I find shopping for toiletries an overwhelmingly draining experience. I’ve been known to go out to get shower gel and not return for several days. I can stare at an entire aisle of shampoo for hours, just looking for shampoo. Just your basic, ordinary, not-too-cheap, not-too-expensive, not-containing-any-wierd-ingredients shampoo. It’s nearly impossible. There’s too much choice!

Using the Tesco.com online shopping service, I did some research. Tesco carry 80 different types of shower gel and 94 (count ‘em) different shampoos. And that’s proper different varieties; I didn’t count the different sizes of bottle. For a start, there are too many brands. Shampoos called Advanced VO5, Alberto Balsam Herbal, Aussie, Clairol Daily Defense, Dove, Elvive, Fructis, Herbal Essences, Neutrogena, Organics, Original Source, Pantene, Scent-Idol, Sunsilk, Supersoft, T Pro-Vitamin, Tesco, Timotei and Ultra Swim all vie for shelf space.

Yet could it be that all this choice is a good thing? After all, whether you have blonde, coloured, curly, damaged, dry, fine, frizzy, greasy, lifeless, oily, permed, thin, tired, treated, unmanageable or wavy hair, you need to make sure you have the right shampoo for you. And you will be provided for, even if you have greasy roots but dry tips. Pity the poor soul who has “normal” hair, but even amongst this vast array of hair categories there is room for normal hair shampoo. (It seems to me that the marketeers have admitted defeat with normal shampoo. After all, all the slightly different varieties of normal could surely be sub-categorised further.)
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Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 4:02 PM EST

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The big problem with the notion of animal rights is that defending them necessarily involves harming people. For exmaple, it’s one thing to think that fox hunting is distasteful and to try to convince others of this through reasoned argument; it’s quite another to pass laws preventing it. Passing a law involves using force against those who disobey it. To use force against people to protect animals is to reduce human life to the value of animal life, which is absurd.

That animal rights activists often lose all perspective and begin to see the lives of animals more worthy of protection than the lives of humans is well known. Examples abound of acts of terrorism against institutions performing medical experiments on animals. That the knowledge gained from animal experiments might save human lives does not seem important to people who engage in such activities. It is as if they start to believe their own rhetoric that killing an animal is murder, and come to equate the killing of a person as no worse than eating a steak.

Over at the Daily Ablution, Scott Burgess comments on a story about a PETA flyer entitled Your Mommy Kills Animals (available as a PDF). This flyer is to be distributed to children whose parents are seen wearing fur. Apparently PETA cares more about fluffy bunnies than it does children, because it sees nothing wrong in telling them that their parents are evil. It has been known for a long time that PETA hates people. In a conference in 2001 their vegetarian campaign coordinator said:

I think it would be a great thing if, you know, all of these fast-food outlets and these slaughterhouses and these laboratories and the banks that fund them, exploded tomorrow. I think it’s perfectly appropriate (applause) and I think it’s perfectly appropriate for people to take bricks and toss them through the windows and, you know, everything else along the line. Alleluia to the people who are willing to do it.

I don’t have a moral problem with eating steaks or saving dying children with animal researched medicine because animals don’t have rights. They are a natural resource, just like trees and coal. Humans have used animals to survive for as long as they have existed, just like animals use each other to survive, often by cruelly eating each other.

This is not to say that animals should be made to suffer unnecessarily. I probably wouldn’t particularly enjoy going fox hunting if it involved excessive suffering by the fox (which is debateable), but there is no way I would ever support a law against it. This is because I think people are more important than animals, and deserve to be allowed to go about their business as they see fit as long as they do not harm other people or their property.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 7:11 PM EST

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My web hosts, XCalibre, decided to upgrade the web server and rolled back all the files by four days, so some posts have gone missing. The lesson here is - back everything up! Want I want is a Movable Type plugin that will mail me the full text of every post. Perhaps such a plugin exists. From memory, the missing posts were:

1. A link to an amusing onion article about a chap who is disappointed to recieve a gift of a non-widescreen DVD.
2. My commentary on the fallout from the Soham trial. I find it disturbing that sentiments were being expressed such as:
   
   

   Concerns have been raised about how Soham murderer Ian Huntley was allowed to work with children despite past allegations of rape and underage sex.

   
   
   It would be unfortunate if, as a result of this case, people were barred from taking up certain jobs as a result of mere allegations. The fault lies with those who did not follow up the allegations properly to reach a conviction in the first (ten) place(s).

3. A link to a Samizdata article about the European Parliament of Looters awarding themselves pay rise. What do MEPs do anyway, and does anyone think we get value for money from being in the EU?

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 4:15 PM EST

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On the Adam Smith Institute blog where, incidentally, there is now a link to this site, Alex Singleton quotes from a speech in which Michael Chrichton compares environmentalists to religious fundamentalists.

For example, environmentalists have a back to basics, back to nature, Garden of Eden myth, in which if only we could learn to work with nature instead of against it, like ancient peoples did, there would be paradise on Earth. Chrichton debunks this myth:

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

But even if we could have paradise on Earth, just how natural would it be?

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk.

The Garden of Eden myth is what leads many environmentalists to assume by default that technology is bad because it is unnatural. This can be dangerous. It can lead to poor people dying of malaria in their millions because somebody decided that DDT must be bad because it’s an evil, artificial chemical.

While scientific papers hidden in obscure journals reveal that DDT is innocuous, these reports don’t make it into newspapers, so don’t influence the politicians. Chrichton concludes:

…it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.

This might happen the day people start to think critically about issues like the environment instead of jumping on the latest feel good, save-the-planet bandwagon and demanding that the governent Do Something About It. I don’t see that day coming very soon, but we can try.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Enviro-Mentalism at 11:13 PM EST

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The Present Occupier has received this latest missive from the folks at TV Licensing:

We have reason to believe your address is unlicensed. Your details have been passed to a TV Licensing Enforcement Officer who will be visiting your street soon.

Below this is a table that states, “Amount due: �116.00″ and “Payment due: IMMEDIATELY”. In tiny print below it reads, “If you have recently purchased a license, please ignore this letter”, and you have to read to the bottom of the page for, “Please see reverse for important TV Licensing Information, including exclusions and how to pay.”

In effect this is an invoice, not dissimilar to the one sent out by Nodots, who the ASA upheld a complaint against. In that case,

The Authority considered that, although the smallprint on the mailing stated “Should you not want a Qname, please disregard the invoice”, the invoice section of the mailing did not make clear enough that it was merely a marketing communication offering an Internet service. The Authority concluded that the mailing was misleading.

By these standards, the TV Licensing letter is certainly misleading. It is also obnoxious and threatening. But what can you expect from goons paid to extract protection money?

Related Link: I came across a TV Licensing Mini-FAQ that explains when you need a TV license and when you don’t, and how TV Licensing try to obfuscate this information.

Previous Episodes: Not Owning A TV Licence Is A Crime; TV Licence Update; TV Licence Update 2.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, TV Licensing at 11:05 AM EST

3 Comments »

I hate it when the government tries to control what people spend their money on, even when what they’re spending it on is employees for their company. So you can be sure I have plenty to say about new anti-discrimination laws recently introduced. Much of it, though, is already said for me by cleverer people than me. However, one aspect really niggles:

From 1 December it will be unlawful to discriminate against workers because of their sexual orientation, whether they are bisexual, lesbian, gay or heterosexual.

Religious organisations are exempted from these new rules.

[From 2 December it will also be unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of religion, religious belief or similar philosophical belief.]

So these new laws say you have to be tolerant of gay people and religion, including those religions that promote intolerance of gay people. The doublethink involved here is almost beyond belief. Isn’t it a good job we have the government to tell us how to think?

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Imaginary Friends at 9:52 PM EST

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