And I agree, it is.
And so…
Let’s make ‘Giant Sadiq Khan ‘baby balloon to fly over London’ happen.
Works for me. I gave them some money.
|
|||||
|
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] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
The ‘Baby Trump over London’ balloon is being hailed as a triumph of freedom of expression…July 10th, 2018 |
 45 comments to The ‘Baby Trump over London’ balloon is being hailed as a triumph of freedom of expression… |
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. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
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. |
|||||
Mayor Khan is a joke – a sick joke.
Why is it the greater the city the more ridiculous the mayor?
Dunno but that’s just the way it is.
So a bunch of people spend money on a giant advertisement saying “we’re a bunch of ridiculously silly people who should never be taken seriously,” and the response is for a different bunch of people to spend money on another equally giant advertisement saying, “we’re just as ridiculously silly as they are, we should never be taken seriously either.”
Well that’s just politics, Ken, that’s how it works.
I empathise with both Perry and Ken.
As a compromise might I suggest that we pay for a balloon that says something like “Oy! You cunts who are getting all wound up over nothing! NO!”?
We could back it up with another balloon that said “If you had real problems, you wouldn’t be looking for advice from a fucking balloon.”
American tourists contribute more money to London than any other nationality.
America is London’s top market for both services and goods, and it’s growing much faster than shipments to Europe.
The American economy is on fire and Trump has floated a zero-tariff trade deal that would benefit London enormously.
So what does the mayor of London do? Tell Trump he isn’t welcome in the city, encourage protests and approve childish balloons.
Khan, Corbyn, May, Sturgeon. What the hell happened.
BTW Trump has just pardoned the Hammonds who were the original victims of Bureau of Land Management thuggery in the USA. Which lead to the armed standoff with Federal thugs.
A measure of where his heart is. God bless the bloke.
Chip–“Khan, Corbyn, May, Sturgeon. What the hell happened.”
Well-Off, MIddle Class, CUltural MArxist, (mostly) LOndon BUbble Scum is what happened.
WOMICCUMALOBUS.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Trump has secretly financed the Baby Trump balloon himself.
Freedom of “expression”?
Would a swarm of quad copters with precision edged rotors ALSO be Freedom of “expression”?
How about “choreographed performance art”?
Trump balloon? #woke #resistance #tuckfrump
Khan balloon? #rayyycissss
Right. 🙄 21st Century Britain is known worldwide as a bastion of “freedom of expression”…….and Khan helped make it that way.
Will the balloon of Mayo Khan have an inflated knife stuck in the side?
I sense a burgeoning market for inflatable, helium filled knife balloons. 😎
>So a bunch of people spend money on a giant advertisement saying “we’re a bunch of ridiculously silly people who should never be taken seriously,” and the response is for a different bunch of people to spend money on another equally giant advertisement saying, “we’re just as ridiculously silly as they are, we should never be taken seriously either.”
You’re missing the bigger game, Ken. The bigger game is that the left are always looking for areas in which they can broadcast their views and establish their dominance while preventing the right from doing so (more here: https://hectordrummond.com/2018/06/18/double-standards-may-be-all-the-left-needs/
This is why some on the right immediately wanted to do the same thing — the point was to stop the left succeeding at this game, or at least to expose the double standards. This is an eternal battle. If you let the left get away with this then it’s another way in which they get their foot on our throats.
A colleague of mine claims he has a life-sized blimp, sorry, balloon, of Diane Abbott in a pink bikini. He wonders if the Mayor of London will allow him to fly it over Parliament. I have suggested that any reply from the Mayor’s office will be that he Khan’t.
Fly it anyway–and let them try to prosecute you on….what grounds? Health and Safety ? A helicopter might have crashed into her fat arse?
Even Sad Dick wouldn’t want that kind of publicity.
So I guess Khan will be approving a Tianamen Square balloon for the next time the Chinese president visits and a naked lady balloon astride a pig balloon for when the. Saudis come to town, right?
Anyone here seen “Kind Hearts and Coronets”?
Firing anything knife-shaped into the Khan balloon would be an obvious and, uh, pointed, comment on the Mayor’s policies, so the Mayor’s friends would seem to have a problem (unless they can prevent the mocking balloon getting aloft in the first place). By contrast, if the Trump balloon does not fly for long, the ways to spin what that means are more varied. We seem to have the edge here. 🙂
Reminds me–a little–of the 1930s “race” between the R10O and the R101. The capitalist and socialist airships.
And we know how that turned out.
This was all started by a (no longer) impoverished balloon-maker.
“This was all started by a (no longer) impoverished balloon-maker.”
Balloons are all well and good, but popcorn is where the real money is.
I’m guessing the Khan balloonists are hoping some do-gooder finds some excuse to refuse permission for their balloon. If it was purely up to Khan then I think it would be exceedingly unlikely for permission to be refused because of the terrible optics. But it looks like the decision of the Trump balloon was made independently of Khan so it’s possible they will ban it and then Khan won’t interfere.
How about a Tommy Robinson balloon.
My hypothesis is there is something about cities, in the air or water or the crowding, that drives most people in them insane. The larger the city the more insanity.
There was a study with mice or rats in the 60’s that seems to bear this out.
London really isn’t exceptionally full of insane people.
Speaking of Freedom of expression are there any Brit TV series like League of Gentlemen, the Young Ones?
Perry, to refute your point, London voted Remain! Enough said.
Nicholas,
How many ‘Forreners’ are employed in the City?
What do you mean, Regional? Since they couldn’t vote, what difference did it make? It was the British Londoners who wanted to stay as part of the EU.
The ones that have taken out citizenship.
Look at locusts and grasshoppers.
Locusts are simply grasshoppers that have entered the swarming-mass phase, usually triggered by crowding, drought, or lack of food.
In times of sufficient water, food, and space, grasshoppers live a solitary and peaceful life. But, when stressed by drought or overpopulation, serotonin secretions in their brains transform them into a swarming nomadic mass, known for appearing as a feared all-devouring cloud and stripping fields of all vegetation.
They’re the exact same species taxonomically. But the stresses of overcrowding and deprivation transform peaceful and innocuous grasshoppers into the swarming plague of locusts.
Just like huge cities do to people.
Regional, all Londoners seemed to be in favour of remaining, so foreigners stayed because of the congenial, pro-Europe atmosphere.
Nicholas, Perry has a point: let us not imitate our enemies by instisting that all who dispute with us are insane.
Politics is full of ‘insane” (say rather, deeply dishonest and self-deceiving) remoaners (see Natalie’s post above), but outside that uncharming circle I have spoken with remainers – people who voted remain but who think the vote should be honoured. Be glad of them. They are an important cause of the electoral impossibility of the remoaner plan: the UK electorate contains a lot less than 48% of remoaners. If only politics were as free of them, we’d be fine.
Lots of perfectly sane people voted remain & more than a few nutters voted leave.
Nah, I think there are just as many nutters in the countryside, they are just more spread out and thus harder to spot. For me, living anywhere other than a large city would be pure hell.
Mr Ecks wrote:
‘Reminds me–a little–of the 1930s “race” between the R10O and the R101. The capitalist and socialist airships.
And we know how that turned out.”
Yes, indeed – the ‘socialist’ airship failed miserably and killed 40-something people in the process. And the relatively-successful ‘capitalist’ airship was immediately grounded, never flew again, and was broken up for scrap within the year. Those who designed and built the failed airship were never punished in any meaningful way for their homicidal failure. Those who designed and built the successful airship were punished for the failure of the unsuccessful airship.
IOW, socialism at work.
llater,
llamas
You are not quite right there, llamas. In a most unusual departure from the norm, there was punishment for the politicians, bureaucrats and time-servers involved – those of them, that is, who were on the airship on the day in question. IIRC, the relevant minister (in Britain’s first Labour government) insisted that it had to fly on the scheduled day as otherwise it would be very embarrassing politically. Rather like the launching the Obamacare website on the day scheduled, no-one dared dissent loudly enough – especially not those who’d been assuring him everything was fine – so it crashed and burned, with him and some sycophants on board. Imagine the Challenger disaster with the NASA bureaucrats who shouted down the engineers being on the shuttle – or the Obamacare website if O himself had had to buy insurance there on its first day.
Being burned alive is a far harsher punishment than I’d inflict on a socialist minister and his minions for being pompous and silly, but the poetic justice element was present. You are of course correct that the succeeding minister shut down the capitalist project lest its airship not crash and burn.
There has been the usual rewriting of history since to explain away – or at least minimise – this embarrassing outcome of what was explicitly set up as a test to show the superiority of socialism (see for example the wikipedia article on it) but Nevil Shute’s being involved ensured a first-hand and readable account would exist nevertheless.
And the Trump Curse strikes again–Croatia gives him a jersey, the UK gives him an insulting balloon. Guess who won?
@ Niall Kilmartin – while your points are well-taken, the fact remains that most of the engineers and designers who actually worked on R101 and who might be expected to have known just how unfit-to-fly she was, never suffered any serious repercussions for their failures, just as with prior UK airship developments, from the MayFly onwards.
R101 lifted off for India with a known, critical shortage of useable lift, known serious gas leaks, and after having just completed a major reconstruction (being split in two and having a 50-foot bay added) with not more than a few hours of flight test. No engineer in his right mind would have countenanced this for an instant, and indeed Nevil Shute, in his writings on the subject, made it clear that actions like these would have been unthinkable if R100 were involved. Yet the R101 design staff and program management let it happen. And they never suffered any real consequences for it.
While it is true Lord Thompson and various senior civil servants associated with the R100/R101 venture perished in the R101 crash, and her rush to departure for India despite her unfit state was partly-driven by Lord Thompson’s personal ambitions, I actually attach less blame to those people. They were too high up in the chain-of-command to truly understand what they were managing and had to rely on their staff to tell them the truth. Lord Thompson was told that she was fit to fly and, being a military officer and not an engineer, took what he was told at face value. Again, I don’t blame him, but the people who lied to him, and doubly-so because they told him the worst kind of lies – namely, the ones he wanted to hear. He and his staff paid for the mendacities of their staffs with their lives.
The comparable-example that springs to mind is the Challenger disaster, where very-junior engineers were telling anyone who would listen that she was not fit to fly, and why, and the message got diluted, sanitized and finally suppressed, for political and commercial reasons, as it went up the chain of command, until it just – poof! – vanished. Richard Feynmann got to the bottom of the reasons for the crash in just a few days, and even after he did so, political attempts were made to suppress the truth. This is just how state organizations, but especially socialist state organizations, work. Search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and praise and honours for the non-participants.
Shirley Norway stood up for me and mrs llamas at our wedding. She is gone now, rest her soul, but I still exchange letters with Heather, still spry and active at 84. For the longest time, the bookcase of my office was graced with the Dollond thermobarograph that Nevil Shute bought in York in 1928, when knowing the barometric pressure and temperature began to be very, very important in his life.
llater,
llamas
I have a better idea – a giant mocking balloon of Muhammed (Mohammed). I am sure Mayor Khan would support the idea – as he believes in Freedom of Expression.
The “Me To” feminist movement should certainly support the idea – given Muhammed-Mohammed’s enslavement of women and his instruction to his followers that they could rape captured women.
And the “anti racism” campaigners should also certainly support the idea – given that Muhammed-Mohammed was white (the sources stress how pale he was) hence “white privilege”, and the disgraceful way that Muhammed-Mohammed traded in black slaves, and referred to black people as “raisin heads” and claimed that they looked like Satan.
Clearly, as supporters of feminism and anti racism, both Mayor Khan and Prime Minister May will support a campaign of public mockery of Muhammed-Mohammed.
Well, Khan has flown his Trump-mocking balloon and, despite the media doing all they could for it, the balloon’s reality has not matched its hype (h/t instapundit). As a metaphor of socialism in theory versus socialism in practice, I suspect this picture will run and run. When you promise to dominate the London skyline, you need to be easier to spot in a picture of it (hint: look in the right-hand bottom corner). It’s a mistake to oversell by this much – people can end up having to fake their woke enthusiasm while feeling deflated, thinking they’ve been let down.
We all recall how the beeb understated Trump’s inauguration crowd by showing its size at 09:15 instead of at 11:00. The same approach to the Trump balloon makes the crowd below it look proportionately as unimpressive as the balloon. More turned up later, but last night on the BBC ten o’clock news, close-angle shots (that hid how small the balloon was) were followed by a wide angle shot (that didn’t) to show the whole crowd. Looking at the empty pavements round its edges while the BBC presenter said ‘thousands’ marched, I could not help wondering if the plural word was really needed. I’m very ready to accept that it was, but either the beeb was not showing the crowd in a way that flattered its size or else it was struggling to meet its organisers claims. I’m as ready as anyone to admire the stately proportions of Trafalgar Square but when commentators can announce that ‘most of the march has now entered the square’ then it does imply a limit to its size.
When the Khan-mocking balloon is flown, I trust its sponsors will stress the free speech ‘sauce for the goose’ aspect, while being realistic about its size. Admittedly, it does appear to be bigger, but against so feeble a rival that’s no big deal in itself.
Well now the balloon goes up, or so it seems, the Khan balloon, complete with yellow bikini.
A bashful source, speaking on condition of uncharacteristic anonymity said ‘It’s a great balloon, a really great balloon. I mean, its tremendous. It’s bigger than the Trump balloon, and more on target, it’s a really special balloon.”.
llamas: Good observation. (Rest of commentary as well, of course.)
Challenger occurred to me too.
.
And as is usual, Paul also makes irrefutable points.
.
bobby: re huge-ish cities as Unnatural, agreed.
Though on grounds of compassion, we should try to Understand and Forgive those who, like our Leader, have become a little out of touch with natural human responses, due to too long spent in just such an overpopulated social environment. :>)
—Although, Perry, there’s hope for you yet. There was a time 800 years or so ago when I was in love with Chicago and thought it a small portion of Heaven on Earth.
Some four decades later, I had grown out of it.
Of course, I am Only a Country Girl.
Cheers, 😀