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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[Napoleon] had one prodigious advantage – he had no responsibility – he could do whatever he pleased; and no man has ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much; I knew that if I ever lost five hundred men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees to the bar of the House of the Commons.
– Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Our present day military commanders probably think in private that Old Nosey had it about hundred times easier on the PR front than they do.
You’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law, Sod’s Law and various other codifications of observations about human affairs. How about this one?
One of the comments to an earlier post of mine, made by Mark Griffith, seemed to embody such a fundamental truth of commercial life that it deserves to be a law in its own right.
“Speaking as someone from Manchester, I can tell you the Guardian is not the only Mancunian organisation to get silly after moving to the capital.
“Marks and Spencers’ troubles really date from the shift of its head office from Manchester to London.
“Come to think of it, I believe the headquarters of the hyper-merde bank Credit Lyonnais were relocated to Paris, not Lyon, a couple of decades ago, before the debt disaster really took off.
“Could we have a theme here?”
Can readers think of any other examples?
I urge you to read a post by Stephen Pollard. He links to a Guardian articled headed, breathtakingly, “Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter”. Why do I say “breathtakingly”? Because the freedom-fighting of the woman profiled by the Guardian, Anne Gwynne, consists of the fact that she went to ‘Occupied Palestine’ the better to be chummy with the families of two suicide bombers who killed twenty-three Israeli civilians. Or who “went on the mission to Tel Aviv” as she winningly puts it, before adding, “They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons.”
The woman herself is of a recurring though despicable type: the White Liberal Murder-Groupie. OK, you’ve seen her like before, swooning over the Khmer Rouge or the Black Panthers. We are up to about Mk VIII by now, with Improved Extra Gush Factor. Let us wash our minds of her and move on.
But the Guardian’s commentary hits a new low, and the Guardian once had some honour to lose. Did you know that it was once the Manchester Guardian, provincial in the best sense, standing for a tradition of Nonconformist self-improvement? Think on that and then re-read that headline describing a woman who pants to to further help the killers in their bloody work: Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter.
Then look at the first sentence: Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. Mrs Gwynne did not write that, the reporter, Chris McGreal wrote it. Probably didn’t think about it much.
Did I say “the Guardian’s commentary” just then? Silly of me, it isn’t a commentary. The nearest it comes to an effort at any of that “dig deeper, ask the tough questions” stuff reporters and analysts are meant to do is this:
Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?
The answer given, pretty quickly, is “Nah, ‘course not.” Note how McGreal had to drag in that fact that many of the victims weren’t Israelis in order to make even a debating-point case for sympathy. Beyond that one limp line there is no justification offered for the term “freedom fighter” or for calling Anne Gwynne’s activities “her own war against terrorism.” In contrast great detail is offered of the sufferings of the Palestinians (which is as it should be) – but not the slightest scepticism as to whether Anne Gwynne is telling the whole truth. Could McGreal not have made some interjection, asked a few challenging supplementary questions, for instance, when confronted with lines like this: “I used to think it was all excuses, but they [Israeli soldiers] actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s.”? Perhaps he was never going to give the answer I would have given, namely, “Your pals with the bomb-belts seem to slaughter well enough, dearie,” but one would think that the traditions of the Guardian would demand some note of distance, of qualification, of un-acceptance?
An apologia, even when desperately, heartbreakingly wrong, is a sort of bridge between evil and good, an acknowledgement that there is something here that needs explaining. But Chris McGreal saw no necessity for any elaboration. Tip-tap-tip went the swiftly typing fingers and out came the words “freedom fighter”, “her own war on terrorism”, praise as easy and insouciant as a local reporter putting in a good word for the latest charitable efforts of the Womens’ Institute or Rotary Club. As Stephen Pollard concludes, “Ms Gwynne’s evil views are not merely presented without criticism or proper questioning; they are endorsed. And that is, in its own way, also evil.”
[This post originally appeared on my own blog. I have also posted it here because of Blogger problems and to make it as widely known as possible what sort of attitudes the Guardian considers acceptable in its reporters.]
Cor, Gnasher, that’s a relief! Alert status down to Bikini Off or whatever they call it. The good guys are so far ahead in the War on Terror that they have time to spare to ban the Dandy.
Samizdata voted No. 1 Group Blog by a fairly large group of the great and the good of the blogosphere (or the mad and the bad, depending on your p.o.v.) Nice. True. Stiff competition, too.
Chris Bertram of Junius has written:
I’ve just blogged about a matter that I think has potentially serious implications for freedom of expression in British universities. See link.
It is, too. Universities are understandably anxious not to have their names dragged in the dust by things like the Mona Baker affair. These proposals, however, would have a chilling effect way beyond that. As Bertram says:
“We could see, for example, a physicist who feels strongly about Tibet and protests against the Chinese government, being held to account for endangering the reputation of a university. Academic freedom would be no defence.”
UPDATE: Apologies for the bad link, and thanks to those who pointed it out. It ought to work now.
I don’t care how hungover you are. Get thee hence to the newsagents and buy, yes buy, a paper copy of the Mail On Sunday today. They have a story about some TV chick the German Chancellor is shagging. You care not about the paramours of foreign potentates? Buy it anyway. The point is that it’s a test case about whether British courts are supreme or whether the EU can over-rule them. Apparently Lover-boy Gerhart has got an injunction to suppress the story in Germany and is claiming that under EU law that means he can suppress it here too.
“You teach people that it’s wrong to care. You tell them that the right course of action is to “not get involved”. When they see a crime being committed, then if they try to stop it they may end up in prison, but there’s no punishment for looking the other direction and not seeing. And thus fewer people will get involved.”
– Steven Den Beste writing on what happens when you punish people for killing robbers. Emphasis added by me.
“Jesus Christ was so little minded to give specific guidance as to politics that he didn’t even deal with the issue of slavery. And these twits think that it’s heresy to be in favour of the free market or against the UN.”
Funny how that same topic has kept coming up recently. Just the other day, I posted the words above on my own blog. Now Christopher Pellerito’s comments in the post just below this one, and the Howie Carr and Joe Bob Briggs articles he quotes, have got me thinking.
“What would Jesus do?” when first coined might have been a good phrase to prompt Christians to examine their own lives in the light of Christ’s example. There is nothing logically wrong with that principle, employed with due modesty. Christians Socialists, Conservatives and Libertarians all may sincerely believe that their political beliefs either flow from their religion or are at least compatible with it. (Not all of them can be right, but that’s one for another post.)
However the WWJD phrase has now become little more than a hook for anybody to make any claim they like about divine backing for their side in whatever temporary and local kerfuffle happens to be in the paper this week, secure in the knowledge that the authority they quote is scarcely going to gainsay them.
At least, not yet.
By definition every Christian believes that he or she will one day stand before Jesus. I can’t help wondering whether some Christians would be so presumptuous about putting words into Jesus’ mouth if the prospect of that final, consummate meeting were truly real to them.
A Canadian Samizdata reader alerted Samizdata to a story in Canada’s National Post. The Post reports that costs for Canada’s gun registry have overrun by a factor of 500. No, that’s not an overrun of 500% (which would be bad enough) but a final cost of five hundred times the original estimate. Did I say final? I meant cost so far; it’s not final yet.
Well, at least Canadians are safe now. Only they’re not. He adds:
“Herewith is another example of why gun registration programs don’t work. Canada has a history different from the US with respect to firearms (which explains, in large part, why this became law in the first place). I think that violent, gun-related crime in Canada’s urban centers has probably increased since 1995 (but I don’t have any hard evidence to support this assertion). I can say that, in Toronto, there was a series of gang related shooting in October where every weekend (for a month) different gang members ended up dead in different parts of the city. Further to this, the gun control law has had no impact on the Hell’s Angels in Montreal.”
As chance would have it I had posted earlier today about how Simon Jenkins of the Times should not believe all that Michael Moore says about Canada being a paradise of trust. Moore is right about one thing. America does have an anomalously high murder rate. But all the strategies put in place by countries who boast that their lower murder rate is the result of gun control, and that they therefore need more of it, keep on failing. Expensively.
That would have been a good sign-off line, but I’ve one more thing to say. I was struck by the sentiments of Allan Rock, a Liberal Party bigshot who the opposition attacked for keeping mum about the spiralling costs of the gun registry. The report said:
Mr. Rock defended the registry, saying it has “saved lives” and reinforced “Canadian values” by distinguishing Canada from the United States on the issue of gun control.
Were his actual words as thin and shabby as this paraphrase implies? Does he really see mere difference to the United States as a merit in itself?
A columnist for the Telegraph has been arrested and held in a cell for saying that the rural minority should have “the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays.”
…you fat (alliterative expletive deleted)?
No, not you, dear reader. I refer only to a few words quoted in Jim Bennett’s latest column. The opening sentences might be of particular interest to Samizdata readers. If the line quoted sounds slightly different from the way you remember it, bear in mind that they are a pure-minded lot at UPI. Not like us lot who will print anything.
Oh, and just as an aside, Jim Bennett touches on two subjects that I’d like him to explore further: tort law reform and Ireland.
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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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