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.
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David Farrer links to this story, about a call from a Scottish lawyer to legalise not just cannabis, but all drugs.
A LEADING Scottish criminal lawyer yesterday called for the legalisation of all drugs.
Donald Findlay QC said legalising narcotics such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis was the only way to “break the link” between users and dealers.
The advocate also attacked politicians and the Scottish Executive for failing to get to grips with the problem of drug abuse, accusing them of fostering a “tough on crime” image rather than looking for radical solutions.
However, politicians last night hit back at Mr Findlay, describing him as “irresponsible”.
The Executive also denied Mr Findlay’s claims, pointing to a raft of recent policies to tackle drug abuse.
Mr Findlay, who last week attacked the Executive’s policy on crime, said: “Drugs is a huge issue and there is no question that what drugs do to families and communities is the biggest problem that we have had in recent years, and it is a problem that politicians just will not tackle.
“Since the mid-1980s we have had drug offences. It is now more than 20 years on and the problem is continuing to grow.
“From the law’s point of view, there has to be much more effort to break the cycle, and I really think we should be having a proper look at legalising drugs. You have got to try something to get people away from the dealers.”
Mr Findlay said simply decriminalising cannabis did not go far enough.
Alas, there’s no chance of Findlay QC winning this argument in the near future in Scotland, because, as David notes, Mr Michael McSomeone has said that this would “send the wrong message”. There was, Mr McSomeone added, “a clear need for a consensus”, by which he meant everyone agreeing with him.
I also believe that there is a clear need for a consensus, by which I mean everyone agreeing with Findlay QC and with me. This would send the right message, namely (and with thanks to P. J. O’Rourke for saying something along these lines on a Cato tape I once listened to): (a) do what you want with what’s yours, and (b) accept the consequences.
Those who look for symbolism as a guide to events might like to note that ‘Evian’ spelled backwards is ‘Naive’. Whilst I would never suggest that that is anything except concidental I do reckon that even a casual observer of the latest G8 conference in that Southern French town would have noticed that idealism (to the extent that it ever existed at all) has given way to thorny realpolitik.
No amount of mutual backslapping and bonhomie can disguise the fact that this latest conference was little more than a cosmetic exercise in alleged unity of purpose where none, in fact, exists. Quite aside from the fact that US-EU tensions are hardly going to be settled by a couple of days of diplomatic chinwagging in the Alps, the early exit of George Bush illustrates pretty effectively where he feels his priorities lie:
President George W Bush was not present for the summit’s final session on Tuesday, having left the previous day on the Middle Eastern leg of his foreign tour.
Nothing could illustrate more clearly that the Americans regard the Middle-East as a more pressing concern than the latest round of plaintiff appeals for ‘international somethingorother’ from the likes of Chirac and Shroeder. The former demands attention, the latter can be safely stacked in the pending tray.
But even aside from that, there are cracks which just cannot be papered over with reams of polite communiques. Even a left-of-centre and devoutly internationalist British PM is pressing for a different worldview than the one assiduously promoted from Paris. The result will be no single worldview at all.
I suspect that this G8 malarkey has had its day and not because of the travelling circus of the ‘Great Unwashed’ wreaking havoc and gutting town-centres in its wake, but rather because the reasons for its inception just no longer hold true. This annual round of global group-hugging was only important when it was felt (perhaps not unreasonably) that the interests of the world’s great industrial powers were converging. They are not converging any longer and, if anything, they are diverging. This is not so much globalisation as polarisation.
This will likely not be the last G8 summit. There will probably be more in the future. But I suspect we have seen the last meaningful one and that the summits of tomorrow will be prove to be nothing more than an exercise in formality and politeness where the delegates exchange chit-chat whilst waiting for something bigger and more exciting to come along.
Hint: it is not about health and safety…
at least not your health and safety
We now know that Salam Pax worked for a time as an interpreter for New York Times and Slate journalist Peter Maass. Maass had absolutely no idea of his interpreter’s secret identity until he returned to the US, found out some more about Salam Pax, and eventually realised that Salam Pax had been blogging about his experiences with Maass (although he hadn’t revealed Maass’ identity either – presumably to protect his own). We thus had a situation where Maass and Pax were working together, and both were writing for large global audiences, but one of them was unaware of who the other was and what he was doing. There were no doubt people in the west who were reading both Maass and Pax, and had no idea that the two people were talking about the same things – quite literally – from different points of view. Plus we have the fact that the blog and the blogger are a much more interesting story than anything in the New York Times. (It’s probably possible to relate this to Dave Winer’s bet in Wired that the blogosphere would be more authoritative than the New York Times by 2007, but I am not sure quite how. I don’t think anyone thought things would unfold like this).
When Maass first met Salam, Salam was reading a copy of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Dick was the master writer about issues of identity. His books are full of questions about who is who, and who is real, and what is real. Although Dick wrote most of his books in the 1960s and 1970s, the issues raised in them have steadily become more relevant and fascinating to people as the decades have gone by, and the world has come to seem more like the world he envisaged. Hollywood has been influenced more and more by Dick’s work, both in terms of direct adaptations like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as by works obviously Dick influenced, such as The Matrix, Dark City and Vanilla Sky. The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate world in which America has lost World War Two, and America is partitioned into a Pacific Zone ruled by Japan and an Atlantic Zone ruled by Germany. And it is about occupying powers becoming fascinated with the question of the authenticity of the culture of the country they occupy . By being seen to read it, Salam Pax almost seems to be making some kind of deeply ironic statement about his situation.
And that seems to me the odd contradiction. Pax seems largely unaware of the extent that he is famous in the outside world (or at least claims to be unaware) and yet at the same time he is reading and referring to cultural items that are about the kind of awareness and interconnectedness that he is denying. The question is to what extent he is doing this deliberately, and to what extent this is simply a consequence of the zeitgeist of the age. As I discussed a few weeks ago, Pax previously compared the situation in Baghdad to something out of a William Gibson novel, unaware that Gibson himself, on his blog, had already compared Pax to a character out of one of his novels. Then of course we had Gibson commenting about Pax commenting about…
And that is the extraordinary thing about all this. Salam Pax is the most Gibsonian and Dickian figure to ever actually exist, I think. The writings of Gibson and Dick are about the muddiness, murkiness and complexity of the modern world, and the patterns that arise from that muddiness and murkiness. As Maass observes, Iraq is very muddy and murky, and Salam Pax himself appears to be a pattern coming through this, as well as a suberb chonicler of it. And through his actions, Salam Pax seems to be making a peculiar commentary on himself. And yet to make that commentary one thinks he would have to understand more than he actually does, and indeed understand more than it seems possible that anyone in Iraq could understand. From his writing it is easy to tell that Salam is very smart, but is he that smart? This is why I am finding the Salam Pax saga to be such an extraordinary story.
(This is also why I am finding the “Salam is a tool of the Ba’athists” theory steadily less likely. The more detailed and intricate the story gets, the less I simply can believe they could have the imagination to dream something like this up).
Are you sick of popular entertainment with every sort of bad person being bad in it except the actual bad people we all know we are actually up against?
Go see a movie. The terrorists trying to blow up the world will be from the Balkans, won’t they? Or they’ll be Germans. Or Russians. In Hollywood movies the villains (and many of us over here take a kind of quiet pride in this) are often British.
What they won’t tend to be is Islamofascist. Islamofascist bad guys are just too close to the truth. If Jeremy Irons wants to make a living playing Brit villains, or German villains, fine. Nobody will confuse that with reality, so no skin off any noses. But Islamic villains? Well, that might cause actual offence, mightn’t it. That might reinforce conventional stereotypes. The sort of conventional stereotypes that are quite widespread. The sort of conventional stereotypes that are quite widespread, because they are rooted in reality. Because, that is to say, they are true. So, no true stereotypes please, they’re trouble. Get Jeremy Irons to do another implausible European, and confine the plausibility to such things as detonators and passports and hidden cameras and AK47s.
However, this does rather create a realism problem. Take this TV series they’re showing now, on the BBC, called Spooks. Episode one of the new series, shown last night, had a villain from – yes you’ve guessed it – the Balkans. A Serbian to be exact, steeling guns from the British army and then shooting up or blowing up the “Cobra” committee or whatever it is, which consists of the Prime Minister and Head of the Army and other such Head Government Persons. But we have a real terrorism problem in our midst and we all know it. Spare us this.
Episode one was on BBC 1 from 9pm until 10pm, and then episode two was at 10.30pm on BBC 3 (a digital channel which I now have), and at the end of episode one they showed foretaste excerpts of episode two which made it seem quite enticing and interesting. For what is this? Episode two starts up, and a fat bloke in a beard and with a cloth around his head, is spouting stuff about how this country will one day soon be entirely Islamic and that it is the great achievement of “a boy like you” that you have kept yourselves pure, so try this on. And he hands this boy a suicide jacket. → Continue reading: The British Islamofascist menace – more than a ripping yarn from the BBC
I always thought Burke’s metaphor of the English oxen ignoring the buzzing political insects was a good thing, however in the present situation placidity in the doorway of the abattoir may not be a virtue.
– Doug Collins
As is obvious from reading this blog, we boys and girls at Samizdata are not exactly big fans of the European Union and its attendant horrors of red tape and regulation. So, here’s an interesting experience of mine from last weekend. I managed to leave and enter France and then return without having a single item of paperwork inspected, including my passport. How come?
Well, I sailed to Cherbourg on a yacht from Portsmouth, stayed overnight in France and came back to Portsmouth. No passport check was carried out at either end. Now, I am sure if British Home Secretary David Blunkett were reading this (dream on!), he’d be aghast. (“You mean people can travel, breathe and eat without my express permission? Form a committee!”). But actually, I found the experience rather liberating. I was able to travel, using my own humble skills as a yacht sailor, to travel to and from a Continent without being troubled by officialdom.
And of course I loaded up the boat on cheap wine due to lower French duties on booze. So all in all the whole weekend was a poke in the eye for the offices of the Blairite state. C’est magnifique!
It is hot and humid Monday morning here in Britain and, right about now, millions of people are waking from their slumber to the start of another week.
Bleary-eyed and sticky with sweat, they will munch their toast, slurp their coffee, grab their keys and head out of their doors to do battle with another working day. A day, on the face of it, much like any other day.
Only it isn’t. Not quite. For today, 2nd June, is Tax Freedom Day in Britain. This is the day when we stop working for HMG and start working for ourselves. From today, we can begin supporting our families and not the state. Up until today, from January 1st, we have laboured non-stop for the benefit of the public sector; for all those legions of bureaucrats and rubber-stampers without whom life would be worth living.
There will be no celebrations though. No party hats, no holiday cheer and no group hugs. For the vast majority, the day will pass by without so much as a brief acknowledgement of the temporary release from bondage. There is something sad about a whole nation being so inured to the painful bites of the government that they do not even notice when the biting ceases.
Nearly half a year. Nearly half a life. What a waste.
No sooner has Perry reminded us that the Conservative Party are not to be trusted when it comes to liberty, than, as if right on cue, the buggers prove him right:
Patients should be issued with “entitlement cards” to stop illegal immigrants abusing the National Health Service, the Tories said yesterday.
Liam Fox, the shadow health secretary, said the cards, which would be issued to every UK citizen, would stop so-called “health tourists” being treated at the taxpayers’ expense.
Now, to be fair, the problem they are referring to is a valid one. It is an outrageous abuse of the already over-burdened British taxpayer to force them to pick up the healthcare tab for anyone anywhere in the world who happens to want it. However, the blindingly obvious way of putting a stop to this would be to deregulate health services and dismantle the Soviet-inspired monstrosity of the NHS.
But, no, the Tories would never dream of doing anything to upset the left. They would much rather that we were all issued with an electronic tattoo which is not only obnoxious and anti-British, it will also prove ineffective in solving the problem referred to. Within weeks of the introduction of any such ‘Entitlement Card’ the country (and possibly the rest of the world) will be flooded with forgeries and, even if that were not the case, neither the Human Rights regime, nor EU law will permit the NHS to discriminate against non-UK nationals. Added to that is the massive cost of administering and policing the system the burden of which will also fall on the taxpayers and probably prove more expensive than treating foreigners for their arthritis.
The Tories clearly have not thought this one through but ‘thinking’ is generally frowned upon in those circles. I expect very little from the British Conservative Party and I am rarely disappointed.
As a general rule of thumb, when two non-government organisations, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, the BBC and the New York Times agree that the whole powder keg’s about to go up, it’s a safe bet that things are going swimmingly.
-Mark Steyn, reporting in the Telegraph about the lack of a humanitarian crisis in post-war Iraq.
Actually, the whole article is terrific, particularly his explanation of why the NGOs need to be sent home.
John Naughton has written an article about blogging and much to my surprise, he avoids all the usual Big Media whinging.
In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media – including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it’s just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them – which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.
Third, there is the problem – not often touched upon in the New York Times, by the way – that many controversial public issues are ignored by Big Media for the simple reason that the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors preclude it.
Read the whole article, it is good stuff!
Sadly none of Britain’s mainstream political parties are, they just vary (slightly) in who they want to benefit from their regulation of civil society. When it comes from choosing amongst which tribal faction of statists will regulate your life, we are spoilt for choice.
So next time you have an earnest young Tory hopeful turn up on your doorstep asking for your vote and pledging to save you from those beastly Labour socialists, ask him where his party stands on the issue of ID cards, which will naturally start off as ‘National Health Benefit Cards’ and then very quickly become mandatory for pretty much anything you try to do, such as open a bank account or rent an apartment.
And then look ‘earnest young Tory’ in the eye, explain why his party is part of the problem rather than part of the solution and then tell him to fuck off. A choice between a party which brought us Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard and one which has brought us David ‘RIP’ Blunket is no choice at all. But if you cannot bring yourself to resist the syren call to the ballot box, vote UKIP.
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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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