Friday
(19)Gordon Ramsay, the 'outspoken' celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian.
The TV chef said it was "fundamentally important" for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. "Fruit and veg should be seasonal," he said. "Chefs should be fined if they haven't got ingredients in season on their menu. I don't want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown."
The 'I am' does not want to see something and so thinks his views should be the force backed law of the land: the psychopathology of the expert that we so often see coming from doctors is at work again. The great unwashed must be forced to follow expert opinion, which means their opinion, naturally.
I like the idea of third world farmers pulling themselves out of poverty and selling me their products whenever I want to buy them and why should a loud mouthed self important chief and a bunch of fascistic green activists get to have a say in that? Their craving to impose their will on others should stop being socially acceptable and they need to be called authoritarian thugs to their faces.
Leaving aside the practical objections (such as decline in the quality of the UK legal system) is capital punishment justified for murder?
Note, this is not a question on whether capital punishment is effective, but is it just?
Thursday
The monster who locked up relatives in his Austrian home for many years - at god knows what cost to their psychological state or physical health - is trying to defend himself by blaming it on Adolf Hitler.
Oh well, makes a change from blaming it all on video games, globalisation or George Bush, I suppose.
To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture - to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques - it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim's mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.
The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam's mediaeval ass?
- Mary Jackson quotes from a Spectator article by London's newly elected mayor Boris Johnson written just after the July 7th attacks on London (but Boris backtracked during the recent campaign)
One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life in Britain in 2051, a dystopia, showing what the country became when industrialism, liberty and associated individualism, modern technology, medicine, commerce and mass travel and communications were destroyed by a mixture of forces. Unlike the dystopias of Huxley which attacked modern technology, Clark's dystopia very clearly shows that, with all its occasional shallowness and gaudiness, life as we now enjoy it is pretty wonderful and to turn our backs on it would be to miss things such as mass communications and information sources; techniques such as modern dentistry and keyhole surgery; cheap flights; fast, relatively safe transport, cuisine from around the world; downloadable music of any type available for a few cents, the prospect of DNA mapping to cure many diseases... the list rolls on. Our society is still pretty free, on the whole - though the losses of civil liberties and the associated nanny statist developments are a part of the trend towards a darker society that Clark writes about. But if you think, gentle reader, that Gordon Brown's Britain is bad in certain respects, then Clark's version is vastly worse still. He imagines a society, fractured into tiny tribal units lorded over by thugs and religious bigots, in which all these things and more are banished, loathed. His nightmare prediction is one of a world in which scientists, doctors, engineers and bankers are attacked, even murdered, for what they do. It is not a book to read if you are suffering from a bad depression and need a bit of cheering up.
A question that occurs to me about this book is that Clark seems to have written it with the partial object of satirising reactionary Greenery, religious fundamentalism and technophobia, hoping no doubt that the loathesomeness of the dystopia he presents will remind readers of the dangers of what the Greens/others have in store. My problem, though, is that other dystopian novels have often not had much of a salutary effect. As Perry of this parish remarked some time ago, our capacity for satire has been so sated by real-life lunacy that even a hit TV show called 'Big Brother', taking a line from Orwell's 1984, does not inspire the same intended feelings of loathing that Orwell's attack on totalitarianism was supposed to elicit. Fair enough, there are signs of a fightback against this trend.
But I wonder whether Clark is only really preaching to the converted. I hope not. I hope some stray Guardianista who thinks that John Gray or Bill McKibben are great sages will pick up this great little book and learn something from it. And for undecideds, I would hope that this dystopia warns them off from the anti-Enlightenment trend in which part of our society seems to be moving.
Perhaps a another way to think about winning arguments for technology, capitalism and so on is to portray positive fictional accounts of such things, rather than to portray the opposite. One way to win an argument to is be positive, to give examples of how things are improving, and improving the lives of millions of people. Grumpiness is not really a great sales pitch. Alas, avoiding the error of slipping into grumpiness is difficult when there is so much to be grumpy about, so it takes quite an effort to avoid it.
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner and I love London town, but from where I sit by far the most newsworthy winner in the recent round of British local elections was the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. However, unless I am very much mistaken (which is entirely possible), the Boris Johnson blog, far from being at the centre of the Boris campaign, was put on ice for the duration, and looks like staying there.
Or am I missing something? Is there another Boris Johnson blog? Is there one for his currently very neglected constituency (the one linked to above), and another blog (not linked to because I can not find any such thing) about him trying to be and now being the Mayor of London?
If my failure to spot it means that there is indeed no Boris For (Boris Is) Mayor blog, then I think that's rather a telling fact about the limits of internet political campaigning in Britain. The way Boris himself told it when interviewed on the telly at the very end of his campaign, he did his campaigning not via any internet efforts, but by trekking around London making personal appearances and being on local radio stations. You might have thought, what with so much of success in local politics being the art of attracting any attention at all, and what with Boris having done this so very, very well and having got his own vote out so very, very successfully, a blog might have been part of it.
Or is the thing that I am missing that other bloggers, like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, made crucial contributions to Boris becoming Mayor by campaigning on his behalf, under the opposing radar so to speak, making points in his favour and claims on his behalf that he himself did not have to worry about and which he was not personally obliged then to, as they say, clarify? Boris would no more have his own campaigning blog than he would set up and run his own radio station. In politics, it seems, either you do it, or you blog, but, you don't do both. This makes sense, I suppose. Blogging works best when you blog your mind, and tell it how you see it. Blogging means having an authentic voice. Politics, on the other hand ... Some bloggers - this one, for instance, in something he said at a gathering I was at - have complained that Boris's authentic voice was also muted, for the duration. Something to do with him not drinking, perhaps? (Bring back the booze I say.)
On the other hand, why didn't any of Boris's mere supporters gang up and run a Boris-is-here-today-and-there-tomorrow Boris-thinks-this-Boris-says-that blog, at least while the campaign itself lasted? Not worth the bother, presumably.
In other local election news, my brother Toby Micklethwait (UKIP) came a decent (but to him I daresay deeply disappointing) second to the Conservatives in Englefield Green west, very near to where we were raised and where our Mum still lives. He too accomplished what he accomplished not with any fancy blogging or internetting, but with lots of posters stuck up in people's gardens, with a ton of leaflets and other printed material, and with all the associated personal chit-chat. Maybe the truth is that the more local the politics (and Toby's latest burst of politics was about as local as it is possible for British politics to get), the less relevant blogging is to the campaigning politician. The blogging USP, its ability to send your message whizzing around the entire planet in seconds, does everything but solve your actual problem, and tells everyone in the world all about you except the exact people you are trying to reach, so blogging is of little use to you. Maybe it is time for me to revive that notion I once had about becoming the Supreme Ruler of the World.
Wednesday
Via Tim Worstall's blog, I came across this imagined encounter between Polly Toynbee, and her political Mr D'Arcy, Brown, by this guy:
As for poor Pol, where to start? Imagine the despair, so raw you can almost taste it. Imagine the sense of crushing disappointment. For years now, she has waited for her prince to come - her dashing Norse warrior, who will sweep away all the effete detritus of the Blair years and unload a torrent of resources into child poverty and public services. Night after night she has left the red light on for him; lying in the bed in her Agent Provocateur lingerie, maybe some crotchless pants and a peephole bra, striking an uncomfortable pose lest he come charging through the door at any moment to sweep her up in his powerful arms.
Oh my god.
As a child, I was indifferent at team sports - especially rugby union - and my preference was and is for individualistic games like golf, tennis, squash, martial arts (Bujinkan and fencing), or the odd game of poker (I guess some card games like Bridge count as a team game of sorts). One exception to the Pearce Crapness at Team Games was cricket. I loved playing it, unless some sadist of a captain put me on the boundary at point on a chilly afternoon with no prospect of a bat or bowl. I do not play much any more. My fielding was one of the best parts of my game: I once took a flying catch off a batsman who was beginning to rack up a big score and the catch was the pivotal point in the game. Our lot won. There is also the sensual pleasure of hitting a cover drive on the 'sweet spot' of the bat. You get a similar tingle down the spine when you do that in other sports, such as baseball. But cricket was my great team sporting love if only for the entirely selfish reason that I was just about competent at it.
I was reminded of all this by this excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph today. Like the author of that piece, I played cricket at a state school; cricket is being taught and played less in the public sector education system, to the detriment of the national game. Personally, as an advocate of private schooling and of reducing, not raising, the school-leaving age, I would not want to moan if the sport is taught less if that is what the parents, and just as importantly, the pupils, want (some kids hate team sports so much it has scarred their memories of schooling for life). But I would like to think that in a genuine private sector school system, where parents can use their consumer power to drive up standards, that the Greatest Game Known to Man would flourish a bit more.
I would be interested to know what fellow cricket nuts and Samizdata conspirators, Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings, have to think about this. Brian recently linked to this book, which looks very much worth a read.
This is what I call gratitude.
On the subject of rare musical instruments, and as a sign of how desperate some investors are to make money away from the standard stock and bond markets, you can even invest in violins. I can see the jokes coming: "So, what do you invest in?" "Violins". "Hmm, I've been on the fiddle myself".
Groan.
Tuesday
Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.
... Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”
There's a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for "not doing enough" on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.
Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain - and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address - liberty is no longer intelligible.
Does the word "liberty" appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? ...
Read more.From The Times:
Jansen Versfeld, the solicitor who conducted the fruitless search for a barrister, said: “Because of the very low rate of pay for these hearings, £175.25 per day, and the amount of work and complexity involved, with no payment for preparation, none could undertake to do it.”Mr Versfeld, who is with Morgan Rose solicitors, said that there were 6,586 pages of documents and a total of 4,548 transactions that would require arranging into a manageable form by experienced senior counsel for an estimated six-week hearing.
[...]
"So although this defendant was convicted of offences only involving a few hundred pounds’ worth of cannabis, he found himself at risk of losing £4.5 million worth of assets – with the burden on him to prove that they were not ill-gotten gains. On top of that, he was prohibited from using those assets for his own defence.”
I predict that the law will be changed. It is plainly intolerable to the state that people's property should not be seized merely because the unfair procedure is inadequately funded.
Just straying off the Samizdata reservation for a moment...a pointer for Nine Inch Nails fans: Trent Reznor is giving away his latest record The Slip, and it is 100% free... to download it, go here. Reznor has released it under Creative Commons, which is a very interesting development.
Monday
"The Tories are free-marketeers – they have a mechanism to get rid of their leader on a wet weekend. Labour are central planners, so adopt protectionist policies."
- Fraser Nelson, over the Spectator's Coffee House blog. His quote makes a fair bit of sense, even if you, like yours truly, wonder about the free market credentials of David Cameron's Conservative Party.
The following choice quote has perhaps already been recycled here. It has surely done the rounds elsewhere. But just to be sure, here it is for Samizdata readers, either again or for the first time:
"After five years in government, I now have the same respect for politicians that the pigeons of Rome have for statues."
Which, I think you will agree, nicely sums up the Samizdata attitude towards politicians, whether we have been "in government" on not. Usually, just having a particularly governmental bit of government done to us is sufficient, and it does not require five years of it to happen before such enlightenment is arrived at. And you certainly do not have to be a politician for half a decade to find out how nasty politics is.
This was said by Antonio Martino, Italy's Defence Minister from 2001 until 2006, at the 2006 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Guatemala. It was quoted by Charles Murray at the start of this speech, which was given in Washington just after that MPS meeting.
I came across this speech by Murray because I was looking for a picture of him to use in a posting at my education blog, about this article by Murray entitled The age of educational romanticism.
Glenn Reynolds links to this article on not one, but two different pipe bombings in San Diego.
I suspect the answer to the question "Why Haven't We Heard About This" is to be found in the lack of blood and bodies.
No bleed, no lead.
Sunday
Christopher Booker has a great article in the Telegraph titled Watch the web for climate change truths, which shows that The One True Faith of Anthropogenic Global Warming, having used the internet to preach their gospel, are going to have a hard time suppressing global warming non-conformists using the 'net to do the same.
Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said "we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change". Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon's summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for £4.2 million of EU funding.[...]
On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded
So not such a bad time to be a polar bear after all. It is also nice to see in-article out-linking to a source on a newspaper site.
Also Daniel Hannan has a Telegraph blog article called How bad does the UN have to get? which presents the difference between the ideals and reality of that vast organisation, mentioning ivory poaching, the Iraq food-for-oil scandal, the betrayal of Bosnian Muslims massacred in Srebrenica and the appalling UN role in the Rwanda genocide. However the most interesting part for me was in the comments, a defender of the UN replied thusly:
I don't think you have bothered to give us enough information regarding the various allegations you have made about the UN.There isn't enough information on the Bosnian Muslims being betrayed for any of us, lefties or righties, to make a reasonable assessment. Where in the chain of command did this betrayal happen? What, exactly, was the UN betrayal of these Muslims? What else was the UN doing in Bosnia and in regard to Bosnia at the same time, so that we can come to some opinion as to whether what happened in Srebrenica was a small part or a large part of the total UN activities there in that region?
Was the oil-for-food scam [in Iraq] the activity of a small group of UN employees or was it what all UN staff were engaged in directly or indirectly? We don't know because you haven't told us! Was the UN institutionally guilty right through all its employees for the oil-for-food scam or was it down to a few individuals, whom the UN may have disciplined in some way by now? You didn't tell us!
What were the UN reasons for not seizing the arms caches [in Rwanda]? We need to know! Did they make a mistake in not realising that the genocide would follow? A mistake is not corruption nor is it a failure to deliver overall.
So we need more information before rushing to judgement. That is a very representative defence of the UN of the sort I have heard for years. It is the equivalent of the time hallowed tactic of a UK minister responding to embarrassing questions by saying "we must hold an enquiry before rushing to judgement" in the knowledge that by the time the enquiry gets under way, said embarrassing news will be months or even years in the past and the the headlines have vanished down the memory hole, allowing harsh reality to be safely reinterpreted into something more 'nuanced' and the gravy trains will still keep running along their well polished rails undisturbed... except in the cases of Srebrenica, Food-for-Oil and Rwanda, the nasty truths are very well documented and understood. All this is only ten seconds of typing and click of the Google button away.
The internet really does change almost everything.
Saturday
How do we trust a guy who says he knows about London, when he's just taken three of his kids out of state school and put them into private schools?
- Arabella Weir, on Boris, in The Guardian's desperate chrestomathy of leftyluvviedom for Ken.
I would say it indicates very clearly that he does know something about London's state schools. More penetrating political insight from woman of the people Ms Weir here. Foreign readers may be aghast at the political culture of central control the latter clip reveals. It is not for the faint-hearted libertarian - or for that matter anyone, conservative or liberal, with a sincere belief in separation of powers and limited government.
"We've had it with baby boomer politics. We've had it with coteries and courts, dens and sofas. But if we are fed up with that private politics, we are also tired of the public face of politics. We are told that modern politics is about TV studios: that poisonous truth may be about to become untrue. Westminster and Whitehall might yet make a come-back, as bastions of decently-argued policy and its delivery. This is a switch away from post-60s trends. But it needn’t be a backward step to snobbery and stuffiness."
I hope he is right, although I doubt that Westminster and Whitehall have ever achieved a high point of "decently argued policy and its delivery". Rose-tinted spectacles, and all that.
