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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To forbid “discrimination” is to violate basic freedom – not just religious freedom, any freedom. It was grimly predictable that faced with a choice between freedom of association and the doctrine of “anti discrimination” Mr Cameron would choose to support state control. So much for his “big idea” of the greater delivery of “public services” by voluntary groups.
Both Mr Blair and Mr Cameron have shown themselves to be people who only support association if people associate in the way they COMMAND.
– Paul Marks
It is of course too much to expect much rationality in the debate about immigration occurring on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment. I keep getting completely deranged e-mails from an outfit calling itself Conservative News NYC from across the puddle who are claiming that the USA and Mexico are in a de facto state of war due to the ‘invasion’ of the USA by illegal aliens. They also take the view that anyone who takes a more measured opinion on this is clearly a vile traitor. This is the same outfit who thinks any American who supports Israel is also a traitor, a word they rather like it seems, although of course they preface this with “but we’re not anti-Semitic”. No, of course not, perish the thought.
Now just because I think the fine fellows of Conservative News NYC are barking moonbats that does not mean all is well when it comes to immigration. There are indeed two groups in the USA (and one in the UK) who really are a problem. On both sides of the Atlantic we have an increasingly radicalised and non-integrating community of Muslims amongst whom support is very widespread for values completely antithetical to post-Enlightenment western civilisation.
Add to this in the United States the quite similar, at least in outlook if not action, ethnic fascists of La Raza, the one form of overt in-your-face racist fascism that seems to be quite acceptable for members of the American left to praise and with whom they are quite happy to share a stage (I guess being racist to white people is not really racism, eh Hilary?). At least one good thing about La Raza is that they are a lunatic fringe amongst Hispanics in the USA (much as Conservative News NYC are a radical lunatic fringe amongst US Conservatives). Of course the same could probably be said of Samizdata in many ways as we are hardly mainstream in many of the views we take, so it is not like I am against lunatic fringes per se.
Sadly the same cannot be said for much of the Muslim community who do indeed appear to share a wide range of views with the people we quite incorrectly call ‘extremists’… I say incorrect because it appears they actually reflect increasingly mainstream Muslim opinion, particularly in the UK. They are not extremists, they are merely practising Muslims who actually believe what their religious texts tell them to believe. The problem is not extremism, it is Islam itself and anyone who actually takes it seriously.
One thing both of these groups have in common is that they must be relentlessly confronted and cannot be compromised with or appeased in any way whatsoever. It really is ‘them or us’.
However… → Continue reading: Immigration successes… and disasters
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Whilst having lunch the other day, I saw an attractive young woman wearing a tee-shirt with a slogan that made me laugh:
I’d rather wear fur than go naked
No doubt she was reacting to this campaign. And when she and her gentleman friend were finished, she put on her fur trimmed coat and they left. It reminded me of this. Bless.
I missed this the other day… The French government, the same people who gave aid and comfort the the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, and have done everything they could to thwart the arrests of mass murderous Serbian war criminals in Bosnia, have decided to ‘honour’ one of their own. They have awarded the Legion D’Honneur, France’s highest award, to Harold Pinter, that well know playwright, man of letters, literary colossus and apologists for mass murdering national socialist Slobodan Milosevic and mass murdering national socialist Saddam Hussain.
Vermin, one and all.
And how do I know? It has passed Julian’s Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT).
It seems that the Tory Party wants less market forces and more local political planning of the economy in order to stop local shops from closing.
But if enough local people wanted local shops to survive at the expense of supermarkets and out-of-town shopping centres, they would indeed already be voting for them… with their wallets and credit cards. Yet that notion seems not to compute with ‘Conservative’ Nick Hurd, the MP for Ruislip-Northwood. Presumably what he wants to ‘conserve’ is the power of local political activists by giving them even more power to decide who can and cannot make money in local communities. More ‘direct democracy’, eh Nick?
I must say the Spanish solution to people who cannot restrain themselves from meddling in the lives of others who want to just go about their business starts to look more appealing by the day.
There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
Although no official statement has yet been given, the Guardia Civil have indicated that they strongly believe those responsible for the murder of the 50-year-old mayor bore a grudge over his policies in the village. There is no shortage of contenders. During his 12 years in office, the mayor, a member of the conservative Popular Party and the owner of the village’s only guest house, had been involved in almost four dozen individual court cases with homeowners in Fago. He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.
[…]
“He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible,” he said.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered.
Just to state the obvious, White Rose is inactive. This is due to a simple lack of time on the part of the main contributors. Work, life, other blogging… alas White Rose is currently a ‘blog too many’.
Quite possibly WR will be reactivated at some point in the future as Gawd knows the need for it has not gone away.
TTFN.
Producing a plausible TV show about international terrorism without depicting Muslims is like producing a plausible TV Western without depicting cowboys.
– The indispensable Robert Bidinotto
I happened to read a ‘house’ copy of the Daily Mail (not something I would pay good money for) whilst having lunch at Pret a Manger today and saw with some incredulity that the news seems to be dominated by some particularly ugly ‘celebrities’ I have never even heard off insulting a very attractive Bollywood star who I have indeed heard of, in the dismal ‘Big Brother’ reality TV programme. Questions in the House? Comments by the Prime Minister and Chancellor? Some of the breathless reports act as if an exchange of nuclear weapons with India is in the offing. Organs of the state threatening to get involved because of ‘racism’? Clearly someone must have put something in the water. Is this really that important? Even on its own terms the whole thing is bizarre, though it does appear that to many ‘racial equality’ means only being allowed to be a jackass to members of your own race. That does not sound very equal to me. Surely the only ‘punishment’ required for the gorgeous Shilpa Shetty’s tormentors is to be revealed as ignorant trailer-park trash to the millions of people who inexplicably watch this programme.
My incredulity factor peaked later tonight however when the top story on SkyNews was the ‘Big Bruvvah racism row’. Oh what drivel, particularly when there is a real ‘human interest’ story to report on, namely the astonishing action by some Royal Marines and Army Aviation in Afghanistan. How on earth could this not be the lead news story?
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.
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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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