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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The England cricket team, having been utterly smashed in the first test match at Brisbane last week, is now being broken into even smaller pieces by the Australian second eleven, prior to heaven knows what humiliations in the rest of the test matches. England are also now being hammered by Australia in the rugby at Twickenham (oh, hang about, England have scored sixteen unanswered points and now lead by 32-31 with ten minutes left – so forget that) but, the Old Country – sorry, make that “Ancient Enemy” – is still the one dishing out the punishment where it really matters. Take a look at this:
- The Mont Pelerin Society is a secretive, elite group;
- It has less than 500 members worldwide;
- It was founded in 1947 as a cult which worships the free market.
- It designed the policies of financial deregulation, privatization, Competition and free trade. These policies have wrecked Australia and other countries around the world.
- Mont Pelerin is directed from the highest levels of British Intelligence.
Although whoever wrote all this tries hard to dress up the Mont Pelerin Society (whom we have listed on our links page for ages) as an ultra-secret conspiracy, he actually ends up describing how it has operated really quite well.
→ Continue reading: “Don’t let them suck the blood out of New South Wales!”
Long live freedom and Secularism
– From the Movement of Iranian Students, who are right now the fighting forces of ignorance and darkness.
I walked past the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service in Victoria Street yesterday and saw giant banners telling citizens not to call the emergency services number 999. The advice was that “unless a crime is being committed or a person is in immediate danger” one should call the local police station.
If I understand this notice correctly, if I should observe a murder being committed in the street outside my window, and I am quite sure the victim is dead (e.g. by being decapitated with a machete), and the murderer flees the scene of the crime, then I must not call the emergency services or risk being arrested for wasting valuable police time. Instead I should attempt to contact my local police station which is normally either shut, or the fearless crimefighters are hiding in back offices compiling hate crime statistics. As the typical response time for calling my local police station is never (at least on the three occasions in the past five years that I tried that route), this means that the police don’t want forensic evidence, and the corpse is presumably a problem for the road sweepers.
With the abolition of the right to silence, police licence to shoot people in the street for no good reason, and the removal of double jeopardy, there doesn’t seem to be much point in wasting time on detective work to actually try to find out who is really committing a crime.
Meanwhile hate crimes have their own hotline. This is useful. I’ve been bored with the usual tiresome ethnic jokes for some time. The fact that one can be arrested for telling a joke which someone finds offensive on the grounds of race, gender, and sexuality will obviously make London a safer place to live.
Alas Dodgeblog is dead… yet despair not for Andrew and his eldritch minions have gone slithering and gibbering over to their new cobwebbed lair in some dark and dank corner of the otherwise fragrant realm of La Blogatrice, Sasha Castel.
Also, former Dodgeblog alumnus Mommabear has found a new den at On The Third Hand.
Tim Blair has noted an arkward fact about the Bali bombing for the Australian left to deal with, namely that the Australian left’s (entirely reasonable) campaign to free East Timor from Indonesia was one of the things that provoked the bombing, according to the latest production from Bin Laden Records and Tapes.
They are in a bind; how now do they blame the Howard government for making us a terror target by aligning with the US when their own pet issue seems to have done the same thing?
Good question.
Moors murderess Myra Hindley has just died and is hopefully now burning in hell. Good riddance.
Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit.
– Paul Johnson
Last night I attended a discussion evening in an upstairs room of the King George IV pub in Portugal Street, hosted by the London School of Economics Hayek Society. Very good. Very high quality talk, very smart group of people, from many different countries, Americans, Scandinavians, an Italian, and enough Brits for it not to be a completely non-local event, about twenty people in all. There was no set speaker, we just took it in turns, but as Mr Visiting Libertarian I was given extra pontificating rights, which I trust I did not abuse too annoyingly. They asked me to come again so I must have behaved reasonably well.
The topic was along the lines of “Does libertarianism imply an optimistic view of human nature?” I voted no, but not with any huge confidence and with less after the discussion than I had before. It made me think, in other words, as all good meetings do. For what it may signify, the vote went about two-to-one for no. But that was just a fun way to wind up the discussion, it wasn’t the point of the thing. This wasn’t one of those ghastly Oxford Union type debates where everyone is training to be or pretending already to be a cabinet minister. We just sat around in a circle and talked, gently but firmly chaired by one of the Americans.
The Hayek Society has been chugging along for some years, and in general it is fascinating how university groups, once founded, often seem to stick around, even after two or three complete personnel recycles. The significance of the Hayek Society is thus hard to overstate. I don’t know exactly where in the British university pecking order the LSE comes but it’s not far from the top. In the past, it has made a lot of mischief all around the world, and was I think started to spread collectivist economics. Like France, it is often deeply annoying but it remains a great institution and is a great intellectual prize, a great meme machine. So for us to be getting our memes into it in a big and quality way is, well, big.
The person who invited me to this meeting was Nick Spurrell, and last night he mentioned something about “setting up a website” for the Hayek Society. Either I misheard him (in which case grovelling apologies) or he doesn’t know that there already is one, which was last updated on April 3rd 2001. He must know this. I must have got that wrong. Anyway, I’ll clarify all that soonest, and link to whatever new operation gets going as and when, giving any new material they produce the push here which I’m sure it will deserve.
Meanwhile, email Nick Spurrell to signify that you’re interested in meetings like this, if you are. There doesn’t seem to be any problem about non-LSE folks joining in but sort that out with him. At the moment the meetings happen every Thursday evening, and there’s also a bigger set-piece meeting happening next Wednesday afternoon (1pm – 3pm), which I may also go to.
I got to know Nick Spurrell through him coming to a couple of my last-Friday-of-the-month meetings. As usual, meatspace continues to matter.
Stupidity at this level is nearly criminal. The US Army dismissed six Arabic language translators on grounds which had nothing to do with their ability to serve and protect the USA.
Yes, the US military does need some transformational changes. Some of its’ people need to be transformed into residents of the 21st Century – instead of the 19th. I want a military whose first concern is accomplishing their mission. One uses the resources at hand whether one likes them or not.
Nothing else matters worth a damn but winning this war before millions of us die.
I don’t smoke. I don’t like the whiff of a cigarette and frequently will come back from a certain pub, cursing the atmosphere in the boozer for making my clothing reek of ciggies. I think that so-called ‘passive smoking’, while it may not cause cancer or other health problems, is certainly unpleasant. I prefer to sit in the non-smoking bits of a restaurant if at all possible and ask people in my apartment not to smoke. So there it is.
And yet, and yet… I loathe the cultural jihad in the West that has been going on against smokers. The latest lunacy has been the decision by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ban smoking in all public places. All of them. So even if the owner of a private restaurant or bar (which are of course private property) says it is okay to smoke, and the customers are okay with that, the ban must be imposed nonetheless. Never mind that no one is forced to go into a bar or restaurant if they dislike the atmosphere. This is a clear violation of property rights. Of course with true public spaces which have been funded out of tax, the situation is a bit different and with subways, safety issues to do with fire can be used to justify a ban, or partial one.
But Bloomberg, owner of a some sort of news company  , is showing a total lack of proportion. Since September 11, 2001, New Yorkers have occasionally had many reasons to steady their nerves and enjoy the indulgences of this fleeting life. For some, it may be the taste of a delicious bagel, or a sip of a beer. But for many citizens of that great city, it has been about lighting up a cigarette.
…does not mean it is not true!
In Brian‘s earlier article about why railways are the width they are, there has been much commenting about the veracity of the theory that it can be traced back to Imperial Roman times. But in those comment, it was claimed the English V-sign is also of largely mythical origin. I disagree.
The meaning of the V-sign is quite well known and I have not seen any better explanations.
The US gesture of extending the middle finger is clearly just a phallic reference (i.e. “f**k you”), but the English V-sign, which has some similar connotations (i.e. it is not a sign of endearment), has historical roots dating back to the 1400’s. If the middle finger is a gesture of anger, the V-sign is a gesture of defiance and above all, a threat. “It is with these two fingers that I use my longbow!”… Up yours, with an arrow!
Of course as with anything of this nature, it is more or less a matter of folk lore yet I have not seen any evidence to contradict the contention that the V-sign was indeed a gesture of defiance by common English soldiers towards the French, though my understanding is that it was not just associated with the Battle of Agincourt but was in general use during the Hundred Years War.
 
Both versions of the gesture made perfect semiotic sense and
were calculated to resonate with the ‘common man’ circa 1940
Since World War Two the V-sign, knuckles inwards, has come to mean V-for-Victory far beyond the shores of Britain. Knuckles outwards, it retains its more ‘earthy’ meaning. Yet Churchill would have been well aware of both the gesture’s significance and history. He intended to coopt both to use against Nazi Germany: Defiance and, to put it bluntly, Up yours.
The V-sign considerably pre-dates the European Union…
but do not think it is can only be aimed at foreign enemies
Jack Bell makes a timeless point and leads many at Samizdata.net wonder if not just Iran but some Western societies are not well overdue for Jefferson’s prescription.
Reason has an editorial everyone should read. It discusses the story of Dr. Hashem Aghajari who is facing a death sentence in Iran because he called for secular and religious reform. He has turned down a negotiated appeal with the religious courts of Iran because, as Dr. Aghajari says
“… those who have issued this verdict have to implement it if they think it is right or else the Judiciary has to handle it.”
Basically he is willing to die to make his point.
In these days of jihad where our focus is on the religious fanatics and their facist fellow travellers, it is good for us to know that there are also those in the Middle East who share our belief in the rights and dignity of man and the liberty of the individual. In freedom from religous and secular tyranny. Share it strongly enough to pay the same ultimate price as was once paid here in America to secure those very rights for us.
I wonder how many of us will be standing up for the count in a decade or so if (when) the apparatus of protection we are so busy erecting is used for darker purposes? Personally I think Thomas Jefferson said it best:
“What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
Jack Bell
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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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