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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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One hundred and three days after their general election, life goes on in Belgium. People go to work, they meet their friends, the beer is world class, the food is good, folks go about life as they always have. And there is still no government.
Hopefully the country will provide an inspirational example to the rest of the EU and split under the pressure caused by increasing Flemish unwillingness to pay the parasitic leftists who dominate Wallonia. Of course things might get messy but more likely it will be a velvet divorce… but the really interesting thing for me is that society and the economy continues to function just fine without any active government at all. No new laws, no cabinet meetings, and yet somehow the sky has not caved in and the world keeps turning.
A few days ago we quoted Adriana sticking it to Andrew Keen in a debate. Well she is at it again in a bit more detail this time on her own blog.
Irritatingly, debating with the man invariably leads from his arguments to the person he is. It is like trying to have a conversation about a picture or an image with a colourblind man. He is looking at the same thing but, in his vision, there are colours missing and so in his mind the resulting image may be fundamentally different from reality. In the end, you find yourself insisting that the colours are really there and that he should just take your word for it. He, on the other hand, insists on describing what is in front of him without taking any notice of others telling him that his vision is flawed.
I particularly like the bit about him ‘re-setting’ each time so that no intellectual progress is possible with the man over time even if you successfully refute some part of his argument… next day it is as if the previous debate never happened (kind of like watching old non-story-arc episodic SciFi shows that never referenced previous events).
Read the whole thing.
Iain Dale has an article in the Telegraph called Gordon Brown is out to destroy the Tories, which makes for interesting reading.
Not surprisingly I have a somewhat different take on what the implications of Gordon Brown’s “ruthless” political tactics would be, should he be successful and finally make the Tory’s collapse once and for all.
Of course Labour want to destroy the Tory party… as it is now ideologically indistinguishable from Labour under the dismal Cameron, they are clearly fighting for the same centre-left statist voters as neither side cares about conservatives.
As a consequence voters who are actual conservatives ideologically have only one genuinely conservative party to vote for and that is not the preposterous Blue-Green caring-sharing hug-a-hoodie tax-and-spend Tory party, it is UKIP. Thus is Gordon Brown well and truly “destroys” the Tory party, it might actually finally force the rump of suicidally loyal Tories to look elsewhere for their psephological fix on election day.
In fact if Brown manages to destroy the Tory party, he will be doing actual conservatives a great service (though in truth it will be ‘Dave’ Cameron and all those who voted for him to be leader who actually destroyed the party, not Brown).
In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:
- Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the ‘Surge’) in order to actually win
What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated… and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.
Yet surely to argue for any reduction in military force levels in Iraq by anything less that 100% and to argue that things are not going well, is tantamount to saying you support a policy to make the allied military situation even worse.
Orwell imagined a political order that would try to change people by expunging certain terms from the vocabulary in order to make the very concepts those words represent un-knowable.
Of course Orwell had not heard of the European Union. To quote EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini:
I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector… on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism
And of course this will also block anyone researching the history of Nazi German and all manner of other governmental action throughout history . It might be interesting to speculate on what the motivation of someone like the EU’s “Justice and Security” Commissioner really are.
(via Ben Laurie)
There is an interesting article in The Times about Ehsan Jami, a former Muslim who rejected his religion in the aftermath of 9/11. He is organising a movement to fight for the rights of people who leave the Muslim faith and as a consequence face the threat of death, as mandated by the Koran.
This is not an issue on which there can be any compromise whatsoever. However it is also an issue which needs to be highlighted not just for the sake of former Muslims but as a means to rubbish the advocates of multicultural relativism. This is an issue that must be forced down the throat of anyone who wishes to practice Islam in any civilised country.
The administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand. With all due respect, I don’t buy it.
– Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, accusing General David Petraeus political motivations when delivering his report on military progress in Iraq. And of course a seeker-of-truth like Tom Landos’ utterances on the military situation could not possibly be motived by political considerations, right?
… too busy with politically incorrect activities…
It is interesting that the French government is now apparently seriously trying to stop people eating Ortolan, a delicacy I once tried some years ago (that said I ripped it apart rather than the traditional method of eating it whole). A small matter to be sure but It really does seem to me that the control obsessives like to pick on the people who have tastes or habits some despise, as a way to gradually control more and more aspects of civil society.
Smoking is another interesting example: wait until social attitudes mean smokers are not in the majority and only then use the force of law to repress the hard core. This dynamic is why I have often thought that people who are statists and also homosexuals, i.e. who are members of a group that is always going to be disliked by a significant portion of the population, are really quite stupid. There will come a time when they reap what they sow.
I suspect all of us do something that a lot of other people will dislike and there is an entire class of people out there who use that fact to convince ‘us’ to support the use of the state to “do something about that”.
There could be an interesting storm brewing when you see things like this…
Gold has raced to a 16-month high of $700 an ounce as investors seek to shelter their cash after stock markets ended the week sharply lower. The yellow metal has clawed back around $30 this week, raising hopes it could revisit last year’s highs of around $730 an ounce. Although gold is traditionally strong at this time of year, the rout in credit markets is fuelling further appetite for the safest investments.
and this…
A sharp drop in foreign holdings of US Treasury bonds over the last five weeks has raised concerns that China is quietly withdrawing its funds from the United States, leaving the dollar increasingly vulnerable.
I am trying to join the dots but instead of a bull or a bear, the outline looks a bit like a hippopotamus. Not sure what to make of that.
Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, has written an interesting and very ‘bloggy’ article in The Times with a subsection that was right on the money called Left-wing cant and the indefensible:
There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.
We had two this weekend. We discovered last week that the playwright Arthur Miller, who abandoned his disabled son after the child was born because he was, in Miller’s words, “a mongoloid”, avoided all contact with the child until they met, to the playwright’s surprise, at a meeting where Miller was championing a better deal for disabled people. This sort of behaviour is beyond satire. To seek applause for your stance on behalf of suffering in general, while being so indifferent to the fate of individual suffering, is the quintessence of canting left-wingery. But for The Guardian Miller was as much the victim as anyone.
But their treatment of Miller was positively caustic besides their lionising of one of Britain’s most shameless intellectual apologists for evil. A fawning tribute to the Eric Hobsbawm, 90, made light of his championing of Soviet communism and his support for Stalin, the gulag and totalitarian tyranny. I’m happy to leave the old devil in peace to enjoy his dotage. But can we at least be spared any more laying of garlands at the feet of this man who supported mass murder?
Quite, although I am not so forgiving as the Honourable Member for Surrey Heath. It is intolerable that the Guardianistas get a free ride on these sort of issues. Now if only the leader of Gove’s hilariously misnamed party would call a spade a spade like that.
Now it might seem odd that someone on record as being as hostile to the EU as me might hope that Gordon Brown gets his way and just bounces Britain into adopting the resurrected EU treaty against what is quite obviously the wishes of the majority of politically active people in Britain.
But that is what I want. I want the EU to get its way and for there to be a dramatic shift in power from London to Brussels, with commensurate huge diminution in democratic control of the political process in this country. I regard the fact Gordan Brown can look the nation in the eye and utter such a naked lie that the current offering is not, to quote the Chancellor of Germany, “the new constitutional document is the same as the old constitutional document: the only difference is that it doesn’t have European Constitution as its title”, with pure delight.
In short I want Gordon Brown to strip away the myth of the democratic accountability. I want the system that has been so seriously damaged over the last ten years to be broken in such a visible way that even the most purblind self-deluding fool can see just what sort of country they really live in. Let all sixty million people on this island hear the stream of pork pies issuing from the gob of the man in 10 Downing Street, with the entire apparatus of power standing behind him nodding.
Although very worthy folks like the UKIP will argue passionately for a referendum, knowing that their position will almost certain win (which is of course why it will not be allowed to happen), in truth the long term position of a fringe party like UKIP will be vastly improved if the ‘nightmare scenario’ does indeed come to pass. To actually break the current political monoculture will require far more really pissed off people than currently exist in Big Bruvvah anaesthetised Britain.
The system needs to break and millions of people need to be confronted with their political irrelevance before anything really… interesting… can happen.
So good luck Gordan, I wish you great success in screwing over your subject people and locking in the centrist regulatory Big State at the more remote European level. More and faster in fact.
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