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]
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Here are a couple of recent stories, both recently linked to by Instapundit, that I think deserve to be put next to each other.
First, here is a quote I found while rootling about in the McCain/Feingold story, which Dale Amon has already posted about here. Here is the bit that interested me:
These laws are decidedly NOT aimed at online press, commentary or blogs, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was carefully drafted to exclude them. The FEC has now been asked to initiate a rulemaking to work out how to deal with different kinds of Internet political expenditures, and there will be plenty of opportunity for public commentary.
This denial is, of course, the result of the exact opposite having been alleged. I read it because one Winfield Myers of the Democracy Project quotes it, and notes that the quotee, a hot shot lawyer, makes very little of his past legal relationship with McCain. Bloggers prefer it when they know where people are coming from.
And the second quote, is from a review of a book called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.
McNab was a seafood importer who shipped undersized lobsters and lobster tails in opaque plastic bags instead of paper bags. These were trivial violations of a Honduran regulation – equivalent to a civil infraction, or at most, a misdemeanor. However, using creative lawyering, a government prosecutor used this misdemeanor offense as the basis for the violation of the Lacey Act, which is a felony. The prosecutor then used the Lacey Act charge as a basis to stack on smuggling and money laundering counts. You got that?
McNab was guilty of smuggling since he shipped lobster tails in bags that you can see through, instead of shipping them through bags that would frustrate visual inspection. He was guilty of money laundering since he paid a crew on his ship to “smuggle the tails.” Although it turned out that the Honduran regulation was improperly enacted and thus unenforceable, the government did not relent. A honest businessman lost his property and his freedom: McNab is serving 8-years in prison.
Okay, so what do the tribulations of a seafood importer have to do with the right of bloggers to blog what they damn well please? Well, what interests me is the political process involved in both matters. How the hell do the laws and the processes that got poor Mr McNab nabbed get put in place in the first place? The phrase “not aimed at” is the point of this posting. → Continue reading: “Not aimed at who?”: how distributed governmental stupidity McNabs the innocent
A week ago I hosted a meeting at my home, and took photos, a couple of which are, I now think on looking through them again, rather good.
This one, of Samizdatista Philip Chaston, shows him in full put-that-bloody-camera-away mode:
But I carried on snapping, and also got this rather nice pic, of the speaker that night, Patrick Crozier (left as we look) and of occasional Samizdata commenter on behalf of the Total Libertarian Correctness tendency, Paul Coulam (right – as always):
This photograph is my response to this, which, alas, was then getting into its evil stride.
Although, I recently, in a moment of disgusted introspection, found myself understanding where the mania to ban smoking comes from. A friend had asked, yet again, if I minded him smoking in my home. In truth I do mind, but tolerate it from friends. (Non-friends who smoke in my home disgust me.) So the answer is usually, as it was last Friday, okay go ahead. After all, if they want to smoke, I can either cross them off my friend list, or put up with it and stop moaning. Easy.
Well, no. What I would like would be some magic procedure which would stop them smoking, so that they could remain on my friend list without any reservations or difficulties or embarrassments or resentments.
The thing about laws is that they have little impact on criminals, but they can change the habits of the law abiding. So, if you want some of your friends to behave differently, the law can magically achieve what you alone cannot. I cannot make my smoking friends stop smoking. But the law can!
To which my answer, to myself, is: Get thee behind me Satan. I will not support legal coercion merely because it will solve a tricky little problem in my personal life. But to which, alas, the answer of many others is: We want our friends to stop smoking, but we cannot merely say that, and pass the law. So instead we must dress our tastes up in the language of care and concern, and jabber on about health hazards, and best of all about passive smoking.
The simple truth is that lots of non-smokers simply do not like it when smokers smoke in their vicinity, or worse, in their homes and workplaces. They do not like it. They want it stopped. Health, for many people is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a mere smokescreen. Personally, I do not give a damn what my friends are doing to their health. That really is their business and not mine at all. The smell of smoking in my flat, for several days afterwards, that is what I wish would go away.
No doubt there is some kind of spray on stuff that would help me, but you know how it is. That is just one more stupid thing to have to worry about. How much easier would it be if the law could just put a stop to it! (No! Satan! Go away I say.)
The serious point is: if I were to get my smoking ban, what would be next?
Digital photography perhaps? Such a ban would surely attract widespread support.
I have long believed that Robert Mugabe, ruler of the hapless Zimbabwe, will die before he ever admits to having made a mistake. Yet the Telegraph now offers this report, about how Mugabe has admitted to making a mistake!
President Robert Mugabe confessed yesterday that millions of acres of prime land seized from Zimbabwe’s white farmers are now lying empty and idle.
Confessed.
After years spent trumpeting the “success” of the land grab, Mr Mugabe, 81, admitted that most of the farms transferred to black owners have never been used.
Admitted.
But what did Mugabe actually say?
… in his home province yesterday, Mr Mugabe chided the new landowners for growing crops on less than half of their land.
“President Mugabe expressed disappointment with the land use, saying only 44 per cent of the land distributed is being fully utilised,” state television reported. “He warned the farmers that the government will not hesitate to redistribute land that is not being utilised.”
In other words, Mugabe admitted no wrongdoing at all. He made the right decision. It was the people who were charged with implementing the decision who did wrong, by failing to grow as much food as they should have.
Plenty of other people are saying that Mugabe made a mistake with this larcenous policy:
Critics said Mr Mugabe’s admission exposed the land grab’s “failure”.
“It has been a phenomenal and absolute failure on every level,” said Tendai Biti, secretary for economic affairs of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. “It has failed both in terms of production of crops and in terms of the occupation of the land.”
And what is more, they seem to have supplied the Telegraph with a reason for the failure of the new farmers to farm successfully:
The new farmers are unable to raise bank loans because their properties are formally owned by the government and they have no individual title deeds. Without loans, they cannot buy seed, fertiliser or farming equipment and the regime has broken a pledge to supply them with tools.
Some farmers have resorted to using horse-drawn ploughs. Many have given up trying to produce anything at all.
So Mr Mugabe has made yet another mistake, this time in mishandling the arrangements for the new farmers with whom he has replaced the previous ones he stole from. But has he admitted it? No. Has he shifted the blame onto the hapless farmers? Yes. I would not want to be in their shoes now.
Par for the course. Mugabe is infallible. Reality is unworthy of him and has let him down.
But more importantly, this is a revolution that is starting to devour its own, to implode. Those “new farmers” are, or were, enthusiastic Mugabe supporters, were they not?. Now they are being blamed for the failure of a Mugabe policy. With luck, this means that this vile regime is now starting seriously to weaken itself, rather than merely to weaken its enemies.
If that is right, it might help to explain this:
Zimbabwe will hold parliamentary elections on March 31 and, for the first time in 10 years, Mr Mugabe is no longer holding out the offer of white-owned land as a vote-winner. Instead, his speeches are dominated by attacks on Tony Blair, who he claims is plotting to recolonise Zimbabwe.
I daresay many of his listeners are thinking: that sounds good. When is the Great White Blair due?
As I have said before, Robert Mugabe is now the leading spreader of the idea that Africa should be reconquered by white people.
Samizdata has been a bit quiet for the last few months, by its early standards. Partly, this has been because a lot of us have become busier, doing our various versions of real life. But partly, I suspect, it is because the big story out there during the last few months, the onward march of democracy in the Middle East, first in the form of the Iraq election, and then in the form of the demands for more democracy stirred up by the example of the Iraq election, has been somewhat of an embarrassment to us Samizdatistas. While Instapundit and his many linkees have exulted, only the occasional grudging posting here, to the effect that democracy is a step in roughly the right direction, has broken our silence on this subject.
The Samizdata view of democracy, most eloquently expressed by Perry de Havilland, is that democracy is one thing, and freedom is quite another. Freedom is freedom. And democracy means the mob doing whatever the hell it likes, which may be freedom but which is just as likely to be tyranny.
Few now talk this way. Nowadays, the tendency is to regard freedom and democracy as so closely related to one another as to amount to a new noun and a single thing: freedomandemocracy.
Freedomandemocracy has been the great ideological winner of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, conservatives and old-school liberals were still to be heard denouncing freedomandemocracy as mob rule, Perry de Havilland style. Then, other isms arose, full of the certainty that their preferred revolutionary and/or national (mix to taste) elite knew best and that freedomandemocracy was doomed, by its incoherence, moral mediocrity, lack of national team spirit, and general shabbiness, feebleness and decadence. But as the twentieth century rolled onwards, freedomandemocracy proved surprisingly resilient, and it was the isms that proved shabby and decadent, and morally far worse than mediocre. And freedomandemocracy now marches onwards into the new century, ready to chalk up yet more triumphs, leaving the old isms behind …
… to face new isms, in the Middle East. So now, freedomandemocracy, under the canny leadership of President George W. Bush, is busy threatening to knock over more dominoes.
Why does democracy work so well? And why do people insist on lumping it together with freedom?
In this posting, I will try to expand on ideas which I have already touched upon in a previous posting here. I am not, in this posting – together with any on freedomandemoracy that may follow (I promise nothing), aiming at most people, because most people do not need to be sold on democracy, or on why it feels so much like freedom. This posting is aimed at people who, like me, have embraced libertarian political axioms, to the point where we have become so acutely aware of the differences between freedom and democracy that we prefer to speak of freedom versus democracy. We need to know why and how democracy is proving to be such a formidable enemy of our ideas, and in what way it is also a formidable ally. Because my point here is: those most people have a point, in fact lots of points. Freedom and democracy do overlap in lots of ways, which I will now try to start itemising.
The first and greatest argument in favour of the connection between freedom and democracy is that democracy is preferable to civil war, and that civil war is extremely bad for freedom. → Continue reading: Freedomandemocracy: on how democracy is better than civil war and on why the next election must not be cancelled
My February last Friday has just ended, and it was definitely one of the better ones. Patrick Crozier spoke about libertarianism and private road ownership. Excellent talk, excellent discussion. The result of Patrick’s time writing for and bossing the now only archived Transport Blog, which he has now ended. (He now writes this.)
Among those present was Alex Singleton, and he naturally talked about his newly launched Globalization Institute, which, of course, has a new blog.
It occurs to me that you might expect the word itself, ‘globalisation’ (I prefer an ‘s’ in the middle there), to be the equivalent, at the global level, of ‘nationalisation’ at the national level. Yet, while nationalisation means the national government stealing things, globalisation means something quite different and much nicer. If globalisation was the same at the global level as nationalisation is at the national level, globalisation would mean a World Government stealing things.
Does this matter? Well, maybe it does, because we surely do need a word to describe the equivalent of nationalisation, but at the global level. I have been drinking and may have forgotten the obvious, but my impression is: we do not have such a word.
Surely the existence of the word ‘nationalisation’ made it far easier to oppose the thing itself. Not having a word for this other form of ‘globalisation’, predation by the government of the globe, makes it harder to oppose, I think.
The line here, which I pretty much toe, is that the Olympic Games are an orgy of drug-sodden, politicised insanity, which Britain, London in particular, will spend the next century or more paying for, in the unfortunate event that Britain, London in particular, get the damn things, in 2012. That the politicians all seem to love the Olympics is enough to make me hostile, even though I do have a serious weakness for modernistical structures of the sort that they build nowadays to accommodate sporting events.
Luckily, Paris is now said to be the front runner. But, the news from Paris is deteriorating. On March 10th, that gang of bribe guzzlers known as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) will be visiting Paris, and the local unions, purely by coincidence I feel sure, happen to be agitating at that time against … the future basically:
French unions have rejected calls to shelve strikes planned for the day the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is due in Paris to assess its bid.
Seven unions are to take part in marches and stoppages on 10 March, to protest against government moves to relax France’s 35-hour working week.
Meanwhile, Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is up to his neck in a row about some insulting and borderline anti-semitic remarks he made to a Jewish journalist, in the course of his ongoing feud with a newspaper group.
The pressure on London Mayor Ken Livingstone intensified today as Tony Blair joined calls for him apologise for his Nazi jibe to a Jewish journalist.
In the capital, there were fears that the continuing row over Mr Livingstone’s outburst – in which he likened the journalist to a concentration camp guard – could damage the city’s chances of hosting the 2012 Olympics.
Well, it certainly could, and the French press is presumably spinning this story like a nuclear powered top. But, a possibility that does not seem to have been much discussed is that Ken Livingstone’s attitude during this ruckus might be what it is not despite the attempt to get the Olympics for London, but because of it. The initial insults sound less than calculated, but politicians like Ken Livingstone are nothing if not good actors. What if Ken picked this particular fight deliberately? Okay, that may be somewhat farfetched. But the aftermath? After Ken had had time to think things through?
Israel has called on Ken to apologise. “International” people, like the people in the International Olympic Committee, are just going to fall over themselves to obey Israel. Not.
Tony Blair wants Ken to apologise. And he is another focus of adoration throughout International land. Again, not.
I do not know the political attitudes of the IOC people, but I bet Ken Livingstone does. And what if he calculates that hanging tough, in the face of all this pressure, adding further insults to the original insults, will actually get him more points with these people than backing down?
I reckon we ought to be a part of (better somewhat belated than never) this:
An online protest Tuesday of Iran’s crackdown against bloggers made an impact – even on Iranian officials.
So says a leader of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the group that organized the effort to decry the jailings of Iranian bloggers Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad.
Reuters on Tuesday reported that Sigarchi was jailed for 14 years on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country’s leaders, a move probably linked in part to the timing of the protest, said Curt Hopkins, the committee’s director. “I think there’s got to be some connection,” Hopkins said.
A message left with the Iranian mission to the United Nations was not immediately returned.
Hopkins’ group – whose deputy director is Ellen Simonetti, the former Delta Air Lines flight attendant fired over photos of herself in uniform that she posted on her blog – asked those who maintain Web logs to call attention Tuesday to the plight of Iranian bloggers through posting banner ads and contacting government officials.
Some notable members of the blogging community took up the cause. They included Jeff Jarvis, who runs the BuzzMachine site, and Glenn Reynolds, who’s behind Instapundit.
Hopkins said the response was just as impressive around the world. Hits on the committee site jumped from a daily average of about 500 to about 3,000 just during the Asian daytime hours. “It’s been going like gangbusters,” he said. “We’ve had people from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and Japan and Russia.”
Notice how, what with this being from News.com (www address: news.com.com, which I rather like), it is full of links. Old Media stuff which has merely been shoved online but without links, even to things mentioned in the text with .com in them, or to bloggers that they deign to name, are starting to look, even to a www latecomer like me, very dated.
As for Iran, my understanding of Iran now is that it is rapidly moving towards being a very sensible country, and that a little pressure from outside, of the sort described in this posting, will be all that is required. It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians, with plenty of overlap between these two trades, but nevertheless a distinct separation of realms also.
Any attempt at military conquest from outside is, or at least should be, out of the question. Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. When that happens, and you then say things like “… out of the question …”, it still causes flutters, even if, like me, you absolutely mean it. They do not know that, is the point. Without the Iraq invasion, the Iranian government would not be nearly so bothered about all this blog chatter. Anyway, it all looks like a situation well worth watching.
I would love to be able to say that I saw this kind of thing coming before Iraq was even invaded, and, looking back to then, I reckon I did. Many of the comments on that posting also look even cleverer now.
Well it seems that today, short little link-pieces are okay, so here is a short little link piece, with links to these mealy-mouthed trimmers, arguing for a flat tax, and to me, arguing that mere flatness is not the point. Just having a flat roof to the graph is a hideous compromise. It must be flattened until it is zero-height roadkill. (Metaphor muddle there, but I hope you get the picture.) Seriously, this is one of my best diatribes (“THE TOP RATE OF INCOME TAX SHOULD BE CUT TO ZERO”) from my time as a Libertarian Alliance pulpit banger, and I recommend that you read the whole thing, even if it is only a .pdf.
When the world in due course sees the wisdom of this proposal and enacts in universally, the result will be that there will remain a top rate of income tax, but that whatever money you earn above the level at which the top rate of income tax kicks in, you keep. All of it. These flat-raters say that it should be fifteen percent or whatever for everything you earn. I say, once you have paid your share of the rent, you should keep the lot.
Sorry, I went on a bit there.
For the last several weeks I have been watching with growing pleasure, every Monday night from 8 pm to 9 pm, two episodes at a time, one of those Channel 5 TV series that tend to pass without much comment or many claims of significance, called Massive Engines.
Last night saw the airing of the final two episodes, number 9 about massive pumps, and number 10 and finally, about the massive jet engines that enable modern airliners to ply their trade. The presenter was Chris Barrie, who is probably best know for comedy-of-embarrassment characterisations like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, or Brittas in The Brittas Empire, and in Massive Engines there are occasional Rimmer/Brittas style, self-send-up moments of leaden humour. The impression you get is that Barrie is not as sure as he would like to be that he is keeping his audience’s attention.
For myself, I absolutely do not think Barrie need have worried. Whenever, which was most of the time, he forgot about being comical and concentrated on explaining the whys and wherefores of his various massive engines, often while himself operating them and with every sign of knowing pretty much what he was doing, I was held, and fascinated.
I learned all kinds of things I never knew. For instance, in the last show, about aircraft engines, I learned that on an early aircraft engine, not only did the propeller rotate, but the cylinders also, firmly attached to the same bit of the engine as the propeller, and rotating along with the propeller. To keep them cool. Amazing. Well, you probably knew that, but I had no idea. You probably also know that whereas petrol engines work with regular explosions, diesel engines (names after a German bloke called Diesel) do not feature externally induced explosions. The pressure caused by the cylinder coming back up again is enough to set fire to the next lot of fuel. Well, I sort of vaguely did know that. But now I know it a little better.
In general, throughout the run of the show, Barrie’s quick and clear explanations of the principles behind all the mechanisms he was describing were, well, amazingly quick, and amazingly clear.
The only episode which I found a bit weak was the one about motorbikes, which featured rather too much footage of Barrie trundling about rather pointlessly on a motorbike, in between the serious explanatory stuff. The trouble with motorbikes is that frankly, they are not massive. They got as big as they will ever be many decades ago, and anyway, the point of them is speed, plain and simple, rather than speed (or anything else for that matter) achieved through massiveness.
That episode aside, all the engines on show got steadily bigger and more effective throughout their history. They are not necessarily massive any more. The pumps, for instances, that shift water hither and thither used to be a lot bigger, when they were steam engines, than they are now, now that they are diesel or electrical engines or whatever. But a good few of the engines Barrie talked about with such enthusiasm are huge right now, and getting ever huger.
The earth moving kit they now use is unbelievably huge, as was proved with a trip to a massive open cast coal mine in Germany, where there were also earth-shifting lorries with wheels the size of terrace houses. The machines used to dig tunnels are now as massive as they have ever been. As are those aircraft engines of course.
I expected the airplane episode with which the show ended to be a commercial for the Airbus A380, but actually it was a commercial for the Rolls Royce Trent Alphabetsoup engine. No Airbuses were mentioned, but a Boeing was, the two engine 777, which is apparently almost as huge as the four engine 747.
I recall no mention whatsoever of the wickedness of massive engines from the environmental point of view, which was most refreshing. On the contrary, massive engines got massive because they were used, again and again, to solve massive environmental problems, such as the environmental mess that the London sewage system had become towards the end of the nineteenth century, or the massive problem of travelling vast distances across the damn environment, most especially the sea. (There was an episode devoted to massive ships.) The entire show was a continuous hymn of praise to the God of the Technical Fix. You have a problem? Building a massive engine to solve it.
I cannot claim to remember all the technical details that were laid out before me on Massive Engines, but when they were being laid out I recall very, very clearly that they did make perfect sense, at the time. Had I written the stuff down, I am confident that only my own handwriting would have then stopped it making perfect sense now.
What I am really saying is, if I come across DVDs of this show at a suitably miserly price, I would definitely consider buying them, and watching the whole show again, repeating the quick and clear explanations and fast forwarding through the motorbike trundling.
As a potential interester of intelligent and intellectual curious children, boys especially of course, these shows would, I feel sure, prove excellent.
And Chris Barrie’s Rimmerisms might even help from that point of view. By the end, even I was enjoying the rest of it so much that I found myself smiling instead of wincing when Barrie started up yet another massive engine not with a “right let’s start this thing up”, but instead by shouting rather self-consciously: “let’s rock”. Very embarrassing dad. But when you really like the serious work that someone is doing, you can put up with mannerisms and foolishnesses that would drive you insane if it was just another pointless idiot doing them. And when they are gone, you even find you miss them.
So, an outstanding show, and particular proof of the value of having lots of different TV channels, allowing lots of different points of view besides the official one, which as far as massive engines is concerned is now that massive engines are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, just plain evil.
I bought a DVD of Nabucco the other day. It’s the usual story: boy meets girl; girl’s father attacks Jerusalem; Hebrews carted off to Babylon. “Sack, burn the temple,” says the King of the Babylonians. “This cursed race shall be wiped from the earth.” But first, let’s all have a sing-song.
I saw it in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It was the Latvian National Opera, so I was watching Latvians, in China, pretending to be Jews in Babylon, and singing in Italian. Well that’s all right. I can take a joke.
– Harry Hutton last Friday. More about Nabucco here.
Alex Singleton says that this is good news:
The Royal Mail will lose its monopoly on delivering Britain’s letters on Jan. 1, an industry regulator announced Friday – 15 months earlier than originally planned.
Regulator Postcomm said that from the beginning of 2006 private companies will be able to bid for licenses to deliver letters, previously the sole preserve of the state-backed Royal Mail Group PLC.
Postcomm chairman Nigel Stapleton said more competition would create “a more innovative and efficient postal industry.”
“This is only the first step in a process which the commission hopes will eventually see market forces replace regulation as the main driver of an efficient and effective mail industry,” he said.
Bulk mail delivery is already open to competition, but domestic letter services are the exclusive domain of the Royal Mail.
I agree. I have no problem with the principle that postal services ought to be competitive rather than monopolistic, and most of the arguments I hear which allegedly defend that monopoly strike me as misguided. For instance, I have never understood why sending a letter to people living at the far end of beyond in the deep, deep countryside, should cost no more than sending a letter from a dweller in a city to another dweller in the same city. If a competitive postal delivery service wants to have a one-price-fits-all policy, as many do, for simplicity’s sake, fine. If it wants to deliver non-urgent packages sent by me to someone half a mile from me by sending them to Birmingham and back, again: their problem (and their solution) rather than mine. But if other postal services want to ‘skim’, that is, do only easy deliveries (and maybe do them really, really quickly), and thereby force a little product differentiation into this market, well, again, why not? Making a bicycle is easier and cheaper than making a luxury car, and bikes accordingly change hands for far less. Where is the problem with that? Why should both cost the same?
Add all the obvious advantages associated with competitors competing with each other to establish reputations for reliable, efficient and really clever service, and you get a compelling case for a free market.
There is also the point, which I was only reminded of when deciding whether to label this as being about “globalization”, that postal services these days cry out to be global, rather than merely national with global stuff treated as a bolted-on afterthought.
However, I believe that I do see one problem with this particular exercise in demonopolisation. → Continue reading: Demonopolising postal services: the front door problem
The Guardian is serious about blogging, and it is also serious about presenting the occasional non-left piece of writing. (They used regularly to publish pieces by Enoch Powell.) So the surprising thing about this piece about blogging is not that the Guardian published it, but that the name of Iain Duncan Smith appears where the author’s name goes. (I share Patrick Crozier‘s doubts about the piece’s true authorship. And when we are talking about blogging, being who you say you are is a big thing, I think.)
IDS (I will assume this to be real from now on) hopes that blogging will revitalise the right in Britain, and notes that blogging has already revitalised the right in the USA, and has utterly deranged the left by causing the left to drag their party away from electability.
I wonder. I suspect that the problems of the Conservative Party are more serious than that, and that blogging will as likely serve to dramatise all the many differences that are now contained, if that is the right word, within the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives now have a hideous problem. Having lost confidence in its own economic nostrums, with the collapse both of the old USSR and of its own attempts to galvanise the British economy by seizing control of it, the British dirigiste left is content to allow Blair – or, I suspect, any likely successor of Blair – to triangulate away into the sunset. Labour knows that for them, it is either New Labour or no Labour at all. Which means that the Conservatives are no longer united by Labour. Instead they are divided by New Labour.
I do not go out of my way to converse with Conservative Party activists or critics or cheerers-on, but every one of such persons I have met with during the last decade or so has had his own distinct plan for the future of the Conservative Party, consisting of his own preferred mixture of policies. Each activist knows that his particular plan is The Answer, and that all that is needed is for all those other Conservative morons to stop with the negativity and embrace his plan without reservation. Easy really.
The Conservative Party should take a firm stand about this (or its opposite), without compromise. But, it should fearlessly compromise on that, by either lying or not talking about it. Go hard with England, Britain, Europe, the Anglosphere, the World (mix and dilute to taste). Be anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant. Anti-ID-cards, pro-ID-cards. Smash the welfare state, buy voters with an even better welfare state. Cut pensions, raise pensions. Support state education, destroy state education. Defend fox hunting, ignore fox hunting. Applaud the Americans, denounce the Americans. (I once thought that the Conservatives could maybe agree about applauding the Americans and leave the rowing about the Americans to the Labour Party. Fat chance.) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Every policy front is a distinct way to destroy Conservative Party unity.
It used to be that the Leader would decide all these things. Now they all want to be the Leader. And if they are not the Leader, and a different mixture of policies and attitudes is propose to their preferred mixture by the bloke who is the Leader, they are about as loyal to the Leader as a basket of low-IQ, but poisonous, snakes. As a result, the Conservative Party is now nigh on unleadable. It is not that they have chosen bad Leaders, or for that matter that they have chosen their Leaders by the wrong methods. It is that they cannot be lead.
I cannot see blogging being much help with all this. On the contrary, I think it will only allow the stupid snakes to hiss louder and louder. Blogging will be a whole new source of indiscretions and vituperations, a whole new way to destroy the Conservative Party. The anti-Conservative journalists could have a field day, and I think the Guardian knows it.
IDS says that blogging will put the fear of God into the “metropolitan elite”, and assumes that this will help the Conservative Party. It is just as likely to start a new civil war within it. IDS says that lazy journalists think only of the impact of this or that policy on the opinion polls. Which the leadership of the Conservative Party never does, does it? The title of IDS’s piece is “Bloggers will resue the right”. But what it blogging rescues “the right” from the Conservative Party?
But, we shall see. Politics is weird. Often something that seems utterly impossible one month, becomes unavoidable a few short months later. Maybe blogging will provoke a big Conservative revival.
Personally I do not much care one way or the other. I agree with Perry that a speedy return of a Conservative government would improve very little, and very possibly make things even worse. My loyalty is to blogging itself. This is where I have placed my bets. If blogging very publicly sweeps the Conservatives back into office, hurrah! If it rips the Conservatives into unmendable fragments, hurrah also!
Or then again, maybe the unanimous ignorance of the modern world and its possibilities will mean that the stupid snakes continue to neglect this new way for them to hiss, and we bloggers will have to spread our enthusiasm for this new and amazing medium by quite other means.
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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.
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