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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The Mirror may not be the most august of newspapers but if half of what they are saying is true, this could be very interesting indeed and puts the whole psychological makeup of the ‘suicide’ bombers in question. Maybe it was not suicide at all!
The evidence is compelling: The terrorists bought return rail tickets, and pay and display car park tickets, before boarding _ a train at Luton for London. None of the men was heard to cry “Allah Akhbar!” – “God is great” – usually screamed by suicide bombers as they detonate their bomb.
Their devices were in large rucksacks which could be easily dumped instead of being strapped to their bodies. They carried wallets containing their driving licences, bank cards and other personal items. Suicide bombers normally strip themselves of identifying material.
So perhaps it was all done with timers and those little terrorist shits were told a porky about exactly when they were going to blow up. If this is true then the more widely this is known, the less likely it will be that non-suicidal Muslim terrorist supporters might not be quite so willing to act as couriers or bomb planters for ‘the cause’. Maybe the whole deranged ‘Shaheed’ thing has rather less resonance with the UK Islamic fringe than we thought. If the facts are correct, it is a pretty compelling interpretation.
Sales of the sixth Harry Potter adventure by J.K. Rowling have reached 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours. Repeat slowly: 6.9 million copies. That puts this novel – and I am not a great fan, it has to be admitted – up in the sort of league that used to be associated with sales of Beatles albums or Michael Jackson tunes.
6.9 million copies sold in 24 hours. Egads. Those who decry Potter as lowbrow nonsense can spare their rage. (Yes, that includes you, Stephen Pollard). This is a cultural phenomenon we have not seen from these islands for years. As Brian Micklethwait pointed out not so long ago, Rowling has created a character to rival an earlier, very British-but-also-transferable-character – James Bond (I am an unashamed Ian Fleming fan).
I mentioned Michael Jackson a bit earlier. Strange to relate, but has anyone noticed that Johnny Depp, starring as Willy Wonka in the new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Tim Burton, looks just like the Faded One? I presume this has to be some sort of Hollywood in-joke.
Update: latest figures put Harry Potter sales at 8.9 million.
For years, the French and now the Chinese have attempted to emulate the large-scale efforts of the United States to waste as much of their taxpayers’ money as they can in orbit. The vision of a beflagged rocket thrusting into the vacuum is presented as a symbol of national virility.
We British should feel lucky that no government has ever felt the need to put a bloody great big Union Jack on top of a rocket and sling it into orbit. Since the ‘special relationship’ supplied most of the intelligence that the British required, a space policy was unnecessary and was not developed. Indeed, a civil space policy has emerged in recent years at the behest of the Brussels lunatics.
A quick survey, in an article by Taylor Dinerman, a spacepundit in The Space Review, provided a quick survey of contemporary and future developments in British space weaponisation. Possibilities include the potential development of defenses for new satellite capabilities and acquiring space strike capabilities for the RAF. It is clear that,
…this is not a joke. The UK does have a variety of military space systems and is developing more. It is inconceivable that any British government would ever willingly give up its status as a first-rank, medium-sized military power. Thus, they will have to develop a far more sophisticated and comprehensive approach to military operations in orbit than they have up to now.
The most interesting aspect of Dinerman’s conclusions is that the lack of government funding or inspiration in Britain has not prevented the development of a potential infrastructure for space in the UK.
Britain is, indeed, lucky that its entrepreneurial juices have not entirely dried up. Unlike other European states, whose governments have invested massively in space technology and who are struggling to replicate America�s military space infrastructure, the UK has achieved potential military space independence largely through the efforts of small entrepreneurs, such as SSTL�s CEO, Sir Martin Sweeting, and the Starchaser team. It is said that the British Empire was an inadvertent achievement. In the future, it may be said that Britain�s place in space was gained through a similar accident.
Could this be linked to anything?
Plans by an alliance of rightwing extremists and football hooligans to exact “revenge” on Muslims after last week’s bomb attacks are being monitored by police.
The Guardian has learned that extremists are keen to cause widespread fear and injury with attacks on mosques and high-profile “anti-Muslim” events in the capital.
And so another unfortunate spoke is added to the growing cycle of violence. But beneath the predictable roar of indignant outcry, it behoves us all to take the time and trouble to examine the plight of the native British working-classes; a plight which is all too often trodden underfoot in the wholesale rush to judgement.
Over the last few decades, the British working-classes have had to endure the indignity of watching their homelands colonised by foreign settlers, while oppressive “zero-tolerance” policing and so-called ‘anti-social behaviour orders’ have made them virtual prisoners in the few, dwindling communities that remain to them. At the same time, their jobs have been exported abroad, while the trade unions that used to promote their interests have been politically neutered. Thus despised, impoverished and persecuted, is it any wonder that some of their activists have taken it into their hands to strike back?
Nor should it be forgotten that they have no guns, no helicopters, no batons, no dogs, no infra-red detectors, no CS gas sprays, no tazers or other quasi-military means of defending themselves. Instead, they are forced to use what few pitiful resources they do have in a despairing bid to restore some dignity to their lives.
Of course, violence should not be condoned because it actually further damages the patriotic cause. But the victims of that violence would learn a great deal from an honest reflection of what role they may have played in driving these patriotic campaigners to such desperate measures.
Few, it seems, are prepared to face up to the simple truth, let alone articulate it. Instead, there is likely to be a chorus of demand for more security measures such as surveillance cameras, ID cards and oppressive police powers, all of which will merely add fuel to the fires that rage within the activists, reinforce their sense of hopelessness and humiliation and virtually guarantee further patriotic operations in the future.
We can all agree that the violence has to stop but in order to achieve that end we must urgently and sincerely address the legitimate grievances of the patriotic community.
This site takes on the issue of a UK national identity card. That puppy is a good advertisement against id cards!
I have just got in, hot and tired after my trudge back from the office. Flicking on the television, and, behold on BBC 1, is the first night at the Proms, commencing the famous series of music nights held for a period of weeks at the Royal Albert Hall.
The orchestra is bashing out a piece by Edward Elgar right now, a composer associated – not entirely correctly – with brash British patriotism. In the current climate, it makes me smile rather wryly that this supreme genius of British music should be beamed into our homes on this sultry Friday evening, and via those lovely people at the BBC.
On BBC Radio 4’s “Today” Programme it was announced that Karl Marx was the greatest philosopher of all time and a leading Marxist historian was invited on to the show to explain the ideas of my near namesake. This was not an example of bias – simply a result of people e-mailing the BBC in response to the “In Our Time” Programme asking this question.
Of course, people who listened to BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time” programme (or any other BBC show) would not have heard a sustained attack on Karl Marx in recent years. And today (July 14) shows this point – on the “In Our Time” programme the presenter (who is a supporter of the Labour party but, by the standards of the BBC, is actually rather fair minded) asked if any of the experts on the show thought that there was a connection between the ideas of Karl Marx and events in Russia, China…
None of three academic “experts” thought that there was. Karl Marx was, in fact, a great supporter of freedom.
A glance at say The Communist Manifesto (1848) would show that Marx favoured (even in the early stages of the revolution) the confiscation of the property of anyone who tried to flee the new regime, and that he also favoured the creation of industrial and agricultural “armies”.
For a man who was normally careful to say he could not describe what the future society would be like, this is quite revealing.
Marx believed in “freedom of speech” for himself – not for anyone else (this is quite clear, both from his doctrines and his life). The academics were simply following the tradition of Plato – that of the “noble lie”.
Is it any wonder that people who were educated by such academics would have a favourable view of Marx?
But we must move on.
On the 1pm. BBC television news we were told that although the bomb in Baghdad had killed 30 children it was really targeted against the Americans (after all one American had died), and that the bomb in September that also killed about 30 children had also really been targeted against the Americans.
So that is OK then, if one supports killing Americans.
Except, of course, it does not make sense. If a bomber waits till a crowd of children has gathered (to get sweets or for any other purpose) and then sets off his bomb, then the target is THE CHILDREN.
By the 1700 Radio Four “PM” programme, things had got truly bizarre.
A “leading astrologer” was interviewed to examine the theory that the evil Americans had altered our destiny by shooting a space probe at a comet.
Most of the questions were respectful (rather than ironic), and the astrologer said that he did not know, but seemed most concerned at the “arrogant” action of the Americans, which might have pushed us into a “parallel universe”.
So we went from Marxism to Islamic fundamentalism, to barking mad mysticism – all in one day.
It would not be true to say that the BBC will support “anything” that has “death to America” at its heart (for example it would not support a return to a strong Monarchy that demanded that the colonists return to loyalty to the Crown), but it will certainly support a lot of rather different anti-American ideological positions.
I remind readers that unlike the “Guardian” or the “New York Times”, people are forced to pay for the BBC – via their television “licence fee”.
Watching the news is starting to give me a strange throbbing headache. Most people in Britain realise that just because our enemies are Muslims, that does not mean all (or even most) Muslims are our enemies. Other than in a few shitholes like Oldham, most British folks really do value, or at least accept, the pluralistic tolerant society that largely prevails in these ‘Sceptred Isles’.
Ok? Did you get that Messers Blair, Howard, Kennedy, etc. etc? Most of us understand that and those who think otherwise are not going to listen to you anyway. You will note that synagogues getting vandalized in France are such a regular occurrence that it is hardly even news anymore, whereas a stone through a mosque window in the UK makes the papers. Does that tell you something?
So next time there is some hideous atrocity, be it here in the UK, in the USA, in Iraq, in Israel or anywhere else in the world that Al Qaeda or Hamas have infested, can you kindly resist the urge to say “But Islam is a religion of peace…”. We heard you before and we have not reacted to previous incidents by torching mosques from London to Lanarkshire. Please. PLEASE…just.shut.the.fuck.up.
Thank you.
I do not believe that we have a “No shit Sherlock” category for blog postings here, but maybe we should. Here is the explanation that the Evening Standard was offering today of what made those who committed the atrocities of last Thursday in London decide to become suicide bombers:
This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station, at about 3pm this afternoon.
To be fair to the Evening Standard, their actual reportage was somewhat more informative, and more up-to-the-minute billboards revealed that one of the bombers was a primary school teacher. That was news, to me anyway.
Now that we know what everyone except Tony Blair suspected (that the suicide bombers were probably British born or at least legal residents), perhaps it is worth noting that had mandatory ID cards been in force, they would have been perfectly entitled to avail themselves of one each.
Yes, I can see how this will help stamp out terrorism. Right? Right?
Here is a project I certainly welcome called We are not afraid. The message is simple, worth repeating and lets you do strange things with a camera.
Harry Hutton and his commenters very quickly became fed up with people going on about the British Stiff Upper Lip, and the Spirit of the Blitz. I know the feeling, and I am sure they speak for many. A lot of this talk is indeed rather self-conscious and theatrical, by which I mean not arm waving and emoting, but just a case of us all deliberately summoning up our inner David Nivens so that the bits of us just above our mouths will look suitably stiff in TV close-up.
Plus, I wonder how stiff our upper lips would now be if three thousand people had died and London had lost two of its most striking buildings.
On the other hand, the father and mother of Philip Russell, the second person on this melancholy list, were briefly on the telly this afternoon. She was silent. He was a model of considered sorrow. There was no out-of-control display of rage, no “why us?” wailing, just calm grief, and quiet words of appreciation for the character of their departed son. If Mr Russell senior is shedding tears he was not showing it to the cameras, and we were spared those hideous, triumphant close-ups of a person showing more feelings to the camera-persons than he intended. To dismiss Mr Russell’s reaction as mere theatricality would be very tasteless, and I would say, mistaken.
But whether you think all this talk of stiff upper lips is a media led posture or the real thing or, as I think, a bit of both, the good news is that it all makes a most refreshing change from the emotional incontinence that greeted the death of Diana Princess of Wales. This, we all immediately realised, is the real thing. Quite enough real people have lost real loved ones whom they actually knew and really liked, without lots of other people piling in with self-indulgent displays of bogus misery concerning people they never knew.
There is also the fact that, whereas the message that all those silly public mourners were sending out when Princess Di died was all about what the Horrid Paparazzi had done, and of What She Meant To Us, blah blah blah, we now all understand that the more we emote about these bombings, the more pleased will the people be who did them, and who helped them, and who are now cheering that they did them. We do not want to give those people any further satisfaction. So yes, it is all a bit theatrical, in the sense that the tone is deliberate. But, good.
Tony Blair, instinctive politician that he is, tuned in to both moods. When Di died, he was on the verge of tears. When these bombs went off, he had already practised a much calmer display, to suit the new, far more serious – far more real – state of affairs.
Emotional continence is not the same as intellectual excellence. A stiff upper lip is no excuse for refusing to use the brain a few inches above it in an intelligent manner. I am not saying that everything Tony Blair and his supporting caste of cabinet ministers and coppers has been correct, just that the tone of voice has mostly been good. What we ought to think – and what we ought to do – is a quite distinct matter from how we should merely feel about all this. (I strongly agree with Johnathan Pearce that last Sunday’s Telegraph leader is an excellent place to start. And if you liked that, you will also like this by Mark Steyn.)
But, with all those caveats duly caveated (or whatever it is you do with caveats), emotional continence is entirely the right emotional atmosphere within which to get stuck into the process of sharpening up our thinking about all these matters, and then acting upon those thoughts. It is, in short, an excellent start.
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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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