Another stroll

By | | , , , ,
Comments Off on Another stroll

It seems whilst I was away there was a bit of a demo by people who’d rather the government not make any cuts at all but presumably instead drive the country into penury as they don’t seem to be suggesting an alternative to not borrowing more money every month. Though it seems they are keen on anyone who seems to be “rich” paying some unspecified amount of tax as avoiding tax is bad (Not not evading – avoiding I.E. not paying more than you have to. I can but assume that the only way to not “avoid” tax is by giving the government 100% of your earnings). These people that’d prefer there to be no cuts at all decided the best way to further this cause would be to cause criminal damage to (or peacefully occupy) a shop privately owned by one of the worlds largest charities which may not even be “avoiding” tax to start with.

Now it seems that some dubious sorts have decided that maybe they should have a little walk to protest that maybe tackling the debt might be a good thing, and that this will sadly result in cuts. They may even consider that it’s a good idea to have a proper debate about how and where one might make these cuts. Anyway they’d quite like to have a bit of a shindig on May 14th in London, so if you feel inclined to get your self involved with such no good malcontent’s then all the details can be found over on facebook where they are proposing:

“A well mannered, polite rally for civilised people who don’t wish to see their hard earned money being spent on pointless government initiatives and instead would like government spending to actually fall and our national debt to be cut.

We don’t think that it’s fair for us to continue borrowing money to live a lifestyle that we simply can’t afford – burdening our children with unnecessary debt that they will have to pay back.”

0

Wooly thinking

By | |
Comments Off on Wooly thinking

So I may have been a bit optimistic in saying I was back, work went a bit busy and then there was a holiday. This involved a lot of beer and a reminder that local police can be lovely people and apply common sense and a blind eye when given the chance. So I’ve rather missed all of the nonsense that was the Census – I shall fill it in with the aid of a beer or three later just so I can honestly claim it was all to my best knowledge and belief.

In the meantime I’d like to heartily recommend my holiday reading “Bad thoughts – a guide to clear thinking” by Jamie Whyte. It’s a wonderful guide to bogus reasoning and crimes against logic as illustrated by many of our glorious leaders.

He deftly dismantles pretty much every prohibitionist argument by pointing out that those in favour of that which the prohibitionists would ban consider that people “doing more of it” is actually a good thing, and that the prohibitionists also tend to ignore the benefits of the cost benefit analysis (usually “it’s fun”), taking the example of cocaine:

“They will acknowledge some benefits of legalisation, such as removing the criminal element from drug-trading, but never do they count as a benefit the increase in pleasure caused by increased cocaine-snorting. Yet that is the whole point of legalising it. If you don’t count what makes people want to do something , the cons will always out weigh the pros. Consider kissing. If you set aside the fact that people enjoy it, then there isn’t much to be said in it’s favour – it is just a good way of spreading germs. Ban it!”

Another particularly fun bit is his section on shocking statistics where he observes that the three billion made by the greedy bastards at Barclays in 2002 actually only represents a return of 15%. I really can’t recommend this book enough, both for the observations it makes, the style in which it’s written and the wonderful examples*.

Still whilst we’re on the subject of clear thoughts, and misconceptions may I also point you towards two articles over at Cracked.com? Firstly there is a worrying list of “important things we’re running out of” (oil is possibly the least of our trouble if we’re even running out of it) and then there’s a run down of “Socially Conscious Actions That Only Look Like They Help”.

Enjoy.

* I’m really not on commission I did just enjoy the book a lot

0

And I’m back

By | |
2 Comments

Just in case anyone was wondering, the server Anonymong is hosted on fell over rather seriously, and I’ve had to wait to be migrated to a new server and for everything to be restored. It looks like it’s all survived roughly intact – however I shall take advantage of the outage to just ignore all the things I’ve been meaning to comment on whilst work and other things have been busy and give myself a fresh start.

0