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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Like me, Tim Blair has been pondering England’s amazingly bad performances against Australia – two down and three more humiliations to go. He suggests that something to do with better running between the wickets, or some such, might improve England’s chances. He may be right. I am in no mood to disagree with any Australian on matters cricketing just now. (See the corrective comment on this, setting me straight about Shane Warne, from Michael Jennings. Michael, when it comes to being an Englishman who is confused about Shane Warne, I am not alone.)
But may I humbly add a further suggestion as to why Australian cricket is now doing so well compared to English cricket, apart from the fact that Australians are, you know, Australians, while the English are merely English. → Continue reading: Cricket – the Anglo-Australian contrast
According to Ros Coward of the Wanker, we should be grateful to the Islamic rioters in Nigeria for reminding us of our shortcomings and just how far we have strayed from acceptable civilised standards:
“What an irony that fundamentalist Muslims managed to do what feminism ultimately failed to do: make Miss World a global political issue. As contestants flee to London, and Nigeria counts its dead, it is almost impossible to retain the idea that an annual parade of female flesh is just an innocent quest for universal beauty acceptable to all reasonable people.”
Of course! (Slap to the forehead) I should have realised that ‘Miss World’ is a deeply symbolic manifestation of class and gender struggle; the very antithesis of the dialectic rationale for the liberation of..er..something or other.
“In the west, the contest became as naff as bingo. It was feminism that represented modernity.”
That’s funny, I thought things like the silicon chip and the space shuttle represented modernity.
“Last year’s winner, Miss Nigeria herself pointed out that she is “the first black African woman to win”, because, for all its multiculturalism, the winners from black countries remained resolutely pale.”
That’s right, they weren’t ‘black’ enough. They were the wrong sort of ‘black’. In fact, they were all Uncle Toms still grovelling to ‘de White Massa.’
“How was this circus of womanhood going to respond to an issue of global political concern for women: the sentencing of Amina Lawal to death by stoning for adultery? Even a bunch of brainless bimbos would have found this a problem, but our post-feminist intellectual beauty queens couldn’t avoid it.”
‘Brainless bimbos’? Excuse me, but isn’t that a rather pejorative, sexist remark? Hate speech, in fact?
“The riots in Nigeria were ultimately triggered, not by the contest itself but by a piece in a local paper claiming the prophet himself might have chosen a wife from these beauties.”
If only all newspapers could be as sensitive as the ‘Wanker’ then surely there would be world peace!
“This is the same cultural naivety exposed by the bombing of the Sari club in Bali. The consolation some clubbers exchanged after the outrage betrays this same sense that the world is a playground where the true human (western) values can be paraded. Because no harm is meant, no offence should be taken. One clubber mourned the passing of the club on a website, saying “it was the United Nations of decadence” without any sense that this is what made it a target.”
Translation: the victims of the Bali bomb got what deserved and deserved what they got. They should have shrouded themselves in self-effacement and sensitivity. Instead they recklessly taunted and tortured those poor Islamic terrorists until they could tolerate it no more. They are the real victims.
“Now the reluctance to attack representatives of western values has disappeared even among those with no involvement in extremist organisations.”
And, let’s face it, in that extremist organisation known as the ‘Wanker’, that reluctance never existed in the first place.
“In such a world we should think carefully about what values we want to parade. Democracy, equality and tolerance certainly. But a beauty contest?”
We must abandon our sinful ways and foreswear all this drinking, dancing, laughing, carousing, loving and generally celebrating our lives. It’s unseemly; it’s uncivilised; it’s dangerous, dammit. We must aspire to the true hallmarks of civilised behaviour, like wearing sensible shoes, cross-referencing files in the Department of Social Security, exchanging Outreach Initiatives and discussing gender politics over an organic vegetable curry in a ‘Fair Trade’ workers co-operative canteen. That is the zenith of Western civilisation and it behoves us well to aspire to nothing more than that.
In order to survive we must be boring, po-faced, monochromatic, insecure, shot through with crippling guilt and terminally earnest. Just like…well, just like Ros Coward I should imagine.
Would somebody please send a message to Al-Qaeda to the effect that the editorial staff at the ‘Wanker’ are planning to sponsor a Naked Lesbian Dance Collective in Mecca. With a bit of luck, they’ll be next on the hit-list.
variant of “doggerel.” Opinion put forward on a blog that has previously been repeated over and over and over again until it makes people sick.
(Coined by The Pontificator)
I have been alerted to the existance of a new website called Conservative Liberty.
For those of you who regard the words ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberty’ as oxymoronic, I should add that it does appear to be genuinely ‘devoted to representing the under-represented voice of Libertarian Youth within the Conservative Party’, and is therefore worthy of a welcome.
Looks like a blog, though, doesn’t it?
[My thanks to Sean Gabb for the alert]
The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.
– Michael Oakeshott
Next Sunday I expect to be headed with a crowd of French libertarians, from the place de la Bastille towards the headquarters of the French finance ministry at Bercy in the eastern districts of Paris.
Interest in the event seems to be building up, with emails buzzing around asking for a lift from places like Pau (almost in Spain), or has anyone got a couple of flag poles? The Gadsden and the Culpepper flag should be flying.
Meanwhile, in London, not a sausage.
Paul Marks laments attitudes in Britain to anti-tax protests.
Those people who know me will know that I like family owned enterprises (more common in Germany than in Britain these days) and that I like the people who are at the top of manufacturing companies to be trained in such things as engineering rather than such things as law (I sometimes feel that many British managers think a “machine tool” is something to do with kinky sex). But, have no fear, I will say no more about my personal prejudices – and I fully accept that Germany has higher government spending and (in some ways) more government regulations than Britain.
However, something has caught my attention recently. In Germany a pop song denouncing the German government’s tax increases has reached the top of the charts.
In Britain taxes are increasing much faster than in Germany (government spending and regulations are increasing at a faster rate also) and, sure enough, a pop song has been written that attacks this increase in taxation – and the song was mentioned on B.B.C. Radio 4’s “Today Programme”.
But in Britain the anti tax protest song is not being treated seriously even, it appears, by the man who wrote it. Nobody expects this song to get to the top of anything – even though the British government have also told lies about tax and are increasing taxes more than the German government is.
Is the basic culture of Britain so collectivist that a protest against statism is automatically a joke?
Paul Marks
I have felt for some time the Internet is bringing the “Two Cultures” together, and this poetry reading (1 MB mp3) by British poet Fred Turner is a case in point.
A tree house to the stars! What a gloriously Carrollian idea!
Alice Bachini has been out shopping, for her aunties:
What I can afford is Marks and Spencer room spray, or Woolworths scented cushions for putting in your wardrobe. But it seems to me that if aunties wanted that kind of thing, they would buy it for themselves already.
If they wanted a normal sort of thing, they’d buy it themselves.
Because so many people can now afford to get normal things, there are now special places called gift shops, and special mail order catalogues called gift catalogues, to enable you to buy abnormal things to give to people at Christmas. This is a recently encountered abnormal thing selling operation, the dead-tree catalogue for which came with the Sunday Times of about a fortnight ago. My favourite abnormality here is the hat you put on to catch incoming ping pong balls.
Rich people used to love this kind of nonsense, when they were the only ones who could afford it. But now they are above such stuff, and live in places which are ostentatiously full of empty space. → Continue reading: Stuff
Does anybody else recall reading this rather doom-laden analysis written by John Derbyshire?.
I seem to remember that Mr.Derbyshire was treated to something of a rotten tomato-splattering from much of Blogland in response to his heretical pessimism. Whilst I must admit that it makes for a sobering read (to say the least) there was one prediction which struck me as all too plausible:
“Actual crime — murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and assault — will skyrocket, but it will be illegal to talk about it.”
That plausibility began to look like distinct possibility when I read this:
“An editor whose newspapers print lists of local crimes has claimed the police are trying to gag him.”
Now that’s not quite the same as making it illegal, but the impulse is apparent.
“Andy Jackson of Avon and Somerset Police said: “We do not want a blanket list of crimes because we don’t benefit from that.”
No, I’m sure you don’t benefit from that, Mr.Jackson. After all, if the tax-cattle are exposed to the reality they might begin to wonder what the hell they’re paying you for.
“We wanted to present it in a responsible way so readers weren’t alarmed by large volumes of crime.”
Note: no denial that there are ‘large volumes’ of crime, merely a plea for the statistics to be presented in a responsible manner (whatever that means).
And so it begins. And Mr.Derbyshire, if he ever reads this, might feel just a little vindicated.
[My thanks to Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance for the link to the BBC story above]
In response to rioting by Muslims in Nigeria which has left over a 100 people dead, the organisers of Miss World have hastily arranged for the whole competition to be moved to Britain.
Rumour has it that the international beauty pageant will resume in Finsbury Park
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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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