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]
I hope the reports of rebel triumph prove to be the case… and kudos to the UK and France for helping things along whist also resisting the urge to get too deeply involved.
But that said, I cannot help but hope the dirty secrets now emerge of how overseas politicians aided and abetted Qadaffi over the years, in particularly the disgusting deal over Abdelbaset al Megrahi. It would be wonderful to see the polities in England and Scotland take one in the face if the unlovely details eventually come out.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Christians were not supposed to charge interest. Therefore, the most common moneylenders-to-kings were Jews. They could loan money at a profit, and were thus more likely to lend it.
But whenever the King’s debts got too large to repay, he began to demonise the Jews. And eventually came a pogrom. And hey-ho, the debt went away along with the Jews.
I’m seeing the demonisation of banks. I wonder how long before government throws a pogrom?
I was reading an article by Janet Daly, whom I rather like even if I do not always agree with (I met her at a Stockholm Network shindig once and found her sharp and charming), in which she excoriates the NYTimes for a risible screed about the recent riots in Britain:
Never likely to be outdone when it comes to Left-liberal sententiousness, the New York Times has produced a corker of a leading article on our very own riots. With a mock-judicious bit of throat-clearing, it begins on a tone of apparently unimpeachable even-handedness: “nothing can justify or excuse the terrifying wave of lawlessness, etc, etc … the perpetrators must be punished, etc, etc.”
But it then lurches into an absurd compounding of the irrelevant and the ill-informed. David Cameron, the paper intones, is “a product of Britain’s upper classes and schools”. (This is scarcely intelligible English: does it mean upper-class schools?) And so, presumably as a consequence of his class-induced ignorance, “he has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subculture”.
Yes indeed he has, thus putting himself in agreement with about 90 per cent of the British population. But the New York Times in as uninterested in the overwhelming majority of British public opinion as it is in the great mass of American public opinion. It is as smugly and narrowly orthodox in its Left-liberal posturing as its counterparts in Britain
Good stuff. But what really caught my eye was a comment under this article by a blogger rejoicing in the giggle inducing pseudonym “He’s Spartacus”, which I reproduce entirely here as it is rather splendid:
Comments are pre-moderated at the NYT and I have little doubt that mine will not pass muster, so here it is….
It’s difficult to know where to begin dissecting this flatulent nonsense, it’s so full of holes, so I’ll content myself with saying that the NYT continues to demonstrate that it knows as little about the reality of life in Britain as it does about America.
No….wait….scratch that….
This social disintegration is exactly what clear thinkers have been warning about for more than half a century.
Replace the family with the State, bellow “revolution!” from every street corner while in reality making the banks and corporations you claim to hate yet more powerful because, loath though you may be to admit it, they debt-fund the State’s rent-seeking schemes and social engineering projects, steal our money at gunpoint to pay for it all, ghettoise entire communities by telling them they can develop separately (now where have I heard that before?)….
What were you THINKING?
Reap the whirlwind.
Now for the good news….
The state has failed, and the really good news is that a lot of people have worked this out for themselves, as evidenced by the thousands of ordinary, law-abiding folk who, once they had recovered from initial impact of the sheer cold-bloodedness and randomness of the violence, took responsibility for protecting their own streets and neighbourhoods.
If this spells the beginning of the end of the nanny state, I for one will raise a glass to the state-created bottom-feeders who initiated it.
Is anyone seriously going to try to make the case that this isn’t black culture in excelsis? Or does anyone, perhaps, want to persuade me that this is but one tiny and much-exaggerated facet of a broader black culture dominated by opera and madrigal singing and crochet and sonnet-construction and lawn bowls and Shakespeare and new translations of Ovid? If they are capable of doing so then maybe, just maybe, I might accept that there was something demeaning or reductive in Starkey’s comments on black culture. Problem is, I don’t think anyone can. (And I speak, by the way, as someone who quite likes his hop hop and who is very much into the new Kanye West/Jay Z album. But who, listening to it, can’t help noticing that it’s rather more a celebration of gats, hos, casual sex and easy money, than it is an invocation for study, hard work and social conformity.)
To pillory a man for pointing out such a glaringly obvious cultural fact just because he’s white and Right-wing would have been quite wrong even before the riots. Post riots it is positively obscene.
Peter Oborne is not exactly one of my favourite commentators (to put it mildly) so when I saw people praising an article he wrote called The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom, I was expecting the worst. And sure enough, he falls at almost the first fence:
A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.
I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.
Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?
So Branson and Green get tired of having so much of their wealth confiscated that Branson moves some of his operation to Switzerland and Green takes his profits off-shore, and Peter Oborne sees that not as a sign of the confiscatory state’s moral decay but rather… Green and Branson’s moral decay?
That is a bit like saying the shopkeepers who defended their shops from looters were being ‘greedy’ because they did not want the product of their hard works taken by looters… or in Green and Branson’s case, the looting tax man working at the behest of the parasite classes.
Oborne gets it right when he describes the corruption and hypocrisy of the political looter class class, but his failure to grasp the difference between the looter classes and the people they loot means I will not be joining the Amen Chorus praising this article even if I agree with some parts of it.
It seems to me that he misses the obvious target. Sure, politicians are hypocritical and corrupt but when has this ever not been the case? Surely the real issue here is not the predictably dismal behaviour of the generally dismal sort of people who are attracted into politics in the first place, it is the de-socialising nature of the policies that have been followed by both Labour and Tory since 1945.
There exists a broad consensus between so-called ‘conservatives’ and the ‘democratic left’ across the western world that capitalist wealth producers exist to be taxed to fund ‘social’ welfare, which in turn produces a huge class of people benefiting from these confiscations and this, not the crapulous personal greed and behaviour of MPs, is the root of the problem from which everything else springs.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the looters were not in fact the primary recipients of the ‘largess’ (of other people’s money) being collected and redistributed by the state… it is the huge army of people who find their employment via the Guardian’s public sector advertisements who are the actual main beneficiaries.
Approving comments that have attracted the pitiless attentions of Smitebot, a creature of tireless vigilance and limited brain, may take rather longer than usual over the next few days.
Tomorrow the primary bio-mechanical component of the intermediating data analysis buffer is going in for significant repairs once again.
I am delighted to see that some people are ‘taking the law into their own hands’ and not just abandoning their communities to the barbarian thugs…
When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.
The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney’s burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm
[…]
“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named. “But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two.”
Firstly, to those blaming ‘immigration’ rather than the welfare state, and the utterly grotesque way the state demands you do not protect what is yours, well people would do well to emulate the Turkish and Kurdish community in Britain. Indeed the looters we see on television and streamed over the internet are so multi-racial it must gladden the hearts of the Welfare Statists who created them.
So when the police decry ‘vigilantes‘, I would point out that communities can often do a better job at protecting themselves than the police can and the folks who got out on the streets, not to loot but to defend their neighbourhoods, well they are the real heroes here.
The safety of you and your property is only tangentially of interest to the state (certainly they want to tax what you own, so to that extent they do indeed care about your life and property), but as demonstrated starkly over the last few days, the state also created the conditions that led to these riots and is therefore rather uneasy about punishing people who, after all, only do what the state does every day only without having to smash any windows.
A community of few people with rifles and something worth protecting are not such a soft target to thugs, even armed thugs, compared to a disarmed general population looking vainly for the Plod to save them. But for all sorts of reasons, the British state has so effectively propagandised this country that to even suggest armed self-defence puts you on the lunatic fringe… so crowbars and cricket bats it is then.
If these last few days shows anything it is that when push comes to shove, only you and your neighbours can defend against what can only be called barbarian scum. Contrary to what the state would have you believe, you have the right to defend yourself and your property that morally supersede any law that would deny that right. The rioters ‘took the law into their own hands’ so I applaud those Turks and Kurds (and many others whom the Guardian would not be so keen to report on) who did the same… they took the law back from the barbarians with and put it where it belongs: in their own hands.
The state is not your friend, so do what you have to do and if you drive off some thugs, do not call the police after it is all over as nothing good will come of that.
If you have been unfortunate enough to be following the UK media’s breathtakingly awful attempts to say something useful about the riots… such as tut tutting about ‘social media’ for enabling the looting to be organised (cue calls from that hideous Janus-faced Guardian/Daily Mail Chimera to “Do Something”)… well you might get a giggle from Alec Muffet’s take on that subject.
Of course the predator political class are going to use the behaviour of the predator social class they created to justify their continued existence… no surprise there.
But all it takes is a look at the footage or a walk down the right street if you live in London, to see that the thugs in question, with a Blackberry in one hand and wearing expensive trainers, are not doing this because “Haringey Council has lost £41m from its budget”. Does anyone seriously think these rioters are doing what they are doing because their ‘Youth Services’ Danegeld was cut back?
Just look at this…
… these are the bastard children of Diane Abbott and David Cameron… and their lineage goes all the way back to Clement Attlee…and all the other members of the political class who created them as the Welfare State progressively hollowed out civil society. These are the product of the demon seed that was planted in 1945 and progressively watered ever more lavishly each year.
So yes, the largely fictitious ‘cuts’ are indeed to blame. Far far far too little and 20 years too late.
The riots in London over the last couple nights can be condemned as assaults on private property by predatory opportunists. That much is easy.
What is rather harder is commenting on what sparked them off and I have felt no urge at all to swiftly form any opinions.
The police say the dead man was shot after shooting at a policeman and that said policeman’s live was saved by the incoming round lodging in his radio.
Well… is that true or is it a self serving fantasy to exonerate the use of deadly force by the police? I have no idea. But in the aftermath of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, where just about every single ‘fact’ provided by the authorities turned out to be either mistaken or a total fabrication, quite simply how can anything said by the Met be taken at face value until it is corroborated by multiple sources?
Was this a ‘righteous shoot’ of a gangster who fired first or another cack-handed murder by the state justified by a flood of lies?
Only time will tell and my unwillingness to give the police the benefit of the doubt is entirely the fault of the police’s handling of the appalling Menezes affair.
“The US government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone” […] In the Xinhua commentary, China scorned the United States for its “debt addiction” and “short sighted” political wrangling. “China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets,” it said. It urged the United States to cut military and social welfare expenditure.
No kidding but hey, when a state run by a communist party tells the USA to spend less on… welfare, you start to get some idea just how strange the world has become and just how screwed the US actually is.
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
