|
|||||
– George Gordon, Lord Byron June 19th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I can think about football, but not for very long. So, when I observed the generally convivial, if noisy, multi-racial crowd in South Africa, it did not take long for me to forget about the ball game and start to think about Boudicca’s massacre of the Romans in Verulamium and of Suetonius’ slaughter of her and her army that followed it. This is known as being cultured. My line of thought was this: although many whites have left Africa, there are also many who are committed to making a future for themselves and their families there. Presumably they are not troubled by the thought that their descendants will eventually intermarry with the black majority around them. Their not so distant ancestors who settled Africa were so troubled yet went to Africa anyway. Vast amounts have been written about why it is wrong for people of one race to oppress those of another race. Much has been written about why it is wrong for people of of one race to be prevented from marrying those of another. What has been written about much less is why the whites in Africa thought they could succeed in ruling over the blacks and keeping separate from them forever. Because, simplifying massively, that must have been what those early white settlers thought. Racial mixing was not acceptable to them, being ruled by people of another race was not acceptable to them, yet they took the irrevocable step of taking their families to another continent where their race would be vastly outnumbered. And they did this with the example of Boudicca and Suetonius known to them. Bloody rebellion followed by equally bloody reconquest, and the empire still goes down in the end. By the time whites were leaving Britain to settle in Africa no one knew which of them had Roman ancestors. Did they not wonder whether their descendants would eventually merge with the natives in the same way? Or if not that historical example for the Dutch, French, Germans, Portuguese or Belgians, any one of a thousand others would teach the same moral: that ruling castes do not stay ruling or castes forever. On the other hand, that word “castes” reminds me that the caste system in India has lasted thousands of years. And the Jews have been “a race apart” for almost as long. How did the early white settlers envisage the future of whites in Africa? Did they hope to become the majority as had happened, or looked set to happen, in America? Or is this whole business of imagining the far future a purely modern pastime, given that Christians of olden days thought of the time between creation and Last Judgement as lasting thousands rather than millions of years? (Please, not too much modern politics in the comments. Isn’t there a football match you could watch instead?) June 18th, 2010 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Friedman has a thought-provoking item up on whether politicians in the 1850s would have acted differently had they known of the carnage that was to be caused by the US Civil War of the following decade. He runs some interesting scenarios. Counter-factual history is a genre in fiction, of course. I remember Philip Chaston wrote about this issue some time ago. Sean Gabb, one of the current leaders of the Libertarian Alliance, has thoughts related to this about the Second World War (as readers may recall, I find his revisionist perspective unconvincing, as does Patrick Crozier). June 18th, 2010 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
By “ourselves”, of course, I mean supporters of the English football team. Tonight, in the group stages of the World Cup “soccer” tournament, England’s not-entirely-convincing team takes on the might of Algeria. The English team failed to beat the USA a few days ago, conceding a soft goal due to a horrendous mistake by our goalkeeper. But England were not as terrible as some media commentaries suggest: some players such as Glenn Johnson, Aaron Lennon and Stevie Gerrard were good, in my view. So far, I have quite enjoyed watching the tournament. I don’t get all that bothered by the endless din of the horns that the South African fans insist on blowing. If it drowns our some of the more moronic chants or even the banalities of the commentators, that is no bad thing. The local fans look as if they are having a great time, although as no doubt Samizdata commentators will point out, they are ultimately also paying for a lot of this razzmatazz. I have not checked all the details, but I assume that the government of South Africa, and hence the taxpayers, are funding some of the cost of all this. So far, my prediction is that the finalists will probably be drawn from the following: Brazil, Argentina, Germany and possibly England (you’re mad, Ed). France lost big last night to Mexico; Spain, which has been considered among the favourites, was stunningly defeated by Switzerland, which brought a gleam to my pro-tax haven eye. Even so, Spain could and should probably progress to later stages. As for England, all I can hope is that we don’t give away possession easily, give plenty of the ball to Wayne Rooney, and hope the goalkeeper remembers the old adage – keep the body behind the ball. Here is what Brian Micklethwait wrote about the previous World Cup, back in 2006. I don’t remember a lot about it as I was getting married at the time. June 18th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bob Bigelow, the operator of two inflatable test habitats in orbit, fired one back at the idiots who claim to be all for free-markets, capitalism and liberty… until their own socialist-space ox gets gored:
June 17th, 2010 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Dear Sir, In your current edition you have as the main cover story an attack upon the “American right”. In reality, of course, it is not the fact that the people you attack are American that causes you to hate them – you hate them (and attack them in the most abusive terms you can) because they commit the dreadful crime of not agreeing with you. You hate the British “right” just as much as you hate the American “right” – with “right” really being defined as people who do not support endless bailouts, corrupt “stimulus” government spending, and corporate welfare (such as the Central Bank producing more credit money and issuing it in various sweetheart loan forms to politically connected financial sector enterprises). I am not really interested in the fact that you use abusive language (“mad” and so on) and cartoons against people whose only crime is to have different political opinions to yourselves, after all I have used abusive language (such as “corrupt”) to describe your editor, Mr John Micklethwait, and the only reason I have never drawn an abusive cartoon of him is that I can not draw. No, what interests me is your claim that America needs a “better opposition” to President Barack Obama – and your implied claim that you should be the guide to such an opposition. June 17th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times has vanished behind a pay wall and… frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. There is nothing about The Times that cannot be easily replaced with other on-line sources. Move along, nothing to see (literally). June 17th, 2010 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
SpaceX has signed a $500M deal to launch the next generation Iridium satellite system. The mammals are now getting big enough to go for the dinosaurian jugular vein. June 16th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally. – Daniel Hannan finally admits that he was wrong to have backed Barack Obama for President June 16th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The usual explanation for the troubles now afflicting the EU that is doing the rounds now is that the Greeks and Spaniards have recently been behaving even more like Greeks and Spaniards than they usually do. But Helen Szamuely offers an alternative explanation for the EU’s current woes. Germans, she observes, are finally reverting to being regular Germans. Having quoted a Der Spiegel article about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now mysteriously unwillingly to bow to France in the manner of her predecessors since WW2, Helen says this:
And that fits a point that I have made over and over again, which is that when it comes to predicting the future, there is one kind of thing that one can say with certainty, when all else is guesswork. Statements of this kind are always going to be true: in twenty years time, you and I and everyone else will either be twenty years older, and influencing the world in the way that people twenty years older that all of us are likely to influence the world (in my case hardly at all), or dead. All manner of interesting suggestions about the relationship between events and later events can be derived from this kind of observation, including even events which have yet to happen, as Helen Szamuely’s own earlier versions of the above presumably suggest. Such speculations are not all going to be right. But they can be very interesting and suggestive. Historically, one of my favourite such twinning of two events is: Battle of Crecy 1346, Peasants Revolt 1381. A great many of those “peasants”, including their leaders, were the veterans of earlier continental wars. Now? Well, can it be coincidence that our current financial turmoil is happening just when, for the first time since it happened, hardly anyone is still alive and counting for anything who remembers the previous bout of such financial turbulence, that started erupting around 1929? June 15th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. – James Harvey Robinson, via Dale Carnegie’s classic How To Win Friends and Influence People June 15th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian’s George Monbiot is talking about the US Tea Party Movement. Which is it, do you think? Has nobody ever told him about the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, or does he just enjoy winding people like me up? June 15th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||