Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Nov 2024The initial model of the Beretta 38A had a number of features that were dropped rather quickly once wartime production became a priority. Specifically, they included a lockout safety switch for just the rear full-auto trigger. This was in place primarily for police use, in which the guns were intended for semiautomatic use except on dire emergency (and the first batches of 38As in Italy went to the police and the Polizia dell’Africa Italiana). The first version of the 38A also included a bayonet lug to use a version of the folding bayonet also used on the Carcano rifles. This was a folding-blade bayonet, and the model for the 38A replaced the rifle muzzle ring with a special T-lug to attach to the muzzle brake of the SMG. These bayonets are extremely scarce today, as they were only used for a very limited time.
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March 31, 2025
Berettas With Bayonets: The Very Early Model 38A SMG
February 26, 2025
QotD: The banality of crime
When I was still in grad school, there was a big pot bust in College Town. Big enough to merit statewide notice, anyway — a couple hundred pounds, something like that, obviously not El Chapo level but enough to where some kind of actual, organized smuggling was involved.
Cynical bastard that I am, I immediately wondered just how they’d managed this feat of law enforcement. College Town being, well, a college town, it had a surprisingly large police force, but the cops dealt overwhelmingly with quality-of-life stuff. I doubt they had more than one or two full time detectives (if that) chasing burglars; I don’t recall College Town ever having a homicide. They certainly didn’t have narcs on the force, is what I’m getting at, so how on earth did they disrupt this small-time, amateurish, yet still legit (on volume alone) drug smuggling operation?
I forget the details, but as you’d surmise from this story taking place in Clown World, they were fake and gay. I’m slightly fictionalizing, and slightly exaggerating, but it really was on the level of “A prowl car saw a guy driving erratically and pulled him over, at which point smoke started billowing out of the windows. The cop looked in and found a felony amount of pot sitting in a garbage bag on the front seat, and the driver copped a plea — he ratted out his supplier, and when the cops showed up with a warrant, that knucklehead, too, had his bales of marijuana sitting out in plain view on the living room couch.”
Most crime works like that, as it turns out. Even in the big cities, where police departments have bigger budgets and more combat power than a lot of European armies. Homicides, for instance, are 99% paperwork, I’m told. Everyone knows that Peanut shot Ray Ray over a pair of sneakers, not least because Peanut is walking around in the damn things, and probably still has the gun shoved in the waistband of his track suit, too. “Solving” the homicide is just a matter of putting the paperwork through. Stone cold whodunits, like big sophisticated undercover narcotics operations, are vanishingly rare, because the cost of enforcement, let’s call it, is extremely high.
I know, I know, The Wire was a tv show, but people I know who really do work in law enforcement say it’s close enough to the real thing for our purposes. Drug dealers down in the ‘hood aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated and above all self-disciplined as the Barksdale Crew, but the basic principle is the same: Since the low-level people are inevitably going to get busted, make sure that the low-level people don’t have anything on the guys one level higher, and your drug dealing operation is more or less safe. Just as Peanut could probably get away with blasting Ray Ray in broad daylight if he were smart enough not to wear the shoes around, so the pot dealers in College Town could’ve gotten away with their operation more or less forever, provided they weren’t stupid enough to be driving around high on their own supply, with said supply in plain view in the passenger seat.
Severian, “The Cost of Enforcement”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-29.
January 11, 2025
Euphemizing organized gang rapes of children as “grooming” won’t work much longer
It’s possible that the current upswell of anger about the decade-long cover-up of organized child rape gangs in English towns and cities may come to nothing … or it could result in a complete breakdown of law and order:
Like professional basketball, those accused of being members of “grooming gangs” tend to be monocultural.
The grooming gang thing has really blown up in the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure wholly why myself but a couple of guesses.
One is that the media really couldn’t report all that much — and for the same reason that Tommy Robinson got jailed one time around. Because there have been multiple ongoing cases and full reporting of one could — and probably would too — prejudice a jury in subsequent cases. So, those ongoing cases mean that the subject is more or less sub judice and can’t, in volume or detail, be talked about.
Thus things like Guardian reporting. Where you get the news that a gang has been tried, found guilty, sent off to jail. And no comment on who they were. Well, except for a list of names all of which are, shall we say, less than Anglo Saxon or even Viking in origin. We all draw our own conclusions at that point.
[…]
The number of abused — which means children raped, recall, arses blown up with pumps so that adult dicks can multiply penetrate to be detailed — starts to be counted up into the thousands. The tens of thousands perhaps.
There’s a point there at which I don’t think that normal societal agreement to allow the authorities to handle things works any more. At some point along that spectrum then significant civil violence breaks out.
Which brings me to the two questions. What is that number which, when known, leads to actual riots? And no, I don’t mean 15 meatheads lobbing half bricks at the police. Actual real and sustained loss of civilian authority control. The second, obviously, is are we going to reach that number?
In short, what is the level of betrayal of these girls that leaves the mob triumphant over law and order?
What really worries me is that I have a horrible — even if still slight at this point — suspicion that there was enough vileness done to enough young girls that we’re going to find out.
On Substack, Francis Turner shares concerns about the mass rapes of children and young women over too many years:
The scandal has been going on for at least 25 years and probably a decade more. That means that every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs.
Every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs
There are roughly 300,000 girls of each year cohort in the UK so that means one in around 300 girls of any age group has been gang-raped. Given that there are large chunks of the UK which are not places where the ~50 identified rape gangs have operated and indeed are places without residents of the relevant ethnicity (primarily Pakistani and Somali in a couple of cases) that means that the number goes way up in those areas. It seems likely that in one those 50 areas the ratio of new victims to their year group is more like 1 in 100 or 1%, especially when you remove the Pakistani girls that probably weren’t targeted even if some of them were in fact abused at home.
In places like Telford if you see a school year group photo for any year in a Comprehensive school in the last 30+ years at least one of the girls in that photo was being gang-raped
If successful steps had been taken in ~2010 to stop the abuse then about 15,000 girls would not have been gang-raped.
The Tory party and civil service disgust of Tommy Robinson has had the result that about 5000 girls were gang raped between when Tommy Robinson started going about the issue in around 2018 and 2023 when Sunak finally set up the national Grooming Gangs Taskforce.
If Substack would let me do a table this would be easier. However here is a summary of girls gang-raped under the prime ministers of this century based on a simple linear model
Starmer: 500 (to date)
Sunak: 1700
Truss: <100
Johnson: 3000+
May: 3000
Cameron: 6000+
Brown: 3000-
Blair: 10,000Probably half of Blair’s 10,000 was before anyone was aware that this was a systemic problem, but it was known to be a potential problem by at least 2004 when
[a] Channel 4 documentary about claims young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex by Asian abusers is delayed as police forces warn it could inflame racial tensions. It was finally shown three months later.
If the UK had got serious about stopping grooming gangs back in 2004 then over half of the gang rape victims could have been saved from such a terrible experience.
Take that 35,000 number a different way. There are roughly 35 million women in the UK. So one in a 1000 women in the UK have been gang-raped over the decades.
January 9, 2025
“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”
The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):
It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.
And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.
This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.
Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.
Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.
The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.
This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.
Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.
By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:
November 15, 2024
“OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”
At the current rate, future generations will have to be persuaded that Franz Kafka wasn’t actually and Englishman:
Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens with the novel’s protagonist, Josef K., being arrested early in the morning by two officers of the law. When he asks them to explain their reasons, one of the men tells him: “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.” He never finds out, of course. Even after the story’s abrupt and chilling end, the reader is none the wiser as to why any of this has occurred.
And so it is hardly surprising that Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson described it as “Kafkaesque” that she was visited by two police officers on the morning of Remembrance Sunday. She was informed that she had been accused of “stirring up racial hatred” by means of an unspecified social media post from a year ago. Anyone who is familiar with Allison’s writing will understand just how improbable this is. Her account of the discussion that followed could have been lifted directly from The Trial itself:
“What did this post I wrote that offended someone say?” I asked. The constable said he wasn’t allowed to tell me that.
“So what’s the name of the person who made the complaint against me?”
He wasn’t allowed to tell me that either, he said.
“You can’t give me my accuser’s name?”
“It’s not ‘the accuser’,” the PC said, looking down at his notes. “They’re called ‘the victim’.”
Ah, right. “OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”
The term “Kafkaesque”, like “Orwellian”, has become something of a cliché, precisely the kind of writing that Orwell continually urged us to avoid. But what else are we to call it? I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s account of his visit to Prague in 1988 to report on the Communist regime. He had decided in advance that he would be “the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka”. As it transpired, this resolution was impossible to fulfil. During one of Václav Havel’s “Charter 77” committee meetings, police burst into the building, threw Hitchens against a wall, and arrested him. When he asked for the details of the charge, he was told that he “had no need to know the reason”. How else could he describe this other than “Kafkaesque”? As he was later to say at a lecture at the University of Western Ontario: “They make you do it”.
This is all very well for the Státní bezpečnost, but I’m not sure even Hitchens could have imagined that such behaviour would become routine in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. I have written previously on my Substack about the phenomenon of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), but it’s worth repeating here the key points. Estimates suggest that the police in England and Wales have recorded over a quarter of a million NCHIs since the practice began in 2014. Those who are so branded are often not informed, and these can show up on DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks, thereby impeding their employment prospects. According to the Times, three thousand people are arrested each year in the UK for offensive comments posted online, even in cases where a joke had clearly been intended. This is because Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalises online speech that can be deemed “grossly offensive”. Whatever that means.
November 2, 2024
The mirage of Trudeau’s mediagenic gun control efforts
To hear the Prime Minister talk about his gun control strategy, it’s been a stunning success. Many police chiefs’ responses thoroughly denounce this as, at best, self-serving spin:
As police unions pillory federal gun bans for doing nothing to address skyrocketing gun crime, an Ontario police department revealed this week that virtually all its crime guns are now illegal imports from the United States.
“Approximately 90 per cent of (the) firearms that we seize are directly traced back to the U.S. And I can say in reality the remaining 10 per cent are likely also from the U.S.,” Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah said at a Monday press conference. The 10 per cent referred to guns that have been modified or had their serial numbers removed, making them harder to trace.
Duraiappah was announcing the results of Project Sledgehammer, the breakup of a gun smuggling ring that included the seizure of a shipment of so-called “giggle switches” — black market devices that can turn a regular handgun into an automatic machine pistol.
But during the press conference, police revealed that both gun crime — and the number of illegal guns in the community — is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.
The Peel Regional Police cover an area immediately to the west of Toronto that includes Mississauga and Brampton. Duraiappah said that only 10 years ago, if a criminal in the Peel Region wanted an illegal gun, “it was doable, but it required a lot of work.”
Now, Peel Police are seizing an illegal gun about once every 30 hours — an 87 per cent increase over the year prior. Illegal guns are now so ubiquitous that they often show up in unrelated investigations, such as an impaired driver having one in his glove compartment.
“The availability of firearms has just saturated the community,” said Duraiappah.
This has all occurred in tandem with a nationwide spike in gun crime, including fatal shootings.
Earlier this year, Statistics Canada published 2022 data showing that “firearm-related violent crime” was at the highest rate recorded since they started tracking it in 2009.
September 10, 2024
Chilling effect (with a British accent) – “No one is now sure what they are allowed to say”
Spaceman Spiff makes a bid to star in one of Gauleiter Keir Stürmer’s big show trials, coming far too soon to a town hall near you:
In Britain many of us now walk on eggshells.
The country and its systems are broken. Free speech is being outlawed. Many are frightened to say anything, although it doesn’t stop them noticing and thinking.
Recent emphasis on invented categories of offence — misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation — mean almost anything can come under the purview of the State and its informers, from ill-timed comments to jokes and humorous observations.
Famously, memes based on simple observation are admissible in Britain’s world-famous show trials, including this one no doubt:1
It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.
Everything must be monitored because less and less can be tolerated by those in positions of authority. Their narratives are failing, and they are panicking. They are getting desperate.
Noticing is verboten
Many of the topics that trigger the strongest response by the British Government are simply unpopular policies that normal people can no longer ignore.
More accurately, policies that directly affect growing numbers of law-abiding taxpayers who did not vote for them.
Do not discuss immigration
Mass immigration is the supreme example. Britain’s cities are being flooded with “asylum seekers”, most of whom are economic migrants with no right to settle in the country.
Many are alien peoples from distinct cultures with no connection to Europe and a poor track record of assimilation.
They are aided by an army of well-funded human rights lawyers who distort laws designed to help the genuinely dispossessed, which most immigrants are not.
Thanks to our generosity many privileges are extended to foreigners that are unavailable to natives such as free housing and financial help on the understanding these are used sparingly and temporarily to aid the desperate.
These myriad of kindnesses did not emerge to serve those who want the benefits of first-world living while dodging the corresponding costs; the development of high-trust social structures, the communal spirit that transcends tribalism, and the selflessness it all requires. These are rare phenomenon much of the world cannot produce or maintain, and they are being squandered in Western nations by the selfish obsessed with demonstrating their own virtue.
No serious discussion of immigration is tolerated at any level in Britain. However, this does not stop the erosion of goodwill upon which most of their schemes depend. The generosity they abuse is a limited resource and the magnanimity upon which it depends is evaporating quickly.
1. Many are being jailed in Britain for posting memes and related social media content. The judges often go to some lengths to confirm it is not the content of the material they are questioning as they are perfectly legal, but the perceived intent behind the posting itself.
This unprecedented legal descent into clairvoyance, hate speech and arrogance is relatively new. It will not age well and tells us more about the decline in competency in the judiciary than anything else. Standards are clearly not what they once were.
To put this kind of absurd reasoning on display in irremovable public court records speaks to the level of delusion and arrogance we are now dealing with in Britain. Our social betters are truly lost in a world of their own.
August 31, 2024
Britain’s police double down on “non-crime hate incidents” as a tool of repression
Andrew Doyle admits he was over-optimistic by predicting that the British police forces’ use of “non-crime hate incidents” — after court judgments and Home Office instructions to stop using them — would not last for much longer. That was in 2022:
“Metropolitan Police London England” by William Mewes is marked with CC0 1.0 
.
I have a tendency to be over-optimistic. In my 2022 book The New Puritans, I wrote about “non-crime hate incidents” and how they were still being recorded by police, in spite of the Court of Appeal’s ruling that they were “plainly an interference with freedom of expression” and direct instructions from the Home Office that the police must stop this illiberal and unethical practice. However, I concluded that ultimately “it seems unlikely that ‘non-crime hate incidents’ will last for much longer”.
Of course I was wrong, because I had not counted on just how authoritarian a new Labour government might be. It was bad enough that the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson scotched the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act just one day before parliament went into recess — presumably to avoid having to debate the matter — but now the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has reversed the Conservatives’ pledge to limit the recording of “non-crime”. Labour is bringing back this absurd policy, and has convinced itself that this is somehow a progressive measure.
It should go without saying that the police have no business recording “non-crime”, particularly when such records are based on accusations alone (that is to say, the “perception” of the “victim” is what counts, rather than actual evidence of hatred). The Tory government should have eliminated the entire practice in its entirety, but instead decided that such “incidents” ought to stay on record if there was a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had a phrase for this: “pre-crime”.
So let’s leave aside the woefully inadequate restrictions put in place by the Tories. Let’s also leave aside the obvious point that hatred, along with all other emotions, will never be eradicated through legislation and that the state is wasting its time trying to alter human nature. Let’s focus instead on why the Labour government is so determined to control the speech and thought of its citizens.
How does it help anyone for the name of the schoolboy who accidentally scuffed a copy of the Koran at a school in Wakefield to be on police records? His “non-crime” was duly recorded after the event, but why? Does the government really suppose that this child is one step away from torching a mosque? Even if he had deliberately scuffed the Koran, what has this to do with the police? I don’t much approve of defacing books, but vandalism of one’s own property is a matter for individual conscience.
Of course, Labour will say that the recent riots have proven the necessity for cracking down on the private thoughts of citizens. In truth, these acts of violence are being exploited to justify further authoritarian policies. We have seen how quick our politicians are to seize upon these moments to advance their own goals. The murder of Sir David Amess had precisely nothing to do with social media, and yet politicians immediately began to argue that his death was evidence of the need to curb free speech online. This was grotesque opportunism from a political class that does not trust the public.
August 30, 2024
Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)
Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:
The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.
I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …
- The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
- Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
- Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
- Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
- Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
- Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
- The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
- Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
- The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
- The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
- Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
- The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
- A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
- Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
- The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
- The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
- The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
- The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
- Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
- Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.
Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.
It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.
I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)
But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.
August 27, 2024
Britain as the modern Panopticon
Jeremy Bentham proposed a new kind of prison in the 1700s, one where all of the prisoners in their cells were under constant observation by the guards. What sounds like a horrific way to live to any sensible rational person seems to have a fascinating appeal to the kind of micromanaging, busybody control freak who runs for office in British politics today:
An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.
In Britain authorities use cameras to monitor private individuals in real time. They track cars using number plate software, and human beings using facial recognition software and analysis of gait.
The rationale for these intrusive measures is to prevent illegal activity as well as recording crimes for use in trials.
This troubles many since it places unsupervised control mechanisms in the hands of politicians and authorities increasingly out of touch with the interests of the majority.
Full-spectrum surveillance
The British Government has recently threatened to use this surveillance technology to clamp down on “extremists”.
Currently that means anti-immigration protestors, although there is provision for “anti-establishment” protestors too.
There is much Britain’s political class will not tolerate in the people who elevate them to power.
They have promised to relentlessly hound detestables using advanced spy technology, principally facial recognition software. This is specifically designed to identify individuals and track their movements in real time.
None of this has been requested by the public, and polls reflect considerable unease, particularly with facial recognition software, a powerful tool few are comfortable with.
Advocates of surveillance claim this erosion to our privacy is a necessary step to tackle crime. Cameras enable the police and authorities to identify criminals as well as detect and record the crimes they commit.
To the casual observer it sounds plausible and even reasonable. We won’t be using it to spy on you, only them. It has some public benefits.
This seems like a workable idea. So why is it so useless at stopping a very visible crime?
August 7, 2024
“Two Tier Keir” fails the latest challenge
Violent protests continued in many British cities over the weekend, and despite promising to crack down on violent groups, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer fluffed it again:
Young Muslim men rampaging through Birmingham should have offered the government a convenient chance to quash the accusations that the Prime Minister is “Two Tier Keir”.
Fuelled by rumours that the far right were organising a protest in the area, the demonstration soon took on a dark life of its own. Young men in balaclavas harassed journalists, driving Sky News’ “communities correspondent” off the air, with an attempt even being made to slash the wheels of the Sky van. LBC’s Fraser Knight was chased out of the area. Mr Knight explained that “6 men ran after us down a road with what looked like a weapon”, and that “cars followed us”. “There wasn’t a safe place for us to go for miles,” he says.
Meanwhile, a white man was attacked outside a pub by a mob of masked men, and attempts were made to stop random drivers. This violence and intimidation, of course, mirrors that which has been perpetrated in riots elsewhere.
But there is a difference. Where were the police in Birmingham? We have seen riot police wielding dogs and batons against the far right, and Keir Starmer was promising that rioters would face the “full force of the law“. In Birmingham, though, the police appear to have acted with a light touch. One officer was recorded apparently dismissing the violence as a “small scuffle“.
Local MP Jess Phillips is famed for her outspoken and combative manner, so one might have expected swift condemnation. (Indeed, given that Phillips was recently bragging about how “unflappable” she is around criminals, it’s a shame she wasn’t there to resolve things.)
Actually, Phillips’ first public response to the disorder was to quote tweet a video of a group of masked men and write:
To be clear all day rumours have been spread that a far right group were coming and it was done entirely to get Muslim people out on the street to drive this content. It is misinformation being spread to create trouble.
Okay, I can believe it. But surely this was time to tell them to disperse and go home? Phillips then quote tweeted Richard Tice MP, who had published a video of the Sky News team being intimidated. “These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them,” she wrote:
This misinformation was spread entirely to create this content. Don’t spread it MR Tice!
Sure, again, we get it. The gathering was fuelled by misinformation. But when a group of journalists — with a female correspondent, no less — is being intimidated by masked men flashing trigger fingers at the camera, it has clearly evolved into something more hooliganistic. These men were not confronting a skinhead in a “Blood and Honour” t-shirt. They were confronting a woman trying to do her job.
Esmerelda Weatherwax gathers reports from local media in Birmingham over the weekend:
A huge crowd gathered in Bordesley Green this evening following rumours that a “far right rally” was going to take place … hundreds of mostly young men in balaclavas and face masks gathered outside the McDonald’s at the junction of Bordesley Green and Belchers Lane.
300 or so people mostly Asian and male, many dressed in black and wearing masks or coverings, turned up after the rumour spread rapidly online.
Despite the rumours circulating today, there was no rally and the crowd was seen later dispersing, with some young men using the opportunity to show off on motorbikes.
A 45-year-old from Bordesley Green said he was there to stand up against fascism … “We don’t want this portrayed as Muslim men causing trouble …”
Yardley West and Stechford Cllr Baber Baz was among the crowd this evening and said there was a “strong response from the community”. Cllr Baz added: “As long as it remains peaceful which I am sure it will we are sending a strong message to the EDL that they are not welcome here and will not divide our community.”
A Sky News reporter was forced off air after she was sworn at, with one man on a bike riding towards the camera before saying: “Free Palestine, f*** EDL“. A man wearing a balaclava and wielding a knife “stabbed” the tyre of a Sky News van after its reporter was forced off air, it has been reported. Sky News had to cut short its broadcast in Bordesley Green after its reporter was sworn at on TV.
August 6, 2024
Britain’s immigration debate turns violent
At The Last Ditch, Tom discusses how the immigration issue has become the issue in modern Britain:
Protest and counter-protest in Middlesbrough over the weekend of August 3-4.
Margaret Thatcher famously quoted Kipling’s Norman and Saxon to President Mitterand of France in an EU meeting;
The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing”, my son, leave the Saxon alone.She was trying, perhaps not as delicately as her diplomats would have wished, to explain how the apparently calm British will react – eventually – to being wronged.
I spent twenty years in three other countries and worked closely in business with people from many more. I have often smiled to myself since returning when I hear British people speak of our unique sense of fair play. It’s not unique at all. Everyone has it. We do not own fairness. We do not own tolerance.
We do, however, traditionally pride ourselves on both and the way we see ourselves has shaped our reactions over the last twenty-five years as we welcomed more immigrants than in the previous two millennia. A few years ago I listened quietly to a Bangladeshi friend – a would-be human rights lawyer – talk about racism in our country. I asked her where in the world was a better place to live as a member of an ethnic minority. On reflection, she agreed with me that there is nowhere.
I am not saying we couldn’t treat each other better. Of course we could and should try. But let’s take a moment, as our streets burn and our elites condemn us as far-right racists, to be proud of how we’ve behaved in general towards so many new arrivals in such a short time.
[…]
One day history may reveal which politician in the capital of an old European empire realised there was a ready supply of workers in the former colonies. People who spoke our languages and were familiar with our systems of government – because both had been forced on their ancestors. It was a perilous idea that may yet prove to be the end of European civilisation but he must have looked like a genius to his peers.
The doors were opened and cheap labour flooded in. From the lofty heights where the elites survey us, it looked like a perfect solution. On the ground, not always so much. Mostly we’ve been welcoming, accepting and tolerant. We’ve sometimes even gone beyond tolerance and flattered our new arrivals that they’ve enhanced our magnificent old culture with their jerk chicken and curries.
Yet already when I was a youngster practising criminal law problems had begun to emerge. A custody sergeant with whom I used to chat when waiting to see clients in the cells told me suicide rates among Muslim girls in our Midlands city were disturbingly high. Asked why that was, he said they were not suicides, but honour killings – the first time I’d heard that phrase. No-one, he said, commits suicide by pouring paraffin over themselves and setting themselves alight. It’s just too painful. Muslim men were killing their daughters and sisters. Asked why there were no prosecutions, he said senior police officers made it clear to their subordinates that it was “racist” to suggest the dead girls’ families’ stories of suicide were untrue.
Fresh out of my university law faculty, I sneered that his bosses were right and he was a racist. I will never forget the last words he said to me;
Young man, then you’re part of the problem.
And I was. In that moment, I’d turned away from murdered women to preserve my smug world view. Just as, decades later, council staff and police officers in cities all over Britain turned away from young girls groomed and raped by Muslim men, for fear of being called bad names.
Gary Fouse in the New English Review asks whatever happened to Merry Olde England:
If you have been following the news out of England for the past week, you might think that the country has all but fallen into civil war. Riots and various forms of violent protests and counterprotests have broken out in cities all over the country in reaction to a shocking murder that occurred in the town of Southport last week. On July 29, a group of little schoolgirls were attending some sort of Taylor Swift-themed dancing class when a 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants (who was born in England) attacked them with a knife. Three of the schoolgirls (ages 6. 7, and 9) have died and eight others went to the hospital with serious knife wounds.
The entire nation has erupted in shock and anger. Obviously, the anger is being directed at immigrants in general — given the country’s out of control migration situation and long-simmering tensions with the largely-radicalized Muslim communities. It seems that now-finally — the people have had enough. At least one migrant shelter has been attacked, and several Muslim young men are showing up to counter-protest and do battle with young white men. Now the cops in several cities are trying to keep the two sides apart.
I should state at this point that I will not condone the violence and destruction that is taking place and the objects being thrown at police who are trying to keep order. While I do not condone the violence, I think I can understand why it is taking place. I recall back in the 1960s when there were many riots in inner city areas of the US during the Civil Rights era and in response to the murders of black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. Many responsible black leaders condemned the violence but also added that they could understand the reasons for it. It was a different era then in America, and in the South, segregation had the force of local laws behind it. Many blacks felt that the government was not responding to their grievances.
[…]
The fact is that far too many nations in the West, including ours, have suffered from bad political leadership. We see it in our cities, we see it in our state capitals, and we see it in Washington DC. Bad political leadership results in bad cities, bad states, and a bad country. The fish rots from the head, and what we need to do-in England-in France, in America, etc is elect responsible people who recognize that their government’s number one duty is to protect the citizens. When a government fails to do so, eventually what happens is what we see in England today.
July 17, 2024
What do “‘elf an’ safety” concerns have to do with VIP protection details? A lot, it seems
I haven’t been following every twist and turn of the post-assassination-attempt story, but this one really does have me scratching my head. According to the person who had the overall responsibility, the reason the shooter’s location was not properly secured was due to health and safety concerns … for the Secret Service agents, rather than the person they were supposed to be protecting:
Oddly, the roof that the counter-sniper team was occupying visually seems to have a steeper pitch than the one identified as too dangerous:
Since we’re looking at the biggest news event of the year (so far), let’s consider what N.S. Lyons calls “The World Spirit on a Golf Cart“:
I’m going to do something I normally resist doing and offer some hot take thoughts based on recent events. Not on the details of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump specifically (there’s already plenty of that out there), but on what feels like his role in our general moment in time.
In the minutes after Trump dodged a bullet on live television, I joked on Substack Notes that “one does not simply shoot Napoleon”. This proved open to misinterpretation in a few different directions, but what I meant was this:
Napoleon famously led from the front, charging time and again into a hail of bullets and cannon shot, and yet not once was he ever seriously injured. In fact his luck seemed so impervious that he quickly acquired a legendary aura of invincibility. This became part of his overwhelming charisma – meaning not just his social charm but the inexplicable sense of unstoppable destiny that he seemed to exude. This aura proved so captivating to normal men that when he escaped from exile and landed alone in France to … well let’s call it make his “reelection” bid, the army sent to stop him promptly surrendered and switched sides at the mere sight of him.
Napoleon had seemed to become something more than mere mortal: he was a living myth, a “man of destiny” whom Providence had handed some great role to play in history (for good or for ill) and who therefore simply couldn’t be harmed until that role had been fulfilled and the world forever changed. This is why when Hegel witnessed Napoleon he described him with awe as “the world-spirit on horseback”: he seemed truly an “epic” figure, the sweep of history seeming to have become “connected to his own person, [to] occur and be resolved by him” alone, one way or another.
This, it should be noted, used to be the standard way of explaining how the course of the world’s history was shaped. Thus was Alexander understood; thus was Caesar. Only after the Enlightenment and the onset of rationalistic modernity did this mythic view begin to wither away with the broader disenchantment of the world, to be replaced by a depersonalized and mechanistic view of historical causality.
We’re so back now though. Donald Trump has always been something of a bafflingly lucky man, as even his enemies are prone to admit. But witnessing him, in response to whatever whisper of Providence, tilt his head at precisely the right moment and degree to cheat death, I and it apparently many others can’t help but feel like he may be more than lucky – that he now seems as much myth as man.
And when he emerged, shaking off his bodyguards and streaked with blood, to stand and pump his fist in defiance beneath the American flag (as captured by a photographer who just happened to be there at the perfect place and time to reveal an era-defining symbolic image), this was rightly described by awed watchers in the stands and across the nation as “epic”. Maybe epic is the word that comes to their mind only because it’s become internet parlance for “cool shit”. But I suspect that they may mean more than that, that they may be attempting to describe the deeper charisma of someone who really seems to somehow have become a man of destiny, and that they intuited the scene as truly epochal in its meaning.
Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.
Earlier, Mark Steyn wondered whether the security failures in Butler were caused deliberately or through utter incompetence:
Let’s cut to the chase — the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?
Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom — from Kabul to Uvalde — to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional.
And yet and yet … it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.
In any accountable “public service”, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secret Service gal would already be gone. By this point after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington (Foreign Secretary), Sir Humphrey Atkins (Lord Privy Seal) and Richard Luce (Minister for Latin-American Affairs) had already resigned: see my column of September 17th 2001 expressing in my naïve Canadian way mystification as to why, six days later, all the 9/11 flopperoos had not been similarly dispatched.
Because that’s how it goes in the Republic of Non-Accountability, and, if he’s harbouring any doubts about his fitness for the job, Mayorkas figures it can wait till someone takes out RFK Jr. This is a depraved political culture.
What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.
July 11, 2024
In Germany, flying your national flag in June is considered a “grave offence against the human dignity” of the LGBT community
For reasons that I hope I don’t need to go into in any depth, displays of patriotism in Germany are viewed with deep suspicion by progressives and the various state and national government agencies. Even doing something like displaying the German national flag in any context other than a football match can draw official condemnation:
Many readers may not know about the German Stolzmonat, but I promise the backstory is worth it, so please bear with me.
As all of you do know, via some opaque imperial decree, every June across the Western world has become the monstrosity known as “Pride Month”. It is an occasion for the raucous celebration of every sexual minority and deviant proclivity imaginable. There are rainbow flags, lewd street parades, bizarre political speeches and all manner of astroturfed queer activism. I’m told that the festivities were massively scaled back this year in the Anglosphere, perhaps because they are awkward for elections, but on the Continent all such trends arrive very late and we had nothing but the usual excesses.
The eager flying of the rainbow colours is especially obnoxious in Germany, where the display of one’s national flag – except perhaps in a sports context – is discouraged and politically suspect. Some Germans have therefore responded to the perennial irritation of Pride Month by declaring June to be “Stolzmonat” instead. “Stolzmonat” is merely the German translation of “Pride Month”, but our clever cultural hackers have appropriated the term to indicate not gay but national pride. Those who celebrate Stolzmonat do not conduct any lavish public events and they give no speeches. Most of them simply change their social media profile pictures to present the colours black, red and gold. Now and again they also tweet the hashtag #Stolzmonat.
It’s primarily a German act of social media protest, but anybody can participate:
Enough people observe Stolzmonat to cause the corresponding hashtag to rise to the top of Twitter trends now and again. This has given the Rainbow Brigade indigestion, and as there is precious little division between the Rainbow Brigade and the German state, the domestic intelligence services of Lower Saxony have decided it is time to issue an ex cathedra condemnation of Stolzmonat – eight days after it ended. […] Below I translate this ridiculous woman’s statement. As you read, please remember that this is not just some random trans activist, but a functionary of the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution – an agency endowed with considerable powers to surveil and harass ordinary Germans for their alleged intellectual offences against “democracy” and the constitution:
Stop scrolling! We’re here to tell you all you need to know about the new right-wing campaign “Stolzmonat“. “Stolzmonat” is actually just the German translation of “Pride Month”. That’s what members of our queer community [1] say; they want to make the term “Stolzmonat” into what it should actually be – an expression of diversity, tolerance and strengthening of the rights of queer people.
Last year, the hashtag Stolzmonat temporarily landed at number one in the X-Trends – albeit as a polemical term of the extreme right wing. This year, the New Right in particular called for participation in Stolzmonat. The LGBTQIA+ community [2] is among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene. In addition to discrimination against queer people, nationalism – that is to say, exaggerated national pride with simultaneous devaluation of other nations and the rejection of the values of liberal democracy – are core elements of Stolzmonat. They appropriate the German flag as a symbol for this campaign and associate it with the aforementioned elements. The new right use Queer hostility to associate themselves with existing prejudices in society and to activate ideologically like-minded people to participate in Stolzmonat. This is intended to create the impression of a large counter-movement to Pride Month. They use the hashtag and the German flag instead of the rainbow flag in their profile pictures. One of their messages: queer people are not a part of Germany. Right-wing extremists are thus pursuing a metapolitical approach [3] to exert influence on the pre-political sphere [4] and thus lay the foundation for anti-democratic positions.
There are so many dumb statements floating in this verbal morass that I don’t know where to begin. So just briefly: 1) The alphabet soup community is not “among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene”. Pride Month has, however, became a deeply ridiculous and shallow cultural celebration of a great many things that are wrong with our society and a lot of people are extremely tired of it. 2) “Nationalism” in no way entails the “devaluation of other nations”, nor does it require the “rejection of the values of liberal democracy”. Liberal democracy grew up alongside nationalism, after all, and the Stolzmonat organisers explicitly encourage non-Germans to display their own national colours during Stolzmonat. 3) It is obviously not the point of Stolzmonat to argue that “queer people are not a part of Germany”.
July 10, 2024
The four horsemen of cultural collapse
Chris Bray provides yet more examples of cultural decay and the collapse of law and order in America’s Trudeaupia, California under the loving care of Justin Trudeau’s spiritual twin, Gavin Newsom:
Today tells you about next year.
In a long history of murder in America, the historian Randolph Roth argued that violence follows other losses of trust and order. The murder rate surges in the face of “four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy”.
Read that list carefully, because it should sound familiar.
Similarly, the originators of the theory of “broken windows policing” argued that peace and order grow from peace and order; neighborhoods are more likely to be calm when they’re “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls”. Crime follows crime; vandalism, for example, “can occur anywhere once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no one cares'”. The police commissioner William Bratton famously reduced all categories of crime in New York City subways by assigning officers to arrest turnstile jumpers who entered the system without paying. He sent a signal at the front gates.
“Broken windows” is a much-criticized theory: “He contended that the very notion of ‘disorder’ is subjective and racially fraught”. But the criticisms tend to reduce the complexity of the theory in order to “debunk” it.
Decay communicates. Disorder is a message.
