Subrosa and an Independent Scotland

The delightful and prolific Subrosa is a Scots Nationalist. The IPP is a Unionist. We have crossed swords at her place in the comments on this post on the SNP's possible Independence Bill.

Moderating Comments Left & Right

A blogger's comments policy is his own prerogative. It's your territory so you can ban or restrict however you so like. But that doesn't stop it being shitty to moderate. This blog has never deleted a comment* and possibly never will. I won't be identified here and I won't allow anything that leaves me legally threatened. If I ever get obvious commercial spam, I might delete that too, but equally I wonder if I could be bothered. Other than that, I can't see any reason why I'd ever delete one.

It seems to be that lefty blogs tend to review comments before allowing them to be posted on the blog ("pre-moderating"), while those of the right allow anyone to say what they wish. There are exceptions: The excellent To Miss With Love pre-moderates, while mad Dave's Part blog is pretty free-for-all from my experience. But generally it's the other way round. Pre-moderating stifles immediacy and discussion and makes it less enjoyable to comment.

I can't help but notice how this seems to tally with comparing the grauniad's insipid comments policy with the Torygraph's. And the fact that lefties tend to socially exclude right-thinking people for ideological reasons than vice-versa. They tend to be more worried that you'll offend one of their gentler-disposed acquaintances (never for themselves, obviously), whereas what right-thinking man would really worry that his acquaintance would be offended by some drivel from a lefty? I suppose if lefties were open to genuine debate and criticism of their ideas, they wouldn't be lefties....

*One comment was once deleted at the request of its author who is a friend.

Welfare State - From Oxbridge to Training Contract

"Yah, I'm actually taking benefits myself at the moment," an acquaintance of the Idle Pen Pusher sheepishly confessed recently in his clipped Oxbridge accent, perfected by a recent law conversion course and delivered from within a navy quilted Barbour lining jacket in a pub near his flat in one of the swankiest, fanciest areas of London, south Kensington.

"They pay my rent, and council tax and give me £50 a week. It's mostly lawyers, accountants and recently graduated students I see there. Hardly any tracksuits."

How depressing that a Oxbridge graduate with a legal qualification, waiting to start his training place in a few months, is eligible to draw on money extorted with menaces from supposedly free people, merely because he doesn't have a job. Quite why he, and the rest of the professionals who queue up with him once a fortnight, is thought to be needy to the point of requiring assistance from an arm of the state backed up by the full force of its monopoly of the means of violence is beyond me.

Is it really possible for them to not get a job, any job, that would pay the £900 a month these benefits are worth? Is it so important that other people must be threatened with imprisonment unless they cough up the cash so that he doesn't have to get a bar job until his City law firm training contract begins?

Why do we pay people money not to take jobs whose net benefit to them is less than the value of the benefits? Because that's exactly what we're doing. We're paying him £900 a month to not take a job whose salary is less than that amount over the effort involved in the job. For example, if a job were to pay £1200 a month after tax, but there were additional costs (transport etc) of, say, £100 a month, and he valued the stress incurred and loss of free time at, say, £600 a month, then the value of the job would be £500 a month. However, with the Job Seekers Allowance paying him £900 a month not to work, then he's £400 a month worse off by working, and would have to find a job paying £1600 a month after tax before working became in his interests.

Something is very, very wrong in our society.

CIF Silences Dissent

The IPP has commented on a few grauniad articles at CIF recently. Here, here, here and here.

One comment I left was on this article by Catherine Bennett re the environmentalism court case I blogged about the other day.

The comment was "I found this simultaneously amused and depressed me" (with a link to my blog on it.) The post was deleted by a moderator and my account suspended so that future comments are not put up until they have been checked by a moderator. Curiously, when I post about such things as legalising drugs, the tofu-munchers don't seem to have a problem.

CIF claims here in their 'Community Standards' that they 'welcome debate and dissent' but it's patently false. This has happened countless times. Say something that statist or socialist and it'll be fine. But say something anti-establishment and it'll be 'moderated', presumably reported by some unctious little prick on an Apple Mac drinking dolphin-friendly elderflower presse.

Now, CIF is their site and they can be as narrow-minded and pathetic as they wish. What pisses me off about them, though, is the lying bullshit about 'welcoming dissent'. Like fuck the lying twats do. You can contrast it with the Torygraph's blogs, which frequently have comments from an anti-Telegraph perspective, often full of immoderate invective about the authors. They don't seem to use that as an excuse to silence opposition to them though.

If you are very careful indeed about what you say, scrupulous about not giving the slightest offence to anyone at all nor including any links which any given Guardianista might just decide to be offended by then it is possible to argue for liberty or against anthropogenic climate change or anything else which might rankle Graun sensibilities. And even then, as my example above shows, sometimes they delete your comments for no other conceivable reason than they disagree with them. But those taking the other position have no such worries.

Of course, when I go there, I know the Graun is full of nasty little mini-dictators who'll act like arseholes, it's happened before so I'm getting exactly what I expect. I don't expect them to treat me fairly. I do wish they'd be honest about how they behave, though.

If nothing else, this highlights why a constrained, small and limited state is vital for liberty. Imagine what they would be like if you gave them real power? Except you probably don't have to imagine if you've ever dealt with state officials before...

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Policing and Crime Bill

"By punishing men instead of women... the policing and crime bill will create a new consensus". So says the shudder-inducing Beatrix Campbell at the Guardian.

Damn right it will. It'll mean lower earnings for prostitutes and no difference to the amount of prostitution. It's been a while since the Idle Pen Pusher was an undergraduate, but the effect on prices of encouraging supply and discouraging demand is pretty basic: it goes down.

The blue lines represent the status quo of a prostitution market supply and demand. The green lines represent how the market will be in future, after penalties on prostitutes are removed and penalties on johns are imposed. Because there will be lesser and/or fewer penalties for prostitutes, their supply curve shifts to the right indicating the increased willingness to supply at the same price level. Because new penalties are introduced for johns, their demand curve shifts to the left, indicating their decreased willingness to score a whore at a given price.

As you can see from the graph, both changes have the effect of reducing the equilibrium price of a trick. But the two changes have opposing effects on the equilibrium quantity thereby cancelling each other out. The net effect is lower earnings for prostitutes, cheaper prices for johns, but no change in the level of prostitution.

Well done, chaps. Well done.

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Render Unto Gaia

This highly amusing article in the Grauniad is worth reading.

When Rupert Dickinson, the chief executive of one of Britain's biggest property firms, left his BlackBerry behind in London while on a business trip to Ireland, he simply ordered one of his staff to get on a plane and deliver the device to him.

For Dickinson's then head of sustainability, Tim Nicholson, the errand was much more than an executive indulgence: it embodied the contempt with which his boss treated his deep philosophical beliefs about climate change.

In a significant decision today , a judge found Nicholson's views on the environment were so deeply held that they were entitled to the same protection as religious convictions, and ruled that an employment tribunal should hear his claim that he was sacked because of his beliefs.

While it's obviously depressing in terms of the consequences of yet another set of opinions being given legal 'protection', I can't help but be amused by Rupert Dickinson's instructions and the final recognition that believers in environmentalism are indeed religiously motivated.

Political Stasis

The IPP has recently been very uninterested in politics. It seems stale, dull, boring. The same issues keep cropping up; drugs prohibition and Alan Johnson's sacking of the advisory panel chair for telling the truth, the continuing splurge of public money, the fucking of the entire country's evenings so farmers' mornings are better suited to them. But it's stale. Nothing much changes normally, but now nothing at all will.

Everything seems to be waiting for the election, either so that Brown can win and govern with a mandate, or Cameron can take over and slightly change the direction. Or maybe a hung parliament.

Dull is better than disastrous, but from where we are now, excitement and change are probably good things.

Communities' Civil Rights

The IPP has finally watched the BNP Edition of Question Time. It was pretty tedious. Like some (but not many) others, I thought Nick Griffin came off pretty well from the exchanges. His hand was trembling a bit, but his voice pretty still. And pretty much all the audience and panel were pitted against him so it wasn't entirely surprising. I suspect a lot of people thought he did badly by virtue of who he is: he is the leader of the BNP and therefore he comes across badly. It seemed more like a Sixty Minutes Hate than a discussion.

One questioner smugly asked him if he’d travelled outside the UK and seemed to expect the reason for Griffin’s detachment from the racial zeitgeist to be uncovered there and then. The whole program was full of tedious, moronic crap – most of it directed at Griffin (in truth resultant of the fact that most of the entire program was directed at Griffin) which left me feeling slightly sorry for him. Obviously, he came out with some too, but not really in any greater measure than the others.

Warsi, for example: “Lots of people who vote for the BNP are not racist – there is statistical evidence to prove this”. Really? Statistically non-racist? Give me a break. And: "There’s no such thing as an bogus asylum seeker, you are an asylum seeker, that is a legal term." For fuck's sake. How about someone who isn't fleeing a threat but says they are in order to increase their chances of securing the right to reside here?

The most interesting question concerned the Jan Moir article. Should it be pubished?

Bonnie Greer: "one of the qualities of our democracy and is the most important –maybe- is we have freedom of speech and freedom of expression. If we don’t have it, we doomed. I didn’t like this article, I thought it was nasty… but she had the right to write and the newspaper had the right to print it. That’s called democracy: it ain’t pretty but it’s the least evil we human beings can make."

Quite right. On to Chris ‘zzzz’ Huhne:

"Like Bonnie I entirely defend the right of JM to write what she wrote and the right of DM to print it but I didn’t approve of it. I thought she was quite wrong, I thought she was quite wrong, because to that someone has brought on themselves, which was effectively what she was saying, a sleazy lifestyle and as a result of that had died, I thought frankly was in extremely bad taste she didn’t know what was happening, at the time it was intruding and was speculating on all sorts of things which she cannot possibly have any knowledge of and what she was essentially doing was giving vent to the most crude type of homophobic prejudice and I don’t think there’s any place in the civilized society for that

Hang on - there must be a place in a civilised society for homophobic prejudice. Having such prejudice may rule a person out from being civilised person, or a state from being civilised, but a society can only be civilised if it is free.

"it’s a very similar sort of prejudice to the sort of prejudice we’ve previously been talking about against ethnic minorities because what we have to remember is that all of us sometimes find ourselves in a minority all of us it may be people on the right defending Countryside Alliance marches against banning foxhunting, it may be people on the left, all of us find ourselves in a minority, we need to respect each others’ rights and that was an article which did not respect the gay community and really undermined their civil rights and was a very retrograde step"

What is a community's civil right? What illiberal nonsense. Individuals have rights, not 'communities'! So, after Sayeeda Warsi waffled on a bit, what did the guest of honour have to say?

"I believe the freedom of the press as bonnie said is an absolute foundation stone of our democratic system so the Daily Mail can publish if they want but I personally also believe that it’s better to in the case of Stephen Gately who’s died to abide by the old maxim: of the dead say nothing unless it’s good, so I think it was wrong."

So far so agreeable. But what about homosexuality in general? What about that?

"I’ve said that a lot of people find the sight of two grown men kissing in public really creepy, I understand homosexuals don’t understand that but that’s how a lot of Christians feel that way, Muslims, all sorts of people – (heckling) I don’t why but that’s how it is."

Obviously, he's right. And not just about believers in Yahweh. Many atheists and agnostics also find it distasteful. Indeed, it wasn't long ago when kissing in public by anyone (let alone two men) wasn't the done thing ("public demonstrations", as an elderly relative of the IPP's refers to them). The clown in the audience shouting rubbish should get real. Why can't people distinguish between how the world is and how they think it ought to be?

"And we have come, (heckling) I took a party ten years ago that said that homosexuality should be outlawed, should be driven underground uuand persecuted, the British National Party position now is that what people do in the privacy of their own homes is absolutely up to them and the state has no right to interfere, but nor do militant homosexuals, not all of them but militant homosexuals have no right to preach homosexuality to school children –that is perverse."

I found it amusing that for much of the show, Griffin seemed to be courting the approval of the panel for the fact that he has made the party less illiberal than it used to be.

Free Speech, BNP & Jan Moir

Matthew Parris has written a great article in the Times linking the frighteningly illuminating 'flinch' in the 'commitment' of the British intelligensia to free speech with respect to a lawful political party's appearance on a TV programme with the circumstances surrounding Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir's recent article about Irish gay boy-band vocalist Stephen Gately's death.

He starts off with a nauseating story about him blubbering like a girl in some woods somewhere, and ends up with a poem. But allow him those indulgences, otherwise it's a great article.

Hat tip to Mr Eugenides for pointing this one out...

Are Turkish Men From Venus?

One thing that has struck me is how frequently I see British women here waddling around with Turkish men, or being worked by their rather dubious charms while I rarely see British men with Turkish women.

I’m not sure I quite understand why, and my first thoughts on the matter were little more sophisticated than the conclusion that women are more gullible than men. Perhaps the disparity is due to Turkish girls staying home with their families while the men rush off to find work and relatively affluent girls who put out easily in the tourist seaside towns? Perhaps men are more used to being having the opposite sex befriend them for at least partly material reasons and are therefore less gullible and more cynical?