Today, however, I must come clean. (you might want to rephrase that, ed)
Today, we have a threesome of satires. How can I resist (lacking as we all are, any meaningful moral agency or free will)? That they all have a bearing on the libertarian viewpoint is an added fillip.
First up: A Modest Proposal from Samizdata. This had many readers fooled. Even your sharp-witted Pedant-General remained only suspicious until the last line.
The second requires a suitably humble doffing of cap in the direction of the big (though expat) daddy of the UK blogosphere and his 48th weekly roundup. I have commented on unsupportable contradictions, but not nearly as savagely skeweringly as this:
'living her entire life within the confines of a cardboard box frees the Uttabollux women from the tyrannies of the male-dominated hegemony. Unlike in the West where a woman is paralysed by having to live up to the so-called freedoms of choosing motherhood, career, independence, her own life, husband and so on, the Uttabollux woman is free within the confines of her cardboard box to be a total absolute woman, free from interference.True, her husband is free to beat, kill, rape, sell or mutilate her anyway he sees fit as long as he can claim that the Skhighhibhoss says its fine by him, but that is far better than the so-called 'freedoms' of the so-called 'liberated' West.'Sublime. Just sublime.
And for the third, Neil Harding - whom I have, in the past, accused of being a moron - produces an exquisitely crafted satire, in which he appears content flippantly to discard nearly a thousand years of legal precedent.
We can tell it is satire, because it is - hilariously- titled
Why Tony is rightHe then leads us gently up the garden path with
A man found with 10,000 in cash late at night with no reasonable explanation DESERVES prosecution regardless of whether the police can actually PROVE it is the result of wrongdoing.and then, just to show he has been pulling our leg all along, delivers the punchline:
In terms of low level punishment [he is talking about £100 on the spot fines] for low level crimes, it is BETTER to punish the innocent than to let the guilty go free.The way he leads us to this conclusion is evidence of a truly brillant comic mind. It is a consummate spoof. Really, really excellent.
Oh, Ok. I'm sorry, I'm pulling your leg. This was just an excuse to broadcast one of the best put-downs I have heard in a long time. This, in the comments to a rebuttal of the moron by MatGB, has that mathematical precision of language which is so dear to my heart:
"On religion and philosophy, he comes across as fractally ignorant - no matter what distance scale you're using, the image of complete absence of knowledge is identical."Ouch...
2 comments:
It is rather good isn't it? The bile that man inspires is impressive in it('?)s diversity.
I never could recall where apostrophes go after the word it. I have, ad it happens, read all the posts you refer to already; shame, I like reading good stuff; there was a day when Tim's weekly roundup was somewhere to find new blogs, now it's mostly to confirm that someone else thinks something is good. Ah well...
My letter to Michael Howard does not say that we are lacking in meaningful moral agency or free will.
It says that if you are campaigning on a political platform of reducing crime by a change in government, it is utterly irrational to describe people a 'wholly' responsible for their actions. Politically responsible, criminally responsible - fine. But if Howard wanted to reduce crime then he must ascribe causal weight to government action. If he does not, then he is a loon. Not because he believes people are wholly responsible for their actions, but because he believes this and still promotes the idea that government action can affect the crime rate.
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