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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I missed this article in the Telegraph yesterday. It was written by Ibrahim Nawar, an Egyptian, who is the Head of the Board of Management of Arab Press Freedom Watch, a non-profit organisation based in London that works to promote freedom of expression in the Arab world.
I fully support Robert Kilroy-Silk and salute him as an advocate of freedom of expression. I would like to voice my solidarity with him and with all those who face the censorship of such a basic human right.
I agree with much of what he says about Arab regimes. There is a very long history of oppression in the Arab world, particularly in the states he mentions: Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, as well as in Sudan and Tunisia. These regimes are not based on democracy and their legitimacy comes from military dicatorships or inherited systems. The basic right of an individual to voice his or her opinion is not granted in any kind of form in the Arab world.
It is worth remembering, however, that there are individual Arabs who do work hard to defend human rights and one cannot make a blanket generalisation about Arab people. We support Mr Kilroy-Silk’s comments specifically in reference to Arab regimes because we are against the oppressive policies supported by rulers in the Arab world.
As already expressed here on Samizdata.net, we do not agree with the contents of Kilroy-Silk’s article in its ‘totality’, as Tony Blair would say. But we do agree with some of the points, namely the ones about oppressive Arab regimes. These are echoed by Mr Nawar and I am particularly fond of his last paragraph though.
I condemn the decision to axe his programme and call for the BBC to reinstate him forthwith. Indeed, the treatment of Mr Kilroy-Silk is very worrying because it indicates that censorship is now taking place in liberal, Western countries like the United Kingdom. These countries should instead be setting an example to the oppressive Arab regimes that violate freedom of expression on a daily basis.
Yes, but it was the BBC, after all.
Update: Mr Nawar does have stronger words for Mr Kilroy-Silk in an article on the Arab Press Freedom watch website. And his defense of freedom of speech is pertinent as ever.
Those who are calling for a swift action against Kilroy-Silk through the administrative route will not be able in the future to defend any victim dealt with in the same way. Moreover, it is not in the interest of advocates of freedom of expression in the Arab world or in Muslim countries to resort to the state in order to punish someone they may differ with.
A Personal Odyssey
Thomas Sowell
Free Press, 2000
The autobiography of this economist is an impressive one, first as an achiever in the usual sense of someone making a life for himself, from a heavily disadvantaged childhood to a respectable career as both an academic and practical economist. Born in North Carolina and soon orphaned, he was brought up in New York by a great-aunt as part of her family, a relationship that ultimately broke down under the pressure of his trying to better his education. Then there is an interesting account of his experiences as a conscript at the time of the Korean War; he never went to Korea, partly due to his photographic expertise.
Apart from “merely” achieving, he also chose to follow a more rigorous self-imposed regime in his academic career, in opposing any dilution of standards, lowering pass-marks, acquiescing to special pleading in individual cases, let alone cheating (at Howard University). This attitude got him into trouble with two or three university faculties and administrations. He had the misfortune to have to try to teach during the disturbances of the late ’60s and “while approving the Civil Rights campaigns and legislation, he was uneasy at the obsession of black activists with these aspects of black improvement and opposed “affirmative action” as an incorrect extension of the struggle for black advancement, which he saw as basically a matter of education.
He never alludes to suffering from race discrimination himself, apart from a mention of segregated southern lunch counters and he summarises his own good fortune: “I happened to come along right after the worst of the old discrimination was no longer there to impede me and just before racial quotas made the achievements of blacks look suspect.” He continues “… many of the paths I took [have] since been destroyed by misguided social policy, so that the same quality of education [is] no longer available to most ghetto youngsters, though there was never a time when education was more important.” Though sounded out as a possible adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, he refused to be considered; he feels he lacks the politics gene. He is not affiliated to any political party and gives the impression that he does not even vote.
There is not much about his personal life: he married, had two children, a boy and a girl, divorced and remarried. His son, though bright in other ways, did not learn to speak until he was four; his story is told in another book, so that the therapy is only sketchily given here; he seems to have developed into a normal person. Sowell himself suffers from high blood pressure, as do or did the siblings he was separated from at birth but later got to know; after a 20 year gap of estrangement he also contacted again his great-aunt’s daughter.
Online purveyors of imperialist Yankee running-dog capitalism are not welcome in socialist paradise:
A new law has been passed in Cuba which will make access to the internet more difficult for Cubans.
Only those authorised to use the internet from home like civil servants, party officials and doctors will be able to do so on a regular phone line.
So there we have it. A country that has (allegedly) 100% rates of literacy but you are not allowed to actually read anything.
Yesterday’s Guardian contained an article that is an interesting sign of the times.
Says the subheading:
The ‘war on terror’ is being used as cover for a sustained assault on the independence and progressive agenda of NGOs, says Abigail Fielding-Smith
It may seem like a cheap joke to go on about what a perfect name that is for the piece: Abigail Fielding-Smith. Abigail. The hyphen. But I think this name is more than just a joke, because what is happening here is that an entire Ruling Class that was, which was quietly but firmly taking over the world, with no muss and no fuss, is being rudely challenged by a new Ruling Class that is: America!!!
The horror.
The so-called “war on terror” is radically reformulating many aspects of world politics, not least the international nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sector.
“War on terror”. So uncouth, unnuanced and confrontational.
Broadly defined as not-for-profit, autonomous organisations working in the global public interest, NGOs play a pivotal role in international society. They have a strong advocacy voice in intergovernmental politics and are viewed by some as the “third sector” (after intergovernmental bodies and corporations) of international society. Kofi Annan calls them “the conscience of the world”.
Northern governments respected the NGOs’ flexibility, commitment and capacity to respond to (and prevent) international crises in a way that the interstate system could not. Consequently, the proportion of aid budgets given to intergovernmental organisations such as the UN decreased during this period, while funding for NGOs rose steadily. International NGOs now receive one-quarter of the average northern government’s total aid budget; the French government gives them nearly half.
Abigail Hyphen Stroke Money was quietly taking over the world, in other words.
But now those infuriatingly heroic Arabs with their hijacked airplanes have really upset the apple cart, haven’t they? They’ve only gone and got the Americans seriously interested in the big wide world out there. And instead of just paying for them in the old style, the Americans have started trampling all over the shins of the NGOs. With the result that those ghastly Arab resistance heroes, never inclined to make very many fine distinctions, now make no distinction at all between the Great Satan and the Lesser Satans of Oxfam, the Red Cross, and the rest of them.
In Iraq, many NGOs have tried to distance themselves from coalition governments by refusing to accept their money. The attack on the neutral ICRC in Baghdad on October 27 demonstrated the futility of this attempt. As Alistair Dutton, emergencies officer for Cafod, explained: “If our government is the occupying power and we are distributing food, where is the distinction between those who wage war and those who distribute humanitarian goods? Politicians have chosen to coin the phrase ‘humanitarian war’ and they have therefore co-opted us, arguably.”
Distinctions are further blurred in Iraq by the unprecedented use of for-profit organisations in the reconstruction operation.
Those vulgar Americans. Not content with having a “war”, they also want to do trade everywhere.
It gets worse:
Another source of pressure on NGOs’ independence is the political environment of the “war on terror”. While the threat of terrorism is real and important, there is no international agreement on what it is. The concern in the NGO community, particularly in the US, is that the taint of terrorism may be used to discredit the work of politically dissenting international NGOs, or even to stop their funding.
The piece concludes:
Many of these trends existed before September 11. But the “war on terror” has created an acute need for NGOs’ international expertise while at the same time providing justification for glossing over or rooting out their progressive political agenda. At a time when it is needed most, “the conscience of the world” looks vulnerable.
The NGOs are still in business, but they’ve been demoted. They used to be in charge, but now they are only taking orders. It must be very galling.
This posting is about what is happening and about what Abigail Fielding-Smith thinks about it, and it may well be that the lady doth protest too much, and that actually the NGOs are not really being permanently stopped from becoming a new global Civil Service, and that they are merely having to duck and weave a little. But I must tell you that, insofar as what Fielding-Smith says is actually happening, Brian Hyphen Micklethwait (and I do have some hyphenage in my ancestry and quite a few people of the Fielding-Smith persuasion among my cousins) is cautiously optimistic about this trend.
Which is just one more irony. When it comes to her final intentions for the world, Fielding-Smith is a rabid statist, with her as the state. Yet meanwhile, she regrets the decline of “Non-Governmental” organisations. I’m leary of the state, usually, but when the US State barges in on the NGOs, I am, for the time being, delighted. My only worry is: is it really happening? Here’s hoping.
I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as ‘surveys’. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.
However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:
Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.
The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.
I know exactly who those ‘dismayed’ people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that ‘AIDS’ is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.
Africa still has that ‘dark continent’ quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.
I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80’s. From out of nowhere came legions of ‘experts’ to assure us that it really was the new ‘Black Death’ and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.
It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.
First of all, the new European arrest warrant was exercised today for the first time. Michael Kurt was wanted in Sweden on drink-driving charges and was arrested in Alicante. He will be taken back to Sweden.
The arrest warrant is valid in eight Member States:
So far only eight states have adopted it: Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
Moreover, another system is being introduced to provide every EU citizen with a smartcard. These health insurance smartcards will replace the E111 and other forms that allow every EU citizen access to the health systems of other Member States.
These smartcards will eventually include the bearer’s medical records and any other information deemed appropriate. The information here is taken from Ireland, and there does not appear to be any corroborating information at the Department of Health in the UK.
The European Public Health Alliance has one or two articles on the new smartcards. The draft regulation that I have not fully read is located here.
This new system standardises the information on citizens’ health held on databases throughout the European Union. In Member States where no cards exist at present within the healthcare system, these will be introduced. In most Member States, a European card will be introduced alongside the existing systems. It is in those countries where no system exists at present, that this proposal can act as a stimulus for standardising government databases and producing another precursor to a formal identity card.
Whilst electronic systems are here to stay, there are few safeguards against the dissemination of personal information. This is not noted in the draft EU regulation and presents another route by which the privacy of individuals may be undermined as ease of administration gains a higher priority than the right of the individual to safeguard and police his personal data.
I found this gruesome story in a letter to Editor in today’s Telegraph:
Sir – Julius Strauss’s report on the lost prisoners of the Soviet gulag (News, Jan 3) reminded me of a wartime experience.
As an 18-year-old seaman aboard an escort destroyer out of Scapa Flow in 1943-44, I recall that, after shepherding the convoy in the Kola inlet north of Murmansk, we moved to the small dockside at Polyarni.
During one of our arrivals, when some of us were stretching our legs ashore, a well thrown snowball caused me to stagger against a snow-covered stack of logs. I recovered my balance to find that I was hanging on to a human foot, naked and frozen.
We found that the stack was not of timber, but of human bodies, laid five upon five, approximately 30 to a stack, piled along the jetty. We surmised that they were casualties of the war to the south, could not be buried in the frozen ground and had been moved by rail to an ice-free port for disposal at sea.
Having read your report, I am inclined to suggest that they had perished in the gulag Vorkuta, not far to the east.
From:
Leslie James Cousins, Petersfield, Hants
The article mentioned in the letter talks of horrendous conditions of gulag prisoners at the Vorkuta camps.
Even in the context of the times, the suffering at the Vorkuta camps was extreme. In the winter, temperatures on the tundra can drop to minus 50C.
Inmates were provided with ill-fitting, poor quality clothes and forced to work 12 or 14 hours a day on a starvation ration. During the 1940s and 1950s a million prisoners passed through the Vorkuta gulags, according to Memorial.
At least 100,000, perhaps many more, died. They were buried in the rock-hard permafrost or simply left by the roadside to be covered by snow.
Many of the survivors are now trapped by poverty as the hyperinflation following the end of communism wiped out their meagre savings. For years Vorkuta was a political gulag. Today it has become an economic gulag.
As Natalie Solent mentioned in a Samizdata.net article yesterday, Robert Kilroy-Silk is taking heavy flak for his remarks about the Arab world and has been brow beaten into a rather ignominious apology.
I was just interviewed on BBC News 24 to put my views on this affair and I pointed out that whilst I found his remarks full of nasty collectivist generalization, many of the points he made about what passes for civilization in the Arab world are simply facts… people do indeed get their limbs chopped off as punishment in Saudi Arabia, women are indeed second class citizens (if they are even citizens at all), human rights are ghastly across a great swathe of the Middle East, the last time the Muslim world was a hive of innovation was in the 12th Century etc. etc… all these things are simply facts.
Yet my point is not to defend Kilroy-Silk, of whom I am not a particular fan but rather to wonder why it is that Robert Fisk and John Pilger can make equally sweeping and egregiously collectivist statements about Israel and the United States without so much as a murmur from the Guardian reading classes?
I check this site day by day, and found this cartoon today.
By the way, there is a curious transatlantic rift over the Beagle: the British media call it a ‘British Mars probe’ and the US media call it a ‘European Mars probe’.
I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I’m glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)
To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:
It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.
Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.
As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we’re as bad … But, if we don’t, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 1996
The title illustrates the difficulty of captioning and characterising the problem the author is up against. “Touch not the Lord’s anointed” seems to be the sentiment behind the title – except that “the anointed” are the self-anointed. To some extent the sub-title of the book helps: “Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, defining as it does the moral complacency of the left-liberal consensus and its absence of self-doubt even when policies fail. Sowell does not like the classification into left and right, but it is difficult to avoid.
He also points out that while the attitude of controversialists on the right to those on the left is that they are misguided or foolish, the converse attitude of the left is that the others are evil and “Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.”
Ch. 2 defines a “Pattern of Failure” when the anointed initiate a program as involving four stages “The Crisis”; “The Solution”; “The Results” and “The Response” and illustrates this with three examples – President Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, Sex Education (starting at about the same time) and Criminal Justice (the new “criminals’ rights” initiated a little earlier). Matters had actually been improving in all three, so that whether any of the changes were needed is questionable. After all these programs or initiatives had been in operation for some time, all three situations were manifestly worse.
The “response” was usually to talk about something else rather than to admit the problem wasn’t solved. The War on Poverty was to abolish dependency; it increased it, but, naturally “it benefitted a lot of people”; sex education was to reduce teen-age pregnancies; these increased but “people felt better about sex”; crimes increased after criminals were given more rights, but Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had been most responsible for this merely claimed that people were “overlooking the root causes of crime” – without explaining how these must have got worse after 1960. This chapter is perhaps the most tightly argued in the book, but other chapters are also valuable, pursuing the contorted reasoning of those who know they are right, despite everything that happens to the contrary.
Later, he introduces the instructive concept of “trade-offs” (see Index): that improvements in one direction may result in deterioration in another and that cost is something that must always be taken into consideration.
There are also “mascots” (Index), normally “undeserving” sorts of people who are treated as if they can do no wrong – vagrants, homeless persons, the “handicapped”, homosexuals, AIDS sufferers. Just as some hazards are exaggerated (ignoring the “trade-off” factor), others are pooh-poohed, perhaps the most tragic being AIDS. Transfusions had been proclaimed safe (without testing); about half of all haemophiliacs in the US became infected with AIDS from them, because homosexuals were “mascots”. And there are extraordinary contortions of logic to let criminals off. The victimisation of business and the professions is nothing short of frightening.
What is not so clear is where the mind-set comes from that so persistently flouts conventional wisdom. It seems to result from the idea that, because any situations is not perfect – and is therefore a problem – some alternative must be better. What could be simpler than to carry the honourable Anglo-American tradition of dissent to its reductio ad absurdum and proclaim that to do the opposite of what always has been done must be the solution? But who started this Gadarene rush?
Glenn Reynolds blogs about a happy ending to the story of imprisoned Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. This is very good news. The icing on the cake (the cake being release from prison) is that he credits blogs for playing key role in the events.
OJR [The Online Journalism Review]: So why do you think they let you go?
Motallebi: They didn’t expect the pressure from Webloggers and foreign media in my case. They think I’m an individual [freelance] journalist and not affiliated with any political party, I’m not an insider. So they think that when they arrested me, there wouldn’t be strong pressure to release me… I think they found the cost of arresting me more than they thought before.
There will probably be much written and made of this (quite rightly). What caught my attention was this bit from the ‘post-release’ interview with Sina Motallebi.
At newspapers, an editor can change your article. They’re [ed. Iranian authorities] afraid of Weblogs because in Iran we don’t have the experience of an [open] society. We have a [closed] society. Weblogs are a good experience, where everyone can explain their ideas. And the government is very afraid of them.
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Socially in Iran, we haven’t experienced a [free] society where everyone can express their ideas. We don’t experience the freedom of expression that much. But Weblogs give the opportunity to Iranians to speak freely and share their ideas, their views, and even the details of their personal lives.
Freedom of expression was also important for people talking about their personal life, especially for girls and women. That’s the reason you see many Iranian females blogging now. Under Islamic rules, many things are prohibited for young people. Each week many Iranian youngsters are arrested only for going to a party or walking with a friend of the opposite sex. So normally, they can’t even talk about their personal life. But online with their fake names, or in some cases their real names, they can mention their personal lives and experience freedom of speech.
The Bloggers of the World Unite!
Aargh! Typing this almost hurt and the instinctive reaction is one of: Over my dead body…but you get the drift.
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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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