Off to the Middle East

So I am disappearing at the crack of dawn to the Arab world- so blogging may be a bit light for a while. It's work, but I'm hoping to keep this going, as long as Blogger isn't blocked by local proxy servers.

Standard delivers good news

Cuts to the Ministry of the Environment. Which from my experience has a handful of very clever people and a lot of died in the wool statists who get very excited about planning other people's lives, and not too excited about benefit/cost analysis and justifying what they propose with evidence.

To think it didn't even exist before 1985. Now think about how we could return to those days by leaving the environment to private property rights.

Stuff saves us from ugliness

Colin Ansell, President of the National Front (NZ) is in a thumbnail picture on the main page of Stuff (right). The full article avoids showing us this.

Appropriately so, because Ansell's ugliness is in his ideas as well as his face. After all, successful intelligent people aren't going to join groups made up primarily of poorly educated white trash (men) unless they have a racist psychosis.

It isn't a registered political party, it isn't even halfway to the minimum 500 members. Ansell claims he is no neo-Nazi, when he of course was, and is a convicted criminal for being involved in an arson attack on a synagogue (go figure why self proclaimed nationalists have problems with Jews, and deny being neo-Nazis).

Unlike the UK, which has seen the BNP get a councillor elected to the Greater London Assembly, NZ can be proud that it keeps this flotsam and jetsam at such a low political ebb. After all, you don't want to see Ansell's face twice!

Private prisons then?

Not PC and I share some discomfort about the private sector being involved in the delivery and operation of prison services - and Anti Dismal has written much about the issue too, interestingly noting the risks of privatising maximum security facilities. This point stands out in an article he quotes "Moreover, hiring less educated guards and undertraining them—which private prisons have a strong incentive to do—can encourage the unwarranted use of force by the guards. As a result, our arguments suggest that maximum security prisons should not be privatized so long as limiting the use of force against prisoners is an important public objective."

Let's be clear - contracting out of ancillary services at prisoners is no issue, and there may be a case for contracting out prison management. The key is the disconnect between incentives to HAVE more prisoners, and the public policy reason for prisons.

Ideally, prisons would be nearly empty because crime would be rare. Ideally, prisons would deliver people reformed and who would never be repeat offenders.

However, a private prison owner would WANT repeat offenders, and would WANT criminals to want to return. That creates incentives not only to not rehabilitate, but to make prison desirable. Hardly what any of us want.

The flipside is that paying prisons to be feared creat incentives for abuse, and for crimes in prisons to be ignored. As much as many of us have glee at rapists and murderers suffering violence in prison, if you want prison to be a place of corporal punishment you should be transparent about it - as in Malaysia. Don't pretend that a Darwinian approach to justice in prison is a civilised substitute.

So I am wary of privatising prisons, wary of profits from applying force to people, wary of the incentives and malincentives around it.

Indeed, as Not PC has already pointed out, why is National and ACT only pursuing THIS privatisation? Why don't the usual masses of the lumpenproletariat give a damn about prisons, when they go apoplectic about privatising TVNZ, NZ Post, Air NZ, Kiwirail or a power company?

Indeed, if any sector needs more of the private sector, it is education. Imagine if ACT's policy, same as the UK Conservative Party's policy, was implemented in some form - parents not paying twice for education.

Now that's a step towards privatisation that would excite me, privatising prisons worries me, especially when mixed with the attitudes shown here by some in government.

The vile surrender in Pakistan

What disappoints so much is how feminists have failed to rally in protest against the surrender of the Swat Valley in Pakistan to the Taliban. An action that will at the very least deny girls an education, and along with that the means to be independent, to move from the abject servitude to troglodyte men from the Dark Ages, and at worst threatens all people with the totalitarian theocracy of terror that Islamism offers as "morality".

I have written before of my disgust at the appeasement by the semi-failed state of Pakistan in fighting these barbarians, and the actions since the Taliban took over.

Now Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah have written in the New York Times about how the Taliban have now banned music, how people have been fleeing the area and how such appeasement emboldens the Taliban. "The Taliban also announced in the local mosque that every family in the village would have to contribute one young man to their ranks" conscription ISN'T peace.

Christopher Hitchens write in Slate that there is now a new trend of separating the moderate extremists from the extreme extremists "In the last few days, we have heard President Barack Obama musing about a distinction between good and bad Taliban, the British government insisting on a difference between Hezbollah the political party and Hezbollah the militia, and Fareed Zakaria saying that the best way of stopping the militants may be to allow them to run things in their own way".

Imagine talking about those good and bad Nazis, or Khmer Rouge.

Hitchens predicts disaster for the Swat valley "A state or region taken over by jihadists will not last long before declining into extreme poverty and backwardness and savagery. There are no exceptions to this rule. We do not need to demonstrate again what happens to countries where vicious fantasists try to govern illiterates with the help of only one book." Quite, but worst of all it will hurt far wider than the people of that valley.

"who will be blamed for the failure? There will not, let me assure you, be a self-criticism session mounted by the responsible mullahs. Instead, all ills will be blamed on the Crusader-Zionist conspiracy, and young men with deficiency diseases and learning disabilities will be taught how to export their frustrations to happier lands. Thus does the failed state become the rogue state. This is why we have a duty of solidarity with all the secular forces, women's groups, and other constituencies who don't want this to happen to their societies or to ours."

In other words, the war against terrorism is a war against the destruction of civil society by these forces of the Dark Ages giving themselves succuour and a land of people to enslave and bully. THIS is the battle that should unify secularists and those who support individual liberty and the rights of women as a part of that - yet they are mostly silent. Hitchens calls it shameful that this be left to happen "we shall long have cause to regret the shameful decision to deliver the good people of the Swat Valley bound and gagged into the hands of the Taliban, and—worst of all—without even a struggle."

One wonders when the scourge of Islamism will be serious enough for the Western left to unite in disgust, or for the so-called peace movement/feminist left to stand up and recognise that the greatest fight for peace and womens' rights today is against Islamists, who worship violence and the subjugate of women and girls.

Or perhaps it is easier to send faxes about pay equity?