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.
|
|||||
|
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)
 Writing books about “current affairs” is tricky. If you write your book while whatever you are writing about is not yet over, you are liable to be wrong-footed by later events, especially if you thought it was over. But if you wait until you are sure that whatever it is has finally finished, your book is liable to be lost in a throng of rival books on the same subject, written by people all of whom, like you, know that it’s now or never, and at a time when whatever happened is now pretty much obvious to all. But what if you are spot-on about what is happening while it is still happening, but you wait until the dust settles? Then you miss your chance to have been “prophetic”. “That’s what I said!” works far better if you actually did say it, loud and clear, before it all became obvious. Stephen Davies latest book, entitled The Economics and Politics of Brexit: The Realignment of British Public Life, is a rather cunning answer to this dilemma.
Davies has written a book about a process which still has a way to go, but also about one of the consequences of this process which is already very clear. The larger process is the political realignment which Britain is now still in the thick of. But one of the many consequences of this realignment has now been pretty much settled. → Continue reading: Stephen Davies on Brexit and political realignment August 1st, 2021 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The truth is that China has come out of the lockdowns grimmer, stronger and more assertive. The world we knew has gone.” – Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph today (behind paywall). He is writing on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. An organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and which continues to run a heavily authoritarian and dangerous place. It is nothing to celebrate – quite the reverse. July 4th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The future of the flying car is finally arriving, a flying car, the AirCar, has completed a test flight between two airports in Slovakia, reports the BBC. This wonderful development brought to us by Professor Stefan Klein (the article has a short video showing the car flying etc.) is not yet licensed to fly, and given the caution around aviation, such approval may be a long way off, but it is technically possible now, almost a century after the English Electric Wren which was seen as a rival to the emergent motor car. To think that within around 31 years, English Electric would build the Lightning is simply mind-boggling. However, this fantastic development runs on a petrol engine, has an airborne range of c. 1,000 km (625 miles) and can cruise at 170km/h (c.106 mph), at 8,200 feet (pressurisation not an option at the moment it seems). Imagine the liberty of flight, in your garage, the horror of unrestricted travel, no speed cameras, the Left’s (and the State’s) hatred of mobility and autonomy will shine like the fiery pits of Hell. Two passengers, provided that they don’t weigh more than 31 stone. Let physics limit your weight, not the government.
but there is obviously a cautionary note:
With a 600 mile range, a self-fly/drive break on the Continent would be a breeze. Short-haul aviation is pointless in such a world, as are inflexible trains (HS2 etc.), even car hire. Bring it on. June 30th, 2021 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
As soon as I saw it I thought of psychohistory. I was not alone, judging from the most recommended comment to this fascinating Guardian article: ‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war An extract:
June 26th, 2021 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Posted to Samizdata by me on 23rd June 2016: “Well, I dunno”. The link to an image of the Daily Mirror‘s cover for that day showing a deep dark well with the slogan “Don’t take a leap into the dark – vote REMAIN today” seems to have died, but it can be seen in this collection of front pages from that day compiled by the Atlantic. I was not despairing but definitely a little pessimistic, as were many of the commenters. But in the wee small hours of June 24th things began to look different: “Well, well, well”. And in the bright fullness of day: “Now is the winter of our discontent, or perhaps just two very English words”. June 23rd, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Classics Won’t Be the Same Without Latin or Greek”, Professor John McWhorter writes in the Atlantic. He goes on to argue that
Being interested in languages, I bought Professor McWhorter’s The Language Hoax a few years back. I recommend it. It is something of a riposte to Professor Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass and I love a joust between academics. In the course of reading The Language Hoax I found out that Professor McWhorter is black. In a sane world I would have been only mildly interested in this fact, in the way that one is mildly interested to see an author’s photo on the dust jacket and to learn that he or she has two cats with amusing names. Or in the way that I was mildly interested but not at all surprised to learn that Professor Deutscher is an Israeli. We do not live in a sane world. Black American academics in fields that do not have “Black” in the title are rare. There are many reasons for this, including racism of the old and the new kinds. If Princeton has its way they will soon be rarer still.
Related: “Heresies of our time: that children should be taught to read music” – a post from 2020 in which I mentioned the proposal from the Oxford Classics faculty to reduce the “attainment gaps” between male and female students and between those educated at state schools and private schools by dropping Homer and Virgil from the first part of an Oxford Classics degree. So far as I can tell this proposal has not been implemented yet, so maybe the petition worked. But the engineers of the human soul are nothing if not patient. June 14th, 2021 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
A year ago today, the leader of the Labour party knelt in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Here is how it was reported at the time: The Independent: Black Lives Matter: Keir Starmer takes knee in solidarity with ‘all those opposing anti-black racism’ Sir Keir himself, on Twitter: We kneel with all those opposing anti-Black racism. #BlackLivesMatter I had forgotten about Parliament as a whole holding a minute’s silence for George Floyd, yet the BBC report has that as the headline and leaves mention of Sir Keir Starmer until far down the page. And that is the point of this post. Heaven knows, I detest the BLM movement as it actually is: an engine for manufacturing racial hatred founded by self-described “trained Marxists” whose goals are, not surprisingly, Marxist. But if you got your news from the BBC or the Guardian in June 2020, you would not have heard about all that “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” stuff. Come to think of it, you probably still won’t have heard about it from those sources in June 2021. It must have seemed a reasonable move at the time. The day before hitting the carpet, on June 8th 2020, Sir Keir had participated in a radio phone-in hosted by LBC’s Nick Ferrari in which he talked about the toppling of the statue of Sir Edward Colston and said,
This nuanced line had gone down rather well. Most of the callers were polite. In the press, many of the comments on his performance were favourable, even in outlets like the Mail or the Sun that are traditionally hostile to Labour. How natural, then, to balance out that right-wing law ‘n’ order talk with a harmless gesture to show he was still on-side. Everyone else was doing it: the UK Parliament as mentioned above, a bunch of senior Democrats in the US, the Metropolitan Police in London and many others worldwide. Yet Sir Keir kneeling is now widely seen as a political disaster. Looking at the trendlines of Sir Keir’s performance as Leader of the Opposition as measured by YouGov, “doing badly” is not much affected but “doing well” flattens out there and then, and, crucially I think, the numbers saying they “don’t know” suddenly decrease. There were quite a lot of people who started to have an opinion about Sir Keir as a potential prime minister when they saw him on his knees. June 9th, 2021 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier today, at the Historic Photos Twitter feed, I encountered this photo, of Lenin:
Here is how Historic Photos describes the state Lenin had arrived at, when this photo was taken:
I have read many things, including many books, about Lenin and his sayings and doings, yet I have never come across this photo until now. That could be me, just not having noticed it. But I think there’s a reason why this particular piece of Lenin imagery has not done much circulating. There is still fierce disagreement about Lenin and his impact upon history. Many still revere him, as the man who set in motion the most serious attempt to overthrow capitalism that has so far happened on this planet, and many others detest the man for the same reason, and for the disgusting brutality with which he set about doing this. Some think Lenin (good) was “betrayed” by Stalin (bad). Others, such as I, think that Lenin (bad) started what Stalin (bad) carried on doing. But what all of us, on all sides of such debates, agree about is that Lenin was a very important and very consequential figure, who had a lot to say for himself and who did a lot to shape the course of history, for good or for bad. However, in the above photo, we see Lenin in a state of utter impotence, looking downright comical. And that’s surely why this photo doesn’t get out much. Either Lenin had immense power and did hugely important and noble things or he had immense power and did monstrously evil things, but whatever he was he was certainly not a joke. If those of us with things to say about Lenin, one way or the other or yet another, wish to decorate our judgments about Lenin with a photo of the man, the above photo is not going to be the one that any of us would choose. To generalise, images of historic figures get circulated a lot, or not, depending on whether they illustrate how we already think of them. The world’s cameras spit out a daily torrent of portraits of the great, the good and the bad, and it is in the editorialising process, when the “best” images are selected and the rest put aside, that the camera is made to tell a particular sort of story. This is surely an important way that cameras lie, or at the very least mislead, although there are of course others. Image googling confirmed my hunch. If you go here and keep scrolling down, you will scroll down in vain if you wish to see the above “historic” photo, or any others resembling it. No, all you will get are pictures and graphic recreations of Lenin being anything but “paralyzed and completely mute”. May 24th, 2021 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
George Archer-Shee died at nineteen, in what might almost be called a natural death for a young British man of his class at that time – he was killed in the First Battle of Ypres. His name is inscribed on the Menin Gate but he has no known grave. He shared the manner of his death with thousands of others, but, quite against his own wishes, his short life before that had taken an unusual turn. At the time of his death he had been famous for six years. It all started in 1908 when George Archer-Shee was thirteen and a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Osborne. He was accused of having stolen a five shilling postal order intended for another cadet. An elderly post office clerk said she remembered Archer-Shee as having cashed two postal orders that day, one of his own (which no one denied) and the stolen one. Archer-Shee protested his innocence to no avail; he was expelled without much ceremony. That should have been that, a minor story of Edwardian disgrace, but his father refused to take it lying down. He engaged one of the most celebrated lawyers of the day – Sir Edward Carson, famous for many reasons, some of which are still controversial today, and determined to pursue the case to the highest court in the land. But there was a slight problem: if I have understood it right, at that time one could not sue the Crown. Quoting a 1939 article in the Pennsylvania Law Review:
Carson won in the end, as he usually did. Archer-Shee was exonerated. And the important precedent was set that the King can do wrong, and can be sued. So far, so Whig history. The setting of that precedent is how I come to know about the case. I think I read a rather good account of it and why it mattered in Look and Learn magazine in the mid 1970s. Terence Rattigan wrote a play loosely based on the story called The Winslow Boy. It has been filmed at least twice. But a more recent event also involving the Post Office – and the refusal of the Post Office to admit the possibility of error – and the refusal of the British State as a whole to admit the possibility of the Post Office being in error – and the blackening of the names of innocent people – made me think that we need to learn that lesson again. Let the BBC tell the story:
Edit: In the comments Rudolph Hucker pointed out that the doctrine driving the Post Office’s reckless prosecution of so many of its own employees bore an even closer parallel to the doctrine, supposedly overturned by the Archer-Shee case, that “the King can do no wrong” than I thought. He linked to a piece from the radio station LBC called ‘The Post Office were mendacious in the way they denied justice’ The title is a quote from Nick Wallis, a journalist who has been covering the Horizon scandal for many years.
May 11th, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Got a great idea for a thriller – the plot will knock your socks off. So there’s a shadowy Global Elite, yes? Davos, yachts, private jets. They used to need the masses to work in factories, till the fields, and do all the menial stuff, and, now and then, for an army. In my fictional world, big standing armies are a thing of the past. There’s no appetite for invasions any more. Rapid advances in AI, robotics and mechanisation also mean that The Global Elites will soon no longer need peasants toiling away in the factories and fields, causing deforestation, extinctifying species etc. Plus they’re mostly fat, stupid and ugly. (Sounds like the real world here.) My novel is set when the world population is 7 billion, but heading for 10 billion. Worse, those extra three billion people are not going to be three billion poor people living a subsistence life – they’re aware, through smart phones and the internet, of a better life, and their demand for food, for environment-destroying power generation, and for bling and cars and general ‘stuff’, is going to be a lot higher than was their parents’, thirty years ago. In my novel, the imaginary Global Elites – many of whom have openly talked about the urgent need to depopulate the earth – start thinking. ‘Hmmm,’ they think. ‘Ten billion of them is going to really destroy the environment and kill all the snow leopards and the blue whales – who’ve done nothing to deserve any of this, and are after all just as intrinsically valuable as any human, and much more valuable than certain humans of the lumpen proletariat variety. ‘Anyway,’ they think, even if we didn’t hate them for killing the blue whales and being fat and stupid, there’s no way the world can support an essentially middle-class lifestyle for seven billion people, much less ten billion. ‘And where does that lead?’ they say. ‘Old-fashioned resource wars! So actually, if we could help five or six billion people shuffle off this mortal coil in a relatively peaceful way – as opposed to via decades of small nasty wars, or even one or two really big ones – we’d be doing them a favour, really. Not to mention, the snow leopards, the blue whales, and ourselves, obviously.’ In my novel, they start off by releasing a virus. Now, obviously, they have to be careful. A real killer virus is unpredictable and chaotic, and it might get you and yours, or wipe out a disproportionate number of, e.g., tech nerds politicians, and top chefs, whom my main characters will need in future, while sparing too many fat old checkout workers and labourers, whom they won’t need, and the panic and chaos as millions of people start dropping dead in the street is going to have unforeseeable second-order effects in which my Global Elites might find themselves entangled. That’s what unpredictable and chaotic means, see. No, they need something controllable. So they decide to release a virus that is just bad enough to terrify people – helped along with a major dose of propaganda from the news outlets, governments, supranational bodies and social media organisations that are controlled (in my fictional world) by my imaginary Global Elites. And then they announce a vaccine. (Plot twist: they announce loads of them, even though it’s untried technology, created by supposedly competing companies. Too implausible? Not sure.) Despite this novelty, my plot cleverly has them scaring/boring people enough that they’re queueing up for jabs ‘to get to the pub’. Obviously they can’t nail them all with the vaccine – too big and sudden, with all that scary chaos and unpredictability – so what my characters do is they say, ‘There are lots of variants, and you will need regular re-ups with slightly adapted vaccines!’ I haven’t yet decided whether they then slip something in there at a later date, or release a new virus which reacts with the vaccines, but the key thing is they take out 10%, 20% or maybe (if I can make it plausible) 40% of the ‘herd’ – and the right 40%, because they’re controlling the vaccine distribution. Obviously, my survivors wonder what’s going on, but they’re terrified, grieving and demoralised – I might have them starving, too? – so they can’t do much. In fact, they’re so grateful to have been spared to work in the remaining factories that they sing the praises of the Global Elites. To create the fear needed to drive vaccination, the baddies lock loads of countries down – bit implausible, it’s never been done before, and goes against all the previous the advice on the WHO’s own website, which (in my novel) said ‘don’t lock up healthy people’, though (in my novel) it turns out they removed that advice just before the pandemic began and changed it to ‘do lock up healthy people’ hoping no-one would notice. The baddies force people to wear masks, stress the death figures every day – after inflating them beyond all logic, and they absolutely never mention that far more people recover. If anyone mentions recovery, they shout about ‘long virus’. They demoralise people by banning them from attending their parents’ funerals. They close the pubs – where people might swap ideas and foment revolution. They arrest people for sitting on park benches (though they wave through anyone spray painting rude words on statues). Lots more of that. It’s all good stuff. Very dramatic. They have to be careful though because locking down economies, even in novels, creates that chaos and panic which might spill over into their gated compounds. (My protagonists are guarded by armed police 24/7, and they go everywhere in armoured cars, but they’re still vulnerable if the balloon ever goes up.) So to avoid that they introduce ‘furlough’ (in the US I have them mail big cheques to people, which might stretch the credulity of my readers a bit). Millions are starving in the third world but the journalists in my novel don’t notice or care (or ask questions about the thousands of cancer patients and others who will die because of the lockdowns in advanced economies), and – given that the whole plan is to eradicate unneeded people – they’re just a bonus anyway. So my villains borrow (create) vast amounts of money – way too much to make any sense, like the kind of money you’d spend on a world war, not a virus that is taking my fictional UK back about a decade in the mortality stats – to spend on bullshit. ‘Doesn’t matter what’, they cry. (Temporary hospitals are one possibility I’m thinking of.) ‘All we need to do is keep the show on the road long enough! The money’s not going to be paid back, because the old days of an economy set up to keep a world of 7 to 10 billion people turning won’t be required when there aren’t 7 to 10 billion people any more.’ I must admit, I was struggling a bit with their motivation. Yes, they hate the people, and yes, they love the snow leopards. But why now? Well, turns out the tech isn’t all one way. The lumpen masses themselves are not far off being able to print their own plastic firearms and fly hordes of slaughter bots onto billionaires’ yachts in the harbour at Monaco, and livestream it, so my baddies have decided now is the time. Was talking to my wife about this idea for a novel over lunch, and she thinks no-one would buy it. ‘There’s no hero,’ she said. ‘And no-one would ever believe that world leaders would behave like that. I mean, yes, a few have. But not ours. Who do you think you are? Tom Clancy?’ April 8th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
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. |
|||||
