(Apologies for the lack of updates today.  My computer has managed to contract a virus, which I’m currently battling against.  This gloriously glum Sarkozy was found using someone else’s internet…)

Apart from the whole, y’know, being Scottish thing I could really not agree with this article more.

My first encounter with William F. Buckley was watching that video I posted earlier. What struck me even before my appreciation of his sublimely poised calm was the purely gorgeous nature of his voice. With an undertone of aloof arrogance and positively aching with intellect and wry wit its smooth, supple tones lulled me with their feline grace.

His views on Vietnam were largely nonsense but as an experience it was superb.

Even before his death I could only see him largely as a figure of the past, no small part due to the pure measured and calmly courteous nature of his tone. He seems precisely the polar opposite of the snarling shock-jock outfits that have become the widely unchallenged mouthpiece of the right. This nature of him as a part of the part was stressed by Johann Hari in a piece he wrote on a conservative cruise in 2006. In a debate with Norman Podhoretz, another elderly statesman of the conservative movement Buckley, ever the empiricist, enquired “Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” only to receive some deranged rant about them being hidden in Syria, instead of being used on the American troops.

Of the two the right has gone far more towards the “National Greatness” espoused by Podhoretz than the “Individual Freedom” demanded by Buckley. Have rehabilitated the entire concept of conservatism Buckley lived long enough to see it plunged into a much deeper nadir than he had found it in. The American right as it stands remains wary of accepting John McCain, a victim of torture, into its bosom on the grounds that he was opposed to the use of torture methods. Having once based their entire movement around opposition to Communism’s faults and the promotion of limited government they now rely upon money to support their vast neo-conservative spending plans secured in loans from Communist China.

In the same article he explains to Hari he states the explanation for this willing plunge into the murk being being that: “What animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That’s pretty well gone.” The achievement of Buckley was fairly substantial, indeed would have been entirely impossible without this united foe: much like Rove’s altogether more foul union of the Right was dependent upon hatred and noise Buckley’s unofficial yet cohesive coalition of libertarians, paleo-conservatives, traditionalists and, most strikingly of all, ex-communists were brought together solely by their consensus that Communism was too dangerous to be allowed to flourish abroad and socialism too inept to be introduced in America.

The latter element of the union are perhaps the most notable, in his 1969 Problems of Communist History Hobsbawm identified the high turn-over of the Communist Party as one of its major flaws. There was only a certain length of time that the overwhelming majority of young idealists could stand the Soviet party line and this led to a good deal of rapid departures. In America I imagine that a fair proportion of these disillusioned departures can to Buckley. This caused understandable stresses within the New Republic but these were resolved largely through internal discussion.

Long since has this era past: the Right establishes strict consensuses now, with any who diverge oft derided as mere “Liberals”. This article credits Buckley with reinvigorating the conservative movement and asks whether it will remain in existence after his demise. It is, in fact, something that I had considered before. After watching the aforementioned video I find myself rather morbidly pondering over which would cease first and what the consequences would be. Chomsky would leave a void that the relativist left would struggle to fill but Buckley seems to have remained active but not prominent, no longer relevant to a political movement that has long since abandoned effectively everything that he advocated, save the name.

The likelihood of it returning to its former path seems minuscule: as Buckley stated it had achieved its aims and thus was left devoid of direction and highly vague, the ultimate victim of its own success. Alas one of the residual elements that it retained was the dab of cognitive dissonance that was unmistakably present in much of TNRs output: this is the magazine that praised Mussolini in a retrospect, served as an outright apologist for Franco and suggested that Jews were silly and irrational for wishing to stage trials for Nazis caught decades after their genocidal crimes. And so the present incarnation of TNR defends waterboarding, “Rendition” to countries willing to do worth to the untried and massive innocent death in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So the most loathsome elements of his philosophy have been safely transposed while the vast amount of worthwhile material of it, both in ideals and in tone, are long since abandoned. He was a highly intelligent man, a fine speaker with an excellent voice and a perpetual challenge for all promoting leftism, but one of the variety which was enjoyable to face rather than ear-ache inducing and forseeably dull. The world is a less invigorating place in his absence.

Network Rail is to be fined a record amount of money for their gross inability to meet simple deadlines.  This seems fair.  If you promise something on time and fail to deliver, you get fined.  Until you realise that 100%  of Network Rail’s income is from a hefty goverment subsidy.  If privatisation is going to work, it’s got to be better than this sham.  Market economy on the rails, or no private market whatsoever.  Monopoly publicly-funded private companies cannot and will not function properly because, as this case highlights, no punishment is remotely effective.

On paper, I would support LibDem policy more than the Conservative equivalent.  However, it is clear that only one party is currently behaving like an opposition - the other is more like a badly-run pressure group.

The LibDem walk-out over the EU referendum was about as effective as paper-chain handcuffs.  It was so obviously contrived that the rest of the House was united in ridicule.  The LibDems have not been gagged - they tried to slip in an amendment that was irrelevant to the matter of debate, and it was rightly ruled out of order.  End of story.  Ed Davey will win himself and his party no favours by behaving like a child who dropped his lolly-pop on the ground and then ran around blaming everyone else because it got dirty.  The LibDem U-turn on a manifesto pledge cannot be masked by a foolish call for an “in or out” referendum.  The LibDems made their bed - they decided the policy that they are now breaking - and so they must live with the consequences.  They cannot possibly pretend that Mr Speaker is out to get them just because they are refusing to play by the rules.  In this, they are just one step behind the infantile anti-3rd runway protestors who broke the law to hang banners from the Palace of Westminster.

The Tories, on the other hand, should have a good day tomorrow.  They are spending £500,000 on advertising on Facebook, Bebo and other such websites to sign people up as “Friends” - note, not party members.  Several national papers will carry the ads tomorrow.  This is an unprecedented amount of money to spend between elections.  Each of ten adverts give a pithy policy proposal, have people-shaped holes filled with clouds, and feature the line “you can get it if you really want”.  Good, wholesome, positive campaigning.

It concerns me that the LibDems are acting so feebly, like a chaotic single-issue pressure group without the single issue.  Clegg should be leading the opposition to ID cards, but we are left with the ever-present company of Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.  We were getting close to a three-party system.  It’s a shame to see that go to waste.

Given the bizarre coalition of eco-warriors, NIMBY conservatives and students who form the bulk of the opposition to the expansion, it’s an odd pose for them to strike…

Still, serious kudos for actually doing it. The Tories are whinging that this illegal protest got much more coverage than their completely legal lobbying of MPs today. Are they really surprised? Theirs was a dull, dry affair of pleading with MPs who have probably already been converted. This was a daring move by a small team of activists against one of the toughest security complexes in London - and targetted at everyone.

Theirs was over an issue which the public are quite possibly sick to death of - and not even a particularly enthralling one. They’re not protesting against Europe. That might well gain much attention, if loud enough. They’re protesting against the government very possibly, if debatabley, going back on something it said in its manifesto. They’re quibbling over petty party points, not the real issue at stake - which is, of course, European integration.

This was over a deeply emotive issue which, the campaigners argue, could blight many people’s lives - and affect them in a physical way which people can picture.

In short, theirs was a dull affair of talking quietly with MPs inside over an issue so removed from the actual assue as to be buttock-acheingly dull. This was an emotive protest over an emotive issue, shouting out to everyone as loud as it gets.

It’s not a media conspiracy that the Referendum lobby didn’t get coverage. It’s their own fault for being so completely dusty. If they’d climbed Parliament and, say, stuck a massive Union Jack on the top, claiming that since Labour had sold out it was necessary, or some such, you could guarantee they’d get attention.

Actually, if they even began by campaigning against the Treaty rather than for a referendum, they’d probably get more attention.

So, are they really surprised?

Two raging hate machines, neither anything at all like the other; yet both visibly struggling to generate anything like the degree of sneering disdain that you would expect.

When somebody can blunt the fangs of both David Duke and Lenin then you know you are onto something.

While working on an article, apparently. How apt.

In rememberence.

The implications of the internet upon the nation state are already being and have been realised and the cracks that they cause within the integrity of the concept can only grow deeper. There are obvious limits but these stand to be eroded rather than remain and are already of sparse importance. Quite simply the proliferation of free web browsers and various messenger programs have effectively doomed the fashion in which humans had previously confined themselves.

To understand how the exact nature of the nation must be considered: I have referred on this blog before to Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities but his persuasive argument bears repetition here. Anderson argues that the nation is a largely a fantasy that was created primarily by the printing press. The existence of literature, varying from novels to newspapers, which addressed entire groups of people as one and used them effectively as mass characters {every phrase from “The Afghan people” to “The Sikh community” constitutes an instance of this} brought people into what they conceived of as a community much like the one which would exist in a town, despite for the surprisingly eluctable fact that that they are unlikely to meet any of those that they conceive themselves bonded to.

As the printing press enabled nationalism, then, so the internet enables internationalism. Whereas simply by merit of logistics such a philosophy proved vastly implausible courtesy of the technology available today I can switch between MSN Plus tabs and contact someone who lives in North London, on the other side of the city from me, at the same speed that I contact someone living in Australia, on the other side of the planet.

This inexplicably bizarre state of affairs is one which all engaged have become accustomed to to the extent that the action has reached a stage of normalcy and is not really worthy of commentary, not deemed remarkable at all. But such an act is truly unprecedented in human history, at least in terms of cost and convenience. To telephone another continent will invariably be a costly affair and one which will thus be distinguished from making a similar call to someone in Northumbria. Furthermore in order to undergo such an act you would, presumably, require somebody who you already knew who dwelled there, something which is unlikely to have occurred save for a prior meeting between the two of you and a degree of intimacy that you would covert further correspondence enough to waive internally the price of such contact.

Upon the internet things are somewhat different: you can meet those who live hundreds of thousands of miles away with ease in chat-rooms, forums or other places of virtual congress. Upon my own MSN list I have a Dane, Fin and Pole, three Canadians, five Australians, copious Americans, a Mexican and a South African, none of whom I have actually met. My AIM “Buddies” are all Americans I have not met save an equally unmet Netherlandian and a single wench from the Midlands, who I haven’t met either. I suspect that this is far from the most diverse assortment in existence. Why, I even lack any South Americans!

This is far from unusual and in fact seems to be something of the new norm. The possibilities for contact with the foreign is boundless, indeed no country has such a monopoly upon the web’s content that most of it is from their sources, making such interaction effectively inevitable. If not friendship then at least some degree of connection is experienced by all web users who do not confine themselves to the most narrow of areas.

The impact of this is likely to be the barriers that had previously restricted humanity into overly tidy boxes that they dared not depart from will be torn down. It is effectively impossible to maintain that your fellow man possesses certain characteristics that distinguish him from you in some severe way due to his place of origin when regular contact shows that he chats, nudges and LOLs just like you do.

The cause for this being such a success is simple: language. English has come to dominate the internet, often abandoned for considerable swathes but largely understood by all present. Far from the assumption of stilted and awkward phrases that one would intuitively expect from those speaking another mother tongue it is frequently found that those online, especially the ones that modestly apologise for its poor quality, discourse in a far higher standard of the English tongue than do most of those raised speaking it solely. The Dutch and Scandinavians seen especially adept, often using phrases far more eloquent than I could ever manage and embarrassing all us native English thoroughly by occasionally requiring us to enquire Dictionary.com.

The result of this is that the location of these formerly foreign people is simply that, where they are situated, not a vital component of their identity. The internet truly is capable of bringing together the globe. This is true of no piece of technology that has thus far been developed: televisions are controlled by the rich and only those with enough funding and authorisation can create and transmit footage. As aforementioned telephones require foreknowledge of who you intend to call. But through the web those endless leagues away can be met and interacted with eventually all the effort it takes you to message a family member in their bedroom.

The potential of this is boundless and demonstrated effectively earlier this month when Anonymous “Raids” were staged worldwide against the Church of Scientology. This group relied entirely upon internet communication and arranged to protest upon the same day and in a nearly identical fashion over the same issues and following the same cause. The V masks were worn by at least some in every location and all of them publicised the same website and told the same facts. All of this was filmed and photographed and then spread across the internet freely, for the perusal of all involved and any interested.

As striking as this was I find it unlikely that nothing similar shall ever happen again: humans are gregarious beings and previously had devised culture around the logistical difficulties presented to them by their borders, as well as the artificial ones imposed by those concerned with such affairs. But when groups such as 4 and 711Chan are openly tossing around self-declared memes that are followed by an international audience what restraint does local custom really pose? What thrives under such conditions is what is appealing, not what tradition dictates.

Perhaps too much emphasis can be placed upon those global gathering places that do exist: if Ebaum’s World and Gaia Online bring together the planet then what of it? There are ample users of the internet who do not frequent such electronic locations. Indeed neo-sectarianism is unquestionably in place as these latter two websites are openly and virulently despised by those who frequent the former. However, although websites such as Facebook and, to a lesser extent, MySpace tend to result in voluntary confinement to the geographic location in which you reside the likelihood of any internet user using all of their time here is low, indeed as are the odds of these two sites and those operating upon such a model remaining as dominant as they presently are. Otherwise, every source of hosting or searching accessible to the public are likely to result in results from other countries. The proliferation of blogs from a dazzlingly diverse array of cultures is likely to expand yet further, along with its impact.

The consequence of this is that chauvinism will become increasingly vulnerable to elimination through the destruction of the ignorance that supports it. It will remain possible to consider your own country’s achievements to be the greatest but to consider your nation’s people to be a separate kind of one to that found elsewhere will become a proposition rendered increasingly untenable, simply through confrontation to the indisputable nature of reality.

This is unlikely to be a swift process but I suspect that it may occur longer than people consider. The state is already suffering from the underwhelming of its authority through extra-national servers: Guido Fawkes hosts his site in America and resides officially in Ireland, rendering legal action nearly an impossibility and certainly an immensely convoluted process should anyone try to pursue it, while in Russia MP3 websites abound as a consequence of the lax laws present there courtesy of the “Shock Therapy” of unhindered, unhinged free market capitalism that was applied to it after the demise of the Soviet Union, with all other nations being able to access such portals and benefit as a consequence. The aforementioned Pirate’s Bay seems to be the Die Hard of websites: a thousand threats assail it constantly and yet it continues to move, refusing to roll over and die despite dozens of offensives that would have crippled the less tenacious.

These loop-holes are of less importance, though, than the way in which the planet’s inhabitants perceive themselves and those around them. It seems highly likely that more will come to the awkward yet glorious realisation that even those upon entirely the other side of this remarkable sphere of rock can be exactly the same as those standing right next to us, exactly the same as we are. Before this new dawn bigotry will wither and nationalism shall be bleached. As soon as it is over humanity will be something else entirely, all for the realisation that it is all much the same as itself.