Recently readGuido’s got the number of the anti-human environmentalists.
[T]he essential problem with Greens [is] they want things that no sensible person would not want, such as clean air and water, a safe and sustainable environment - but the priority is “Earth First“, humans second. With new eco-technologies we don’t need to go back to living in […]
Filed under: Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | 2 Comments »
So Gordon Brown is proposing - with not many details forthcoming yet - a ratings system for the internet. This is to “protect childhood,” of course. Yeah, good luck with that one, smartypants. I wonder if he, like Tony Blair, thinks it’s cute that he is utterly clueless when it comes to the web.
I know […]
Filed under: Law, Life, Politics, Technology, The State Is Not Your Friend | 21 Comments »
Patrick Crozier did a podcast of Antoine’s talk last night to the 6/20 gathering. He covered cheque book politics in the US and UK, how the Democrats’ fan base (but not the Democratic party itself) is doing the best job of any political group of making good use of emergent technologies, the illegitimacy of democracy, […]
Filed under: Family, Friends, Law, Life, Podcasts, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | No Comments »
You know, I absolutely love France. Its perpetually assholish governments…not so much. Here’s the latest dangerous, stupid thing they’ve come up with: Making it against the law for anyone but ‘professional journalists’ to report on acts of violence.
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence […]
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Last night, Antoine and I were working side by side on our laptops when he noticed I was reading this. He asked me if I’d add it to my Furl feed so he could pick it up in his RSS reader later. And then Adriana picked up on it from my feed, to my delight:
What […]
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These quotations, from the comments on this post, pretty well encapsulate my worldview:
Either people own themselves, their labor, and their fruits, to do with and dispose of as they will, or they don’t. If the community owns what I make and what I do, then I don’t own my own actions.
It’s that simple: do you […]
Filed under: Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | 2 Comments »
Brian’s photo and brief quotation on Tony Blair’s “strategy” to combat gun crime pretty much says it all - apart from that it is truly astonishing how many people are truly astonished that, when only criminals and the police have guns, you get gun crime. Fancy that!
I just accidentally heard some of Radio Four’s […]
Filed under: Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | 8 Comments »
This, via Perry, is bang on:
What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably at the point where the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, […]
Filed under: Happiness, Individuality vs Collectivism, Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | 5 Comments »
Has there ever been a better example of why regulation sucks?
Last year, more than 350 companies went public in Europe, selling $86 billion of stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the U.S., 235 companies raised $48 billion in IPOs. In 1999, 507 companies went public in the U.S., selling a combined $63.93 billion […]
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I just read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins who suffers from manic-depressive illness (aka bipolar disorder, which Jamison finds something of an unhelpful misnomer). Being an award-winning and highly-respected medical professional - and having tenure - helped free her to write candidly about her disorder, her […]
Filed under: Books, Happiness, Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | 2 Comments »
I could give a few people on this forum a lengthy lecture on nutrition and what the human body needs, but it’ll be more fun to watch them become more and more delibitated until they die slowly of their own ignorance.
I can’t help but wonder how torn this guy is on whether or not to […]
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Luke Ford can’t figure out when freedom and liberty should trump his wish to live in a certain kind of society. Can you help? I’m exhausted from too many ‘discussions’ with anti-freedom types masquerading as ‘libertarians’ lately. (At least Luke is honest about his lack of certainty and understanding, and not just brazenly dishonest about […]
Filed under: Friends, Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | No Comments »
Adriana is writing about how dictators have entered the world of Web 2.0, and how companies like Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft, and Google are helping to enforce the oppression. She adds a bit of her own life experience, as someone who grew up under a totalitarian regime, to the analysis.
I have often said, although have not […]
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I’m just wondering how far lawmakers like conservative Texas governor Rick Perry would go to force females to have the HPV vaccine. I mean, if her parents are indifferent or want her to have the vaccine while she objects, would agents of the state take the girl into custody and hold her down on a […]
Filed under: Individuality vs Collectivism, Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend | 5 Comments »