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Nothing has changed from the riots and nothing will.
As usual after such shocking events, we had two or three days of moral clarity where you could get away with saying things that normally you can’t – like pointing out how many people live lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness.
Then we had the essential moment – known as “the Gitmo moment” – providing a cause around which confused lefties could rally (in this case the harmless but poorly expressed mutterings of a TV historian).
The next step is to draw ludicrous moral equivalences – burning down shops and killing people is, apparently, no worse than wearing a dinner jacket and getting drunk, or fiddling expenses. I don’t often agree with David Cameron but it was good to see him having a pop on that point at the BBC.
Finally you just keep repeating idiocies about how rioters were “deprived” and bringing it all back to “inequality” and such notions. It doesn’t matter how stupid it is if you say it often enough.
This is just how it works. In a few months I bet you’ll be able to call it the Tottenham Spring. We’ll “reach out”, we’ll open some youth clubs, our policing will become even more limp-wristed, vendors of steel shutters will do well, and small shopkeepers will, bit by bit, give up to take up lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness.
– Samizdata commenter m2p
There was an item on the local London TV news early last night about a bunch of cooks who, when confronted by a bunch of crooks, defended themselves, their restaurant and their diners. Yes, here is the story, from earlier in the month, at the time of those riots. Remember them?
Chefs and waiters leapt to the defence of members of the public enjoying an evening at The Ledbury, an upmarket restaurant in Notting Hill, London.
Thugs and rioters armed with bats and wearing hooded tops forced their way into the two star restaurant before demanding diners hand over their wallets and wedding rings.
But staff and others fought back with kitchen tools before leading customers into the wine cellar for protection.
Later in the evening, the looters returned, and the diners were ushered by the staff to the safety of the downstairs wine cellar. Which seems like a craven retreat, and in a way it was. But the personal cash and valuables of the diners were what the looters were after, and they were again thwarted.
The significance of the TV coverage I saw this evening wasn’t just that all this happened, but that the TV coverage was so sympathetic to the restaurant staff for doing what they did. The Ledbury (which I had never heard of until now) has apparently won some kind of vote of excellence for its food, organised by a restaurant guide, and the general atmosphere radiating from my TV was: hurrah! Good for them, and the perfect excuse to tell the story, again, of those heroic deeds by the heroic Ledbury staff a few weeks ago.
A few further thoughts occur to me. → Continue reading: Praising the defenders of the Ledbury (again)
I am a sarcastic cow, I am used to being a sarcastic cow and I am comfortable being a sarcastic cow. When the time comes to simply recommend an article in the Guardian my non-sarcastic mooing sounds all funny in my own ears. But, here goes: I recommend you read ‘Freedom of information is for businesses too’ by Heather Brooke.
A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research.
The UK’s FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public’s name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.
Apparently Greece has stopped the export of Tzatziki and Taramasalata… They’re worried about a double dip recession…
– Bert Trubshaw, seen in the comments over on the Telegraph.
So I suppose the jet she flew in on from her home in Colorado worked on rubber bands.
– a commenter called ‘SouthendViking’ on the Telegraph, remarking about actress Daryl Hannah, who was arrested at a protest where she reportedly said:
Before she was arrested, Hannah told WRC-TV the protesters want to be free from the “death and destruction” that fossil fuels cause. The group is calling for clean energy instead.
Greens… they want us living as serfs in a pre-industrial society.
It is right to ban the English Defence League’s march, argues Lutfur Rahman, the leader of Tower Hamlets council. How sensible and moderate he is. Observe how he calms the fears expressed by the left wing feminist writer Nina Power that the power to ban the EDL today is certain to be used against other causes tomorrow. Mr Rahman writes,
So while I applaud the Metropolitan police and the home secretary in listening to the many voices from our community in banning the EDL march, I will support the right of community organisations to hold some of the events that Power fears might be banned. However, I feel sure that good sense will prevail, and that the authorities will be capable of distinguishing between community events and demonstrations designed to whip up racial and religious intolerance.
Pernickety people might argue that once the “right” to demonstrate is dependent on your organisation falling within the authorities’ definition of a “community organisation”, then it is no longer a right. Really, though, who can be bothered with such far-fetched ideas? We have the assurance of a local politician that good sense will prevail.
I think MPs should have their personal tax rate depend on how often they vote for new legislation… think of it as a ‘binge legislation tax’ to encourage more responsible legislative behaviour and finance the social cost of their boundless interference in every aspect of other people’s lives
– Perry de Havilland
This piece, about how people are moving from states in the USA governed according to lefty principles, towards states governed by somewhat less lefty principles, reminded me of this piece I recently did here, about people moving from country to country in the world. As in the world as a whole, so in the USA.
Come the next round of elections, the numbers of Americans on the move, and the unmistakable direction in which they are moving, will be hard for the lefties to explain away.
In the emerging presidential campaign, it’s easy to see a version of these questions dominating the debate. Why should anyone choose to endorse liberal, Democratic policies when a single year (2009-10) saw 880,000 residents packing up their belongings to place Barack Obama’s Illinois in their rear-view mirror, while 782,000 new arrivals helped drive the robust economy in Rick Perry’s Texas?
California, so the piece says, lost two million people in the years 2009 and 2010. The promised land no more, it would seem.
I’d be interested to hear what American readers make of Governor Rick Perry. Will I like him, as and when I learn more about him? I’ve read people saying that Perry sounds too much like President Bush Junior. But I’m thinking that people are in the mood to listen to what is actually being said, next time around, rather than fussing about the mere manner in which it is said. Or is that being too optimistic?
Richard North and Christopher Booker are having a go at the more unpunished sort of looting, by overpaid local council employees. Says North:
Loot a shop, and you go to jail. Loot council tax payers and, if they don’t pay up, they go to jail.
I can’t remember who said it, but what whoever it was (Kingsley Amis?) said was that the rot set in when they stopped calling the Town Clerk the Town Clerk, and started calling him the “Chief Executive”.
LATER: See also this posting, in which trooper Thompson quotes a big chunk from Right-Wing Populism by Murray Rothbard, including this:
Why then did communism implode? Because in the end the system was working so badly that even the nomenklatura got fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have correctly pointed out that a social system collapses when the ruling class becomes demoralized and loses its will to power; manifest failure of the communist system brought about that demoralization. But doing nothing, or relying only on educating the elites in correct ideas, will mean that our own statist system will not end until our entire society, like that of the Soviet Union, has been reduced to rubble. Surely, we must not sit still for that. A strategy for liberty must be far more active and aggressive.
Hence the importance, for libertarians or for minimal government conservatives, of having a one-two punch in their armor: not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the corrupt ruling elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more specifically how they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is “negative campaigning” at its finest and most fundamental.
Indeed. I’m not saying I agree with everything in this Rothbard piece, but I do agree with that. But I also believe that if I, and others of my inactive disposition, spread the correct ideas, it is automatic that the kind of people who, unlike me, refer to themselves as “Trooper” are going to want to join in on my side, but more aggressively.
As I mentioned earlier, the TV networks are giving this wall-to-wall coverage. TJ Holmes on CNN is repeatedly calling it a “monster storm”, and everyone is desperately trying not to mention that it has been downgraded to a category one hurricane, the weakest category in the Saffir-Simoson hurricane scale.
The politicians are falling over themselves to be seen to be doing something. The president, Barack Obama, called it a “historic” hurricane yesterday and has returned to the White House a day early from his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. He is desperate to avoid the mistakes of George Bush, who was slow to act over Hurricane Katrina.
Here in New York, mayor Bloomberg was slammed over his slow response to the big snow dump last year. City Hall is at the end of my street – they’ve been up all night there, co-ordinating the response to this.
Hurricane Irene is political, as well as meteorological.
– Matthew Wells
Children will be banned from watching shooting events under Boris Johnson’s Olympic ticket giveaway.
London schoolchildren are eligible for 125,000 Olympic tickets but these will not include any featuring guns, as Games organisers and City Hall fear a backlash from the anti-gun lobby.
The sheer idiocy of this speaks volumes of the rot at the heart of British society and its decadent political class. A different take on this can be found here.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is due to speak in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, later today and according to some of the investment notes that I receive, he is expected to commit that central bank to a third round of credit creation from thin air, otherwise known in these mealy-mouthed days as “quantitative easing.” There are doubters out there about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of this. We can of course expect the usual devotees of hard money to scoff at this, but what intrigues me is how some economists in the commercial world are hostile. Take this from Steen Jakobsen , chief economist at Denmark-based Saxo Bank:
“When talking about the impact from Quantitative Easing (QE) one has to realise that most academic studies show that the biggest “impact” from QE on markets comes from the actual announcement of it rather than the execution of it. An analysis of the two prior QE introductions point to a 50 to 100 basis point reduction on bond yields and subsequent inflation of equities via “a feel good” factor – the so-called wealth effect.”
“But realistically, what has been the net impact of QE1 and QE2? Chairman Bernanke has used 3,000 billion US Dollars to create what? Nothing! Unemployment is still above 9.0 per cent, the housing market is still in a slump, and now the only successful thing going for the Fed is the stock market’s rise from the floor at 666.00 in March 2009. But now there’s talk of an interbank funding crisis and unrealised losses. It certainly smells like 2008, doesn’t it? Or what about August 2010? – Yes! It is almost a 100 per cent analogy to last year. It’s actually like watching the movie Groundhog Day.”
I like his final paragraph:
“There is another political theory stating that the best environment to create growth in is one in which politicians have no power to pass legislation (similar to the U.S. situation for now until the U.S. elections). Think about Clinton: he had a major “programme” coming in as President, yet failed to get anything whatsoever done in his eight years in the White House which then led to the biggest growth period in U.S. history. What does this tell us? Total radio silence works as the micro-economy – investors, consumers and companies – adjust their behaviour and consumption to the new reality and then start moving forward. The last thing that we need is “political noise” and promises of better days ahead with nothing to back them up.”
I can think of a good book on the collapse of paper money that I can send this man.
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