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]
|
No, I cannot actually read Danish
Yesterday morning, I strugged to get out of bed after the Friday Samizdata party, caught the train to Stansted airport, caught the early flight to Aarhus in Denmark, caught the bus into town, took lots and lots of photos for a large Samizdata posting, and then checked in to my hotel. Wifi was provided in the lobby but not in the rooms. Oh well, good enough. (The group of intense looking young men crouching round a laptop and speaking Russian at the table in the lobby closest to a power outlet does add to the atmosphere, but also makes it harder to keep my laptop charged).
However, my card reader failed to be packed in the struggle to get out of my flat yesterday morning, so I could not upload the photos for the post. My plans to elicit a “What the <expletive> is Michael doing in Denmark immediately after the Samizdata party?” reaction from the readership had failed.
No problem really – I shall just post the article in a day or two. Meanwhile, Denmark is a land of very flat countryside, nice pubs, friendly, decent and at times brave people (even if they do have a slightly worrying overenthusiasm for historical enactment), adequate coffee, and nice pubs. I am enjoying the weekend out of London.
Bonus question though. What the <expletive> is Michael doing in Denmark immediately after the Samizdata party? Kudos for anyone in the commentariat who can figure it out.
It is, I suspect, no accident that it is in Europe that climate change absolutism has found the most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest popular hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of Green alarmism and what has been termed global salvationism – of which the climate change issue is the most striking example, but by no means the only one – which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy.
– Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, quoted today by Guido Fawkes
Overconfident?
Governments are happily increasing their power everywhere by stoking fear of terrorists. Why risk undermining that by spilling over into loony implausibility?
Terrorism is the “biggest threat to all European nations,” Home Secretary John Reid has said as he discusses ways to boost security with five EU ministers.
– BBC
Utter tripe. Terrorism does kill, indubitably. That embarrasses governments that pretend to be perfect protectors.
Ignoring government self-image, it might be a serious enough threat to some people in some European states, to be worth some European governments spending a lot of treasure tackling it; and it might even be serious enough to merit changing the law to cope with it. I doubt both those prescriptions, and the latter more than the former, as regular readers will know. But they could conceivably be true.
However, let us review the facts against Mr Reid’s stronger assertion:
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any European nation. No European nation state, and no identifiable national group in Europe is in danger of loss to terrorism endangering its identity or existence.
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any Europen state. There are a handful of states in the world whose existence is from time to time endangered by terrorism. None of them is currently in Europe. The only very obvious example is Iraq. Colombia, Nepal, and others have come close recently, but no EU country has been in that position since the Greek civil war.
- To individual people and certain groups more than others, terrorism may present a threat, it is true. But that is not true of all European nations. The majority of EU countries have had no terrorist incidents whatsoever in at least a decade.
- Even in the few countries with significant terrorism in recent years (which really means France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK, if you extend ‘recent years’ to cover the last 20 or 30, which is a pretty generous estimate of the contemporary for a political phenomenon), actual casualties have been small. Hospital infection, food poisoning, non-political crime, bad driving… each presents a bigger risk to any of us. Terrorism is plainly not the biggest threat faced by people anywhere in Europe.
Witless hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of dictatorships propagandising their presumed-credulous servitors, in order to buff up their self-image. (Read any government-endorsed press story from an African or Mddle Eastern bullydom.) Dictatorships cannot bear to be embarrassed, and are embarrassed by terrorists, because they can never concede anything is outside their control. But in liberal states that sort of pretension to deity is supposed to be mocked from office. Which is Britain? Or is the question, which is Europe?
See if you tell the difference.
The EU and the US have failed to reach an agreement on airline passenger data sharing. This is a euphemism. The US is demanding information on all travellers that the European Court of Justice says violates our privacy, and the EU countries have been trying to square the circle. They have failed so far.
Let us be clear. The member states want to do it. All 25 of them, despite Germany’s constitutional data protections. They would love to give the FBI your travel plans, bank account details and dietary preferences. UKgov is particularly keen, and makes sure such information is always sent ahead from UK flights to such friendly, peaceful and enlightened regimes as the People’s Republic of China (it bullied the other EU states into accepting the principle of requiring carriers to retain all communications data for state inspection). What is stopping this becoming an universal convention is not European states but the independent, supra-national institutions of the Union.
Continuing on the topic of Belgian idiocy, I have been marvelling at the way the police in Brussels have been pronouncing on yet another night of rioting by Muslims in that city.
Philippe Close, the chef de cabinet of the Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, said that the authorities would continue their efforts to defuse the situation in a peaceful manner, but he announced that the police will be less complacent in future, “since we cannot tolerate that this [Marollen] neighbourhood falls victim to a problem from outside the neighbourhood.”
Why ‘in a peaceful manner’? People try to set fire to a hospital and that should be solved ‘peacefully’? After three days of violence and looting of private property, the police should be cracking skulls without apology and to make the important point that violence should be met with greater violence. If they cannot protect the taxpayers who pay their salaries, what use are they? Moreover what are we to make of Philippe Close’s remark about the Marollen district falling victim to a problem from “outside the neighbourhood?” Does that mean it would be okay if only the rioters were local lads?
No doubt the Vlaams Belang (about whom I am deeply ambivalent) will reap the rewards from the Muslim rioting at the upcoming Belgian municipal elections, probably leading to the Belgian government banning them at some point in the near future.
The fact Belgian newspapers want it to be harder to find the content they put on the internet is weird (why bother having an on-line presence at all then?), the fact they went to court to force Google to stop driving traffic to their sites is bizarre, the fact a Belgian court found against Google is insane.
This book states what the revisionists have questioned: the fall of the Roman Empire sucked and the Dark Ages really were dark and a regression for civilisation. Looks like a must-read for fans of ancient history.
Dutch-born writer Ian Buruma writes about the issues stemming from the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. On the basis of his previous writings, I would have expected his account to be a compelling one. This reviewer of his book, however, gives a fairly harsh assessment. (Via Arts & Letters Daily).
Readers of Murder in Amsterdam are likely to close the book with a heavy heart. One reason is that the problem it addresses, the emergence of militant Islam as a divisive political/religious force in the West, is not going to go away soon. Another is that, though full of learning and skilled if tepid reporting, Buruma’s book often feels muddled, ungenerous and confusing. There is plenty of scholarship on display, but no compelling point of view.
There is, however, an off-putting strain of snobbery. Buruma, an Asia specialist and the author of Inventing Japan, Anglomania and, most recently, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, grew up in Holland but left it as a young man in the 1970s. Now a New Yorker, he clearly feels he’s gone on to bigger and better things. He rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at some aspect of Dutch life, whether it’s the “dank and gray” area of the Hague he was raised in or the “arrogance” of the great national soccer teams of the 1970s and ’80s.
Van Gogh’s murder followed the assassination two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, Holland’s flamboyantly gay, and very popular, anti-immigration politician who had also railed against the Islamicization of the Netherlands. Fortuyn was killed not by a Muslim, but by a white, left-wing vegan “activist”, who didn’t like the fact that the flashy politician wore fur collars and criticized immigrants. “The sobering truth,” wrote Rod Dreher in National Review shortly after Fortuyn’s death, “is that Europe – democratic, gun-controlling Europe – is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead.”
Read the whole article.
There is an interesting article in Newsweek suggesting capitalism is on the march in more minds than you might think.
In France, books approved by the Education Ministry promote statist policies and voodoo economics. “Economic growth imposes a way of life that fosters stress, nervous depression, circulatory disease and even cancer,” reports “20th-Century History,” a popular high-school text published by Hatier. Another suggests Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were dangerous free-market extremists whose reforms plunged their countries into chaos and despair. Such blatant disinformation sheds new light on the debate over why it is that Europeans lag so far behind Americans in rates of entrepreneurship and job creation.
[…]
a recent poll by the IPOS Institute finds the market economy’s approval rating rising to 59 percent among Germans under 30, with only 32 percent saying the state needs to play a bigger role. Ten years ago, the figures were reversed. “The values shift is already underway,” says Bürklin. It’s about time.
Indeed it is about time. The absurdities and contradictions of the statist world view is our biggest ally and gradually more people do figure out better theories for understanding reality regardless of what they are taught.
The Europeans mess up once again. We look at them playing power politics without a powerful hand or a sense of bluff. It takes some level of incompetence to have the Chinese do to you what you tried to do to the Americans:
Today, the Chinese are attempting to do to the Galileo system the same thing that Europe tried, and failed, to do to the US. China has registered with the ITU its intent to use frequencies that are as close to Galileo’s as Galileo’s were planned to be to GPS 3. The speculation is that this is the Chinese response to the European refusal to allow China into the charmed circle of senior Galileo management.
I mustn’t gloat.
Spain’s socialist government is turning its back on the post-Franco ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ approach with regard to the Spanish civil war. It plans to prohibits any political event at the location of Franco’s tomb in the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid. Yet whilst I am hardly a fan of Franco, the notion that a socialist government has any moral authority to suppress pro-Franco sentiments strikes me as absurd. There were no ‘good guys’ in the Spanish civil war and if the current Spanish socialists see themselves as the heirs of those who fought Franco then they see themselves as heirs to despicable would-be tyrants who were in no way admirable just because their enemy was little better. It was a war between mass murderous collectivist socialists of various dispositions against mass murderous collectivist national socialists.
In many ways the one thing Franco had to commend him was that his system of government was always unlikely to outlive him whereas a socialist system might have lasted longer… which is to say it might have lasted until the late 1980’s and in which case more the mass graves being dug up now would be filled with falangists and their families as opposed to socialists and their families (not that the left was shy about slaughtering its civilian enemies during the war).
People who get misty eyed over the resistance to Franco in the Spanish civil war are fools. It did not really matter who won, Spain was going to lose regardless. A pox on both sides of that terrible war.
|
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.
|
