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I was at the UN general assembly in New York the other day and talking to the foreign minister of another country. I won’t say which one, since I must preserve my reputation for diplomacy. But let’s just say they have an economy about the size of Australia (though getting smaller, alas), plenty of snow, nuclear missiles, balalaikas, oligarchs, leader who strips to the waist… you get the picture. – Boris Johnson, in fine form as usual 😀 October 4th, 2016 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The concepts that we need to grasp here are folk marxism, oikophobia and conservatism by proxy. Most modern leftists haven’t read a line of Marx. But his odious creed has passed down to them in a diluted form in which people are to be divided onto groups and all relationships are to seen as being between oppressor and oppressed. Needless to say that the oppressed are always noble and the oppressors all evil. This gives us identitarian politics. Oikophobia then comes into play, as the leftists see their own culture as an oppressor culture. Another symptom of leftist thinking since the time of that scoundrel Rousseau is the admiration of the noble savage which I call ‘conservatism by proxy’. This has a religious element in that it is often given voice by those tiresome people who’d never go near a church in their own countries, but will wax lyrical about the ‘spirituality’ of monks in Cambodia, Laos or some God-forsaken place like that. In Australia the modern leftist’s conservatism by proxy is usually satisfied by the simple expedient of admiring Aboriginal culture because: “It has been around for 40,000 years.” Thus do lefties satisfy their need to admire tradition and obtain the joy that conservatism brings, without suffering the awful fate of having to be labelled ‘conservative.’ Add to these three, the zero sum fallacy view of the economy, the inability to understand the distinction between speech and deed or between ought and is and you have a good summary of the neuroses and intellectual bigotries of many leftists. This is a comment I saw on Sp!ked that I thought was right on the money (reproduced with a few typos corrected). October 2nd, 2016 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are trying out a plug-in that lets people edit their comments on Samizdata for five minutes after posting them… no more eye watering typos, right? This is just an experiment to see if this causes anything else to break. October 1st, 2016 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 27th, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hurrah! The struggle for the leadership of the Nationalsozialistische Britisch Arbeiterpartei has been won by Jeremy Corbyn, and the re-branding as the Party of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists is now complete! I look forward to reading of this momentous moment in the Great Leader’s memoirs, which I assume will be titled “My Struggle”. Our friends from Hamas and Hezbollah are thought to be very happy with this outcome, as well they should. But what is that sound I hear off in the distance? Gunfire? Has the revolution started already? Ah, no, it is the pop of champagne corks coming from 4 Matthew Parker Street in London!
Update: strangely not everyone is happy 😉 September 24th, 2016 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just heard, on the telly, the leader of the Lib Dems repeat his support for a return by Britain to the EU. Other Lib Dems on the same show are echoing him. The Empire Loyalists of our time. They’ll attract a small lump of enthusiasts, who will spend the rest of their lives insisting that they were right to oppose Brexit. And everyone else will watch and say: so what? Even most of those who voted Remain themselves. Regret is not a policy. This was too perfect not to warrant a little post of its own. September 18th, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 18th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 15th, 2016 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Douglas Carswell makes some excellent points about the perils of any post-Brexit trade agreements with the EU:
Indeed, and as Peter Lilly wrote not all that long ago:
Quite so. The sooner we are out of the EU the better. September 14th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s parlance — has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has justified the gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs involved” in keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed widespread government spying on Americans’ phone calls. Since Snowden’s leaks, pundits and experts (myself included) have debated the legality and ethics of the U.S. surveillance apparatus. Yet has the president’s blueprint for spying succeeded on its own terms? An examination of the unprecedented architecture reveals that the Obama administration may only have drowned itself in data. What’s more, in trying to right the ship, America’s intelligence culture has grown frenzied. Agencies are ever seeking to get bigger, move faster, and pry deeper to keep pace with the enormous quantity of information being generated the world over and with the new tactics and technologies intended to shield it from spies. This race is a defining feature of Obama’s legacy — and one that threatens to become never-ending, even after he’s left the White House. – James Bamford (£) September 13th, 2016 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is nothing new about this; it mostly started fifteen years ago, in 2001, and again the Irish were the main target. Ireland in the early 1990s had a high general corporation tax rate of 40%, but it introduced a special low 10% rate for finance companies in its Dublin-based International Financial Services Centre (IFSC). The Commission ruled that this was effectively an improper subsidy to the finance industry under the State Aid rules, and ordered its abolition. That was really the root cause of the EU’s current row with Ireland, because the Irish response to the IFSC being declared illegal was to reduce all its corporation tax to 12.5%. Because that wasn’t targeted at a particular company or industry sector, it wasn’t illegal State Aid and so the EU Commission could do nothing to stop them, much as it wanted to. So the EU Commission’s current action against Ireland over Apple is largely “Round Two”, a repeat of what it did fifteen years ago. September 8th, 2016 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nobody is going to be banning meat in the near future, but that is for political reasons. There are simply too many meat eaters and not enough fanatical vegetarians. It is a question of power, not ethics, and the author of this article – vile authoritarian though he may be – inadvertently makes the libertarian argument very well. If it is the government’s business to prevent people taking voluntary, informed risks about one lifestyle choice, there is no reason to stop at smoking. He asks whether it’s “OK to allow free choice” or “OK to prevent ‘unhealthy behaviour'”. In my view, the only moral answer is that it’s OK to allow free choice. It is not the government’s business. The author obviously disagrees, but I bet it wouldn’t take long to find something he likes doing that has been linked to cancer. At least his argument makes more sense than the scatter-gun bigotry of people who argue for state force to be used against activities they don’t like while demanding protection for those they do. – Christopher Snowdon, from an article titled “The NHS as a tool of social control”. September 6th, 2016 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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