. As the article says, there are AI programmes now that screen writing to see if a generative form of AI has written it. So we have a sort of arms race, as it were, between those using these systems to write essays or whatever, and those using it to spot the cheats. Using AI is not quite the same, necessarily, as using a search engine to check up on sources, or a calculator to do sums rather than by hand. I do think that something is lost if a person has no idea of how to go about how to find things out: what references to check, how to validate such references and how to understand sources, levels of credibility and corroboration, etc. Being able to think through a topic, to structure an essay, marshal facts and figures, and come to a convincing conclusion, is a skill. It is also an important way that we hone our reasoning. And I don’t think there is anything specifically “Luddite” in pointing out that using AI to “write” your homework assignment will lead cause atrophy of our mental faculties. And in this age of social media, “coddling” of kids and all the problems associated with a “fragile generation” , it is easy to see this trend as being malign. I am definitely not saying the government ought to step into this. I think that schools and places of higher learning ought, as part of the conditions of entry and admission (preferably with the consent of parents/students) to restrict AI’s use to avoid people not developing their own mental muscle and developing ability to truly grasp a subject, rather than simply “phone it in”. If a place of learning has a mission statement, it surely ought to want to develop the learning ability and skills of its students. If AI detracts from it, then it is out of bounds. It is best, I think, to leave this up to individual schools. This is also another reason why I am a fanatic about school choice, and fear the dangers of state central control of schools. Technology has its place, in my view. In my childhood, pocket calculators started to be used, but we were not allowed to use them in class until we’d already mastered maths the old-fashioned way. (I used them in doing my physics O-level, for example, so long as I clearly could show my workings if asked.) Here is an associated article by Gizmondo. On a more optimistic point, venture capital mover and shaker Marc Andreessen has thoughts on the overall positives from AI. I also have a more financial concern. If students, such as undergraduates, are using AI to write essays, even whole dissertations, etc, then it makes it even more scandalous that they rack up tens of thousands of dollars, euros or whatever in debt to pay for this. Because if they get a degree thanks to ChatGPT (that rhymes!), then what exactly have they got for their money? February 21st, 2025 | 100 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Earlier this week, the BBC admitted it had broadcast an hour of primetime television narrated by the son of a Hamas terrorist leader. This connection to terrorism was not initially disclosed to audiences.” – Danny Cohen, Daily Telegraph (£) Here’s a non-paywalled story about this. February 21st, 2025 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Violent offenders face ban on owning knives” reports the Telegraph.
Something tells me that the violent offenders will face this prospect with the equanimity that comes from already having faced a ban on being violent criminals.
Chris Rose has been inspired to do his bit to help the Home Secretary fight crime:
February 21st, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I will forever remember that it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that made me realise the political right is as retarded as the political left. February 21st, 2025 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
We can no longer afford luxury beliefs. It’s not sustainable to have investment funds which shun arms companies on ESG grounds. It’s no good saying you want to save the planet if you can’t stop China and Russia controlling more and more of it. It’s self-harming to apply DEI policies to the military. The services are there to intimidate and, if that fails, kill our enemies, not impress them with how kind we are to people struggling with their gender identity. Laws policed by foreign courts which prevent our security and intelligence services doing what is necessary to keep us safe are weapons we have fashioned to arm the terrorists who wish to harm us. If our agents can’t do their job because of the ECHR, it must be changed until they can. Or junked. – Michael Gove (£), who for once is kind of making sense February 20th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
However sympathetic you are to the populist cause, however “realist” on Ukraine, it is impossible to defend the head of the world’s most powerful nation putting out reckless semi-literate screeds like this. February 19th, 2025 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
The prosecution of speech crimes will erode public trust in the police and is taking us to anarcho-tyranny: the police will come after easy targets, and leave persistent criminals to run rampant. There is no British equivalent to the “thin blue line” movement in the United States, a segment of the population which will support the police come what may, and they may find themselves without a dependable public support base. While it is for politicians to repeal the laws which have killed free speech in Britain, the police must do their part too to revive Robert Peel’s founding principles and protect the safety, order and indeed liberties of the British people, instead of enforcing the political creed of multiculturalism over freedom, as many do today. February 18th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Preston Byrne makes the comparison in a speech at the Free Speech Union. February 17th, 2025 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
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