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]
|
The delusions of the neo-Ptolemaic view of reality Lord Stern would have us believe that ‘arrogance’ undid the recent attempted power grab known as the Copenhagen Conference.
Strangely the public unravelling of the entire political and cultural narrative of global warming does not so much as get a mention in passing, as if ‘Climategate’ can be wished out of existence and with a Triumph of the Will, time itself can be rolled back to pre-hack days.
|
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.
|
So now dubious taxes are innovative? Who would have thought it?
Its fairly obvious these unflushable turds wont stop. They, having been denied their triumph at Copenhagen will now settle for gradualism, finely sliced legislation passed in commitees, and never troubling the voters.
Theres allready billions riding on this, the blessed UN sees a way of becoming self funded, free from the treats of non-funding if they go to far.
The same UN that promotes the AGW theory….
Frankly, with the arcane power of the UN, whose ‘power’ is illusionary – pantomime power – (behind you!), and the power of the vicious, hissing left, we are at a turning point.
The left has to be shot through the heart with a silver bullet and buried at a crossroads at midnight under a full moon.
That should do it.
I don’t know what else would work, frankly. But it must be done.
An ancient remedy, but true.
Mole, of course they’re innovative. They’re being more boldly and proactively dubious with their taxation powers than any government in history.
The EU politburo has no legitimacy or integrity but is hell bent on crippling British industry with the gleeful and quite appallingly cunning of the Nu-lab marxist terrorists.
Placemen lackies like Stern have no pull in the real world but in lala land of the EU he has traction.
Incredible but true, the faceless ones are winning at the moment, there will be a time though…….they should remember what happened to Mussolini.
If the warmists put towels over our heads, the AGW skeptics won’t see them, and the latter will go away.
The linked BBC website article, is adorned with a photograph of a cooling tower, discharging a bit of water into the atmosphere.
Given that use of cooling towers is generally a good thing environmentally (it reduces discharge into river or ocean waters, of heat that cannot otherwise be beneficially used), and has nothing to do with carbon burning (that great fear of the CAGW crowd), why is the photograph relevant to the content of the article?
Is it just because it looks not particularly attractive and has ‘bad associations’ for the ignorant and irrational?
Here is a nice picture (from Wikipedia) of a cooling tower used as part of a nuclear power station.
Best regards
The UN, of all organisations on would think, should want to exist by consent.
It seems it wants to exist by coercion.
Speaks volumes.
they should remember what happened to Mussolini.
Why?
Everyone agrees, after the fact, that Benny M. was one of the bad guys, but these people KNOW they are the good guys. They see no link.
Don’t forget, all left wingers are nice people who care, deeply care, about the people. The nasties are the right wingers, like Benny and his mates in Spain, Hungary, Finland and Germany. And Churchill. And Thatcher. And Reagan. You know, anyone who isn’t left wing.
People like us.
We are the ones who really must be controlled. And we are on the agenda.
Just ask Ezra Levant, Mary Steyn and Geert Wilders.
As virutally the only libertarian on the planet who thinks that human C02 emissions might be a problem (“you only give the idea house room because it is bad news and you LOVE bad news Paul” – well that point would have some merit) I will not get into the science of the matter.
However, Lord Stern nonresponse (i.e. treating Climategate and so on as if they had not happened – just talking and writing about these matters regardless) is very much “standard operational procedure” for the establishment.
For example, twice in my lifetime it looked as if Marxism was discredited.
The first time is when it became clear in the 1970s that “Lenin”, and “Stalin” and the rest of the Comrades had murdered tens of millions of people (yes I know it had always been clear to some people – but A.S. in his “Gulag Archipelago” got this knowledge into the mass culture).
It also became clear that Mao (still in power till 1976) had murdered tens of millions of people. And that the pro Soviet regime in Vietnam was a nighmare (the “Boat People” were on the television and so on) and that the pro Mao regime in Cambodia was even worse – indeed engaged in genocide.
And then there were such events as the Soviet expansion in what had been the Portugese colonies in Africa (with Soviet aid and Cuban troops crushing non Communist anti colonial movements), and the Marxist terror regime in Ethopia (with all the horror that led to) and the Soviet invasion of Afganistan and so on.
This was all at the same time when even “moderate” statism had been seen to fail – Carter in the United States was a joke and the Labour Prime Minister in Britain was openly saying “we can not spend our way out of recession” the bankruptcy of 1976 had shown that “spending our way to prosperity” just did not work.
So much for Maurice Dobb and Pierro Straffa (and so on) with their efforts to unite Marxism with Keynesianism. The two systems did not correct each other – on the contrary, the errors of one were just added to the errors of the other.
Yet the left came back – BECAUSE THEY NEVER REALLY WENT AWAY.
Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won elections – but the leftist (Marxist and fellow travellers) did not get weaker – they got stronger (both in the education system and in the “mainstream” media).
I watched as anti socialist books became RARER in school and university libaries (they were always the works that went – to make room for admin space, now to make room for computers) and msm productions got madder and madder.
The second time that Marxism seem to be discredited was with the tossing away of Maoist economic policies (although not the name of Mao himself – or his system of dictatorship) in China and the collapse of Marxism in Eastern Europe.
This time (1989) I was convinced the left was on the rocks – but I was wrong.
There was no real change in the education system and the msm (apart from token stuff about the fall of Communism – whilst still accepting all basic Marxist doctrines as if they were “scientific truth”), indeed the left continued to get STRONGER in the education system and the msm.
These people have an ideology (and climate change is part of that ideology – part of it because it can be used as a excuse for greater collectivism).
Actually Lord Stern is a very moderate example – most of the establishment people are much worse than him.
To think that they can be reached by reason or evidence (on any matter of policy) is an error.
The education system and the “mainstream” media and political class (including in many large private companies) they produce are the sworn enemies of liberty and the must be treated as such.
A bitter truth – but it is the truth.
Counting Cats – of course Mussolini was a lifelong radical collectivist and the “Progressives” (including F.D.R. and Lloyd George) loved him.
Of course once it was accepted that Mussolini was a bad guy then he was suddenly a “conservative” (something that would have amazed him) and even libertarians are supposed to have something in common with him.
I do not know whether the left believe their own lies or not – and I no longer care.
Absolutely, look at the threats of punishment being doled out to people who question who question whether GW is A.
Nice post Paul. It goes to show how important it is that the Conservative Party actually need a plan to attack the enemy if they’re going to be any damn use to us. Thatcher won a few victories, but everywhere she didn’t fight the left advanced their agenda. Simply running the leftist state “competently” is no where near enough. If they don’t manage to free the msm and the education system, they’ll never have a chance of killing the beast.
AKM – is the point and gist of Paul’s post not more that the Left didn’t indulge in whingeing about the elected officials not being pure enough, rather they just got on with promoting lefty causes …
Isn’t such persistence a trait that we can use, too, to render the insufficient purity on our side equally irrelevent ?
The Internet is helping to end-around-run the MSM and the entrenched educational system, so that people are actually finding out that not all that they learned in school or from the MSM is actually reality …
The Grauniad is becoming less and less relevant …
We should be getting even the Camerons into power, and then working on *them* to get the policies through that we need … allowing Gordon Brown back in just because Cameron isn’t “pure enough” is an historically-proven failure …
I have to agree wholeheartedly with this post and the majority of commenters on this site who seem to think similarly. It is evident that the AGW camp are out in force with their non-factual counterclaims, presumably in a last-ditch attempt to swamp the media and sway peoples’ opinion regardless of, or despite, the facts.
There seems to be some rubbish now being routinely trotted out and sprayed into the international media portals, from British sources and especially (sadly) from my favourite old radio service the BBC or BBBC (Biased British Broadcasting Corporation). For example, we have:
The one from Lord Chris Smith takes the biscuit where he says:
Some people might call this a staggering denial of the truth and a blatant attempt to tell people what to think:
1. The elephant in the room: There were apparently a lot of errors, not just “a few”, and more are being discovered almost on a weekly basis.
2. The errors categorically did and do undermine the “overwhelming strength of evidence”, which has been found to be highly dubious, underwhelming and weak in any event, if not just plain wrong.
3. The so-called “evidence” has clearly NOT been “painstakingly accumulated, peer-reviewed, tested and tested again”. (Where does he get this rubbish from?)
I could go on, but really, what would be the point? The mere fact that the BBC apparently saw it as being fit and reasonable to publish this nonsense is bad enough.
Lord Chris Smith is either making some kind of a joke, or he would appear to be living on a different planet to the rest of us. Maybe AGW has been scientifically proven to exist on his planet, but it’s certainly far from being a scientifically proven fact on Earth. Quite the reverse – it is proving itself to be a potentially bigger scientific con than the Piltdown Man. I don’t believe in that, or in fairies, or the Emperor’s new clothes.
I’m not asking for ideological purity from the Conservatives, I’m asking for fighting spirit.
As I see it the left advanced so far primarily because the right largely refused to fight, not from cowardice but from a misplaced sense of honour. On the right we were taught that politics is a matter of individual conscience like religion and that it shouldn’t be discussed in polite society. The left are under no such self-imposed restrictions and as such get to frame nearly every discussion in nearly every arena, the only exception being the blogosphere. My experience has been that opinions on politics or economics you hear expressed in the street or a work are nearly all left-wing memes parroted from the TV or radio.
I agree that the internet is helping to bypass the MSM and that this is a good thing, however I am less optimistic about the education system. There will always be a few iconoclasts who make a point of seeking out alternate points of view, however I rather doubt that the majority of the population will do so. Most probably absorb a frame of reference during their formative years and maintain that throughout their lives unless something momentous happens to challenge it. It would be nice to find out I’m wrong about that though.
As for getting the Camerons into power, that isn’t within my power as I live in a very safe Conservative seat: The only way the Conservatives could lose this seat is if nearly all the Labour votes switched to the Lib Dems while the Conservatives lose 1000’s of votes to UKIP. The Conservative majority is about 6000, which is nearly as much as the entire Labour vote at the last election.
An excellent summary of the state of play over the last few decades, Paul.
I’ve said it before here: these events – the exposure of communist atrocities, and the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse – actually helped the left, because they allowed it to disassociate itself from socialist failure and evil, and present a new face to the world. “Of course we’re not Leninists/Stalinists/Maoists/Communists; those ideologies have rightly been discredited, but…”
The present government was elected as New Labour, governed as New Labour, and that’s why we’re back where old Labour left off in 1979.
Quite right Sam.
For example, now it does not matter how much evidence one produces that a “moderate” leftist politician (or other such) is, in fact, a life long Marxist.
“You still banging on about Communism – do you not know the Berlin Wall came down in 1989” is the reply one is likely to get.
Although oddly enough it does not work with the other forms of collectivism (National Socialism and Fascism).
For example, in the 1950s (or today) being a fan of Adolf Hitler would make quite a debt in a political life.
“You still banging on about me being a Nazi – do you not know that Berlin fell in 1945?” would not work so well as the above line.
It would not work so well because the media (and the education system) get to decide what is tolerated and what is not.
For example, the Watergate dirty tricks of Nixon were an outrage according the media, the academic system that produces the media, and the court system that reflects both.
I have no brief for Richard wild-spending-and-price-conrols Nixon, but the media clearly played favourates.
For example, when L.B.J.s people bugged the Goldwater campaign H.Q. the media just laughed it off – it was a nonissue, because they judged it to be a nonissue.
The msm is in decline – but it is still very powerful.
And the education system (the schools and universities) are even more powerful.
Since no one else has commented on it, I would like to give a hat tip to the word “neo-Ptolemaic”. It very nicely captures the essential spirit of the warmists and Gore-mongers.