The satire writes itself these days. For the past 16 months, ever since voters said No to the EU, the supposed liberal set has been signalling its virtue over migrant workers. These Remainer types have filled newspaper columns and dinner-party chatter with sad talk about foreigners losing the right to travel to and work in Britain. Yet now these same people have chortled as London mayor Sadiq Khan and his pen-pushers at Transport for London (TfL) have refused to renew Uber’s licence in the capital. Which means 30,000 people will lose work. Many of them migrants. They cry over migrant workers one day, and laugh as they lose their livelihoods the next.
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Samizdata quote of the daySeptember 25th, 2017 |
 36 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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The mascots of the politically correct often suffer a net dis-benefit from their attentions. A lucky few, usually those already in a more favourable position, gain from the new protections, new “rights”, new charges, etc., while a not-so-lucky many experience whatever downside-that-must-never-be-mentioned is caused by the state’s new rules. The groups Khan is favouring will include some established migrants, while more are in the group that will lose work. In this way too, the logic the PC say they reject is the logic of what they do.
The more I think about Khan’s actions and dishonesty, the angrier I feel. I’m not alone
They don’t WANT the migrants to work. They want the migrants beholden to a redistributionist state.
Mr O’Neil is correct.
As for Mayor Khan – he is a socialist, he is supposed to behave like this.
What is the excuse of the Conservative Party (my party) government for not opposing Mayor Khan and the whole absurd idea of a local authority covering all of London.
The “licensing power”? As Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke pointed out in the case of Dr Bonham in 1610 – the Common Law recognises no such crime as conducting a trade or profession without a piece of parchment called a “license”.
If the satire is writing itself, then comedians will be out of jobs! More on the dole quey! Just how irresponsible is all this?
The entire mess of Bliar created “elected Mares (sic)” needs to be abolished by decree.
Imagine if we had a real patriot and freedom lover as PM instead of the Fish-Faced Cow? Imagine Sadsack Khan waking to his radio-alarm clock informing him that the office of London mayor had just been abolished right from underneath him.
I assume it is merely a coincidence that Khan’s bid for Mayor of London was partly sponsored by the black cab drivers, who are the ones suffering from Uber, and it’s Uber that Khan is trying to stop.
I assume it is merely a coincidence that Khan’s bid for Mayor of London was partly sponsored by the black cab drivers, who are the ones suffering from Uber, and it’s Uber that Khan is trying to stop.
– so, are you saying “follow the money”? – how naïve…
I assume it is merely a coincidence that Khan’s bid for Mayor of London was partly sponsored by the black cab drivers, who are the ones suffering from Uber, and it’s Uber that Khan is trying to stop.
The black cabs are represented on the TfL board, whereas Uber are not. Hardly surprising that TfL therefore decides to outlaw Uber in favour of black cabs.
Lets comfort ourselves with the idea that Khan has just lost the next mayoral election. Let’s hope the Tories put up somebody sensible this time, like Syed Kamall.
Hell yes! I have known Syed for some years and he would be an awesome mayor! In fact, he is pretty much the dream candidate, which is why the Stupid Party would never run him. He actually understands real world economics and is a conviction politician in the Thatcherite mould, therefore he probably terrifies certain elements of the Tory ‘Blue-Blairite’ establishment.
But can you imagine left-wing heads exploding when trying to run against a charismatic Muslim Thatcherite?
All mascot groups are merely tools. The left does not want to improve their lives. They oppose the only thing that can: the law-and-market-based mechanism proposed in the Enlightenment and slowly developed (imperfectly) ever since.
The goal is for us all to live equal lives, in poverty and squalor, so that the embittered cunts who couldn’t win in an open competition can have the consolation prize of making everyone else lose too.
Is being Muslim now a requirement for candidates to mayor?
“Is being Muslim now a requirement for candidates to mayor?”
We’re only a couple of decades from it being a requirement for candidates for PM…
Socialists always favor (and are financed and supported) by trade unions, and trade unions represent the interests of veteran, high earning, well organized, rich workers (usually in the public sector). The interests (i.e. high wages) of these unionized workers are threatened by new, young and immigrant workers (not yet unionized).
So, any labor party office holder must protect the unions, without the strong, rich and fat and powerful unions there would not be any socialist party.
No, he just happens to be a Muslim, which is hilarious from a political googly point of view but incidental to the fact he is pretty much a libertarian leaning Thatcherite
Hyperbole. This is not France.
It helps. Boris won in part by appealing to small business type ethnics, which means South Asians, particular in outer London. However, this group would also find it attractive to have ‘one of their own’ as Mayor. (I realise this is speculation and comes across as a bit condescending – seems plausible though.) At the last election the Tories tried to capture the liberal vote, by have a dripping wet liberal Tory as candidate; but this electoral group all voted Labour or Liberal Democrat anyway so it didn’t work.
It just so happens that Syed Kamal is an excellent candidate, and he ran in the primaries to be the Tory candidate last time, and he is going to get kicked out of the EU parliament very shortly. With the Uber thing, Khan has alienated part of the electorate that voted for him last time due to ‘feelz’. That same electorate can also get the ‘feelz’ from Kamal.
Perry, do what you can to encourage Syed Kamal to run.
Further down the line maybe we can have him as PM with Savid Javid as Chancellor. Would be hilarious to see the left trying to deal with the mind fuck.
Wiki:
Funny. Same language, and I even read the Wiki definition, and I still have no conception whatsoever what this means.
It means bowling a ball that is very hard for the batsman to play… it is a bitch to actually hit a proper googly and often bad things happen when you do (like spinning off into a fielder’s hands).
Hence the Tories running a charismatic photogenic Muslim son-of-an-immigrant-train-driver really fucks their class warfare narrative up something wicked.
Ah! A knuckleball analogy!
Got it. Thanks.
‘Two peoples separated’, etc. 🙂
Never a problem for the leftoids and their media enablers. To them, he’s just another traitor to his class.
“Never a problem for the leftoids and their media enablers. To them, he’s just another traitor to his class.”
Spot on. They are shameless. They demanded people vote for Hilary Clinton ‘because she’s a woman’ but eviscerated Sarah Palin. Mrs T was considered ‘not a woman’ as undoubtedly is Mrs May currently. Yet the Tories are the party of the patriarchy apparently. Its entirely conceivable that the Tories could have a lesbian as their leader (Ruth Davidson) at some point in the future and that would still not stop them attacking her mercilessly. Thinking that putting up a candidate from the Left’s identity du jour will cause them a moments discomfort is naive in the extreme (and contrary to all experience so far).
What one must always remember is that the Left use these groups as tools only, towards their ultimate goal, which is power. There is no actual desire to help the working man, or women, or immigrants, or gays, just to use them as stepping stones. At any time they can be abandoned because a better candidate has appeared. Hence the arrival of the Islamic bloc has meant that the gay bloc has been abandoned, in deed if not yet word. The same goes for feminism if truth be told.
So any group that the Left champion had better watch out, their moment in the sun will not last forever.
What’s the Muslim equivalent of “Uncle Tom”?
My guess would be “Uncle Abdul.” (Uncle Slave.)
Not ‘Abdul’, but ‘Uncle Dhimmi’, dummy!
Won’t work, but between our two responses, I think we’ve got it.
“Dhimmi” means a non-Muslim. We’re speaking of Muslims.
“Abdul” can be translated as “slave”, but it’s more common as “slave of the.”
So, “Uncle Abdul Dhimmi” would be “Uncle Slave of the Dhimmis” – slave of the non-Muslims in our society.
Of course, it lacks the snap of “Uncle Tom.”
A dhimmi is a non-muslim who knows his/her place- just like uncle Tom!
Yeah, but I actually have an Uncle Dimi, so I can’t accept this.
First off, they did not demand that people to vote for anyone; second, they did favor Hillary for being a woman over other socialist candidates, but being socialist is the fundamental requirement – being a woman, or black, or more socialist than the other candidates, (or simply having closer ties to the “right people”) are all just additional factors.
Alisa, September 28, 2017 at 5:45 am: “they did not demand that people to vote for anyone”
I’m puzzled by your use of the word ‘demand’ above. ‘They’ (from context) are mainstream media IIUC. I seem to recall seeing much in the MSM in 2016 that demanded voting for Clinton as I normally use the word ‘demand’. The demand was justified in various ways: that it was sexist to oppose her, as it had been racist to oppose Obama, was one of them. There was also coverage that presented the same idea in a less demanding, more insinuating way.
The What if Donald and Hillary had been Brenda and Jonathan re-enactment experiment had a surprising result (and, admirably, some on the left noticed this), but it began in a firm belief in the righteousness of that demand.
Nicholas (Unlicenced Joker) Gray, September 28, 2017 at 12:49 am: “A dhimmi is a non-muslim who knows his/her place- just like uncle Tom!”
Dhimmi are non-muslims who are “people of the book”. Mohamed’s rules are:
– polytheists: kill them; offer a warning to the group to convert (e.g. three days notice), then start jihad. (Here, ‘poly’ means any number except one IIUC, so no get-out clause for atheists. 🙂 )
– jews, christians, etc., i.e. people-of-the-book: invite to convert but also offer dhimmi status. If any who convert should later become apostate, kill them. If any dhimmi act uppity, make an example of them. Otherwise, wait for dhimmi to see the light, meanwhile taxing them.
The Ottoman empire’s enslavement quotas for dhimmi were justified by this taxing power – it was a tax on dhimmi to have to surrender a quota of their children as slaves. It would be a very hard argument to make in Islam that this Mohamed-authorised taxing power did not extend to enslavement, given contextual remarks, though perhaps not as immediately impossible as other issues of yet greater current moment. (And even if it were so argued, other founder-authorised routes to enslavement would remain: the restriction could only ever be applied to the post-jihadic-conquest status of people whose surrender had been accepted, so would not affect e.g. Boko Haram.)
“second, they did favor Hillary for being a woman over other socialist candidates, but being socialist is the fundamental requirement – being a woman, or black, or more socialist than the other candidates, (or simply having closer ties to the “right people”) are all just additional factors.”
No, they specifically stated that Hilary’s gender was reason alone for people to vote for her. Remember the Madeleine Albright rally speech – ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other”?
Now it is true that in reality its what is unspoken that is crucial, ie the views of the woman in question, but thats not the point. In public the line was that everyone should vote for Hilary because she’s a woman, nothing more. Not because she’s a liberal AND a woman, just she’s a woman, vote for her.
Niall,
You realise the remarks drawn on to support slavery as taxation in the hadiths were written for this purpose? They’re texts written to justify religious positions taken after the Qu’ran was fixed – the taxation that Muhammed was familiar with was measured in coinage (even if often paid in kind), being a Roman institution. Whilst failure to pay this might have led to slavery, it would not be to the state – it would be the tax collector (local notables had to do this, in both Roman and early Islamic systems) who had to sell the debt slaves to raise the money.
As the post-Roman economy deteriorated in the Islamic area (nothing to do with being Muslims, as they preserved it better than anyone, but the fragmentation of the caliphate meant it couldn’t work as it required scale) then the state itself took over productive resources and due to being a state, and therefore inefficient, favoured slave labour to deal with this, even favouring it in the army (again this is paralleled in the west where the church took over much of the land and resources, and where evidence survives can be seen to have had far more slaves than anyone else, with royal land also quite slave-intensive). So Islamic justification of slavery is nothing to do with the religion so much as a justification for state-organised application of slaves in a normal early-medieval fashion.
Watchman,
Would you care to rebut or comment on this commentary on slavery and its position in Islam from Dr David Wood?
Watchman (September 28, 2017 at 4:45 pm), the specific case I was mentioning is very much Islam-based: it was about the Ottoman empire’s taking of tribute children from Christian parents. The parents were dhimmi and so could be thus treated.
Obviously, both slavery and taxation long pre-date the Ottoman Empire, and Islam, and the Roman Empire. Enslavement for debt has existed at various times and places – and so could create the possibility of enslavement for non-payment of taxes. However a tribute child was not something a Christian family handed over if they were too poor to pay their taxes. The sultan’s drivers could simply take any boy between the ages of 7 and 10 from any Christian family.
Niall and Jim: I base my reading of these things on the premise that left-wing politicians of both overt and less-overt varieties (the latter being media types and similar) tend to talk to their own base. That happens because some of them think that addressing The Deplorables is a waste of time and energy, while some others are not even aware of the fact that there are people out there who hold opinions different from their own (AKA ‘How could Trump win? No one I know voted for him’).
Think of it from a leftist’s POV: anyone who disagrees with me is racist, misogynist, homophobe, and hates the poor – therefore, why would I bother to address them, let alone demand anything from them? Thus, pointing out the Left’s preference for Hillary for being a woman while despising Palin as to some sort of hypocrisy entirely misses their premises and their view of the world.