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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I don’t give two flying figs about Silvio Berlusconi’s business dealings be they murky or otherwise. All I know is that he is just about the only European political figure with personality:
Mr Berlusconi lashed out when socialist Martin Schulz accused him of an alleged conflict of interest over his Italian media empire.
Does this qualify as ‘lashing out’?
“I know there is a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps,” Mr Berlusconi said, “I would like to suggest to you the role of Kapo (guard chosen from among the prisoners) – you’d be perfect.”
Naturally this left all the po-faced EUnuchs clucking like a lot of indignant hens. Expect a draft directive on inappropriate insults any day now.
We’re all familiar with the popular cartoon caricature of Americans as gun-crazy cowboys who would shoot you as soon as look at you and peaceful, sophisticated, post-history Europeans who only need their directives to keep them safe from harm. In fact, I have lost count of the number of sneering British lefty journalists who prefix every reference to Americans with the words ‘gun-toting’ as a means of driving home the impression that they are dangerous, violent, atavistic non-communautaire people.
True? Well, probably not:
“Contrary to the common assumption that Europeans are virtually unarmed, an estimated 84 million firearms are legally held in the 15 member states of the EU. Of these, 80 per cent – 67 million guns – are in civilian hands,”
Good gracious! And to think that Tony Blair wants political union with these gun-loving maniacs!
Finland, with its strong hunting tradition, has the most legally registered guns in the EU at 39 per 100 people, the UK has 10 – one third of the German and French figures – and the Netherlands has two. Gun laws are tightest in the UK, the Netherlands and Poland, while France has more legal handguns than the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, England, Wales and Scotland combined.
Just one quibble: there are no legally held handguns in the UK at all so maybe France is not quite as awash with hand cannons as the article would suggest. Nonetheless it is clear that most Europeans have not, in fact, been gripped by the same anti-gun hysteria that has swept over Britain.
It is about time that some mainstream voices were prepared to challenge the absurd and iniquitous eco-fascist-inspired war against the motorist and, much to my surprise, that voice is emanating from the Conservative Party:
The Tories promised yesterday to raise the motorway speed limit from 70 to 80mph as part of a “fair deal for drivers”.
Tim Collins, the shadow transport secretary, said this was part of a set of reforms to be unveiled later this month.
They will include the removal of the bus and taxi lane on the M4 between Heathrow and London and speed cameras that trap motorists “unfairly”.
Unnecessary road humps and road tolls will be abolished. Some speed limits, through villages, for example, may be tightened.
Its a funny old world when the Conservatives are starting to make anti-establishment noises but that is what they are doing. I suppose it is symptomatic of having spent so long in the political wilderness that even they realise there is nothing to be lost by saying boo to a goose.
It is still a long way from the kind of radicalism that we need and it is not enough to cause me to review my poor opinion of them as an institution but I am prepared to give them credit where a little bit of credit is due.
I don’t know whether the annual Glastonbury Music Festival is the world’s longest running or the world’s most famous music festival or whatever but it always attracts great heaving mobs of students and twenty-somethings.
For our enemies, this is a target-rich environment:
Bands play above a huge Greenpeace banner on the main stage, there are notices about Third World water supplies inside the toilets and organisers want every single person to sign a petition for fairer international trade laws.
On top of that, Tony Benn got a rock star’s welcome, a Palestinian group has brought an inflatable tank, Columbian trade unionists are planning to stage mock kidnappings of comedian Mark Thomas and singer Billy Bragg, and the Drop the Debt double decker bus is offering its bath to a lucky competition winner.
Depressing, isn’t it. Mind you, there’s always the risk of overkill:
“You notice it a lot but I don’t really take much interest it,” said Lisa Rush, 28, from Colchester.
Come the day we see a ‘Hayek Stall’ at a rock festival, we will truly know that we have turned a corner.
I think that Hermann Rorschach was really onto something with that little inkblot test of his. If two different but apparently sane people can look at the same picture and see two entirely different things then perhaps that goes at least some way explaining ideology as well as psychology.
A perfect illustration of this lies in the response of British socialist bloggers to the plans for the regionalisation of England. This is the plan to divide England up into nine entirely artifical ‘sectors’ and give each its own assembly with regulatory functions. The details of this project are currently being thrashed out by the Office of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
Over on the left, this is an eagerly awaited development. One of the new kids on the left-block, Farringdon Street, waxes lyrical:
The northwest is going to have a referendum on a regional assembly. This is a development that should be greeted with alacrity. While its chief protagonist in central government John Prescott hardly has a reputation as a constitutional iconoclast, devolution is vital to the reconstruction of British politics.
Power is to concentrated, the agenda to London centric. The regions especially those furthest from the capital need their own champions. We must increase the sheer amount of political muscle deployable in London and Brussels to advance the regional interest.
And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. It is sincerely shared by the rest of British left all of whom appear to be getting moist-knickered and dewey-eyed over what they are trying to present as ‘decentralisation’.
Now, if this really was a process of decentralisation it might have some merit. At the very least it would be worthy of further discussion. But this is not a process of decentralisation. Not even to the smallest degree. → Continue reading: Top down and down and down
Yesterday:
The hardline Palestinian Islamic organisations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction have declared a suspension of attacks against Israel.
Today:
But a Palestinian shooting killed a Romanian truck driver in the West Bank, and gunmen opened fire on workers near the border with Israel, suggesting some armed bands had not been brought into line with the day-old cease-fire called by militant groups.
Tomorrow?
I really must try to set aside some time to further develop an idea I have for a ‘Lefty Street Demo Reality Conversion Chart’. I have in mind a handy reference source can be used to translate ludicrously inflated attendance figures for lefty protests into actual numbers that the rest of us would recognise. For example, whenever you read of ‘hundreds of people’ at some lefty demo, simply look up the this figure on your handy conversion chart which will give the real figure of ’50’. Similarly, ‘thousands of people’ converts as ‘150’, ‘tens of thousands’ means ‘500’ and so on.
I better get a move on with this project in order to answer the urgent market need because the buggers have been at it again this weekend:
Thousands of campaigners across the UK are taking part in a marathon lobby of MPs and a series of protests this weekend to call for a shake-up of global trade rules.
The mass demonstration Scale Up for Justice is calling on the government to put pressure on the World Trade Organisation to rewrite its laws in favour of poor countries.
Any idea what they mean, precisely? Well, the organisation behind this latest round of muddle-headed, sandalista squawking is something called the Trade Justice Movement and, if their website is anything to go by, they appear to be long on rhetoric but remarkably short on details.
According to the TJM:
Together, we are campaigning for trade justice – not free trade – with the rules weighted to benefit poor people and the environment.
No mention of what constitutes ‘justice’ nor what ‘rules’ they have in mind. → Continue reading: Send in the clowns
Due to the high risk of an embarrassing misunderstanding here, I think it behoves me to start off by advising our American readers that, in Britain, the word ‘fags’ is a slang term for ‘cigarettes’. It is not generally perceived as having anything to do with homosexual men.
And this is important because cigarettes are no longer just ‘fags’ or even ‘smokes’. Now, they are symbols of defiance as well.
For the past two decades or so, tobacco manufacturers have been forced to print hectoring health warnings on cigarette packets. But now, due to a directive from Brussels (where else?) manufacturers are required cover at least half the space on both the front and rear of the packet with even more lurid warnings. It is the kind of useless, paternalistic gesture that enables the European political classes to posture self-righteously at someone else’s expense.
At last, though, someone is fighting back in the form of a website called ‘Fake Fags’ through which you can purchase waggishly irreverent stickers to cover up the politically-mandated health warnings on your cigarette pack.
It is a delicious act of subversion and, predictably, it has sent the reactionary health fascists into a blue funk:
Deborah Arnott of anti-smoking group ASH criticised the labels.
“These labels do not strike me as being funny,” she told BBC News Online.
Well they strike me as hilarious and I am very heartened that at least some of my compatriots are not prepared to throw in the towel just yet.
The Telegraph continues to paddle in the murky waters of our Gallic neighbours with a further editorial devoted to Sabine Herold and what appears to be a growing movement for free market reform in France:
The French long for a Margaret Thatcher to tame the over-mighty public sector trade unions, but despair of ever finding one. In the cafes of Reims, speaker after speaker deplored the weakness of President Jacques Chirac in the face of union opposition, with many echoing the withering Thatcherite critique launched against him by the 21-year-old student Sabine Herold in Paris.
What really caught my eye though, in the sidebar next to the article, is the link to Merde in France.
En avant et vers le haut, nos amis.
And that is about how long I had to get just a little bit of classical liberal thinking out into the more mainstream airways last night.
Though, actually, rather less in view of the fact that I was sharing a platform on the ‘Richard Littlejohn Show’ with two other protagonists. One was a chap named Jay Lee who is an activist in the British National Party (and who has been expelled by his Trade Union because of it) and the other was Kevin McGuire a journalist with the Guardian.
I was placed in the middle in the ‘Mr.Reasonable’ seat which, as it turned out, was not ill-judged. Mr.Lee insisted that the Union had no right to expel him just because of his political views and Mr.McGuire insisted that the Union had an obligation to expel him because of his political views. Applying the voluntarist principle I maintained that Mr.Lee was perfectly entitled to his views, regardless of how stupid and vile they may be, but that the Union, as a voluntary organisation, were free to make any rules about membership that they damn well please and it was nobody else’s business.
Perry, who was watching from home, tells me that the BNP guy actually made a pretty decent fist out of casting himself as the persecuted victim (with just the right degree of indignant self-pity) and that Kevin McGuire came across as an intolerant ranter. I like to think my libertarian message got across as well but it is always so difficult to know for sure amidst the soundbitten and somewhat chaotic nature of TV debates. I think it fair to say that I hit the right chord with Richard Littlejohn but then, as he quietly admitted to me afterwards, he is rather sympathetic to our ideas. It certainly helped that he clearly wanted my voice to be heard. I think we have an ally out there.
So that was that. No resolution of course but these things are seldom solvable and I was content that, aside from nearly melting in the stifling heat of the TV studio, I had managed to emerge unscathed. I was a little frustrated at being unable to get in a plug for the Samizdata so that will have to wait until next time (assuming, of course, that there is a next time).
Purely for the benefit of people who get excited about this kind of thing, a tantalising tidbit to whet your appetites:
The Conservatives have moved into the lead in the opinion polls, bringing to an end the record dominance that Labour has enjoyed for more than a decade.
So is NuLabour on the way out? Are the Tories on the way back? I don’t much care to be honest. For people like me the British Conservative Party promises more of the same, business as usual, social democracy by other means.
And so to bed.
The trouble with people who ‘come in from the cold’ is that they have unfortunate tendency to bring some of that coldness with them and, every so often, they just cannot help but drop a little of it into our lives.
Take, for example, Christopher Hitchens, a man who has been widely (and justifiably) praised for the excoration of his former leftist colleagues since the WTC attacks. But reports of defection from the dark side may well have been exaggerated if this infuriatingly superficial and condescending bit of Euro-fawning is anything to by:
The Turkish Cypriots did not mount mass demonstrations against partition because they had any romantic idea of the European dream.
They just didn’t want to be confined in a little sweat-shop state, forced to do business in the mainland Turkish lira, and kept away from a prosperity that they could see taking place on the other side of the wall.
See, the Turkish Cypriots want to embrace Europe so why are we Brits being so stubborn? Who is Mr.Hitchens trying to kid? The Northern (Turkish) sector of Cyprus has been the subject of official sanctions imposed by just about every European country since it was established in 1974. If the Cypriot Turks are, indeed,wallowing in a ‘little sweat-shop state’ then Europe is the cause of their misery not the cure.
For them, “protection” and “protectionism” became the
same thing – another name for stagnation and isolation.
‘Protectionism’ does indeed mean ‘stagnation’ but membership of the EU does not mean the abolition of protectionism. It simply means writing protectionism across a whole continent. It is exchanging the almost non-existant risk of ‘Fortress Britain’ for the racing, inescapable certainty of ‘Fortress Europe’. A bad idea does not get better by simply inflating it.
In order to join this club, you had to have a political
democracy and free movement of labour and capital
No, in order to join this club you have to submit to the will of the Commission and agree to trade according to their incomprehensible ziggurat of rules and regulations. → Continue reading: Smack my Hitch up
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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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