"If I wanted Britain to fail"

A new video has just started doing the rounds - "If I wanted America to fail". Now if only this video went viral like the "KONY 2012" meme. Unlike the Kony video this one, whilst following the surefire emotional porn philosophy, is packed full of verifiable and tear-jerking observations.

Everything in this video applies double to the UK and I'm sure a UK version is in the offing....

Please share widely.

You can support the Open Rights Group...as long as you're not white and male

UPDATE 3 (27/03/12) - Jim Killock, Executive Director of ORG responds in the comments (Comment #10). Response is as expected - no condemnation of Nishma's views. My response follows in comment #11.

UPDATE 2 (26/03/12): Nishma Doshi responds on twitter. Comment #8 below.

UPDATE 1 (26/03/12): Mealy mouthed response from and twitter exchange with ORG advisory board member Owen Blacker added - comment #7 below.

I'm done. I've absolutely had it with attempts to work with the activist left in this country. No more.

The Open Rights Group held its conference 'Orgcon' yesterday. It's a hub of activity and interesting talks for anyone interested in the crucial issues facing us in the digital realm in general and with regard to the internet in particular. ORG have worked for many years now to raise awareness on issues such as the Digital Economy Act and ACTA and have run many campaigns to get people involved. These are causes that affect everyone and there is good reason for people of all political persuasions to get involved.

You might be reading this and passively wishing I'd included links to ORG and their useful summary pages on the Digital Economy Act and ACTA. That was a conscious choice not to and I won't be doing so again for the forseeable future. Tomorrow I will be cancelling my donations to them.

Let me tell you why.

For many years now quite a number of us on the libertarian right have made attempts to reach out to the broad left on issues of common concern. In my personal experience it was mainly for anti-war actions and campaigns. In every single case there would be at least one person amongst the left-wingers who would say that we "weren't allowed" to join them, and worse. I've known of so many attempts to hold out the Olive branch - and all from the right-libertarian - that have been rebuffed, and often with menaces.

I know this kind of attitude has put many of my libertarian and libertarian-leaning Tory friends off ever going to events run, or largely dominated, by lefties just for this very reason, even if the case for common cause is compelling and possibly necessary for any chance of victory. One of the clearest examples of shooting themselves in the foot in recent memory was in the battle over AV. The lefties refused to work with Farage and UKIP on this despite common cause. As a result the case for AV was seen largely as something exclusive popularised by the Guardian reading metropolitan lefty elite. And people were, it seems, right to think that. This is not to say had they made common cause the vote would have been won, but I suspect the pro-AV vote would not have been so embarrassingly small either, and the turnout perhaps a little better (and the debates from the AV side less childish too).

A couple of friends I'd mentioned the Orgcon to had already declined on the grounds that they didn't want to end up in an argument with left-wingers who would tell them that they were 'evil' and not welcome and blah blah blah. Yeah, you know the rest. But I thought I'd give it a go. I've been a supporter of ORG and their work for some time so now I'm based back in London I thought I'd finally make it to one of their major events.

Unfortunately I groaned almost as soon as I joined the - very long - queue to get in to the conference. Being the gregarious kind of chap I am I decided to start getting to know the people nearby in the queue. An older bloke behind me was ranting to a friend - I was about to say 'hi' but paused to listen first. He claimed, first, that the cuts on pensions would be 'given to the bankers at Canary Wharf' and second, claimed he had met a "right wing sociologist" whose secret task was - apparently - to "destroy the working class". It was a classic facepalm moment and I wondered if I was going to make it through the day without putting someone's head through a window.

Fortunately throughout the day I met a handful of friendly left leaning people with whom I found a lot of common ground. Interestingly they were generally older and also not UK natives. The two keynotes - by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig were particularly good and well worth watching when they go online. (I'm sorry I refuse to post links and give ORG traffic from this blog). Particularly notable was an argument made by Lessig - he made it clear that it was a mistake to regard these issues as left/right in any way and that the only division that mattered was those within the political class and those without. I thought he was very clear on this. Apparently not.

In the early evening most of the attendees went to the pub. Three libertarian pals joined me at the pub, though (lucky for them) two had to leave a little earlier at which point the two of us left retired to the back room of the pub to continue drinking and chatting.

It was then I encountered Nishma for the third time.

When she breezed in, whilst chatting to my friend, I passively noticed how the group of (white, males) reoriented around her and she became the centre of attention. That's nothing new in left-activist circles as I've observed over the years, though it is relevant for what was about to pass. Despite lots of fine rhetoric about being open minded and the women not wanting to be "objectified", that soons slips when it suits and I witness a ritual even more painful than most I've seen after 13 years of looking after nightclubs full of drunk idiots. I do honestly wonder how many of the men get laid in these circles and how dull their sex lives must be.

Anyway, I digress. Nishma was ranting loudly about Tory bastards this and Tory bastards that and at one point turned to the two of us and asked something about hating right wingers. I said 'well, there's two of us right here'. A stunned silence ensued until one of her compatriots said "libertarians". At which point she seemed to relax slightly. (The underlying implication being that whilst we had some credibility in their eyes, Tories were not allowed full stop! As many of you know there's no love lost between myself and the Tories but I still find much of the left attitude towards them utterly repugnant not to mention often completely wrong).

She then proceeded to tell us how libertarianism "excludes women of colour" (how?) and how everything was the fault of us evil white men. My (female) libertarian friend, to her eternal credit, then leapt to my defence and pointed out what a hypocrite Nishma was. Nishma then came out with the classic line we're all used to now that it isn't racist or sexist if it's white men we're talking about. Both of us started laughing at which point she also then said "and then there's colonialism too". The mutual recriminatory exchange only got worse from then on until she flounced out of the room.

At this point something inside me just gave. I'm done with putting up with this, or just putting it to one side for the perceived greater good. She was surrounded by four (white) men who - as per fucking usual in these groups - just passively accept this offensive concentrated bullshit. But of course they do - they all want to get into her pants and its hard work when the odds are 4 to 1 and they have to pay lip service to not "objectifying" her and taking their licks as "evil white men". If they were confident men and not emasculated craptivists they would have done one of two things - either i) backed up her position or ii) told her to stop being so offensive to almost everyone present and shut up. They did neither. They made a very quick exit, with one muttering "I'm getting out of here!". Fuck 'em. They're welcome to their sex starved lives of constantly having to self-flagellate for being white and male and beg for approval.

Now here's the second important bit:

Nishma Doshi is the Community and Events Organsier at the Open Rights Group.

She's responsible for PR, outreach and is the main point of contact for many people with ORG. As such she's very much a bona fide spokesperson for the organisation and just not some random nutter amongst the supporters.

As I mentioned, earlier I'd ecountered her already at least twice that day. She'd already said something offensive about everyone in the room being "white males" at one of the workshops but I let it slide again in the interests of getting something out of the session. No more. Other greatest hits from this white hot intellect included - in response to her being asked why she thought Boris Johnson was corrupt, it was because "he went to Eton" and during the "hacktivism" workshop she shared her - barely out of teens years of experience - clue for working out who the police informants and undercover agents were. They're socially awkward apparently. This was said to a room full of techie geeks.

With someone this openly bigoted, dogmatic, sexist and racist, following the usual cultural marxist script in such a sensitive position at ORG it is reasonable to assume that her views are at least passively tolerated.

Well that *is* intolerable to me, especially after having promoted and supported ORG for so long and joined in on their various campaigns.

So I'm sharing this blog with all of my libertarian and right wing friends and asking them to share further and boycott ORG unless and until Nishma Doshi no longer works for them and they release an official statement to the effect that they apologise and do not endorse her views and that people of all political persuasions (and white men) are welcome to get involved. I will be cancelling my donations to ORG tomorrow and writing them a formal letter explaining why and what it will take for me to consider ever associating with them again in future.

It's mob rule at the Guardian....

(This blogpost should perhaps also be titled - 'What I did/didn't/did say at the Guardian today....')

There's nothing quite like rank hypocrisy to boil my piss. However, to ensure it is fully evaporated in anger, combine rank hypocrisy with crass stupidity, naked opportunism, complete resistance to facts or reason and censorship.

For that was the bread and butter of Leo "bless 'im" Hickman's disgraceful piece of yellow bellied journalism at the Guardian today.

Hickman decided it was time to form a posse comitatus to try tracking down the source of the climategate emails, laughably using the README textfile included in the latest tranche of releases as the primary source of evidence.

This was one of those pieces - especially as it was in the comment is free if you agree section - that really reveals the Guardian's true colours. Numerous commentators including me (prior to the first round of censorship - sorry - 'comment adjustment') attempted to point out the Guardian's and Hickman's rank hypocrisy on this issue. The most striking and obvious example having been the paper's massive support for Wikileaks, however there were many other examples, including the anonymous Enron whistleblower, as another commenter pointed out. As was repeated again and again, it appeared that all leakers were equal but some were more equal than others in the Guardian's eyes.

This was of course brushed off by Hickman and his part-time principle party of followers in the comments section.

Next I pointed out (prior to 'comment adjustment') that claiming it was the work of a hacker was still just an assumption. Hickman replied to me directly on that and similarly brushed it off. He claimed it was irrelevant. The poor dear didn't seem to realise that if he assumed it was the work of a hacker and in fact it was a leaker then his "investigation" would lead him down to all sorts of blind alleys, not least because the MO and levels of access would be completely different (not to mention the trail of evidence left behind).

There were a plethora of delightfully dense comments in support of Hickman et al and stunning leaps of reasoning. These people were also apparently immune to criticism because they "knew" what they were claiming was true, especially regarding the "hacker" claim. Many pronounced completely ill-informed statements about this showing that i) they knew nothing about IT security and ii) that they couldn't even be bothered to use google to check details. After all, The difference between an internal security breach and a carefully coordinated external breach is vast. Pointman gave an excellent overview after the first climategate - here. Moreover they absolutely did not care about their ignorance. What a familiar pattern, eh? No wonder they were immediately supportive of the "scientists" at the heart of the climategate storm - they're just like them!

There were some absolute crackers amongst the received wisdom of this bunch of easily led zealots and I highly recommend you read through the comments - well those that are left - as it is a laugh a minute.

Komment Macht Frei

Speaking of the comments - when the piece first appeared this morning, it was absolute devastation from the moderator. ALL of my comments bar the first one were censored, as were numerous other comments by others. I had no clue why they'd been removed beyond the fact that we all seemed to disagree intensely with Hickman.

Now I should point out something important here for Guardian watchers - they have two types of post moderation. There is the one we're all familiar with - where the boilerplate 'this comment was moderated because it breached our community (puke) standards' but there's also a much more insidious type and I only noticed it because I've been paying a lot of attention to their censorship pattern over the last couple of years - its what I call "nuking". In this case they remove all evidence that the comment was ever there. It's particularly chilling for freedom of speech because aside from the fact that by looking at the comments one can't actually assess the general level of censorship, if it's *your* comment that disappears in this way it's only your word that it was ever there in the first place....

Now bizaarely, after the comments spilled over onto two pages I happened to click back to the first page to see what else had been censored and was surprised to see that most of my previously "moderated" comments had reappeared (except for the "nuked" ones). I don't know if this is a bug in their software or a disagreement between moderators but it adds even more to the general sense of confusion and latent fear of arbitrary censorship that completely fucks any meaningful contribution over there.

Another important point to be aware of is this: One way to guarantee being censored on the Guardian is if you make a reference to your, or someone else's having been censored you will immediately be censored and they often use the "nuke" option too.

The Guardian is  - as a media institution - utterly reprehensible. Most other media outlets are of course too, across the political spectrum. But none outside the BBC attempt to present themselves so often as the default "good guys", nor do their followers similarly regard it as received wisdom...

The climategate 'gait' or the 'out of context paradox'

There's a regular pattern that occurs in any discussion of climategate (1 or 2). It is inconsistent but also entirely consistent with the unthinking nature of many of those who promulgate it:
i) They assert that the emails were "taken out of context"
ii) Responder says that they are not.
iii) A request is then made for evidence.
iv) Responder invites them to read the emails - there are numerous complete email chains, supporting claims against the "scientists" that ONLY MAKE SENSE IN CONTEXT. But the trick is you have to actually read the emails....

A modern day climate "scientist"

Now given how unambiguous some of the exchanges are (in particular those that involve purposefully frustrating FOI inquiries and deleting emails....) one is then prompted to ask exactly what standard of evidence is required. For the evidence before us, if for example we stick with complete email chains rather than individual comments, is a magnitude higher than the typical standard accepted in the vast majority of journalism that we ever read or see. It means that - to be consistent - if one were to completely reject these email chains as sufficient evidence, one would have to throw out almost every received opinion on any quoted person in the press one has ever encountered. Will the zealots do that...no of course they won't. But of course consistency is in the same disused box in their basement as a regard for truth....

One final delicious irony of this of course is that 'The Team' will surely be scratching their heads now, trying to remember what on earth what was said to who. But because they very likely deleted these emails after they had been copied from the mailserver then they have only one place to go to check.....

The Path and The Way

Yea unto you I say for it is The Path and The Way. The One True Dictum of the Holy Portly One, Marx, may Peace Be Upon His Name. For his Holy Word is timeless and unchanging.

Followers of THE LORD need no understanding of modern financial systems - for these are the edritch and wicked constructions of mere men. One Unchanging Philosophy to encompass all possible future eventualities is all. Since the passing of our Lord, nothing new exists under the Sun and ALL innovations and changes in social relations were predicted and anticipated by our Bearded deliverer. We have no need to change our opinions when new facts arise, for there are no new facts. OUR LORD has seen and predicted all. Everything that occurs is simply a recapitulation of his teachings.

The instrument of Satan - CAPITALISM - is everywhere and everywhen. Ill defined, vague and mysterious, it evades the gaze of OUR LORD in the hearts of men. Given shape and clear definition only when that definition suits our followers' purposes. The fact that it has many varied definitions in many varied contexts is simply a mark of its true and eternal EVIL.

Yea witness the transubstantiation of the truly pious one's ego: Verily, it is the holy mystery how one's ego can transcend the False Consciousness and Historical Materialism that afflict all who are non-believers. The pious are raised up from this substrate by their Faith. It is at once a veil for non-believers, how a faith in collectivism is combined with the holy trinity of Me, myself and I, and how I AM RIGHT. The wisdom of crowds, like CAPITALISM, is truly evil when it does not fit our preconceived notions.


Yea, the Pious may join OUR LORD in the atheist heaven, where all the calculators go when they die. Ye are commanded to turn the other cheek to naysayers who point out that parts of THE LORD's written commandments contradict one another. Scribbles in The Holy Communist Manifesto only APPEAR to contradict the Holiest of Holies, the Testament of Das Kapital, because they were written through the flawed hands of man. For OUR LORD did sacrifice himself for our sins by sitting on the dole and writing endless manuscripts, suffering so terribly as he was pampered by the very elite who are the agents of SATAN. TRUE BELIEVERS can interpret what THE LORD really communicated, though ineffable, through the power of faith and may cast down any who have not read every single tedious line after tedious line in every single endless monologue after endless monologue as unfit to speaketh ill.



Those evil men who suggest that OUR LORD stole many ideas from the consort of Satan, ADAM SMITH, should have their tongues removed. OUR FAITH guarantees our righteousness in this cause for we have never read An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. We have been told by the Acolytes of the Lord that it is worthless and meaningless and should be consigned to the Memory Hole. We KNOW what it contains without having read it, or the work of Lucifer's followers derived from its false wisdom. Rumours that some apostates have fallen from grace after reading SMITH and finding that he in fact criticises many of the things we fear are FALSE. Followers of THE LORD who have stood, open mouthed, whilst reading the passages of the evil text damning Corporatism have read words FALSELY IMPLANTED. For our one and Eternal Lord was in fact a TIME TRAVELLER, and Satan's Consort, IN FACT, stole ideas from THE LORD, twisting them and mixing them with lies.

For ALL Authoritarian measures are RIGHT and JUST when delivered in the name of OUR LORD. We believe in Collectivist thinking, however WE the pious and followers of the Holy One KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR YOU. The superiority of our Egos over that of the chattel non-believers and less pious is another of the holy mysteries.


Our favoured methods are continual repetition of dogma - said loudly enough and often enough, the incantations of OUR LORD, can cast out even the most single minded demon, causing them to walketh out of the room. Other weapons acceptable in Our Lord's sevice are Ad hominem and argument by association. In trying times, carefully targeted use of the following unholy words can be used to discredit or, in suitably dogmatic company, even destroy enemies of THE LORD: "Tory", "Loon", "Conspiracy Theorist", "Capitalist", "Elitist".

Lo are these methods no more frequently applied than on that giant shoutbox known as the Intardnets. We have come to fear the unregulated and unfettered terror that it is. For it has come to pass that its nature is in line with our mortal enemies. Oh horrors.

We could not possibly contemplate sincere and open debate with the demons - especially in scholarly and peer reviewed journals, as good scholarship is a tool of the establishment. Instead we will produce poorly edited and researched pamphlets and manuscripts. Fear not though brothers and sisters, for we can keep OUR LORD's Orthodoxy alive and intact through only interacting with people who already agree with us on backwater bunker sites where no one dares disagree on substantive points. If persistent demons appear we can easily gather a posse comitatus to strike down the offenders using the holy methods enshrined above and if that does not work then removing their tongues comes very naturally.

In fact we have warriors amongst us who, like our LORD, sit on the dole and churn out thousands of pointless posts on insular internet forums, lecturing a small group of people who already largely agree with us. Taking succour from the state while agitating for its destruction is a terrible burden to bear and these brothers are truly saints to the cause.

When there are no other enemies to strike down we pious and Righteous are compelled to turn to one another. For the Lord dictated that, as a property of evil is that it eventually turns in upon itself, all who seek succour in the teachings of the Lord must fight one another until those who are the most RIGHTEOUS and RIGHT win and ascend to OUR LORD's knee. Others, the faithless, who engage in such internecine warfare are engaging in SOCIAL DARWINISM, those of the faithful however, who fight one another over tedious differences are carrying out the Good Lord's work. We become UNLIKE our enemies by becoming just LIKE them. It is truly cunning wisdom. And ALL of our faults can be lain at the feet of the beast of CAPITALISM, for we can take no responsibility for ourselves.


Our enemies, though they appear to regularly share the same concerns and interests as us, are naught but DECEIVERS. Those unlike us can be identified most often with seductive whispers about the greatest sin - PROPERTY. Whilst we have been cast down into the pit of sinners, all of us have original sin - wearing flesh suits, we the faithful struggle with and bear the burden. For although we must BEAR the burden of property, suffering as we do, in order to satiate those evil, hated biological mechanisms, we do so WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUE WORD OF THE LORD.

For PROPERTY is in itself evil, and when also acquired directly through the blood, sweat and tears of effort, through the hated body, is therefore EVIL SQUARED. And when exchanged for tokens of mutual value with one another, becomes EVIL CUBED. Our enemy CAPITALISM therefore prospers through the despicable mechanisms of being born into a human body, creating value with one's efforts and exchanging PROPERTY with one another with tokens which - whatever form they take - will always be the work of the devil.

Eventually the most pious and just will wear shirts made of their own hair. For we can alleviate the burden of the original sin of PROPERTY through discerning the difference between de jeur and de facto property. There are NO awkward questions, or tricky issues for the faithful in considering this evil for we simply turn the other cheek once more. There is NO slippery slope between 'de facto' and 'de jeur' because we sayeth so. If all arguments fail us we can reinvoke our faith in THE COLLECTIVE which will spontaneously produce the RIGHT answers for us in the future, so we meek and humble followers need not answer these questions now. Property is only OWNED temporarily by those who are using it. Therefore when I sleepeth I have no property. And verily there are NO thieving bastards, because all belong to the collective and it is good.

So speaketh the Prophets of the LORD. Aperson.

*('Amen' is sexist and therefore FORBIDDEN).