Truly we are beset upon all sides by the tyranny of evil men. But that’s not really news.
Archive for the ‘Civil Liberties’ Category
North Korean Football
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010North Korea lost the football game against Brazil 2-1. At half time there were no goals. In the second half North Korea scored a goal. Brazilian players play all year round in the world’s best leagues, with and against the world’s best players. What do North Korean players do? How did they get good enough to even qualify for the tournament, never mind not lose 14-0?
Presumably the players are well motivated. At press conferences the manager is sensitive and testy: “…we are called Korea Democratic People’s Republic. Please do not use any other name.”
He does not want to talk about the leader. When asked, “Who selects your team – you or the president?”, the annoyed answer is, “That’s a political question. Next question please.” But he’ll yak on about the leader all day, living up to the stereotype: “This will bring a lot of joy to the Great Leader, it will show that North Koreans have great mental strength.” In some other interview, he proves that he thinks just how we think he thinks, or at least knows what he is supposed to say: “Perhaps there is no other team in the world who would be fighting with the same dedication to please the leader and to bring fame to their motherland.”
The team are probably lucky ones and well favoured, but there’s no reason to believe they are exposed to the outside world very much. Perhaps they have watched football played by the top leages on TV. Presumably they are physically fit and well trained in basic skills. But I am surprised that is enough to play reasonably well against Brazil. Perhaps physical training and basic ball skills is all it takes to play well and I am overestimating the value of experience. Perhaps Brazil weren’t trying hard enough; it happens when top teams play lower teams. Perhaps those men really are playing for their lives. Or perhaps North Korea has its equivalent of the Premier League and we have never seen it.
Hamster Cruelty
Sunday, June 13th, 2010I follow someone on Twitter called crazywtf who posts all sorts of crazy news stories. Today he posted one about a teenage boy who microwaved his brother’s hamster.
Apparently this warrants a four month spell in jail. Now I know it’s horribly cruel, and might well indicate a disturbed mind, but are we really jailing teenagers for stupid pranks now? Is a Hamster’s suffering worth any amount of human suffering? I don’t think it is.
By all means ostracise the boy. Microwaving hamsters is not socially acceptable. But not everything that is wrong should be a criminal matter.
I’m pretty sure these animal cruelty laws are just pandering to soft in the head tabloid readers. My mother would probably say the boy should be shot for doing that to a poor cute hamster, but honestly, worse things might happen to cows every day without anyone being jailed for it and she happily eats beef.
The RSPCA man said, “…as microwaves cook from the inside, the organ damage to this tiny animal must have been horrific”. Which just goes to show the sort of fuzzy-headed thinking we’re dealing with. Microwaves do not cook from the inside. But hey, if it gets you even more sympathy for the hamster, what does mere truth matter?
Immigration
Sunday, May 16th, 2010The coalition government wants to set an “annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work”.
Immigration isn’t the problem it’s made out to be. The angle that the government is working is that immigrants will take your job, and the government will protect you from that. It’s the lump of labour fallacy. In the end, the more people there are, the more jobs there are to do. This is self evident: there are millions more people living in the UK than a hundred years ago and they are not all unemployed. The more people there are, the more people go out to restaurants, so the more waiters need to be employed. More fundamentally, a “job” is just a specialisation, something you get someone else to do because they can do it better or more cheaply or more conveniently than you can do it yourself. People will always do things for each other no matter how many people there are.
There are dynamics to the situation. Sudden changes in the make-up of the population can cause problems for some. If you’re a plumber, and lots of plumbers move from Poland and are prepared to do the same work as you for less money, I can see why you’d be worried: you don’t want to lower your prices, increase the quality of your service, or provide a different service. The government talks about limiting immigration because it wants your vote. But doing so doesn’t help people in general. The sudden influx of cheap plumbers is good for me: I get my plumbing done for less. And I have money left to spend on something else, so whoever provides the something else benefits too.
You can’t pretend that limits to immigration are good for “the economy”. No overall good is done by limiting immigration. It helps one group (the incumbent plumbers), but only at the expense of other groups (the would-be immigrants and anyone who wants to hire a plumber).
In the long run, freedom of movement makes everyone richer. You could say that it enables labour, like any other commodity, to move to where it is best able to be used. But there’s more to it than that. Being able to move freely is valuable for its own sake. Left alone, people figure out how to improve their lives. That improvement, whatever form it takes, is an increase in wealth. If a Pole wants to move to the UK and do my plumbing, and I want to pay him to do my plumbing, then left alone we are both richer.
If a third party wants to stop us from making that agreement, they have to initiate force. That’s inherently evil. That’s what goverments do: they’re the go to guys if you want evil done to make sure you can continue to charge high prices for your services.
Tory Manifesto on ID
Monday, May 3rd, 2010Via a NO2ID newsletter comes a link to a summary of manifesto pledges related to ID cards. The Conservatives make by far the strongest statement:
The Conservative Party argues that “Labour’s approach to our personal privacy is the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive” and states that they will “scrap ID cards, the National Identity Register and the Contactpoint database”
The Conservatives are the only ones to mention ContactPoint, which is the database of all children (except those of celebrities and politicians). And specifically mentioning the NIR hints that they understand the real problem. So there is some hope on this issue, at least.
Becks Blue
Sunday, March 28th, 2010
What is wrong with this beer label?
Police Force and Markets
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010Police in Vancouver Victoria, British Columbia are filmed kicking people while they’re down. Allegedly that’s just what those people were doing to someone else before the police arrived, but still.
Someone on Reddit argues for anarcho-capitalism: private police forces that customers can pick and choose between. Your system, “sounds like something out of a dystopic novel” says someone else.
“My” system is what exists naturally, without the widespread superstition of government necessity.
It’s funny you should consider it dystopian, considering the worst-case-scenario is what we currently have – a monopoly security corporation. If you told any reasonably-intelligent person that a monopoly would abide by the will of the people because of a wonderful vote-tally system… they would laugh in your face.
And it’s absolutely true. Without the market to check these police, they run roughshod over the population without any serious threat of retaliation. Statism is a superstition, in the same way religion is.
What are your assumptions? Have you challenged them lately?
Calendar
Saturday, March 6th, 2010My wife bought a Guiness calendar because she likes the artwork. On the back of the calendar is the web address drinkaware.co.uk and below that the text:
This product is intended for purchase and enjoyment to people of legal purchase age for alcohol beverages. Always drink responsibly.
My goodness.
Border Force
Thursday, February 25th, 2010I just caught part of a TV show called UK Border Force. Immigration officials arrest a man they think suspicious. A bystander gets indignant and starts yelling “this man is not a criminal”. The bystander is detained and rants and raves a bit, saying entirely understandable things like “people are trying to make a life better for themselves” and “I’m not a criminal, I’m only talking about rights”.
He ends up getting arrested for “obstruction” for his trouble.
An immigration official later talks about how the other onlookers reacted. Some of them applauded the immigration officials, others apparently “thought that it was morally wrong.”
She concludes, “but we’re here to do a job, so we do what we’re told.”
You can’t reason with authority.
Update: It gets better. Later in the same episode, immigration officials raid a spring onion farm where illegal immigrants from India are working. One of them actually says, “They are being paid £135 for a 40 hour week, which I reckon is about £3.75 an hour, which is a couple of pounds below the national minimum wage.” Another one says, “It’s horrible coming out to a job like this, where you see they’re working long hours for little money in conditions you wouldn’t want to keep animals in really. They’re not criminals. They’re here because they want to better their lives. We understand why they do it. If I had to feed my kids I’d do exactly the same thing.” The immigrants are duly shipped back to India. Well done! Okay, the barn they work in is not heated and the roof is a bit leaky, but they have a microwave and a radio and it’s not *that* bad. There is some concern that because they work for their accommodation and get driven to work in a van that this is forced labour, but I don’t find this convincing. The immigrants themselves say that they are doing this because they are poor back home. Shipping them back to India out of sight might make the socialists feel better but it ain’t helping no-one.
Eastenders on State Intrusion Into Family Life
Saturday, February 13th, 2010None of my readers would watch such low culture as Eastenders. Luckily, I watch it so that they don’t have to.
A couple of days ago, the devil child Dotty was caught mischievously pouring water on her stroke victim grandfather’s lap. Grandmother Dot Cotton, in an uncharacteristic pique of anger, gave her a well-deserved slap.
Then tonight, the cops show up at the local pub and arrest poor old Dot Cotton for assaulting a minor. At the police station she is interviewed and admits to hitting the girl. The police decide that as she is the “primary carer”, they will treat it as a “smack from a parent” rather than assault. But they warn her not to do it again.
Dot Cotton gets up to leave, but this is not the end of the matter. Oh no. She is to face interviews with social workers, and social workers will visit her home to “evaluate” the care of Dotty.
It’s a positively chilling story. Good on the BBC for raising awareness of the issues of state bullying, nosiness, and possibly even kidnapping.