The great convergence of all the world's idiots into one, big indistinguishable glob is a phenomenon that has been widely documented throughout the blogosphere but is one that, hitherto, I had only read about but not actually witnessed.

That has now changed. Just about an hour ago, I was caught up in real, live manifestation of this phenomenon on the streets of Tottenham, North London. Well, when I say, 'caught up', I was actually on my way to a DIY superstore to engage in some healthy, life-affirming consumerism when I got stuck in traffic behind a slow-moving demonstration. On being allowed by the police to drive slowly by while it snaked its way down Tottenham High Road, I got a good look at all the banners; Kurdish communists, Sinn Fein, Hamas supporters and anti-globalisation protestors. There they were, marching and chanting side by side, arm-in-arm in protest for or against something or other. I didn't care enough to inquire.

But, as I drove by, I felt the warm satisfaction of knowing that they were chiefly complaining about people like me. Splendid! I wound down my car windows, turned up the John Philip Sousa march that was conveniently playing on my car radio and sped off to do my bit to help spread capitalism.

... Paul Staines does not think so!

British Chancellor Gordon Brown's recent splurge on the National Health Service was supposed to be supported by a bouyant economy, but first quarter figures (just released) are terrible.

Manufacturing output tumbled by 1.5 per cent, leaving it 6.5 per cent down on the same time last year ÷ the biggest annual decline since the recession of the early Eighties. A further slump in exports, by nearly 7 per cent, also took a heavy toll. On the plus side that means mortgage rates are very unlikely to rise near term, but taxes may be more likely to rise as the economy stagnates - unless you think New Labour would actually consider reducing state spending? As the graphic shows we have slipped from first to last in the G7 growth league - as the other G7 countries voters all shifted rightwards. Things are going to get more difficult for Brown, sooner rather than later. Paul Staines

For sex (bikini reference!), violence (attack by dog! blood!) and much, much more, go to Bitter Girl!

World trade could be a powerful motor to reduce poverty, and support economic growth, but that potential is being lost. The problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the rules that govern it are rigged in favour of the rich.
-Oxfam, from the Introduction to their Report Rigged Rules and Double Standards: Trade, Globalisation, and the Fight Against Poverty. See their Make Trade Fair campaign website (but don't expect the rules to be any less rigged by the time they've finished with them).

Ever since Tony Blair ushered in the 'Age of Blandness', I sense that a lot of people in this country have been seeking a true 'Voice of Britain'.

Personally speaking, I reject such collectivist concepts both formally and informally. However, if there was such a thing as a 'Voice of Britain' then Richard Littlejohn would be it.

One of the many joys of the Samizdata is that it is a truly marvelous tool for weedling all manner of Libertarians out of their various hidey holes. So it is with nothing but pleasure that I accept the gentle rebukes of Paul Marks from whom I have not heard since sometime before the last Ice Age.

For the benefit of Paul (and others) let me make it clear that I accept that President Bush is not beyond criticism and I will leave it at that for the moment.

And, like Paul, I welcome the likes of Messrs Prodi and Petain speaking their minds. It means that blind people can hate them as well.

One of the reasons for my absence on the blog was grieving for my motorbike that was stolen several weeks ago.

For some time now, my mood have been alternating between a profound sense of loss and anger with a burning desire to have my bike back preferably covered with puréed remnants of those who deprived me of it.

I decided to replace it as soon as possible and managed to do so earlier this week. The world seems a happier place, however, not as happy as it ought to be given that I am on two wheels again. This is because I had to switch to a different type of motorbike, which would not necessarily be my first choice.

For the uninitiated, my previous motorbike, Suzuki GSX-R600, is a pure sportsbike designed for a racetrack. It is a highly desirable motorbike both for joy riders but more importantly for thieves who sell them as parts for race bikes. This was certainly the reason my bike was stolen since the various security devices that I had installed would make it impossible to ride by anyone else.

My new bike, a Ducati Monster Dark 900, is a very different affair – bigger engine, stylish and urban. It is still desirable but to a different group of thieving criminals who I hope will be deterred by the bike's security.

Both are top of the range in their category, so why am I not completely satisfied? The point is that I have been forced to change my preferences because there is a 'market' for the bikes I really like and their parts. Short of putting my dream bike in a bomb shelter and/or booby-trapping it with Semtex or some other owner-friendly material, there is nothing I can do to stop those thieving bastards from continuing to steal my sportsbikes.

There is a point to the stolen bike saga and it's to do with property rights and their protection. My lovely Suzuki was the second sportsbike that I have had stolen in the last two years, so naturally, I have been wondering what to do about this - it is a problem that obviously will not go away, in fact, is getting worse. The local police have admitted that they can't do anything to stop it and gave me a friendly advice, bordering on counselling, to treat the constant infringement on my property rights as the price one has to pay for living in Central London.

Perhaps, if my local council (a local government body in London) installed secure parking for motorbikes, it might make it more difficult for the thieves who would look for a more convenient bounty… Or perhaps if my street had CCTV cameras, the thieves would avoid it (or more likely find some clever ways of disabling them or simply ignore them)…. Or if the local residents decided to hire private security that would constantly patrol the area, the thieves might be permanently deterred…

I like the third option. Residents in three streets in Kensington (a desirable residential area in Central London) decided to do just that and the crime rate has been reduced to almost zero in the year the secret pilot scheme has been running.

As expected, the reactions have been mixed. The Sunday Telegraph reported this with a generally positive take:

Eldon street is a public street but the uniformed man with an Alsatian at his side making its way between the stucco-fronted buildings of one of London's most desirable roads is not a public servant; he is not a policeman but a private - albeit highly-trained - security guard who keeps this Kensington avenue free from crime. The catch is that residents have to pay for the peace of mind they now enjoy; the scheme is funded by payments of up to £1,000 a year from householders.

However, the scheme has not left everyone happy. It was criticised by the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers. The chairman of the constables' branch of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said it was "denigrating the role of the policeman":

The Government has announced it wants to introduce civilian auxiliaries under police control and also accredit private security firms to patrol streets...but by doing so, they are taking away the role of the police officer as a professional person and also getting policing on the cheap.

Hmm, £1,000 a year doesn't seem so cheap, constable. Or perhaps your understanding of the cost is skewed by the knowledge of how much of taxpayer's money is spent on ineffective policing…

The final twist on the story, which worried me more than finding the extra money on top of the local tax, was a throwaway line by the same policeman:

If rich communities can afford to do this, it is unfair on those areas which can't.

I am not sure whom I detest more now - those who steal my property or those who take my money to protect me and my property, fail and then prevent me from doing so myself and from blowing up the criminals to the kingdom come. Let me think about that while getting used to riding my Ducati Monster Dark...

Here's an observation which I think deserves wider currency, which I got – very appropriately considering the nature of the observation – from my mother.

Prams. Which way do they face?

In the olden days, prams faced inwards. Babies, when being walked by their mothers, or nannies or au-pairs or whoever, faced backwards, back to whoever was doing the walking. Prams were also quite bulky, and babies were shielded (cut off?) from the dramas of the outside world. Now, most prams are far smaller and skimpier, and they mostly face outwards, away from whoever is doing the walking.

Given what has been learned about the truly astonishing rate at which the growing brains of babies suck in information from all around them, is this not a quite important change of social custom? Does it somehow portend a world of looser and less intimate family relationships, and greater (and maybe also earlier) engagement between growing children and the outside world, beyond their little family households?

My mother disapproves of this change, because she considers the relationship between children and their mothers to be of crucial importance. (She was one of the Founding Mothers of the National Childbirth Trust.)

Me, I don't know. I think there's much to be said for getting to know about the world early on and feeling at ease with its excitements, opportunities and complexities, and not just getting acquainted with your mum. But I think my mum is definitely on to something. I completely agree with her that this is a fascinating little fact about the modern world.

Thoughts anyone? Does Natalie Solent have anything to say about this, what with her being a mum herself?

Incidentally, when checking out the link to the NCT, I noticed that they still use the same logo, based on an Eskimo wood carving that my mother brought back from a trip to Canada. It's of a mother and child. It may even be Mary and Jesus, I can't remember. And the child? It's facing mother.

When Dr Johnson described patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word Reform.
-US Senator Roscoe Conkling

Antoine totally missed my point, and bounced the point that I did make back at me as if I thought the opposite of it. Those mixed married people weren't looking for trouble? That's exactly my point. But trouble - this-thing-is-bigger-than-both-of-us trouble – nevertheless engulfed them. It is the nature of that trouble, and what I think is the nature of that trouble, that now seems to elude Antoine. He thinks that I hold all individual Muslims individually responsible for all the Islam-v-the-Rest grief that's happening now. How many times do I have to say that I believe the opposite of that? He jumps to all manner of really quite insulting conclusions about what I think ought to be done about all this stuff, when I have not even reached any conclusions, still less stated any, beyond that it would probably be better to talk about this stuff than not, and that the situation is indeed serious. (Although if someone wants to tell me that even to talk about this stuff only makes things automatically more serious, I'd be fascinated to hear from them.) Is Antoine perhaps falling into the trap, in the manner of John Simpson when he interviewed Pim Fortuyn, of thinking that because I "sound like" certain other nasty people, such as the British National Party, that I automatically believe in all their vile and aggressive policy proposals?

Antoine's ideas about how welfare exacerbates all this may be right, and they may not. Personally, I don't think that putting an end to the British welfare state would solve this problem. There are plenty of countries where there is no welfare state to speak of, yet the grief between Muslims and the Rest is as grievous as ever. And part of the problem is that Muslims run their own private sector welfare systems, in a way that Libertarians would thoroughly approve of - except that, in among running youth clubs and keeping young men out of trouble and off drugs, they also use their resulting influence to turn a few of the same young men into suicide bombers and terrorists.

I think, to generalise, that what we may have here is an argument about whether "society" exists in a serious and sometimes seriously life-wrecking form, or not. I say that it most emphatically does. And Antoine, the way I hear him, is arguing as if that is not just wrong, but so obviously wrong as not to be worth even considering. For me, the Islam-v-the-Rest THING is a classic example of an over-arching social fact that is capable of ruining individual lives. It is, for example, capable of taking a happily married couple whose behaviour towards each other and towards everyone else is impeccable, and making them take opposite sides in some huge fight they had no part whatsoever in starting. And if that isn't society asserting itself, I don't know what is. But maybe I misunderstand Antoine. If so, he now knows how it feels.

Perry, please umpire this. Stop us if you think it's getting annoying.

As for the general point of Antoine joining in with this blogging business, despite its regrettable timing last night when he was blogging fit to bust and I was blogging fit to bust about how no-one else was blogging, I'm delighted, truly delighted. That posting about the impact of the Le Pen campaign on French crime was a fine example of something that only Antoine, in London libertarian circles, would know about and bother about. Does everybody realise that Antoine is fluent in both English and French? Yes he is.

What, London libertarians may be asking, about Christian Michel (who runs the excellent Liberalia website)? Well, yes, he's bilingual in English and French and libertarian and dead clever. But he is a quite different sort of intellectual personality, with nothing like Antoine's enthusiasm for intriguing titbits of news, indeed for journalism in general. Antoine could feed – and I suspect would greatly enjoy feeding - a steady stream of brilliant news items from Francophonia into the Anglo-blogosphere, and I really, really hope that he will. If the price I have to pay is to have frustrating rows with him in which I say (among other things) "A" - and he says "no that's all wrong - the situation is A!!", well, I can live with that.

Paul Marks takes a rather more jaundiced view of Dubya than David Carr

I agree that the enemies of President Bush tend to be rather evil. However, that does not mean that the Bush Administration is very good.

As far as I know they have not even tried to cut (let alone abolish) any Welfare State program or get rid of any major regulation - they seem to be just marking time before the Democrats take control of the White House again.

Still this better than the first Bush Administration (the Bush with the "Herbert" in his name). That Administration increased taxes and added lots of new regulations (such as the infamous Americans with a Disability Act).

Paul Marks

Paul Marks read David Carr's article and points out that one can regard the remarks being made by the leaders of the EU...rather differently!

The honesty of Mr Prodi and Mr Chris Patten should be welcomed.

It saves a lot of time if, instead of going through a big debate on whether the E.U. is aiming at setting up a superstate and crushing as much liberty as it can, leaders of this organization stand up and boast of their ambitions.

If the only the Chancellor in the latest Star Wars film and been so honest. Picture the scene - he stands before the Senate and says "I am a Lord of the Dark Side of the Force - I am behind both sides in this new war. I plan to use the war to place the whole galaxy under my heel and grind it into the dirt".

Real life is often odder than fantasy.

Paul Marks

According to the BBC website, 11,990 people have voted on whether Roy Keane, the captain of the Republic of Ireland team at the soccer world cup in Japan (who can't play England unless both sides win or lose in the semi-finals) should have been dropped by his manager or not.

Last week about 3,000 voted on whether Britain is ready to join the euro and 55 per cent said yes. If England are knocked out playing badly, by a EU country, I predict a swing to the euro. If England win, then Mr Blair can bamboozle us in during the celebrations (he'll have about three years if the last time is anything to go by). Go the Eurosceptic should hope for dignified defeat at the hands of Brazil in the semi-final.

I don't like "Yes you did" "No I didn't" conversations in newsgroups so I'm wary of doing so here. Brian refers to the horrors faced by mixed-married couples in Yugoslavia. I think we'll find that these are precisely the people who didn't start looking for an ethnic or religious war with their neighbours. Oscar Wilde would no doubt have suggested that matrimonial strife was amply sufficient. Alexander the Great tried to solve racial problems by ordering his officers to marry Persians. Napoleon suggested that if the French all married blacks then the issue would be ended once and for all. Both were poisoned for their pains. Next time someone compares these tyrants to Hitler I'll dig out the reference.

As for my awkward posts: suck eggs Brian! and let's look forward to Zinedine Zidane (a Moslem who's idea of terror is firing footballs into a goal full of terrified innocent defenders) versus Nicky Butt in the second round, assuming Cameroon don't cripple half the England team in the 'friendly'.

Anglosphere writer Jim Bennett weighs in with another fine salvo against EU Commissioner Chris (oh no, not him again!) Patten. Rather than repeat my earlier comments last week about the wretched Commissioner, just take a look at what Mr Bennett has to say. What impresses me so much about Bennett's writing is that he manages to maintain a civil, pleasant tone even when trashing ideas he regards as dumb.

Oh, and changing the subject, another excellent article, if one has the time, is Andrew Sullivan's Sunday Times column on the vast wealth of what he calls the Western world's "overclass". Sullivan makes the point - obvious to we libertarians if not to collectivists - that the tremendous wealth of Bill Gates and the like is not made at the expense of we humbler mortals, but is part of an ever-increasing pie. However, Sullivan frets that the growth of such an overclass" is a problem, since society can become fragmented if the very rich are seen as detached from the mores and concerns of the middle class. A sort of mirror-problem of the "underclass". I am not entirely sure he is right, but agree this is worth thinking about. It is also instructive to look at what Sullivan says about the proportion of tax paid by rich Americans. Completely undermines the idea that supply-side tax cuts are unfair. If anything, the rich were entitled to a bigger cut than that which Bush gave them last year.

However, Sullivan backs away from the obvious conclusion - the moral tax rate is Nil!

Nice profile of UK scientist Dr Terence Kealey in the latest online edition of U.S. technology and venture capital magazine Red Herring, which draws out Kealey's claim that it is wrong to suppose science will die without generous funding from the taxpayer. The man knows what he is talking about, having worked as a research scientist at a number of British institutions.

The profile is refreshingly fair-minded. In fact, this edition of Red Herring is excellent, with lots of good stuff on biotech, nanotechnology, telecoms and much besides. It is generally pro-free enterprise without being tiresomely ideological and is often a good way to pitch capitalism to the neutral observer. I once met its main editor and founder, Anthony Perkins, in his Californian home about five years ago and am impressed to see how his publication has surged over the years. More power to Red Herring's elbow.

Harold Wilson said Labour was a crusade or it was nothing. I try not to think about his assertion. The logical implications are too painful.
-Roy Hattersley, 1997

Romano Prodi wants tax harmonisation in the EU and a single foreign policy. Does it mean we will all have to surrender simultaneously?

Meanwhile Chris Petain calls for all Europeans to discard their national identities and learn to love the EU and the Blair government is busying itself with it's plans to 'regionalise' England (both matters liberally linked to in the 'sphere).

All of a sudden, the EU looks like a project in a big hurry; sort of like campers desperately trying to get their tent erected in double-quick time 'neath brooding storm clouds.

Perhaps, with one big puff, we can blow their house down.

The world is a complex and confusing place oftentimes. It can be so hard to know for sure whether or not one is doing the right thing. There are, though, some yardsticks and one of them is the 'European street' which has risen up in protest at a visit to Germany by George Bush.

I'm not entirely sure what track Mr.Bush is on, but when he induces rent-a-mob to take to the streets with slogans like 'Nature Before Profits' we can all be pretty sure that he's on the right one.

Personally, I'd like to see him rub some salt into the wounds while he's about it. Perhaps he could play up the 'cowboy' image? (Is this Germany? Where are all them folks wearing them leather pants?). Better still he could echo Reagan in the 80's but instead of calling for the end of the Berlin Wall, he could call for the end of the Welfare State. Then he could fly back to the US, chuckling to himself, while watching Berlin explode in his rear-view mirror.

As you can probably tell, Samizdata is undergoing a phase of collective preoccupation with Other Things just now, not least the difficulties associated with the programme Perry uses to run the thing. And to adapt Groucho Marx, any enterprise that relies on me might as well give up now and save itself the bother. The point being, I'm busy too, even if it may not look it. I'll tell you all about it in due course, but not until I've done it thank you. A man's got to know his limitations, failing to stick to public promises being one of my worst.

So let guest writer P.G. Wodehouse take up the slack. I swear on a stack of Jeeves paperbacks that I picked this paragraph, which is from The Code of the Woosters, completely at random. The only qualification I looked for was that it lacked inverted commas, because I especially like Wodehouse when he alone is doing the talking. Here is the random paragraph:

The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking - and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs' worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal's face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.

Now I know what you're thinking. What is this whole situation? Well to echo Clint Eastwood just once more, this time from the closing moments of Two Mules For Sister Sarah: I haven't got time for that.

Bloody Antoine. You spend half your life trying to get him to do things, and then he does something just when you don't want him to (see below), and makes nonsense of everything in this post so far, which you might as well have anyway.

I know that individual Muslims can be the salt of the earth. I too regret the passing of the kebab shop in Tachbrook Street. Some of my best friends are Muslims. The trouble is that when one of these Islam-versus-the-rest horrors erupts, it swallows up individual salt-of-the-earth Muslims along with everyone else. In Yugoslavia for example, happily married city folks who hardly even realised that their marriage was "mixed" suddenly got shot to hell.

Plus, I'm not in favour of a war for heaven's sakes. I'm just frightened there might be one.

An "individualist" approach doesn't cut it, because individuals ain't the problem. But I'll supply a more thoughtful response when I've more time. (Damn, another public promise.)

Brian Micklethwait should try applying an individualist approach to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Is Mohammed Al Fayed a viper in the nest of free-market(ish) Europe? Perhaps, but he's not a threat to Western Civilization because of his religious beliefs. The Turkish kebab shop in Tachbrook Street (now demolished by predatory developers ) with the Galatasaray and Arsenal football fan may be included on census forms as a "non-white European" to terrify drawing room society, but I was less frightened of his political opinions than I am by some of Sean Gabb's, and his cooking was a lot less threatening than Brian's.

Go to an Italian restaurant in central London. Many of the raven haired waitresses are no more Italian than I am, and no more Catholic than Osama bin Laden. They're wine drinking economic migrants from Kosovo whose parents had "Moslem" on their communist era identity cards. Sure, add them up and you get 40 per cent of the population of a grotty flat in Finchley or Norwood. The other 60 per cent are as likely to be Serbs, Croats or Slovaks all with their nominal ethnic or religious hatreds. How come they aren't slaughtering each other in Ballards Lane or West Norwood High Street? As individuals, Moslems are no worse than Glaswegians. It's when a mob looking for a fight at a football match run into you that they're a nuisance.

The problem isn't immigration... Its immigration and a welfare state. We have to choose one or the other. I make no bones in saying that the NHS, comprehensive education, state benefits, council housing, free abortions (no charge to the user) all have to go. All that immigration has done is accelarate the process of creating an underclass. If we'd had the welfare state in the seventeenth century the Jews and Dutch would have a reputation in Britain for being alcoholics, single mothers, violent etc. No doubt Jewish fundamentalist groups attacking the decadence of the West would be scaring Gabb and Micklethwait with demands for shop closures on Saturday, modest clothing for women and demands for apologies for anti-semitic persecutions. Instead some of them went into banking.

Launching an air strikes on Harrods and rounding up all Moslem males over the age of five for an unstated purpose is not the answer, it seems more likely to worsen matters and destroy the moral meaning of the West. Actually the libertarians got it right who said that the best way to prevent another Oklahoma bombing would be to get Clinton out of the White House, and a relatively non-interventionist government in her place.

The best way to improve race relations in the UK is for the state to get out of welfare and stop appearing to spend white taxpayers money on layabouts who happen to be black. The state should however either get out of policing, or vigourously enforce laws against violent crime and crimes against property. Islamic sentences for property crimes would seem to me preferable to the present lunacy in Western Europe.

Fundamentalist terrorism is not uniquely Islamic. The shopkeeping Moslems are as afraid of a nuke in London as anyone, they are also pretty worried that they might become scapegoats for Brian's fears. War on Moslems because of Bin Laden is like having a war on Californian hippies because of Charles Manson.

Between the two rounds of voting in France the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off had a curious effect. David Carr asked if this had reduced attacks on synagogues. I don't know, because the French media don't report these attacks and I haven't got round to checking.

However a French police officer did comment how wonderful it was: all the no-go areas saw a massive drop in crime, as if the underclass figured that a Le Pen presidency might not be the best place to be a petty criminal. This incidentally suggests that free-will is not entirely absent, even from compulsive criminals and supposedly rabid Islamic fundamentalists. The logical conclusion is that the president should face re-election every month, with a really nasty opponent guaranteed a chance of winning.

Small Tyrants, threatened by big,
Sincerely believe
They love Liberty.
-W.H.Auden, 'Marginalia', City Without Walls, 1969

No doubt anti-market commentators will be using the current troubles of U.S. broking giant Merrill Lynch to bash the capitalist system. But they would be wrong, just as wrong, in fact, as to say that the demise of U.S. energy titan Enron was a slap in the face for we free-market types.

Not so. What I think the Merrill saga shows is that in a dynamic marketplace where more and more wealth is attached to the realm of ideas rather than physical capital, it is crucial to ensure good behaviour. Merrill has suffered over doubts about the impartiality of the analyst advice given to clients. It shows how the brutal forces sweeping global capitalism can chasten the brashest of Wall Street players.

And it ought to show investors in stocks and bonds something else - let the buyer beware!

I am not entirely sure what to make of this admission from Donald Rumsfeld to the effect that it is 'inevitable' that terrorists are going to get their grubby paws on WMD sooner or later and bloody well use them.

I don't think anybody is blogland is surprised by this admission. After all, isn't this something we have all speculated about? A nuclear weapon is not exactly available at any retail outlet (yet!) but it seems that constructing just a rudimentary one is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as it used to be. Given that, all that is required is the will to use it and we all witnessed an unambiguous demonstration of that will last September.

No, what is arousing my curiosity is the Official Stamp that these suspicions have now been given by Mr.Rumsfeld. Even the most gauche among us have been alerted in no uncertain terms. So is Mr.Rumsfeld trying to soften us all up? Does he know something we don't? Or is it a case of expecting the worse but hoping for the best?

I couple this with the appearance yesterday of a dire warning on the front page of a popular British tabloid (sorry, can't find link) that suicide bombers were on their way to Britain. It may or may not be true, of course. British tabloids are somewhat notorious for issuing dire warnings that turn out to be nothing more than, well, dire warnings.

Things are a tad less dramatic over on the actual battlefront in Afghanistan where British Royal Marine Commandos trudge around disconsolately seeking engagement with an enemy that either cannot be found or no longer exists. Meanwhile, back in the West, we are fighting a war of catastrophic expectations and that ratchet has just been cranked up another notch or two.

Natalie Solent links (Monday May 20) to a Guardian piece about blogging. That "fact checking your ass" meme is never going to die is it? They mention Glenn Reynolds of Instpundit by name and by blog. Do they know his meta-context?

I'm sure mostly they do. I've always rated the (what it now, just about, still, makes sense to call) "left" at least as good a bet in the long run for libertarianism as the (ditto) "right". Most Guardian-readers love idea-based radicalism (making trouble for the high and mighty, such as many current Guardian-writers) more than they love socialism, if forced to choose. Many British (at any rate) onservatives, if forced to choose, love the high and mighty more than they love trouble-making (i.e. idea-based radicalism). (This is one of the meta-contextual reasons for the spat between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. The LA suspects betrayal as the old establishment welcomes the new. The Daily Telegraph regards the LA as politically insignificant and out of the power loop, and hence socially inferior. Both have a point.)

Will there soon be lots of left wing blogs for us to link to and quarrel with? That would be something. Or will they all just be spoiler or defensive salaried offshoots of the mainstream media, like – and no offence is intended here, I'm just being descriptive - the Guardian's web operations. (Mixed metaphor warning: can a mainstream have an offshoot? Make that journalistic treetrunk.)

It has been of extreme concern to me for several years now that the sinister person who does the voice-overs for the sinister BBC "children's television" show, The Teletubbies, at any rate in the version shown here in London, sounds exactly like Britain's sinister Prime Minister, Tony Blair. What can this mean? Or am I dreaming this?

"I'm 48 years old and I've been taxed to pay for America's nuclear arsenal my whole life. Now I want to get my money's worth."
-An American on the Rush Limbaugh show, explaining why he wants, as Orrin Judd reports (May 20 - 1.20 pm), "the bombing of every dictatorship in the Middle East" (with thanks also to Instapundit)

Guardian's Weblog links to an interesting article about how repressive regimes suppress the Internet, Censorship Wins Out by Andrew Stroehlein. (It was posted on April 4, so this is another of my better-late-than-never reading suggestions.) If your taste runs to reading only a few intelligent paragraphs rather than half a dozen intelligent pages (I know the feeling), try these:

In many ways, the Internet seems to fulfil the same role as samizdat did in Communist Czechoslovakia. Like that old dissident literature, the Internet in authoritarian regimes offers the only place for critical voices, but, sadly, it has little effect on the ground. Remember, despite the international fame of writers like Vaclav Havel, outside of a small circle of intellectuals in Prague, hardly anyone ever read samizdat within Communist Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution emerged from direct action within a changed geo-political atmosphere; decades of dissident carping had nothing to do with real change when the regime finally fell.

As it was with samizdat, most people in authoritarian regimes never get a chance to see Internet publications, and the whole enterprise, both the publishing of banned information and official attempts to stop it, is more a game for elites: elite dissident intellectuals criticize elite rulers, and they argue back and forth in a virtual space. The opponents can score a few victories in that virtual space, but meanwhile, back in reality, little changes for the people on the ground.

Some may find such a conclusion a bit pessimistic, especially coming from someone who works in the field of online journalism in these countries. But it is important to keep one's feet on the ground and neither underestimate the scope of the problem nor overestimate the ability of the medium.

And there is some reason for cautious optimism. CPJ's A Lin Neumann, for example, reminded me that "elites, generally, tend to lead the movement toward change so the fact that the Internet is somewhat confined to elite communication in some places does not disqualify it as a change agent." Neumann points to China, saying that the Internet has had an effect on the ground there, leading, for instance, to greater impact of stories on corruption.

CPJ stands for something called the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Stroehlein goes on to mention a website called the the Three Gorges Probe, which reports negatively on a dam scheme in China about which locals are willing to complain out loud.

In general, Stroehlein, in a manner appropriate to a Guardian linkee, tends to neglect the importance of economic influences. To suppress the Internet is to impose upon one's country severe economic damage, and not just political harm. It isn't just reportage and opinion that is spread on the Internet. There is also all that other boring stuff that regular people like to have, like … stuff.

Thus, suppressing the Internet will eventually erode the will to power of the elite, both by de-glamorising their own elite lifestyle, and by ruining or perpetuating the already ruined state of the economy upon which they prey. Eventually it becomes impossible for them to pretend even to themselves that their rule is in anyone's interest except their own, and in due course not even that. By suppressing the Internet - not just because of what it is and what it symbolises, but because of what it does (and what the Internet can do now is only the beginning of that story) - they lose the future. And once you lose the future in politics, you lose period.

Please, God, strike down my enemies – but make sure I've got an alibi when you do it.
-Anthony Bourdain, in his short story "Chef's night out" (Prospect Aug/Sept 2001)

In the early hours of Sunday morning (the 19th - last night as I finish this) I watched BBC News 24, although following that link will probably only get you the operation as a whole, not the story I'm about to refer to. Which was: John Simpson talking, in Holland, with a Dutch journalist, who interestingly had just returned to Holland after spending a decade in South Africa. I didn't see the beginning of the interview and I therefore didn't catch the name of the Dutchman. Peter something, I think. It was on just before 3 am.

For the time being anyway, democracy is doing its job. There was mass unease in Holland, and the ballot boxes had registered it. In Pim Fortuyn, Holland – indeed I would go further and say Europe – found a major politician who knew how to talk about "multiculturalism" and all that, in a way that does justice to the fears that regular people (by which I mean non-Muslim people) have about it, without being blatantly racist in the manner of the BNP (British National Party), or, if I understand him and his followers correctly, Jean Marie Le Pen.

Simpson mentioned that interview he did with Fortuyn a few days before Fortuyn's death. He recalled that when he had said that something that Fortuyn had said to him "sounded very like racism", Fortuyn had got extremely angry, for this was a distinction Fortuyn (unlike Simpson, it would seem) well understood. Islam is not a race, and being hostile to it, as Fortuyn was (and as I – a convinced atheist – also am), is not racism. Islam is a body of ideas, predominantly false and - insofar as Islam has anything to say about the likes of me - aggressively nasty ideas, in my opinion. It is a culture, political as well as religious. I congratulate John Simpson for reporting his conversation with Fortuyn accurately. His own opinions about "racism" are silly, and hit the nail squarely in its surrounding timber. But when Fortuyn told him this he reported Fortuyn's reaction for the important fact that it is.

Maybe Fortuyn's answer – stop immigration now – isn't yet very appealing, and may never be workable in a way that is remotely humane, but his question cannot now be funked. There is, as Fortuyn insisted, a clash of civilisations going on within Europe, never mind between Europe and other places. Muslims now make up forty per cent of the population of the big cities of Holland, and will soon be in a majority in them, or so the Dutch journalist said. If some Muslims then start taking the idea of majority rule seriously, the bad times could begin. At that point democracy may stop working, and become the justification of and provocation of major conflict instead of the means of avoiding it.

For the last few decades, the idea in the West has been that the severe conflicts that have erupted between Islam and the West over the centuries could be made to go away by us all pretending that there was no problem and refusing to talk or even think about it. Since 9-11, and now since the shooting star that was Pim Fortuyn's political career, that notion is in the process of being junked. Ever since 9-11, the internet has pulsated with infidels analysing Islam, explaining its doctrines, describing its foundation ideas, reflecting upon the career and example of Mohammed himself (not good news in my opinion), gasping with horror at the virulently anti-Semitic grotesqueries of the Middle Eastern press.

Personally I am extremely pessimistic, and see no lower limit to how nasty things may eventually get, down to and including genocide. I further believe that looking such horrors in the face makes them less likely, rather than more likely, to happen, which is why I believe in trading these moderately insulting insults now.

What makes the situation particularly horrible is that there is little that "individual decent Muslims", of which there are huge numbers, can do about all this. Islam itself, as Fortuyn insisted, is the problem. Individual Muslims, however genuinely decent, and however desperate they may be to escape from the economic stagnation and political nastiness of the Mulsim heartlands and hence desperate to live instead in a country like Holland, are nevertheless the carriers of an inherently antagonistic culture. They seem doomed eventually to destroy the very havens they are now moving to in such numbers, by their very presence in such numbers. Until Islam undergoes fundamental changes, there'll always be trouble between it and its neighbours.

Or, of course, Western culture could be profoundly altered. We could accept Islam. Let me give a passing nod to political correctness, and temper the savageries in the previous paragraphs by saying that there is, of course, a quite different way of alluding to these same notions. Instead of Islam being blamed, it could equally well be said that we infidels are the basic cause of all the trouble between ourselves and Islam, because of our stubborn refusal to submit to it. Either way, as far as the formerly or still Christian West is concerned, we are talking about two fundamentalisms here, not just one. Something very big has to give between us and Islam if these two now utterly distinct and antagonistic cultures are ever to learn to get along in a state of prolonged and intermingled amicability.

This is the problem that Holland is now squaring up to. Should Muslim newcomers be forced to learn the Dutch language? Should there be some kind of oath of allegiance which all, of all cultures, must swear? Or what?

All this stuff should be and will be of intense interest to us in Britain, because our demographics are heading in a similar direction.

With all attention focussed on the Middle East, it might be easy to forget the India .v. Pakistan conflict which, according to this report has moved another half-notch up the ratchet.

Of course, it may be nothing more than a brief intensification of the sporadic skirmishes that have been bubbling under for the last few months but, coming on the back of the news that Delhi has expelled the Pakistani Ambassador, a lot of the ingredients of all-out, balls-out war look like they're falling into place.