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“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.” He forced back force by the power of argument. His epitaph might be: the pen is mightier than the sword. November 16th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Our next Prime Minister speaks.
November 11th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wrote two posts for Biased BBC about the BBC’s reporting of President Bush’s “admission” that there were parallels between the present situation and Iraq and the Tet Offensive. The BBC, of course, is neither the only nor by any means the worst offender among the media organisations that have seized on this. Those who think that a clueless idiot can get and keep the office of President of the United States may well be good children or pleasant neighbours but there is no need to take anything they say about politics seriously. Whatever criticisms one might justly make of Bush, one thing he cannot be is a simpleton. For all that there is a kind of truth behind it: Bush is a simple man. As I wrote here, precisely because he is a child of privilege “in important respects his values are more normal than is normal in his milieu.” Poor guy. Of course he had thought about the similarities to the Tet Offensive. Like some prince letting slip that there might be something to this Copernican system in front of his less enlightened bishops, he just forgot for a moment to keep one of the taboos that it is safer to observe when so many of the intermediaries between him and the populace are either ignoramuses or hostile. He forgot that so many of them rejoice that the American media managed to turn that offensive, which General Giap viewed as a failure, into “proof” that the war could not be won. He forgot that so many of them view the conquest of Vietnam by a regime so detested by its own people that thousands of Boat People preferred the mercies of the open sea to enduring it any longer, and the deliverance of Cambodia into the hands of the democidal Khmer Rouge, to be their finest hour. You know, thinking about it, his moment of forgetfulness might make a few people remember these things. It may not do him such harm after all. October 21st, 2006 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Teach you I cannot, my young Padawan.” As a science fiction reader I am used to meeting strange words and either guessing their meaning through context or not guessing and enjoying the story anyway. So I was only slightly hampered when reading a story in yesterday’s Times headlined “New York Mayor fights drain of IPOs to London” by my complete ignorance of what an “IPO” is and the complete failure of the story to enlighten me. You can tell me all about it in the comments if you must, but as far as I am concerned “eye-pee-oh” could be replaced by any other sequence of sounds, such as snurg-ah-poog or plibble. Plibble it is. Plibbles must be pretty nice things, because the mayor of New York is so concerned that all the plibbles New York used to win (apparently plibbles are things you win) now being won by London that he has appointed management consultants to investigate causes and possible remedies for the Great Plibble Crisis. Concern has focused on the fact that since the passing of the Somebody-Whatsit Act, London has gained a 26.4 per cent share of the global plibbles. Hurrah for London, I think. New York’s problem is that doing whatever you have to do to comply with the Somebody-Whatsit act before you can get your plibbles is one big hassle. So the plibbles go somewhere else. Blimey, I could have saved Mayor Bloomberg a packet on consultancy fees and I still have no idea what a plibble is. Come to think of it, anyone could work out that if plibble-getting is made tedious and expensive in your country then plibbleseekers will get their fun somewhere else. Even if you do not know your plibbles from your twogbots. September 29th, 2006 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The German magazine ZAPP has a video of Green Helmet, whose name has been revealed as Salam Daher, taken in Qana when it was bombed ten years ago. He oversees a dead boy being put into an ambulance. The sequence is not good enough. He gives stage directions. The boy is taken out again, transferred pointlessly to another stretcher, put back in the ambulance. Daher makes sure there is a clear field of view for the camera and the blanket over the boy is pulled back so that his face can be seen. The video is on You Tube. EU Referendum promises to provide an analysis soon. This should be worth reading, as it was EU Referendum’s Richard North who first noted Daher’s surprising prominence If you care to you can also read a translation of an article from Stern magazine saying that the whole thing is just a bizarre conspiracy theory. The picture from 1996 briefly shown on the left of the Zapp footage shows Daher holding up a dead baby dressed in blue. The baby’s head is blurred, and that is not surprising. Zapp’s picture was taken within minutes of this one showing that the baby’s head had been blown up. (Needless to say, this is a disturbing image.) That picture is fairly famous – for instance it appears as the fourth picture down in this series of pictures from the “Main Gallery Of Zionist Massacres” of a website called “Resistance.” It was also, I seem to recall, at one time the cover picture for Warblogger Watch (http://warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com, although if you try the link it is immediately covered up by sex adverts.) Daher has had a successful career. The dead children from both 1996 and 2006 were really dead. Almost certainly they were really killed by Israeli munitions – although I have no doubt Hizb’Allah reassigns casualties from “friendly fire” whenever it gets the chance, let us not pretend that in what I take to be a worldwide war our side will not also kill innocents. The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity. However from now on it will be impossible to forget that these famous images tell not one but at least three stories. The dead child. The man holding him. The man behind the camera. August 10th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“One of the perverse effects of the Endangered Species Act,” writes Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy, “is that it encourages private landowners to make their land inhospitable to potentially endangered species. ” He then links to a sad but predictable tale of residents of an area hastening to make sure that a particular endangered bird finds no place to nest and rear young – at least no place on their land, since once this bird is found there, environmental regulations make the land unsaleable. In North Carolina they persecute woodpeckers. They do not hate woodpeckers, they just do not love them enough to lose thousands of dollars for their sake. Here in Britain we persecute bats, and not because we are afraid of vampires. August 9th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Drinking from Home posts two Reuters pictures (CORRECTION: one Reuters picture and one AP) of a woman lamenting the destruction of her home by the Israelis. Different dates, different homes, same woman. August 6th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Sun is not happy about the “First National Muslim Fun Day”, to be held at Alton Towers. The Sun says
So far as I can see, Muslims who did not book via Islamic Leisure have also been refused tickets. “Sorry, the park is already booked.” What is so difficult to understand about that?
I do not know the previous policy of Alton Towers, but a few years back I went with a church playgroup to Thorpe Park for “Prayers in the Park”. The children spent the day on the rides then finished with an open air service. Happy time had by all. Back to the Sun:
Maybe because Islamic Leisure paid the hefty premium that such places charge to book on a busy weekend?
The lawyers ought to administer a slap on the wrist for the MPAC for saying that, which probably contravenes discrimination law. The lawyers ought, but libertarians and other people with respect for freedom ought not. Freedom of association necessarily involves freedom to exclude. Sometimes you want the party to be private. How would you feel if you hired a hall for the annual party of your local pro-abortion group and they demanded that the doors be open to anti-abortion activists? Feel free to swap the sides in this example. The point is the same. (In fact the organisers seem confused as to whether they they actually want non-Muslims along. Some other statements suggest that the organisers feel that if non-Muslims see Muslims enjoying themselves just like everyone else it will would be good P.R. for them.) The Sun says
I doubt either statement is entirely true. We will not be seeing a Nazi Fun Day for the excellent reason that Alton Towers would turn down the booking. That is their right. There are urban myths that theme parks are sometimes hired out for the day to childish but very rich individuals; if that is the booking a park wants to accept then that is their right too. It is tough luck on George from Crayford, but theme parks are not public utilities. Unless you want them to be nationalised (imagine a theme park run by civil servants and tremble) can I suggest that George try Drayton Manor? July 1st, 2006 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a telling quote from a recent Observer article about violence between (South) Asian and Somali schoolchildren in Birmingham:
Here is another:
Sorry, Mr Blake, but myths with a core of truth are hard to kill. Communities will always “scrap” for government resources because they are correct in their belief that if group A gets more of the pie then group B gets less. Scrapping, with or without bricks and broken bottles, is an excellent way to get more pie. Nor is it wise to hope for a day when resources are no longer scarce; in most of the country the economy is more sovietised than many countries that not so long ago were actually part of the Soviet bloc. If you will forgive an earthy metaphor, an economy based on drinking one’s own urine can only go on so long. Laban Tall, commenting on the same article, congratulates the Observer for having finally discovered that not all racism is white on black. I am a good deal more optimistic than he that multi-racial – and even, to some extent, multi-cultural societies can be made to work. Just not where there is socialism. God help us if the world ever becomes one multi-cultural society under socialism, as it looks as if it might. I forsee a future of low-level suppurating conflicts that never heal because the reason for their existence never goes away. We have had a foretaste. A recent report that examined the causes of the riots in Burnley five years ago says that the government handing out “regeneration” money in the 1990s created rivalry and anger that helped create the conditions for the riots.
You know what they say: first you screw up. Then you screw up again in the same way again to prove that it really was a screw-up first time round. You guessed it: Burnley’s problems in 2006 are to be dealt with by handing out regeneration money. But fear not!
Themes. Assuredly these themes will make all well and no one will whisper that some communities are more thematically challenged than others and hence are getting more than their share. However, never let it be said that government always screws up in the same way. Sometimes government screws up in new ways.
It does not say whether those “furious homeowners” are black, white or brown. It does not matter. Whatever colour their skins they will be embittered by having their homes taken from them for the greater good – the greater good of other people – and in a place blighted by regeneration it takes but the weight of the feather to tip the balance from general bitterness into racial bitterness. June 9th, 2006 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Look, I have got a cold coming on. I do not really want to post about this. But, for the record (and because this is Samizdata, dammit! We may not be able to stop the passing of liberty but we of all people should toll the bell) David Irving should not be jailed. Historical opinions, however deluded and malevolent, should not be criminalised. February 21st, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 6th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“They won’t publish cartoons, but they will run anything they can get out of Abu Ghraib. Both sets of images provoke Islamic anger; note how the media behaves when that anger is directed at them.” – Tim Blair, referring to the Australian media – although the same could be said of the British, in contrast to those papers in Europe that have showed solidarity with their Danish colleagues. February 5th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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