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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Following up the somewhat irrelevant but entirely excellent and useful comment number one on the previous post, here’s Ananova:
Reports are coming in that Saddam Hussein has been captured in Iraq.
The reports, from the Iran News Agency and an Iraqi Kurdish leader, claim he’s been arrested in Tikrit.
There has been no confirmation from the US Defence Department or the Ministry of Defence.
“Saddam Hussein was arrested in his hometown of Tikrit,” the agency IRNA quoted top Iraqi leader Jalal Talabani as saying. It gave no further details.
The reports have sparked celebrations by hundreds of people in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
In Baghdad, a US spokeswoman told reporters that a “very important” announcement would be made at a news conference scheduled for 3pm local time (1200 GMT) but did not say who would be the speaker.
Here’s hoping it’s true.
And not before time either.
Yes, there is a new kid on the blog and one that I am sure is going to be mighty popular. It is called Eursoc, a blog set up and run by British and European anti-EU dissidents and dedicated to the sole task of exposing the horrors of the European Union.
Pay them a visit and extend them a big, warm, blogospheric welcome.
But still under sentence of death.
That is why I have such mixed feelings about the apparent breakdown of talks to finalise an EU Constitution:
European leaders are playing down the scale of divisions at their Brussels summit that made it impossible for them to agree on a constitution for the EU.
The can play it up, down or any way they damn well please. This is not the end, merely a brief setback. There is far too much vested interest in this wretched process for it to be simply left at that.
Nor has this impasse been brought about by anything as welcome as reflection or second thoughts. Assuming any of the participants have ever read this monstrous charter, it is probably a stretch to assume that they have even given it a first thought. No, the bandwagon has been brought to a grinding halt by an intractable bunfight over their respective looting voting rights:
Negotiations broke down over how voting will work when the EU expands from 15 to 25 members in May.
Poland and Spain insisted on keeping voting rights already secured, while France and Germany want a system to reflect their bigger populations.
Glueing an entire continent into a permanent state of indenture will have them feverish to sign the dotted lines but fail to stroke their egos sufficiently in the process and they will make a brave stand. I have long since passed the point of expecting reason or common sense to prevail; there is not enough of either of those qualities among Europe’s political classes to fill a thimble. But at least their over-arching need to all get their snouts in the trough has worked in our favour (albeit for now).
But, lest we forget, Mr Velveteen (and his huddle of Vichyites in the Foreign Office) is no better. He simply cannot wait to get this whole train back onto the tracks:
Tony Blair insisted, however, that the humiliating inability of heads of government to get beyond the first items on the summit agenda did not spell doom for the constitution. “We have got to find a way through. We have got the time to do it,” he said.
If Mr Blair gets his way this country will cease to exist in any meaningful or material sense. We will have been delivered up as a mere component of a big, despotic, inescapable dirigiste asset-stripping operation. This is what he wants and he wants it more than anything else.
But why? Why does he want to assassinate this country? What is impelling him and this cadre of political fixers to want to drive a dagger through our hearts? If we can find the answers to those questions then maybe we have a means of turning this stay of execution into a true and lasting victory.
About a month ago, Norwegian blogger Bjorn Staerk composed a sumptuous satire of the marxoid mentality in a parodistic review of the Lord of the Rings:
Working hard to foil the plans of these good, decent white folks are the “evil” Saruman, and the even more “evil” Sauron, rulers of two countries called Isengard and Mordor. Both are portrayed as near-demonic in their hatred of our white heroes. Sauron is no more than a big, red eye, hovering in the air, clearly implying that he’s some kind of “Devil”. Both have massive armies at their disposal, consisting entirely of filthy, ugly monsters that happen to be black, every single one of them.
I wonder how many people read that, chuckled and thought to themselves that, in reality, no respectable left-wing commentator or pundit could ever possibly plumb the depths of such absurdity?
If you were one of those people, you were wrong, because Bjorn Staerk’s creation was both witty and remarkably prescient.
British socialist and Independent columnist, Johann Hari has not only risen to the bait, he has grabbed hold of it and ripped it to shreds in a feeding frenzy. Perhaps Mr Hari also read the Bjorn Staerk piece, got entirely the wrong end of the stick and decided to follow its lead. More likely, though, that he thought this up all by himself.
In an editorial he has called ‘Oppose Tolkein!’ (which itself sounds as if it has been lifted straight out of the Student Trotskyite Handbook), Mr Hari warns the world that the Tolkein classic is, in fact, a thinly-veiled Nazi screed:
The most obvious is racism. The purely evil Orcs are, in Tolkien’s words, “squat, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant-eyes”. The enemy is the Dark Lord and he lives in the Black Land. The heroic hobbits and elves are, by contrast, uber-Aryan and ethnically pure. Ideals of “blood” and its purity are always sloshing around his narrative. For example, the Men of Gondor – “the high men” – are descendants of the Numenorians, the greatest of all warriors. Over the centuries, they have become “degraded” because of breeding with inferior races. When their bloodline is pure, as in Aragorn’s descendants, the strength of the original Lords of the West is retained.
Read Bjorn Staerk and then read Johann Hari. Can you tell the difference? No, neither can I. Mr Hari has provided definitive proof for what we have all long suspected: that no satire on the thought processes of the modern left can be regarded as exaggeration.
As well as writing for the Indie, Johann is also a regular contributor to Harry Hatchett’s blog where he and his fellow travellers are forever accusing free market campaigners of holding views which are ‘out of touch’ and ‘unpopular’. Deliciously ironic then that Johann should elect to publish his laughable denunciation not 24 hours before the British public votes ‘Lord of the Rings’ as their ‘favourite ever book’.
I am also given to believe that he is considered in many circles to be something of a rising star of the British left. Judging from this kind of form, I can only concur.
“Good evening, this is the news from the BBC, 25th December 2010. Several arrests were made today after a dawn raid on an illegal Christmas celebration in Hertfordshire. Acting on a tip-off, armed officers swooped on the residential premises where they found a secret grotto, a fully-decorated Christmas Tree and up to two dozen suspects unwrapping gifts and singing carols. The police also recovered large quantities of contraband including a plate of mince pies, a string of fairy lights, a whole stuffed turkey and a sackful of toys.
The raid came as a part of ‘Operation Tolerance’ which is designed to curb the alarming spread of Christmas-crimes in the community.”
That’s a joke, right? Ridiculous? Alarmist? Wildly over-the-top? Gross exaggeration? Undue pessimism? Perhaps.
A church has been told that it cannot publicise its Christmas services on a community notice board to avoid offending other religions.
The Church of England may be the established faith of the United Kingdom. But Buckinghamshire county council regards it as a “religious preference group” and the ban was upheld yesterday.
A spokesman for the Tory-controlled council confirmed the distinction, explaining that because the service contained Christian prayers it was against policy.
Margaret Dewar, who is responsible for the council libraries, said: “The aim of the policy is to be inclusive and to respect the religious diversity of Buckinghamshire.”
Peter Mussett, the council’s community development librarian, said his member of staff was right not to display the poster.
“We have a multi-faith community and passions can be inflamed by religious issues,” he said. “We don’t want to cause offence to anyone.”
Well, they managed to offend me.
I often make predictions, and with a kiss of Mafia-like death, virtually all of them fail to come true. I have a gift.
However, it gives me great pleasure to announce that at least one of them has come true. Lord of the Rings has been voted, against all the muttered displeasures of the socialist London-based diners of the BBC cognoscenti, and the great and the good, as the United Kingdom’s favourite ever book.
Which reminds me of the following quote:
Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-Earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all spurious BBC competitions to fill up the airwaves with cheap programming, so the money saved can be used to prop up the useless lives of BBC socialist parasites, are an evil.
If this book can win, against all the railings of the government worshippers who rule this country, then I have hope. One day we will destroy their ring of power and free ourselves from their tyranny. In the meantime, let’s just hope Mr Jackson gets the film rights for ‘The Hobbit’, to give us something to watch next Christmas.
I disagree almost completely with George Monbiot’s political ideas, but I share his curiosity about the Revolutionary Communist Party, that’s Living Marxism, no: LM (as LM for Living Marxism as in L for nothing M for nothing), no Spiked, that is to say Institute of Ideas. Who are these people?
Here is the Monbiot version, from last Tuesday’s Guardian:
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers “about complex scientific issues”.
In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation’s journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.
All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.
I am in favour of good science, progressive technology, and I’m pretty sure I like genetic engineering insofar as I understand it. Above all, I’m in favour of what Monbiot calls “individuation”, and despise the idea that this makes me or anyone else who believes in it “far right”, i.e. (the old smear) in league with Nazis (who flatly opposed “individuation”). And “confident individualism” sounds great, and I believe that it is restrained by the confident individualism of other individuals. I’m against gun control, and against banning tobacco advertising.
So, does all that make Spiked/Institute of Ideas good guys? Apparently. → Continue reading: Revolutionary Communist Party as in Living Marxism as in LM as in Spiked and Institute of Ideas – I agree with George Monbiot: who are these people?
As to the “Left” I’ll say briefly why [September 11, 2001] was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our “national security” calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of “Left” intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush’s legitimacy. So I don’t even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.
— Christopher Hitchens, interviewed in FrontPage Magazine.
(Link via NZ Pundit).
The following editorial was published in the latest Economist:
The ability to recognise people automatically by analysing bodily characteristics such as fingerprints, faces and eyeballs – collectively known as biometrics – has long been a goal of technologists and governments alike.
Plans for large-scale projects to incorporate biometric scans into passports, ID cards and visas are now under way in several countries. From January 5th, America will begin scanning foreigners from particular countries as they arrive at its airports. Both America and Europe plan to start issuing biometric passports as soon as next year. Biometric ID cards are being adopted in Hong Kong and Oman, and Britain plans to follow suit. Politicians seem to be transfixed by the technology.
Typical was the recent declaration by David Blunkett, Britain’s home secretary, that biometrics “will make identity theft and multiple identity impossible – not nearly impossible, impossible”. This claim is absurd. Current biometric technology is not the answer to the world’s security fears.
→ Continue reading: Economist throws doubt on the current value of biometrics
Says Dave Barry of this apprehended spamster: “Let’s see how large his penis is.” Ho ho. And I know the feeling. I’m sure we all do.
A man alleged to be one of the world’s most notorious spammers was arrested yesterday in North Carolina, accused by Virginia prosecutors of falsifying the origin of e-mails that pitched low-priced “penny” stocks and home-mortgage schemes.
Jeremy Jaynes, also known as Gaven Stubberfield, of Raleigh, was charged with four felony counts as prosecutors seek to increase the heat — by bringing criminal penalties — on spammers for deceptive e-mail marketing.
The case marks the first time Virginia’s criminal provisions for spam have been invoked.
This anti-spamming activity has to be watched, I say, precisely because so many people are crying out for it, flaming torches in hand. What if they make a law which ends up making my Brian’s Fridays list illegal? This is the one that gets you invited to my last Friday of the month soirées. You know, just to make sure they get all the bad people. There are lots of complaints doing the rounds already that what Europe is doing about spam now is not enough.
They wouldn’t do that! Of course not. Ah but they might. More realistically, what they might do is make Brian’s Fridays list a bit illegal (like, I have to “register” it or something), and then they do me for not registering it when I say something truly hurtful about them, on a completely different subject. Or, I get scared that this might happen and refrain from my criticising. And other potential nuisance makiers do the same.
I really have no idea whether this will work or not. But whether it triumphs or bombs (so to speak), I think this is probably Europe’s biggest story today. Certainly it’s the most portentous for Europe’s long term future.
Muslim headscarves and other religious symbols are almost certain to be banned from French schools and public buildings after a specially appointed commission told the government yesterday that legislation was needed to defend the secular nature of the state.
The 20-member group, appointed by President Jacques Chirac and headed by the national ombudsman, Bernard Stasi, recommended that all “conspicuous” signs of religious belief – specifically including Jewish skullcaps, oversized Christian crosses and Islamic headscarves – be outlawed in state-approved schools.
La France! You’re either part of it, or not, and not is not an option. (By the way, I love that France’s “national ombudsman” is called “Stasi”. You truly wouldn’t dare to make that up.) And since the French state and its doings are just about the most important thing in France, what the state ordains is a very, very big deal.
Meanwhile, here in the lackadaisical old UK, we don’t do anything very much to ensure that the U bit continues to happen. (See also my previous posting immediately below.) We just do to our human imports whatever we would have done anyway. We show them the Premier League, Coronation Street, the All New Top of the Pops (yes Samizdata is always at the cutting edge of what the youngsters are excited about) on the telly, and if they want to join in fine. If not, fine also. That’s how things are done in Britain. We just squirt all over them the general joy and misery of being British, and they swallow it or shake it off to taste. Whatever these soon to be ex-newcomers do to fit in, or don’t do, we then decide to be a Great British Tradition.
It will be interesting to see which of these two profoundly contrasting methods does the business better. And when I say “interesting” I really do mean interesting. I don’t mean I’ve already decided but want to hedge my bets, I mean I really will be fascinated to see how these two dramas work themselves out. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to live to be a hundred and fifty, to see how it all turns out.
Both approaches have their extreme hazards. Both could work out well.
What’s the French for fingers crossed?
Arts & Letters Daily links to this article by Leo Marx in the Boston Review. Here are its first two paragraphs [their italics in our bold]:
When I was teaching in England in 1957, Richard Hoggart, a founder of the British school of cultural criticism, told me about having met a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of something called “American studies.” “And what is that?” Hoggart asked. An exciting new field of interdisciplinary teaching and research, he was told. “But what is new about that?” It combines the study of history and literature. “In England we’ve been doing that for a long time,” Hoggart protested. “Yes,” said the eager Americanist, “but we look at American society as a whole – the entire culture, at all levels, high and low.” Hoggart, who was about to publish The Uses of Literacy, his groundbreaking study of British working-class culture, remained unimpressed. After a moment, in a fit of exasperation, his informant blurted out: “But you don’t understand, I believe in America!”
“That was it!” Hoggart said to me, “then I did understand.” It was unimaginable, he dryly added, that a British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain.”
Of course it could just be coincidence, but I reckon this contrast does illustrate rather nicely the power of academic ideas.
Britain is now ruled by an elite which is busily breaking it into fragments and melting them into the European Union. I’m not saying that this is necessarily as terrible an idea as some writers here think it is (although personally I think it’s a pretty bad one), but it is nevertheless beyond denial that this is what they are doing.
The USA, on the other hand, is still very much together.
Granted, in 1957 there was a lot less Britain to believe in than there was, or still is, USA, but still …
On the other hand, I dare say that “American Studies” perhaps now means something rather different to what it meant in 1957.
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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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