Category: Main

Challenging post at TBR, criticizing British comedians for coming out in favour of the rights of Baha’is in Iran.

I’ve made similar arguments in parallel cases, but I don’t deny it’s a difficult question.

This instance is a particularly good example, because Baha’is are so terribly, terribly nice.  At least in my experience, they are so ridiculously inoffensive they seem like a parody.  They make Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor look like Torquemada (OMG he said Ecclesial Community!)

Almost anyone can have sympathy with their position in The Islamic Republic of Iran.  I can’t deny it would be nice if they had full equality there.  Hell, it would be nicer still if they ran the place. That’s my opinion, and after all, everyone’s entitled to one.  Including Bill Bailey.

But just as it’s hard, as a practical matter, to criticise some private domestic activity without, ultimately, threatening to ban it, it’s also difficult to criticise the internal policy of another country without, ultimately, threatening that country’s sovereignty.  The questions “should Bahai’s have equality in Iran” and “should we take action against Iran, including military action if it would work, isn’t too expensive, and nothing else will succeed” are, logically, quite separate.  The assumptions of political debate are such, however, that they inevitably become one.  The correct view, that the Baha’is should be better treated but it is not my job, even as a voter and citizen, to rule the entire world according to my infallible whim, is so unfamiliar as to be incomprehensible to the average “Question Time” viewer.

Peace and Justice are generally good things.  Sometimes it is necessary to create justice in order to achieve peace.  But at other times it is better to accept an unjust peace than to fight.  It is not always easy to tell which situation you are in, but sovereignty is a rule of thumb which set a default assumption – that injustice in foreign countries is not my fight.

Brian Micklethwait says that the UK should default on government debt.

He also, as a sort of parallel, suggests that in the event of Islamist terrorism getting much worse,  it is possible that the outcome could be extermination of Islam.  He seems to be advocating such (in the hypothetical situation), which I cannot agree with.  A more charitable reading of his piece would be that he is emphasizing that it could happen, which is a reasonable point – one I made myself at the beginning of time (November 2004):

At the end of the day, like any other immigrant group, Muslims in Europe live on the sufferance of the majority population. The Muslims would trigger genocidal violence against themselves long before they could become a serious threat to the host populations.

If I’m reading him right, he’s saying that if everyone understood that, there would be less hysteria on both sides of the argument.  However, if that is what he meant, he expressed himself quite poorly.

On the question of sovereign default, it is true that there is no moral neccessity for any government to pay it’s debts.  If lenders wanted their money back, they shouldn’t have lent to a body that can properly change its mind by popular vote.  I’ve said that before.

The British Association for Adoption and Fostering has its knickers in a twist because maybe 10,000 children in Britain are being looked after by people who are doing it voluntarily without properly informing the authorities.

Can you imagine why anyone would want to avoid involving the authorities?  They’re obviously all up to no good.

When listing the many bad effects of authoritarian and nanny-state policies, we usually remember to include “alienating the public from the police”.  But I’m not sure it gets the attention it deserves.  The all-providing, all-protecting state really is becoming a parent to its citizens.  And the citizens become the sullen teenager, not involving Mum and Dad in anything he doesn’t need them to be involved in.

I went to the IEA yesterday for the launch of Dominic Raab’s book “The Assault on Liberty”.  I won’t go into detail about the book until I’ve finished reading it, but  again, I’m wondering how much of the retooling of the police and justice systems has been made necessary by the collapse in public trust.  When the state’s scope was limited, it commanded trust within that scope.  As its scope grows, the number of reasons for not getting involved with it in any way mount up.   Most people have something to hide, and that’s always been the case.  But today, most people have something to hide from the police.

People are urged to report their suspicions about apparently wealthy people with no legitimate income.

While this immediately raises my hackles, it’s perhaps not so outrageous to ask people to try to spot suspicious activity in their neighbourhood.

The real problem is that enforcement of victimless crimes – and one assumes that drug dealing is the main target of all this – is always going to intrusive and limiting of freedom and privacy, because, duh, it doesn’t get reported by the victim.

The current Freeman reminds us in an article of a story from 2008 which I never covered here – the German government’s aquisition of customer data from a Luxembourg bank.  An employee of the bank sold the list to the Germans for over 4 million Euros

What I wonder is what could happen if any of the officials, or even politicians, with managerial responsibility for that action, happened to visit Luxembourg.  Because they, surely, were involved in the commission of a crime in Luxembourg.  Think how lovely it would be to see them jailed.

Not that that would be an unqualified good thing.  Because to the Germans, the bank itself was, arguably deliberately, assisting the Germans on the list in committing a crime in Germany – of evading taxes.

If either government took the approach of the US to the scope of its jurisdiction, both German tax officers and Luxembourg bankers would have to be very cautious with their travel plans.

Probably how it stands is that each holds the power in reserve, to retaliate if the other starts by arresting important people.  That would be for the best, attractive as the idea of German tax-collectors in a Luxembourg jail is.

Eric Raymond does the latest EconTalk

There wasn’t much new for me – hardly surprising since I’ve been reading what he writes for nearly 20 years now.  But he did say about the Network Neutrality campaigners that, for the phone companies, “they think they’re the best enemies they could possibly have”

It seems a particularly bizarre conspiracy theory to claim that the phone companies are behind the network neutrality movement, but, in fact, they did kick the whole debate off.  It wasn’t started as a reaction against anything the phone company/ISPs were actually doing.  It started when they themselves announced that they would quite like to charge large internet services for access to their customers.

I’m not taking anybody’s word for this – I covered it myself at the time.  Three years ago, the CEO of AT&T said in an interview that he thought content providers should pay extra.  That was the start of the Net Neutrality war.

In those 3 years, neither AT&T nor anybody else has actually tried to do anything like this.  There have been some big fusses over things like interfering with bittorrent, but the net neutrality argument has been all about a hypothetical.  If regulations get passed, that will be a direct result of the interview Whitacre gave in January 2006.

As I pointed out at the time, Whitacre was taking the piss.  His cusomers have paid for access to Google.   If his successor tries to charge Google for the same thing, they will laugh and say “what will your customers say when you tell them they can’t use Google anymore?”  There is approximately no chance this will ever happen.

Given all that, the possibility that the whole Net Neutrality issue is a subtle bootleggers-and-baptists move by the telephone companies to get more regulation sounds a lot less insane.