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.
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The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and a member of the Socialist Party in France, on sexual assault charges in the USA has triggered a stream of bizarre collectivist wailing.
“Arrest Throws France Into Disarray and Disbelief” says the New York Times…
But why ‘disbelief’? Now I have no idea as to the merits of this particular case and thus no position on this statist bastard’s guilt in this matter, but socialists are people with a profound sense of entitlement to what other people have but are not freely willing to give up without threats of violence.
So is it hard to believe that someone whose entire world view is based on using force to take what is private without prior consent might have used force to take what they wanted from a woman? It is not really so different.
I eagerly await Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre being turned over to the BNP for a debate on how changing demographics in England are depleting national pride
– Michael Weiss
Superb.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard
– H. L. Mencken
I read this article by Matthew d’Ancona and had to laugh out loud.
David Cameron would be wrong to jettison his co-pilot. Nick Clegg’s only chance of recovery is to ignore the turbulence and carry on regardless […] Instead, Clegg has led his party in another direction: into office with an ideological rival, and the cockpit of compromise, U-turns, and grinding policy formation. To say it has not been easy is a laughable understatement, and the price – so far – has been immense. But it was the right call.
Hahahaha… political rivals, sure… but ‘ideological’ rivals? Oh give me a break. Tories, LibDems, Labour, oh and SNP… ie. all of Britain’s main parties are utterly committed to the regulatory welfare state and their ‘idealogical rivalry’ amounts to arguing over the length of their minister’s ties. The ‘co-pilot’ is staring straight ahead as the aircraft in on ‘finals’ for a CFIT.
I particularly loved this…
“The best help we can give the Lib Dems is not a shopping list of policies,” says one senior Cameroon, “but to help them through their adolescence as a party of government – to help them navigate this crisis.”
It is not that the LibDems are ‘adolescent’ but rather that the entire political establishment appear to be intellectually ‘senile’ as the disconnect between objective reality and acceptable political reality grows apace (and largely unremarked by that essential priesthood of media truthsayers).
It hardly matters which of these lumps are in office. All the policies being bandied about are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and not only does *no* major political party have the will to implement a radical reduction in state expenditure and a massive reduction in the red tape that limit the scope for new market entrants in industry after industry, they all lack the will to even seriously discuss such notions.
When someone suggests a budget that has the state appropriating 20% less of the national wealth overall next financial year and the same the year after that, and allowing banks to simply go bust if they screw the pooch on an epic scale, well then and only then are they are getting serious… but until that happens, let the various party loyalists blather on about Dave and Nick as if it actually matters.
The Ponzi scheme has reached the ‘end game’ phase and the antics of the clowns in Westminster and their supporters are as important as a tinker’s damn. Britain and much of the western world have got the leaders they voted for and the ones they deserve. Drink wine, watch films, play games, meet friends, but only pay attention to politics for the entertainment value. It is not like politics is actually going to have much impact on where the economy is heading.
I was naturally delighted to hear the news that Osama Bin Laden came to a sticky end at the hands of US SpecOps and the importance of that far outweighed my wish that someone other than the dismal Barack Obama was in the White House to take the credit.
But the extraordinarily inept manner in which the post-hit PR has been handled is just adding to the joy of the moment for me… the weird and unseemly hasty ‘burial at sea’, almost as if they are actively trying to incite the legions of conspiracy theories out there, followed by contradictory accounts of what happened and what the mission’s brief actually was…
…he was killed because he resisted arrest… no, he was killed because that was the mission objective… he was armed… no he wasn’t… he used his wife as a human shield… no he didn’t… well yes but it wasn’t his wife… or not… this son was killed… no, some other son was killed… and so on and so on…
We could be looking at the best possible outcome here: Osama dead and Obama and his team snatching PR defeat from the jaws of victory. This just keeps getting better and better!
Some people are just neurotically sceptical. But even they won’t deny what is before their eyes. Is there anyone who seriously questions the fact that Saddam Hussein is dead? That’s the way to do things these days. Don’t launch a bloody, decade defining series of wars and then refuse to release photos of a dead body, or better still display the actual body, because you’re worried it’ll upset people. Shoot the ****** in the head on camera then release it on youtube.
– Commenter ub313 on Ed West‘s Daily Telegraph site blog
Well, call Ghost Busters if you like but for heaven’s sake do not call the Plod.
When a gang of travellers trespassed on her land and allegedly threatened to cut her throat with a chainsaw, Tracy St Clair Pearce dialled 999, expecting protection and reassurance from the police.
But while they took a statement and visited the nearby traveller camp, officers came back and confiscated her shotgun, saying it was a “sensible precaution”.
Well Tracy got quite a life lesson, eh? Where on earth did she get notion the State gives a damn about her right to self defence from some predatory ‘Traveller’ thugs?
The rule is simple… are you a home owner? Never. Ever. Call. The. Police.
They are not there to protect you. Just file this under ‘the State is not your friend’…
There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who’s-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough…
…but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago.
This worthy project is about trying to get folks to examine their underpinning meta-context… the unspoken ‘givens’ that we all use to frame our view of the world that almost always go unexamined: well if you think that, then surely this should follow, no?
… and if you manage to reach people on that level, you can change many of their conclusions about a great many things.
A message from the people of Iceland to the global political establishment…
Farðu í rassgat!
By rejecting the absurd notion that governments can legitimately make taxpayers liable for bad commercial decisions by banks, Iceland shows itself as an island of sanity in a global sea of madness.
Every day is Earth Day in North Korea
– Samizdata commenter ‘newrouter’
It is 8:30 pm in London and ‘Earth Day’ has begun. Every single light in our house and garden have now been turned on.
Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel…
“Excuse me,” he says, “I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Er, no,” you reply, “I am happy dressed the way I am.”
“I see,” the man replies, “well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie.”
“But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!” you point out.
“No,” he says, “I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don’t do what I want voluntarily.”
This statement of the bleedin’ obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of ‘press release’ style journalism:
The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.
If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.
So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin… ‘voluntary’… ‘not nanny state’…
Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a ‘political correspondent’ at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the ‘Nanny State’ in action… and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense ‘voluntary’?
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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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