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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)
Obama’s supporters should savour today, they really should. Even Obama’s detractors have at least something to be happy about. A black man has become President of the United States, The Leader of the Free-ish World, the Commander-in-Thief. And that at least is a fine thing. But the mere fact it has happened shows it is much less important than it seems. A huge percentage of America’s blacks voted along racial lines, and thus presumably can have had no complaint if non-black people had likewise voted their race en-mass. Fortunately by and large even in race obsessed America most white people did not see it that way. Things have moved on, something obvious to anyone who has visited or worked in the US over the last few decades. Perhaps, just perhaps, the sheer folly of identity politics, the poison wellspring of all ethnic sectarianism, can be discarded once and for all. Yeah, as if. Well one can hope. But today Obama does indeed become the very embodiment of a victory over an irrelevant thing which should never have divided people in the first place. And against that noble tableau, the calls for a New Hope and Bipartisan Unity will ring out strong and loud against a backdrop of Old Glory fluttering in the wind as Obama looks out at the horizon in all his Apollonian glory. Powerful stuff given how much Americans respond to appeals to the sentimental. And the correct response to this is not to put your hand on your heart and get all misty eyed, it is to nod sagely at the agreeable symbolism of a clear triumph over America’s grotesquely racist past… and then, in answer to the calls for unity, raise your middle finger and make a loud raspberry sound. You will be drowned out by the cheering crowds but trust me when I say there will be millions of other people off-camera doing precisely that. President Obama will only ever have one meaningful victory, and that is being a black man who was elected President. Cool. Seriously, very cool indeed. Celebrate that much in good faith. As for the rest, the things he actually wants to do, well that is the stuff that always should divide us and always will. Republicans and for that matter libertarians who cannot see that are, quite simply, political enemies who are part of the problem, not the solution. So cheer the glorious apogee of the civil rights movement today because its significance ends the instant he takes the oath. Everything else that follows will be the start of a progressive and cumulative defeat for Obama. The One will get the laws he wants and his supporters will conclude that means he is winning, as if saying something is so makes it so. Let them do their worst because there is nothing anyone can do to stop them at this juncture in any case. But Obama’s actual enemy is not the Republicans, who are prostrate at the moment and worthless as currently constituted. No, it is reality itself that is Obama’s utterly implacable opponent: that vast Ponzi scheme called ‘regulatory statism’ has reached the end of the cycle, as Ponzi schemes always do in the end. In previous times, economic growth has masked the pyramidal nature of what both parties did as they pushed the hard choices off into the future with the knowing connivance of millions of voters… but not this time. The future has arrived and the sainted American middle class, who acquiesced to it all and yet about whom no ill may be spoken, will find that future quite unsympathetic. And when irksome reality stubbornly refuses to follow Hollywood’s script and accept the Triumph of the Will, more laws will follow. And then more. And more. The cannibalisation of the shrinking productive economy to ‘bail out’ the failing bits will become ever more intense. Much as John “I support the Bail Out” McCain would have done in fact. Pervasive political regulations trying to manipulate things back into health will become ever more pervasive, all to rapturous applause at first… and all to no avail. Obama’s progressive and spectacularly expensive defeat will be a defeat for the entire nation with implications that will be felt around the world. It will be a defeat that consumes much that is still gleaming and golden in the Republic and turns it into toxic waste. So now is not the time for ‘unity’ and ‘bipartisanship’, which is just a genteel way of demanding surrender, it is the time for resistance and the renewal of purpose by those who see the liberty and prosperity that comes from constitutionally limited government as a prize worth any price to defend. This was never really about race other than as the final flourish of a very worthy battle that had already been won.  January 20th, 2009 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
English taxpayers will see their Council Tax bills rise by 3.5% this year. The official line was predictable:
The ‘money quote’ is of course: “More people are turning to councils to help them through the recession”… the idea that civil society revolves around the state is so deeply ingrained that the concept of less state and more civil society simply does not fit within their world view. Let me suggest that if a massive number of council employees in England were fired, very few of whom are net contributors of wealth to the ailing economy, that would do more to alleviate the recession than anything the state could do at the local level to ‘help people through the recession’. Less taxes, that would help. The sheer arrogance is breathtaking. Expecting any increase in tax, when they should be shrinking themselves at the very least in step with the contracting economy, shows how rotten the system is. And of course the dependably useless Tory party, at their very best only a ‘lesser evil’, only want to ‘freeze’ local taxes for two years. They are not even contemplating actually rolling back the state even in line with the shrinking economy. Message to the vile Dave Cameron: if the economy is contracting, anything other than a reduction is an increase. January 19th, 2009 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
A year from now, when those who saved see the value of those saving buying a great deal less, and those who did not save see the empty shops and find themselves out of a job, will they see the sheer folly of expecting the state to manipulate the economy back to health? Perhaps they will. Classical liberals and libertarians are often accused of being ‘utopian’ because of our reliance of the self correcting mechanism of markets. “That assumes people act rationally!” our critics say. Nothing could be further from the truth. We know people do not act rationally, oh good grief you statists have no idea how profoundly we know that, and that is exactly why we do not trust the state to have so much power over the domestic life of its subjects. Amongst other things, a strong state, far from protecting us from mean old Big Business, actually entrenches Big Business and lets them limit competition. People are not particularly rational, even less so in large groups… and that includes people with great political power. They make mistakes and then repeat those mistakes again and again and again. The true utopians are those who think it is wise to give demonstrably fallible people vast legal backed power over civil society. But hey, if you clever and oh so rational statists do not get the results you expect from the ‘stimulus package’, just strap in and do it again… and again… and again. Have fun. This is indeed the end of an era, just not the one you think. 
What 79% of Americans want apparently. Enjoy. January 18th, 2009 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Bail-out fears hit banking shares‘ howls the BBC… “We know of no justification for the fall in share price. We are fully aware of our regulatory obligations and we have not said anything,” said a Barclays spokesman in a statement. Hehehe. Could it be that more and more people do not believe the shit that government and the mainstream media keep peddling any more? The ‘bail outs’ are consuming a larger and larger proportion of the world’s ailing economies, with no end of ‘bailing’ in sight. Frankly why not bail out the porn industry? Why not ‘bail out’ every damn industry! Just print more money! The system is devouring itself and no amount of manipulation can change that… because manipulation is why the system is collapsing. When the correcting mechanisms of markets are not permitted to work, it is like never allowing forest fires to clear out dead wood. In the end all you do it store up problems for later. Guess what? Later is now. Let it burn. January 16th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The EU is bleating as people go cold due to Russian gas being shut off due to its disputes with the Ukraine. And the ever dependable Russian polity, moonbats to a man, blame the USA for the crisis. The pragmatic Slovak government has made the very sensible decision to possibly restart Soviet era nuclear power plants that they were decommissioning as part of their accession to the EU, if the crisis drags on… and in doing so, they show the simple and ‘carbon footprint’ friendly (as if I care) solution to this and oh so many problems… nuclear power. How can a solution that dooms both the Kremlin and Middle East to long term strategic insignificance not be a Truly Many Splendored Thing? January 14th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The splendiferous Doc Searls has an alarming article about an outfit called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. Global Internet Freedom Consortium sell tools to break the Great Internet Wall of China. Cool. They also sell the private details of their clients who have purchased these tools to ‘vetted’ companies for ‘personalised advertising’. Extremely un-cool… catastrophically so if one of the ‘vetted’ companies turns out to be a front for the Chinese government. I despise most internet ‘push marketers’ at the best of times (not only does it not really work, it is intensely annoying… those two points are not unrelated) but to sell that sort of client list to any third party is just all kinds of a bad idea. These do not sound like people I would care to trust my liberty and quite possibly my life with if I was planning to most righteously dig a hole under the Great Internet Wall. I know two people in China who do exactly that on a regular basis and this article is probably the fastest way I have to let them know about the worm in the “Global Internet Freedom Consortium’s” apple. The moral of the story? Read the fine print when buying the tools you need to stick it to The Man… before you pull out that credit card. January 13th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few days ago I was asked why I hold Dave Cameron in such utter contempt and I am sure that person soon regretted provoking such a lengthy invective filled rant from me. Well here is another example why he is a complete waste of space. In an article titled Tories ‘would wipe slate clean’, Dave Cameron promptly precedes to explain that far from wiping the slate clean, he represents philosophical continuity with the people he wishes to replace:
If ever there was an example of John McCain style “I am the Lesser Evil” politics, this is it.
…he says blithely immediately after having promised to increase spending by £25 BILLION at a time when the economy is actually contracting. What sort of mathematics is ‘Dave’ using in which an increase in spending by the state whilst a decrease in economic activity is under way does not add more god damn debt to ‘our children’? He wants to strip money from productive sectors at the worst possible time and pass the debt on to future generations but we should vote for him because he wants to do this slightly less than the other guy? Are you starting to understand my transcendent loathing of the man yet? And he is not even a clever politician as he has the example of what happened to John “I support the bailout” McCain when the half-witted Republicans ran a Big Government Statist against an Even Bigger Government Statist. Truly a waste of space and a pox on the party who tolerates him as leader. And the Labour party response?
It is like listening to two madmen arguing over how full an invisible jar of jam is… and each insisting that as the other cannot see what they see, they must be insane. The lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum. January 11th, 2009 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
Who would have thought it? Prince Harry is just a normal bloke in spite of the weird circumstances of his upbringing.
Sounds like a great guy to me. Sure, I am all for abominating racism like any other form of odious collectivism (like socialism for example, which is tyranny for all rather than just tyranny for certain racial groups), but this hypersensitivity to any politically incorrect use of language is really annoying. I know Pakistani people who use the word ‘Paki’ for Christ’s sake! And ‘raghead’? Kill the enemy by all means but lets not insult them, eh? This is the comment I left on the BBC site:
January 11th, 2009 | 77 comments - (Comments are closed)
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