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 – How radical leftist activist groups have captured the British Government Fourteen years in government and what have the British Conservative Party got to show for it? The highest tax burden since World War II, radical anti-freedom green policies, and critical race and gender theory being applied throughout all institutions.
Some simply blame this all on government incompetence. Others doubt the politicians actually believe what they’re advocating and suspect they are just doing it to appease special-interest groups. While these may play a part in it, one largely overlooked factor is that the British government itself is funding left-wing activism.
– Jess Gill
|
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.
|
It must take a good deal of government incompetence and appeasement-mindedness for them to overlook this.
How on earth is a *CONSERVATIVE* party pandering to masses of people who wouldn’t even piss on them if they were on fire, let alone vote for them?
Didn’t David Cameron stand up and support gay marriage saying he did so because he was progressive and a conservative? Maybe the occupants of parliament are more than a little to blame for the idiocy of the last two decades.
The real problem isn’t the ideological differences between the parties; the actual problem is that the people running both are only aping the forms of differentiation. They are all part of the same social mass, coming out of the same schools, with the same brainwashing. You couldn’t get a razor blade in between the actual effect of the parties in both the UK and the US, and that’s because they’re infested by exactly the same people.
We don’t actually have representational government. What we’ve got is government by the Tracy Flicks of the world, the “party activists” that are all the same under the skinsuits they wear. They took over a long, long time ago, and the “parties” are merely the victims of an organizational Cordyceps fungus that has taken them all over and pithed them as effectively as a lepidopterist pinning his specimen to the board.
I seriously doubt that any of the actual majority voters want either one of the parties or what they get up to. There’s a vast middle out there that doesn’t want to do any of this crap that they’ve gotten up to, and the majority would be receptive to someone standing up and speaking sensibly for once. Only, that’d be decried as “Populism”, and shouted down the same way they took out the Tea Party folks here in the US…
It’ll keep on until it can’t, and then the whole thing will spin apart like some deranged Catherine Wheel of a whirligig…
I’d like to see someone give Rishi a hard time over “far right extremists” on the one hand and Cameron’s assertion that conservative voters are “swivel eyed loons and fruitcakes” on the other. Surely these are the same group of people, prime minister, your own voters. Are you planning to suppress them, and how do you think that will play in the election?
These are not unrelated issues
I’ve long argued that exclusive political parties are the carpetbaggers of democracy and should be outlawed under electorial rules.
There is room for interest groups, from single issue all the way up to global ideology, but to allow groups to exclude people from their banner whilst at the same time submit candidates is not conducive to a fair and open election.
People should elect people with their preferred interests to represent them, not some monkey wearing the right colour rosette.
For too long the main parties have bagged this game and the Galloway win shows how awful it can become.
People have it lodged in their heads that elected politicians make policy – sometimes this is true, but mostly it is NOT true. The endless talk of “democracy” has led people to think they live in one.
No minister decides to give taxpayer money to “Stonewall” (and so on) and when a minister, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, tries to stop “Woke” (Frankfurt School “Critical Theory” Marxism) in the Civil Service and independent agencies – they find they can not.
It is NOT a matter of “Woke” (Marxist) Ministers and Prime Minister – it is a matter of a government machine which is no longer controlled by elected people.
Remember what happened to the Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, when he, allegedly, raised his voice when he found that officials were not following his orders – he was out-on-his-ear.
“Make the officials obey you!” – try that and you will be accused of “bullying” and it is you, not they, who will be OUT.
Yes an elected person can have some influence sometimes – but against such a vast unelected government machine (national and local) there is little an elected person can do. Not “nothing”, that would not be true – but little.
Especially in the British system – where there is no elected head of national government and no elected State Governors.
A minister, and the Prime Minister, can be removed at any time – they have no real legal standing. No real legal protection from efforts to remove them for offending officials by not following “the narrative”.
For example, several State Governors in the United States said “no we are not going to have a Covid lockdown here” and they made that stick – that would be impossible in the United Kingdom.
There is also the double standards of the legal system – which makes “I trust the criminal justice system” the most (darkly) amusing thing I heard on GB News yesterday.
Put up stickers saying “Save Weekley Wood” and you will get no punishment at all – but put up stickers opposing the demographic transformation of England and you get two years in prison. This is because it is not the act of putting up the sticker that is the crime, it is having an opinion that is against the establishment narrative that is the crime. “Paul the person sent to prison hates Red Sea Pedestrians like you” – so what? How is hate, an emotion, a “crime”?
It is much the same in America. Antifa Marxists attack people – and it is the people they attack who will be prosecuted (and in New York it was the people who were attacked who were sent to prison).
Even being a leftist is no protection – if you mistake in some faction fight.
Harvey Weinstein was a life long leftist “liberal” – a close friend of Hillary Clinton and so on, but he made a mistake in some factional conflict – so he was put on trial for rape.
Whenever the defense stood up to speak the journalists in the court room put down their pens and electronic devices – nothing the defense said would appear in the “mainstream media”.
It did not matter if Mr Weinstein had raped anyone or if he had traded parts in films for sex (with the young actresses sending him loving letters – AFTER he supposedly raped them) – the narrative said he was guilty (because he had backed the wrong faction – or just because he was not useful any more, time has moved on) so he as guilty, and the jury did what they were told to do.
Just as the jury in the case of someone said to prison for posting the old “vote by text” joke meme (which was invented by Clinton supporters – and then copied by Trump supporters, a rare case of the left inventing a meme) did what was expected of them – what the narrative demanded.
Murder trial? Certainly – the jury will find someone guilty when they know (they know) the “murder victim” (Mr Floyd) died of drugs he willingly consumed. Guilty is what the narrative demands – so guilty it is.
Civil or criminal trials – does not matter, a jury can be found that will support the narrative.
Paul,
We expect politicians to be sufficiently charismatic to get elected on the one hand and capable of formulating and implementing policy on the other. I would suggest few individuals have both abilities and so a natural division of labour occurs, the politicians concentrate on politics and the bureaucrats handle the administration.
Unfortunately we have allowed the bureaucracy to grow to such a size, and to be responsible for so many people’s daily bread, that it can pretty much vote itself into office without involving the taxpayer. If the bureaucrats have their way, they will try to turn taxpayers into helots, who will then down tools and walk away, and that will be that for Western Civ.
Roue le Jour.
There is a lot of truth in what you say – but you overestimate the importance of who is elected.
Yes elected politicians can have some influence on government – but the way the system is structured, that influence is limited.
For example, at the local government level, Council Tax will go up the full amount that Central Government permits – this is because most spending is (by national regulations) on Adult Social Care and Children’s Social Care (both “demand led services”).
So the idea that “if I vote X my Council Tax will be lower than if I vote Y” (democracy) has been undermined. In other countries there are “equalizing policies” – so some areas are forced to subsidize other areas (that this destroys democracy is ignored).
It is still, at least partly, true in the United States that how you vote really may influence the level of tax in American States – but much less true here.
As for “down tools and walk away”.
That is happening right now in some American States – such as New York, New Jersey and California. Honest people are fleeing – leaving vicious people, ideal for Progressive juries.
But the rulers do not seem to care – as the Corporations get their money from the financial entities and they get their money from the Federal Reserve, which creates the money from NOTHING.
The system, both in America and here, depends on money being created from NOTHING and dished out to the Corporate entities.
The international establishment openly hate farmers and manufacturers – only money-created-from-nothing is an economy (according to them) – it is “GDP”.
They really do think like this – farming and manufacturing are, supposedly, evil – only “GDP”, spending from money-created-from-nothing, matters.
Simplest statement of the problem possible? We’ve put the precise wrong sort of people in charge of things.
Mainly through a series of perverse incentives that don’t work the way everyone likes to think they do. Elections are popularity contests, and nobody wants to hear anything like a harsh truth like “Social Security is unsustainable as constituted”.
So, we get the lying liars who tell us that everything is fine, and that the sky is cerulean blue, and that those storm clouds of impending insolvency don’t really exist.
Monarchies and strong-man rule gets us the problem that no one man is virtuous or competent enough to run things, and going with what we’ve got going gives us the problem that the masses aren’t much better when it comes to making decisions about what to do for societies. So, what to do?
Muddle through, as always. Idiots.
I think we’d be better off without the popularity contests, and making government something everyone does for a short period of their lives, and no more. Pick legislators by lot, same with the executive from men and women who’ve experience at that sort of thing. You couldn’t munge things up any more that way than we have…
I’m on a parish council, and they are notorious for not enough people standing for election, so we always have vacancies. Parish councils are allowed to co-opt to fill vacancies, so we are effectively a self-selecting oligarchy. 😉
Of course, we are subject to the normal danger of perpetually self-selecting incompetant morons.
Kirk is right. I don’t see Biden, Trump, Starmer, Sunak or any other major political figure (apart maybe from the Argentine PM, who’s been excellent so far), been honest about the parlous state of government finance and spoken frankly on what to do about.
When Macron in France tried to raise the state retirement age, all hell broke loose. A church in Bordeaux was set ablaze, I think.
A big problem is the wider public. There’s a level of evasion of reality that would make Ayn Rand wince.
Kirk is right. I don’t see Biden, Trump, Starmer, Sunak or any other major political figure (apart maybe from the Argentine PM, who’s been excellent so far), being honest about the parlous state of government finance and spoken frankly on what to do about.
When Macron in France tried to raise the state retirement age, all hell broke loose. A church in Bordeaux was set ablaze, I think.
A big problem is the wider public. There’s a level of evasion of reality that would make Ayn Rand wince.
Apologies for double-posting.
Yes the Argentine President has been more honest about the economic mess then any other government leader I can think of.
But he also has real powers (a President of Argentina seems to have more powers over the budget than American one does), and can not be removed without Impeachment.
A British Prime Minister has little real power (the position does exist in law – but it has few actual powers) and can be removed on a whim of the establishment – without any formal Impeachment process.
The last American President who dramatically reduced government spending, from a peacetime total, was President Harding – and that was more than a century ago now.
Warren Harding really did reduce government spending (dramatically) – it was his personal efforts that got this through Congress.
I suspect that this is why the establishment hate him so much and have made up so many lies about him.
In the United States in a natural disaster I think it is the case (in spite of the vile “FEMA” bureaucracy) that elected people still have some real power – local Mayors, State Governors and so on.
In the United Kingdom this is not the case – in time of natural disaster (flood – whatever) the mask is dropped and the “Chief Executive” (an official) takes over openly (by law) – the elected people stop pretending to be in charge.