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December 24th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace – Vaclav Havel, tireless fighter against communism and sundry other human absurdities, has died. Ave atque vale. December 18th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I rarely write about party politics as I think it is a waste of time, given that the two and a half main parties in Westminster are largely interchangeable and simply despise them all with an icy passion. But I will make an exception today… Cameron, far from being a smart political operator, could not even gain a majority for his party against a detested Labour government at the last election. But by saying ‘no’ to Merkozy, he has actually done something that almost 60% of the country appear to approve of. And it has made his LibDem coalition partners publicly incandescent with rage… and therefore also uniquely vulnerable. So the smart move is to finally tell Nick Clegg to get stuffed and to call a snap General Election. Go ‘nuclear’ and do it right now, whilst the advantage is for once very clearly in the Tory Party’s court. If the LibDems and Labour want a shot at forming a coalition, well give them what will be a ‘hospital pass’ and let them try. But then this is the Tory Party we are talking about of course, and it would be fair to say they rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. More likely he will just sit there looking smug and wait for the initiative to pass over to his political enemies once again. December 12th, 2011 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
So all the UK is isolated from is an impending disaster: the eurozone will fragment with countries leaving and debt defaults. It is like being as isolated as a man who failed to get onto the Titanic before it sailed. December 11th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It should be possible to discuss racial genetics dispassionately and honestly in a public forum. But it is not. That is simply an empirically derived conclusion gained from running Samizdata for 10 years… it.can.not.be.done. Sorry but that is the inescapable truth. Racists are the perfect example of Churchill’s definition of a fanatic and unless you immediately show them the door and boot them through it, discourse in the comments section will quickly become untenable. So Samizdata will continue to delete and ban racists when they leave comments and no apologies will be made for that. Our house, our rules. For another article pertaining to why we will not tolerate racist discussions on Samizdata, read this. December 6th, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
An article about the psychiatric assessment of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik got me wondering about a couple things, one entertaining and the other, not so much:
Suicide bombings? Plural? As it has been claimed he worked alone, I am curious how he could carry out more than one suicide bombing. But less flippantly, I cannot help wondering if the only reason this coldly calculating man is being deemed ‘insane’ is that is the only way the Norwegian state never ever have to let him out, given that Norway apparently has no ‘life sentence’ in which ‘life means life’… so the only way to put him away forever is to declare him insane and thus lock him up in a loony bin until he dies. He may well belong in a small room for the rest of his life but using the much loved Soviet, Russian and Chinese approach of expedient psychiatric assessment to achieve it may reveal a lot about modern Norway. November 30th, 2011 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
In its varying degrees, the political, legislative and social applications of environmental science studies in this 21st century should be carefully compared to that of Eugenics in the late 19th and through the mid- 20th centuries. – Redoubtable serial commenter ‘RRS’ November 18th, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Beijing is full of empty shopping malls and empty apartment buildings. There are at least 60 million empty housing units in China, and probably a great many more than that. The absurd construction boom that continues to go on here is many times bigger than the rest of the world combined, and the Chinese banks are many times more bankrupt than those anywhere else – Michael Jennings (currently in Beijing) November 6th, 2011 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 5th, 2011 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today is our blogiversary…Samizdata crawled out of the primordial ooze of the blogosphere on Friday, November 02, 2001. Our name was a wee bit longer then but like some vestigial tail, it eventually dropped off once we learned to walk upright… and it took us a while for our flippers to evolve into feet… but here we are all those years later, still blathering on about the things that irk or amuse us. 13,315 articles and 226,617 comments later… …Blimey, where did all those years go? November 2nd, 2011 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
(via Small Dead Animals) October 30th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It bears repeating that banks are not creators of wealth. They are places where you store the surplus value generated by productive enterprise. In very narrow circumstances that surplus value can be loaned out at a profit, but a financial sector is the icing, not the cake. This should be common sense, but apparently it is wisdom so rare it can only be learned in countries small and remote enough to avoid the deadly medicine of the global financial markets. October 28th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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