The name of the woman being led into captivity in this picture is Naama Levy. The photo was taken to celebrate her capture.
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Matt Taibbi: “America enters the samizdat era” It is a sobering description of how the world went from this:
to this:
(Hat tip: Instapundit. Like us at Samizdata, Glenn Reynolds has watched this change happen over the time he has been blogging.) Even if by some highly improbable miracle Sunak/Hunt & their coterie of Blue Blairites snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, things will continue to get worse, and root causes of that will not change one iota. Why? Because the direction of travel is exactly what Sunak, Hunt, Starmer etc all agree on and want. They all want a technocratic regulatory state & that’s what we have, a technocratic regulatory state. Under Labour, it will just become much more obvious, the rainbow makeup brighter, the clown shoes they are destined to keep tripping over more polished, particularly given they will have a triple digit majority. We must end the fiction that the fraudulently named Conservative Party circa 2025 is an alternative to Labour as opposed to much the same thing, just more lubricated and with a better wine list. They had a big majority and could have systematically attacked and undone what Blair did, but they did nothing, because a critical mass of the Tory grandees don’t actually want to. Blair is one of them. What will it take for the last Tory loyalists to see that? Probably nothing and I can easily imagine the photogenic but inane Penny “women-with-cocks” Mordaunt becoming leader when Sunak rides off into the sunset. We passed the point of no return the day Truss was deposed, that was when we went over the cliff edge. We are a nation of Wile E. Coyotes and a great many of us have yet to look down to grasp the truth. It is pointless and counter productive to call for the brakes to be applied because we are mid-air, there are no brakes. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take us to hit the bottom. We just need to start thinking about how to survive the impact and what comes next after that. Starmer, we are told over and over again, is just ‘a normal bloke’ who likes to play football and wants Britain to be well run. He’s just a bland technocrat who rejects divisive ideological narratives in favour of sound government. But, in truth, Keir Starmer and the people around him do have a radical vision of politics and our democracy. It’s a vision of a country where people who think and act like them are in power forever and where the populist revolts against the new elite which erupted over the last decade, through UKIP, Brexit, the Brexit Party, and then the reassertion of popular sovereignty in 2019, are made impossible. Labour want to do this by taking political power away from elected governments and giving much more of it to an assortment of unelected civil servants, regional assemblies and spurious quangos. I cannot add to this article by Fran Ivens in the Telegraph: “How Argentina’s ‘chainsaw man’ Javier Milei slashed rents by 20pc”
In political theory, an idea that got going in the 18th Century was that of the “social contract”, and to this day, writers can sometimes raise the idea that there is an implicit/explicit “deal” that we enter into (stay with me, dear reader) to give up certain qualities or freedom of action in return to some greater overall result. An example used to justify the “Nightwatchman State” of minarchist dreams might be the “contract” in which citizens give up the ability to go after criminals, or those they think are criminals, and instead submit to the powers of policemen and women to do this, or to sub-contract this role to approved private police, etc, and with all the due process of a legal system (details don’t matter, it could have juries, or not, investigative magistrates, or not). The police, so the argument goes, go after suspected wrongdoers and also deter wrongdoing, and the citizens pay a tax to the police, and the territory in which this operates is safer and more tranquil than would otherwise be the case. (Not all liberals/libertarians like the social contract theory, such as Jacob Levy. Robert Nozick did not show much time for it in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, if I recall.) Well, like all contracts, there can be a point at which one side has so abandoned its side of the deal that the contract loses its legitimacy. Example from today’s Daily Telegraph (£):
It’s unsurprising that those who can afford it are buying more elaborate security, that domestic household insurance rates are rising fast, and so on. As with the dysfunctional National Health Service, I wonder at what point the penny drops on a lot of the public that they are being defrauded on this “contract”, and demand change? Here is an explicitly libertarian take on policing. Slightly off-topic from policing, is a reminder of this book from more than a decade ago, by Joyce Lee Malcolm, about the UK, US, and the very different approaches to handguns and self defence over the decades. I missed this article when it came out in the Observer (the Guardian‘s Sunday sister-paper) three weeks ago: ‘People are scared’: “Sweden’s freedom of information laws lead to wave of deadly bombings”
With typical cowardice, the Observer article does not mention that the sharp increase in violence in Sweden is almost entirely driven by immigrants, mostly from the Middle East, and to a lesser extent from the Balkans. How does anyone think a problem can be solved if it cannot even be mentioned? In other respects, Miranda Bryant’s article was a good piece of journalism, highlighting how something that was for centuries considered a valuable freedom in Swedish society has become dangerous for many:
I can see why Swedes want to keep their traditional tryckfrihetsförordningen. My previous post mentioned the “Streisand Effect” with very little sympathy for Barbra Streisand’s famously counter-productive effort to keep information about her residence out of the public domain. Maybe I should have shown more. Being a libertarian does not oblige me to defend to the hilt everything which has the word “freedom” on it, and it does seem to me that, given how much easier it is for a criminal to track down a victim nowadays than it was in 1776, the freedom not to have one’s name appear in public government records ought be given more weight in Sweden and elsewhere. Fourteen years in government and what have the British Conservative Party got to show for it? The highest tax burden since World War II, radical anti-freedom green policies, and critical race and gender theory being applied throughout all institutions. Some simply blame this all on government incompetence. Others doubt the politicians actually believe what they’re advocating and suspect they are just doing it to appease special-interest groups. While these may play a part in it, one largely overlooked factor is that the British government itself is funding left-wing activism. Nothing to see here sir, please move along: From Richard Tice’s X/Twitter feed. Tice is leader of Reform, the right-of-centre party started a few years ago:
I thought the existence of voter ID was supposed to render the need for postal voting less necessary, or something. I have performed jury duty in London, and I recall that I had to submit a fair amount of information in order to be eligible. Voting is, or should be, a serious business. The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, did something he should have done a long time ago about where public life in this country is going. The new Rochdale MP, George Galloway, is one of those PT Barnum chancers in public life who has a most interesting history, as demonstrated by this Reuters (yes, Reuters) story about his involvement in Iraq. Rochdale has, in a way, sent a guttersnipe to Westminster, bad even by the often flaky standards of MPs. “Power doesn’t often age gracefully. It clings and expires in a labored rush, devoured by another generation, hungry for its time in the sun. Washington can’t long remain a country for old men: Democrats will either replace Mr. Biden in a putsch at their convention in August, or voters are likely to do so in November.” – Alex Castellanos, Wall Street Journal ($). As an added point, it is worth reminding ourselves that Mr V. Putin of Russia is not getting younger, either, although he appears to remember what day it is – at least for now. “It is telling that Beijing and Hong Kong are more afraid of their own people than Hong Kong’s British colonial government ever was.” – Wall Street Journal, editorial comment. ($) It is commonly said that the problem for the Tories is that they don’t know what they stand for. There is a certain element of truth in this: the Parliamentary party is an almost absurdly broad spectrum comprising at one extreme people who wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Tony Blair’s cabinets, and on the other, traditional religious conservatives – with an awful lot of Thatcherites, One Nationers, old-fashioned ‘shire Tories’, ‘wets’ and libertarians in the middle. But the bigger problem, it seems to me, is that the Tories don’t really know what they stand against. This is a particular problem for the Tory party in particular, which since the early 20th century has had the main raison d’etre of keeping Labour out of power. In order to do this, it should go without saying, you have to know what Labour stand for, and provide a clearly discernible alternative. That is the Tory party’s main duty, but it is badly shirking it. Some readers of this substack will raise their eyebrows at the idea that the Tory party’s existence is mainly justified on the basis of keeping Labour out, so let me explain. And let me make no bones about it: while I have plenty of time for Labour voters (I come after all from dyed-in-the-wool Labour-voting stock) and even some Labour politicians, I despise the Labour Party and more or less everything it stands for. I don’t think there is an institution in contemporary Britain which exerts a more baleful influence. And this is because it is imbued with – indeed, it is the very political manifestation of – what Dostoyevsky might have called the morality of the Grand Inquisitor: a morality that positions itself always against freedom and agency in the name of comfort and ignorance. Read the whole thing. I heartily commend this article to you and suggest subscribing to David McGrogan’s substack. |
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