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A robust libertarian attitude to road signs

· French affairs · Humour · UK affairs

Ben Macintyre argues in the Times that the proliferation of road signs that order, warn, chide, and harry drivers, not to mention giving involuntary Welsh and Gaelic language lessons to those navigating busy roundabouts, has become a danger in its own right. “We’ve lost our way when it comes to road signs”. I suppose that link should have been preceded by:
\\\
\\
\
PAYWALL AHEAD

…but I thought it would be more fun to place the warning where it was too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, where was I? (as the actress said to the bishop coming on to the M6 from the A38(M)). Oh, that’s right. I did enjoy this exchange from the comments:

mumqueem

Sometimes I think there aren’t enough signs. Such as when negotiating an unknown town and directions to your destination just disappear. So you drive in circles until you pick up the relevant signs. I never have this problem in France.

John Hatch
@mumqueem

I also never have this problem in France.

It is one of the many advantages of not going there.

When my father first went to France, he disregarded the road signs. He relied on his map and the fact that he was sitting in the turret of a tank.

September 5th, 2014 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

Thirty years ago, a custody sergeant beneath Nottingham Magistrates Court told me (I was then a young solicitor and we were chatting as I waited for a client to be brought up from the cells) that there were many “honour killings” in the city but that his colleagues routinely accepted the families’ ludicrous explanations; e.g. that the girl had committed suicide by pouring paraffin on herself and setting herself alight. The detectives believed these deaths were murders, but feared their bosses would think them racists if they pursued the cases. So they let murderers walk free.

To my shame, I disbelieved him and called him a “racist”. He looked at me sadly and said “then you, young man, are part of the problem.” He was right. He was an honourable man who thought all lives of equal value. He was rightly disgusted at the true racism of holding these families to a lower standard of behaviour. I, fresh from my Marxist professors, had bought into political correctness. I was refusing to open my mind to a disturbing possibility that did not suit my world-view.

Twisting language and contorting truth to suit your political beliefs is not some game to amuse the semi-educated self-righteous. It has consequences; including those we now face in Rotherham and will probably face in other British towns. We need to face reality even when it doesn’t suit us and do the right thing regardless. Probably there will be some effort to do so now, but how long before the Guardian and its readers raise the cry of “racial harassment?”

– ‘Tom Paine‘ commenting on Samizdata.

September 5th, 2014 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)

Direct health care: register your interest

· Health & medical

Recently I wrote about Simon Gibbs’ idea to find doctors willing to offer direct health care, providing better care at good value to customers and making a profit at it. Now his site Libertarian Home is gathering a list of people in the UK interested in such a service.

Register to express your interest in purchasing, for your own needs, a monthly subscription for GP services such as check-ups, disease management, minor treatments, obstetrics, and advice.

Simon explained to me that he wants to find a cluster of people who make a potentially viable business for someone, and put them in touch. You will be signing up to be notified of opportunities.

I hope he can help make this work. For the right price I would welcome such a service: it would be valuable to just have access to a doctor who I could chat with at leisure for general advice and not feel like I was being a nuisance.

September 4th, 2014 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Want to blame someone for Rotherham? Lets start with the Guardian…

· UK affairs

The English ‘fascist‘ movement is a bit like a bowel movement, smelly but easily disposed of. In truth they are so trivial in terms of their support or intellectual influence that I cannot escape the notion they get as much publicity as they do primarily to keep them as a boogieman to be pointed at by their equally irrelevant confrères on the loony left.

The Rotherham scandal is not about comically half witted and pleasingly unphotogenic fascists (sorry Ed Temple). It is not about Islam or Pakistanis (sorry BNP, EDL et al.). It is not even about immigration (sorry UKIP). It is entirely about how the political culture pushed unfailingly by the BBC and Guardian (and the increasingly indistinguishable Telegraph and other formerly ‘Tory’ papers) for decades has so completely enervated British institutions along with all the mainstream political parties, that such thugs could not be dealt with. We do not need more laws, we have more than enough to deal with what happened. What we need is the preposterous culture of political correctness and its obsession with race to be flushed down the toilet.

So my caring sharing multicultural leftie chums… Rotherham? That is entirely down to you. Yes, YOU

Yes of course the rapists needed to be ‘blamed’, prosecuted and sent to jail, but that applies to all rapists. That should go without saying.

But Rotherham is not a ‘normal’ case of a rape gang, it is far more than that. It is about the entire edifice of the British state utterly failing to do what it is supposed to do. THAT is what I am blaming the Guardian and BBC for. They did not create the culture that these rapists came from, blame Pakistani Islam for that (and do so loudly and unapologetically and tell anyone who responds with “that is racist!” by saying “fuck off you apologist for rapists and the community leaders who shield them”). The blame I am talking about is the multiculturalists who let it happen and keep happening. They have ‘marched through the institutions’ and Rotherham is the result.

September 4th, 2014 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations

“There are no facts, only interpretations”, Friedrich Nietzsche once said. One needn’t be a nihilist or a relativist to be bemused at the latest radical rewriting of history from our official number-crunchers. Everything we thought we knew about the British economy’s performance over the past 15 years or so now turns out to be wrong. Endless articles, books and academic papers have become worthless at the stroke of the statisticians’ pen.”

– Allister Heath.

Hey, I thought the science was settled!

September 4th, 2014 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

The invasion proceeds according to plan

· Hippos · How very odd! · UK affairs

thames_hippo

September 3rd, 2014 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)

Our Chavez, who art in heaven

· How very odd! · Latin American Affairs · Religion

Progressive Venezuela has rediscovered the benefits of Emperor worship:

“Venezuelan Socialists rewrite Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Chavez, who art in heaven'”

No doubt, like Claudius, the Divine Hugo will be worshipped by the more gullible among the British tribesmen. As Seneca wrote in the Apocolocyntosis,

Is it not enough that he has a temple in Britain, that savages worship him and pray to him as a god, so that they may find a fool to have mercy upon them?”

September 3rd, 2014 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

The new world of news

· Media & Journalism · Middle East & Islamic

It is interesting that media groups like the Kurdish Rûdaw are now able to plonk their news on YouTube with English subtitles, giving us yet another perspective of what is happening beyond the usual suspects.

I find it fascinating. Of course it will be no less slanted depending on the sensibilities of the source, but the notion of being able to watch stuff from a Kurdish news organisation in Erbil would have seemed fantastical just a few years ago. The fact they provide foreign subtitles is very telling.

September 2nd, 2014 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

The impression given was that to be against multiculturalism is like being against chicken tikka masala, or bhangra, or arts festivals or smiley brown skinned people or fun generally. But multiculturalism isn’t and never was a handy synonym for “multiethnic”. And at last, it seems, the majority of British people have twigged.

– James Delingpole

September 1st, 2014 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)

Deleted by the Guardian… spotting the pattern

· Deleted by the Woke Media · Middle East & Islamic · UK affairs

I found this interesting:

Harun Khan said many young British-born Muslims felt pushed to the fringes of society and that the latest government crackdown could nudge them further into the grasp of radical clerics, instead of drawing them back into mainstream society.

If they want to be in mainstream society in the UK, then their young males need to go down the pub and their young females need to stop wearing a head scarf. But this was my reply:

So if I understand what Harun Khan is saying, it is that monitoring members of the Muslim community for fear of Islamic extremism will cause radicalisation, so the thing to do is to leave it to the imams and community leaders to ensure everything is hunky dory. So a bit like Rotherham then?

And the Guardian’s reply was:

This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.

Now as I respect private property, unlike the some I could mention, I accept that as the comment was posted on the Guardian’s site, it is up to them what they allow to be published… so no nonsensical bleating about ‘censorship’ please… their house, their rules. I certainly never apologise for deleting comments I think are inappropriate on Samizdata, and neither should the Guardian.

But I do find it interesting that what I think was a pretty innocuous remark gets axed the moment it touches on this particular topic. I sense that a thread is being pulled on the whole morally relativistic carpet that has been draped over the large grunting shitting snuffling pig in the middle of the room, and there is mounting alarm in ‘certain circles’ as they see this carpet coming unravelled. So to me the issue is not “Oh noez! My comment has been cruelly deleted!” but rather “it is interesting to see this particular pattern show where the intolerable sensitivities are”. If that is the weak point, that is where to keep thrusting the dagger.

But then as I said last time I got a comment deleted, that was the sort of mainstream media world view that pushed me into setting up Samizdata in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11.

And so I introduce a new comment category today: Deleted by the Guardian

September 1st, 2014 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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