We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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If you are anything like me, then you missed out on the annual Socially Responsible Investors in the Rockies Conference, which commenced this past weekend. Luckily, Reuters told us all about it.
Socially Responsible Investing, as we will see shortly, has become a big business in and of itself. But what to make of this concept? You might expect me to ridicule the whole movement, but I am not going to. Libertarians believe that the “responsibilities” of a corporation boil down to maximizing shareholder value while complying with the law, but I can find a lot of common ground with the SRI crowd. The problem is that an investor who tries to incoporate SRI principles into his portfolio will be led down any number of blind alleys.
In theory, I think that SRI is a great idea. If progressive types feel the need to bathe themselves in self-congratulatory rhetoric before participating in the capitalist system, that is fine with me. We would all be better off if environmentalists and consumer advocates used their own actual money to try to make things better, rather than pester the rest of us with their demands for more burdensome regulatory restrictions. Under the right conditions, even the most avowed socialists are willing to play — as his financial disclosure for the 2000 presidential race makes clear, Ralph Nader invests heavily in corporate equities (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar). (Heh heh, OpenSecrets.org strikes again!)
Unfortunately, determining which companies are “socially responsible” quickly degenerates into a Sisyphean task. What will be the next “politically incorrect” technology or product? Fast food? Cell phones? Tanning salons? Big Chocolate? What will be the next country to face a Chomsky-approved “divestment campaign” a la Israel? I have some very recent finance textbooks that celebrate the exemplary corporate citizenship of… Enron. → Continue reading: Socially Indifferent Investing
We all know what caused the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, right. We all know because we have been told (ad nauseum) by this lot among others that the root causes lie with America’s wrong-headed foreign policy, its empire-building and its constant meddling in other people’s business. If one accepts that argument then the solution presents itself: America should mind its own business, stop arming foreigners, bring troops home and quietly get on with the business of building a peaceful, free, non-interventionist country. Then the worlds bad guys and bullies will simply leave America alone and go off to look for someone else to haunt.
In other words, America should be more like Switzerland. After all, nobody ever attacks Switzerland. Why should they? There’s no reason to. Switzerland is neutral and peaceful and prosperous and…under attack:
“Switzerland is facing the risk of sanctions from the European Union over failures to lift its banking secrecy laws and co-operate with Brussels over a new savings tax”.
Nothing to do with Swiss foreign policy then. Nothing to do with Swiss meddling in other people’s conflicts. No, it’s everything to do with the exceedingly domestic policy of banking secrecy which means that Switzerland is a living, breathing bolt-hole for those desperate Euro-serfs who want to hang on to whatever precious capital they have left and shield it from the endless predations of Brussels. → Continue reading: Root causes revisited
So Saddam is trying to show he cares. The amnesty was the most important gesture of a campaign aimed at presenting a softer face to his people and rallying them for war. Iraqis are being regaled with propaganda showing him as a caring and conciliatory leader.
He certainly has the means to do that – satellite television is banned, foreign radio stations are jammed and the internet is tightly controlled, with many websites blocked. Iraqis have no choice but to be overwhelmed by Saddam’s immensely powerful propaganda machine as the great majority encounter nothing but the state media’s relentless diet of indoctrination.
As part of the propaganda drive a mass wedding was held in Baghdad yesterday, paid for by the regime. More than 150 couples gathered at the headquarters of the Youth Wing of the ruling Ba’ath party to tie the knot, benefiting from the benign patronage of their leader.
The regime had supplied wedding dresses to the brides and suits to the grooms. None fitted. The grooms wore trousers that either flapped around their heels or barely covered their knees. Equally ill-fitting shoes condemned them to walking in a painful hobble. The brides, all clad in identical dresses, struggled to raise a smile.
After posing glumly for photographs, the couples left for a party organised by Saddam’s eldest son, Uday. Saddam had also paid for their honeymoon – a two-night stay in the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad. After this, the brides would be allowed to hand back the wedding dresses. But the grooms would have to keep the suits.
Isn’t that just wonderful? The problem is that I have heard of this kind of grotesque and absurd propaganda stunts. They are usually perpetrated by dictators who have completely lost touch with reality and live in the world of their own. It is a result of an evolutionary process based on survival instinct – the leader spends first few years shooting everyone who disagrees with him and voilà, all is well as everybody agrees with him! Remember Nicolae Ceausescu?
I suspect that we only hear about a small fraction of Saddam’s escapades. I hope that after Iraq is freed and the full horror of his regime revealed, it will become one of the examples of justified use of force.
The EU Commission would appear to be a law unto itself. Confirming his remark last week that the Euro Stability Pact is stupid, he added yesterday:
“Neither the Commission nor myself have been appointed just to enforce rules blindly, ignoring their limitations. That is what I called – and still call – stupid,” he said, addressing Euro-MPs who had summoned him to Strasbourg to explain his unauthorised ditching of Europe’s core set of economic rules.
At least he is honest. He want to power to do what he thinks is best for all of Europe and to hell with any inconvenient agreements that get in the way. Fair enough because I think EU law is also completely illegitimate nonsense too, but then I’m not the head of the European Commission.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
– H. G. Wells
On the recommendation of a friend, this afternoon I went to see the IMAX 3D movie Space Station. I expected to enjoy it but I did not think I would be astounded by it. 3D filming sure has come a long way!
The experience was made even better by the entirely suitable venue of the IMAX cinema, which is the superb Science Museum in Kensington. After seeing the show, I wandered around and looked at the exhibits.
If you want to see the glory of what Islamic culture can produce, go visit the Alhambra in Spain. But if you want to see and understand the glory of what secular western culture can produce, go to the Science Museum and see the making of the modern world. This place is more than just a museum, it is a temple to the western mind and what makes us what we are. It is gallery after gallery of astonishing achievements, dead ends and curiosities. If you would know what you are then understand where you came from.
This is your heritage.
Alice Bachini is now taking terrorism seriously. (The blogspotting link refuses to work. Scroll to Monday Oct 22: “Taking Terrorism Seriously”, if you aren’t already there.) So I will now pick up the torch of triviality (importance of) and ask: Madonna, crap actress or what? I’m going to argue for the or what position. At some length, I’m afraid, but what the hell? It’s been a rather slow Samizdata day so far.
BBC 1 showed a Madonna movie last Sunday evening. My Radio Times makes no mention of it, but does mention the movie Black Sunday, which they didn’t show. This is the one where Bruce Dern hijacks the Goodyear Blimp in order to zap a Superbowl crowd with knitting needles, and presumably they cancelled it so as not to give those Arab terrorists any clever ideas, or maybe because, what with the bad guys in this movie actually being Arab terrorists, they didn’t want to show a work of fiction that had now become insufficiently fictional. It’s odd that, isn’t it? – although I’m not disagreeing. Odd also that I settle down to blog about triviality (importance of) and profundity has immediately barged its way back in. That’s terrorism for you.
Anyway, Madonna. The movie BBC1 did show was Body of Evidence. The plot concerns a woman who picks on rich old guys with heart conditions and then shags them (very kinkily and dominatingly) to death, after first ensuring that the will gets changed in her favour. → Continue reading: Madonna: too scary to be a star
Another bombing tonight in Northern Israel. Another bus rammed by a car packed with explosives. At least 15 dead and 30 maimed.
As I have indicated previously, this is not going to stop.
‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ has a bad name these days: the idea was that if a gang of killers murdered a British subject in a far-flung country, a gun-boat would be sent out. If the local potentates were considered to be accomplices of the killers, the gunboat would bombard the government palace until the potentates agreed to hand over the killers or execute them locally. Otherwise a joint-punitive expedition would be organised with local involvement.
To the extent that the US supported by the UK, carried out such an operation in Afghanistan last year, I approve. My reasoning is that there was a very clear chain of events which anyone, regardless of which side they support, could understand. As regards Iraq however, no such clarity of purpose exists.
The real justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein is that he is
- a tyrant
- the highest profile Arab government opponent of the West.
Therefore Saddam’s overthrow would demoralise Islamic fundamentalists. But the US government won’t put it this way because it looks too much like an imperialist anti-Arab position. Instead an arbitrary objection to the Iraqi regime’s attempt to build nuclear weapons is invoked, creating an opportunity for the campaign to be side-tracked by the weapons’ inspectors issue. There is no mileage for the British government to get involved in this.
First, never start a war which you would be unable to finish if your allies pulled out: the sad truth is that the UK would lose a war against Iraq, unless Mr Blair launched weapons of mass destruction on Iraq.
Second, war against nuclear proliferation cannot be won. There is first the hypocrisy of letting Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea develop nuclear technology, whilst threatening war on a dictator who is no worse than some of the leaders of all the other nuclear powers (all of them anti-American at various times too). Then there is the fact that this is sixty year old technology. We might as well try to prevent cross-bows or hard-encryption from spreading.
Third, unless the British government gets serious about its own internal terrorist threat: Islamic, eco-terrorist and of course the IRA, what is the point of sending British troops to traipse around the Middle East?
Finally, the equipment is so poor, the fighting capability so stretched, the politics so unrealistic, that sooner or later the British Army is going have another Majuba Hill.
Tradesports.com runs an over-the-counter derivatives market with contracts covering various events.
Those of you who like a market solution for any problem will be pleased to know it quotes quarterly futures style contracts on the likelihood of Saddam being President of Iraq in December, March and June.
Market prices currently imply that he has an 83 percent chance of being the Mother of all Dictators come Christmas, but only a 48 percent chance of opening Easter Eggs as President and a 37 percent chance of seeing in the second half of the year in power.
Early optimism that Saddam would take an early bath has declined as time has progressed. Being an unregulated market there is of course nothing to stop Dubya doing a bit of insider trading…
Paul Staines
Below is the story of the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty. It is as clear a warning to those within the EU reach (grasp, claws etc) about the nature of its objectives and procedures as it gets. Yet it seems that the public, both in the EU and in the Eastern European countries so keen to join, do not register the rising levels of undemocratic behaviour. Just like in the tired old ‘boil a live frog’ myth1. But in this case, not only there is a frog in a pot with hot water, there is another one waiting to jump in as soon as the cooked one shrinks…
First, the Irish Government disregarded last year’s clear referendum result. The Telegraph reported in September:
Mr Ahern has virtually promised his EU counterparts that the Irish will say “Yes”, unlike last time, when they rejected the deal, thus threatening to unravel plans to enlarge the EU in 2004. This is European democracy, Henry Ford style – you can reach any answer, as long as it is yes. In simply refusing to recognise the outcome of the first referendum, the government makes the point of the No campaigners more eloquently than a thousand speeches.
Second, the governement changed the rules and amended the law on the conduct of plebiscites. Ireland used to have admirably fair rules on referendum campaigns, providing for equal airtime on state media and for the distribution to each household of a pamphlet setting out the case for each side. The government scrapped this rule. The way was thus clear for the Yes side to exploit its massive financial advantage. It outspent the anti-treaty campaign by a factor of 10 and played heavily on fears of what Ireland could lose by turning its back on Europe’s ambitions.
Third, the Irish government changed the question. Mr Ahern also rigged the question. Voters were asked to ratify Nice and, in the same vote, to oppose Irish participation in the EU army. Thus, many supporters of neutrality – a natural anti-Nice constituency – felt obliged to vote Yes. Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP for South East England explains what has been done to the question:
To see how outrageous this is, imagine that in a British referendum, Tony Blair phrased the question: “Do you want to join the single European currency and preserve the supremacy of the UK Parliament?”
Fourth, the Irish were facing moral blackmail. They were told that if they voted No, they would deprive 70 million people of the benefits they have themselves reaped from EU membership, even if the money has now virtually dried up. The rejection of Nice Treaty for a second time would, apparently, have delayed for at least three years the plans to bring the new members – Hungary, Poland, Latvia and the Czech Republic into the EU. Every big gun from Lech Walesa to St John Hume was wheeled out. Ireland, they all argued, has done well out of Brussels; now let’s give eastern Europe the same opportunity.2
Daniel Hannan again ‘fastidiously’ points out that given the Irish voted for enlargement…
…[it] is something of a surprise, then, to read the Nice Treaty and find that enlargement is barely mentioned: it comes in a codicil tacked on at the end, and could easily have been agreed without a referendum. Nice is about deepening rather than widening the EU.
It provides, among other things, for the scrapping of 39 national vetoes, the harmonisation of justice and home affairs and the establishment of pan-European political parties. The Euro-elites were never going to allow mere public opinion to stop all this. Once again, they have got their way.
…and concludes that:
In order to ratify an essentially undemocratic treaty, Ireland has had to debase its own democratic procedures.
Makes sense to me. In order to cook the frog, you need to increase the temperature…
1 = In the experiment a frog was dropped into a pot of hot (not boiling) water. It immediately jumped out, as would any sensible frog. Then it was placed in a pot of cool water sitting on a stove. This was more to its liking, so it swam about and lounged comfortably. The heat was turned on and raised very gradually. Soon it was hotter than the water in the first experiment, but the frog didn’t jump out. This was because there was no dramatic difference, as there had been when it was taken from room temperature and dropped into hot water. The frog became accustomed to the increased temperature as it was raised little by little. Before long the temperature was so high that the frog was unable to jump out of the pot, and it died.
2= Polish prime minister Leszek Miller, keeping a pledge he made to a local television station, drank a glass of Guinness and sang the popular folk song “I love you, Ireland” when told the Irish had definitely voted Yes.
Britain’s idiot gun laws look like being today’s issue du jour. And at the risk (following on from my enlarging photos fiasco) of making a further fool of myself on a technical issue, it seems (to me) that if you follow a link embedded in a Samizdata comment it works, but the window refuses to get any larger, and the result is tricky to read. That’s what happens with me anyway. No doubt one press of one button will solve the problem, but I have yet to locate the button in question.
So, here, just in case it helps anyone, is the Reason article by Joyce Lee Malcolm linked to by Ralf Goergens in his comment on the sublime David. This Reason piece concludes thus:
The English government has effectively abolished the right of Englishmen, confirmed in their 1689 Bill of Rights, to “have arms for their defence,” insisting upon a monopoly of force it can succeed in imposing only on law-abiding citizens. It has come perilously close to depriving its people of the ability to protect themselves at all, and the result is a more, not less, dangerous society. Despite the English tendency to decry America’s “vigilante values,” English policy makers would do well to consider a return to these crucial common law values, which stood them so well in the past.
And here’s a link to Natalie Solent‘s latest piece on Biased BBC, also regarding guns. Taster paragraph:
Oh, and just skim the whole bunch of stories and look at the headlines: “Terror in US schools and workplaces” – “History of shootings” – “America’s gun culture.” Every mention of the liberty angle has a question mark after it: “Firearms – a civil liberties issue?” – “Right to bear arms?” Don’t hold your breath waiting for headlines like “crime down in gun states”, willya? And don’t wait around for a list of accounts of innocent people saved from murder or rape by guns, although there is a list of accounts of innocent people slain by guns.
Come to think of it, has anyone compiled an internetted list of links to accounts of people saved by gun use, along the lines of that Muslims Condemn Terrorism link page that I flagged up a while ago? If so, another link embedded in another comment please. Do wait around for that, because I bet there is one.
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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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