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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The sheer front of the man. Dave Cameron has been openly lying for political advantage again and again and in response to suddenly realising that the recent defections to UKIP are indicative of a very serious problem, what does he do? He is doing it again, with the Daily Telegraph not so much as blinking at the latest volte-face from repudiating Thatcherism to (ostensibly) wrapping himself in it. So I suppose from now on everything he has said since he was elected leader of the Tory Party (more regulation, less school selection, more Euro-Federalism) gets ‘packaged’ in a covering that suggests the exact opposite. “I am Thatcher’s heir!” he proclaims. Well as we are playing make-believe…”I am Howard Hughes heir”. It would appear that stating something boldly simply makes it so, regardless of all the contradictory evidence.
I have also been pondering the article of Matthew d’Ancona, or more correctly the attitude underpinning it, called ‘Tories who would rather lose than change’, which I linked to in my previous bit of bloggage as two bits of it stuck in my mind.
But to say that Mr Cameron is an old-fashioned statist is simply incorrect. His ethos has much more in common with the “compassionate conservatism” espoused by George W Bush when he was Governor of Texas than with the Butskellism of the old Tory wets.
…and…
I would simply ask this brilliant economist: who is more likely to lead a Eurosceptic government, to reduce the tax burden when the public finances allow, and to tame the centralised state? David Cameron or Gordon Brown?
Nice leading question. So when trying to get elected leader, Dave Cameron promises to pull the Tory Party out of the €uro-federalist EPP (part of whose platform is ‘ever greater union’), then decided not to after all… and then upon being elected goes back on his pledge to allow individual Tory MPs to campaign to leave the EU, and that somehow that makes him a… Eurosceptic. How does that work exactly? And his promises to impose more ‘green’ regulations and absolute refusal to say which government programmes or departments would be scrapped under his administration, that makes him in favour of reduced taxes? Really?
But when I saw d’Ancona holding up G.W. Bush (timber industry protectionism, ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ federal statism, Patriot Act, etc. etc.) as an example of someone who is not an old-time statist of really significant magnitude, well, that actually left me lost for words for initially (not a common occurrence for a opinionated git such as myself). So Dave Cameron is not an ol’ time statist… he wants the state to meddle in family life, but he is not a statist. He refuses to cut taxes but he is not a statist. His close adviser wants to redistribute wealth but Dave is not a statist. Oh, what’s that? He is actually Thatcher’s heir? Oh, that’s all right then! Phew, you had me worried for a moment there.
In short, Matthew d’Ancona’s article is actually either incoherent or (more likely) not actually based on any genuine exposition of what Tory ideology consists of at all but just a tactical piece designed to protect ‘his party’. I strongly suspect d’Ancona thinks getting onto power is an end in and of itself, rather than achieving some specific objective with political power. That really is the only way I can explain his strange lack of understanding why life long Tories have turned against his party. He seems to have the meta-context of ‘politics as its own justification’ if you like. No doubt if confronted with that notion, he would reply “you actually have to get elected before you can implement your policies”, as if you do not actually need to get the intellectual ground work into place for what you intend to do, you just get elected and viola…you implement whatever policies take your fancy… which would work if we were electing dictators, which we are not.
A very good indication that the Tories have belatedly woken up to the fact they are indeed circling the drain is that today’s Daily Torygraph is absolutely chock-a-block with anti-UKIP articles. It is almost as if they are trying to force UKIP out of existence by sheer force of column inches. The reason I have only externally linked to articles in the Daily Telegraph is that all the information you need to see the absurdity and contradictions in the articles today in the Telegraph praising Cameron and saying he is the heir of Thatcher can be demolished by reading other older articles… in the Daily Telegraph.
Are you a member of the Tory Party? Remember when Dave Cameron said he would pull the Tory Party out of the €uro-Federalist EPP once he was elected leader? Remember when he promised Tory MPs would be free to campaign for withdrawal from the EU provided they were not on the front bench?
Have you had enough of the endless porkie pies from Dave Cameron yet? Do you care if you are lied to just to get your vote? If you do care and you still like the idea of being a member of a political party, then I suggest go and join the only thing even approximating a conservative party in Britain… and to do that, you have to leave the Tory party because if you are not a part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
The only thing worse than another term of Labour implementing its destructive policies would be a term of the same destructive policies being implemented by Dave Cameron’s Tory Party and institutionalising radical regulatory centrist authoritarianism as the only permitted political option in Britain regardless of the party in 10 Downing Street.
Although the editorial writers are pulling out all the stops to minimise the threat of the UKIP, clearly the blood is in the water and ideology-free die-hard ‘sensibles’ like Matthew d’Ancona and other have abandoned their policy of trying to laugh off UKIP. There could be no clearer sign that the Cameron Tories are circling the drain.
Update: I left the following comment earlier today on the Telegraph’s website for the Matthew d’Ancona article linked above. As they seem to have decided not to approve the comment for publication…
So let me see… Dave Cameron (who you may have noticed leads a party that claims to be conservative) promises more ‘green’ regulations, goes back on his pledge to leave the Euro-Federalist EPP, goes back on his pledge to allow non-front bench Tory MP’s to campaign for EU withdrawal if they support that, has called for ‘redistribution of wealth’ a la Polly Toynbee, but no, he has not signed up for the European Social Model and is a pukka conservative. Is that really your position?
Sorry Matthew, but how credulous do you think people are? Not only is Dave Cameron a liar (please show me where the things I have mentioned are incorrect), he is clearly not in fact a conservative by any meaningful definition of the word.
Michael Totten has some more great stuff from Lebanon that you just will not read in the mainstream media.
And remember he does not have a news organisation behind him, so he trips and reportage are all funded from his own pocket and from donations from readers.
How cool is this? A MIG-21 available on eBay!
Although it is not all that expensive, sadly I really do not have anywhere to put it.
The message is simple: get out now.
Chavez is calling for ‘Socialism or Death’ and that in fact means ‘Socialism and Death’. As it appears a majority actually supports him, not much will be gained by putting a bullet between this man’s eyes as clearly the problem lies deeper than the life of a single tyrant (though that is not to say that shooting tyrants is ever a bad idea).
If you are have property, sell it if you can, but get the hell out. If you are creative and intelligent, there is a whole world out there in which to rebuild your life. There may come a time in the future when you can come back, either to help pick up the wreckage of the totalitarian experiment voted for by a kleptomaniac majority, or to woo back your nation at bayonet point, but for now, for God’s sake get out with what you can as soon as you can.
And if you are a shareholder in a multi-national company… feeling a little stupid now, eh? At least try and do the decent thing and torch as much infrastructure you own tonight to leave as little to sustain the parasites who are about to nationalise your operations in Venezuela.
It is fair to say not many Englishmen live in the more remote parts of Russia. Thus when someone gets an e-mail from an Englishman called Tim Newman, living in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, who is an oil business professional discussing the Royal Dutch Shell’s operations, and there is a Tim Newman working for Shell in that part of the world, it will be one and the same person, right?
Nope.
Take a look at this for a real life comedy of errors.
If the report turn out to be true about the success of the US military attack in Somalia, that is good news indeed. It is being claimed that some of the people targeted were those responsible for the horrendous 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and 2002 atrocities on in Kenya against Kenyan and Israeli civilians. If those are the bastards who have indeed been killed then that is a cause for some satisfaction.
It is interesting that the attack, which took place in Somalia, has attracted praise from the Somali president, who is no friend of the Islamists. But rather more baffling is that the EU has criticised the attack, with a spokesman for EU development commissioner Louis Michel saying “Any incident of this kind is not helpful in the long term”. I wonder how killing members of Al Qaeda is not ‘helpful’ in a fight against Al Qaeda?
Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian has written about the blogosphere in a way that had me grinning by the end of the first paragraph…
I’d love to see his reaction to the Guardian arts blog, where the dynamic often suggests that the argument has spilled out of the crowded bar and escalated into a punchup in the car park.
Yes, the comment sections of blogs, and indeed blog articles themselves, can get a bit like that at times. Although he is writing about the ‘Arts’ blogosphere, some of what he observes also pertains to the political and punditry blogosphere… and some does not, which I also find quite interesting.
However where I think Lynskey is not quite correct is where he writes…
Many of the people who post [comments] on blogs appear to be annoyed not by what the writers say so much as the fact that they’re in a position to say it. You can spot this type because they write things like : “You’ve only written this to provoke a reaction.” Or: “Why did you even write this? What a waste of time.” As if writing to complain about a waste of time were not, in fact, a bigger waste of time. Or, my favourite: “Typical Guardian.” Perhaps they also post on the website of Practical Caravan magazine, complaining: “Typical Practical Caravan. So caravancentric.”
No, not really, I do not think people care that Lynskey is in a position to say what he says. I think what he is observing here is not resentment that he has a gig writing for the ‘Grauniad’ but rather a change in the culture regarding the whole journalistic profession.
People have realised that whilst they may not be journalists, they no longer need to be one in order to editorialise the news. In short, journalism is no longer an ‘institution’, it is just ‘something people with opinions do’. Some people get paid for it and other do it for free. In a sense, we are the journalists now in that we are the ones keeping journals of our opinions on the outrage-of-the-day. People who work for newspapers might be better described as ‘newspaper men’, many of whom are formatting commoditised information, or as ‘reporters’ if they are collecting information to be formatted. The editorialising role is something that the mainstream media has now largely lost their lock on.
If the Guardian tells me car bomb has gone off in Baghdad or a British minister has resigned, I believe them. However I do not need the Guardian to tell me what the significance of that is as the low-down regarding what was behind said ministerial skulduggery is probably better and fresher on Guido Fawkes.
However he is quite correct that criticising a Guardian article in the Guardian’s own comment section for being a ‘typical Guardian article’ is rather bizarre. What were they expecting? It is all the stranger as people in the UK have the advantage that most clear eyed British journalists make little pretence that their newspaper is not partisan (unlike in the USA when the preposterous myth of journalistic impartiality persists), by which I mean each paper has an identifiable political editorial line that colours everything it does… people understand that the Guardian is a left wing statist newspaper, the Telegraph is a right wing statist newspaper with occasional classical liberal pretensions, the Independent is the Al Qaeda House Journal, etc. etc.. Just as people do not read Samizdata and expect to be confronted with a paean to the NHS (that is the Guardian’s job), they should not expect to read an article in the Guardian calling for an end to state education (that is our job).
Nevertheless, love it or loath it (one guess), the Guardian has always been far and away the most internet savvy newspaper and Lynskey seems to have a much better grasp of what blogging is about than the irascible Keith Waterhouse.
The current war in Iraq is the long death rattle of a savage era that started in 1968 with the start of Saddam Hussain’s rise to power and begun in earnest in 1979 with his assumption the presidency of Iraq. To outsiders, what happened in Iraq then and more recently is somewhat abstract unless you are a member of the US or UK military or family member of such, but to a great many Iraqis it was all too real and all too personal.
And you did not have top be a political opponent to experience the true evil of the Man from Tikrit. Over on Camera Anguish, Julian Taylor reports on an attempt by expatriate Iraqis to use the death of the tyrant to close the book on Saddam Hussain’s era of very personal horror for them.
Why is a bloody tyrant getting his just deserts generating so many official grimaces and shocked swooning amongst the professional political classes? That Saddam Hussain’s executioners visited upon him a tiny measure of the degradation and horror Saddam’s own busy hangmen inflicted on so many others when he was in power is a trivial matter. Tyrants should have neither consideration nor dignity, deserving only to reap the harvest of hatred from the fields of skulls they have themselves planted, ideally at the hands of their victims or suitable representatives.
Tyrants are killed as punishment for unspeakable evil acts and as a warning to other would-be tyrants. Puncturing their vanity and disrespecting them is not ‘inappropriate’, it is justice and a small measure of revenge for against a person towards whom the most appropriated emotion is hatred. That such a person controlled a state makes their debasement all the more important, though quite possibly that very fact lies at the heart of why so object to what happened to him.
Sic semper tyrannis.
The French involvement in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 has been something about which the chattering classes have been largely indifferent, much to the annoyance of many Rwandans. The Rwandan government recently unceremoniously threw out the French embassy, and any French institutions with links to the French state, after a court in France issued arrest warrants against several leading Rwandans (including the president) for assassinating former President Habyarimana, whose death was the event that sparked the genocidal murder of 800,000 Tutsi. That was rather like France in 1956 calling for the arrest of the few surviving conspirators behind the (sadly failed) plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler in 1944.
I cannot escape the suspicion that if somehow, however tangentially, the USA was involved then articles about Rwanda would be a far more common thing in the media. That said, I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has concocted a conspiracy theory that it was the CIA, rather than France, who was backing the Bad Guys in 1994, supplying the Interahamwe with machetes from a secret Halliburton machete factory in somewhere in Texas.
For those of you who have been following the story of the Pakistan born ex-Muslim blogger ‘Isaac Schrödinger’ who has been seeking asylum in Canada, I am delighted to report a very happy ending.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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