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With all attention focussed on the Middle East, it might be easy to forget the India .v. Pakistan conflict which, according to this report has moved another half-notch up the ratchet.
Of course, it may be nothing more than a brief intensification of the sporadic skirmishes that have been bubbling under for the last few months but, coming on the back of the news that Delhi has expelled the Pakistani Ambassador, a lot of the ingredients of all-out, balls-out war look like they’re falling into place.
I’ve worked out a use for Stephen Byers. If you take the intellectual rigour of John Major, the financial probity of the late Robert Maxwell, the sense of public service of Neil Hamilton and the integrity of Stephen Byers, you get… President Jacques Chirac!
– Antoine Clarke
I disagree with Perry de Havilland‘s attack on the boycott of the Cannes Film Festival for four reasons.
First, I’ve got nothing against voluntary boycotts as opposed to trade embargoes or tariffs imposed by government or international bureaucratic organisations. Provided no force is threatened against those who attend, opponents are entitled to stay away and ask others to do so.
Second, the Cannes Film Festival is an excellent target for a boycott to hurt the French establishment. It is a matter of pride that the Americans feel compelled to turn up. The one thing that really upsets the French cultural establishment is the idea that France is irrelevant. A boycott of Cannes is as good a way of making this point as any short of war.
Third, some French film critics criticises the Cannes Film Festival for its anti-commercial ideology. The hit “Amelie” in France released as “Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain” was ignored mpelled to turn up. The one thing that really upsets the French cultural establishment is the idea that France is irrelevant. A boycott of Cannes is as good a way of making this point as any short of war.
Third, some French film critics criticises the Cannes Film Festival for its anti-commercial ideology. The hit “Amelie” in France released as “Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain” was ignoredd, opponents are entitled to stay away and ask others to do so.
Second, the Cannes Film Festival is an excellent target for a boycott to hurt the French establishment. It is a matter of pride that the Americans feel compelled to turn up. The one thing that really upsets the French cultural establishment is the idea that France is irrelevant. A boycott of Cannes is as good a way
Over at Instapundit, His Holiness Glenn is having a public think-in on the subject of, among many other subjects of course, to what degree if any the US government or bits of it is/are guilty of having failed to see 9-11 coming. Glenn Reynolds reckons that, although 9-11 was imaginable, it makes no sense to blame Bush, the FBI etc., or at any rate not that harshly. I agree, but go further.
The underlying assumption of the complaints about the pre-September 11th US security effort is that it is a good thing for governments to spend their time preventing particular bad things, rather than doing something about them afterwards, to go around, in other words, bolting stable doors while the horses are still in residence.
I dissent. I am of the worry-about-it-when-it-happens-and-not-before school of governmental decision-making. First, and rather trivially, it may never happen. And second, if your government takes precautions against this particular pending disaster, what about all the other equally pending disasters? Free individuals can choose which disasters they will worry about beforehand and which ones they’ll only bother with if and when. But governments being governments, if you tell them to worry about disasters they’ll regard that as a reason to worry about alldisasters. This would itself be disastrous, and to some extent it already is.
This tendency to expect governments to prevent bad things rather than to react to bad things afterwards is itself a hugely bad thing.
Central to the idea of the rule of law, at any rate as my bit of the world understands it, is that the authorities are not allowed to bang you up because of what they think you might be about to do. The rule is that they have to wait until you have already done something bad, and then they try and catch you and punish you. Law court proceedings are about what the accused has or has not done, not about what he might do in the future, on account of the sort of person he might or might not be, or on account of the types of actions he was indulging in which have a remote chance of causing bad things, like being black, taking drugs, using a rather dirty kitchen, owning scary weapons, being mentally unstable without having yet committed any actual mayhem, etc. etc.
Sadly, this principle is being severely undermined, at least here in Britain. Here, there is a plague of precautionary lawmaking going on. A centrally administered law-machine, which will supposedly end up making the world as safe as it can possibly be, is (a) running amok, and (b) making nobody any safer.
By the way, I don’t blame only our rulers for this, I also blame the general public. Whenever something bad happens, it is Joe Public himself who says: Why was this not prevented? (By the government, in other words.) Because, Mr Idiot Joe Public, that is not and cannot be their job. Refraining from serious badness before the government even knows about it is where you come in.
It always bothers me when people say that the government ought to be more “creative”. That’s not what governments are for. As a tentatively anarcho- brand of libertarian I’m strongly attracted by the notion that governments are for absolutely nothing, but if they are for anything, it is certainly not “creativity”. Creativity is unpredictable. Creativity is thinking “outside the box”, i.e. not following the usual procedures. Governments should follow the usual procedures.
The usual US government procedure for dealing with terrorist outrages is, and ought to be, that if you do something seriously bad to the US, the US will do something seriously bad to you. You can’t punish successful suicide bombers themselves, but you can go out and kill as many of their friends as you can find, and you do. Damn the expense. And you do this only after they’ve committed a huge horror. Result: this horror is not prevented, but funny how the general level of horror seems to remain agreeably low.
The usual procedure for stopping me murdering people is not for the government to spy on my every move. It is for the government to punish me, or failing that hunt me for ever – damn the expense – if I ever commit a murder. I know that. This is why I and my fellow countrymen, on the whole, refrain from murder. Again: murder stays comfortingly rare. Not by thousands of individual murders being governmentally prevented beforehand (we, the citizens do that), merely by being punished (very imperfectly and incompletely, by the way) when it occurs.
The law, and government generally, is a huge, mucky, blunt instrument. When terrible things happen and you’re the government, your job is to flail about with this blunt instrument in the general direction of the people you suspect of having done the bad things. You should not delude yourself into supposing that what you really have in your hand is a scalpel. Never, never promise that “such a thing will never be allowed to happen again.” Yes it will. Inevitably.
The US government is now being praised for hiring Hollywood scriptwriters to help it foresee future terrorism disasters. But how long before the relevant committees of “creative” people start cranking out a whole new deluge of attacks of the rights of Americans to do what they want, on account of what these creatives think it might lead to?
This is one of those bits of writing which, if I had had more time to devote to it, would have been shorter and better written. As it was, it took me almost as little time for me to write it as if has just taken you to read it. Bad luck, and all that. I hope, despite the longwinded incoherence factor, that you have found it worth your attention. Have a nice weekend.
I was in the process of polishing off an acidic rebuke to the American Jewish Congress over its campaign to boycott France, which would be counterproductive even if it was merited (which it isn’t), only to find that my colleague Mr.de Havilland has gone and beaten me to it. Not only has he beaten me to it but he has also said, more or less, everything that I wanted to say. I was going to send him an e-mail to endorse him but, in the circumstances, it is more politic that I endorse him publicly.
I have been growing increasingly uncomfortable with continued claims that the EU’s attitude towards the conflict in the Middle East is motivated by antipathy towards the Jews. I am uncomfortable because it isn’t true. To say that men like Goran Persson or Javier Solana are rabid (or even closet) anti-semites is arrant rubbish. Nor are they motivated by any feeling of kinship or goodwill towards Palestinians or Arabs. No, the discomfort with Israel has far more to do with the Israeli insistence on action over compromise; survival rather than capitulation. In post-modernist Europe such iron-will and self-belief are sins to be shunned.
And, of course, it also has a great deal to do with the USA for a lot of Euro-posturing about the Middle East is, in fact, anti-Americanism by proxy. Whatever Americans are for, the EUnuchs must be seen to be against and there is a certain breed of Eurocrat who would rather be seen publicly reading a copy of ‘Little Miss Muffin Monthly’ than taking any position alongside George Bush. If Israel’s main ally was, say, China, then I am sure we would see a very different European approach to the Middle East and, furthermore, I seem to recall that the Euro-elites were far more comfortable with both the US and Israel when they were led by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak respectively.
Now before I start getting any e-mails reminding me of the high incidence of anti-semitic attacks in Europe and the conitnued rise of radical nationalists, please note that the attacks were all carried out not by native White Europeans but by young Arab muslim immigrants and it is no small part due to fear of those same immigrants that the radical nationalists are riding high in the polls. Whilst I am generally very averse to these kind of collectivist labels, the least I can do is implore that they be pasted on straight.
This should not be read as any sort of defence of or apology for the ruling European elite because, as anybody who has read my posts on the subject before will know, I find them loathsome and untrustworthy in almost equal measure. And that is rather the point behind this post because when accusations are made that turn out to be baseless and hysterical it only serves to contaminate the accusations that are meritorious and deserved.
We at the Samizdata are busy building our dossier of ‘Peace Crimes’ against the EU. Please don’t muddy our waters. Thank you.
Leo Le Brun wrote a letter to Instapundit making much the same point made by our own illustrious Samizdata Illuminatus regarding the call by the collectivists at the American Jewish Congress for people to boycott the Cannes Film Festival (a call being ignored in droves). Exactly what ends are served by blindly attacking the people working in a sector of the French economy? Any damage caused will include damage to people like Leo Le Brun who did not vote for Le Pen and, judging by his blog, Leo is not fighting to suppress an urge to burn down the nearest synagogue. It is not something like cutting off the food and water to a town to force it into submission, it is just causing some people’s living standards and job security to be slightly reduced at the margin.
There is nothing quite like annoying but ineffective pressure from outsiders to confirm prejudices, which is why ‘American Jewish Congress’ actions are so idiotic. All it does is play into the hands of the racists who can point to a few empty hotel rooms (not enough to actually scare anyone into line, of course) and then point an accusatory finger at ‘The International Jew’. It is not within the power of American tourists to change the actions of the French state or to significantly alter French public opinion about Jews for the better, even if 100% of potential US visitors to France complied with the AJC’s wishes (and I very much doubt even 5% will).
The ability of such organisations to do harm to the interests of Jewish people (particularly in France) is far greater than their ability to do good if they are going to dismiss the entire French people with a phrase like ‘The French are anti-Semitic’ and then make pronouncements that can only encourage precisely that sentiment. Although the tourism sector in most countries took a big hit after September 11th, I would not be surprised to see groups like the AJC and French neo-nazis making common cause by claiming ‘The Jews’ are responsible for the misfortunes of various French resorts, the former ‘taking the credit for a successful boycott’ and the later declaiming about ‘the power of International Jewry’ whereas in fact it was all down to Al Qaeda flying three airplanes into buildings last year.
Of course the same sort of dynamic can work to more beneficial ends. Every time the European Union turns the screw and imposes another annoying but ultimately trivial little ‘EU directive’ on Britain, a few more people are pushed into the anti-EU camp and British society polarises a little more, a trend I would like to see continue. The Aquis Communitare is not the only ratchet at work here.
Sometimes the story is something that never happened. And what never happened to me is that I neither filled in nor ever sent in my census form, whenever it was. They sent me a census form, so they do know where I live. I kept the form in case things ever turned nasty. I didn’t treat it as pure junk mail and bin it at once, but I never did anything about it. I vaguely remember them sending me a follow up letter saying something like: oh go on, please, if you haven’t … But I still didn’t, and since then: nothing. No threats, no men knocking on the door. My plan was never to actually defy the government and refuse to fill it in. I was never going to send letters to the local paper and insult local magistrates and refuse to pay the fine on principle. It was just to fill it in only when they really made me. “Oh you mean you really wanted me to fill it in? Why didn’t you say? Goodness. Silly me. Sorry, won’t happen again.” That was going to be my line. But it never came to that. Peculiar.
I think what pissed me off about the whole exercise was the slogan at the top, which went: “Count me in!” There was a little child’s hand sticking up, as if I was just begging to be included, and as if the thing was actually a spontaneous exercise in participatory democracy. It was as if the census was really a mass eruption, every ten years, of the popular desire to tell the government how many people one lives with and what one’s religion is, and how much money one earns. ” I can’t help myself, I simply have to tell them! Please, please, give me a form!” For some reason, I didn’t get swept up in this national emotional spasm. Instead, I said to myself: okay if you’re telling me it’s actually voluntary, then that means I don’t have to do it, right? It turns out I didn’t, and it was voluntary.
I don’t know what this proves. I think what it shows is that officially administered British life is now getting fuller and fuller of things that you must do, but which actually you don’t have to do.
I’ve noticed in radio debates recently that quite large swathes of the very law itself are now sliding into this must-do-but-don’t-actually-have-to-do Twilight Zone. Drugs for example. People are adamant that drugs (and you know the ones I mean, I’m not talking about aspirin) shouldn’t be “legalised”. But, on the other hand, they don’t think the police should actually do anything nasty to people who use drugs. It’s just that saying that you are allowed to use drugs would “send the wrong message”, or some such. When someone in a radio yack-in says that drugs should “remain illegal”, I press for clarification. What should happen to you if they catch you doing them? Oh, that’s not the point, the point is they’re very bad, very dangerous, they stick around in your body, blah blah blah. Yes, but should you be arrested, punished, fined, sent to prison? It’s not about that, blah blah blah. Isn’t it? Well no it really isn’t. That actually does now seem to be the law with drugs. Drugs are illegal, and you mustn’t do them. But, on the other hand, actually you can. Like I say, peculiar. This time it’s you-mustn’t-but-actually-you-can, which is the opposite of filling in your census form, but the principle, if you can call it that, is the same.
No links to this. I thought of this story all by myself.
Who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humour? By extending constitutional rights to animals they have presented the world with a cornucopia of comic possibilities [“Sheep claim Wool-fare benefits”, “Rabbits sue for workplace hare-assment”].
It is rather less amusing to contemplate the scope of this. Exactly what animals does it extend to? Rats? Cockroaches? Amoebas? Viruses? Will innoculation become a war-crime? Will fly-paper become an offensive weapon? How many Germans are going to bask in the warm glow of self-righteousness when they find that the mice in their kitchens are protected from eviction?
Like all the best comedy, it is actually the height of absurdity. Animals have only one right and that is the right to be served in the appropriate sauce and whilst it is deeply morally wrong for humans to be wantonly cruel to animals or subject them to unnecessary suffering, this is far from the same thing as declaring that those animals have ‘rights’.
If a dog is as good as a human being then a human being is no better than a dog. But in the through-the-looking-glass, relativistic and future-phobic world of the European polity, reversing the last two million years of agonising evolutionary development is seen as ‘progress’.
“The main impact of the measure will be to restrict the use of animals in experiments.
There hardly seems any point. The Germans are suffering from a sickness of spirit that no amount of medicines will ever cure.
Chris Cooper’s Blog is slowly getting into its stride. It may never proceed at faster than a slow walk, which is fine by me. So far the postings have been longish and rather scholarly, in keeping with the new title at the top, Blogosophical Investigations. If Chris sets a slow pace but sticks to it, then all honour to him, I say. On current evidence I recommend a visit about once a week, with Friday being the day when the most seems to happen.
The latest posting is a meta-contextual comment on the abortion issue, which concludes thus:
There is no such thing as a right answer here. That’s not sitting on any fence: pointing to the existence of a hundred-foot high fence isn’t the same thing as sitting on it.
So chew on that, objectivists. It means that in a free society, people are going to divide into communities of divergent moralities, and the anti-abortionist ones are just going to have to live alongside communities of people whom they regard as murderers. As they already have to do, of course – but they’re not reconciled to the fact.
A week ago, there was a piece, with lengthy quotes, concerning the argument between Bjørn Lomborg and the Scientific American. No sitting on that fence either.
Roger Dorrington, the father about whom I reported on Wednesday following his conviction for beating up the drug dealer who was divvying up heroin with Dorrington’s children in their family home, has been told by Judge David Griffiths that he will not have to pay the drug dealer £250 after all.
However the conviction still stands and he will have to do 100 hours of ‘community service’ for the crime of defending his children against a predatory heroin dealing trespasser. If Judge Griffiths wants him to actually serve his community, I can think of no better way of him spending that 100 hours than for Dorrington to explain, slowly and graphically, to the idiot on the bench what the reality of trying to prevent two teenage children from destroying themselves with heroin is actually like in the real world outside Southampton Crown Court.
Judge Griffiths is just doing what the state expects him to do by demanding that all British subjects be prostrate in the face of any actual threat in which the state does not choose to intermediate itself. Justice for Roger Dorrington and the very survival of his two children does not even enter into that equation. The state is NOT your friend.
That’s it, that’s the story. Most libertarians know the arguments for pricing roads sanely instead of insanely. This Sky News report tells us that the RAC (Royal Automobile Club), a big fragment of the British road lobby, now ‘gets it’ as well. Perhaps some of the people there even realise that road pricing, far from being “anti-car”, will in reality usher in a new golden age of the car, and put the present dark age of gridlock behind us.
We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.
-Mark Twain
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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