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.
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Last month, it was this:
A report published by the government predicts more than 12m adults and one million children will be obese by 2010 if nothing is done.
And this month, there is this:
Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has called for “stick-thin” models to be banned from the catwalks during London Fashion Week…
Ms Jowell said “stick-thin” models pressurised girls to starve themselves.
Damn these wretched sheep! Can they not get anything right? One minute, they are stuffing their ovine faces with calories and the next minute they are starving themselves. Have they no pity for the suffering of the Nagging Classes?
That the BBC can earnestly report, almost simultaneously, two flagrantly contradictory agenda-driven hysterias is symptomatic of the fact that we have too many paid worriers with too little to worry about.
I am sure that ours is not the first civilisation to undergo spasms of a sociological St. Vitus’ Dance nor will it be the last. But have there ever been so many popular hobgoblins surrounding the subject of food and eating? Could it have something to do with the fact that ours is possibly the first (or maybe second) generation that is more than one rainy season away from famine? Is it all just a part of the struggle to find a cultural narrative within which to fit this apparently easy abundance?
Who can say? But the sheep will graze on regardless.
By every measurable standard, interest and participation in the established political system is in freefall decline. Political parties of state who, only a generation ago, could boast of membership numbers in the millions, can now barely muster a few hundred thousand between them. The most apparent and immediate effect of this is a funding crisis, with both of the main parties now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
But, on the other hand, who needs voluntary donations when you can help yourself to some dollops of tax:
LABOUR wants taxpayers to plug a gaping hole in the party’s finances caused by a collapse in donations after the cash-for-peerages allegations.
Hazel Blears, the party chairman, told The Times yesterday that Labour, as the party of government, should get more public money to support political work.
There, problem solved. Can’t get people to give their money to you voluntarily? Then simply take it from them whether they like it or not. It’s not as if they will object or anything:
“That will mean, hopefully, you don’t have to go out and raise huge sums of money because there will be a level playing field….
“I think that is what the public wants…”
Want it? Why, they are crying our for it, demanding it, begging in the streets for it. In fact, I have no doubt that, within days, an ‘opinion poll’ confirming 100% public support for this measure will be cheerfully announced by every media outlet in the nation.
Ms. Blears will assuredly get her way. After all, we have a political establishment whose main (and perhaps even sole) preoccupation is now its own survival. In truth, it is a rotting carcass rolling around on its death bed gasping for a few more lungfuls of sweet oxygen.
A crisis of funding is easy to solve, if you have political power. A crisis of legitimacy is rather harder.
As I type these words, Britain’s Channel 4 is airing a major piece of breath-taking propoganda.
This two-hour prime-time ‘documentary’ is called ‘The Doomsday Code’ and purports to be a ciritical examination of the violent, apocolyptic, end-of-the-world ideology of (wait for it)…American Christians!
The story so far:
- American Christians and Israelis are conspiring to bring about a global nuclear holocaust and this is why they are attacking Islam
- Americans are deliberately causing global warming as a part of their monstrous plot to realise ‘End Times’
- The only hope for mankind lies with the UN but its effectiveness is being undermined by the “corrosive hostility” of the fundamentalist Christian Americans
I cannot find any specific programme website to which to link but there is a link to the website of the production company which is somehwat illuminating:
The Doomsday Code is produced by Fozia Khan and directed by James Quinn. It was commissioned by Aaquil Ahmed, Commissioning Editor for History, Science, Religion and Arts at Channel 4.
It is still broadcasting and has now moved on to Africa which, allegedly, is proving to be a fertile recruiting ground for the insanely violent American Evangelicals who are (among other things) doing their best to facilitate the spread of AIDS in accordance with the Book of Revelation.
I am not making this up.
Looks like the Holy War odds have just lengthened:
Pope Benedict XVI has said he is sorry that a speech in which he referred to Islam has offended Muslims.
Only fair, I reckon, given the superhuman levels of tolerance and generous spirit of the latter.
Weird echoes of the 12th Century in the 21st Century:
THE Pope’s visit to Turkey, which many hoped would herald a new era of improved relations between Islam and the West, was in doubt yesterday amid condemnation of remarks by the pontiff that appeared to link Islam and violence.
As Muslims all over the world protested, with effigies of Benedict XVI burnt during demonstrations in Pakistan, members of the Turkish Government urged the Pope to reconsider his visit in November. Senior officials in Turkey said that they could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead with the trip.
So, where is this going?
A. It will all blow over in a few days; or
B. One or other side will back down; or
C. We are headed for Holy War
The journey from environmentalism to sanity may not be so far after all:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reversed a 30-year policy by endorsing the use of DDT for malaria control.
The chemical is sprayed inside houses to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
And about bloody time too! The prohibition of DTT was a product of wrong-headed, fashionable green dogma and Lord only knows how many people in the developing world have paid for it with their lives. Just how many neural transmitters do you have shut down in order to hand-wring about poverty and premature death in the developing world while simultaneously campaigning against everything and anything that stands a chance of tackling them?
I sincerely hope that the greenslimers are seething with thwarted rage. In fact, I hope their blood boils until they have a collective stroke. I wish a pox on them (before they unleash a pox on the rest of us).
London calling! London calling! Reports are coming in of growing resistance to the brutal occupation of the Food Nazis:
Pupils at a South Yorkshire school are being fed fish and chips through the gates by parents who say the canteen is not providing what their children want…
The move is being seen as a backlash against TV chef Jamie Oliver’s campaign for healthy school dinners..
“We aim to provide good quality food which is within government healthy eating guidelines and helps the children’s learning in the afternoon “…
“The food that these parents are handing out is not part of a healthy eating diet and on top of that I have to question the morality of delivering it from the grounds of a cemetery.”
Smuggling food into prisoners is a time-honoured practice but I have to admit that the cemetery angle is cool. They may need to start digging tunnels though.
Hopefully, this is a ‘line in the sand’; a message from the public to the ruling class paternalists and busybodies that their food fascism is an intervention too far.
Well, if you spray acid everywhere:
Public faith in Britain’s political system is being eroded by alarmingly low levels of trust in Tony Blair’s Government, the standards watchdog said yesterday.
A detailed survey of public opinion carried out by the committee on standards in public life has exposed deep mistrust of politicians, with fewer than one in four people saying they thought ministers tell the truth…
The survey exposed corrosive levels of mistrust in the political system.
“This suggests a widespread disillusionment in the way the business of government and politics is conducted – people just do not believe they are being dealt with in a straightforward, honest and open manner” …
Of course, our political masters will conclude from this that the solution lies in compulsory voting.
Is this really the best way to combat negative stereotyping?
Britain could face the threat of two million home-grown Islamic terrorists, says a senior Muslim leader.
Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, fears that continued negative attitudes towards people of his faith could provoke a vast and angry backlash.
“There are a few bad apples in the Muslim community who are doing terrible acts and we want to root them out,” Dr Bari told The Sunday Telegraph.
“But some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they’re all terrorists — and that encourages other people to do the same.
“If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists — 700,000 of them in London,” he said. “If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive.”
So, for those people who think that all Muslims are terrorists, Dr. Bari’s message is: you were right all along. You are not frothing, paranoid Islamophobic bigots but astute judges of character. And by the by, I don’t know what ‘media’ Dr. Bari has been exposed to but if it the same press that I have reading then I think he will find that, when it comes to terrorist atrocities, the members of the British Fourth Estate have been tripping over each other in the headlong dash to blame everyone and anyone except Muslims.
But, quibbles aside, I am inclined to be charitable and assume that Dr. Bari sincerely wishes to repair damaged community relations and foster a mutual spirit of tolerance. However, threatening what is tantamount to civil war is unlikely to achieve such a laudable objective.
Dr. Bari is described as a “senior Muslim leader” so I suppose that makes him a representative. I only hope that he is not representative.
Speaking of moonbats, Germaine Greer dusts off her keyboard to put the untimely demise of her compatriot, Steve Irwin, into some sort of perspective:
In 2004, Irwin was accused of illegally encroaching on the space of penguins, seals and humpback whales in Antarctica, where he was filming a documentary called Ice Breaker. An investigation by the Australian Environmental Department resulted in no action being taken, which is not surprising seeing that John Howard, the prime minister, made sure that Irwin was one of the guests invited to a “gala barbecue” for George Bush a few months before. Howard is now Irwin’s chief mourner, which is only fair, seeing that Irwin announced that Howard is the greatest leader the world has ever seen.
So there we have it. Driven to despair by the illegal encroachment, a member of the oppressed Alternative Species community hit back against the Irwinist-BusHitler-Howard cabal. They must adopt a different maritime policy.
If laid end to end, I wonder how far the column inches about the recent war in Lebanon would extend? Would they stretch right around the earth? Would they extend to the moon and back? Perhaps they would only reach as far as Sudan:
Two years ago, the then American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that the killings in Darfur constituted genocide.
Since then, the number of deaths through violence, starvation and disease in Sudan’s western region has risen to at least 300,000, and of those displaced to about two million.
Despite the fact that genocide is a crime under international law, both the African Union and the United Nations have proved powerless to stop it.
Notwithstanding these horrifying statistics (which dwarf even the most overwrought claims about Lebanon), the response of the “world community” is very close to pin-drop silence. Apart from the occasional bloodless and anodyne article (such as the one linked to above) the MSM could not seem to care less. Where are the lurid photographs of dead Sudanese babies? Where are the demonstrations by “anti-war campaigners”? Where are the human shields? Where are the demands for a ceasefire? Where are the calls for a change of foreign policy? Where are the Nazi Germany comparisons? Where are the..ahem..’intrepid’ Western reporters with cry-me-a-river expressions on their faces? Where are the Church groups organising boycotts?
The answer is the same in all cases and there are no prizes for getting it right. No, the real question is why? Why the ocean of indifference to a sustained programme of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that is, by modern standards (and perhaps by any standards) horrific? It seems that the plight of impoverished Africans is enough to precipitate an avalanche of rock concerts and celebrity blubbing while hundreds of thousands of murdered Africans causes not even the thinnest batsqueak of protest.
I am just speculating here, naturally, but could this conspiracy of silence have something to do with the fact that the perpetrators of this real atrocity are Arab Muslims? Depressingly enough, I think the answer is yes. If even the Telegraph article I have linked to above is too timid to actually identify the aggressors (preferring instead the safe and neutral term ‘rebels’) then claims of ignorance or laziness simply will not do. I don’t imagine there would be quite this level of caginess if it was the Israelis who were laying waste to Darfur.
In my opinion, Darfur is kept off the radar screen because it is too embarrassing for the bien pensent. Having adopted the narrative of Arabs/Muslims as victims of oppression they are pretty much obliged to ignore or dismiss any evidence that might undermine that view (such is the mental paralysis induced by narrative). Besides, Africans living in the West seem disinclined to blow up airliners, so there is no need to waste precious air-time deliberating about the ‘root causes’ of their anger.
The horrors of Darfur cannot be excused by reference to Israeli or American ‘occupation’ and so it is locked away in the attic like a mad relative. Yes, it is ugly and unfair but at least we know for sure that there is not one single shred of decency or honesty in the entire (and preposterously misnamed) anti-war movement.
One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it.
– From ‘The Column of Phocas’, a novel by Sean Gabb.
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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.
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