Saturday 31 July 2010

That Soham killer story

On the face of it, the Soham killer may have a point. There is a duty of care to prisoners, and it's possible he's been let down in this respect. Not that anyone cares, except him.

I will not re-open the recent debate on the death penalty, but if the pro-hanging contingent need a poster boy, Huntley is it. Probably only Ian Brady stands between him and the crown of most hated man, and I expect a majority believe the only just sentence would have involved a hood, a rope and a trap door (or indeed something more medieval).

A sizable percentage of the population are gratified by each act of violence inflicted on him, but personally, I don't think we should leave justice to violent offenders to mete out on an ad hoc basis. Any money that he is awarded should go to the victims' families, and if this isn't how it works at present, I suggest the laws are fixed so it does in future.

The ultimate defence of Zeitgeist

Elsewhere in bloggerland I have been arguing about the Zeitgeist documentaries, which I hold to be pernicious bullshit, which call for the most hellish totalitarianism possible, presided over by supposedly enlightened beings a la Plato's Republic. I haven't seen them recently, but due to the conversation, I revisited the Alex Jones' review, which shoots most of the holes I would, and then came upon this 'rebuttal', which cracked me up. Life may be too short to watch the whole thing. I merely present you with the opportunity.


Thursday 29 July 2010

The art of misdirection



I can't remember if I've ever posted this before, but it's still funny, so never mind. For those of you who don't know, it is a piss-take of the trial and acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe, erstwhile leader of the Liberal Party.

Wikileaks: who's pulling the strings?

There's something very fishy about Wikileaks' big story. The agenda seems to be:

1 Blame Pakistan
2 Implicate Iran
3 Continue the myth that Osama Bin Laden is still out there, hiding in the shadows

There's also the way Wikileaks has gone about releasing the information; hyping it for some time, giving it to selected establishment media, something ain't right with this.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Doctor Who before he learned to hate guns

Taking a small step to reduce my ever-growing book mountain, I gave a load of old Doctor Who books to my friend's kid, who's a fan of the show, including the above number, with my favourite Doctor, Tom Baker. My young friend was most surprised to see the Doctor carrying a firearm on the cover of this and other stories. Apparently since I was a child, the Doctor has developed a hatred of guns; an interesting example of propaganda being inserted into children's television.

(Here's a taste of the story, but be warned! One of the characters smokes a cigar - shocking stuff)

Fury's not what it was

Who are the strange people who watch Top Gear, solely in order to be offended by Jeremy Clarkson? This time an anecdote about a woman in a burka has inspired literally, err, seven complaints, which is enough for the headline 'Jeremy Clarkson sparks fury over burka babes underwear joke' in the Daily Mail. In this article we learn:

"The Muslim Women's Network UK last night criticised Top Gear after they joked about using the burka as a way of preventing drivers being distracted by female pedestrians.

Faeeza Vaid, co-ordinator at the organisation, said: 'The debate surrounding the burka is a serious issue which shouldn't be publicly joked about. Rather than joking about it, we should be having serious dialogue.'"

On this last point, I beg to differ. Anything is fair game to humour, and although I don't support calls to invoke the power of the state to prevent women wearing a burka, I don't see why the rest of us shouldn't take the piss.

Cameron - a trEU believer

Remember when David Cameron, the archetypal lying, fake, principle-free-zone politician told us about his 'cast-iron guarantee' that we would have a referendum, and how that 'cast-iron guarantee' turned out to be a lie, and how we were then promised a referendum 'next time', in other words sometime never that a similar treaty handing over whatever's left to hand over of our sovereignty to the crooked politicians, former communists and Hegel-worshipping bureaucrats of Brussels, with a knowing wink to the wings, as there will be no new treaty, Lisbon being the capstone on the pyramid?

Now Cameron is rubbing it in with his championing of Turkey's membership of the EU. Such a change would constitute a large enough change to warrant a referendum. What do you reckon the chances of that happening? Also, to further underline how he is nothing but Blair with a bigger forehead, he is threatening war against Iran.

What a cunt.

Murray discusses strategy



I'm still on a blogger sabbatical, so here's the great libertarian Murray Rothbard speaking in 1989, and sounding strangely up-to-date, with references to banker bailouts, global warming hype and swine flu, amongst other things.

Wednesday 21 July 2010

Thought for the day

Monday 19 July 2010

The Obama Deception: get it while you can



We never know when the criminals in government will drop the hammer on our free internet. Our elite enemies hate the power of the internet. In the good old days, it was much easier to control the flow of information with a handful of gatekeepers. But the idea that, if the BBC hasn't covered it, it didn't happen, is dead now. Under the aegis of protecting the public from terrorism, extremism etc, they are itching to throw the switch. Then they can carve up the internet into a corporate bonanza of meaningless trash.

So, if you haven't already, watch 'The Obama Deception' while you still can.

Sine qua non

It seems the most unlikely characters are claiming to be libertarians. Some no doubt would say they are libertarian instinctively, and its only in their conscious, thinking minds that they are rabid state-worshipping, jackboot-licking authoritarians.

As others have noted, this could be an inchoate attempt to do to libertarianism what they have done to liberalism: i.e. take over the word, twist it into something else, something that stinks of dirty socialist socks. The motivation for this would be envy and fear. Leftwingers hate libertarians, because we expose the misanthropy of their worldview and their economic theories as busted flush fallacies.

In one sense this could be a good sign, imitation being a form of flattery, but libertarians must rise and challenge these imposters, and the better we understand what we're talking about the better we can lay down some sine qua non libertarian principles that will flush out these charlatans and self-deluders.

I guess I'm really talking to myself, here, so I continue to try to educate myself, working my way through Hayek, von Mises, Lord Acton, Sir William Blackstone and others. Without knowledge, we must rely on rhetoric and shallow emotionalism. Better to leave that to our foes.

Saturday 17 July 2010

Paying people to fail



A youthful Thomas Sowell debates the dynamics of welfare with Pennsylvania Secretary of Welfare, Helen O'Banion (1980), and below, a little older on education.


Dirty your hands

Coming across this essay; 'the administration of Andrew Jackson' by William Graham Sumner, the passage below makes me pause for thought. It is, I would say, a call for action on the part of the 'philosophers and book-men', to do their duty in society, even though it's often a thankless task.

"The philosophers and book-men have no great rôle offered them in a new country. They will always be a minority, they will always be holding back in the interest of law, order, tradition, history, and they will rarely be entrusted with the conduct of affairs; but, since their lot is cast here, if they withdraw from the functions which fall to them in this society, such as it is, they do it at the sacrifice not only of duty but also of everything which makes a fatherland worth having, to them or to their posterity. The fault which they commit is the complement of that committed by their opponents. For the notion which underlies democracy is that of rights, tenacity in regard to rights, the brutal struggle for room for one's self, and, still more specifically, for equal rights, the root principle of which is envy. This was abundantly illustrated in Jackson's day. The opposition of his supporters to bank and tariff had no deeper root than this, and the name they chose for themselves as descriptive of their aims was “The Equal Rights Party.” But the principle of political life lies not in rights but in duties. The struggle for rights is at best war. The subjection to duty reaches the same end, reaches it far better, and reaches it through peace. Still less is there any principle of political health in the idea of equality of rights, much as some people seem to believe the opposite. In political history it has been the melancholy province of France to show us that if you emphasize equality you reduce all to a dead level of slavery, with a succession of revolutions to bring about a change of masters.

If, then, the classes which are by education and position conservative withdraw from public activity, pride themselves on their cleanness from political mire, and satisfy themselves at most with a negative and destructive interference at the polls from time to time, the conception of political duty with them must be as low as with their opponents; and I will add that they will at best turn from one set of masters to another, under a general and steady deterioration in the political tone of the country. If we have to-day a society in which we go our ways in peace, freedom, and security, a society from the height of which we look back upon the life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a shudder, we owe it to no class of men who wrote satirical essays on contemporary politics and said to one another: “What is the use?” Elliott and Hampden and Sydney and these revolutionary heroes whose praise we are just now chanting did not win for us all the political good we owe them by any such policy as that. There was no use, as far as any one could see, in their cases. They risked persecution, imprisonment, the axe, and the scaffold, and their puny efforts seemed ridiculous in the face of the task they undertook; but they never stopped to think of that. They saw that it was the right thing to do then to speak or to resist, and they did it and let the end take care of itself.

...

No man, no committee, no party, no centralized organization of the general government, can rid us of our difficulties and yet leave us self-government. Nor can we invent any machinery of elections or of government which will do the work for us. We have got to face the problems like men, animated by patriotism, acting with business-like energy, standing together for the common weal. Whenever we do that we cannot fail of success in getting what we want; so long as we do not do that, our complaints of political corruption are the idlest and most contemptible expressions which grown men can utter."

Tuesday 13 July 2010

More padding

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Monday 12 July 2010

Hat tip: Leg Iron



As I've been so remiss in my blogging, I'll shamelessly pinch this from Leg Iron and boost my numbers. I wonder how far out in space the original broadcast of this show now is?

Liberty and the Rule of Law 3: What have I missed?

Statute of Felonies

Ye shall not commit the following acts, for they are considered the most serious crimes, neither shall ye attempt to commit, conspire to commit or be complicit in the committing by others of these felonies, whether by recklessness, malice aforethought, negligence or insanity.

I Manslaughter II Murder III Malicious Cruelty IV Rape V Abduction VI False Imprisonment VII Grievous Assault IIX Serious Assault IX Indecent Behaviour X Indecent Assault XI Robbery XII Burglary XIII Theft XIV Fraud XV Criminal Damage XVI Criminal Possession XVII Criminal Association XIIX Criminal Coercion XIX Incitement to Felony XX Betraying the Nation XXI Perverting the Course of Justice XXII Dereliction of Duty XXIII Desecration of a Corpse XXIV Reckless Endangerment XXV Riot

Defence Denial outright Committed in self-defence
Aggravations
Helplessness of the victim Habitual criminality Multiple felonies Cruelty Pitilessness
Mitigations
Duress Coercion Entrapment Provocation Isolated Act Intoxication Completely out of character Insanity Beneath the age of responsibility Co-operation Full Admission
Verdicts Not guilty Guilty, but with mitigation Guilty Guilty with aggravation Punishments Incarceration Fines and Forfeitures Expulsion Public Safety Bond
Sentencing Punitive Tariff Exemplary Tariff Public Safety Tariff

Slight Reprise

I've let the weeds grow on my blog these last two weeks for no better reason than a state of apathy with regard to it. I would like to apologise to anyone who has suffered distress or hardship due to my lack of activity in this sphere.

Meanwhile the economy is still falling, the war drums are still beating and America is still teetering on the brink of a total collapse into tyranny. Plus ça change.