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]
|
The Christmas season often brings forth stories that act as an ‘Indian summer’ for the silly season, reminding us of warm August evenings, listening to the closing overs of a test (rain permitting), and a time when you can sit outside a pub drinking Ordinary in any London green. Summer nostalgia aside, this year’s theme revolves around name changes.
In Manhattan, Jorge Luis Espinal sent a reporter to new heights of expression with his legal petition for the Second Coming:
A Manhattan man’s holiday spirits soared to celestial heights today when a judge gave him permission to change his name to Jesus Christ.
Jose Luis Espinal, 42, said he was “happy” and “grateful” that the judge approved the change, effective immediately.
Espinal said he was moved to seek the name change about a year ago when it dawned on him: “I am the person that is that name.”
The article provides some further information on the legal framework governing legal name changes. You can be a name but not a number in South Dakota. You can be Jesus Christ so long as your intention is not to defraud others by your actions or avoid an obligation. Jose has more chance of changing his name than a convicted conman, or possibly, a politician such as Tony Blair, if the latter wished to change his name to that of the Christian Messiah.
The judge said she held a hearing in which Espinal, who also uses the last name Tejeda, testified. She said he was aware of the “common law right to assume another name without legal proceedings so long as the change is not made to deceive or perpetrate a fraud or to avoid an obligation” but wanted to go the formal route anyway.
The judge said Espinal’s “reasons were primarily those applicable to his own private religious beliefs and he stated no desire to use his proposed name to secure publicity, to proselytise, to fund-raise or advise others that he had been cloaked by the courts or government with a religious authority”.
Jose’s example has been followed by that closet nominalist Prince Charles who is reported to be seeking coronation as King George VII. Changing the name of the Prince or Princess on accession to the throne is quite common and the Royal Family supposedly views the name Charles as jinxed, due to associations with decapitating Puritans and rebellious Jacobite pretenders.
Patrick Cracroft-Brennan, a genealogist from Cracroft’s Peerage, said: “There has been a tradition over the last century for the regnal title to be different to the christian name. The change would make sense.
“Monarchs called Charles have not had much luck. One was beheaded, one was in exile, and one was a pretender to the throne.
While the Prince of Wales is known throughout the world as Charles, there is enormous goodwill to the name George. George VI was an outstanding and popular king who took over in the aftermath of the abdication crisis and rallied his people during World War II, Mr Cracroft-Brennan said.
“King George and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother were wonderful. I think George VII and Queen Camilla sound wonderful, too.”
A swift name-change to airbrush the excesses and eccentricities of unfortunate heirs seems all too common with the Hanoverians. If our heir to the throne will adopt a name off Rainbow, surely Zippy or the more accurate Bungle would prove just as gracious and popular.
For some reason, the decision by Bill Gates to become an honorary British knight makes me sad. Has the founder of Microsoft finally, and completely, sold out to the “establishment”? Has his bruising encounter with the looters, whoops, I meant U.S. Justice Dept and EU Commission made him yearn for a respectable, quieter life?
Somehow, I cannot see Steve Jobs wanting a gong.
So hapless Prince Harry takes a swing at some paparazzo who bashes him in the face with a camera, and the British press have apoplexy tut-tutting over his behaviour.
To use internet parlance, WTF? If some pushy bastard negligently clips you in the mouth with a camera whilst in search of a few quid, the correct response is to return the favour with interest. That is not ill-advised or thuggish or incorrect, it is an entirely appropriate means of male-to-male comminication at such a time. I am glad to see that there is a member of the royal family who actually has personality traits that approach those of the Crown’s normal everyday subjects.
It seem quite appropriate that not only should he not apologise for his reaction to the incident, he should be advising Christopher Uncle that if there is a next time, there should be some expectations of a royal boot in the bollocks as well.
Well, not quite. The Royal family’s horrible little dogs have been fighting each other to the death, is all. Not for cash bets, which would be much more exciting, if less hilarious: just because that’s what animals sometimes do if you let them. Sometimes animals kill people too. We sentimentalise them at our peril.
We British folk, especially the upper classes, have long been renowned for our perverse attachments to four-legged creatures over normal human beings. Personally, I can’t see the point. They can’t think, they cost money, you have to clean them, take them for walks, pay vet’s fees, if you go away for a couple of months they destroy the house and/or die and make a mess, and all this for nothing other than the proximity of a creature that can’t do anything except perform basic bodily functions. Why? On second thoughts, don’t tell me: I don’t care.
What I do care about is people getting attacked by other people’s vicious animals in public places. Why this crime which Anne was found guilty of last time only merited a £500 fine, I have no idea. But there’s a definite poetic justice to this seasonal next chapter of the story, in my view.
Jokes about pets, life and Christmas, anyone…?
The most absurd intellectual property rights claim ever?
With their earthy tones and lizard motifs, Prince Harry’s paintings won admiration at home and last week earned him a grade B at A-level. But his work has stirred anger in Western Australia, where he is accused of stealing Aboriginal themes.
The moral pygmies claiming ‘ownership’ of the images drawn by artists who died hundreds of years ago must be the world’s biggest losers. Inacapable of artistic expression themselves, they demand the unearned greatness of their remote ancestors.
How sad that genuine aboriginal achievements are drowned out by the moochers!
The first foreign cricket team to visit England (in 1868) was comprised entirely of aboriginal players. Subsequently, Australian cricket authorities tried to forget about this as more than a century passed without a non-white player. Are they excluded from clubs, does the welfare system turn an entire race into a dependent underclass?
I don’t suppose that the professional racial-awareness poverty pimps are demanding that aborigines stop getting welfare and solve their problems by economic means.
For the record, one of my French ancestors wore the Crusaders’ red cross on white background in Palestine. Does this mean I should sue England soccer supporters for ‘violating’ my heritage, after all their king only went on the Third Crusade?
The dependably clueless Prince Charles wants the state to require tax funded institutions like Britain’s nationalised public health service and state schools to add insult to injury by not even attempting to get ‘best value for your stolen money’… which is to say he wants such arms of the state to be required to buy British farm products even if foreign products are cheaper/better… not only does he say they ‘should’ buy British, but that the government should force them to.
Like most people with socialist & fascist understandings of economics, producers are all and consumers are nothing to Charles. Why will people like him not be more honest and just admit directly that they want productive taxpayers to be compelled by force to prop-up less efficient areas of the economy and they should not be given any choice in the matter.
The Royal Family usefully occupy the same seriocomical niche as the Flag and ‘Hand-on-heart’ pledge of allegiance do in the USA… and like that inanimate object and rote chant, are largely empty of real meaning beyond their warm-fuzzy-glow value. If only we could devise some means of permanently depriving Charles of speech, leaving him only with earnest looks and poses, then the British monarchy could have another couple centuries of seriocomical semi-usefulness ahead of them.
The British newspapers are agog at rape allegations inside the Royal Household.
Yawn.
The British state daily rapes million of people of billions of pounds to pay for ‘services’ that fail to deliver whilst blighting the economy and distorting civil society… yet the idiot media concentrates of the trivial antics of House of Windsor, who are little more than a bunch of national tourist attractions who at least generate more money than they cost the hapless taxpayer. Now that is the true scandal, not who might or might not have buggered whom in some drafty palace.
How can I count the ways! Well first, let me say what is right with him… namely that as a future constitutional figurehead monarch, he is in fact powerless to do jack shit to impose his world view on the rest of us and his ideas are in reality no more significant than John Bull the Greengrocer. That is a very good thing indeed because unlike members of the government, we are free to ignore his bleating if we wish.
The thing that annoys me however is that when Charles opines in some issues, such as hunting, people misunderstand his underpinning philosophy. People think of him as advocating liberties against the encroachment of the state because he supports the right of hunters to hunt in Britain, but this is utterly incorrect. Prince Charles is in fact an advocate of big interventionist redistributive government: for example see his calls for taxpayers to be forced to subsidise organic farms (which overwhelmingly sell to higher income members of the public). Most significantly he has no problem whatsoever with the philosophical position that rights exist collectively, which is the underpinning of every tyranny imaginable. In a letter to Downing Street, the Prince wrote:
The Human Rights Act is only about the rights of individuals. This betrays a fundamental distortion in social and legal thinking
So when Charles says:
Our lives are becoming ruled by a truly absurd degree of politically correct interference
He is not arguing against the morality of the state interfering in people’s lives, just the fact that it is not being done in a way he approves of. Like so many paleo-conservatives, he thinks the state telling you how to live your life is just fine, provided ‘sensible chaps from Eton’ are the ones in control of that state.
I’m a little unnerved to hear about your unhappiness, Brian. I tend to rely on your general bouyancy to keep me from going under.
I note what you say regarding ‘er Maj but I can’t say that I find it very persuasive. She is performing the useful function of being stubbornly in the way of those seeking more power and glory (and we all know who they are, don’t we). Besides, your claim that she acts as camouflage for the nefarious doings of the nefarious is somewhat contradicted by your (correct) assertion that an Anti-Blairite resentment is beginning to fulminate. People do catch on sooner or later, albeit for different reasons.
I think the British have a rather predictable and long-standing attitude towards the governments they elect. It starts off as:
Stage 1: A great bow wave of expectation and enthusiasm followed by
Stage 2: anti-climax and disappointment which tends to become
Stage 3: feelings of unease and surly resentment which eventually translate into
Stage 4: let’s hang the bastards!!
We’ve been hovering around Stage 2 since just before the last General Election but I detect that we have, in the last few weeks, seamlessly slipped into Stage 3.
I also agree that the Tories are doing exactly the right thing by doing absolutely nothing. They cannot win, Blair can only lose, so let him. Of course, whether the Tories are acting in this strategically brilliant manner due to 1) genuine vacuity and impotence or 2) masterful political nous, is an entirely different discussion.
Why the caution David? Because if they do start chucking H-bombs about the subcontinent I don’t want to add a feeling of extreme foolishness to all my other unhappinesses. It reminds me of yet another P.G. Wodehouse quote, where Bertie Wooster (I think) notes the occurrence of some ghastly modern practice or other and says something to the effect that if it catches on Western Civilisation will collapse. “And then what a lot of silly asses we should all look.” I love that.
Changing the subject, to all this royal stuff that’s going on just now (which you also mentioned in another post, David), I find myself noting the emotions that millions of my fellow countrymen now seem to feel, of fondness for their stubbornly traditional country and its stubbornly traditional head-of-state arrangements, but not sharing them. I’m a puritan. I think constitutions should describe the realities of power, not surround reality in an aerosol spray-canned mist of sentimental heritage flummery, which was once the real system but which is now just a fading memory. I’d like to live in a country where the official story of how we are governed approximates to reality.
It is said that Royalty confers respectability upon the sordid manoeuvres of politics. Exactly. That is precisely my objection to it. Let the sordid reality of politics be looked in the face, not funked. And then, you never know, people might just be persuaded to change it for the better. I don’t think that our Monarchy is better than the predations of democracy; I think it protects them. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues for the reality of Monarchy, not the shadow of it as we now have.)
However, there is the matter of Europe. The Europe issue is real. Royalty is just an argument about interior decor by comparison. If I have to choose between Britain becoming a sordidly real province of the European Union, and remaining a sentimentally heritaged flummery in a state of at least some political detachment from that Union, then I go with the flummery.
I summarise my objection to Britain’s “membership” of the European Union with one question: What British problems will it solve? Only career problems among the elite, it seems to me. With luck, some of them will get to run what they fondly hope will become a superpower to rival the USA. No more grovelling to Uncle Sam. No other problems will be solved that I can think of. What problems might British membership of the EU cause? Infinite. As some clever French conservative (identificatory emails welcome) once said: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
That’s how the Royals always do it. They quietly allow themselves to become identified with whatever in the country is being complained about, and all the complainers forget about any flummery objections they might have had (and in this case there were damn few complainers to start with).
The Conservative Party is finally making a difference to all this. It is keeping its hated mouth tight shut. This is helping. An anti-Blairite atmosphere may now finally be coalescing, and the Conservatives must wait in silence, and let it grow.
(I’m right now watching the Falklands Play, and I’m taping it too. Very interesting.)
Pomp and Circumstance
Heard from a British TV presenter today when reporting on Golden Jubilee Celebrations:
“The crowd greeted the Royal entourage ecstatically. The young Princes went on a walkabout and were treated like popstars“
I must admit that the terms ‘Libertarian’ and ‘Monarchist’ are not one that are effortlessly congruent but neither are they mutually exclusive. So it is without any hesitation that I declare myself to be, in my own quiet and understated way, a Monarchist, at least as far as Britain is concerned.
This being the case, I am only too happy to rise to the challenge of Brendan O’Neill
“..in fact, worst of all is a monarchist who dare not speak his name, who won’t come out in full defence of the royals. So come on then – defend the monarchy.”
I do dare to speak my name, Mr.O’Neill, and defending the monarchy is not just my burden but, I’ll have you know, my pleasure.
If one is to live within the institution called ‘nation’ then it is entirely reasonable (and maybe even essential) to have something or someone to symbolise that nation. Our monarch fulfils that role not just satisfactorily but admirably. It is an institution which is the product of our heritage, culture and history and a reminder that our constitution and civil society was painstakingly built by the craft and toil of ages and has now been largely squandered by the kind of elected representatives you seem to admire so much.
The monarch is a continuum; it is an anchor for the commonwealth of the people and stands not above politics but apart from politics. The monarch has served and continues to serve as a totem for both British sense of community and nationhood; a stubborn reminder that British civil society is not within the gift of Tony Blair or Romano Prodi and will be here long after both of them have turned to dust. Our Queen really does serve, our politicians merely feed at the table.
I might remind you, Mr.O’Neill that it is not the Queen that is bleeding us white with taxes, it is elected politicians. It is not the Queen that is suffocating us with pettyfogging regulations and laws, it is elected politicians. It is not the Queen who has traduced our civil liberties, it is elected politicians. It is not the Queen that has delivered us, bound hand and foot, to the fat Cardinals in Brussels, it is elected politicians. Given the choice between Queen Elizabeth and the gaggle of mendacious, thieving sluts that people like you have in mind to replace her, I know for sure which one I would take up arms for.
So there you have it, Mr.O’Neill. A defence of monarchy. And since I have been bold enough to defend my position, perhaps you will allow me the indulgence of a challenge of my own? It is a challenge for you and all others who believe in ‘democratic’ virtues. Did you take a holiday last year? If so, did you canvass everybody in your constituency beforehand on their opinion as to a) whether you were entitled to a holiday and b) where you should spend it? If not, why not?
|
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.
|
