The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

You can read all about it here. Very surprising, but perhaps not, for the poor assaulted Russians have been in the front line against enemies of reason, internally from intellectuals, and externally from the “east and south”, for some centuries.

Here in the North, and being a Catholic, I have running spats with aggro-chavdads every 31st October. One of whom must have come back disappointed in the night last year and superlatively-egged our car, so that I had to car-wash it five times.

No reports of untoward assaults on the house so far this evening. 

Just that. Watch this space.

Parturiunt Montes; tamen, nascetur ridiculus Mus (or not.) 

I chanced on Brian Mickelthwait’s post on Samizdata about the wide and promiscuous use of this word by our masters and controllers in order to frighten us into losing our liberties to them (our masters) and I want to use it to flag certain things.

Brian found a nice post on “Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, a blog by Russell Blackford, an Australian writer and philosopher. If you go there, the text nicely illustrates the problem of understanding that exists between the secular liberal West and what our Masters call “Islam”, when I think that they think that they mean Moslems who are not “radical Islamists”, about what States ought to be allowed to do and legislate for and how, and on what philosophical grounds.

Waleed Aly (author of People like Us) is a secular Sunni Moslem and this is what Russell Blackford wishes he had said.#

My contention here is that “radical Islam” (Wahhabists aside) seems to be a rather modern infection, whose inception seems to post-date the invention of “Socialism”, which is to say, the advocacy of anihilating all the good done to all people of the world by Capitalism who have been fortunate enough to have come into contact with same (except for whoever could be a warlord, local or otherwise.) From the 17th Century during which Islam faced (and lost against John Sobieski in) its Teenage Crusading phase, until recently, inter-religional and intercultural flare-ups had been mercifully rare, and short-lived.

Churchill, in The River War, did highlight in a timely fashion Islam’s “local warlords’ “ still-abiding propensity to cause sharp local difficulties to the ordered life of modern or emerging nations and the efforts of British Civilisation to enlighten the lives of all people, but there was not some general alert, darkening the entire world. No, this seems to have happened recently. The efforts of American “Liberals” to side themselves with such people as “Truthers“ , raises the possibility that Socialism may be pursuing a tactical direction allying itself with “radical Islam” so as to degrade the ability of the USA (The Last Best Hope) to resist assaults on the West from any angle.

I only raise this because the often simplest and most transparent explanations for things may be the true ones.  Could it be that the real mortal Enemy of Man, that is to say Socialism (initially defeated as in 1815, 1918, 1945 and 1989 - and progressively assaulting Man ever more virulently as Churchill’s “Strong Arms of Science” gain more benignity and strength) has mutated?  Has Socialism entered surreptitiously into the body of Islam, now a middle-aged philosophy and most probably therefore increasingly benign and relaxed towards others, especially “People of the Book”, in order to try again to bring about the Destruction of Man? I do not say this to let the Truthers off, for I think they are disgusting, ungrateful, leftist anti-western saddo turds and slimebats, oathbreakers and quislings, their souls like those of Animal Rights Terrorists foredoomed therefore to Wander Eternally After Death,  but the temporal coincidence of “radical Islam” and of Socialism’s fightback from impending disaster does interest me.

I just wonder if it’s not Islam’s fault after all, but it’s just unfortunately caught a nasty dose of a bad pre-Capitalist disease, that still hangs about despite reality and reason? Highly-educated populations like Polly Toynbee still vote for socialist/statist politicians, so we have clearly not got the vaccine right yet. 

Reports are beginning to circulate in the blogosphere and elsewhere of the LA’s best ever Conference. Accounts of it and of the input of particular speakers will shortly feature on the Alliance’s website and on this blog.

Sadly, my rheumatoid arthritis decided to ground me from Thursday last, so I couldn’t be your correspondent as I would have wished.

Sean Gabb did a bit about this a little time ago, but this comment reproduced below is so important that I thought I would flag it up fully on the Mainblog (as opposed to on the Afterblog, the Mizzen-blog, the Foreblog or the Blogsprit.) I hope that E Zantryus does not mind; anyway it’s too late now, so there.

I admit (mea culpa) that I had not referred previously to the wikipedia entry on this matter, but here it is for us sceptics/contrarians/deniers/heretics (me? I’m a denier….soon I expect I will be a heretic) for everyone to go to and competely redraw so it contains at least some truths. Even at a somewhat cursory 30-second view, I note that the x-axes of those graphs which the writers use to show the relationship of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations versus progress of Ice Ages, are exactly reversed from those on the wikipedia Ice Age page. Interesting anomaly!

We ought to recall that one Pope, I forget which, defined “heresy”  as “an exaggeration of the truth”.

E. Zantryus // Oct 26th 2007 at 7:04 am (edit)

When you do a Google search for “Global Warming,” one of the top two results that always pops up is the Wikipedia entry for this subject. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Unfortunately, most of the people that sign up and edit this article exhibit a clear pro-global warming. This means that everyone from school children to the media are getting this highly biased view of Global Warming, when they research this topic via a Google search. Fortunately, however, ANYONE can sign up on Wikipedia free of charge in less than one minute and edit this article. I would encourage everyone to sign up and contribute to this article, to ensure it presents the correct view of global warming.

-E. Zantryus

(I originally posted this about five days ago, but it so reduced bloggage-traffic to a stalinist gosplan-crawl, that I voluntarily deleted it, for the good of the blog. But I post it again now, in case everybody who could read was on drugs or something.) 

At 20 minutes to ten local time (raise a glass at 7.40 tonight here) 70 miles west of Cairo, Montgomery’s artillery started on the Afrika Korps and the Last Battle of the Old Empire, against socialism its new and mortal enemy, was under way. It was not the turning point in Africa; that was three months earlier, but it was the symbolic last appearance on their own, of Old Anglosphere soldiers, largely without Americans (no disrespect there, for they had their hands full in the Pacific at the time.)

Could modern liberalism and our notions of Liberty have arisen in any other culture than this one?Could they still, if there are remotely friendly ones still out there? If sovereign individual Liberty was to be expunged, erazed and eliminated in this Age of the World - and the prognosis is not good right now, or we in the LA would not need to have invented ourselves - could Liberty be reborn anywhere else? We ought to have a plan B.

Stuff going on such as the UN, the EU, Western lefty-dons who have collectively ruined the lives of modern Africans, a Russia re-enslaved, not to mention pre-Capitalist barbarian Creeds based on Tribal Survival in lands of little worth, gather like the black horizon-cloud bank of an approaching typhoon.

Candidates are few. Of the civilisations which have had the power to export themselves over the globe, that is to say mainly the European autarkies, none has a clean record. If a civilisation, or rather or instead a political “value-set” is to be propagated, then it helps if its practitioners apply it in their dealings with others with whom they come into contact, and if they apply it by example and with gentleness.

Let us first consider nations with originally comparable cultural and technological skills. 

Thus, the less said about Spanish and Portuguese activities in South America and Africa for example, the better (They can’t complain that we plundered their “treasure-ships” - their deeds in acquiring the stuff were largely unspeakable, and anyway we needed the dosh to fund our side of their war upon us and upon their Dutch and Belgian helots, prosecuted by them because we were being liberals!)

The Belgian Congo comes to mind. As a boy, I remember the harrowing radio broadcasts on the “BBC Home Service” from there in the 60s. There was no live Wireless Tele-Vision at the time, thank goodness, for I would have had nightmares at that age. Belgian Imperial Staff and their wives and children didn’t personally deserve the deaths they got, but their masters had a fine example Over the Water from Ostend, and they ignored us and our advice, totally.

French people for a long time were afraid to travel to North Africa. Perhaps they are still, I do not know. If I was them I would not risk it. But North Africa has now travelled to them. Their President’s remark about “canaille” is understandable but they also have brought hatred upon themselves.

The Dutch don’t seem to figure much: that wasn’t meant to rhyme…..Some wanted Indonesia to come to us in time! (Yep, and I can write convincing Kipling-doggerel too. A grand and under-rated poet, whose stuff ought to be taught today, but is not.) Perhaps the most populous Moslem nation in the world would not have been slaughtering so many Christians in East timor and elsewhere if it had joined the commonwealth in the late 1940s….or perhaps it still would, but we cannot know now.

What of Russia, a tangentially-Asian nation trying to be European, and facing in the wrong direction? Northern Tartars, starting form middle-Asian culture, speaking a West Slavonic Language, and trying to be French? Stupid British Chiefs of Police would say Russia - seen as a victim of a murder (not altogether innapropriate) was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Russia too tried to export itself (we’re still paying - vide the IRA etc.) We used to print badges saying “VISIT THE SOVIET UNION, BEFORE THE SOVIET UNION VISITS YOU“. I still have one somewhere, must polish it up to remind people.

Could any these have been the home of liberalism?

Er, probably not, but p’raps the Dutch? People like us, slooping about in the cold windy mud on the Outer Edge Of The World; to them and to us, the sea was/is a highway and never a border - just like us and the Norsemen, for by then we were probably all cousins anyway. The boats all looked the same. One was found in Canada. (The Dutch gave us the EF50 in 1940, an hour ahead of the occupiers - a cyber-bottle of champagne-substitute to the first responder to tell me what this is and what it was (& still can be) for, and why it was crucial!)

China?

Nah. Almost all of China’s history is soaked in blood and serfdom. Big place for pre-enlightenment Man to handle, so if yu wuzz a warlord, and you wuzz a wannabe-big one, then you had to reach far and butcher wide. Gunpowder and writing, that’s all (and I personally don’t believe the gunpowder bit as firmly as western lefty students tell me I should.)

Japan?

I admit I don’t know a lot about Japan, except that although Englishmen make the best lovers, the Japanese have found how to make them smaller and cheaper. I don’t predict that anybody will from now on stop Japan from owning nuclear weapons; the question is whether it wants to, and that’s a decision for the Japanese; the history explains itself. The tragedy is that the only hitherto use of such weapons was the strategically and tactically correct one - against an enemy nation that did not possess them. But Japan looks good, although not as good as…..

India?

India is interesting. There has not been a longer Imperial association between Britain and almost any other country on the earth except this one. I have high hopes for India, possibly the next defender of the Free World, after the fascist lefty nazis have finished degrading America (they will regret it, when they are done, and there is nobody to speak for them, and India is parhaps not ready, or even willing.) We had a bit of a rocky start with India, I freely admit, but we were the first technologically and rationally-driven nation to have to learn how to teach others how we thought it was best to live. We got there in the end, ofr it’s a fine modenr country that can feed itself, and exports food too, and has a healthily sceptical attitude towards western nazi lefty greenazis which want it to “cut its carbon emissions”. Indians, tell the Goracle-buggers to “go forth from here, travel widely, and make children by having sex”.

“The Arab World”?

Hmmmmmmmmmm. As Sean Gabb said once at a Putnet Debate, “Islam is a fine religion!” Certainly, and unlike Islam, Christianity’s outings against other “religions” as opposed to internally, were never offensive, only defensive (such as the Crusades) unless you consider how the Spaniards blotted their copybook in South America vs the Incas and others. (But I’ve already rubbished the Spaniards - worse, they LEFT THE WAR after the Madrid bombings. You don’t become an Oathbreaker and skedaddle away from pain just because the enemy has hit your homeland. Very sad all round, a very poor show, I am sorry to say. Note to guvmint of Spain; (perhaps the people would be different but they have been deselected) consider yourselves demoted to the “under-16 extra B” subs bench.) But I was doing the “Arabs”…is there actually any such entity yet? No. They are a pile of nations just like everywhere else, but none shows any semblance of intention to overthrow its current oligarchy and wholeheartedly embrace a liberal pluralist political settlement.

We could still help them to get it right in Iraq, but we will leave, just like the last time (1991) and the time before that (1926) ‘coz it’s boring and a bit too far away. 

Me? I’m half-Lebanese. It would be nice if the Anglosphere’s relations with the “Arab” “world” could turn out like the Indians, but I don’t hold out hopes.

So we’re left with India. I daren’t mention Israel because the leftie-Jew-haters are watching, and the blog will get shut down if I said what I thought about “Palestinians” and their European brown-nozers, but maybe another time.

Isn’t that interesting? We’ve just had a major electric-power-outage here, while I was (thinking about) typing about how nice Israel might be to us in our hour of travail.

Perhaps it’s down to Haliburton, keen as ever to stifle the friends of Israel so the Hallies shall not have been seen to “go to war for oil”!

So who’s going to carry the torch for liberalism, when the Anglosphere goes down?

We do know, actually, in our hearts, really, why the guvmint is picking on fat people.

Daniel Hannan has a good bit of bloggage today, (see above) about this rather pressing (sorry!) matter. I quote a choice bit:

“Anti-fat campaigning unites a number of disparate interests. Anti-capitalists and greenies see it as another stick with which to beat McDonalds. Snobs seize on it as one of the few acceptable ways in which they can still look down on the poor. Above all, bureaucrats descry new opportunities to expand their powers with targets and strategies, bans and regulations, publicity campaigns and task forces.

We keep hearing that we are in the grip of an “obesity epidemic”. Never mind the faux-medical language, which suggests that fatness is an affliction, rather than the result of choices. Is it really true?

Pull out a photograph from, say, a hundred years ago. Observe those jowelly Edwardians…”

To fully enslave a population, I mean REALLY properly, you have to control not only what they think, how they live, and how you shall permit them to breed (that’s coming back next, I bet you 5p) but also what they shall be allowed to eat, and what it shall taste like (remove salts and fats, criminalize their inclusion, and you can then REALLY depress the poor bastards.)

Come to think of it, when I posted about slebs not being seen eating, the other day, I forgot politicians. When did you last see a pol eating or drinking? 

I have never written about art before here, but a great deal of guff and puff is talked about it. “Society” (which I think does indeed exist in an organic sense, but not in the way Margaret Thatcher was thought by the Communist Nazis and other fascists to mean that it did not) is impacted upon by the art that goes on inside it. To me and I expect to many libertarians, Art and Science have an indistinct border - the main degree awarded, after all, by various Universities, is called “Master of Arts“, even if the recipient was a “scientist” in the modern usage of the word. Art reflects what a civilisation thinks about itself.

What’s the point of art? It’s what real or ordinary people, not “Gods” (aka Matisse who is reputed to have once said he was one) use to depict stuff to each other. For me, “art” is how you show to others where you have come form and what it looked like. Now we are Six (as the book says) a lot of it can be Brian’s “billion monkey” stuff. Google Brian Micklethwait and  “billion monkey“. People can share art in real time about what they have done and where they have been. So in this sense “modern” Art is becoming truly representational again.  J M W Turner did art, with what he had. Leonardo da Vinci did the same thing.

Dictocrats, nazis and other similar kinds of socialists all realise the iconic importance of art. To them, it is monumental, hyper-realistic, airbrushed statuary of themselves - or else just take a look at any communist-era bank notes - the Czechoslovak pre- 1989 100-crown “greenback” was a particularly fine example of craggy nordic man, stern-featured headscarfed woman both gazing intently up Stage Right, past sheaves of corn and a middle-distant panorama of smoking chimney stacks  and cog-wheels. Here it is in all its glory! Who could possibly say that this ghastly, nazi inhuman stuff is not art?

Or any of the murals of the butcher-pig Saddam Hussein, or that other bugger hiding in North Korea. That Jim Livingstone Wally in London would do the same on posters if he thought he would get away with it: just look at him, he’s a dead ringer for a 50s Polish Commie or the Goracle.

Go to houses where I teach, and pretty much you find on the walls, if not vastly expensive and expensively-shot pictures of the children, with or without their parents and all sprawled informally all over a white floorground, you find JACK VETTRIANO. This has to be the most hated and reviled artist in the history of the modern world. The whole caboodle is very, very funny! I personally like his stuff for he has studied how to draw people, he puts them in emotional situations which ordinary folk instinctively understand and identify with, he titles them sensitively, and they sell and sell and sell and sell….Originals go now for up to a million, so get one if you can… (…also you will have to bear not to be invited to dinner in Islington ever again, or else don’t admit that you own one - keep it for your bust hedge fund.) His own attitude to his critics, that is most of the “Art World” in the West, is refreshingly insouciant. 

But about 100 years ago something awful and rather portentiously strange happened: almost as if”art” was portending the First World War. Art, instead of being a window on the past, showing us all where we had come from and what it had been like, tried to go into the future. Like the Kaiser did whe he “dropped the Pilot”. Like “computer models” of the future (and we all know where that leads as to global warm-mongering etc) which are always and invariably wrong, art when applied to the future is blind.

Art became the name for that sector of it that the prevailing culturati-of-the-day wax lyrically and opaquely about. They did this often in front of those Classes of people whom they despise. Art thus began a downward spiral of decreasing realism amid more and more contemporary PR-hype about less and less content, enabling its producers to hide the fact that they did not know or care about how to draw anything. (At the same time public buildings became increasingly monstrous and faceless, reflecting probably the attitudes of the Enemy Class towards “lesser” people, but that’s another story, about architects, for later. Corbusier - gahhhh…. “Mr Crow” - who’d give a job to a guy like that? - I’ve said enough already, and that thing in Nuremburg that was going to need, er, six billion bricks…? Er? Ummmmmmmm? With what labour would it be built….or need I ask?)

Picasso’s works evolved further into primary-school-drawings. Matisse’s “economy of line” became an excuse to almost not draw anything much at all. Henry Moore got to waste many tons of bronze, now happily being recycled progressively by friendly and ecological metal-dealers-of-the-night. As for Miro and Kandinsky, well, your guess is as good as mine, but I’d hazard a guess as to what they’d been smoking. And I would not even like to say what I think about such “in-your-face” “statements”, as made by, say, Tracy Emin, or that sadly-obscene and obscenely sad statue that got put up in Trafalgar Square the other year: one might be arrested for hate-speech under some law or other that we have not heard of yet.

“Interpretation” is a buzzword often associated with the pretentious prose that “critics” and frequently artists themselves use, as a sort of affectation. The purpose must be to loft the importance of the “installation”, while obscuring its total lack of meaning as much as possible. here is a recent example - this is not art, it is a collection, expensively collated, of trash;

British-born sculptor Tony Cragg (°1949, Liverpool) left his native land in 1977 to work on the Continent. He now resides in Wuppertal, Germany. This work, entitled ‘Britain Seen From the North’ (1981), is typical of a period when Cragg made floor and wall reliefs out of broken pieces of found rubbish.

It features the shape of Great Britain, oriented so that east is up, north is left. At that left is the figure of a person, possibly the artist himself, ‘seeing’ Britain from the north. Because of its components, the work has often been interpreted as a comment on the state of the nation at that time, when it went through considerable economic hardship – especially in the north.

Cragg was British representative at the (43rd) Venice Biennale (in 1988), where he earned a menzione speziale. In the same year, he won the Turner Prize. In 1994, he joined the Royal Academy and in 2002 he received a CBE. In 2007, he won the Praemium Imperiale. Not bad at all for a bloke who started out as a lab technician at the British National Rubber Producers Research Association.

Jantien van der Vet alerted me to the existence of Cragg’s strange wall map, acquired by and exhibited at the Tate Modern in London.

This is by no means the most extreme example of what we face; I merely had it to hand. You could cite the famous “Tate Bricks”, which I was told off by a Tate zoo-keeper for walking on in 1980, as I just thought it was a slightly raised bit of floor which I was crossing. It was globally praised to the rooftops at the time, although thankfully enough normal people were still left alive to say that it was, er, just a couple of layers of bricks.

Of course no Libertarian ought to criticize another person for his/her taste in art, or in theory in anything else, subject of course to natural rights being honoured. What I object to is another aspect of what Sean Gabb calls the cultural hegemony of the tastes of one Class, and almost always a tiny minority at that. That same Class currently likes to publicly rubbish Tesco and MacDonalds, in its media (to which it believes it owns rights of access) possibly thinking that those same masses who don’t appeciate “art”, nor who want to read utterly unreadable novels by narcissistic nobodies, also patronize these establishments.

I’m not a prejudiced old bumpkin, honest, please believe me. Perhaps if education of students AND teachers was finally taken out of the hands of the state, some of this unspeakably innapropriate nonsense-on-stilts posing as “art” would simply disappear, and the problem would go away.

SLEBS.

Celebrities.

Do they actually, ever, eat? I do not know. Do you? Have you ever seen one eating? If not, are they human? If not, are we all being “had”?

I mean, you never see a pic of one grunching into a MacDonald’s, I mean, do you? I don’t, but perahps I do not read the right papers. Even though all their worshippers do, and almost all normal people also do.

Like not having seen Victoria Beckham eating, I have never seen Osama bin Laden eating, for example, but then that may be coz’ he’s been dead for some time in a hole in some Afghan mountains, as Mark Steyn stated four years ago, and all the videos were cleverly shot before then. Pity about the old-model Kalashnikov, but I guess they’d have had to live with it, knowing most of us would not notice the error. Anyway, Al-Goracle-the-oracle has not said that he is not dead so he must be, as He knows all about the climate.

But……..I am still troubled. Do slebs eat or not? I need to know.

David Davis

I promised posts about the significance of the battle of Trafalgar on this day, its 202nd anniversary. This is because I wanted commentators and viewers here to discuss the value, or not, of the British international political settlement know variously as the “British Empire” and/or the “British Commonwealth”. The upshot is whether these institutions have been helpful in promoting liberalism (I PERSIST in using that word) to populations, such as the European Autarkies, whose Enemy Classes such as today’s “enarques” persist in not granting liberal freedoms to ordinary people - at least not in name if even they do >de facto<, since lives have got to be lived and transactions have got to be transacted - or even “taxes” can’t be collected! 

When I was born, it might have been possible for me to know living persons who had known very old living people who had actually fought in it, but in 2007, not now sadly. To illustrate what I mean, my grandfather had when young met a very old man who had been with one Dutch brigade which nearly broke at Waterloo (but didn’t quite break, happily. So one guy from it met my grand-dad very very much later.) Trafalgar, a similarly seminal encounter, sealed the fate of the second embryonic EUroSoviet, the natural and mortal enemy of liberalism being born in the British Isles in the late 18th century.

Whatever we may think of the “French” “Revolution”, its direct children, very quickly spawned, wanted and did try to to subject Europe” to a new slavery, under the new nationalist/socialist monarchy of a Corsican gangster, whom they have to have delighted to pretend was French. To this day, I argue volubly with Czechs and Poles (including my own wife) who truly believe that Napoleon was their saviour, and who erect memorials to him, such as near Vyskov in Moravia where he trashed the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in December 1805 (they call it Slavkov-u-Brna.)

The dream of pan-European hegemony over the World, often driven by a hatred of Our First Child the liberal USA - and including hatred of Euro-hegemony’s mortal enemy the British Isles, which is the home of liberalism and also of the first people (yes before the Vikings!) to whom The Sea meant ”a Road” and not “a Border”, has not died. Today, Broon has signed us up to the “treaty”, that is to say the “constitution” of the “EU”, as so many “European” bureaucrats have so charmingly and frankly told is it still is - almost as though they take no cognizance of our own “extreme right wing” (as they would put it) media here! Because these “treaty” people exist in a fishtank that is without tradition of liberal democracy, and think that they are what they themselves call “opinion-formers”, they have no fear of telling the frank truth about what the stuff they do really means.

I don’t think the world (that is to say; Man) can ultimately stand against fascist nazi communist destruction (all destruction by whichever of these leftist infantile mechanisms is the same as itself) of all that Man has achieved, if from now on Libertarians don’t start themselves to take a political stand. The onward march of Statism has no effective opposition from any “parties” I or you could name now in the UK. Nobody else is going to help us, from anywhere, not even Australia or New Zealand or the Ukraine. If nothing happens, then life on the Planet is doomed since all that we have fought to learn, and could use to get off, could be destroyed. Not now, not tomorrow, not in the next thousand years, but later. Libertarians have a duty to try to affect the political outcomes of elections over the next 100 years, which is all that I think is left when a difference can be made.

Discuss.