The Last Ditch

A dialogue of the deaf (and dumb)

A woman was in full niqab at my local Tube station today. That I respect her right to dress as she likes, is for most libertarians all that there is to say on that subject. In truth, of course, there is much more. A wise friend of mine said recently that libertarians are wrong to treat such issues as cut and dried. We give the impression that we are uncaring, cold and more unlike other people than we really are.

This post of mine was a good example. My friend rebuked me for saying that "I don't care" if people want to enter into polygamous/polyandrous marriages, when I would actually be very concerned for any family member or friend embarking on one. He has a point. As witness the conventional lives that most of us lead, libertarians generally have a similar range of ethical scruples to everyone else. In a sense, we just have an extra scruple about interfering in the lives of others.

I would never advocate interfering with that young lady's right to dress as she does. That doesn't mean I don't have any other response. In truth my reaction was the same I would have to seeing her paraded in public on a leash. However much she and they might deny it, I feel it's degrading that her menfolk claim the right for her to be seen only by them. I feel her garb is the sign and symbol of misogynistic subjection.

Other libertarians might have different responses. We are not an army of liberty-minded robots. We are diverse, mostly rather ordinary humans with a range of views.

Why then do I feel so uncomfortable in expressing such a personal view? I am not afraid of being accused of islamophobia. As used in public discourse in Britain, I regard it as a bogus concept designed to close down discussion. Rather like racism, sexism and homophobia, it is usually no more than an incantation; a magic spell to shut opponents up.

Nor do I recognise the lady's right not to be offended. Someone is offended by any point of view. I am very offended by those who advocate enslaving their fellow-men on a time share basis; making them work for the state for months before permitting them to earn for their families. Yet I don't claim the right to suppress their foul views. There is no free speech without offence - real, imagined or bogus. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but if we want to live in a free society we can't ever allow mere words to hurt us.

My wise friend is right. If we don't talk about the many concerns we share with non-libertarians, we make it harder to win them over. We sound like cold, hard people lacking concern for our fellow men. It's not enough to say the lady in the niqab is entitled to wear it. We also need to say that, like our fellow citizens, some of us at least feel sorry for her and disgusted by the misogyny her garb represents.

In modern Britain, libertarians inevitably spend most of our time arguing against the increasing intrusion of the state into private lives. We need also to make clear that we only do so as a matter of ethical principle. It's not because we approve of whatever "evil" the state pretends it is trying to cure. We would oppose a hijab ban à la française in England for example, but that doesn't mean any or all of us are happy for the women concerned. Just because we claim no right to interfere doesn't mean we lack a moral response.

Perhaps the confusion arises from the fact that, in a radically statist society like ours, where government accepts no boundaries on its right to interfere, moral criticism is almost always the precursor to an attack on liberty. We used to separate the immoral (to be avoided in oneself and discouraged in others on ethical grounds) and the illegal (to be suppressed for the protection of others from genuine harm). That distinction has somehow been lost.

The loss is no accident, in my view. To advance their cause, statists have - in a cynical agitprop exercise - sought out "oppressed" groups and offered them the state's protection. They have given the right to those favoured groups (selected for the sympathy they evoke in a population of generally decent people) not to be offended and not to have hatred expressed against them. In doing so they have chilled free expression so effectively that it's hard not to imagine that was their objective. And they have caused a clamour from other groups to be added to the list of the elect.

The British media demonised the Polish and Ukrainian peoples as racist bigots in advance of UEFA 2012, for example. I am familiar with both countries and don't believe racism is more prevalent there than here. I simply think we have suppressed its expression here and in doing so may even have increased its incidence. Does that really make anyone's life better? Does it increase the chance of different communities growing together; learning to understand each others' concerns and to build trust? I think not.

The lady on the platform today may, as most human communication is non-verbal, have detected my unease. She may speculate as to its causes but she will never know the truth. Unless it's possible to talk openly to each other, how can we progress? How can we explain to those who are taught to assume we are hostile by our racist, sexist, homophobic and islamophobic natures, that we stand by the old English principle of "handsome is as handsome does?" That we really just want people to stop calling for us to be controlled like dangerous dogs and for all of us - citizen familes old and new - to sign up to the standards of tolerance and mutual respect that we think should define our society?

The key question is, as always, cui bono? I don't think it's the young lady in the niqab, who might well enjoy having me as a neighbour if not taught to fear me. I don't think it's the black and brown football fans who missed out on two wonderful countries. The only beneficiaries of this moral panic agitprop are those who seek ever more control over our lives. Every time we edit our speech for fear of PC "offence" we are losing the battle for our freedom.

A danger to the state?

The Courier - 'I started laughing, and kept on laughing' — Olympic torch protester gets a police visit.


I was asked earlier this year at a professional gathering what change I had noticed on returning to Britain after 20 years. I answered that the police seem more interested now in what people say than in what they do. There was a polite silence as people digested this politically-incorrect observation. Yet is it really so controversial? In what possible universe can an elderly man's declaration of his intention to stand with a placard as the Olympic torch passes merit the time of two detectives to establish his precise intentions?

h/t Nourishing Obscurity

Can any Canadian reader please help?

 

Another video by Ezra Levant did the round of the blogs a while back. You know it; the one in which he was filmed taking an Alberta Human Rights Commission functionary apart. Now there's a new one in which he takes the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to task for running a kangaroo court. Looking at the decision on the Council's website, and reading there how the Council is constituted, his basic points seem to be true.

Yet it's hard to believe that Canada censors private media companies while exempting the state broadcaster. It's hard to believe Canada's government is so hypocritical as to describe the Council as "voluntary" while making membership a pre-condition for a broadcasting licence. And it is extremely hard to believe that the rules of natural justice can be flouted in a Common Law jurisdiction like Canada in the way that Levant describes. Can it really be true that he can be judged without being heard? That he can be judged by his competitors and political opponents?

I don't know enough about Canada to be sure whether I can take this guy at face value. His tone is pompous, hectoring and bombastic and he sounds like - to put it mildly - a blowhard. I am not sure I like him, but he seems to be making important points. If they are true, I probably have to refine my personal stereotype of Canada as a relaxed, open, amiable free society. Can any reader help me understand please?

While I await enlightenment, I have to say - in fairness to a country that only Americans seem able to dislike - that at least Canada seems to have political diversity in its media. Nothing like Levant's Sun News segment is possible on Britain's airwaves. And nothing like his broadcast "**** your mother" to his censors is remotely imaginable. Which is - in a way - precisely why I blog.

Free Asia Bibi

freeasiabibi.co.uk - What can I do?.

 

I have made a donation today to the British Pakistani Christian Association to support its campaign to free Asia Bibi, a Christian in Pakistan who is to be hanged for "blasphemy." The alleged crime is described variously as having taken the form of refusing to recant her Christian beliefs or "drinking from a well designated for Muslims only".

I am prepared to match the donation to the first British Muslim organisation which formally joins the campaign. Some of my intellectually sterner readers complain when, despite my own atheism, I sympathise with the religious. This case offers fuel to their views, but also an opportunity for believers of all faiths to prove them wrong.

Two Christian politicians have been murdered in Pakistan for opposing this barbaric blasphemy law and there are threats from Muslim clerics that people will "take the law into their own hands" if Asia Bibi is released. It is disturbing to think that there are people of Pakistani origin living in this country who nurture such hatred in their hearts, but apparently - according to Harry's Place - that is so. Sitting here in my London home I can't say that I have ever read more chilling words than these;

There is evidence that the case against Bibi is being directed, funded and organised from London.

If so, then shame on those who are doing it. I hope their fellow British muslims will persuade them to see the error of their ways. There should be no place on these islands for such barbarism. The purpose of this blog is to oppose the erosion of liberty in Britain. British citizens baying for the execution of a woman exercising her freedom of thought is - to put it mildly - part of that problem.

h/t Harry's Place

It's our own fault, damn it.

Ambush Predator: London Olympics; Outdoing Beijing In Every Sense Of The Word….

Arguably Britain's greatest contribution to human civilisation is the "Great Writ" of habeas corpus. In our time, it has been shamefully abrogated. Yet only a few "cranks," "swivel-eyed loons" and "libertarians" care. The free press doesn't give a damn, because its readers care even less. Even a highly-intelligent, legally-qualified university chum I lunched with this week was unaware that there are men in this country held without charge; denied not only the right to a trial, but the right to know why they are detained.

JuliaM's linked article highlights once again just how ignorant our people are of the most basic concepts of liberty. That security guards should take it on themselves to interfere with people photographing Olympic sites from public ground is depressing but unsurprising. That their management and the police should back them is infuriating. Yet are those idiots actually to blame? There was a time when guards, management and policemen would have been disgusted to hear themselves utter such twaddle. There was a time when Englishmen and women on the receiving end of such 'Little Hitler' tactics would have named them as such in robust Anglo-Saxon terms. That time has gone. The English are a dwindled, pale, sickly version of our historic selves. We inhabit the ruins of the people we once were.

I was discussing this over dinner this week with Suboptimal Planet. I found myself advancing this depressing notion in explaining why I don't blog so frequently these days. I used to write enthusiastically in the hope of turning opinion against the politicians attacking civil liberties. I thought they were the problem and could be influenced. My enthusiasm is gone because I no longer blame them. I came back to England to find the country I knew had died. An ignorant, infantilised electorate expects government to act whenever it feels threatened. In the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 the most dangerous mob cry of all went up; "do something!" For the politicans not to change the law would have been seen -stupidly - as siding with the terrorists. Politicians competently using the massive resources they already had to bring terrorists to justice would have been seen as inaction.

If a people can't clearly articulate what they want, politicians should probably ignore them. But for the greater part of the British electorate, thinking about what should be done is simply not their job. They cry like babies for the state to act and expect politicians to respond in some soothing way. The politicians who are to blame are those who created the Welfare State and raised this expectation of protection from cradle to grave. They are, sadly, beyond useful reproach. The current bunch are as helpless as they are hopeless. Perhaps a leader of Thatcher's charisma could turn the tide. But in all our centuries of history we have been blessed with only one of that calibre. We would be very lucky to get another in our lifetime.

In economics there is a doctrine of "moral jeopardy", whereby actors (such as banks) take too much risk precisely because they confidently anticipate being bailed out when things go wrong. Perhaps there is also a political moral jeopardy in the electorate's crazed but confident expectation that, whatever threats materialise, the state will avert them? Perhaps the growth of the welfare state in our country and elsewhere has made electorates themselves the problem?

If the people of a democracy are the issue, however, there can surely be little hope. There may be nothing for the wise to do but quietly stockpile resources useful in times of anarchy and wait for civilisation to collapse under the weight of insane expectation. That's not a cheerful prospect and I would love to hear a better. Tell me, please, how we get from from here to a new birth of freedom.

Oliver Cromwell is not (yet) buried and dead

Sir Olly C and the case for free speech in Bexley.

Like I said, the police in this country seem more concerned with what people say than what they do. There should, in my humble opinion, be NO criminal laws that penalise mere speech.

Of angels, pinheads and snake-oil

Harry's Place » Judge at Passover: “nobody” saw Raed Salah blood libel sermon as harmful.

Harry's Place is an interesting site, full of diverse opinions around a narrow point of view. Its strapline ("Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear") appeals to me, but little else does. Frankly, though I hope I am wrong, I suspect most Harry's Placers don't think liberty does mean anything much - at least not where free speech is concerned.

The linked article is a classic example of the tone of the site. It is a po-faced discussion about, essentially, whether a poem was anti-semitic or not. Now savour for a moment the emotional responses that produces in you. Anti-semitism is a disgusting notion, yes? You feel angry at the thought of it and yearn in your gut to suppress it. Now that you think about it, you probably feel the same about racism and other idiotic means to make the ignorant feel strong, don't you? Thus far I commend you.

In the wake of that horror that was the Shoah, our grandfathers and fathers - feeling, perhaps for the first time, the revulsion you just experienced - became fair game for those selling the very snake oil of thought control that had been the Nazis' key product. In many countries (notably Germany) the first response to an evil regime that had penalised people for contrary opinions and banned books hostile to their world view was to penalise people for contrary opinions and to ban books hostile to their world view.

If only nasty people like Wagner had not held such horrible views, reasoned the snake oil salesmen, nasty people like Hitler could never have acted on them. Anti-semitism became, not a disgusting doctrine espoused by idiots, but in some places a crime and in others a civil wrong. Thus an "industry" (if work without positive result can be dignified with that name) was born.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that Hitler, by his nature, was not much interested in the rights or wrongs of popular thought. The real problem with the Holocaust (and I really can hardly credit that I feel the need to write this) was not the nasty thoughts but the nasty actions.

I am surrounded by people who think my self-made well-offness makes me a host to be bled by parasites. Does that hurt me? Not a bit. Just across my borough border is an enclave of Middle Eastern types who think me an inferior being; an infidel or kufar. Does this bother me? Not a lot. Those views, to the extent I hear them, are useful data to be stored for reference. For example, when choosing whom to invite to my home. Only if the holders of these wicked opinions ACT upon them, shall I care.

This commonsensical approach used to be that of all free societies. But no longer. Someone asked me recently what I had noticed most on my return to the UK after 20 years abroad. I replied, to stunned silence, that "the police now seem more interested in what people say than in what they do."

Call me old-fashioned, but if a drunk reveals the depth of his foolishness on Twitter (or on its analogue predecessor, the lavatory wall) I don't think he should be banged up. In the far less likely event that he plucked up the courage actually to assault someone he doesn't like then I think he should be banged up and the key thrown away, regardless of his ideological motivations (or lack of them).

I am not crusty enough to think everything old-fashioned is right, but I am also not daft enough to think that everything old-fashioned is wrong. If our laws were fashioned more oldly, I think we would find a good reason to deport Raed Salah - and many of his noxious ilk. It is their new-fashioned form, based on a recipe including lots of snake oil, that reduces some of us to analysing crap poetry in search of bad reasons.

Of petrol, pasties and the rape of Liberty

I have taken a break from the world for a week. I cruised the single-track roads and waiting smilingly in the passing places of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. I drank whisky, ate poor food and looked at magnificent scenery. I pictured my ancestors (for, despite Salmond's history-pokery, we are all one people) cruising those sea lochs in renamed Viking longboats and scratching a living from a landscape the fertility of which varies inversely with the beauty of the shapes into which it is arranged. It was great.

I did cast an eye over an occasional newspaper. Some fusspot civil libertarians were jeopardising the nation's safety, apparently, but the main issue of the hour was whether or not our political leaders really DO like cheap pasties from some out-of-control Geordie pie-shop. Oh, and whether it had been sensible for some politician to give filling stations the excuse to rack up the price of my motor car's food.

Then I got home and read the blogs. No wonder the politicians constantly hatch schemes to bring citizen journalists under the same 'regulation' as the dying, old-fashioned, corrupt press. The pie shop barely rated a mention and the bloggers were largely unmoved by the 'petrol shortage'. What warped priorities are these?

In opposition, where soon they will repose again, the Coalition was - if not red-hot - at least pinkly-flushed about civil liberties. Labour's refreshingly honest, open, totalitarian-with-a-brave faced-schemes to monitor all citizens at all times lest they act in their own interests were, then, unacceptable. Like most honest citizens who ask little more than to be able to keep the bulk of the proceeds of their own labours and to be free to spend their lives as they wish, both the 'Conservatives' and the 'Liberal Democrats' (note the use of quotation marks as wash-tongs to hold soiled concepts at arm's length) were agin 'em. Trust the people, they cried, in the hope of reciprocation.

But now they are in power and the world is a different place. Or at least the British state is, now that its chain of command ends with them. The French have their own notion of what is the 'English vice' but we are self-aware enough to know that it is, and has always been, hypocrisy. We (not just the English ourelves but the whole Anglo-Saxon world that bears our DNA) are hypocrites to a man.

Who would have guessed that these pink-faced products of old money were the most vicious Englishmen of all? Let's have the other lot back. At least while they rape our liberties, they won't pretend to love them. Such is the fun to be had - once in power - in bossing others around that there apears to be no option to elect any that DO love our liberties.

In the meantime, here are some of the more sterling attempts to do what I should perhaps have been doing when I was having fun. If you don't want to live in a world where the Greggs' pasty is at the centre of political life, I suggest you visit these sites and bookmark or RSS them. Oh, and the picture of my favourite view in the world is to soothe you as you read this stuff.

Big Brother is back

There's something secret

Listen you ignorant trollop

Email and web snooping is unworkable

Meet the new boss

This guy thinks 1984 is an instruction manual

OK, so this is not an April Fool

Tell me this is an April Fool, please

Someone loves Big Brother

Internet privacy - a draft letter to your MP

Digital Dave is watching you

What Davy said, in opposition

Watching your fall

and the BBC's take on it (more regulations needed to regulate the regulators)

 

 

What use is eternal vigilance if you're unarmed?

Sean Linnane: GUN CONTROL.

As a man who never saw military service, I can only be respectfully grateful to men like Sean who have put themselves in harm's way to protect us. Orwell said "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." Those of us who chose other occupations have much cause to thank those men (and now women) in the military, not to mention the police and other emergency services.

There's no reason however, if the laws permitted, why we couldn't take more responsibility for our own everyday protection. In Britain, the laws sadly don't permit. With an estimated four million illegal firearms in circulation we don't so much have gun control as a state guarantee to armed criminals that they will meet no resistance. Yet I never meet more horrifed responses than when I tell British friends we should have the right to bear arms.

Why is it, do you think, that the arguments presented in the linked post carry so little weight this side of the pond?

Speechless

I have been quiet I know. With the aid of family and friends I have been unpacking my chattels in my new home. I am now permanently and comfortably installed. My broadband is up and running.

No excuses. I could have taken a break to blog if I had chosen. But please consider this. The manager of our national soccer team, an Italian, has been fired for defending perhaps the most important concept gifted by our nation to the world; that of "innocent until proven guilty."

In such a time what more, gentles, could I add?