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]
|
Samizdata quote of the day – the opposite of conservatism Net Zero policies are trashing private property rights, stealing vast resources from taxpayers, and creating a moribund economy based on Soviet-style government planning – the total opposite of conservatism.
– Richard Wellings in response to this gaseous emission (£) by Selwyn Gummer in which he argues delaying ruinous Net Zero policies is “unconservative”.
The ‘Conservative’ Party should be repudiating the entire climate scam, not just delaying bits of it to harmonise the UK’s economic ruin with the EU’s economic ruin.
|
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.
|
There is no Conservative Party – look at their treatment of Andrew Bridgen.
They’re just bought and paid for WEF scum.
Perry, welcome to Wiltshire. Permanent or temporary? As to the quote: totally agree it’s a scam. I helped write a report back in 2012 about electric cars. My input, as a mechanical and electrical engineer, was On the production of electricity and distribution of same. It is obviously a problem and I said so. Of course, nobody listened. Now the s**t will start to hit the fan. I can’t wait.
it’s not just net zero, any kind of soviet-style planning is not conservative policy.
You’d have thought with all the historical crisis, up to and including COVID and Ukraine, people would twig that government is not the answer, and morons like May, Boris, Corbyn, Starmer and Rishi are not the brilliant individuals we would like them to be.
Sometimes I think people only vote to make sure the wrong lizard doesn’t win.
I’ve been saying for ages that politics is a spectator sport and the voters only care that their team wins. They don’t care what their guy did in the past, what his policies will be, who he wants to hire. The only thing that matters is the other side doesn’t win. It wasn’t about how great Biden was, it was about stopping Trump. It isn’t about making sure the Republicans win, it’s about making sure the Democrats lose. Politicians might as well wear jerseys instead of suits.
If the people who ostensibly run the countries in the West don’t care enough to pay attention to the politicians beyond what party affiliation is behind their name, why should we get any other result?
Nothing wrong with that. If “the lesser of two evils” is my only choice, I’m going to vote against the worst. Abstaining simply gives one effective vote to the worst.
And when they’re both equally evil?
But you don’t get to vote against someone, just for someone. So if you vote for, say Biden because you hate Trump, then you aren’t saying “Don’t enact Trump policies” you are saying “Do enact Biden policies.” Steven asks a good question, but putting it aside for one moment, what if they are both evil, but guy A is more evil than guy B. Even if guy B wins, you still get more evil. And moreover, you lose the right to question the whole thing by participating — doing so gives it an imprimatur of legitimacy.
I’m not saying don’t vote for the lesser of two evils, do what you judge is best. Though one might well ask — why bother? You vote makes no actual, practical difference. But, if you do, at least we need to go in with our eyes open, and a recognition that what actually improves our lives are not politicians, but rather doing whatever we can to isolate and insulate ourselves from them as much as we possibly can. And of course, getting on with our lives ignoring the bastards as much as we can.
When I became a US citizen they give you a little civics quiz. One question I was asked is “what is the most important right a citizen has.” The “correct” answer is “the right to vote.” I think that is a curious expectation. It is the expectation that you must give your assent, your imprimatur, to one of the bastards no matter how bad they are. I’d suggest that the correct answer is “the right of free speech”, because then you can point out how terrible they both are.
Fraser,
Your answer isn’t wrong but I would argue that the right is indeed very important and that the expectation isn’t that you *must* vote but that you are better off with the option then without it. You don’t have to vote and the last I looked 50+% of the voting population routinely decided that Election Day was a good time to stay home and play video games instead.
I myself would argue that you get a lot more good then evil with either Trump or DeSantis. But that’s a separate question from the “What if they’re both Evil?” one. At that point, I would argue, you do need to weigh evil vs. Evil to decide which one comes closer to what you want and that you should think carefully before deciding to go with the video games. But your mileage may vary on that one.
Steven R,
This one might sound goofy but if you think both sides are evil perhaps the next logical step would be to use TV Tropes and decide where you would place each candidate on the Sliding Scale of Antagonist Vileness and maybe see if there’s any notable qualitative difference that way? 🙂
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfAntagonistVileness
If you are voting for the lesser of two evils you are still voting for evil. In addition the lesser evil will then claim that your vote is an endorsement and that their policies are exactly what you voted for. I spoiled the ballot at the last GE because there wasn’t a single candidate that I didn’t regard as an enemy.
The only way that a country of this vast population could achieve ZERO C02 emissions is by policies similar, or even more extreme, than those of the Marxist Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s – which eliminated a third of the population of the country.
Let that sink in.
Depends how ‘lesser’ the evil is. Trouble with lesser evil voting (when it is only just a bit lesser) is it provides zero incentive for the lesser evil to actually do anything you want them to do (or not do). In order to get your vote, all they have to do is mostly ape the greater evil and just do one or two things slightly less evil. And as the greater evil gets more evil, so does the lesser evil, just incrementally less so, because that is the path of least resistance for them
That is exactly where we find ourselves in UK, with a ‘Conservative’ Party that has members happy to describe themselves as ‘woke’ (indeed, a former leader of the party).
Is Labour worse? Sure, no doubt. Will the Tories try and turn the tide? No, and why should they? That would require real work & mean they need to fundamentally reject comunitarianism, aggressively reject wokeness with deeds not words, reject so called “anti-racism” (i.e. actual racism), and hardest of all, ruthlessly purge the civil service, reintroduce the concept of Ultra Vires, stop funding 90% of all NGOs/QUANGOs, reintroduce actual Parliamentary debate rather than guillotine-motion-by-default, etc. etc…
Never going to happen. And why? Because the Tories know they only have to be ever so slightly less ghastly than Labour for you to vote for them regardless.
I’ve voted Tory since 1979 with one exception (I voted Brexit Party in the final Euro elections 2019). But given what happened to Truss, short of Kemi Badenoch (who is transparently insincere re. her support for Net Zero) mounting a Thatcherite coup d’etat & deselecting maybe 60 sitting Tory MPs 😀 – I’ll henceforth be voting Reform Party (even though they are far from ideal). That’s my small contribution to burning the Tories to ash in the next election.
The Net Zero issue for me is the absolute marker. Reform is the only option I have to vote for a party that is clearly different, warts and all. Lesser evil? Yes, but by my metrics, considerably lesser & massively so on the core enabler issue taking the world rapidly towards totalitarianism: Net Zero & the climate cult.
Yes, Labour will win and it will be ghastly. But frankly I do not give a damn if eco-lunatic blue communitarians are in power or eco-lunatic red communitarians are in power. The only way I have to send a “fuck you, I want to you burn” message to the Tory Party is not to abstain but to vote Reform.
Perry – the Prime Minister has rowed back on the, potentially genocidal, “Net Zero” (or Year Zero) agenda – and has come under fire from lunatics such as John Selwyn Gummer (of the infamous “Y.C.s Care Do You?” campaign of the 1970s) for doing so.
If a politician is not supported for changing their policy, if they only receive attacks for doing so, then the message they will get is plain “I must carry on with Net Zero – because I am only going to get attacks, not support, for rowing back” the same on the, utterly insane “HS2” and all the rest of it.
Reform or Reclaim? Well Laurence Fox and Andrew Bridgen are fighting a good fight so Reclaim would seem better – but, as you know, neither Reform or Reclaim have any chance – and the Labour Party is fanatically committed to destroying this country, as part of the international agenda of the destruction of the West (“so are some so called Conservatives Paul” – yes I know).
By the way – Suella Braverman is putting up more resistance to leftist policies in government than Kemi Badenoch is. The Civil Servants and “independent experts” seem to have crushed some of Kemi’s spirit on such things as getting rid of European Union inspired regulations.
But we do need actions not just words – for example we need to leave the international conventions and other agreements on “refugees”, the mass migration to an already overburdened country is madness.
Promising action in the next General Election manifesto is not good enough – there have been promises to end mass immigration (which is destroying this nation) for many years – voters are sick of promises, they want effective action, and they want it now.
The Treasury support mass migration because it puts “GDP” up (as government spending on migrants, funded by creating “money” from nothing, “adds to GDP”) and enables them to say “Britain is not in recession” – meanwhile people get poorer and poorer, both as individuals and families, the voters are not deceived by “total GDP”.
Even the Democrat Mayor of New York City knows what mass migration is doing – how it is utterly incompatible with government benefits and “public services”.
In a world where migrants were just left to starve, an open door immigration policy might work – as people would not come if they knew they were coming to sleep out in the rain, have no food, and have no medical care – but such a position would NOT be acceptable.
Today mass migration means ever more burdens on the people – the population getting poorer and poorer. Till the nation totally collapses.
Really? Is he calling for the Climate Change Act to be repealed? No… so all that’s changed is Sunak harmonising the timing of the UK’s eco-suicide with the EU’s eco-suicide, rather than us jumping off the cliff first.
I read what you say Perry. And I am presently not able to think of an effective reply.
By the way, I notice that the media is condemning Lawrence Fox for saying he would not “shag” a certain lady – even though the lady herself had previously used the word “shag” in relation to Mr Fox and others.
So a person gets condemned, and suspended by his employer – and attacked by colleagues, including a Mr Peters who I seem to remember (I will be corrected if I am mistaken) tried to take the credit for the work of Mark Steyn in exposing child rape in British towns, all for using the word “shag” in relation to a person who had already used the word “shag” in relation to him (and others).
Hard to care about a society where such blatant double standards, such blatant injustice, dominates.
Yet Another Chris: I wrote a similar report, well short-form essay, as a unscripted price for my electrical engineering C&G way back in 1995, and stated the same conclusion. Switching half the country’s energy consumption from one existing network (gas) to another existing network (electricity) on top of what it was already carrying would not work as it was already carrying everything it could without digging up every single street in the entire country. Plus you would need to double the size of the electrical generation capacity, repeating 100 years of construction, without even taking account of inline replacement of worn-out existing capacity.
Steven R
September 26, 2023 at 6:09 pm
And when they’re both equally evil?
And when your vote isn’t being counted? Is actively ignored by the vote counters? And it’s all lied about by the legacy media? And they also control education so most of the people don’t know or care? Pitchfork time!
Should the elected government denounce the rigging of temperature data and all the rest of “climate” fraud? Yes it should.
But this is about as likely as an elected government admitting that the 2020 American Presidential election was rigged (both Members of Parliament and senior Civil Servant have told me that they know it was – but America is “our closest ally” so nothing can be said or done, other than pass legislation to make it harder to do the same thing, rig elections, in the United Kingdom), or to admit that the Covid “vaccines” were not very effective and certainly were not safe – injuring or killing many people.
The best we can hope for is quietly backing away from these things, more actions to quietly move away from genocidal “Net Zero” (although Perry is correct – the Act of Parliament is a terrible problem), and declaring that only the very old and sick should get the Covid injections (yes that is problematic – as the injections are not very effective will more of even the old and sick be harmed by the injections themselves rather than saved by them?) rather than the vicious American government policy of pushing the injections on as many people as they can. And, as already stated, making harder to rig elections in the United Kingdom.
Sadly, tragically, governments do not admit mistakes if those mistakes are on a huge scale – they just (at best) quietly back away from certain policies, without ever admitting that the policies (pushed by the international authorities) did terrible harm.
The Climate Change Act of 2008 reminds me of the Equality Act of 2010.
Such Labour Acts of Parliament, in effect, make a Conservative policy unlawful – illegal (they were poison pills left by the last Labour government, although supported by many “Conservatives” who did not even bother to study the Bills they were voting for). Such Acts of Parliament commit the British government to radical Collectivism, both in the economic and cultural (societal) areas.
But to even suggest REPEAL gets a person dismissed as insane.
As for John Selwyn Gummer – now Lord D. he was a supporter of Edward Heath, even in the party leadership election of 1975.
In a sane world support for Edward Heath, of wild government spending, government wage and price controls, three day weeks, wreaking local government (the “reorganisation”) and a thousand other pieces of Collectivist lunacy, should consign someone to the waste heap of history – but in our insane world he became Chairman of the Conservative Party in 1983 and has had endless honours and ministerial positions.
Perry condemns the Prime Minister for not openly breaking with Year Zero – Lord D. condemns the Prime Minister for the opposite reason, Lord D. wants the United Kingdom destroyed at once, no delays, no backing away from destruction. Death Now! is the policy of Lord D.
It is also the policy of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.
No delays, no rethinks – destruction and death now.
Paul:
Remember that the impartial chairman of the Climate Change Committee also seems to make a lot of money out of Big Green policies. But since climate change is real and cannot be denied, there can be no objection to that.
Clever chap, at our expanse, that Lord Deben.
JohnK.
It is a mixture – yes there is financial corruption involved, but mostly they really believe in this world “governance” stuff, and are happy to use C02 (or anything else) as an excuse for it.
If challenged publicly they will scream “paranoia” and “Conspiracy Theory” – even though the documents are in the public domain.
And if challenged privately they smile and say “what is your alternative to us – Putin?”
It is hard, very hard, not to despair.
Upon reflection, I believe that some of the Statutes of the last Labour Government (really part of an international “Progressive” agenda of tyranny) were more radical than even what the Atlee Government (1945-1951) did.
The Atlee government wanted to take over private industry – but the “Climate Change Act” of 2008 is aimed at destroying industry, and destroying modern faming as well. The international media pretend that it was “corruption” that destroyed Sir Lanka (Ceylon), but, in reality, it was this “Green New Deal” agenda. The effects in Britain would be far WORSE – yes WORSE.
Also the Atlee government, apart from the lunatic Chairman of the Labour Party – Harold Laski, never seriously considered introducing totalitarian thought control – but that is just what the “Equality Act” of 2010 aims at doing.
It is the conclusion of a long series of Acts (going all the way back to 1965) designed to change the way ordinary people behave, speak, and (yes) think – a policy of destroying traditional society and replacing it with a totally different society (the old society being held to be evil).
Polly Toynbee (a person at the heart of the Collectivist establishment) called the Equality Act codifying socialism into law – in the sense of mental socialism, way beyond “the ownership of the means of production”, mind control, along with “Progressive” education aimed at creating a new sort of person – the dream of Plato thousands of years before Karl Marx.
The end of such “reactionary” things as a national culture (Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada is much the same – he has indicated that his main aim is to eliminate the very idea that there is a “Canadian culture” his hatred of his own nation, of his own people, is that extreme), and the traditional family, and traditional sexual roles.
If successful such a program would mean a population that had no cultural connection to traditional British (or traditional Western) culture at all – yet the current government will not repeal the Equality Act any more than will repeal the (genocidal) Climate Change Act.
This is what Perry is saying, and (again, upon reflection) I see the terrible nature of what he is pointing to.
The mad communes of Plato can not sustain a population of tens of millions of people – and before anyone points to the Kibbutz, and other communal settlements, of Israel – these things never made up more than 5% (1 Jew in 20) of the Jewish population, and many of them collapsed (or were utterly transformed) after subsidies were withdrawn in the 1970s.
Contrary to that lunatic Klaus Schwab (and the rest of the international lunatics – including the controllers of the gigantic corporations) a vast modern society can not (CAN not) be organised on this Collectivist basis.
Whether it is a “noble” community of people living off looting new arrivals (as in the American television show “Found”) or the Disney Corporation making endless dreadful films and dreadful television programmes, to please “BlackRock” and the Federal Reserve that funds “BlackRock” and other such multi Trillion Dollar entities, this economic and social model will-not-work.