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.
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Reuters reports that the hunting with hounds is more popular than ever despite the move by parliament last year to outlaw the hunting of foxes with hounds. (Incidentally, foxes are increasingly a problem in the cities as they scavenge for food. I used to live in Clapham and the place was full of them).
It makes me wonder about whether the vote by MPs this week to ban smoking in public places, including private members’ clubs, will be easily enforced. Let’s hope it meets the same fate as the anti-foxhunting measure. I say this as someone who does not smoke or hunt on horseback (despite being a Suffolk farmer’s son, hunting with hounds never appealed, although I have shot the odd bunny rabbit from time to time).
Harry Hutton speaks for many, I am sure, when he says this:
It’s been a pretty good week for all you non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tossers. All going your way at the moment, isn’t it? Must be feeling pretty pleased with yourselves.
For now you triumph. But you’ll get your comeuppance, you swine. That slippery villain is going to ruin us all. You think he doesn’t have plans for you too? You think that just because you don’t smoke or glorify terrorists you’re off the hook? Just wait. You’re gonna learn the hard way.
Personally I have never really bought in to this Blair-is-evil meme. Perhaps if I met him face to face I would feel differently, but to me he merely seems desperately eager to do good, but somewhat dim about how to actually contrive goodness, like a trendy vicar. Good at winning elections though, and making speeches, and doing Hugh Grant impersonations. The man knows his rhetoric, and if, at any time during the twenty first century, Blair were to step down from being the Prime Minister, I think his rhetoric will be sorely missed by the next government, assuming it’s Labour. Slippery, yes. But a villain? Not really. I don’t think so, anyway.
But whatever his motives may be, and however little he may have any deliberate plans to screw the non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tendency, Blair, or the processes he has now set in motion, will still do this. But, he meant and he means no harm.
But feel free to disagree.
While you are still allowed to.
Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)
Quote:
But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.
Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by “Socialism”. That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill’s team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.
And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.
Heh. Who was that speaker again?
From an email circular promoting think-tank events around Europe:
London
21/02/06 Policy Exchange “Why the Agenda of the Future cannot be delivered by a person stuck in the Past” – William Hague MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary
RSVP: info@policyexchange.org.uk
Danny Finklestein has had a nightmare. About Britain becoming a despotic state. This one-time advisor to John Major (oh dear, we all make errors), even says this:
“But I have to admit that the legislation being debated in the Commons this week — the new ID cards, the smoking ban, the measure on the glorification of terror — has tempted me to take up smoking and start attending lectures about Hayek organised by earnest men with pamphlets in carrier bags.”
Nice patronising tone there Danny – I tend not to bother with carrier bags these days. Welcome to the concept of liberty and limited government.
I am not recommending this because the Government wants to punish you, although it does, but because it is the only place you are likely to be allowed to smoke in peace for the forseeable future. The Home Office is not about to ban smoking in prisons.
But what about the health of non-smoking prisoners in the confined space? What about passive smoking by prison officers, whose workplace it is? N’importe. The tobacco allowance in prison is a means of control used by the authorities. Removing it would remove something of their capacity for arbitrary reward and punishment of individual prisoners. Plus withdrawing it would lead to riots, both acutely in fury at withdrawal, and chronically on losing the calming effects of nicotine.
So the lesson for prisoners in what Shami Chakrabarti calls HMP UK who do wish to smoke is plain. Threaten violence. You will either get your way as other aggressive sub-groups do, or be sent to the segregation block that is the officially acknowledged prison system – and there you may smoke all you like, provided you behave yourself.
If ever developments heralded the demise of the television licence fee, it is the ubiquitous spread of the digital media. Now that televisions have spread to the mobile phone, the BBC is not far behind. Whether it be on your PC or your phone, you must pay the pirates for the privilege of not watching them:
As the mobile industry debates the future of television on phones and other portable devices at its convention in Barcelona, there’s a warning closer to home that the new technology will still be subject to licensing regulations laid down in the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act.
TV Licensing, the body charged with collecting the £126.50 fee (rising to £131.50 on April 1), said that it doesn’t matter whether you are watching television on a PC, mobile phone or old fashioned cathode ray tube, you must be covered by a TV licence or face a fine of up to £1000.
“There is no difference between a mobile phone or a television or any other piece of electronic equipment used to watch live or as-live programming. You will need to be covered by a TV licence,” a spokesman for the body confirmed.
It can not be long now before even politicians see the abolition or curtailment of the BBC licence fee as a no-brainer.
MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.
Our home grown authoritarians plan to inflict yet more absurd measures which have nothing to do with defending ourselves against terrorism. ID cards would not have stopped a single terrorist attack in the UK: they are a control measure designed to make taxing and regulating people’s economic activities easier, nothing more. Yet because there is a genuine threat from Islamic terrorists, the government keeps trying to conflate ID cards with ‘doing something about terrorism’. As it is so obviously untrue, this issue makes a rather good quick and easy litmus test to detect people who are either complete idiots or barefaced liars (or both).
Moreover the intend to make ‘glorifying terrorism’ illegal is not just bound to backfire, it is a terrible idea on every level. You would think people in the dismal halls of Westminster would have learned to leave well enough alone given the comical absurdity of past attempts to ban terrorists saying things in the UK, which lead to such farcical situations as having Sinn Fein/IRA’s Gerry Adams’ voice being dubbed by other people’s voices to get around attempts to stop him airing his views. We need people to actually say what they think and the more vile they are, the more important it is to hear what motivates them.
Moreover does anyone seriously think people are attracted to actively support terrorism because of what they read in a mainstream newspaper rather than opinions closer to their every day life? It is a bit more complex than that and again you would think the experience of Ulster would have shown that when terrorists gain the support of a section of a society, all stoping their spokesmen from talking in the media does is prevent everyone else from understanding what they really think.
The BBC and mainstream media generally has followed the government line that there is a large pool of moderate Muslim opinion which does not support or sympathise with radical and intolerant Islamic views. I too have assumed this to be the case, at least in some measure, and yet as time goes by the theory is starting to look rather threadbare as if there really is a majority of moderates out there, they are more than just silent, they are almost invisible. The organisers of the demonstration yesterday in Trafalgar Square carefully choreographed the event to show the world a moderate face of muslim opinion standing hand in hand with a few dhimmis like Ken Livingston and select useful idiots such as Pax Christi and former KGB front man Bruce Kent. Yet it took less than 24 hours for one of the people behind the demo to reveal his true colours.
But any attempt to shut these people up with the law will not stop them saying whatever they want amongst their own community, unless the government plans to have multi-lingual spies reporting on what gets said in every single mosque and Arabic/Turkish/Kurdish/Pakistani social club in Britain. The only people who will no longer know what these guys really think will be the rest of us. And given that anyone who trusts the what the state says to decide who is and is not ‘the bad guys’ is a credulous fool, that is not a good idea to say the least. Yet again we see why freedom of expression is not just important, it is essential if we are to know our enemies as well as our friends.
The demonstration in Trafalgar square, supported by dhimmi-in-chief for London Ken Livingston, was clearly orchestrated to show a homogenised face of ‘moderate Islam’ for the world to see. An interesting feature of the demo was that no ‘home made placards’ were tolerated by the organisers. A small group of Kurds turned up with their own signs and were fairly quickly handed the printed blue-white official signs. I was not quick enough to get a picture of the Kurdish ones before they vanished as I did not expect them to be taken down, but the ones in English were fairly anodyne.
Not even in Islamic green! I would guess maybe 7,000 people showed up, perhaps 10,000 tops, at least by the time I lost interest around 3:00 and wandered off to a nearby computer faire. Many of the usual suspects were there, such as the inevitable socialist workers and CND set…
Quite what wicked old Blair and BushMcHitler have to do with protesting against cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark was not clear
Hands off secular fascist police states and theocratic police states!
You can be sure those naughty cartoons (or that tee-shirt) would not have been allowed in Cuba! The large official signs were clearly expensive high quality creations and contained all manner of utterly irrelevant slogans designed to appeal to the ‘hard of thinking’.
So if some Muslim desires sharia law for themselves, presumably this is what he also wishes for me… Oh I feel much better now!
Tolerance? Sure, it is yours by right. Respect? You must be joking, that you have to earn
Jyllands-Posten did not ‘incite’ to violence, they just defended free expression, unlike some others we know of. Respect however has nothing to do with it
And just to remind people what this is really about…
The Danish embassy in London under police guard And one final picture which tickled my sense of irony… a pleasant looking young woman watching the demonstration in her stylish Christian Dior scarf.
Governments are not know for being truthful, but it would seem sensible to tell lies that have a reasonable probability of being believed – and I do not agree that the “biggest lies are the most likely to be believed” (at least if by ‘biggest’ we mean thing that are most obviously false).
However, the British government seems to have adopted a policy of telling obvious lies. In the last few days alone we had (for example) the claim that “violent crime has fallen by 23%”. This was duly reported by the Independent newspaper (a newspaper that hates the current government, but hates truth even more – and so was glad to support the claim). This was brought out in support of the government policy of allowing “24 hour drinking”, I am not much interested in the policy (other than like so much ‘deregulation’ it has turned out to mean a lot more form filling and other such), but the claim of vast drop in violent crime was obvious nonsense.
If the government had said “contrary to people’s believe that violent crime is rising, it is actually saying much the same” that might well still have been telling lies (as violent crime is, most likely, on the up) but they would have been more likely to be believed.
But to say a “23% drop in violent crime”? They might as well have said a 123%.
Then there was the recent launch of a new navy destroyer – “The most powerful ship built since World War II”… actually it is an extremely expensive (£1 billion pound) grossly under-armed ship (part of the government’s ‘buy European’ policy – a policy exposed by Christopher Booker and Richard North). But why say “most powerful ship built since World War II” – an obvious lie even to people who nothing of Booker or North?
Lastly we had yet more claims of super educated school children “the best ever” – almost needless to say the Universities (hardly strongholds of free market people) reported today that the students they are getting are as ignorant as sin.
What is the reason for all these wild lies?
I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an ‘icon of England’… and they have just written back accepting the nomination.
Interesting.
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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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