Samizdata

Sir, If Tony Blair is seeking a weapon of mass destruction he has only to read the proposed European constitution.

(From today’s UK Times letters page)

As a general rule of thumb, when two non-government organisations, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, the BBC and the New York Times agree that the whole powder keg’s about to go up, it’s a safe bet that things are going swimmingly.

-Mark Steyn, reporting in the Telegraph about the lack of a humanitarian crisis in post-war Iraq.

Actually, the whole article is terrific, particularly his explanation of why the NGOs need to be sent home.

A Message to the British People:

Jacques Chirac wants to thank you
for saving France on the beaches of Normandy
by giving you
10% unemployment
the Napoleonic code
a Franco-Belgian style military defense

vive le UK

– Clio

“My song is a hymn for individualism and against collectivism. I am also for balls and against circles, for corners and against edges, for trees and against the forest. In my performance it is not so much the song that counts but the moral attitude behind it. Whoever votes for me is against being standardized and cemented in by ‘European Banality’.”

Alf Poier, Austrian entrant to the European Song Contest.
(Via Michael Jennings.)

(In the end, Mr Poier got a respectable 94 points. It seems Britain got no points at all. Politically, this is all to the good.)

British academic communists suffer from ideology, which is a brain virus. It takes every natural, logical and honest thought and turns it into a version of itself. So everything becomes political. A person is either good (communist) or bad (capitalist), poor and trodden-upon (good), white and privileged (bad) and so on. American communists, however, live in an intellectual and informational vacuum. So they make it up as they go, creating the most marvelous conspiracy theories as they go along.
– An insightful observation by a friend of Gabriel Syme…

I don’t know if I’m more impressed by these people’s tenacity in defending their position even as it circles the drain, or horrified that they’re willing to grab up weapons like these in order to avoid having to admit they were wrong.
– Brian Tiemann commenting over on Cold Fury regarding comments on Gabriel Syme’s recent post.