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One of the Republican senators who voted for the new US Supreme Court member has quit to “get on with his life”. As the man is a Cuban, perhaps he will consider doing that back in Cuba as clearly he cares nothing for private property rights (Sotomayor supported the majority on Kelo)… or maybe he supported Sotomayor because he thinks race trumps al? … either way he is exactly the sort of person who needs to be drummed out of the party in disgrace. August 8th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 … for the US Supreme Court. Quelle surprise, Judge Sonia Sotomayor gets approved for the highest court of the land in the USA.
Thus sayeth Sonia Sotomayor in 2001. As Newt Gingrinch pointed out, can you imagine the reaction if a white male Bush appointee for the Supreme Court had ever, and I mean ever said:
The New York Times and Washigton Post would be filled cover to cover with KKK allusions and the nomination would be ‘challenging’ to say the least. But of course this only works one way. This is yet another useful litmus test on Republican politicians (and indeed anyone who calls themselves ‘conservative’). Did they implacably oppose Sotomayor? If not, they are indisputably and unequivocally ‘on the other side’, which is to say they are unalloyed statist collectivists and exactly the sort of people who must be driven from the party if it is even going to be worthy of the title ‘opposition’, rather than ‘Obama’s Loyal Cheerleaders’… and until the Republicans can become a meaningful opposition party, it cannot be a alternative that is worth voting for because in truth voting for such a party is just voting for more of the same, just in a different wrapper: a toxic illusion of choice. Now is not the time for Republican unity, it is the time for for the party to tear itself apart and put a great many people to the political sword without remorse or pity… starting with nine US senators. August 7th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Dan Rather is calling on the state (naturally) to prop up the old mainstream media and had this to say:
From your lips to God’s ear, Dan. But innovation is indeed ‘solving’ this ‘crisis’ as the meteoric spread of blogs and other forms of new media are demonstrating. And Dan, if you think all those bloggers who are pissing on the ashes are trying to help put the flames out, I assure you their motives are rather… different. (Via Instapundit) July 30th, 2009 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone called Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times has written about the use of alcohol in the latest Harry Potter film and I must say I find her article deeply… something…disturbing? No, not quite right… alien… yes that is it. It is deeply alien.
If she found funny drunk people funny, it sounds to me like her daughter understood just fine.
So why is this alien? Partially because booze really is a quite effective ‘coping aid’ that people have used since time immemorial to pluck up their courage to put their arms around the object of their affections for the first time. Why? Because at the risk of stating the obvious, it bleedin’ works. Is this really shocking or alarming to “parents, educators and addiction experts”? I rather doubt my folks would have found a drunk giant and some pie-eyed teenagers in a film all too perplexing. But then they were hardly puritans and came from a more robust generation who felt there was value in a child occasionally colliding with life’s sharp protruding edges. Nor did they get the vapours from the sight of their little treasure’s bumps and bruises or feel any need to call in ‘experts’ when I intermittently got rat-faced drunk. And what exactly is an ‘alcohol educator’? Pointing out that drinking can make you drunk and being drunk can make you walk into lamp posts or crash cars requires a specialist ‘alcohol educator’? How did anyone reach adulthood before such people existed I wonder? Well I learned that drinking has its downside too, not from an ‘alcohol educator’ but from puking my guts up rather too often. I recall a teacher seeing me once heaving miserably after a school event and did he send me to an ‘alcohol Teachers and parents teach children many things. And many of those things are true, half true or pure unadulterated lies. And most children know when what they are taught is hogwash. As a consequence, they learn the importance of critical judgement in ways that were not really intended by the person doing the ‘teaching’. So when we hear this…
…any 100+ IQ child who has had a few beers learns something valuable: his parents, and Dr. Welsh writing in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse, are full of it, because for most people it really is okay and their own experiences confirm that. They sank a few brewskis, had a giggle and maybe made an ass of themselves, and 99.9% of the time, no one died, got pregnant or lost an eye. And this is an important lesson we all learn when growing up: some of what we are taught makes sense and quite a lot of it is complete and utter tosh, and just because your parents tell you something, ain’t necessarily so. And when an ‘alcohol educator’ is trotted out to tell you something, it is because he is being paid to tell you that, and often there is quite a bit more to it than he is letting on. There is only one kind of professional ‘alcohol educator’ worth listening to, and they are called sommeliers. July 30th, 2009 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a subject that we often return to on Samizdata when discussing things, and that is ‘meta-context’. This is the frames of reference, the unspoken assumptions, the underpinning world view if you like, within which people see things and discuss them. Context is usually explicit, whereas meta-context is implicit and very much in the background. This is a useful concept for understanding why discussions get framed in the manner they do. When the meta-context of two people is widely divergent, they tend to talk past each other, because much of what they say will not be what the other person understands. A great deal of the success of the statist political establishment comes from their control of the meta-context, so that in the minds of many, much of what states do simply goes without saying… that is just the way it is, even if on a contextual level a person is not predisposed to like or trust the political establishment, the state’s basic purview is essentially a given and thus not really pondered deeply, much like the sun rising in the morning. So when David Cameron and Gordon Brown exchange meaningless ritual barbs in the House of Commons, we hear an exchange between two people with somewhat different politics and personalities, but they are as one at the meta-contextual level. Each understand the other completely on a great many levels and both understand instinctively what are the ‘proper’ limits of their political ‘disagreement’. So when someone comes along who does not share meta-context, all sorts of interesting things happen. Not only is there going to be a profound non-meeting of minds, there is going to be both misunderstanding and often great antipathy as people struggle to fit the opposing person’s views within their own meta-context, assuming things that are actually not the case at all and imputing meaning that tell you far more about the person doing the imputing than the person they are discussing. And so I present you with Randy Cohen, who blogs for the mainstream statist-left newspaper the New York Times as The Ethicist. The article which caused my meta-contextual antennae to start tingling a few days ago was titled How not to talk about health care. → Continue reading: So genuine opposition is… unethical? July 26th, 2009 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
A chance encounter? Perhaps not. We need to try this in the UK as well. Releasing rabid pit bulls in Parliament (and then locking the doors with everyone inside) might be more culturally appropriate however. July 23rd, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apparently it is news that the UK is still in recession, or as the headline says Economic recovery in UK ‘on hold’. On hold? The government is debasing people’s saving as quickly as possible and stripping money out of productive sectors and pumping it into unproductive sectors, and generally trying their damnedest to drive businesses and wealth creators out for years now… and the fact this is tearing a huge hole is surprising to who exactly? July 19th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated. The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today… But no. This is ‘ground breaking‘ we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications? State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:
Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as “incitement” if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently. This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail… actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein. Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state. Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba’athists for example… and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too… and certain Serbian nationalists)… and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles ‘inciting’ not just ‘violence’ but calling for full blown wars. Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as ‘freeborn Englishmen’ (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, “social cohesion” than a couple comically wacko racists. Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and ‘essential’ media guardians of our liberal western order. The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better… ten years tops… except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their ‘essential role’ and the ‘public interest’ of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful. July 11th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two men have been convicted of thought crimes by the state for daring to express what they think. I very much doubt the Human Right Industry will rally to the defence of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle because the two men in question are a couple deeply unappealing white racist scumbags. Had they merely been scumbag imams preaching in a mosque rather than scumbag white males handing out leaflets and publishing a website, I wonder if the ‘head of diversity and community cohesion’ in Humberside would be crowing about the latest demonstration of the British police state’s ability to tell people what they can and cannot say? Just askin’. July 10th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
… Aussie style, from ‘GetUp!’. It is a pity that ‘GetUp!’ are a profoundly statist bunch who just love state coercion just as long as it is democratically popular and ‘progressive’… but one has to make short term tactical alliances where one finds them (such as on the issue of censorship). The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least for a (very short) while. July 9th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Did you hear that Michael Jackson has gone to meet his other maker? – Adriana Lukas, delivered deadpan during luncheon. June 26th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Millions and millions of Americans support Obama’s desire to even more massively intervene in the market for medical care than the US state already does. And of course Obama’s moves are just the opening salvo in a desire to eventually end up with fully socialist healthcare, along the lines of Britain’s ghastly National Health Service, which has intermittently tried to kill me over the years. I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different. Well yes, it will be different… in that the control obsessed Obama’s of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today. This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry… plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar. June 21st, 2009 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
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