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]
|
To nobody’s surprise, Jacques Chirac has been re-elected as President of France.
And, to the palpable relief of just about everyone, his margin of victory was such as to enable every pundit and politician to pronounce that the spectre of the ‘far right’ has been vanquished. I’m afraid I am not so persuaded.
Whilst le Pen himself has been defeated, the resentments and fears that temporarily elevated him have not and are highly likely to continue to fester and foment. For a lucid analysis of the reasons for the attractions of Radical Nationalism to the working class, I heartily commend this piece by Emmanuel Goldstein.
Whilst Chirac is, nominally at least, a man of the Right, his past record has often been characterised by a craven submission to left-wing ideals. His immediate and public acknowledgement of the part the socialists have played in re-electing him suggests that nothing will change.
Far from being chastened, the French left will be highly emboldened by this result. As far as they are concerned, it is they who put Chirac in power:
“”One can scarcely say that this is a victory for the right. It’s a victory for France,” said Serge Lepeltier, general secretary of Chirac’s Rally for the Republic (RPR) party.”
Already the BBC are attributing Le Pen’s defeat to the ‘street protests’ which were organised by the militant left. They are not going to let Chirac or France forget this and will demand a qui pro quo for their support which will mean that any ideas Chirac may have for deregulation or economic reform (assuming he has them in the first place) will have to be shelved and, again, he will be forced into a sclerotic coalition with the socialists.
At the age of 73, we have probably seen the last of Le Pen himself but let us not be fooled into thinking that we have seen the last of the Radical Nationalism he represents. How much more successful could it prove with a younger, fitter, smarter and more charismatic figure at the helm? In a country whose ossified political class promises ‘more of the same’, it can only be a matter of time before such a standard-bearer emerges.
Proving that what goes around, comes around, Scottish socialist MP George Galloway is reportedly seeking legal advice following a comment from charismatic American actor John Malkovitch to the effect that both he and Robert Fisk were “the two people he would most like to kill”
“The source of Malkovich’s anger appears to be Mr Galloway’s condemnation of Israel’s action against Palestinians and his criticism of the west’s policies on Iraq.
What I find most striking about this is the uncanny counter-echo of Oxford-based Irish poet Tom Paulin who recently denounced Israeli West Bank settlers as ‘Nazis’ and called for them to be shot. Is there any difference? Well, as a matter of fact, yes there is. Mr.Malkovitch is highly unlikely to turn his words into action; if he did he would be guilty of murder and neither I nor anybody else could possibly even begin to excuse or rationalise it. Contrast to Mr.Paulin’s threats which were quite explicity acted out a few days later when a Hamas Death Squad shot dead four Israeli settlers in their beds, including a five year-old girl. There’s the difference. Regardless of the utterances made by John Malkovitch, Mr.Galloway will be sleeping safely in his bed. The gravest threat he faces is one of running up a large legal bill.
Oh, and by the way, at least Mr.Malkovitch had the guts to say that he’d be prepared to do the job himself.
[My thanks to the Brothers Judd for the link to this story]
Nurses, teachers and other state workers in the UK are about to be ghettoised
As a result of their being unable to afford to buy property in London, HM Government has ‘solved’ the problem by announcing that they are going to be coralled into shanty-towns consisting of factory-made pre-fabricated ‘homes’ (tin sheds and plastic boxes to you and I) to be erected on public land which will be set aside for the purpose.
I particularly love this bit of ‘Newspeak’ from the Housing Minister Lord Falconer:
“It’s comfortable, beautiful housing. I would like to see thousands built a year.”
Rumour has it that the public sector ‘tribes’ will be encouraged to earn extra income from tourists by performing native ritual dances, selling beads and arrow heads etc while said tourists tut, roll their eyes, agree that it’s all so terribly sad and that the government should do something aout it.
Bugger it!
But life, and blogging, must go on.
There is no particular point to this post except as a sort of primer.
In a few minutes, I shall be commencing my journey to Cardiff to watch my team, Chelsea play in the FA Cup Final.
It is significant in that the result may be reflected in the ferocity or otherwise of my next few postings.
Professor Reynolds weighs in to the ongoing debate in the USA about arming airline pilots
“I trust airline pilots — and for that matter airline passengers — to protect me far more than I do underperformin’ Norman Mineta, or Tom Ridge.”
I am only too well aware of the number of calls for allowing passengers to arm themselves following 9/11. I was one of those voices. However, on second thought and third thought, I’m wondering if it may not be a bit of a ‘Naomi Klein’ (i.e. a ‘No-Brainer’).
Now before anyone starts calling me a ‘gun-grabber’, let me categorically confirm that my unambiguous support for RKBA remains undiminshed but having your sidearm on an aircraft does not, sadly, make you any less of a sitting target. If we agree to armed passengers then surely it must be all passengers or none and if all passengers can carry guns then what is there to stop, say, three or four terrorists carrying their ‘toolbag’ onto the flight as well? The answer is, nothing. This gives us a very thorny problem when it comes to the kind of slime who crash passenger jets into buildings: it is not just that they are murderous, they are suicidal as well. That makes them very difficult, nay impossible, to deter.
The world of heavily armed passengers is a gilt-edged invitation to Islamofascists whose only desire is to kill as many Westerners as possible. Just how breathtakingly easy would it be to arrange for a team of these nuts to board a 747 with all their automatic weapons and, following take-off, at an appointed moment they all get up, take their catches off and let rip?
I realise that the Islamofascists would themselves get cut down by return fire but two points to note: a) they will not mind in the least. Indeed they will expect it and b) just how many sleepy/drunken/canoodling/reading/slow-witted/elderly/very young innocent people will be slaughtered in a surprise attack, trapped in a steel capsule where they have they nowhere to run and nowhere to hide?Also, whilst one or two bullets piercing a fuselage may not cause the plane to crash, we’re talking about a serious fire-fight here and surely that could.
Some may suggest that strict racial profiling would plug this gap but I rather fear not. Even supposing the killers match the profile (which they may not) many Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis could easily pass for Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian or Italian (with fake passport to match).
No, I regret to say that the idea of arming passengers would work as a very effective deterrent to your average dorky white European terrorist who is happy to see other people die for the ’cause’ but is rather more precious about his own worthless hide. Nihilistic Islamofascists with a death wish are a different order of animal who might gleefully see a measure like this as a golden opportunity to unleash carnage at 30,000 feet.
I have been mentioned, nay singled out, in despatches over at Warbloggerwatch
In case you are wondering precisely what the measured and temperate Justin Raimondo is responding to, it is this
I am particularly fond of this zappy piece of analysis:
“And what a statist mentality it is — influenced, perhaps, by a bit of the typical British “cane-the-wogs” and long-live-the-Empire arrogance.
Anyway, must dash. I have to go and teach the damned fuzzy-wuzzys a thing or two.
Police in Manchester will be patrolling the streets armed with machine-guns in response to a massive upsurge in gun-related crime
“Recently, the level of firearms incidents particularly in areas of south Manchester has reached an intolerable level,”
You see, gun control really does work!
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the spate of anti-semitic attacks sweeping across France (and elsewhere in Europe but especially France) seem to have, well, stopped?
It occured to me tonight that, not only have they stopped, but they seem to have dried up at the very same time as Monsieur Le Pen came waddling belligerently onto the world stage.
Of course, maybe they are still occuring. Maybe there are Synagogues burning in Marseilles as I type but I can’t help thinking that, if that were the case, at least one of the Blogosphere’s ‘sniffers’ would have picked it up and run with it. So maybe they really have stopped, despite the fact that Israeli operations on the West Bank have not.
Coincidence? Who can say? Certainly not me. Interesting though.
Romano Prodi may be a hackneyed old Eurocrat but he is definitely onto something when he says that the British are afraid of full engagement in the EU.
According to The Great Protuberant One, Britain is:
“…constantly on the defensive, putting the brakes on, dragging its feet on vital issues, fighting a rearguard action that can hold up, but cannot stem, the tide of history.”
Sadly, that’s not how it looks from where I sit. And would that we could ‘stem’ this particular ‘tide of history’. Unfortunately, we can’t. The only thing we can do is save our nation and watch from the sidelines as this ‘tide of history’ drowns all those it engulfs.
Nonetheless, credit where it is due. Prodi is on an honesty roll as he notes:
“I wonder what makes this great nation happy to be a junior partner in a transatlantic relationship, but afraid to take its rightful place alongside its European allies?”
Allow me to clue you in, Prodi: it’s because the Channel is wider than the Atlantic. Across the Channel are friends, across the Atlantic is family.
Sometimes, you can gain amazing insight into a person’s whole mentality from merely a simple phrase, a snatch of conversation or a casual comment. A little crack in the curtain can allow you to peer through and shudder at the desolation that lies beyond.
I have had such an experience while perusing the website belonging to those purveyors of fine aluminium millinery antiwar.com. The thing that caught my eye was a headline which reads: “Latest US Menace to Okinawa: Falling Jet Parts”
For a moment I did a double-take. Was I reading that correctly? Yes, I was. I clicked on the link to find this prosaic bit of reportage concerning some bits which fell off a US military jet whilst it flew over Okinawa. This monstrous ‘war crime’ resulted in:
“…no injuries or damage and said the incidents posed no threat to the local community.”
Oh the inhumanity! Oh the oppression! How long can the poor Okinawans be expected to put up with being ‘menaced’ in this way? Weep, WEEP, for Okinawa!!
On the other hand, don’t bother. I may be no expert on aviation but even I know that bits periodically fall from all flying aircraft and I think it is safe to say that it is one of the less worrisome perils of modernity for most normal people. Not so the antiwarriors. No, for them it is a heinous act of US imperialist aggression. I suppose that it easy to do provided you have already settled in your own mind that the USA cannot but be wrongful (despite all the demonstrable evidence to the contrary).
Much of the thrust and complaint of the antiwarriors is directed at the extent to which traditional civil liberties in the USA have been traduced. In this, their complaint is meritorious and noble but I cannot help wondering if they are actually a part of the problem and not the solution. In order to win arguments about civil liberties (or anything else for that matter) the first requirement is to be taken seriously by serious people. But when your outlook is so jaundiced that you brazenly attempt to construe some minor workaday incident as murderous conspiracy then you can only be taken for a crank. Cranks do not help good causes; they pollute them by sheer dint of their crankiness.
Small wonder then that the antiwarriors are left to plough the lonely furrow of providing intellectual succour to vile thugocracies and tinpot demagogues. Like them, the antiwarriors have trapped themselves in a straightjacket of hate and crippled their own faculties with delusions of persecution.
Having read the article based on the observations of Marian Tupy it has occured to me that Jean-Marie Le Pen could be the next President of France.
Now before anybody goes getting their shorts in a knot, please note that I said ‘could’ not ‘will’ because Marian reminds us that an alarmingly high percentage of the electorate voted not just for Le Pen or his fellow traveller Bruno Megret, but also for Soviet-worshipping loop-de-loos like Jean-Pierre Chevenement and Arlette Legullier. Altogther, more than 30% of those who voted, voted for totalitarian government.
It is widely assumed in the press and elsewhere that the hard left will throw its weight and numbers behind Jacques Chirac out of disgust at Le Pen but Marian points out that this is a dangerously flawed assumption. In fact, they are just as likely to throw in their lot with Le Pen and, if they do, then Chirac is struggling.
It is equally assumed that the 28% or so who failed to turn out will turn out this time for fear of a Le Pen victory. But, again, this could be quite wrong. What if a lot of those abstainers are Le Pen sympathisers who failed to register their vote because they felt that he had no chance of winning? Now that he does have a chance, will then weigh-in? If they do, then Le Pen will win.
Of course, this is all just speculation and, on balance, the odds probably do favour Chirac but I think it unwise to regard his victory as a foregone conclusion, because it isn’t.
|
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.
|
