There may be an interruption to the blog-flow/disturbance in the force as our switch over to a new CMS is imminent… hopefully.
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Dave Cameron, the head of the non-conservative Tory Party, has addressed the great and ‘good’ at Davos, and as usual he says things that actually mean the opposite of the words looked at in isolation:
Translation: moral framework in fact means political control… whoever best has the ability to manipulate the political system can simply distort the market so suit their narrow needs. So when Dave Cameron says ‘moral capitalism’, he actually means ‘regulatory statism’ and ‘political manipulation’… in other words he does not actually want to change a damn thing. And political manipulation is exactly how we ended up where we are now with banks and car companies being handed vast quantities of other people’s money: Neither moral nor capitalism, which sums up Dave Cameron’s ‘philosophy’ perfectly. January 30th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Vladimir Putin slapped down Michael Dell at the World Economic Forum in Davos and hopefully some wisdom will come from this.
Which demonstrates several things: 1. when a multinational company in effect offers to invest more in Russia (i.e “here are some assets, please confiscate them at your leisure like you did with those idiot western oil companies”), the kleptocrat-in-chief would rather pretend that his country is “not an invalid” in spite of copious evidence that Russia is an economic basket case. So yes, Vladimir Putin does indeed appear to have limited mental capacity even in his role as kleptocrat. 2. investors in Dell need to make sure that Michael Dell never ever has any say whatsoever is which places Dell invests the company’s money. Russia? Michael, are you out of your fucking mind? A friend of mine suggested the theory that Putin was angry that Dell purchased Alienware. January 29th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via ‘stimulus packages’ with money plucked off the magic money tree… which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey. So is this actually any more daft? Frankly I do not think so and it is at least a whole hell of a lot more funny. January 25th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
The whole point of tolerance is to tolerate things you find repugnant. Tolerance does not mean acceptance however, so just because you tolerate something ignorant or repugnant, that does not mean you need to refrain from heartfelt criticism of it. However tolerance needs to be conditional: tolerance of intolerance is irrational when that the aim of that intolerance is to deny tolerance to you. And so whilst I am ambivalent at best about bullfighting, and I did watched a few in my younger years, I found myself shouting “¡Olé!” after reading these remarks by an 11 year old matador Michelito Lagravere Peniche:
I would not mind if all bullfighting opponents did was to be vocal critics, but the moment they started to try and use the law to ban this ancient Mithraic sport, they crossed the line from being critics to being thugs. January 25th, 2009 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times written by Mickey Edwards, a Republican Party apparatchik of many years standing, called Reagan wouldn’t recognize this GOP. This was the ‘money quote’ for me:
So George W. Bush and John “I support the Bailout” McCain represented the worship of… small government??? So presumably this ‘small’ government must have consumed a smaller portion of the national wealth when it left office compared to when it took office, right? I mean is that not surely the most direct and uncontroversial measure of the size of a government? Ok, 9/11 happened… so if we were to factor out all military spending, would that give us a smaller state at the end of the Bush presidency than at the start? I will leave you to guess the answer to that very simple question. And are there more regulations governing, well, almost everything, now compared when Bush took power? If there are more, then how is that either small or limited?
Of course this ‘us’ of whom he speaks are in reality the political activists who gain the support of a plurality to sanctify the latest looting schedules. His contempt for ‘ Joe the Plumber’ says it all. Joe was indeed one of ‘us’, one of the great unwashed who dared to fart loudly during the chorus of media hosannas surrounding Obama’s stately progress across The Blessed Land. Mickey Edwards on the other hand was a career politician who now lectures on Legislative Politics and International Affairs… in other words, he is about as much one of ‘them’ as you can get. And there is nothing particularly ‘exceptional’ about his description of American government unless Mickey Edwards thinks most of the rest of the ‘first world’ are organised as feudal states. The ‘limits’ to government expressed in the sainted US Constitution may be still be a viable tool for securing thing like freedom of expression and the right to defend yourself, well at least somewhat, but they do less than nothing to make anyone secure in their property or in any way less vulnerable to the political looter class (whom Mickey Edward could identify by simply looking in a mirror) from using the political system to help themselves to other people’s money. And that, my chums across the ocean, is exactly why you are just as totally fucked as the rest of us. January 24th, 2009 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
[E]verything the government is doing now is going to make the situation much, much worse. They’re trying to reflate this bubble. All along I knew that what would potentially be fatal wasn’t the recession itself but the government’s response. But what they’ve already done exceeds even my worst-case imagination. I know it is only January but this is a real contender for ‘Samizdata quote of the year’. January 24th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our migration to the new CMS will not happen until next weekend, so you can enjoy your fix of spleenic rants and pro-liberty disgruntlements throughout the weekend uninterrupted. We felt it was better to get it right than do it fast… plus I am told the stars will be more favourably aligned next weekend. January 23rd, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
This weekend, if all goes well, the bloated monstrosity that is Samizdata’s back-end, all 11,000+ articles and 182,000+ comments (hopefully) will get dumped into a new CMS. I fully expect all manner of server burps, devoured articles and comments and sundry debugging issues will crop up but we will try to keep the disruption to our crazed rants and your edification to a minimum. Wish us luck. January 23rd, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just as Gordon Brown steers the UK full throttle into the ground for the most spectacular economic crash since the 1930’s, far from fighting the culture war in order to set the nation up for an alternative, yet again the utterly absurd David Cameron and his lemming-like party are bending over backwards to show that they represent kleptocratic continuity with the Labour Party.
How “the market can be organised to alleviate poverty and what policies can bolster civic autonomy”… When politicians ‘organise’ markets, that is always high on political organisation and low on markets. And what policies can “boost civic autonomy”? Dave needs a think-tank to tell him that? Less state policies, taxes and interference generally. Anyone want to make a book on the chance Demos offers that up as a solution? Fat chance. “But this claim has been challenged by Labour and the Liberal Democrats who have questioned his credentials as a true progressive.” This is like members of a cartel howling about other members competing with them as a way of hiding the fact there is actually no competition going on at all. Labour, the LibDems and the Tories make a fetish of the minor difference between each other to hide the fact there is actually very little between them. My theory? They have no interest whatsoever in the traditional Conservative voter, whose ovine voting can usually be counted on anyway, but rather plan on gaining power via the strategy of simply waiting for Labour to lose rather than planning to pro-actively win themselves. Therefore they are working up policy statements calculated to appeal to the same Guardian reading looter class seeking more of the same only this time with ‘a sensible safe pair of hands’, to use nauseating Tory-speak. A vote for the Tory party (I refuse to call them the ‘Conservative’ party) under Cameron is a vote wasted because even if they win, nothing changes. Even if you ‘win’, you lose. They are beyond salvage. Want to vote? Then vote UKIP. I do not support all their policies but there simply is no meaningful choice any more and at least they have a more or less nationwide political organisation. Is a vote for UKIP a wasted vote? Well at least you will be wasting your vote on a genuine alternative rather than the illusion of change under ‘Dave’ Cameron and his dismal shower of ‘progressives’. And if enough people do that then it was not a wasted vote after all. January 22nd, 2009 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A court in the Netherlands has ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, for daring to express his opinions. Wilders is the author of Fitna, a critical polemic against Islam.
This judgement completely destroys the myth of both Dutch civil liberties and the nation’s reputed tolerance for differences of opinion. It seems you can have a difference of opinion just as long as it is not inconvenient to the state for you to express it. Yet again, the Dutch state proves that when the going gets tough, the Dutch state has a backbone of rubber. So here is Fitna for you to watch. And to the authoritarian thugs in their court in Amsterdam… up yours. And as a little bonus… January 21st, 2009 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have never felt the urge to buy an iPod as I am really not that interested in music-on-the-move, but maybe it is time for me to reconsider… I feel another overdue hunting trip to Central Europe coming on. January 21st, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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