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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In the maelstrom of epic and terrible world events, prosaic, but nonetheless, important bits of news have a tendency to slip anonymously beneath the waves of sound and fury. Entirely understandable, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t throw out a life-saver every now and then and haul one of the spluttering half-drowned items back in.
The man overboard in this case was an article which appeared in the Telegraph yesterday which covered a speech given by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf and during which he boldy opined that British Judges are not bound by decisions of the European Court in Strasbourg.
“”However, if we are satisfied that the Strasbourg jurisdiction is wrong we should be bold and either not follow or distinguish the Strasbourg decision. If that is what happens, we should take particular care to make clear why we have rejected the authority.”
This is significant because I cannot recall having heard any official or serious doubt cast upon universally-accepted position that British Courts are wholly beholden to Strasbourg. It is, if you will, a murmuring of dissent.
Of course, Lord Woolf stresses that conflict would be a rare thing:
“The Lord Chief Justice predicted that occasions when there would be a conflict between the House of Lords and Strasbourg were “likely to be few and far between”.
Maybe, maybe not. And, in his position, Lord Woolf could hardly suggest otherwise but the consequences of rejecting a Strasbourg ruling even once means that a precedent is set for further rejections and that kind of thing can so easily snowball to the point where, for all intents and purposes, Britain’s judiciary is independent again.
However, the champagne should be kept on ice for now. First of all, Lord Woolf is not a politician and cannot introduce legislation. He is the highest Judge in the land but this is not a ruling, merely an opinion and, as such, has no force of law. His colleagues in the House of Lords are free to reject his invitation but also may take him up on it and proceed accordingly.
Secondly, the entire address was couched in terms of the overriding concern for the rights and welfare of immigrants. This may have been due to the nature of the audience but could equally be the result of the obsession with ‘asylum-seekers’ that has taken a hold of our entire political and judicial class. Whilst it is not a damnable concern by any means, is it too much to ask that they consider the liberties and rights of the other 60 million people who live here? Still, one step at a time, I suppose.
Overall though, an address in which the country’s most senior Judge gives a green light to his fellow Judges to tell Europe to take a hike, must, on balance, be seen as positive.
Tim Hall says:
Some of the right-wing blogs I’ve been reading have complained that they’d heard no condemnation of the awful atrocity in Bali from the Islamic community. They should read this.
Yes we should. If we do, we find this:
Whoever has done this has committed a terrible sin and crime. The Quran says “Whoever kills a single human being unjustly is as though he had killed all of humankind” (Surah al-Ma’ida ayah 32). Deliberate murder of another person will put you in Hell forever. Imagine the punishment for those who have killed hundreds or thousands. Whoever has committed this atrocity will have God’s wrath upon him.
I fear the hatred and violence that will continue to flow from this. May Allah SWT help us all.
I also followed one of the links in this piece, to “Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks”, and then the links really start to pile up. I counted no less than 83.
Now I’m no expert on the nuances of Islamic theology, and I cannot possibly tell you how genuine all this condemnation really is. Do they all come from one particular part of the Islamic world, and are we only really looking at old-fashioned intra-Islamic infighting? Search me.
Are they perhaps merely pretending to condemn? Are they merely scared (“I fear the hatred and violence …”) that if the West’s plan A (“War Against Terrorism”) fails, then, united by the failure of plan A to prevent a series of Bali-type horrors around the world, the West might then switch to plan B (“nuke the damn lot of them”)?
Well if they are scared, good. They should be scared. If that message is getting through to the Islamic world, perhaps partly via its English-speaking fringes, good good good. There could hardly be better news for humanity than that.
Maybe this vast pile of links has already been Fisked into nothing in some blog now unknown to me and a commentator will supply the link with a sneerful flourish, and that will appear to be that.
But I say that even pretending is good. Someone obviously thought it worth assembling all these alleged condemnations of terrorism, even if they aren’t, to make it at least look as if terrorism is being condemned by at least some Muslims. Good. Real changes in thought often begin as a mere pretence that such change has already begun. In politics, again and again, you start by changing the window displays, and then your (at first) mere subterfuge works its way backwards into the shop itself. Such subterfuge does at least mean that some Muslims know that they have a problem.
And maybe it’s better than that. Maybe some of this is for real. Maybe those Good Muslims, whom we now curse for their insanely self-destructive silence, really are finding their voices. Maybe they found them months ago, and we’ve been missing it. True, many of the titles of these links do read more like defences of Islam against the charge of terrorism, rather than actual condemnations of terrorism, but like I say, even that is a step in the right direction, and others among them read like much bigger and more genuine steps in the right direction.
SCENE: BRUSSELS. OFFICES OF THE EU COMMISSION. THE COMMISSIONERS ARE HUDDLED AROUND A SHEAF OF NEWSPAPER REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST.
LOUIS: Look at this…..100 per cent!!
HANS: It is truly amazing
DIRK: I wouldn’t believe it if I couldn’t see it with my own eyes
SVEN: Vote after vote, all the same; Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, Saddam……
HANS: Yes, and how many did that cowboy Bush get, eh?
LOUIS: Precisely, Hans
DIRK: That lucky, lucky bastard
LOUIS: ‘Luck’ had nothing to do with it, Dirk
SVEN: You’re right, Louis. The Iraqi people obviously adore him
HANS: If only we could get an endorsement like this
DIRK: We, too, have our own loyal supporters
LOUIS: Yes, but they’re both getting old now
SVEN: I don’t understand. What does Hussein have that we don’t?
DIRK: Well, the Americans actually pay attention to him
LOUIS: That’s not the reason, Dirk. No, the man is obviously a campaigning genius
HANS: Clearly
SVEN: 100 per cent. 100 per cent. I just love saying those words…
LOUIS: Sven, get your hands out of your pockets, this instant
SVEN: (Sheepish) Sorry, sorry. I..er…just got a little carried away
DIRK: We must find out Saddam’s secret
HANS: Yes, that must be our top priority
LOUIS bangs his fist down on the table
LOUIS: I know exactly what we must do. We must support the American attack on Iraq!
SVEN: WHAT!!??
DIRK: Louis, are you mad?
HANS: You cannot be serious, Louis
SVEN: What about our principles?
DIRK: What about stability in the region?
HANS: What about my investments in Baghdad?
LOUIS: Listen to me, you fools. We support the American attack, they go in and do all the fighting and depose Saddam….Then we bring him to Brussels and employ him as our Public Relations Consultant.
SVEN: Louis, that’s…that’s brilliant!!
DIRK: Damn, why didn’t I think of that?
HANS: Louis, you are a Born Leader.
LOUIS: I know, Hans, I know. And, one day, all of Europe will agree with you.
From David Harthill:
“We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields”.
I have nothing to add
The Reuters News Agency is in trouble:
“Shares in Reuters have fallen 23% after the financial information giant reported a drop in sales and warned of continuing problems.”
In order to avoid sounding judgmental and offensive, I shall refrain from using the term ‘bankruptcy’ and instead employ more neutral and appropriate term ‘market readjustment’.
[My thanks to The Professor for the link]
I really like comments, both here and elsewhere. I especially like the comments on Little Missy, because unlike the regular stuff on Little Missy I can actually read them because – and this is very odd – they’re in bigger writing. The comments on LM are usually just LM’s friends chitchatting amongst themselves, but since I don’t know what they chatting about I don’t know what they’re chatting about, if you get my drift. There’s no harm in friendly chitchat of course, but often comments jump out at you as deserving more than just to be forever buried away as number 17 of 24, or whatever. Consider this:
The puzzle of why brilliant people (and I’m talking G. B. Shaw and Sartre here, not Starfish) are often so stupid politically has interested me for a while. My theory is that artistic types have long despised the middle class (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are born into the middle class). This disdain for the boring old sods who become bankers and lawyers and businessmen, along with the tendency to romanticize either the aristocracy or the lower classes predates communism, but with the rise of communism, those old feelings of dislike and contempt became politicized.
I think that’s one reason why the left has never come to grips with the horrors of communism or wanted to admit that capitalism, with all its faults, offers more freedom and opportunity to ordinary people than any other system. Admitting that would mean changing one’s attitude toward the dull, plodding middle classes and that’s too strongly ingrained in Western culture for intellectuals to easily give up.
I think that’s good. Also, there is no mention of guns or killing apart from the inevitable reference to communism itself, which for Samizdata just now is a plus, I think. That was comment number 32 (you have to scroll down for it) by “Donna V”, concerning comment number 21 by “Mookie Wilson”, both apropos of a piece in Little Green Footballs about some arts people who have signed an anti-GW2 internet petition.
Or, for those more bloodthirsty readers who want a more immediate body count in the foreground of the picture, I also think that this comment deserves more attention than maybe it has so far got:
We will know that President Bush and co. are serious about the war against the Islamofascists, not when they bomb cities full of women and children, but rather when we start reading on the back pages of the papers about mysterious deaths (falling in front of street cars, say) happening with suspicious frequency to men rumored to be supporters of radical Islam (including spokesman, apologists and financiers along with the gunmen). We should take a leaf from Mossad – that exploding telephone yesterday was genius (not that the CIA has either the intelligence or ops capacity to pull something like that off). This may not be as immediately gratifying as nuking the SOBs, but the time is not ripe for that. Mr. Islamiya would be a good start.
That comment was posted by Doug Levene on October 15, 2002 03:57 AM, and was one of 28 (so far) on this, here at Samizdata. Do fellow Samizdata writers have other comments to offer? – by other people I mean, which they think deserve to be elevated into actual postings? Has His Holiness Instapundit ever linked to or quoted from a mere comment?
Thanks to Scrofula we know that the British MP, George Galloway is still out there, way out there.
Galloway spoke last Friday at the American University of Beirut, urging students to take to the streets in massive demonstrations if they wanted to avoid a century in which they will see their resources stolen and continued Israeli domination in the region. He talked about a Western plan aimed at carving the Arab world into smaller and even weaker states.
He claimed that British officials are deciding whether Saudi Arabia will be two or three countries and if Sudan will be two states or not. Their intention, according to Galloway, is to create a holy Saudi Arabia for the Muslims and keep the other Saudi Arabia that has oil fields for themselves.
Nothing’s missed, we have it all here – Israel, oil, British imperialism – Brendan O’Neill should leap for joy… I wonder whether Mr Galloway reads Spiked (former Living Marxism).
Galloway told the audience that people in Britain have done their bit by organising protests against a war on Iraq. But he said it is time for Arabs to demonstrate that they can threaten interests of the West in the region.
I led the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain two weeks ago, half a million people marched through the streets of London under the slogan ‘Justice for Palestine and no war in Iraq’
Apart from confusing two very different demonstrations and blatantly lying about importance and size of the anti-war one, what the hell is going on here?! How can a representative of the British public, a member of the nation’s legislature, incite violence (as in inviting ‘demonstration of a threat to insterests of the West in the region’) against his own country? This used to be called treason, fair and square, and George Galloway is guilty of it many times over. If democracy has any spine, why is he running around spewing such non-sense as an elected member of the Parliament? Do the people who voted for him agree with his treason? → Continue reading: What’s the punishment for treason nowadays?!
The media and bureaucrats are at least beginning to discuss the possibility of al Q’aeda involvement. After you’ve read the article come back and I’ll finish….
Okay. What is blatantly obvious in the comments? Do you see the same pre-September 11th thought patterns I see?
We are no longer dealing with terrorism that fits into the familiar tick box on government forms. We are not looking at terrorism intended to make a statement or to get prisoners released. We are not looking at terrorism as an isolated event with an isolated purpose.
We are looking at the face of 21st Century warfare.
The enemy is out to destroy our society by any means possible. They don’t need to give manifestos to the media about their purpose because the attacks are a warfighting tactic, not a statement.
If any of our readers happen to be in the right circles, please tell these officials to get their heads out of the box and start thinking WAR, not comfortable 1980’s statement oriented violence happenings.
Let’s stop talking about Motive. That’s police work. Start talking Strategy, Tactics and Objectives and how the Beltway events fit into the big picture of this World War.
I might be entirely wrong about the unfolding of this event…. but even if it is homegrown psychos this time… it won’t be the next.
Iain Murray has scared the **** out of me.
If the Blogger bug strikes, as it might well (some bug has certainly prevented me from posting at all on my own blog today), go to The Edge of England’s Sword and scroll down until you reach the words “The end of Habeus Corpus in Britain.” The thing I’m talking about was posted on Tuesday October 15th at 9.19 am.
Don’t give me any of your excuses, either. Whatever the difficulty, go there.
I am back from Slovakia now, and had a lovely time thanks. On my final weekend, while football related mayhem reigned in Bratislava, I took a trip northwards to the Czech countryside. I was shown several fine churches, but the most intriguing item of my stay did not involve any sightseeing trips, at any rate not by me. It concerned, rather, one of my host’s first cousins, a man called Karel Krautgartner.
Krautgartner was Czecho-Slovakia’s answer to Benny Goodman, that is to say a hugely accomplished jazzman who could also more than hold his own in the classical repertoire, on clarinet, saxophone and all related instruments. My host played me a videotape of a Czech TV documentary recently shown to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Krautgartner’s death. He looked like a James Bond villain, and played sublimely. He didn’t seem to have been a huge creative musical force. But he was a great band leader and organiser, who inserted successive jazz innovations from America into Czech musical life, and who added middle-European technical polish and discipline to everything he touched.
Krautgartner was only about sixty when he died, of cancer of the colon, in West Germany. He had emigrated there on account of his unwillingness, following the suppression of the Prague Spring of the late nineteen sixties in which he had played a prominent part, to become a Soviet stooge. Concerning Krautgartner’s death my host told me a fascinating and terrible story, which was not mentioned in the documentary, but which my host had learned through being personally acquainted with many of the personalities involved.
Somewhere in the Urals, during the nineteen fifties, a nuclear bomb went off by mistake in a research laboratory, devastating the entire surrounding region, with, as you can imagine, appalling loss of life. → Continue reading: The USSR and all that jazz
Watching Britain’s Channel 4 news channel last night, I was treated to the amazing scene when its main newscaster, Jon Snow, announced that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been reelected by more than 99 percent of the vote. No mention was made of the fact that the elections did not permit anyone else but Hussein to stand, thereby rendering the vote’s outcome a total farce. What was even more bizarre was how Snow – a man of the Left – announced the result with a totally straight face.
To be fair, the programme’s subsequent coverage of the poll highlighted its essentially coercive nature. Even so, Snow’s performance was telling.
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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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