Blogging suspended

I shan’t be blogging here for a while. It’s my intention to explore video as a communication tool for a bit.

All Coppers Are Bastards

Really, you just can’t make this sort of thing up:

Police have spent £170,000 of public money trying to prosecute a strippergram for playing an officer as part of his act.
…
Stuart Kennedy, who performs under the stage name of Sergeant Eros, was last week cleared in court for the 22nd time.
…

Since March 2007, the 25-year-old genetics student from Aberdeen University has been arrested six times and spent 123 hours in custody, without police securing a single conviction.

…
In the latest incident as part of an extraordinary two-year spat with police, Mr Kennedy was arrested while driving home from Aberdeen’s Tiger Tiger club dressed in full uniform.
Daily Mail

The police are not being brought into disrepute by this, they are actually disreputable.

Their reputation is that they taser or pepper spray old folks, beat rural citizens defending they’re traditions, let Hamas thugs riot and smash shops, persecute motorists, throw people defending themselves in jail and ignore actual crimes.

The more the public realise the cops aren’t on their side and have been turned into a sort of cuddly (for now) Stasi the better.

A market in influence

Believing in honest, incorruptible politicians is a bit like believing in objective journalism it’s more an act of faith than a reflection of reality.

I would much prefer it if MP’s received no salary, allowances or expense of any kind.

They should fund them selves by some other means perhaps by unions or guild, professionals, societies, charities that they’re from or the sectional interests they represent. A market in power and influence if you will.

This is what we have now of course but it’s an underground market or black-market distorted by state subsidy.

This would have the net effect of making us much more cagey about giving them any legitimacy unless they could pretty much demonstrate they where as pure as the driven snow.

So, we rely on markets and reputation rather than on rules and regulations.

Dickens was a tool of the enemy

Yet another wonderful article (from a man I used to hold in little regard).

Charles Darwin reminds us not to squander the great legacy of the Victorians

 No wonder we cannot understand these people, with their heroic endeavour based on learning and scholarship. Neither heroism nor learning is valued in our society. Why else are those who would spend 17 years writing a book (like Darwin) seen as merely eccentric? Why are our great universities starved of money, and the standard qualifications of our school system diluted almost to worthlessness? Can we imagine a great and properly informed debate on questions such as faith, democracy or the individual today? If we cannot, it is because while the Victorians might have shaped how our world looks and the bases of the way in which we now think, we continue to squander our pervasive inheritance from them because of our refusal to rise to their awesome standards.

Charles Darwin reminds us not to squander the great legacy of the Victorians

 Two point aside from two things, both crucial:

“we continue to squander our pervasive inheritance from them because of our refusal to rise to their awesome standards.” It’s not that. It’s the deliberate focused actions of a relatively small group of committed counter-enlightenment forces who, bizarrely, appear to be progressive, even scientific, to the naive.

And the other point. Dickens was a tool of such forces, even if his words were pretty.

Hanging Saddam

In a longish thread Oranjepan raises this great question:

“Take the example of capital punishment – how exactly do you differentiate between criminal murder and a legitimately-sanctioned execution of duty without a concept of universal, or state community?”
Would the death of Saddam Hussein have been more acceptable if it had taken place by public stoning in the street? How could you decide that his death was legitimately obtained or make criticisms that it wasn’t unless there had been a regulated court procedure?”

Libertarians Advise

The stoning would be understandable, perhaps even forgivable given the depredations he heaped upon his people. It would not though have been legitimate.

It would be illegitimate because as Oranjepan rightly points out the regulated procedure is essential. The existence of the state adds nothing in the way of legitimacy.

The legitimacy of the execution – or other violent actions – arises because we see the operation of a formal process rather like a program or the expression of a set of rules which are and can be seen to be applied “blindly” or mechanistically without special privilege or prejudice. It’s this mechanistic rule following that conveys legitimacy rather than legitimacy somehow flowing from the existence of a state.

What I’ve just said is only part of the story. It’s not enough that the rules are deterministically applied it’s that the rules themselves are created and changed by other equally formal or mechanistic processes.

Further, the rules and their operators need to have been shown to be effective and “just” over long periods of time and in a wide range of circumstances.  To some extent this is cause of some of the doubts of the legitimacy of Hussien’s execution stem from.

Yet more, they need to be seen or perceived as moral rules. Morality itself is constructed by evolutionary social processes over generations though ultimately it derives from aspects of our biological existence in the physical world.

States do not convey legitimacy either in principle or practice. The show trials of Stalin’s era are seen as illegitimate even though they’re the actions of a state precisely because they where not the blind application of rules to circumstances.

I cannot imagine being able to buy or sell moral systems but perhaps I just lack imagination. On the other hand I can see no reason to assume that sets of rules or entire legal systems couldn’t be bought and sold on the market. In fact, of course, they are. Non state arbitration and other dispute resolution services are already quite widespread. There’s no reason to assume that the role of such services couldn’t become more widespread and more profound and that healthy competition might develop leading to refinement and improvements in both justice and efficiency.

…slaughtered and tortured, as the Inquisition ordered

At first I supposed that I would be able to deconstruct the rhetoric of the enemy, phrase by phrase – showing it to be illogical and incoherent but that task has proved so much harder than I expected because there’s so little to get a hold of deconstruct.

Let’s take as an example some suppose utterances by David Cameron as reported by the Guardian:

“We need a more ethical capitalism,” Cameron told Vine.

“I don’t think the answer to the current crisis is to tear up the market system and go back to 1970s-style socialism, but we do need a more ethical capitalism in which we recognise that business has real responsibilities.

“Business is not just about making money. It is also about acting in an ethical way and I think we need to build a more ethical capitalism in Britain as we come out of this dreadful recession.”

ethical capitalism

At one level it’s really hard to attack this because basically it’s just a stream of nice sounding words which mean nothing. It’s meant to invoke feelings in you I suppose, a bit like Obama’s “hopey-changey” shtick is. It so mushy and vague he might as well be saying “I’m for goodness. Goodness is good business. I know you want to be good and I want you to be good. Good is good, we will make people be good.”.

At another level it has a much darker subtext about striving for the perfectabilty of man on earth. If this remark puzzles, perhaps you could do read Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom”. Bastiat’s “The Law” (a slim volume) is also good but he didn’t get to see it done on twentieth century scales and so misses the full scale of the terror.

This guy is not just a looter

in response to this self-serving drivel by a looter former solicitor:

I’m not quoting this stuff because it’s too incoherent and if I pick bits out it looks like I’m cherry picking to make him look bad (which in general I’m not opposed to). If you care read the linked post.

Did you not have the capacity to foresee that, just perhaps, you might fall ill?

What did you buy instead of some sort of insurance or other financial instruments?

Are you more or less deserving of state largess because you are an intelligent, well educated and skilled?

Is it not fraud to apply for and accept IB when you can clearly take a job (as you did in fact do).

Why is it morally justified to go on a holiday abroad to when you are about to make a benefit claim?

Is it right or wrong to ask for – claim, in fact – money from others (indirectly) extorted by threat of force?

So then Martin, do you consider your self a morally bankrupt parasite or not?

If not, why not?

Me, angry.

Note 2 things:

1. It’s not wrong to claim IB. If you think that’s what I’m saying your wrong and you need to keep coming back here.

2. This is a posting, as far as I can tell a supportive posting, on a the blog of the founder of LPUK.

If you, in some sense, don’t get this please and actually care, please keep reading this blog because there’s clearly a massive disconnect between the people who are claiming to represent at least on stream of libertarian thought in the UK (and for the record, that ain’t me!) and err, libertarian thought.

Please don’ t trust or believe me. I’m not going to give you chosen spun links and what not. Google like mad. Read. Think. Read some more. There are no welfare libertarians. None.

And the thing that really pissed me off? This:

I should say I’m probably not a ‘typical’ Incap claimant, if such a beast exists. A solicitor by training and writer by inclination

Ahh. Not chav you see, so that’s ok then.

Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens

Over at PANEM ET CIRCENSES we read that:

This is what springs to mind as Labour’s Puritan Roundhead protectorate moves to police our bedrooms in one of its most pointless gestures yet.

Having aggressively subsidised social breakdown, encouraged (preferably unprotected) underage sex, promoted teen pregnancy and favoured single parenthood for decades, our Roundhead masters now wish to flex their moral muscle by banning extreme pornography.

One wonders if Labour eggheads are deliberately trying to criminalise the whole population while setting actual criminals free. A government run by Mad Frankie Fraser wouldn’t achieve this as well as Labour have.

“Fixing windows in Dresden”

Just to pick out one bit: “One wonders if Labour eggheads are deliberately trying to criminalise the whole population while setting actual criminals free.”

Well of course they are:

“Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

(Rand, obviously)

Did you know that fitting people up with nasty porn was a KGB tactic used to deal with people who didn’t get the message to shut the f–k up even after a good hiding or two? Such as Christians in the house church movement.

Of course this was in the 1970’s when they needed to bother – at least to some extent – with excuses and some semblance of due processes rather than just proceeding straight to murder.

Pinter’s dead.

Pinter’s dead. What a shame it didn’t happen sooner. It was of something nasty, for which I give thanks.

Let there be a rejoicing!

On the joys of a free market in cars

 BMW have replaced the AirFlow Meter on my car. I’d been vaguely underwhelmed by the 4.4L behemoth’s performance since I acquired it six months ago. Smooth and quick but not heart-stopping. In the last week performance was dire and I knew something was wrong.

Staggering service from BMW (Fawdingtons), helpful, friendly, quick. They over delivered—said it would be ready mid-afternoon yet had it done by eleven. And they even arranged a taxi at their expense when my wife mentioned we’d planned to get the bus across town to collect it. They cleaned it too. This was an out of warranty repair on a second hand car not even bought from them.

This then is capatalism, red in tooth and spanner. Endless ruthless competion with Merceedes and others have driven them to such desperate ends as offering a 20% discount on labour, coffee and taxis.

The government in this country used to do cars and still does schools and hospitals. Personally I wish they’d stop doing schools and hospitals and let BMW or someone else have a go.

Oh yes, the new AirFlow meter; well I can do no better than quote the master, Clarkson: “Powwweeer“.