If you have not checked out the marvelous Social Affairs Unit blog recently, please let me commend some simply splendid articles that have appeared of late, such as Stumbling towards the EU door marked exit. In particular, keep an eye out for all the ‘Maurice and Gerhard’ articles.
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… it pays to ask if they are in a shark-repellent salesman before deciding just how risky swimming really is. Do bad people use the Net to find victims? Without doubt they do and I would not make light of the harm that can be caused by ‘paedophiles’. Yet so often when I hear of the ‘epidemic’ of child abuse going on, it turns out that the story emanates from some agency or NGO who just so happens to have its funding come up for review or who are in some way rattling their begging bowl. But of course who would deny funding to people who only want to protect children? And who would questions the additional motivations of people who make their living in this line of work, not to mention the veracity of the figures for just how serious a problem it really is? To ask those sort of things runs the risk of having your motivations and ‘interests’ questioned in ways that would make most decent folks rather uncomfortable. But just as legitimate grievances about civil rights have in many countries spawned monstrous civil rights industries that are little more than vehicles for shaking down certain sections of society and which have a vested interest in perpetuating the idea that some problems are worse than they really are, I have little doubt that legitimate concerns about internet predators have already led to something similar in the ‘preventing child abuse industry’. Oh, do not get me wrong, I neither doubt child abuse is a real and legitimate issue nor do I think everyone who works to prevent it is just looking to pad their bank accounts, but given how much I surf the net, I cannot help thinking that the scale of this problem does not seem to match the shrill rhetoric we hear on the subject. To listen to some people the fact I managed to grow up going to untended playgrounds and not treating adults as probable abusers… and yet somehow managed to never attract the attentions of a ‘kiddie fiddler’ must make me the luckiest lad around. Yet somehow I rather doubt that. Cynical? You bet. January 27th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This is beyond the pale. It is completely insensitive and at a time like this, what idiot would shoot an advertisement for TV that used suicide bombers? Appalling… …Yeah. But I must confess, I howled with laughter. January 27th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a fine article by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph called The EU’s four-stage strategy to reduce Britons to servitude. It is an entirely accurate and reasonable article about the process of stripping British (and other European national) institutions of power and replacing them with Euro-level institutions. He finished up with the notion that Michael Howard and the Tories will finally turn things around:
But there is just one problem with that. The slide into the Euro-maw did not start under Tony Blair’s government. In fact it would be no exaggeration to say that the UKIP would not exist today if significant numbers of Euro-sceptic voters were not sick of being lied to again and again and again by Tory politicians. As I said to a table full of captive Tory grandees when I spoke at an event commemorating the end of Exchange Controls, a great many Tory voters simply no longer believe that the Conservative Party actually wish to conserve the things they care about and I very much doubt that any amount of rhetoric by any Tory will win back the trust of days gone by. Many of those former Tories who joined UKIP did so not just to oppose the destruction of Britain as a separate political entity but also because they truly hate their former party and see UKIP as a way to destroy it by making it permanently unelectable. So what Mr. Hannan says is all good stuff, but what makes him think people should trust the party of Michael Heseltine, Ken Clark and Chris Patten to actually turn things around? January 26th, 2005 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Countryside Alliance continues its quixotic fight to use the approved levers of power to overturn the ban on hunting with hounds. Somehow the realisation that there is nothing at all ‘undemocratic’ about the fact they are being oppressed by the state has still not percolated through those worthy but rather thick country skulls.
But why not? If Mr. Jackson believes that what is being done to him by Parliament is unjust, then why not challenge the supremacy of Parliament? There is nothing sacred about a bunch of lawmakers and a law is only as good as its enforcement. If the Countryside Alliance actually have the courage of their convictions, they must start challenging the right of the state to do whatever it wishes just because its ruling party has a majority in Parliament. Maybe if they realised that they are a minority and will always be a minority they would be less inclined to trust the old way of doing things. There is a long history of civil disobedience to duly constituted authority in the defence of what is right. That matters far more that what is or is not legal. January 25th, 2005 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
It would be fair to say that when I heard that 70’s space opera ‘Battlestar Galactica’ was going to be remade, I was dubious: face it, the original made Star Trek seem like Shakespeare. Moreover when I later discovered that a leading character in the original series called ‘Starbuck’ (well before the term became synonymous with coffee) was going to be ‘re-imagined’ as a woman, I became downright contemptuous: “Oh gawd, another sickeningly politically correct bit of drivel spewing forth from Hollyweird”. Moreover womanising hard drinking cigar smoking Starbuck was one of the few engaging characters from the original series. In a sense I acquired the DVD of the mini-series more as something to blog about, so I could actually say I had seen a piece of science fiction that was worse than that hymn for a limp-wristed California vision of ‘inclusive transnational socialism’ (well, maybe not all that inclusive), called Star Trek, a series which hit its nadir with the execrable Enterprise. So yes, I fired up this disc with extremely low expectations. The show starts slowly, setting the scene in some detail, such as the fact we foolish humans were the ones who actually created the Cylons, the show’s homicidal robotic bad guys, and that Battlestar Galactica itself (more or less an aircraft carrier in space) was an obsolescent relic of a pervious war against the Cylons some 50 years earlier and was due to be retired from service after many years of peace. We see the back story of Gauis Baltar, who in the original series was a comical pantomime style ‘villain’ and arch-traitor, and who is this time ‘re-imagined’ as a deeply flawed genius (sort of a cross between Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, brilliantly acted by James Callis) who is psychopathically self-centered and thus tricked by an all too human looking ‘female’ Cylon into unwittingly dooming humanity. All better acted, better directed and far better written than I expected but only Baltar was particularly engaging initially. But then the Cylons make their move… Wow. A show which truly, truly, truly does not pull any punches and proffers a middle finger to the sugar coating of so much of Hollywood’s offerings that are aimed at the mainstream. We see nothing less that genocide: the steady nuclear annihilation of the human race. We see men women and children (yes, children) killed pitilessly in one of the darkest bits of sci-fi TV drama I have ever seen: the Götterdämmerung on 12 planets. Moreover we see the handful of dazed and traumatised survivors on the Galactica and the refugee fleet which forms around this last remnant of the human military, act like, well, people who have just seen their entire civilisation and 99.9% of their species exterminated by an implacable enemy. In many ways this is a story that owes much to the dramas set in World War II that were made in the 40’s and 50’s and posit that there is a great deal more to being in command than saying “Make it so”. Even the look of the Galactica itself is a million miles away from the antiseptic interiors of Star Trek’s spaceships: it has manually opened pressure doors, old fashioned wire cable intercoms and chinagraph pencil plotting tables that would not have looked out of place on USS Yorktown during the Battle of Midway. As in that earlier genre of movies from a less timid era, heart rending decisions are forced on characters, and not just the military commanders (who I am pleased to say actually act like real military commanders in Battlestar Galactica) but also the new president of the colonial government (very well played by Mary McDonnell), who is faced with desperate no-win life and death choices. The biggest surprise for me however was the character of Starbuck, who I was simply determined to hate. Actress Katee Sackhoff plays Starbuck as a hard drinking cigar smoking tomboy and does so with an almost feral gusto and real panache. Her hard bitten mocking grin, snappy dialogue and the almost maniacal gleam in her eyes had me won me over within about 15 minutes. I have no idea if the series following the mini-series will live up to its potential but damn, it is nice to see such a refreshing bit of drama in the science fiction genre. January 24th, 2005 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
And by that question I do not mean ‘might they give nukes to Al-Qaeda’ or sundry other Islamic loonies, but rather is the claim that they would promptly nuke Israel as fast as they could strap a warhead onto a missile actually credible? The author of the linked article, Edward Luttwak, is a good but uneven commentator and analyst. His book Coup d’Etat: a practical handbook is probably the definitive ‘how to do it’ book on the subject… however his prediction on the outcome of the western attacks on Iraq were embarrassingly off-target. Luttwak says that Iranian government figures said:
And whilst I feel it is entirely possible they said exactly that, given the nature of the Islamic theocracy in Iran, I do not think I can just take Luttwak’s word for it. Oh how I look forward to the day when newspapers do what blogs do: always always always link to a supporting source when you say “they said this”. Can anyone helpfully provide links to other reports where Iranian government figures have actually said such things? Forming a sensible view on how to react to the Iranian state is far too serious a matter and the more sources of information that can be gathered, the better we can form theories about what would be the best course of action and what sort of policies should be supported by whom. January 23rd, 2005 | 123 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hubris and self-absorption are almost pre-requisites for a career as a professional politician, but I suppose it is always possible to have ‘too much of a good thing’ in any line of work. When Robert Kilroy-Silk joined the UKIP in a blaze of messianic self-publicity, I suppose those good folks at head office should have realised that his arrival was going to be a very mixed blessing. And of course no sooner did he arrive than he launched a bid to take over the leadership of the party from Roger Knapman. I suppose the Knapman/Kilroy-Silk relationship never had particularly good auguries as Kilroy-Silk’s core political beliefs have always struck me as rather hazy for the most part and when actually glimpsed, of rather variable geometry. Knapman on the other hand is that rarest of rare things in British politics, an ideological man of conviction who often says what he really thinks whilst actually making sense. Upon hearing that Kilroy-Silk was flouncing off in a huff because the UKIP proved somehow inexplicably immune to his charms, Knapman is quoted as saying “break open the champagne”, and “It was nice knowing him, now ‘goodbye’. I would love to hear what he said in private. But Kilroy-Silk has said he will start up a new political party called Veritas, so the best prankster in British politics since the late lamented Lord Sutch will still be around to entertain us. No doubt if the Kilroy-Silk Party does emerge, it will quickly be known by many as the ‘In Vino’ Party. January 23rd, 2005 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Labour government is planning to introduce ceremonies for ‘citizenship’ and ‘coming of age’ to add the imprimatur of The State to being ‘British’. Yet surely one of the things that has always made the British so different from many of the people’s of Continental Europe who live with the legacy of Napoleon is that we have not really needed the state to tell us via ceremonies and ID cards that we are British… or that we are in reality ‘subjects’, a far more honest term that ‘citizen’. Even the United States has its strange hand-on-heart ceremonies in some schools in which they pledge of allegiance not just to the principles of constitutional governance but also to a bit of coloured cloth. Yet in Britain such notions of social identity have generally been, well, social and not some propagandising artifice of the state. This is yet another part of moving Britain into the more Napoleonic traditional in which the state is the core around which everything rotates in a politicised fashion and the highest virtue is political engagement (not a view I share, to put it mildly, given my view of politics). Such things are alien in this country and yet another sign that our political masters are obsessed with the fetishizing democracy as a way to make as many aspects of life as possible political in nature and requiring the intermediation of the state for ever more things. Such ‘ceremonies’ may be banal but what they represent is far from trivial. January 20th, 2005 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
The decline of post-Soviet Russia continues apace and an article on the Weekly Standard site points out that one of the major exacerbating factors in that decline is Vladimir Putin. The crushing of the media, the confiscation of a large company because it was owned by a political rival on trumped up charges, the failed attempt to direct the result of the Ukrainian elections and the pathetic reaction by the Kremlin to the Beslan atrocity are described at the key indicators of the probably terminal decline of the current regime. The article is summed up at the end from a very narrowly ‘American policy’ perspective but the most interesting point for me was author Ander Aslund’s contention that the Putin regime is not long for the world. Whilst the Russia of 2005 may be a banana republic without bananas, political instability in a nuclear power that may well be unable to protect its nuclear weapons (Russia’s corrupt and famously inept military are somewhat like the ‘Keystone Cops’ with live ammunition) is something that is of interest to the rest of the world. I wonder when the focus of attention will start shifting away from the Middle East… January 20th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
There can be little doubt that Albert Einstein was one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century, as his enduring appeal to so many indicates. How many other people in such arcane fields as theoretical physics and mathematics can generate such interest? Not many. Yet sometimes I think Albert Einstein is also the poster boy for the axiom ‘stick to what you know’. Of course in Einstein’s case, what he knew was rather a lot: E=MC2 is a legacy that will speak to the centuries. But then all you have to do is read much of what he wrote about economics and politics to realise how clueless Einstein when it came to many things, with an attachment to nightmarish notions of supranational government. I share Einstein’s distain for nationalism but the cure for the excesses of governments is not super-nationalism but rather a culture of individualism that demands less government rather than yet another tier of it to regulate our lives and take our money. Likewise in his apologia for socialism, he got it spectacularly wrong in 1947 when he wrote that…
…when in fact technology and capitalism means that small business and diffusion of capital have expanded vastly more that ‘one size fits all’ big business since 1947. Technology has created diseconomies of scale in ways that Einstein never imagined in spite of the evidence already being there (pity he did not spend some time with Frederic Hayek). Globalisation (rather than ‘supernationalisation’) of capital markets has likewise put hitherto unheard of quantities of capital into the hands of small businesses beyond counting. He even bought into the daftest and most pernicious economic absurdity of them all, the ‘fixed quantity of wealth’ fallacy. Albert Einstein. A fascinating genius for sure, but like everyone, he had his limitations.  January 19th, 2005 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our hosting company has been under sustained DOS attacks from some worthless scrotes over the last couple days and if you have been finding it hard to reach samizdata.net, that is why. It is also why there has been a low volume of posts here as we have frequently been unable to access our blog’s ‘back-end’. The good folks at Hosting Matters have been doing their best to keep things operational under difficult circumstances. January 10th, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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