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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)
The media and chattering classes are agog that the BNP, a fascistic and racist party, have gained some electoral success. So what? The Labour and Tory parties have been broadly fascistic (a corporatist ‘soft fascism’ whose symbol is a CCTV rather than the goose-step-and-armband kind) for the best part of a decade. Thus the way I see it, the BNP is just a more overt and perhaps more honest expression of the sort of mainstream democratically sanctioned tyranny that has been steadily and remorselessly stripping away civil liberties for quite some time now. I cannot help thinking the real motivation for the aghast shrieks about the BNP is that it means the mainstream media do not have to dwell unduly on the far more ideologically antithetical-to-the-establishment and strategically significant growth of UKIP. The truth is the world view and policies of the (truly vile) BNP is not that different on 95% of issues than the (vile) Tory, (vile) Labour Party and (fairly vile) LibDems, all of whom, once you strip out the overt racism of the BNP, broadly agree about the role of the state. That is to say all their statist-regulatory world views are more or less fascistic when it comes to matters of economy and civil liberties. The gasps and finger pointing at the thuggish scrotes of the BNP give many an excuse to avoid focusing on the electoral success of UKIP, because unlike the profoundly statist BNP, UKIP is a party filled with people who actually do want a less intrusive and smaller state. UKIP may not aspire to some libertarian minarchist paradise, but they actually want less net regulation and dare to talk about civil liberties as something that matters (as opposed to the LibDems, who strongly believe civil liberties matter and yet want to regulate the crap out of everything, as if somehow that has no bearing on liberty). In short, the fact UKIP thinks that the liberties of individuals is something to shout about and they want to shrink the state at all, rather than just keep expanding the state, but just a wee bit slower than the other guys… well… in the context of where we find ourselves today, this verges on revolutionary. No wonder the mainstream would rather emote and declaim about the ultimately irrelevant BNP. June 9th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh dear… seems the EU is being beastly to us again. I wonder if I can buy brain futures or it is just pork bellies? May 21st, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The state spends vast amounts of money, yet the deficit is ‘more that predicted‘? And the recession will be ‘more severe than forecast’? Well mate, I must be an god-damn oracle then, and Paul Marks too in fact, because it is all going pretty much exactly as we predicted and forecast. Government policy is to suck out vast amounts of wealth from the economy and then redirect it themselves… and borrow money from whatever mugs will lend it to them… and to simply print more money like crazed counterfeiters… so the deficit grows by leaps and bounds and the economy tanks. I find it utterly laughable that this was not the predicted, forecast and indeed desired outcome as no other outcome was even vaguely possible. Economic health was never government policy, either in the UK or the USA. The policy objective is increased political control of people’s lives (‘regulation’) via de facto nationalisation of the economy. The fact some investors actually buy into the notion such lunacy actually benefits them just adds some comic relief to the unfolding tragedy. Government policy is working just fine. April 6th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
So how long before not even the mainstream media can pretend this lunacy is not going to spread economic catastrophe far and wide? My guess is they will move from cheerleaders to tut tutting sages of rectitude seamlessly in a few years without the slightest sense of irony. This will probably happen about the same time the mainstream media more or less stops existing in any meaningful sense. The collective democratically sanctified derangement on display sure does help harden the heart when people start complaining about the economic hardship they find themselves in. A friend of mine said “Ordinary people do not deserve what is happening to them”. “Sure, except for all the people who voted for any one of the main parties,” was my reply. They are getting exactly what they voted for, good and hard, and there is a trillion more of it coming down the pipeline that will wash away all our savings. April 3rd, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been clear to me for some time that support for capitalist wealth creation was no longer acceptable. The foolishness of our Austrian economic based opposition to massive politically directed transfers of ordinary people’s money to failed bankers, non-viable unionised car makers and anyone else who has political connections is clearly futile. This is the way of the future and we might as well get used to it while there is still any real money left to be redistributed. Let the printing presses roll and lets re-inflate that credit bubble! Fly me to the moon, my darling, fly me to the moon… on a massive gravity defying credit bubble! As a consequence, as soon as I can get our technical guru to make the changes, we will be changing the name of this blog to ObamaBrownData, not as catchy as Samizdata I grant you, but it more fully represents the paradigm shift that all thinking people have now undergone and this blog is no exception. The world is rotating around the Gordon Brown/Barak Obama Axis now. So please all of you… go rotate. We must learn to accept the wisdom and judgement of our political masters, sanctified by democratic processes, and realise that we are all dependent on the regulatory welfare state now. I will be signing up for as many state aid programmes as I can find and anyone who wants to advise me how to get on the gravy train, please let me know. All these years denying myself the largesse of our beneficent Big Brother has left me with a poor grasp of how to best benefit from the system. As Frederic Bastiat said, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”, well everyone will include me now… and the Samizdatistas… or Obamabrownistas as we will now be known. Point me to the trough, I repent my foolish ways and have a lot of catching up to do. April 1st, 2009 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
March 31st, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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