Yes, Brian, it is.

From Worse Than Failure

“This is Patrick.  He sets up blogs at about the same rate other people write blog postings.”

Perry was only slightly exaggerating and every time I set up a new blog or site I find his words ringing in my ears.

This time it’s Patrick Crozier’s Libertarian Filing Cabinet which is causing the ringing.  It is intended as a store of stuff that I think will prove useful at some later date.  It will include things like libertarian writings, writings by libertarians, things of interest to libertarians along with cuttings, quotes and graphics.

Right now it’s a bit empty.  It’s also not finished.  Some of the panels are missing and some of the runners are a bit sticky.  But bit by bit things like this can be overcome.

From Eurosport

And now…

Lewis Hamilton

All highly - almost unbelievably - successful.  In each case their fathers have been heavily involved in their success.

Are there any other examples?  Does Colin Powell, for instance, fall into this category?

Is this a black thing?  I am struggling to bring to mind any whites who have had similar success let alone ones with a similarly influential father figure. [By the way, and before anyone points this out to me, I am aware that Lewis Hamilton is as white as he is black and that Woods is as Thai as he is black.  It’s the ethnicity of the father I find interesting.]

Is it the only black thing?  Can you be black and massively successful without an influential father?

Is it a Western Atlantic thing?  I am struggling to think of any Africans who fall into this category.

Whatever the cause, for the time being it is enough to sit back enjoy a brilliant driver and (what appears to be) a smashing bloke continue to rewrite the record books.

What should we think about immigration?  Whatever the answer may be, the West should make up its mind pronto - if Mark Steyn is to be believed things could get very nasty very quickly.

Let’s start with the existing system.  The UK is the one I know something about but I suspect it’s not that different from those elsewhere in the West.  If you are rich or European it is easy to live and work legally.  If you’re not it’s not.  Not that that stops people.  There have been few news stories that have given me pause for thought but the deaths of 58 illegal Chinese immigrants in the back of truck at Dover was one of them.  It made me wonder how many other trucks were getting through and marvel at the lengths people will go to live and work in this country.  Conclusion: you can’t stop ‘em.

But then again why should you?  Why should people be condemned to live in one place due to an accident of birth? 

What if, when it came to immigration laws, we just scrapped the lot?

Oh, but we’d be flooded.

What does that actually mean?  Lots of people would show up?  Yeah, I guess lots of people would show up.  So what?

Well they’d take all the jobs and they’d push up house prices and we’d all have to live in rabbit hutches and they’d demand free houses on the welfare state and exhaust the NHS and form ghettoes and vote in blocks and some of them would be terrorists and democracy would collapse.  It would be like what it is now but worse.

Well, lets deal with the easy stuff first.  I am a libertarian so in my ideal libertarian world there wouldn’t be any council housing, a welfare state or an NHS. So immigrants would not be able to sponge.  There wouldn’t be any planning either so housing supply would be able to keep up with demand.

The idea that there is only a fixed number of jobs sounds awfully similar to the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy - which I ought to write something about some day.  Suffice to say more people is better.

When it comes to ghettoes, I think there is a point here.  But then we have ghettoes already.  The assumption is that people want to stay.  But it is not true.  By and large people from the Third World - and just about everywhere else - want to earn money and leave.  Of course, they want to go back. They can build a house of their own - something much more luxurious than what they could afford here - and beer and fags are much cheaper and they are surrounded by people they understand.  And as for the weather… The only reason they stay is, paradoxically, the immigration laws.  Immigration laws provide a massive incentive to stay because if you leave you lose your right to residency.  So you stay until you qualify for citizenship.  But then you want your children to have the same rights.  So, you stay for even longer.

There will be ghettoes - probably rather nice ones - because people of a similar ilk like to congregate together.  But my guess is that they’d be smaller than the ones we already have.

Terrorism.  This is another article that needs to get written.  But essentially, it will say that there is nothing particularly difficult about dealing with terrorism.  The old treason law had a lot going for it.

The final problem is the one to do with voting.  If the Welfare State is to be abolished then action has to be taken to ensure it doesn’t come back.  But on the other hand there is a hell of a close correlation between democracy and freedom.  The answer probably lies in either restricting the franchise to net tax payers or making the franchise tradeable.

IC3?

They’re not alone in such squeamishness.  According to Wikipedia, ITV edits the n-word out when it repeats the Dam Busters movie.

So Gibson was a racist then?  As it happens he probably was - most people were in those days.  But there are racists and there are racists.  He was after all risking his life to destroy the most violently racist regime ever known - risks that eventually got him killed.  There is a big difference between thinking that members of another race are inherently inferior - or just undesirable - and wishing their deaths.

But does his use of the n-word prove it - his racism, that is?  That’s where things get trickier.  You see I am not sure that at the time and the place it was an insult.  Take some British English uses from about the same period.  Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers, for instance.  Or a little vignette I once picked up from a documentary on black American soldiers in England in World War Two.  They found that the natives at first and in all innocence referred to them as “niggers” - a usage that was dropped soon enough after the black servicemen let it be known that where they came from “nigger” was deeply offensive.  I have found other uses in which the term has a neutral meaning, in much the same way that black (in British English, that is) has today.  And I have found others where it implies pity but certainly not contempt.

According to Fowler, the afficionado of all things to do with English usage, writing in 1926, it could be an insult but only when applied to non-blacks.  (Thinks: would I be insulted if called Chinese?)

Another aspect I find interesting is that there is no white equivalent.  “Honky” just doesn’t cut it.  Oh, I guess if I was being called “honky” half-a-dozen times a day in clearly hostile manner it might get to me.  But ordinarily…

I wonder why that is?  Is it because blacks allow it to be an insult?  Is a reaction to this behind the naming of the band Niggaz with Attitude and the Samuel L Jackson character’s extraordinarily frequent use of the word in Jackie Brown - a bit like the way veterans of the BEF referred to themselves as the ”Old Contemptibles”?

When I first read in Michael Yon’s article some two weeks ago that a Challenger 2 tank had been blown up in Iraq I was sceptical.  Surely it would have been mentioned on the news or at very least on the MoD website?  But no.  Coupled with a few other things in his report that didn’t ring true I assumed this was a typical bit of journalistic lilly gilding.

So imagine my surprise when it turned out that he was right all along.

The destruction of a Challenger 2 is big news.  To the best of my knowledge it is the first British tank of any description to be put out of action in half a century.  The new-found vulnerability of a vehicle with some of the most advanced armour in the world may - though I can’t be sure about this - I’d be surprised if it didn’t - have all sorts of implications for the way operations will in future be conducted.

So, why the delay?  Did the MSM not know?  Did they know but not understand the significance?  Were they told to keep schtum?  If so why - the BBC tells us that an Abrams goes skywards almost every other week?  If they were told to keep schtum what else has this been applied to? 

In other words, what else don’t we know?

There have been calls for the British government to apologize for the slave trade.

I think it is a crock but I still find the arguments interesting.

Norm thinks there should be an apology:

Simon Jenkins seems to have trouble with the idea of someone taking responsibility for actions of which they are not themselves guilty, particularly where this is on behalf of an organization or institution. But, as I argued here and here, it’s just because organizations and institutions are real entities - though this doesn’t mean they have metaphysical personalities, or could exist without the human persons that at any given time belong to them, act for them, and so on - that those in a position to speak on their behalf can make apology for wrongs of the past, where the organization or institution was responsible for these but the individuals actually making the apology aren’t. There is nothing mysterious about it.

It’s not as stupid as it sounds.  There are precedents for this.  For instance, who hasn’t heard something like this: “On behalf of South West Trains I would like to apologize for the late running of this service.”?

Medworth points out that there’s no one to apologize to.

Hannan reminds us that we are all descended from slaves.  That should make for an interesting one: “I, Tony Blair, on behalf of the British government apologize to myself.”

Wat Tyler reckons that demands for an apology are being used as a wedge for reparations before going on to suggest that the slave trade wasn’t really worth that much.

Did you put your clocks forward today?  Did you perhaps take your life in your hands as you mounted a rickety chair in order to retrieve that hard-to-reach electric number?  Did you thumb through rarely consulted manuals in search of that seemingly magic sequence of key strokes that will allow you to once again record CSI?  In doing so, did you teach your children some new words, words that they really oughtn’t to know?  And do you have that haunting feeling that somehow, somewhere there’s one that you missed, a figurative time bomb with literal ticks, whose temporal eccentricity will do dreadful things to you at some unspecified date in the future? 

Well, I thought about it and decided to give it a miss.

I’ve had enough of this biannual nonsense of knob twiddling, button pressing and showing up late for Sunday lunch. From now on, or until such time as I lose my job, I’m going to be sticking to good old Greenwich Mean Time, or, as I shall henceforth be calling it for the purposes of clarity: Patrick Mean Time.

If we really need to enjoy long, summer evenings then our employers will have every incentive to provide us with an effective pay rise by bringing normal working hours back by an hour.

But what we do not need is a law that has its origins in the need to increase munitions production during the Great War.

So, the CrozierWatch will keep its time as all those around it lose theirs and its owner will have the added benefit that should he ever find himself chronologically embarrassed over the next few months he can always blame it on PMT.

Looks like this is going to become my main means of blogging for the next few months.  Oh well.

Islam is evil.  As he points out, this is not the first time Brian has said this.  He also points out that Christianity is equally nuts.  The difference is that with Islam some of its followers take it seriously and do what they’re told.  My take: Why? and does it matter, ie even if we knew why they were acting in such a stupid way would it make any difference to how we would deal with them?

Praise for the new Bond.  I liked it too…

...but brickbats for recent Agatha Christie adaptations.  Quite.

Freedom does not make you depressed.  I get the feeling that that meme is going to turn out to be a hardy perennial.

Why do American academics hate America? asks VDH.  More to the point why do American parents and alumni keep paying their wages?  My guess is that it is because when it comes to employers, reputation (which relates to ability and contacts) counts for more than what is actually taught. (Hat tip: Pajamas Media)

Multi-culturalism doesn’t work. My worry is that the debate on the left will go like: “if multi-racial societies can’t work with all this state intervention then they can’t work at all.” (Hat tip: A&L Daily)

Hmm, haven’t blogged anything for a while.  But I have been reading plenty.  Here are some of my favourites:

Healthcare in the US.  Specifically, the hassles involved in buying health insurance.  Scrolling through the comments, abounding as they are with acronyms like HSA and HDHP it becomes abundantly clear that US healthcare is far from the free market that it is portrayed as on this side of the Atlantic.  Which is, of course, half the problem.

How to improve democracy.  The Olive Blogger thinks we should have lots more referendums.  Perhaps this will encourage me to come up with some of my own thoughts on the matter.  Or, maybe not. (Hat-tip Pajamas Media)

How I learned to stop worrying about the trade deficit.  Don Boudreaux’s arguments will have a familiar ring to many but they’re well put. (Hat-tip Tom Palmer)

Do prostitutes need pimps? Seems with pimps they get more work and fewer beatings.  They still get the beatings mind, just less of them.

How good is Wikipedia? For some time I’ve been happy to believe that it’s great on the done and dusted but when you get to controversial topics best to proceed with caution.  But is the storage of hydrogen peroxide really so controversial?  There’s a follow up.

There are too few women bosses because there are too many women bosses. Heh. (Hat-tip A&L Daily)

Cash for honours.  Except these gongs are for money wasted.

And finally, this is so cool, courtesy of the ever wonderful English Russia.  The wooden skyscraper of Archangel.

Saturday I read about the theory that Litvinenko was killed by his own side.  Sunday I watch a BBC documentary on the Diana conspiracy.  Monday, I hear that a man has been denied entry to Iran for Holocaust denial denial.

Why do people believe this stuff?  More to the point, why do they want to?  Is it because they want to be initiated into some sort of secret society - those who know the truth - and thus feel special?  Is it because they distrust their governments?  This worries me because they simultaneously believe their governments to be all-powerful.

Is it just sheer boredom with being rich? a desire to smash up the system that underpins prosperity so that something more “interesting” can come along.

Is it because people have read too many Agatha Christie novels and got used to the idea that the answer is not the easy and obvious one right in front of your face?

I probably shouldn’t let it bother me - it’s just that I have an uneasy feeling about it.

Pinochet (seated).  Definitely not a PR man’s dream.

[Just as an aside - why is it that the media persist in getting the guy’s name wrong?  It is Pee-no-chet, not Pin-no-shay.]

Anyway, what name checks he’s got have tended to be rather negative.  But should they be?  Put yourself in his shoes in mid-1973.  This, as I understand it, is the situation: 

• the president is a communist.
• the economy is falling apart.
• your predecessor has been fired.
• there are stories of clandestine arms shipments from Cuba.
• Congress has declared Allende’s rule as unconstitutional.

In other words, it looks awfully like the end of not just democracy but of freedom itself.  Under those circumstances don’t you have to act?  Sure, the outcome may be far from a libertarian paradise but it’s going to be a damn sight better than the alternative.

Update 11/12/06 He’s dead now.  Paul Marks has similar opinions to my own - just better informed ones.

We (libertarians) have all been there.  Someone you know says something stupid, you pick them up and before you know it you’re in a shouting match.  Now, you could just keep your counsel but that lets the argument go by default.  And as Brian Micklethwait pointed out if you want to win the argument, first you have to have it.  So, how do you stick to your guns without losing all your friends?

Here are a couple of approaches I try to take. Ask:

1.  “What makes you think that?”
2.  “What would change your mind?”

Question 1 is a goody because if repeated often enough it quickly exposes the weaknesses in your opponent’s argument without exposing the weaknesses in your own (not, of course, that there are any).  Unfortunately, you don’t usually get that far - people have annoying habit of changing the subject but you can at least point this out to them.

Question 2 determines if they can change their mind.  Because if they say “Nothing” you know it’s a faith and you can have some fun pointing that out to them.  However, it is not without it’s dangers.  You do have to apply it to yourself from time to time which can be an uncomfortable discipline.

Of course, in all these arguments you have to bear in mind that political beliefs are strongly held and rarely changed.  And that people rarely change their minds unless they want to have them changed.  All you can really ever do is plant some seeds of doubt.

Australian: What about the cricket then?
Human: Huh?

A: You know, the cricket.
H: Which one?

A: The one in Australia.
H: Why on earth should I be concerned about the well-being of a single, solitary Antipodean insect?

A: No, the game, mate.
H: What game?  And I am not your mate.

A: The game of cricket.
H: I have no idea what you are talking about.

A: It’s in all the papers.
H: No, it isn’t. [Hands over newspaper]

A: [Scratching head] I don’t get it… You’re right… It’s not here.
H: [Relieved at successful national conspiracy to eradicate all knowledge of bat and ball games] Now, where’s my pint.

I was having a chat with some of my libertarian friends at the LA conference over the weekend.  We were talking about Hayek and he said something along the lines of: “There’s always the suspicion with him that if socialism was any good at producing fridges and washing machines he would be a socialist.” The implication being that Hayek was wrong.  (And, indeed, that that was what he believed).

I didn’t say so at the time (because my brain works far too slowly) but it occurs to me now that if tyranny was capable of producing the good things in life wouldn’t you have to support it?  Because, even if you wanted to live in your wonderfully-free-but-poor part of the world you wouldn’t get the chance.  If a tyranny is capable of churning out the fridges and washing machines you can sure as hell bet that it can churn out the tanks and fighter jets.

And it would just invade you.  Bye, bye freedom.

Luckily this is not a conclusion I often have to draw.  Usually, or so it seems to me, freedom and prosperity (in all its forms) go together.  Indeed, almost every argument I make on InstaPatrick includes both a moral case and a practical case.

But what if the practical case is far from clear cut? - intellectual property and compulsory purchase - are a couple of examples that spring to mind.  What if in these cases freedom was objectively worse than compulsion?  I think even then I would support freedom partly because it works in so many other areas of life that we can afford to induldge it once in a while and partly because once you’ve started to let a little bit of coercion into the world you find that more follows.

But it’s worth bearing in mind.

So it’s happened again.  Not for the first time I have dreaded the return of Doctor Who only to be pleasantly surprised by the first episode.  OK, so I spent most of the time hiding behind the sofa in fear of some victimist moralising but apart from one ugly moment we were largely spared.  Otherwise, what we got was pretty good stuff.

Thoughts:

• This would have made an excellent two-parter.  There’s a lot of mileage in the idea of stem-cell research going too far.  You could have had one of the stem-cell people (SCPs) escaping and all sorts of odd things going on with the hospital trying to recapture him.  Actually, that was a general criticism of the first (new) season.  A lot of good ideas were given far too short a shrift.
• Is it just me or was the Cassandra Rose preferable to the Rose Rose?
• How did the SCPs learn to walk, talk and think?
• Who thought it was a good idea to place the control that opens all the doors in a corridor and make it that easy to operate?
• And what was that last bit with Cassandra-Mick going back to see Younger Cassandra?  Oh, I know, to tell her that she’s so beautiful so that she doesn’t turn into the self-obsessed megalomaniac she does turn into.  But hang about, doesn’t this violate the “don’t change history” rule?  Talking of which, aren’t all points in time somebody’s history?
• Liked the cat make-up.  At least, I assume it was make-up. 
• David Tennant is a fantastic doctor.

There’s a whole bunch of these here

Hat tip: Freedom and Whisky

In a posting from sometime ago and almost in passing Clive Davis reminds us of a fairly common argument:

How long was it before I overheard the standard comment that, you know, more Americans die on the roads in a year than perished in the towers? How long? A day or two. That’s all.

I find that line of reasoning so irritating.  But I don’t know why.  I am sure it’s a fallacy, a real whopper, but I can’t demolish it.  The only thing I can think of is that the comparison being made is between something that was intended by human being ie the result of human wickedness and something that was the result of human error which is entirely normal.  But I am not happy.  I am missing something here.

I have rarely met a more obvious sign of a real estate bubble than when my [Shanghai] taxi driver explained that he owns four flats to speculate on increasing prices.

Johann Norberg before the Shanghai property crash.

Liberty 2005.  From the floor:

Why should we do anything for posterity?  Posterity has never done anything for us.

Disuss, as they say

Dom gets nostalgic:

In 1984, on a demo protesting the proposed abolition of student maintenance grants, I slung a chunk of paving slab through the window of a GLC building without even realising we were supposed to be on the same side. The fact that I was cheered for doing so rather suggested that my cluelessness was far from unique.

From Mugged by Reality

Via Clive Davies:

Among British progressives, who included so many opinion formers, writers and journalists, the ideological sentiment was overwhelmingly pro-American. Indeed, from the 1790s to the end of the 1860s, America was the favourite country of virtually all British intellectuals on the Left of the political spectrum, just as the Soviet Union was to be for Western intellectuals generally in the period 1918-45. Children of progressive parents were brought up to admire America.... Liberals like Byron were so enamored of the general system of government in the United States that, like the political pilgrims to Russia in the 1930s, they were prepared to overlook or justify shortcomings which, in any other context, they would have deplored.

Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern.