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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Thoughtful, long article here by Alex Massie at the Spectator on the real and presumed issues surrounding Islam and the UK, and whether some commentators on the subject are seeing phantom menaces:
“To my commenters and the others worried by the “Islamification of Britain” I would ask only this: why are you so afraid and why do you lack such confidence in this country and its people’s ability to solve these problems? Perhaps my confidence is misplaced but I think we can probably do it. This is, in many ways, a better, more tolerant place to live than it has been in the past and, unless we blunder, it should remain so. The annoyances of idiotic council regulations about Christmas trees and crucifixes or inflammatory articles in the press ought not to distract us from that fact. The open society is an achievement to be proud of – for conservatives and liberals alike – but the most likely way it can be defeated is if we allow ourselves to be defeated by our fears and, thus, in the end by ourselves.”
“Diversity need not be a threat, though diversity cannot work unless all are equal under the law. But Britain is changing and doing so in often interesting ways. It is, in general, a comfortable, tolerant place made up of people with complex identities that make it a more, not less, interesting and decent place. Yeats’ famous lines do not quite apply here. On all sides, the worst may indeed be full of passionate intensity but the best do not lack conviction even if we don’t shout about it. Perhaps we should do so more often.”
Definitely worth reading the whole article. I think one point to make straight away is this: if we have more confidence in the resilience of Western civilisation and the virtues of a post-Enlightenment, pro-reason culture, and encourage support for such things in our places of higher learning and in the opinion-forming world, that in itself might encourage more moderate-minded Muslims in the West realise that the long-term trend was not on the side of the Islamists. Showing a confident front to the world is not bravado – it helps us to win.
So… the global economy has been tanking in no small measure because certain states provided perverse incentives and pushed lenders to offer vast quantities of money to people who had no realistic probability of ever paying it back… and the solution to get us out of this whole mess is to twist banks arms into making loans they would rather not make.
The Lib Dem members of the Coalition favour a more interventionist approach to banking. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer, they argue, the banks have an obligation to lend. The Tories regard it as contradictory to try to control banks while encouraging them to build up their balance sheets.
No shit, Sherlock. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
I wish I had something new to say on the Ian Tomlinson case.
I wish the new thing was “the person who was caught on video as, unprovoked, he hit a man from behind and pushed him to the ground, with the result that the man died soon afterwards, is going to be prosecuted, and the fact that he is a police officer will make no difference at all.”
But of course I am not able to say that because it is not true.
Oh, and anyone in the government opposing [calls for Islamic dress for women to be banned in Britain] is to be conditionally applauded…
…they are right to reject this vile authoritarian notion…
…but if they opposite it because “Islamic dress is ok” then they are a horse’s arse and need to called that.
A burqua or any item of islamic dress for women is as “ok” as a Nazi arm band… and people’s ability to wear Nazi arm bands also should not be banned, but they sure as hell should not be applauded.
– Perry de Havilland
Now I am usually harsh in my criticism of the National Health Service and indeed I wish to see it abolished entirely… but credit where credit is due. This was a very, er, uplifting example of ‘Enterprise Thinking’ by the NHS.
Carry on, Doctor!
As I have seen before, a lot of political news coverage in the UK (and in the US, for that matter) rather resembles sports coverage, if without the tone of hysteria covering the media’s reporting on England’s World Cup horror show. For instance, over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog on the issue of public spending cuts, it goes into a lot of the arguments about who said X or Y about cutting A or B. In fairness, the Coffee House crew are pretty good at teasing out the statistics – Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has been excellent in hammering the former government over its debt – but there is something a bit missing from its analysis. And that is this: the scale of the shift that we might see from public sector jobs to private sector. If is true that hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs are to go, and the private sector is going to be encouraged to pick up the slack by new job creation, that is surely good news.
We are not admirers of Cameron’s style of Conservatism here at Samizdata (that’s putting it mildly, Ed), but I’ll give him and his finance minister credit if, at the end of the current parliament, there has been a significant shift away from the state and towards the private sector. We libertarian ideologues are hard to please, but such a shift will be pretty tough to pull off. If it means we have to put up with a certain amount of political BS along the route, I don’t especially mind. It is the general direction that counts.
Update: Guido Fawkes points out that certain leftist publications, reliant on public sector job ads, such as with the Guardian, have an obvious reason to fear the axe. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
“There’s a very attractive girl in the second row. Dark and dusky … We’ll maybe put a wee word out for her. She’s very attractive, very nice, very slim. The heat’s getting to me. She’s got that Filipino look – the kind you’d see in a Gauguin painting. There’s a wee bit of culture.”
Thus spake Frank McAveety, Labour member of the Scottish Parliament … unaware the microphone was on. Mr McAveety thus ended his tenure as chairman of the petitions committee and the Labour spokesman for sport at Holyrood, and began his career as YouTube star.
Silly old fool. I bet his wife had words when he got home. He must be wondering whether the voters of Shettleston will punish him come the next election. That, and the YouTube, should be punishment enough. He should not have had to resign. Yes, the girl was fifteen (not seventeen as in earlier reports) – but he did not know that. He did not refer to her in explicit sexual terms. He just said she was attractive. I do not believe for a moment that his “put a wee word out for her” was a plan to arrange an assignation. The poor old boy just wanted to give her a tour of Holyrood and bask for a few moments in her proximity, as tubby middle aged men have tried to bask in the proximity of slim young women since the stone age. This is Benny Hill, for goodness sake, not Lavrenti Beria picking out rape victims from the lines of female gymnasts who performed before the politburo.
Yet according to the Guardian a Scottish National Party MSP, Sandra White, described the comments as “sexist, sleazy and racist” (er, why racist?) and said Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray’s failure to act as soon as the incident came to light showed an “appalling lack of judgment”. Oh, and we have spokesmen from Disclosure Scotland (er, why? Just why?) and the Scottish Parliament burbling on about the “The Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003″ as if the mere mention of that was not damn close to libel.
How did we get here? You know the world has got weird when you find yourself defending a Labour politician. You know the world has got weirder when his being Labour is not enough to protect him from the press. How on earth did we arrive at a place where someone as old-fashioned as me thinks this all has got a little bit crazy? I used to be fond of observing that puritanism had moved out of the bedroom and into the recycling bin, but now it’s back everywhere. It’s in the air we breathe, so that every wistful little fantasy, every bumptious little burst of bravado, is potential career disaster – at least for males. Females who do this sort of thing are demonstrating the rich, raunchy sexuality of the mature woman. Just so’s you know, boys.
Added later: A comment from CountingCats sparked a further thought: how come Frank McAveety’s mere words were enough to make him resign from a chairmanship but Chris Huhne’s actual adultery has not made him resign from anything? I speculate that sex comes under the old progressive rules whereas speech comes under the new progressive rules, which are much stricter. Also, he said “dusky.”
“David Cameron is determined to make as much noise as he can, and for as long as he can, to the effect that every unpleasant thing the coalition needs to do is solely the consequence of the criminal improvidence of its predecessor. No new prime minister, especially in these circumstances, would act any differently. I wonder how long this card will remain trumps, however. After all, when Margaret Thatcher’s government cut the unsustainably vast subsidies to public sector industries – from coal-mining to car manufacturing – which her Labour predecessors had not dared to confront, it established her reputation among millions as a cruel and heartless prime minister. It will be fascinating to see if the much more soothing rhetoric of a Conservative government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats can convince the electorate that they are caring cutters; how extraordinary it will be if they carry that off while reducing public expenditure on a scale which Margaret Thatcher never even attempted.”
– Dominic Lawson
No, the British state is not financially bankrupt, at least not quite yet, but thus quoth Dave Cameron…
“Because the legacy we have been left is so bad, the measures to deal with it will be unavoidably tough. But people’s lives will be worse unless we do something now […] instead of your taxes going to pay for things we want, like schools, hospitals and policing your money, the money you work so hard for, is going on paying the interest on our national debt.” ”
These remarks by David Cameron might look like something that would get a thumbs up from the Samizdata mob yes?
Well no. “Unavoidably tough”… I have no doubt whatsoever that these cuts are something Cameron would indeed prefer to avoid, and therein lies the reason I despise him just as much as I have ever done. The cuts to government spending, which should be an order of magnitude greater just as starters, are not being done because allowing the appropriative state to grow so vast is morally wrong or intellectually foolish, no, it is being done but because it cannot currently be avoided.
If it could be, what Cameron really wanted to do was increase the size of the state’s appropriation by £ 25 billion.
That is what he intended to do before he realised it was simply impossible: never ever allow that key fact vanish down the memory hole. He is not making the moral case for a smaller state, because he does not want a smaller state, he is just discussing dealing with the current economic crisis, nothing more. In this respect he is the ‘anti-Thatcher’, who at least made the intellectual case for a less pervasive state (even if she then allowed Norman Tebbit to destroy the very political cadre that sprung up to support that view).
Could it not be that what “we” want, and certainly what “we” need, is not for more skoolzanhopitalz funded by the state? What “we” need is for more wealth to be created, not more stuff to be funded by money diminished by being filtered through the wealth destroying tax system and then mis-allocated by politics.
I have only two quibbles about this otherwise excellent press release by Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. One, I don’t believe Sean was ever “speaking in London”, as the press release claims. I believe he just sat down and wrote what follows, probably in his home on the south coast. Two, the word “premature” seems an odd way to describe the ending of a similar killing spree in the USA in 2002, by the better armed citizenry that they mostly have over there. Was this interruption to be regretted? The first blemish above is just a pet hate of mine, probably best ignored. And the second I put down to Sean’s eagerness to get his press release out quickly, which I applaud. Indeed, this press release was how I first heard about this horror:
The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties institute, today calls for the relegalisation of civilian gun ownership in the United Kingdom as the only way for ordinary people to protect themselves against gun massacres. [This news release is prompted by the killings of at least five people on the 2nd June 2010 in and around the Cumberland town of Whitehaven.]
Speaking today in London, Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, comments:
“This outrage will certainly bring calls from the police and other victim disarmament advocacy groups for further gun control. However, bearing in mind that civilian ownership of handguns was outlawed in the two Firearms Acts of 1997, we fail to see, unless the murder weapon was a shotgun, what there is left to be outlawed.
“The Libertarian Alliance notes that these shootings would have been extremely difficult in a country where the people were allowed to arm themselves. We understand that the killer, Derrick Bird, was able to drive in perfect safety around Whitehaven, shooting people at random. None of his victims was in any position to return fire. Only when armed police could eventually be brought in did he feel it necessary to run away.
“In the United States, at least one campus shooting was brought to a premature end by armed civilians. The same is true in Israel, where many members of the public go about armed. Only in a country like England, where the people have been systematically disarmed, can a killer go about like a fox among chickens.
“The Libertarian Alliance believes that all the Firearms Acts from 1920 onwards should be repealed. The largely ineffective laws of 1870 and 1902 should also be repealed. It should once again be possible for adults to walk into a gun shop and, without showing any permit or proof of identity, buy as many guns and as much ammunition as they can afford. They should also be able to use lethal force, at home and in public, for the defence of life, liberty and property.
“Only then will ordinary people be safe from evil men like Derrick Bird.”
Indeed.
How many more such slaughters must be perpetrated in Britain before it is realised that making guns really, really, really illegal, which disarms everyone except those willing to break all such laws and go out a-slaughtering, is only making things far worse? I remember the Hungerford Massacre, which went on for as long as it did because the police had to get guns from London, which took hours. After which, inevitably, they made guns even more illegal. The Libertarian Alliance predicted further massacres, and we were not wrong.
The more rural parts of Britain used to be full of guns, and were, partly because of this, very law abiding. Not any more, on either count. Why do such killing sprees now happen? Because, now, they can.
I do not expect to obtain any medals for originality, but as we have noted before around these parts, this is a puritanical age we are living in, at least in respect of certain lifestyle aspects (with the possible exception of sex).
Consider:
“Sir Stuart Rose, the executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, has attacked the idea of minimum pricing for alcohol as “insane”. His comments have emerged just a few days after his rival Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, wrote in The Daily Telegraph that it might help solve binge drinking and called on the Government to investigate introducing it. Sir Stuart said: “Artificially fixing a base price to stop people drinking wine is insane. As an extreme example, if you go back to 1930s America, prohibition doesn’t work.”
Of course, there is – as some commenters occasionally point out – a long-standing puritanical streak in the English-speaking world, which varies in intensity and in the object of its obsessions. In the last few decades, it has tended to focus on health and the environment. Before then, it was about sex. There is a distant, now deceased, old relative of mine who was brought up in a Methodist household where dancing was frowned upon, and so on.
This mindset is, I suppose, ineradicable. But what is not inevitable is allowing this mindset to win.
A superb video from the TaxPayers’ Alliance asks…
… how long do you work for the tax man?
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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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