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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They never give up. An article nicely slams attempts by UK neo-Malthusians to get us all frightened about the terrible idea of people wanting to have babies. Selfish, cruel to the Planet Earth, a drain on “resources”: you know the litany. Here’s an excerpt from the article, which I recommend:
Of all the bogeys you might have thought well and truly nailed in the past decade or so, the population control movement seemed most obviously to have a stake through its heart. At a time when we – I mean, anyone over 35 – are all horribly conscious that there won’t be enough taxpayers to support us in gin and cigarettes in our old age, the very last thing we need to worry about is excess population growth. On the contrary: as seen from the dinner party circuit, the real crisis is the difficulty for female graduates in getting anyone to breed with. Forty per cent of women graduates don’t have a single baby at the age of 35.
Quite. The obsession with their being “too many” people (quite how anyone can work that out is a mystery) is something I find rather malevolent. In any event, as the writer quoted makes clear, it seems a bit weird for the population worriers to go on about supposedly high birthrates when in fact a lot of recent commentary – from the likes of Mark Steyn – has tended to suggest quite the opposite. Indeed, Steyn and others argue that the indigenous population of western Europe, or parts of it, is stagnating and birthrates have fallen below the replacement level (the level required to maintain a stable level). And of course, to enforce strict population controls, even if it makes any kind of sense (it does not) begs the question of how. Does it require China-style policies that lead to mass abortions and an imbalance between girls and boys? I ask these questions now because while watching the BBC television show this morning as I got ready for work, I saw some middle-aged, white-haired woman, a sort of genteel Rosa Klebb, arguing very emphatically against large families. The BBC hosts gave her only the most gentle of grillings. Sitting next to her on the couch was a black couple with 8 children (and very happy and relaxed they looked). The grey-haired lady made all kinds of claims that big families “put too much stress on the planet” and completely dismissed any idea that low population growth, or decline, was a problem. The issue of how to pay for an increasingly ageing workforce and the pressures on pension systems was also dismissed.
In the end of the day, rational debate works only so far with these fanatics. Some of them look quite nice, they wear suits or woolly jumpers, but their demand for state power over the most intimate aspects of your life – having children and raising a family – is implacable. They haven’t gone away.
The Commission for Racial Equality in the UK has taken on a decidedly sinister tone by calling for a Tintin book, Tintin in the Congo, to be removed from sale because it is racist.
A CRE spokeswoman said: “This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ‘savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles. “How and why do Borders think that it’s okay to peddle such racist material?
I am pleased to say Borders’ reply was a polite NO:
Naturally, some of the thousands of books and music selections we carry could be considered controversial or objectionable depending on individual political views, tastes and interests,” [a Borders spokesman said] “However, Borders stands by its commitment to let customers make the choice. After consideration of this title, we have instructed all stores to move it to the adult graphic novels section.”
Choice? CHOICE? That will never do! Clearly we need some more laws!
The fact is, Tintin is racist. So what? It is a very good illustration of the attitudes of the era in which these stories were written (Tintin in the Congo was published in 1930), which was during the Indian summer of colonialism (with apologies to the people of Tibet still under Chinese colonial occupation circa 2007).
I personally find books glorifying socialism hideous as history has proven again and again that socialism is repression and its end state is mass murder and horror. Maybe I should demand Borders stop selling those. Better yet, maybe books shops should not sell anything that offends anyone, which should limit them to selling phone books in all likelihood.
You can get your very own copy of Tintin in the Congo here (UK) or here (US) (I notice that Amazon in the USA wimped out and did not show the cover illustration).
The presence of Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist and columnist, remains something of a mystery to me in the Daily Telegraph. This week’s offering is a bleat about why we stingy Brits cannot get more excited about the 2012 London Olympic Games:
A wonderful Olympic Games – such as those held in Sydney – requires a vast harnessing of common belief, as well as a momentous investment of private and public sector funding. If we cannot rise to these occasions, we should not have bid for the Games. If we don’t get our collective finger out, the terrible (and unsporting) truth is that we will end up looking like a cheap little place with no quality or inspiration to offer the world, and that is sad, too sad to bear, when we are faced with such a gold-getting opportunity.
Ah, yes, we must get our “collective finger out”. We must stop moaning about the cost of these wonderful Games, put on a cheery smile, put a big hand in the wallet and pony up. Well sorry, Mr O’Hagan, that is not quite good enough. If the Games are quite as wonderful as he claims them to be, they should have had no trouble getting funding via the market. Within a few yards of the Games, there is Canary Wharf, with its huge investment banks and legions of financiers versed in the arts of financing long-term infrastructure projects. For example, if the facilities built for the Games could be used for 30 years or more, then why don’t the organisers issue 30-year bonds, rather like in the days of the 19th Century railway boom? It always makes me suspicious when some character like this says what a tremendous idea X is, but then immediately demands public funding for it, as if no one would pay for X out of their free will. And that of course is the problem; the OIympics will not be commercially viable – not if the incompetents who run it can help it.
As the late, great Milton Friedman once put it in Free To Choose, it is – I paraphrase – so much more fun spending other people’s money.
The past weekend, I spent it the way that any islander should – sailing along England’s south coast in an all-too rare weekend of good, if at times blustery, weather. A good chance to practice some rusty sailing skills and practice some navigation. When the sky is a nice cobalt blue and the sea looks inviting, it is all too easy to forget just how violent the weather around the UK coast can be. (The same applies to places like the Med; I have seen some very stormy seas around Malta, for example). I tend to take safety on boats very seriously (there are some people I would refuse to sail with on the grounds that they think horseplay and boats go together). All the more reason to salute people who volunteer to save people in distress at sea. One charity that I have a huge amount of admiration and time for is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
At Samizdata, we like to moan about how certain state-registered charities are being pulled into the maw of the state, and I am one of those moaners. The best way to try and keep the state’s hands off such organisations is to donate generously to charities and urge their organisers to spurn any state “initiatives”. If any charity deserves a bit of help, it is the RNLI. They seem to avoid striking certain platitudes and get on with a crucial task. Here’s to them.
I just came across an article describing why the recent bombs in the UK set by Islamic terrorists failed to detonate… presumably this must have come from some member of the British security services or some other part of the government with access to that information.
It seems to me that this is tantamount to saying “Attention all members of Islamic Terrorist cells operating in the UK: the reason your bombs did not go off and kill hundreds of British civilians is that a medical syringe used as part of the firing mechanism caused a malfunction. We hope this helps you to ensure that the next time you do this, you are more successful in your attempted mass murder. So remember, pay particular attention to that element of the design of your bombs.”
Can the person responsible for releasing this to a media company please be found, fired and then put on trial for aiding the enemy (and possibly violations of the Official Secrets Act). Please do this as quickly as possible please.
As Paul Marks mentioned the other day, sometimes something happens that makes you proud to be English. A case in point: I read an article in the Guardian by Marcel Berlins called If half the nation is in denial about the threats we face from climate change, what hope is there? and felt a frisson of excitement wash over me. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are not so totally fucked after all.
I was more depressed by the findings of a single public opinion survey on climate change than I’ve been by all the pessimistic stories about how little is being done by governments and individuals to combat global warming. An Ipsos Mori poll, published this week, found that 56% of more than 2,000 adults interviewed believed that scientists were still questioning the existence of climate change.
[…]
So how come more than half the British nation still believes that climate change is a questionable, arguable proposition, still a matter of scientific debate? Is the media at fault by not informing the public of the true situation? Or are we facing an epidemic of mass denial, because it is too horrifying to think of the ghastly consequences of unchecked climate change?
Of course whenever the other side is ‘depressed’ because the great unwashed refuse to believe their betters, that is a good reason to light up a nice pungent cigar to celebrate. But might I suggest an alternative option to Mr. Berlins: could this be the beginning not of a mass epidemic (oh how the control freaks loves to pathologise disagreement as a disease… of course two can play at that game) but rather a mass revolt. No prize for guessing how the authoritarians will respond to that.
Surely the cumulative effect of all this truth-telling would have persuaded the doubters by now, not just of the effects of global warming but of the almost total unanimity of scientific opinion on the issue? It seems not.
It matters. Up to a point, laws can be passed to combat climate change, and offenders who don’t conform can be punished. But any successful policies will depend on the cooperation of a population that truly understands the dangers and threats we face. If half the nation continues to be ignorant or in denial, there’s not much hope.
The Big Lie of scientific unanimity will be endlessly repeated and they will naturally try to impose their will with the violence of law, driven by the increasing ferocious indignation of the scorned righteous of the One True Faith. But Berlins is quite correct that in the end if much of the nation refuses to cooperate, all their attempts to control us will come to nothing. Remember the chorus of Rule Britannia, hehehe.
Dick Turpin was hanged for helping himself to people’s money – [Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs] wants it to be legal
– Mike Warburton
All you have to do is take up cigars!
Nice to hear that all eight suspects arrested concerning the recent attempted Islamic terrorism in the United Kingdom worked for the National Health Service (and the person arrested in Australia was recruited by the Queensland Department of Health), so perhaps Michael Moore will entitle his next film Bombo.
Still, it could be argued, that is just as well that they were NHS people. Had they not been their enterprise might have successful.
In the Daily Telegraph of Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 there is the following letter from Lesie Watson of Swansea (in Wales).
Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all introduced smoking bans without problems. But we read “thousands of smokers defy [English] ban” (report, July 2). What does this say about the English?
If the report is true Lesie, it means that there is still sometimes a reason to be proud to be English.
The British master of literary parody, Craig Brown – who lives in my old stamping ground of Suffolk – had this absolute blinder of a sendup of the whole, ghastly Prince Diana industry of ropey biographies and kiss-and-tell stories that cropped up after she was killed in that Paris car crash almost 10 years ago (I remember the headlines the following day so clearly, I cannot believe 10 frickin’ years have elapsed).
Here’s a sample of Brown in action:
A forthcoming book, Diana Ablaze (HarperCollins), carries an interview with an unnamed “highly placed” eyewitness to the blaze at Windsor Castle who claims to have spotted Princess Diana skulking in the shadows with a packet of Zip firelighters peeping out of her top pocket.
I nearly spilled my coffee all over the desk at that one.
I can also recommend this for students of history with a twist.
Sean Gabb is in blistering and delightfully acerbic form in an article titled Two Wasted Hours in Doughty Street. I had a similar experience surrounded by Tories at an otherwise interesting Adam Smith Institute event once, so Sean, I feel for you old chum.
The article reminded me of an old and not particularly distinguished movie with the line: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
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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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