We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Yet another non sequitur from the power elite Never people to let a nice atrocity go to waste, the recent murder of a British solider in London is being used by the ruling classes to renew the push for more state surveillance.
Never mind that the two perpetrators were already known to the security services, somehow the non sequitur that a more panoptic state could have stopped a pair of low tech islamic psychopaths carrying out an outrage that required perhaps ten minutes of prior planning (drive to an area with a lot of soldiers, grab one, murder him in broad daylight in front of witnesses) is being run up the flagpole to see how many people salute it.
Pure and utter bullshit.
Just remember this when some idiot holds up Boris Johnson as someone preferable to the ghastly David Cameron when (rather than if) Cameron gets the heave ho from the Tory party leadership as they start to feel Nigel Farage’s breath on the back of their necks.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Pure and utter bullshit.
Agreed.
All day long I’ve heard nothing but various talking heads, both Muslim and otherwise, going on a “it was nothing to do with Islam” spiel.
Which is absurd, because we have a video of the blood-soaked murderer telling us exactly why he did what he did, and it had everything to do with Islam.
Of course what they mean is that they disagree with his interpretation of Islam, and that they think it beyond the pale. Which is all well and good, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the justifiability of this kind of behaviour according to Islamic law is quite frankly a matter of debate. And despite what the caring, sharing, cuddly, wuddly British Muslim community would have us believe – the non-violent interpretation of the Islamic scriptures is the fringe doctrine, not the other way around. Most of the Islamic world is either actively practising violent Jihad, or is openly supportive of it.
To say that it has nothing to do with Islam is wilfully disingenuous. It would be like my Presbyterian father-in-law insisting baptism by immersion has nothing to do with Christianity when in fact, it is a point of doctrinal dispute among Christians. Likewise, the permissibility of decapitating Kufars in the street is a point of doctrinal dispute among Muslims.
Even if we were confronting the reality of this situation, more spying can’t prevent this kind of random attack. As surveillance gets more sophisticated, the terrorists just use lower tech mechanisms of communications. There is no digital spy device which can intercept a one-time-pad message written on flash paper, delivered by a courier who has no idea what it says. And as Perry already mentioned, it is not like attacks like this require a lot of planning anyway.
And if it wouldn’t work even if we were being honest about the problem, it sure as hell wont work while we prance about in la la land.
There is only one law within the government’s power to pass which has a hope of preventing attacks like this – concealed carry law. But the British are too chicken-shit to do it, because “guns are scary”. And blood-soaked Jihadis in central London aren’t, right?
Pure and utter bullshit.
My view also.
This isn’t a matter of “Snooper’s Charter” requirements. The principal problem with CCDP and other similar proposed legislation, is that its requirements aren’t technically achievable.
Sure, if you put the civil liberties arguments to one side for a moment, it would be helpful to police and intelligence services, if they could monitor everyone’s Internet-based communications.
It would also be helpful to them, if they could walk through walls, turn invisible, or fly, Superman-style. However, the reasons why they can’t do these things, are pretty much the same as the reasons they can’t monitor everyone’s Internet-based communications – at least, not without tearing down the Internet as it currently stands and starting again with a clean sheet of paper, and a set of immutable design requirements beginning with user identification and lawful intercept.
I would say that Jaded Voluntarist is spot-on in what they say.
But the advocates of the panopticon state will not agree.
Forget about the interpretation of Islam: look at its history instead. The history of Islam is one of war, war, war. Muhammad was a warrior who following the battle of Badr captured the Arabian peninsula by force, and following his death, Islam formed one of the most, if not the most successful war machine that the world has ever seen. Compare this with Christianity which was a religion of peace. Whatever you may say about Christianity, one cannot deny that it infiltrated the Roman world by preaching, not by war.
And wherever Islam goes, it is at enmity with other religions. They fight the Hindus and Buddhists, the Confucians, the Jews, Russian atheists, and of course Christianity. You don’t get Hindus fighting Buddhists (much) nor the Buddhists fighting the Confucians. Christianity is at peace with Hindus and the Buddhists. I’m afraid the problem is not with the Islamic extremists but with Islam itself.
Pure and utter bullshit.
That’s an SQOTD, right there.
In Singapore, the government keeps close tabs on all the religious factions, and isn’t afraid to smack them down. Which in turn actually means there’s no such thing as ‘free expression’ here, because the state takes great pain to make sure that nobody gets offended, and everybody toes the line, including religious leaders.
And in the context of an densely populated island state with ridiculous levels of gun control – it works.
I live in Singapore, and while you’re right that the government doesn’t hesitate to oppress dissonant expression, religious or otherwise, I think the greater difference is that Singapore doesn’t willingly import a massive number of people without the skills and cultural affinity to actually succeed here.
Europe has imported a huge underclass and the consequences are this horrible act, events in Sweden and generally a significant drain on the country’s finances.
And I know people like Perry will say the problem isn’t immigration but welfare, but the welfare state is here to stay so you need to deal with the attendant problems.
It’s like leaving your door unlocked at night and after getting burgaled insisting the problem isn’t an unlocked door but the existence of crime.
In Europe’s it’s probably too late to lock the door.
“This is extraordinarily primitive, almost Stone Age behaviour.”
There were dozens of witnesses and all they did was stand, watch, and chat with the perpetrators for 20 minutes waiting for the police to arrive. The stone age was more civilised than that.
Not only that, but some cultures are more susceptible to welfare than others, for various reasons.
As Jason Richwine showed in his thesis, there are some differences in human intelligence between ethnic groups that remain despite all efforts to eradicate it. And the terrible truth of this is that a majority of people who belong to ethnic groups (african, hispanic) with lower average intelligence may be doomed to a life of low/zero productivity when the jobs that they CAN do have been automated or been taken up by slightly more capable (smarter/disciplined) people from other ethnic groups (whites, east asians).
Make no mistake, it is a terrible truth. Neither palatable nor comforting… but we have to base policies informed by these truths rather than ignore them. Ignorance partly led to the problems we see now.
Does the West want to continue to be ignorant? From what happened to Richwine, I dare say it does.
This behavior might be primitive and Stone Age, but it is pretty common in Nigeria.
TWG: I can’t think of a “policy” that takes account of intelligence and ethnicity that isn’t evil and terrifying.
Futhermore your assumption that there will be no jobs for people of low intelligence is flawed. It assumes a fixed quanitity of labour (that is gradually taken by machines) and it assumes that automation only brings productivity to people of high intelligence. If that’s true then we are all doomed (to a life of idle luxury, mind). In fact automation increases productivity of all people.
Wobbly, in the space of 2 posts you advocated for what amounts to a thought police, state enforced ideology, gun control, authoritarianism and racial supremacism.
If you think you’re going to find supporters for those kinds of views here, you’re sadly mistaken. Just because I’m in favour of calling the spade that is Islam a spade, don’t think for a second that I support disenfranchising Muslims through an authoritarian state. And I suspect most other Samizdatistas feel the same.
Well said, JV.
They you have become part of the problem. The welfare state is not here to stay, it is in fact going broke before our very eyes. No ponzi scheme can last forever and welfare is no exception.
No, it is really not like that at all. Leaving your door unlocked is stupidity but a better analogue is the state making door locks illegal: that is what multiculturalism is. By MANDATING that members of a host culture not only cannot ‘discriminate’ against a culture it finds objectionable, it must in fact subsidise it… that is the problem.
You choose to accept the very institutions that cause the problem. Sorry, not willing to do that.
I don’t think anyone is “part of the problem” by accepting reality. Pie-in-the-sky economic, political, and philosophical arguments about the nature of the welfare state are all well and good but no elected official who wants to keep being reelected is going to do anything to dismantle that welfare system. People who live on the government tit get to vote too and none of them are going to vote to end their free ride.
There is a big difference between what government does and your run-of-the-mill Ponzi scheme. Someone like Bernie Madoff has access to only a limited amount of money and eventually someone doesn’t get paid. The government can, and has, just turned on the printing press. Sure it devalues the currency, but the checks will never stop coming and even once those checks are completely valueless government can always shift the blame to those who don’t “pay their fair share”, the rich, need for more taxes, whatever the political boogeyman of the day is.
The main thing about the Communications Data Bill is that the current bill is out of date. Your email communications (not the content, just the fact that a communication occurred) is already recorded. If you go to a site and use webmail, the detail of who you sent the mail to isn’t.
The idea in general is that you can find criminal networks. If the police already knew that these men were connected, this would make no difference at all.
Actually that is exactly what conceding what lies at the very core of so many problem means. Far from “accepting reality” you are actually signing off on the state’s refusal to accept reality. If you cannot bring yourself to address the actual shit-sandwich problem, all you are doing is arguing over “do we want our shit-sandwich with or without mayonnaise”.
Very true and I have often said much the same. There is a reason we hardly ever write about party politics here… it is actually irrelevant to the real issues.
Presenting an alternative narrative that explains why the regulatory welfare state is going broke is vastly more important that arguing over “do we all go over the right side of the waterfall or the left side”… we are still all going to go over the edge because the economic and social reality of the current system is unsustainable. State enforced multiculturalism and abridgement of property rights and civil liberties make the quasi-capitalist world more and more brittle by the year and as a result ‘the long run’ started becoming the ‘no-so-long run’ in 2008. People can vote as much of other people’s money as they want, it will not change how this all ends.
So I am really not that interested in discussing where to put the bandaids, I am far more interested in what is continuing to cause the wounds.
Look on the bright side! With more surveillance cameras, lots more police could have watched the murder without bothering to do a f___ing thing about it!!!
I’m a little troubled by the fact that these guys stood around for 20 minutes after committing a murder in broad daylight, and no one did a damn thing except film them on their mobiles and try not to get involved. Oh and a cub leader asked them if they would mind awfully putting the knives down. They declined.
The press are lauding her as a hero. While I’m sure it is very admirable, where were the guys rushing them with table legs and kitchen knives? Where you compare the public response with that to the Tottenham Outrage it would seem that in the course of a short 100 years, Britons have gone from a nation of heroes who will thoroughly kick the arses of anyone who dares cross us, to a nation of metrosexual pussies who play with their IPhones while waiting for the police to deal with the scary bad man.
Steven wrote :… but no elected official who wants to keep being reelected is going to do anything to dismantle that welfare system.” [My emhphasis].
You’ve put your finger on the problem, right there. As Perry implies, career politicians are interchangeable and party is largely irrelevant. The trick would be to stop people from making a career out of getting elected, via term limits or some such.
Countries are going broke but there is no movement to dismantle the welfare state. Partly due to mass immigration of low skilled people, support for welfare is rising.
The US is on the cusp of approving citizenship for between 40 and 50 million chain immigrants from Central America. They will never vote to dismantle welfare. Instead they will guarantee governments that steadily drain the treasury and wealth producers until the country withers away.
Referring to Singapore again, they have it mostly right. They provide flno incentives for welfare-seeking immigrants while strictly vetting newcomers for skills. And it works.
J.V. brings up excellent points. First off YOU are the first responder since you are there and no one else is. Second I’ve heard that the first police to arrive joined the spectators as they were not armed and the killers were. Health and Safety demands a special armed unit must deal with this.
As to the folks with table legs and the like, yes, since even table knives are forbidden in the defense of your own life, the clarion call to the sons of Arthur is; Hie thee to IKEA and be prepared to do battle for king and country! To my observation the armies of Allah wilt and flee in the face of determined opposition.
The war with Islam is in its 1500th or so year and will not end until the last house of worship is converted to a Mosque, or until the last Mosque is converted to a McDonalds, complete with McRibs.
I don’t blame any unarmed passer-by for not taking violent action against a machete-wielding killer, and I suspect that anyone advocating such action is braver at the computer screen than they would be in the street.
It would be different if we were allowed concealed carry of firearms, which I support and advocate.
But it is now to our advantage that the alleged murderers are alive and in custody. There is no point asking them why they did what they did, they’ve already told us, but it might be of value to learn about any support network they might give up under questioning.
That is one of the best situational assessments this decade.
Do you reckon (Swedish) IKEA , (or, indeed, your own beloved Gubmint), will continue to allow the sales of “tactical” table legs now?
You didn’t find the sight of Londoners milling around like sheep waiting for an authority figure to tell them what to do pathetic?
During the Tottenham outrage an army of Londoners chased some terrorists across the city. Not all of the pursuers were armed.
Accordingly I conclude that at some point between the two events there has been a complete collapse of the values of civic manliness and courage in London, at least among the general public. The only people who did anything at all were women.
At least when the terrorists came to Glasgow they got kicked in the bollocks.
Bruce: My own beloved Gubment can take an all-day hike down a very short pier with orders not to turn around until they’ve caught the elusive Snipe.
Alas I can see certain Uber-Nannies demanding legislation to forbid the carrying of tactical toothpicks, the kind with the colorful wraps on one end that can be quickly loaded into a drinking straw and blown great distances to do horrific damage. Or something.
NOTE: While writing my previous comment, I was struck with a vision of a line of sturdy English yeomen, dressed otherwise normally but sporting bicycle helmets and American football shoulder pads, each armed with a table leg mace and small coffee table buckler facing a mob of “disaffected youth” armed with rocks and bottles. Perhaps Perry or one of the regulars could fill in as the Duke of Canary Wharf leading his army forward.
In the aftermath of the battle, IKEA will be reclassified as an arms supplier and given a contract to supply the Army.
Being recently retired, I assure you an idle mind is a terrible thing to waste.
The rule in street fighting is to rush a gun but run from a knife. In a situation like Tottenham, an angry mob trumps a man with a knife or even a revolver as he faces more attackers than he can reasonably deal with and the weight of numbers reduces his chance of getting in any lethal blows before he in inevitably overwhelmed. He also understands that if he gets in any blows at all, the mob will become more enraged and probably kill him.
The Frankenstein Rule states that an angry mob with pitchforks and torches trumps an authority figure no matter how well equipped.
“Make no mistake, it is a terrible truth.”
TWG: No it’s just bollocks: productivity is not a direct consequence of intelligence. Mind you I am not surprised that someone from Singapore would hold beliefs like that.
I think we all need to start thinking about what we will do the next time such an atrocity happens. It would be so much easier if we were permitted to carry firearms. But given that we aren’t then what? I’m not sure I’d get involved, but I know deepdown that I should; ie. find something long and sharp and charge at the muslim killers with the intention of doing them physical harm. Is that irrational?
John, you have to make a tactical assessment on the spot. It is easy for people to type from the safety of their keyboards that people shudda and coulda done this, that or the other, but the accounts I read said at least one of them had what appeared to be a handgun as well as a knife (but hey, I thought those were illegal in the UK…), so just rushing them might present significant tactical ‘problems’. Getting shot to no positive effect would not make the situation any more preferable even if it would indeed indicate very admirable true grit for ‘having a go’.
You should remember that those in the area standing around who had not seen the incident live and close up might well have taken it for a car accident and reacted to the aftermath with the usual ‘rubbernecking’.
The ‘posse comitatus’ of 100 years ago seems unimaginable in urban England now.
I concede your point that it is not black and white due to the presence of a firearm Perry. Nonetheless there were about 50 people milling around just yards from a guy waving a blood soaked meat-cleaver over a dead body. I think it is both pretty clear what had happened, and that if the crowd en masse had showed even a modicum of “grit” that these loonys could have been disarmed very quickly indeed – although I cannot say for sure that it would have been without further loss of life.
I can say truthfully that had this happened in the street outside my house I would have tried to do something. But then I am unusual amongst Brits in that I keep a projectile weapon in the house (a quick-loading crossbow for home defence). Had it happened outside my work where I do not have access to my “armoury” I think I would have still tried to intervene, but obviously no one knows until they are in that situation.
It’s the way that those folk were willing to stand around gawping, but not do anything, that eats at me. In the photos several young males can be seen standing 20ft from the terrorist trying to look unobtrusive, while middle aged women were wading into the fray as best they could. It’s pathetic.
As daft as it sounds, one of the few things that makes me proud to be Scottish is that ours was the only nation who responded to an Al Qaeda attack with a vigorous kick in the bollocks. Frankly I think if that happened more often terrorism would become less and less of an issue. They may be willing to die for Allah, but are they willing to have their testicles smashed into paste beforehand? I’d wager not.
I do think that Boris Johnson is a significant step up from Dave Cameron. With Boris Johnson, one gets the impression that the puzzling diversions from the expected behaviours of the Lord Mayor Of London may have originally been devised simply because he didn’t fully understand them, and from what he knew was in contempt of them, and any which way didn’t give a rat’s. Sure, he soon after realised that there was mileage to be made in being an iconoclast, but that’s what he is if the above is true.
Dave on the other, reluctant-and-barely-present-for-duty hand, seems to me to be the complete opposite. Dave was raised in a warm liquid cocoon, possibly somewhere not on this planet. He’s been raised – relentlessly – to effortlessly exude the kinds of implacable platitudes that a politician at the top of their game might deploy to star-struck some pleb, who may not yet may then go home and say ‘ang on a cot’n pick’n minit, ‘e’s bin talkin a loada bollox, innee?’
OK, terrible caricatures all around – apologies.
Point is – Dave’s a powder-puff (albeit a particularly well-versed one) who would sell your ideological sacred cow for a grant for a multicultural roundtable session with no binding outcomes – and even THAT SHIT would be all right if he had redeeming features. But he doesn’t. Sigh.
Boris Johnson – well he is as he’s above. Bit of a wanker, bit of a knob, fairly smart chap, but I suspect that when he draws a line in the sand he enforces it with tanks. His kids’ tanks. Does he even have kids? Maybe he can borrow some tanks off the Cameron children and enforce the line with them. If they don’t have any round table events to attend.
The guy supports a more panoptic state so, no, he is just a smarter David Cameron. Hard to see how that is an improvement.
This was a very, very well planned attack, one which is easily repeatable and which the police and security services will find it impossible to stop if it’s attempted again. Everything the attackers had with them had a purpose and there was a strong plan in place with contingency options.
The initial weapon was a car. This would have enabled the attackers to escape and try again later if for some reason the victim had not been incapacitated immediately. It also had the effect of making the attack initially look like a car accident, giving another potential get-out should the attack have to be aborted.
Kitchen knives were used to murder the victim and a cleaver was carried to attempt to behead him.
The revolver served to stand off the crowd and the unarmed police officers who arrived, and guaranteed the attendance of an armed response unit. This bought time. The gun didn’t even have to work properly to do its job, and according to one report I’ve read, actually burst when fired.
While waiting for the armed response team, they clearly articulated their motives. They made no attempt to hide their identities. This made it indusputably clear that it was a terror attack and not, for instance, a botched robbery or a gang related murder.
Once the armed response team arrived, they attempted matyrdom. This step failed, so we can now expect them to put into place their contingency option, to go to jail and attempt to radicalise other muslims they meet there.
With the exception of the matyrdom part, all of their objectives were achieved, and they probably stand a good chance of acheiving their contingency objective of radicalising muslim inmates they come into contact with inside. They used nothing that could not easily be acquired by any UK citizen except for the revolver, but a replica or a blank firing gun sprayed black would work just as well. Both of those can be had legally at present (but expect another assault on your liberties in 3… 2… 1…).
The police cannot react fast enough to protect against this sort of attack or even to act as a credible deterrant. As JV said, the only defence against this sort of attack is prompt action by those who find themselves caught up in it. Legal concealed carry can only help with that.