Very interesting chat between CNN’s international correspondent Clarissa Ward in Afghanistan and Freddie Sayers of Unherd. This is great stuff and why independent media is so valuable.
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August 20th, 2021 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I find it very likely that most future historians will put the date of the real beginning of the collapse of the current political and geopolitical order right here, right now, at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just as with any other big historical process, however, many others will point out that the seeds of the collapse were sown much farther back, and that a case can be made for several other dates, or perhaps no specific date at all. This is how we modern people look at the fall of the french ancien regime, after all. Still, it is quite obvious that the epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over. The bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else. How long it will take for their institutions to disappear, or before they end up toppled by popular discontent and revolution, no one can know. But at this point, I think most people on some level now understand that it really is only a matter of time. – Malcom Kyeyune (who is a strange sort of Marxist btw) August 20th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fifth stage is the crisis which has resulted not so much from Brexit as from Covid. Brexit was a revolt of a new Country party against the Court party of almost all assembled authorities, including both Labour and Conservative authorities. After some dithering, Johnson chose to side with Country. Hence 2016. But Covid has broken all of the traditions of opposition I have sketched thus far. For it is the Conservative Party – no matter how reluctantly – which stands at the head of a unified Court party which has done more than anyone since Walpole has done to ignore the Country, and not only ignore it, but oppress it. Johnson has presided over the establishment of an entirely technocratic politics of problem-and-solution which is, alas, not a politics at all, but the substitution of technique for politics. In this situation, the Government appears to be as committed as the opposition is to a unified politics of Universal Lockdown and Universal Vaccination and Universal Carbon Elimination in which no one is defending any aspect of the old order (including the church or universities) or even liberalism itself. The Conservatives have no longer got anything to defend. They have capitulated to their enemies and done it with a grotesque hyper-Disraelian-Bismarckian-Maoist-Malthusian flourish by way of forcing us to take the knee, take the mask and take the jab. They are not Tory, not liberal, certainly not even ‘austere’. They have found a magic money tree. They are presumably waiting for the seas to turn into lemonade. They are locking us into a magnificently communist-corporate hybrid order which will make the public-private partnerships of Blair and Brown look extremely pallid. If this continues then the only conservative thing about the Conservatives will be their inclination to hold on to their name. This is an excellent essay specifically about the grotesquely misnamed Conservative Party in the UK, but some of it applies to other notionally ‘conservative’ groups elsewhere, particularly in the Anglosphere. August 19th, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The catastrophising narrative continues. The government gives with one hand and takes away with the other regarding lifting restrictions and permitting travel. NHS colleagues continue their handwringing and attention seeking. Having basked in the limelight and affections of the nation and wallowed in the cult of the ‘clap for our carers’, they seem unable to loosen their hold on the pandemic. I, frankly, sense a great deal of disappointment that the pandemic is receding and a sense of relief each time the likes of Neil Ferguson predicts another wave as he has just done. Does nobody understand that this man has never been right about anything, ever? We need, constantly, to remind ourselves and anyone who will listen that all the above was for a virus that the vast majority of people were unlikely to become infected with, from which recovery (not dying) is approximately 99% and those who do die, tragically, are the usual suspects: the very old, the obese and the medically compromised. The outcomes of our response to COVID include a bankrupt country, record waiting lists for NHS treatment, some remarkable statistics regarding suicide and a host of other problems regarding child abuse, domestic violence and mental health problems. China did not do this to us…our own government did. – UNN Opinions: it is time to stop blaming China. August 19th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Steyn wrote the other day,
Good question. But why only ask it about the army? While many here are distrustful of governments in general, most agree that if a government must exist at all it exists for the purposes listed in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
I wish I could say “President Biden is failing at all these objectives”. Mere ineffectiveness would be so nice. He is worse than useless on every one of them. He is worse than the British government on every one of them, which is quite an achievement. ‘America is back’, all right, back to 1975. That affects us, too. Sharks attack when they smell blood in the water. In a spirit of open-mindedness I invite American readers more familiar with their local situation than I am to suggest any mitigating factors which might raise Mr Biden’s score to zero on any of: forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defence (Yanks could spell in those days), promoting the general welfare (promoting welfare dependency doesn’t count), and securing the blessings of liberty to himself and his posterity… on second thoughts, I must grant that he is doing OK at keeping Hunter Biden out of jail. August 18th, 2021 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
A 2016 BBC article describes how to spot vote fraud in African elections – in Gabon, Togo, Niger and suchlike places. ‘Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs’ says to watch out for such things as high turnout in specific areas, or discrepancies in votes versus ballots issued, and notes that delays in the result may be innocent but are suspicious. An older 2010 article I recall added to that list such things as anomalous ratios between 2nd and 3rd-party candidates. (A tin-pot-dictator style election where the favoured candidate gets 99% of the vote is sure to be suspected, but less attention may be paid to whether a given area’s ratio between the most popular losing candidate and long-shot third-party candidates actually makes sense.) This kind of statistical evidence is apparently good enough to have the BBC sometimes condemning, sometimes pointedly suspecting black politicians in black countries. When it comes to white politicians in western countries, by contrast – Biden in the US, for example – a different standard is used. That election also showed large anomalous statistics and ratios in several specific areas (Milwaukee, for example). As for ballot/vote ratios, Montgomery, PA was not the only place where vote updates changed many votes but fewer ballots, and it too had a very implausible Trump-to-3rd-party-candidate vote ratio. But phrases like ‘no evidence’, ‘judge dismissed’ and ‘not proved’ seem to crowd out thoughts of statistics in the BBC as regards the white, western election, despite some of the oddities being even more obvious from a UK perspective. Of course, no one can be made to see who has resolved in advance to keep their eyes shut, and nothing can be ‘proved’ if your standard of proof is set high enough – certainly not vote fraud (a point carefully analysed here – along with links to further statistical oddities). But using one standard of proof when the accused is black and another, higher one when he is white is the classic definition of racism. Sadly, while there may be some readiness within the BBC to confront anti-black colour-prejudice, I fear there is none when the colour is orange. Although the BBC have suddenly and strongly gone off Joe Biden, and are walking back their post-inauguration praise of him, I doubt the effect will extend back to last November. And I have to concede that, at a time when the BBC have abruptly stopped trusting Biden, reminding them of Biden’s October 23rd 2020 remark about having
is offering them information from a now-discredited source. 🙂 But at least black Africans can be sure the BBC will keep an eye on their election statistics, even if in a manner less than perfectly respectful of their equality to ourselves. (Added later) A similar prejudice is visible in the fact that the US spends almost two-and-a-half billion dollars annually to support honest elections in various foreign states – and did so in 2020, much of it on procedures specifically designed to maintain election integrity in the face of the pandemic. This analysis shows the many ways the 2020 US presidential election failed the standards that the US required of the foreign recipients of those funds. August 18th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Taliban is getting its message out on social media, too, giving live updates on its seizure of power. A man claiming to be an official representative has had an active account on Twitter since 2017 and has over 280,000 followers. He has had a lot to tweet about in recent days. This might seem unusual, considering how censorious Twitter usually is. It has punished people for stepping out of line on numerous issues from transgenderism to Covid-19. Most infamously, it banned the sitting US president, Donald Trump, earlier this year. Even more extraordinarily, the ban largely related to Trump’s behaviour off the platform. Many months on, as the Taliban tweets freely about its progress, Trump is still banned. August 17th, 2021 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Specifically, out of the bubble more.
One of many things ‘no one’ saw was the inverse analogy with Iran sending back the hostages just as President Reagan was being inaugurated. The mullahs felt no fear of President Carter but are on record as deciding to send them home to meet incoming President Reagan from a concern that:
The very same Democrat/US-‘liberal’ election rhetoric designed to make voters think Reagan might start WWIII suggested to the mullahs that he might be dangerously unpredictable – and that Carter was a pussycat In exactly the same way, the rhetoric they used against Donald Trump was useful to him – and very undermining to Biden’s ability to ‘deal’ with the Taliban (not that Biden had much ability they needed to undermine). Brendan O’Neill has explained how wokeness hurt the west’s Afghanistan efforts, but while Trump was in the white house there was also a counter-effect. Precisely because it was Trump’s enemies who were saying ‘he’s a crazy violent nutjob who might do anything’, the Taliban were more convinced to be wary of Trump than by Trump’s own threats alone – and more convinced they need not beware of Biden. Did no one that Raab talked to foresee that? I’m not picking on Raab specially. There are many MP’s I’d far sooner see gone from the Tory party, and as for the current ministers of the crown, they could all do with getting out (of the bubble) more. August 17th, 2021 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation. August 16th, 2021 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was in favour of the initial post-9/11 campaign and frankly do not regret that. But as I and quite a few others said back in the day, the time for declaring victory and getting out came many years ago. The objective should never have been ‘nation building’, and this was not ‘for the Afghan people’, but rather a reprisal for the 9/11 attacks; a punitive mission rather than a forever war on ‘terrorism’. That should have been it. Make the point then let the perpetual civil war resume with a salutary reminder to keep the fight local. Oh well. As with Iraq, I vastly overestimated the ability of the ruling class in the USA to actually focus on what mattered (not that the UK version is any better, it is just the consequences of our own clown-class are rather less global than when their American counterparts screw the pooch for decades). And so, the political masters of the now laughably mis-named ‘free world’ fly absurd flags, fretting about people being mis-gendered whilst the USA loses its longest war ever to a bunch of goat botherers with a good command of practical chemistry. Communo-fascist China must be wetting themselves with laughter. It is like a snuff movie set to a Benny Hill soundtrack. August 15th, 2021 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
BBC News 17:16 BST: Taliban take over Presidential Palace – reports Conveniently, Afghanistan has had its own Samizdata tag for nearly twenty years. It is interesting, if depressing, to look at the old entries. August 15th, 2021 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
The day before yesterday a man called Jake Davison murdered five people in Plymouth. In a pattern common with many spree killers he first murdered his mother and then went on to kill random strangers, including a three year old girl and her father. The three major “spree” or “rampage” killings in British history were carried out in Hungerford in 1987, in Dunblane in 1996 and in Cumbria in 2010. There was also a spree killing of five people in West Bromwich and Nuneaton in 1978. There have been other mass murders following different dynamics, such as serial killers targeting particular categories of victim such as prostitutes or homosexuals, or medical murderers like Dr Harold Shipman, who may have murdered hundreds over his lifetime. There have also been other spree killers who were stopped or killed themselves after claiming fewer victims than those listed above. Many years ago I wrote a pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance about the Dunblane Massacre called “Rachel weeping for her children”. I wrote,
Other than quoting that passage I will not repeat here any of the arguments about gun laws that I made in that piece. I simply wish to pose the question at the top of this post. Why weren’t there any British massacres of that type, the rampage killer who attacks random people, early in the twentieth century? It cannot have been that guns were unavailable: the world wars flooded the UK with guns. So far as I know spree killings were rarer in the US during that period too. Not that there was an absence of mass murders during this time – there were several political/racial pogroms such as the Tulsa race massacre, but random killings seem to have been less frequent than in the decades before or afterwards. The two major exceptions that I can recall, the Bath School massacre and Pacific Airlines Flight 773, were both carried out by means other than guns. I may be wrong about the US. That list on Wikipedia omits what I would have thought was the progenitor of the modern type of random mass shooting: the University of Texas clock tower massacre in 1966. I may be wrong about the whole thing. Perhaps there is no pattern to be discerned from what are, fortunately, very rare events. Yet it seems to me that there is just enough of a pattern there to make the question worth asking. August 14th, 2021 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
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