Software, whether that’s a CD, a text file of a book, or a computer program, is a good with a marginal cost of zero. Hence basic economics tells us an individual act of software copying makes society in aggregate better off and harms nobody (because the total producer surplus plus consumer surplus is maximised when [...]

I don’t normally post idiot comments from CiF here, but this one seems to sum up a popular meme of which I have literally no comprehension:
“[Hating immigrants and refugees is] nothing to do with racism, its to do with national self interest, and putting the interersts of your own citiizens first and foremost, and above [...]

Jill Saward is a feminist candidate standing against David Davis in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, on the grounds that putting everyone on a DNA database would be awesome because it’d improve rape conviction rates.
Now, if the problem in getting rape convictions was that there were plenty of cases where DNA samples were taken but [...]

The mysteriously popular Coppersblog has a piece up claiming - in line with its general tabloid nonsense agenda - that crime statistics are nonsense, that crime is rocketing, and that we’ll probably all be stabbed by the end of the week.
Reasonably disgustingly, it uses the murder of Arsema Dawit as a “OMG, evil teen stabbings” [...]

The latest crime figures are out [PDF]: they show a fall in recorded crime, and flat crime according to the British Crime Survey [*].
This isn’t surprising - it just highlights that the rest of the country is actually doing the same ‘crime probably down a bit and certainly not up‘ thing as London, and that [...]

If you name a teddy bear Mohammed in Sudan, you face barbaric and draconian punishment. But if you avoid going to Sudan in the first place, which is a good idea, then you are at no risk of such lunacy.
America is different. Its laws are just as mad (under a system where your sentence is [...]

Much has been written about David Cameron being a Blair manqué. The accusations of style over substance, the eye-catching initiatives, the willingness to alienate his party, the constant drive for modernisation, and the sleight of hand that leads one to believe that one day soon it will be necessary to count the spoons.
And here is [...]

The rising prison population isn’t only a British concern; it also makes the news in Italy. However, the comparison with Britain breaks down on at least two counts: firstly, because the size of the prison population is considerably smaller (in both absolute and relative terms); secondly, because the Italian government has taken the novel step [...]

Being the hip young thing that I am, the other night I found myself listening to Radio 4. Cunningly avoiding the Archers, the Moral Maze and discovering what LPs this week’s has-been pseudo-celebrity would listen to while gnawing their arms off on a desert island, I tuned in to Dave Gorman’s Genius, a show where [...]

Sharpener readers with good memories may recollect that there is a certain common theme to my posts. They all have something to do with citizenship and passports (in a rather formal sense). This one is no different. It’s about David Hicks, the Australian detainee in Guantanamo Bay, who discovered belatedly that he was entitled to [...]

You can define a thing in many ways, especially when it’s an abstract concept (”terrorism”, “democracy”, “British values”…). You can define to persuade, by emphasising features you believe people will find desirable (or, in some cases, undesirable). Alternatively, you can define to exclude, emphasising features some people will find it impossible to sign up to. [...]

The BBC website has a reasonably sensible, if not impartial, article by a sports shooter about guns - specifically, on how they’re fun and basically safe, except for the very rare occasions when evil people get hold of them and go massacring.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘have your say’ comments are full of the usual suspects saying things like “aha, [...]

I hesitate to add to the thousands of words already written about the Euston Manifesto. We had two good posts here yesterday, but the best so far is probably this one. Anyway, I hesitate essentially because I only read it today, and the damn thing is deathly dull, a collection of anodyne pronouncements, platitudes, and [...]

Last Wednesday the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, gave a speech on “UK Terrorism Legislation in an International Context”. At the outset he said ‘You have asked me particularly to talk about the UK legislative response to the threat of terrorism and that is what I shall focus on.’
That hasn’t, however, been the headline-grabbing part of the [...]