At last, that bastion of idiotarianism the BBC is going to go off the air for a while, God willing! That these grasping tax funded parasites are going to strike during major televised sporting events is splendid news so maybe now more folks might be a bit less willing to shell out £125 (about $240) per year in order to support an institution filled with moral relativists, collectivists, reflexive anti-Americans and pro-Islamofascists.
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Whilst Britain remains fixated on the aftermath of Tony Blair’s unprecedented third term victory against their intellectually bankrupt and dependably inept opponents, it would behove people in Britain to pay a bit more attention to the electoral earthquake which shook Ulster which has resulted in David Trimble’s relatively moderate Ulster Unionist Party has almost completely collapsing in favour of Ian Paisley Democratic Unionist Party. Now that the only two significant political players locally are the two extremist parties from either side of the sectarian divide, things look like they are about to get dramatically more… interesting. The message from the Northern Ireland’s protestant majority seems pretty damn clear to me but is anyone actually listening? I have a feeling I am going to be spending a lot more time keeping tabs on what get said on Slugger O’Toole, that most indispensable source of insights for all things Northern Irish, to see how things develop. May 10th, 2005 | 80 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The Daily Mail’s print headline screamed “You gave him a bloody nose!” and the Sun snickered that Tony Blair had been given a “Kick in the Ballots”. Excuse me? Blair wins a historic third term with a good sixty plus seat majority and this is being portrayed as something less than a major political triumph for the Labour party? If ever there was an instance of how the mainstream media has a remarkable talent for making an ass of itself, this is it. This was not a ‘vindication’ of the Tories (as suggested by the print edition of the Telegraph), it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant. One way to see this is that Labour has pulled off a historic victory (which is an indisputable fact). Another way to look at this is that the Tories have suffered a historic defeat. That even after all these years they still cannot be accepted as a viable alternative shows that they are far worse historically speaking than any other British Tory party for a very long time indeed. So I got the result I wanted. Sure I loath Labour’s ghastly regulatory statism and contempt for civil liberties but Michael Howard is now no longer leader of his party and the cabal around him which turned the Tories into Labour-Lite has been shown to be losers of quite some magnitude. Now maybe, just maybe, something better can come along as the scale of their failure starts to sink in. In the comment section of my previous post on this blog, many people seemed to think I was urging ‘libertarians’ not to vote for the Conservative party because it was not the small government libertarian leaning party of my dreams. Well sure, but that is not who I had in mind. I was really not thinking about ‘libertarians’ at all when I urged people not to vote Tory, I was thinking about Tories. The reason I am delighted that millions of conservatives did not vote for Michael Howard was that the Tory party is not a conservative party and enough people realised that for the right result to happen. For as long as the Conservative party is peddling nothing more than the same old “give us your money for skoolzandhospitals” crap as Labour and the LibDems, they really should be shunned by millions of people who describe themselves as, well, conservative. And that is exactly what happened. May 6th, 2005 | 118 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hopefully the Tory party will get hammered at the polls today and take a giant leap towards the crisis they so richly deserve. As I have urged before, if you ever want to get a party which does not share the vast majority of its views with Labour, then for goodness sake do not reward their aiding and abetting of pervasive government by voting for the buggers. Do not hold your nose and vote for Michael Howard’s carnival of clowns because they are the less evil because they are nothing of the sort: they are the same evil with the added toxic characteristic of providing an illusion of choice. If you are going to vote rather than do something useful with your day, and yet you want an end to the European Union’s takeover of British politics, a smaller state, lower taxes (rather than just ‘less tax increases’) and an end to the panopticon ID/database state (or even just any one of those), you will get none of them by voting Tory. If you cannot bring yourself to kick the voting habit altogether, then why not vote UKIP? At least that way you get to indulge your fetish for voting whilst at the same time annoying the chattering classes and not rewarding a collaborationist ‘opposition’. May 5th, 2005 | 83 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper more famous for what happens on page three than its news reporting, has an article on their website called Blogging for your votes written by Corinne Abrams. There are three pictures of young people representing the main parties and under each there is a link to view their ‘blogs’. Click on one of the links and you get taken to a pop-up window rather like a non-interactive comment pop-up with a single scraggly bit of undated and unlinkable polemical text about their party and views… perhaps I am missing something (if so please set me right!) but that actually appears to be their “blog”! Is that really what The Sun thinks a blog is? Given the amount written about blogs in the media these days and the number of journalists who have their own blogs, to drop such a clanger seems extraordinary. April 27th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Three reasons actually: One engagement party (between two Samizdatistas, no less), one St. George’s day party and a party of Samizdatistas in France… We lured the famous Dissident Frogman away from his Northern stronghold to meet up with us south of the French heart of Darkness for much hilarity at the expense of the French establishment and a great deal of good food. April 24th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Only a wilful fool would dispute that racism moved from being the unremarkable default mainstream view in the western world to being a prejudice which scarcely dare speak its name. I would argue that this did not come about just because a few anti-discrimination laws got passed. A great many things are illegal and yet doing them does not put you ‘beyond the pale’ in polite society. In most circles lighting up a spliff or speeding or paying your builder/nanny/housekeeper in cash are matters of little or no account and few people would think less of you if they discovered you were doing so. Overt racism on the other hand has precisely that effect because regarding that there has been a cultural shift. To be a racist is not just wrong, it makes you a jackass in the eyes of others. Most racists are now more prone to keep their views to themselves, not because someone will call the cops and have them hauled off to a re-education camp, but because they can no longer safely assume others will share their meta-context. And so with that in mind, it may seem trivial to rail against people who display or wear images of Che Guevara but what is at stake is far more than a battle for mere tee-shirt space. The fact that a person wearing a Himmler or Hitler tee-shirt would attract scorn is quite appropriate, and so it is really quite intolerable that fans of the mass murderers of the left get to think images of their favoured mass murdering thug makes them look cool. Why just let that slide? Groups like the ‘animal rights’ activists PETA provide a fairly good example of ‘going to the culture’ with some success at portraying people who wear fur coats as wicked and getting that meme into the zeitgeist fairly effectively at least in the USA and UK (though rather less successfully elsewhere). So do not shrug off efforts to portray people who wear images of communist mass murderers as jackasses rather than ‘cool’ as wasted effort over something something of no account. Little things like this add up and if you believe, as I do, that the single biggest factor determining the triumph or defeat of liberty is a cultural expectation of liberty, then fighting for the cultural issues really does matter. And if the lumpen wearing the Che Guevara tee-shirt does not even know who he was, as will often be the case, then tell him in no uncertain terms so that next time he looks at his pile of shirts, perhaps he will think twice before putting it on and maybe, just maybe, look at other people wearing those vile tee-shirts a bit differently. 
April 20th, 2005 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UN continues to confirm that it is everything its detractors says it is and so much more. Kofi Anan is now blaming the UK and USA, the two countries which produced people in official positions who were willing to point out that the UN ‘sanctions’ in Iraq were a complete scandal, for the way things played out. The sooner this bizarre organisation is destroyed the better. April 19th, 2005 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a distinct possibility that the French Left will mobilize enough folks to vote down the EU constitution because, get this, it favours the free market too much. Well whatever, just so long as they vote Non, does it really matter that their reasons are completely antithetical to the reasons most Brits oppose the EU Constitution? Or does it? For people such as myself who do not believe that the EU can be reformed, it seems to me that far more damage will result to the EU by a British ‘no’ than from a French ‘non’. Why? Because France is inseparable from the whole neo-Carolingian Franco-German ‘Greater Europe’ project and thus accommodating French political realities are inevitably what will happen in the aftermath of French rejection of the Constitution. Britain on the other hand is seen rightly or wrongly as peripheral in the long run and thus a British rejection could well lead to the increasingly held view amongst the Europhiles that only with the UK out of the EU, either completely or in effect, can their grand aspirations be achieved… and that sounds pretty damn sweet to me as I want the UK out of the EU altogether. That said, a French rejection which leads to so extreme a second attempt to draught a Euro-constitution that even the Europhiles in Britain blanche from trying to sell it to the Eurosceptic Brits works for me as well. Only time will tell. April 17th, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today I went for a wander around Camden in London, visiting Camden Market, Camden Lock and The Stables, contiguous areas filled to overflowing with small shops and open air stalls selling exotic Goth clothing, lampshades made out of old computer motherboards, Tibetan jackets, New Age crystals, Latex fetishware, fur-lined handcuffs, AC Milan supporters posters, weird furniture made out of tree stumps, flashing clothes with fibreoptic weaving, magic mushrooms to go, bongs, ‘No one knows I’m a Lesbian!’ tee-shirts, and food from West Africa, Morocco, Japan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Korea, Venezuela, France, Italy, China, Jamaica, Thailand, Holland, Scotland and even England.  The political content was endless racks of tee-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara, Bush=Hitler and McShit Hamburger logos and stands owned the Socialist Worker’s Party and various other fringe folk manned by quixotic and very earnest folks handing out “Bush is the biggest terrorist!” posters. Now my guess is that 75% of the people who thronged around Camden (the crowds were dense over a very large area indeed) are more or less completely indifferent to those particular the messages and certainly 95% of the stalls and shops were not selling politically oriented things at all. Yet what was available was entirely of the left and almost all of it was either Communist (Che Guevara’s image was widely seen) and/or anti-American. Right in the centre of the large shopping area called The Stables is a Cuban Restaurant called rather unambiguously The Cuban. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I stuck my head inside as for all I knew the place was owned by some Cuban refugee who had fled Castro’s communist dictatorship. But no. The first thing I see is a large image of Che Guevara. The outside of the building has a sign saying this place brings “The Spirit of Havana in the heart of Camden”…   …which presumably means that criticizing the restaurant gets you dragged off to jail by uniformed thugs as that is truly the spirit of Havana. Now if someone wants to portray a benign fantasy version of Cuba (“Castro chicken tenders!“), well that is entirely up to them. But the moment I see that Che image up on the walls, The Cuban takes a position on who ‘the good guys’ are and it becomes more than just a Cuban restaurant. Too harsh? Well imagine a German restaurant. Now put a picture of Himmler on the wall of that restaurant and suddenly the entire context of the place changes. I wonder how people would react to a Cambodian restaurant which offered a “Pol Pot Roast” or a “Killing Fields Kocktails!” whilst a smiling image of Pol Pot looked down on the gorging clientele. My goodness what fun that would be. Still, perhaps a closer examination of The Cuban’s menu may reveal such dishes as “Jailed Journalist Jambalyah” or “Dead Dissident Daquiris” whereupon my views of the place would have to change somewhat. I have not looked but somehow I doubt it. But it got me pondering. I wonder how many of the anti-globalisation activists who probably regard areas like Camden as ‘home turf’ and perhaps even eat at The Cuban realise how the area only looks the way it does because of the global movement of goods within a market economy. Do they seriously think that there is a place like Camden anywhere in Cuba? Do they think the new Age crystals, the fetish shops, the Goth gear purveyors, the mountain bike shops and, hell, even the clothes they wear, the mobile phones they all carry, the iPods they listen to, would all be available in a politically directed command economy? Please, show me such a place. The thing is, their own lifestyles and environments are examples of the benefits of what they profess to reject. Quite funny really if you think about it. April 16th, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Favouring open immigration into integrationist societies within the context of an eventual end to the welfare state and strengthening of civil society is a view widely shared in these parts. But I can also say will little fear of contradiction that not one of the regular writers for Samizdata would describe themselves as a multiculturalist. The term did once have some appeal but in the end what it has come to mean is someone who thinks all (non-western) cultures are as desirable as each other. However I do not believe that all cultures are equally worthy and I doubt that in reality all too many other people really think that either is you dig deep enough. For all its many and varied flaws, the modern dynamic, secular and above all tolerant western civilisation of the early 21st Century is considerably superior to the alternatives. But of course even within the west, not all the societies that make up that great civilisation are as dynamic and successful as each other. But what is a society? Definitions vary. In the crudest sence it is a group of people who interact with each other by simple virtue of their proximity (something the internet may change), and as a result follow broad (but often loose) cultural norms which have evolved to facilitate interaction and order. So by this very simple (prehaps even simplistic) definition is also pointless to pretend that having long term un-assimilated communities with certain key antithetical values within western societies is anything but a recipe for catastrophic strife. The stunning and very under-reported race riot by Arabs and North Africans in France last month shows what happens when the state interferes for decades by subsidising parasitic behaviour based on identity politics and pretending that state fiats can either enforce or obviate the need for integration. When the French state bans chadors and all other religious symbols in French educational conscription centres (schools), it is not a case of France ‘defending western culture’ but rather admitting that civil society has so decayed under the weight of generations of politicization that natural social mechanisms no longer exist to integrate newcomers as effectively as once was the case. In the end nothing gets done in France without it being planned and implemented politically by the enarques in Paris and racial no-go areas are the result. The solution in the end may be less government so that civil society can actually regenerate but in the short to medium term it is hard to see how the French political class, not a group known for frank introspection and honest analysis, can prevent France gradually sliding into ever more atavistic violence. Even Britain, which has far better race relations than France, learned in 2001 that playing identity politics and handing out other people’s money based on ethnicity is a dangerous thing to do. But whereas in the USA the 1992 Los Angeles riots spurred some soul searching in the USA and the emergence of excellent bipartisan social organizations aiming at economic and social integration, in France a significent race riot barely makes it into the press and in Britain, far from looking to enhance integration and the adoption of western cultural norms, we find that we now risk prosecution for making critical remarks about Islamic culture. Is it any wonder so many Americans react to the European political classes’ pretensions of moral superiority with little more than a contemptuous and well deserved sneer? April 16th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten has been putting some rather compelling articles up on his blog from Lebanon. That Michael, who is clearly a ‘glow in the dark American’, should wander into the ‘Hezbollahland’ section of Beirut with a camera suggests to me that he has some serious stones. Make the strangely named ‘Spirit of America’ Lebanon blog part of your daily bloggage because it is extremely interesting stuff reported from the sharp end… and maybe even drop a dime or two into the plate to help him out. April 15th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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