The actions of radical Islamophobes should not be used to condemn the peaceful Islamophobe majority
– Allum Bokhari, tweeting the situation with great panache 😀
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It has finally happened. Here in Britain, a man has driven a van into a group of people he sees as evil. Clarification: it has finally happened in Britain that a man has driven a van into a group of muslims. If we followed PC precedent, we should be as cautious in assuming this man was not a muslim as we were told to be of assuming earlier perpetrators were muslim. How could it be safer to treat a reported shout of “I want to kill muslims” as more decisive than a reported shout of “Allahu Akbar”? Murder of a gang rival with collateral damage; killing a group of not-muslim-enough muslims with ingenious collateral propaganda advantage; anything is possible. But I suspect he wasn’t a muslim. In the well-armed US, it has not yet happened – that I have heard, and I think it would have been blazoned forth by the media (no doubt will be if and when it does). But the US is exceptional. In third world countries (whose cultures it is racist to regard as more flawed than our own), tit-for-tat retaliation has long been part of the culture. In its quieter, understated way, British exceptionalism has always been as proud as US exceptionalism – and as hated by the politically correct. They decided to “rub the British people’s noses in diversity” in order to get rid of it. We are less exceptional today than we were yesterday. June 19th, 2017 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Earlier today I chanced upon Trooping the Colour on the telly, which is the big old military parade they have in London on the Queen’s “Official” Birthday. Mention was made of a flypast that was about to happen, and I immediately grabbed my camera and ran up to my roof, to photo what whatever of it that I could from there. I had to wait a while, until 1pm. There was much helicopter activity, which seemed promising. Our Armed Forces keeping their eyes out for surface-to-air missiles, and suchlike devilry? Perhaps. Maybe just pretending to be doing that, in order to deter it. Whatever, eventually, I spied, way out beyond the multi-pointed Parliament Tower, two real airplanes, flying together. Which could only mean a flypast. No planes approaching Heathrow would ever bunch up together, like that, by which I mean like this:
That photo was taken with maximum zoom, but eventually these two airplanes trundled towards me, and I got a rather better shot of them, although still with quite a lot of zoom:
When I watched the television highlights of the show in the evening, they said that the biggest of the planes in this next photo was the biggest plane the RAF possesses:
To me, it just looks like a Boeing Dreamliner in plain clothes. Don’t they have any properly big planes? It occurs to me that the Dreamliner may be bigger than I had thought. But at least I got to take semi-adequate photos of this dreary plane and its little sidekicks, and of its predecessor and its sidekick, above. I had less luck with these guys:
That’s a heavily cropped close-up of them, as the Red Arrows (for it was they) vanished behind the big tower block in the middle of the square I live on the edge of, leaving only their jets of patriotic-coloured smoke. Here is the original photo that the above is cropped from:
Which gives you an idea of how far away all this was happening, and how the direction of travel of whatever it was determined whether I would ever see it properly or not. Unlike the earlier boring jets, the Red Arrows didn’t disappear from London in a westerly direction, i.e. past me. They went north. And this was as close to an actual photo I got of them:
I never saw anything like this:
Whch is how the Red Arrows looked on my telly. According to that same telly, a couple of Hurricanes and a Spitfire, or maybe it was the other way around, flying in a formation, were also part of the show. But I never laid eyes or lens on them. Nevertheless, I account the trip upstairs a success. My purpose was to see how one of these London Queen’s Birthday flypasts looked like from up on my roof, and I did. It wasn’t nearly as good as the Farnborough Air Show, but I didn’t expect it to be. It wasn’t even as good as the New Year’s Eve fireworks that I photoed from the same spot last New Year’s Eve. But then, a firework occupies a lot more sky at any particular moment than an airplane does, and its entire purpose is to be extremely visible. I actually find it quite reassuring that the British state’s version of a ceremonial flypast over its capital city is so very modest, and that by far its most impressive moment features guys who are basically aerial ballet dancers. June 17th, 2017 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
The left are about intentions. They treat their own good intentions as evidence they will do good – and that we, who oppose them, have evil intentions. We notice incentives. If the planned road to utopia rewards freeloading while punishing those who pay for it, it will not get there. “Why did I bother!” is what Natalie’s exasperated neighbour said when the Tory manifesto came out. That neighbour is one of the goodies: never rich but she paid her way (plus taxes), raised her kids, worked at many a humble low-paying job (as her neighbours’ cleaned kitchens could testify) and ends up with a house, a life she can respect, and no other major assets. May’s intention was presumably to balance the budget. But taking that neighbour’s house to pay alike for her care and freeloaders’ care incentivised her to demand, “Why did I bother!” Theresa May was stuffing envelopes for the Tory party when she was twelve years old. But maybe that’s the problem. Given my family background, it is mere lucky chance I was not stuffing envelopes for Labour at that age. Almost 5 years separated my reaching voting age from the next general election – which is why I can tell you I have never voted Labour. I had to work out, as the years and days to that first election ticked down, why I should not do what I would have done on my 18th birthday. That is why, today, I could not look at a policy proposal without the thought occurring, “What incentives will this create?” Evidently, Theresa May can. [ADDED LATER: should Natalie’s neighbour have been so exasperated? My thoughts are here.] June 17th, 2017 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
We don’t even know how many souls perished in the Grenfell Tower inferno, and yet already they are being marshalled to party-political ends. Already Labour-leaning commentators and campaigners are using them, using the freshly dead and the unspeakable horrors they experienced, to make mileage for their party, to brand the Tories evil and Jeremy Corbyn saintly. In the 20 years I’ve been writing about politics, I can’t remember a national tragedy being exploited for party-political gain so quickly. The time between a calamity occurring and the use of it to harm one’s political enemies and fortify one’s political allies is shrinking all the time. It’s now mere hours, minutes even, courtesy of social media June 16th, 2017 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Politics Home reports,
[…]
In case you were wondering, the people made homeless by the Grenfell Tower fire are not going to be turfed out on the street. They will be rehoused by Kensington & Chelsea Council, in accordance with its statutory obligations. Mr Corbyn knows this perfectly well. The point of his remark was not to help these people but to use them as disposable weapons in his quest to breach the principle of secure property rights under law. Socialists always start by seizing the property of the rich to give to the poor, because that’s where the votes are. They always end by seizing the property of the poor to give to the rich, because that’s where the money is. Consider the People’s Republic of China: From 2006:The big steal
From 2010: China violence over property seizures
Once the rule of law is breached, it is hard to fix again. Property rights are needed more by the poor than the rich. The rich have other resources. June 15th, 2017 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alison Hernandez was a little too open to new ideas:
A Police and Crime Commissioner is “an elected official in England and Wales charged with securing efficient and effective policing of a police area”, rather than an actual police officer, so do not be misled into thinking that openly expressed crimethink has reached the police. But it has reached people who officially talk to the police. June 13th, 2017 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
I believe economics, and the way economics has shaped society in the past 15-20 years, plays a major role. Sure the young Corbyn supporter doesn’t understand economics, but point me towards a demographic that does. Every government in every western country is staring down the barrel of ballooning deficits, a debt which will take millenia to pay off, and not a single major party anywhere wants to even talk about it, let alone do anything about it. A simple reduction in planned expenditure increase is dressed up as a savage cut by damned near everyone: the Tories’ supposed austerity isn’t some fringe issue on the left, it is a widely accepted truth across the whole electorate. The people pointing out that these cuts are anything but are basically a handful of cranks on the internet. Like, erm, me. If any government program is threatened with a cut taking expenditure levels back to what they were in, say, 2010 half the country screams that medieval times are making a comeback and the other half believe them. The knowledge of economics among electorates is woeful, and almost all of them have signed up fully to the belief that all government expenditure is necessary, good, and wise and any cuts are bad. Nobody wants to even think about the size of the deficit and the national debt, it just keeps racking up. So if we’re going to criticise the young Corbynistas for not understanding the consequences of unsustainable economics demanded by ignorant voters, we might perhaps want to first ask where they got such ideas from. It’s too easy to blame Marxist indoctrination in schools when supposedly conservative governments, backed fully by the supposedly conservative middle classes, have been so irresponsible with public finances for several generations. Conservative governments might not be quite as reckless as Corbyn would be, but we’re talking about the difference between disaster and a catastrophe here. June 11th, 2017 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Conservative party gave me absolutely nothing in their manifesto that would make me inclined to vote for them. They have done nothing while they have been in power that would make me inclined to vote for them. The only thing that they had going for them was that they were not Labour. As far as I can see, the hung parliament is a result of his party being utterly rubbish and running an utterly rubbish campaign. They took the electorate for granted when they sowed and this election result is just what they deserved to reap. – Commenter Stonyground remarking over on Longrider. This strikes me as a near perfect and succinct summation of why the Stupid Party was almost defeated by the Evil Party. Personally I supported the idea of the election, but even given my loathing of Theresa May, I was stunned by how badly May came across during the campaign, snatching near defeat from the jaws of victory. June 10th, 2017 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Guy Herbert: Theresa May proven worse than cancer. It is a fine slogan June 9th, 2017 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like most of my fellow Samizdata contributors, I imagine, I am watching the election results in the UK and the projections from exit polls suggesting that the Tories may not even have a working majority. And about 10 days or so before the full, formal negotiation process is due to start over the UK departure from the European Union. It is a non-trivial possibility that Brexit may either not happen or at all, or take a form on such a humiliating basis that it is not really a departure from the EU at all. As already noted, the idea that it was smart strategy for the Tories to pursue a centrist, pre-Thatcherite, interventionist agenda, was always dumb. Not least because to make a positive case, it was necessary to stress the pro-enterprise case for leaving the EU, rather than simply promising to introduce the very kind of dirigiste policies that the UK was supposed to be freeing itself from by leaving. Mrs May, does not have it in her to make a positive case. It has come to this: a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, Marxist, hater of Israel, cheerleader for the IRA, Hamas, and a foe of open markets and the West in general could be close to holding power in a few days’ time. I seriously hope I am wrong. But whatever happens, I think it is highly probable that May may not be in Downing Street for very long. June 8th, 2017 | 103 comments - (Comments are closed)
The main political insight of Thatcher and Reagan was that parties of the center-right must be parties of economic growth. Having wavered since, those parties now risk losing their way entirely. Some centrists will argue, quirks of this campaign notwithstanding, that Mrs. May shows how to win an election. The important question for conservatives to ask is: To what end? – Joseph C. Sternberg, Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) June 7th, 2017 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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