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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It seems Gordon Brown’s favourite useful idiot, Derek Wanless, has been at it again. The much-criticised former banker, who disastrously turned the giant NatWest bank into a tiddler taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland, has taken a second lump of taxpayer cash from HM Treasury, to produce a second report telling them, once again, what they wanted to hear in the first place.
This follows his previous report, also commissioned by HM Treasury, which told them National Insurance payroll taxes should be raised to increase government spending on the NHS. Which duly happened, straight after the last General Election.
Dilbert Derek’s latest report tells us essentially that the government should do more to look after the health of its citizens. In much the same way, of course, that pig farmers should look after the health of their pigs. Welcome to the farm, citizens.
What this will undoubtedly turn into is a righteous claim, as predicted by our very own Mr David Carr, that HM Treasury should, unwillingly, and after due consideration, raise our taxes again. For our own good. Bless them.
Who cares what the actual tax will be? A fat tax, a hat tax, a stick it up your jumper tax, don’t worry, they’ll think of something. So my hot gambling tip of the day, if you’ve got any money left after this year’s January self-assessment tax deadline, is to put your loot down on ‘More Taxes Soon’, in the five o’clock at HM Treasury. This may be your last chance to ever have any spare money, so enjoy it while it lasts. Get a McDonalds with your winnings. Don’t worry. They won’t mind. They just want your money.
The following point may seem obvious, and my apologies to you in advance if it is, but it did wake me this morning, at around 5am. Which is unusual for me, because at that time in the morning, before my first cup of tea, I normally have the mental capacity and memory attention span of a small flea. A particularly unintelligent flea. A flea, perhaps, in desperate need of a government initiative.
It’s because of all these strikes we’ve been having recently, within the foaming shores of these sceptred isles. We had a paralysing Firemen’s strike, in which 17,000 soldiers, with 50-year-old equipment, unflappably replaced 55,000 strikers. We’ve just had a catastrophic government Civil Service strike, in which I was unable to claim state benefits for almost two whole days. And we’re currently enduring a calamitous state-owned University strike, where a bearded lecturer called Kevin, at the Friedrich Engels College in Newhaven, is refusing to deliver his annual keynote lecture on the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It’s been hell, it really has.
In some ways you could imagine that British industrial relations are heading down the same pan they headed down in the late 1970s. But wait! None of these strikes are actually industrial. In fact I cannot remember, for the life of me, the last serious strike which occurred, at all, in the industrious wealth producing private sector. There may have been the odd Spanish practices walkout in previously nationalised industries, such as British Telecom or British Airways, but a question formed in my mind, this morning, when by all that is great and good in the world it should have been dreaming about Penelope Cruz instead.
Have British strikes, to all serious intents and purposes, become an exclusively public sector phenomenon?
Are British strikes the last refuge of incompetent non-tax-paying public sector ‘key workers’, who wish to hold Britain’s wealth-creating taxpayers to ransom via the coercive hand of their idiot socialist friends in government? And is the public sector exclusivity of these strikes yet another testament to the enduring genius of our very own Joan of Arc, political saviour, and English heroine, Margaret Hilda, the Baroness Thatcher?
Your country is plagued by strikes and you want rid of them. Solution? Get rid of the public sector. Job done. Problem solved. Another instrumental Thatcherite lesson for politicians everywhere.
Baroness Thatcher. We truly are not worthy.
Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years.
One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970’s with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt.
click for bigger image The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one’s hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling.
The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804–1999
Misha Glenny
Granta Books, 1999
Though well-written and well-organised, its length (662 pages +) and the nature of its subject make this a book to be ploughed through, as one switches from one depressing topic to another. Yet Glenny’s attitude to it all is a little difficult to fathom. On the last page he complains of the “long periods of neglect [when] the Balkan countries have badly needed the engagement of the great powers. Yet the only country to demonstrate a sustained interest … was Nazi Germany during the 1930s.” Some model!
Certainly, left to themselves, every ethnic group (Jews excepted?) behaved badly, both internally and externally. Just how badly the book is disgustingly, though not exactly surprisingly, informative. Yet this does not seem to arouse in Glenny any doubts as to the desirability of mixed-ethnic communities. Contrast this with Spain, where the essence of the reconquest there was the homogenising of the population, with the separation of Portugal, and the imperfect assimilation of the Basques exceptions tending to prove the rule that this uniformity was ultimately beneficial. Neither the Ottoman conquest, nor its liberation homogenised the Balkans. Much of it was Slav, the exceptions being Romanian, Albanian and Greek speakers, with a good deal of intermingling, a large Jewish community in Salonica, descended from Spanish expellees, the whole top-dressed with a Turkish ruling class and military. Not that being Slav in any way prevented mutual hatred between Serb, Croat, Bulgar and Macedonian.
Glenny has chosen 1804 as the date when, with the Serbian revolt, the Ottoman Empire started to disintegrate territorially. Attempts to halt this by progressive” well-meaning Sultans failed because any liberalisation encouraged it, while the economic levers were not in Turkish hands. After relatively discrete parts of the Empire had achieved independence or autonomy – Serbia, Greece, the Rumanian principalities and Bulgaria – the rest of the peninsula was land to be squabbled over. The impression is that the Turks were not major contributors to the turmoil, nor the Islamicised Bosnians and Albanians they left behind.
It is difficult to imagine how the great powers could have intervened more effectively than they did. After all, they brought about the independence of Greece (in nuclear form) in 1830, and a settlement of the Bulgarian border at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, after Russia had done most of the fighting. Not that Glenny seems very pleased with the Congress, loading it rather heavily with responsibility for future events in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Sudan and for the scramble for Africa (p. 150). Admittedly either Austria or Russia could have tried to establish a Balkan protectorate, but why, except to keep the other out? And Britain would never allow Russia control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. There was nothing to be gained from a political occupation of a region where all the natives would turn hostile. Economically there were no resources to be exploited or with which to set up an industrial base. Building infrastructure, such as railways, could be, and was, seen as a strategic threat, by the Ottomans or the successor states, or both.
In each of his eight Chapter-Periods, Glenny makes a repeat visit to each separate area, discovering depression and despair in every one, with assassinations for the prominent and massacres for the common people unlucky to live on the wrong side of an ethnic line or be a minority in a particular place. The only exception seems to be Slovenia, which managed to break away from Yugoslavia without much fuss. As man on the spot, Glenny must be regarded as an authority on Yugoslav disintegration and great power intervention, yet there is something contrary-minded about his castigation of America for not intervening sooner in Bosnia and trying to do so just by bombing “without risking the lives of their service men and women” (p. 640). As with recent responses to its intervention in Iraq, the US position seems to be damned if you don’t, damned if you do. Leaving aside the idea that the Americans might consider the bombing option (as also followed in Kosovo) a reasonable preference,surely the facts are that the initial EU reaction was that this was a European dispute and as such should be left to Europeans to take care of. Yet he makes no mention of the inactivity of the Dutch UN “peacekeepers” which preceded, if it did not permit, the massacre of Muslims by Serbs in the so-called “safe haven” of Srebrenica (p. 650). As for the Serbs rallying round Milosevic when he got them bombed, it must be a sign of the times that it is NATO and the Americans that Glenny seems to blame for the irrational behaviour of the Serbs (p. 658).
This is not a very gracious review for a massive, painstaking and brilliant historical survey, but it is a tribute to the fact that its judgements provoke thought and, to some extent, dissent. Incidentally, Glenny uses the presumably Slavic spelling and lettering with the appropriate diacritical marks, but gives no indication as to their pronunciation.
What does this sound like to you?
[From UK Times]
DOZENS of speed cameras are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points.
The devices are to be placed where police can no longer justify having a speed camera because there is no recent history of crashes.
Police hope that the speed indicator devices (SIDs) will defuse some of the anger generated by the huge increase in camera fines. Last year an estimated two million drivers caught on camera were fined £60 and given three penalty points.
The new devices use radar to detect the speed of an oncoming vehicle, and flash it up on a screen. If the driver is within the limit, the screen changes to a smiling face.
At just 1mph over the limit, the face will frown.
Because it sounds to me like the Home Office are starting to back down.
At this rate it will take about another year for the ‘frowny faces’ to be replaced by an All-Weather Traffic Co-Ordination Officer whose job it will be to stand on the verge of a dual carriageway and shout “fascist, fascist” as the cars whizz by.
You can tell that maths teaching in Britain is in a mess. How do we know? This report in the Guardian:
The report calls on the government to set up a “maths tsar” to help revamp the structure and content of the maths curriculum and also to advise ministers.
As we have said here before, when they appoint a “tsar”, it means that they have a problem, but no idea how to solve it.
Our only problem is how we are supposed to spell the damn word.
What does the FBI do if it has a search warrant to track down one miscreant on a network? Why they seize the whole data centre of course!
I’ll attempt to make the seriousness of this more apparent in a non-cyber world example. Imagine the local police are looking for a document that is evidence of a possible crime. The Judge gives them a warrant based on probable cause. When they search the file cabinet at that address, they can’t find what they are looking for. So they corden off the entire apartment building and seize all the file cabinets containing all of the personal and business records of everyone living there. They cart those off with total disregard to the impact on lives and businesses. Then they tell everyone their file cabinets will be returned as soon as they’ve made a permanent State copy of their entire contents.
What sort of society would you say you were living in if that happened?
Sticking with the religious theme, I am puzzled by the furore regarding Mel Gibson’s acclaimed flick, The Passion of The Christ
An American Jewish leader met with Vatican officials to ask them to publicly restate church teachings on Jesus’ crucifixion. Anti-Defamation League Chair Abraham Foxman says that Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” contradicts the Vatican’s repudiation of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. A top Vatican official who met with Foxman said no such statement is planned. Archbishop John Foley, who heads the Vatican’s social-communications office, instead praised the film and said he found nothing anti-Semitic in it.
The way I see it, a couple thousand years ago a Jewish man called Jesus, most of whose followers were Jews, was executed on the basis of trumped up charges. This was done with the grudging sufferance of the Imperial Roman authorities at the behest of certain powerful Jewish political and community leaders. Thus it would be fair to say he was killed by Jews.
This is of course not at all the same thing as saying he was killed by the Jews: that makes about as much sense as saying “John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Caucasians”.
This is just history, guys! What is the big deal?
The Catholic Communications Service for England & Wales have delivered a nifty rejection of a host of the intellectual bits of the Catholic church’s philosophical underpinnings which actually make sense, via a press release called Catholic Bishops: Why we must render unto Caesar. This pertains to a booklet called ‘Taxation for the Common Good’.
Yet again the church in England shows it has no problem superceding individual moral choice (there is no other kind really because a decision cannot be moral if it is not the product of individual free will) by using the collective force of the state.
Moreover taking the property of others is just fine by them. The problem is that when they say the word ‘moral’, they do not actually know what that means. Hint: it is not the same as ‘manners’ or ‘social conventions’ and is certainly not the same issue as ‘desirable outcomes’. If some members of a church (i.e. Catholic bishops in England and Wales) find the rarified air of pure moral theory too taxing compared to issuing pronouncements on plain ol’ politics, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
The Tenth Commandment:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s
Presumably this has now been updated:
The Tenth Commandment, revised:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s… unless the manner in which thou shall covet these things is intermediated by the state
If the Catholic church wants to spurn its role as a persuader of individual moral decisions and instead be just another collectivist political advocacy group, albeit one with rather interesting buildings and distinctively dressed employees, that is fine by me… but it should not then be surprised if people treat it as just another shrill NGO or perhaps think of it as being rather like that paragon of virtues, the United Nations.
For a far more interesting discussion regarding Christianity and Liberty than you will ever find on the arid pages of the Catholic Communication Service, take a peek at the interesting Volconvo site.
The week’s edition of the Economist is a rather good one. It is a publication which although generally on the side of the angels, often infuriates me with its statist meta-contextual inconsistencies. Likewise they are at their worst when describing broader civil liberties issues, particularly self-defence. That said it is a magazine which is often a bloody good read.
The leader article is called The new jobs migration and discusses a subject dear to my heart: free trade and outsourcing.
The fact that foreign competition now impinges on services as well as manufacturing raises no new issues of principle whatever. If a car can be made more cheaply in Mexico, it should be. If a telephone enquiry can be processed more cheaply in India, it should be. All such transactions raise real incomes on both sides, as resources are advantageously redeployed, with added investment and growth in the exporting country, and lower prices in the importing country. Yes, trade is a positive-sum game. (Adam Smith did think of that.)
Great stuff. When people argue that they just want to ‘protect American (or British/French/Japanese) jobs’, what they are really demanding is that force be used to ensure that other people’s purchasing power within their own nation not be allowed to grow because of their own sectional interests.
When people look at cases of folks loosing their jobs in the USA or UK because an Indian or Philippine call centre can do it cheaper, and then call for this to stop, they are not looking beyond the first causal link of costs and benefits. Moreover, they are ignoring that we live in an extended and (largely) capitalist society which is extraordinarily good at dealing with such problems when the ‘invisible hand’ is free to work its ‘magic’. Some people are losing their jobs, ergo, this is bad and must be stopped… this rather like concluding as the world seems intuitively to be flat, therefore it must be flat. By this logic all labour saving devices should have been declared ’employment destroying devices’ and banned long ago.
There is also another splendid article in the United States section called The Great Hollowing-out Myth which roundly rubbishes the notion that outsourcing damages the US (or other) economy and overall employment prospects (alas that article is available only via on-line subscription or in the print version):
Contrary to what John Edwards, John Kerry and George Bush seem to think, outsourcing actually sustains American jobs
[…]
Yes, individuals will be hurt in the process, and the focus on public policy should be directed towards providing a safety net for them, as well as ensuring that Americans have education to match jobs being created. By contrast, regarding globalisation as the enemy, as Mr Edwards does often and Messrs Kerry and Bush both do by default, is a much greater threat to America’s economic health that any Indian software programmer.
Run, do not walk, to your nearest newsstand.
So Britain will indeed remain more enlightened than the Continent, allowing people from the new EU member nations in Eastern Europe to live here: the proviso being that they will not be allowed to partake of state benefits for a few years.
So in other words, they are welcome (and they certainly are welcome by me) to come here and work just so long as they leave the theft of other people’s money (via the state, of course), to native English people or resident French, Germans, Italians etc… or our very own local Arab terrorist supporters, come to think of it.
On a related note, it never ceases to amuse me to hear how politicos can make dissembling use of language. Following an attack by that paragon of liberal values and freedom, Tory leader Michael Howard, in which he asked “Will the government do what other countries are doing, and what the prime minister said he was looking at, will he impose transitional controls on immigration from the accession countries or not”, Tony Blair replied:
“The position as I set it out is this. There is free movement of people after May 1, free movement of workers, however, is a concession we are prepared to grant – but not in circumstances where it can be abused,” said the prime minister […] The prime minister insisted there was no contradiction in government policy. The “free movement of people is distinct from the free movement of workers” he argued.
And this is presumably because workers are not… people? Anyway, I thought it was only a problem when the people in question turn out to not to be ‘workers’. In reality, most of the ‘Old’ EU is not allowing free movement at all but rather highly regulated and restricted movement.
About a year ago I predicted the US was in the first stages of disentangling itself from global tarbabies. Invading Iraq was one of the items I expected as there was no real path out of the Middle East so long as Saddam was there. Northern and Southern Watch would have continued for decades. This is not to say America will not be stuck there for quite a few years to come, only that there is a plausible exit strategy where there once was none.
The BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process is due to culminate in a report in mid-March and will include what may well be the greatest re-organization of American overseas basing since the end of WWII. I expect to see the buzz word ‘capabilities based defense’ used as an explanation for greatly decreased numbers of Americans in overseas bases.
The third part is South Korea, and I give you these two items from Jane’s to take as thou wilt:
Seoul’s AEW&C buy will reduce reliance on US.
The relaunch of the E-X airborne early-warning and control (AEW&C) programme by the Republic of Korea (RoK) Ministry of National Defence (MND) on 4 February is intended to reduce the country’s reliance on US Air Force E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft (JDW 11 February).
[Jane’s Defence Weekly – first posted to http://jdw.janes.com – 13 February 2004]
South Korea haggles over procurement programme. The Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defence (MND) established its Korea Multirole Helicopter (KMH) Programme Management Office (PMO) last month to lead the country’s largest-ever defence procurement programme, with a value of some $12.5 billion.
[Jane’s Defence Weekly – first posted to http://jdw.janes.com – 13 February 2004]
We will see agreements for unrestricted bases containing pre-positioned supplies in in places convenient to expected trouble spots. There will only be enough local American staff to handle peace-time security, inventory and infrastructure. Perhaps there will be some intelligence, training and Special Forces as well, but the ‘footprint’ will be small. As much as possible will be handled by civilians, on base where absolutely required and otherwise ‘outsourced’ to a back-office in the US.
Naval basing will be an exception. A primarily maritime power still needs home ports for the Fleet that are within reasonable sailing distances of trouble spots.
We are entering an era in which our military will be kept at home and deployed only when and where required. It will take most of this decade to get there.
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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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