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]
|
Some of the Serbian paramilitary ‘heroes’ responsible for the mass murder of 192 Croatians in Vukovar in 1991 have been put on trial in Serbia.
This is a welcome development as not only does it brings bring these people to account, it will require Serbian society and the Serbian state to confront what really happened. In the absence of an externally imposed ‘denazification’ process, this could be exactly what Serbia needs and perhaps the start of a process that will de-legitimise vile creatures like Vojislav Seseji and other nationalists who do not have the widespread opprobrium they deserve within Serbia itself.
War crimes trials far off in the Hague simply cannot have the same effect as trials within Serbia itself. Forcing the painful truth to be brought out for all to see has to be a good thing as far too many people with the blood of the Balkans on their hands are still relaxing in the cafés of Belgrade. Perhaps this is the first sign that their days are numbered, but it would be premature to just assume this will be the case. Nevertheless, these trials are a very good start.
I frikkin’ met an Ayatollah! a real life Ayatollah, I watched him eat a banana and then he put his hands on my shoulder and prayed that I get married soon, my mom was beside herself with joy and I just couldn’t stop laughing.
The heretic fagot getting a blessing from an Ayatollah. that is how great those four days were.
– Salam Pax
One of the best summaries of the travesty that lead to Martha Stewart being convicted of, well, lying to avoid self-incrimination, can be found on WorldnetDaily by Samuel Blumenfeld:
Stewart was acting on information given to her. She did not build her wealth on a career of insider trading. It was a one-time fluke which involved a relatively small amount of money. When federal investigators questioned her on this transaction, she said that she had a standing order for her broker to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00. Apparently, that was the alleged lie that the jury convicted her on.
Here was the federal government, which couldn’t protect us from the terrorist attack of 9-11 in which thousands of people were killed, trying to protect us from Martha Stewart. The alleged lies she told were not told under oath. She did not commit perjury. Apparently it is now a crime to tell a falsehood to a government investigator. That’s considered an obstruction of justice.
Whatever you may think of Stewart’s action, she did not kill anyone or rob anyone. Her action did not result in anyone else losing anything. In other words, unless you believe that citizens don’t have a right to tell a falsehood to a government official in defending themselves from self-incrimination, Martha Stewart committed no crime.
Read the whole thing. The sickeningly self-righteous chortling of the predators of the wealth destroying US legal establishment just makes the whole thing worse and make it clear to me what really makes the legal world go around. If some ambitious prosecutor who thinks nothing of destroying lives and livelihoods in order to advance their own careers decides you are going to be their stepping stone, watch out. The state is not your friend.
Devoid of inspiration, I looked in my library and found Soviet Communism – A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There is no question mark in the title of my 1937 Left Book Club edition, and it was “NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC” (as it says on the front). And a good thing too, I muttered, as I scanned through it, looking for something particularly vile and wrong-headed for you people to have a good chuckle and a good sneer at.
Imagine my surprise, then, to encounter a paragraph of complete truth. Admittedly I had to go to page 1122 to find it, but even so, don’t you think that this is really rather good?
We place first in far-reaching importance the complete discarding, as the incentive to production, of the very mainspring of the western social order, the motive of profit-making. Instead of admiring those who successfully purchase commodities in order to sell them again at a higher price (whether as merchant or trader, wholesale dealer or retailer). Soviet Communism punishes such persons as criminals, guilty of the crime of “speculation”. Instead of rewarding or honouring those (the capitalist employers or entrepreneurs) who engage others at wages in order to make a profit out of the product of their labour, Soviet Communism punishes them as criminals, guilty, irrespective of the amount of the wages that they pay, of the crime of “exploitation”. It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference that this one change in ideology (in current views of morality as well as in criminal law) has made in the manner of life within the USSR. No one can adequately realise, without a wide study of the facts of soviet life, what this fundamental transformation of economic relationships has meant, alike to the vast majority of the poor and to the relatively small minority who formerly “lived by owning”, or by employing others for profit.
The paragraphs that follow revert to the evil drivel of which this book mostly consists, as the elderly dupes try to explain how none of this did any harm. But even so, something of a surprise.
Bruce Schneier has a view essay in Wired about how all the money spent on security to turn the country into a fortress may make us feel better, but it doesn’t make us any safer. As most readers of this blog will know, Bruce Schneier is CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
Many of the security measures we encounter on a daily basis aim pinpoint the bad guys by treating everyone as a suspect. The Department of Homeland Security counts on technology to come to our rescue: databases to track suspected terrorists, facial recognition to spot them in airports, artificial intelligence to anticipate plots before they unfold. But that creates a problem similar to the one you see when airport security screeners waste their time frisking false alarms. Terrorists are so rare that any individual lead is almost certainly a false one. So billions of dollars are wasted with no assurance that any terrorist will be caught. When an airport screener confiscates a pocketknife from an innocent person, security has failed.
…
Security always involves compromises. As a society we can have as much protection as we want, as long as we’re willing to sacrifice the money, time, convenience, and liberties to get it. Unfortunately, most of the government’s measures are bad trade-offs: They require significant sacrifices without providing much additional safety in return. And there’s far too much “security theater” – ways of making people feel safer without actually improving anything.
A lone (or so it often seems) voice of sanity and common sense – just what I needed to get me through today…
Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora
Ronald Segal
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry
Bernard Lewis
OUP; 1994
To treat this subject it is really necessary, as Segal has done, to run through the history of Islam from Western India to Western Africa, for during the whole of the period of more than 1300 years black slaves have been acquired and traded increasingly with the spread of Islam – indeed, it might be said that one reason for the spread of Islam was trade, of which slaves were a considerable part.
In Islam’s Black Slaves Segal makes very clear the difference between the Islamic trade, and the use to which it was put, and the transatlantic trade that brought blacks to the Americas. He has already written a book about the latter subject, The Black Diaspora, and it is probable that he regards it as the greater crime. Slaves in the Islamic world were much more for domestic use and while in the Americas the imports were predominantly male, within Islam females outnumbered males by two to one, probably (though this is not mentioned explicitly) because slave-raiding involved killing the men to secure the women and children (as opposed to slave-trading with the black kingdoms on the African West Coast). Segal claims, however, that though the journeys of the slave-caravans were terrible, once the slaves had, so to speak, arrived at their final destination, their treatment was relatively humane. → Continue reading: Slavery under Islam
The other day I came across this article during some random Web surfing, which contained a fairly familiar conservative hammering of what is loosely defined as the Baby Boomer Generation, that portion of the mostly Western population now on the verge of hitting the age of retirement.
In essentials, the argument runs like this: baby boomers are self-obsessed, adopted some mind-bindingly dumb (mostly left) political views; undermined respect for any kind of authority; addled their brains with drugs during the infamous Sixties and now expect we younger folk to shoulder the burgeoning cost of keeping them in retirement. Blah, bloody blah-blah.
Yes, you may have guessed it – this writer (born in that greatest of years, 1966, about a month before England won the soccer World Cup) is not entirely sold on the conservative critique, even though I share some distaste at the dumb political and cultural stances that were taken by said generation. But one thing which I frequently note is this – the BB generation is often attacked for being self-interested and focussed on acquiring self-esteem. But wait a minute. As a libertarian and unashamed individualist, I have to ask: what is wrong with wishing to improve one’s life, exactly? After all, one of the most widely books in that stiff-necked era, that of the Victorians, was Samuel Smiles’ hymn to self-improvement.
Surely, anyone who believes their life is their own, and not that of the State, Volk, proletariat, God, Allah, or the Great Green whatever, will embrace the notion of self-improvement. After all, much of the libertarian movement we know today, with all its different strains, acquired a considerable amount of energy during the 1950s and 60s. David Friedman, for example, who is the son of Milton Friedman and a leading exponent of anarcho-capitalism, might be regarded as a baby boomer. A good number of those who were inspired by the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand were baby boomers. The Libertarian Alliance’s own director, Dr Chris R. Tame, and LA editorial boss and Samizdata.net scribe, Brian Micklethwait, were of the boomer generation.
To put it another way, let us avoid the groupthink mentality that would bracket a whole generation under one heading. The BB generation contain a fair share of boobies, charlatans and fools. It also contains folk I greatly admire and am proud to call my friends.
That’s my basic rule: whatever the problem, the government’s a bigger one
– Mark Steyn
Information Week reports that the State Department plans to begin issuing passports with chips containing biographic information later in the year. Maura Harty, testified at a Congressional hearing Thursday that the United States needs to take the lead in issuing the new passports to encourage other nations to do likewise. Doing so, she says, will help secure our borders against terrorists and other potential troublemakers. Harty told member of the House Government Reform Committee’s hearings on the government’s US-Visit program, which requires many foreigners entering and leaving the United States to have their fingerprints and face electronically scanned.
We recognize that convincing other nations to improve their passport requires U.S. leadership both at the International Civil Aviation Organization and by taking such steps with the U.S. passport. Embedding biometrics into U.S. passports to establish a clear link between the person issued the passport and the user is an important step forward in the international effort to strengthen border security.
Of course, biometrics is foolproof and fingerprinting your citizens is going to improve border security how exactly?! Another example of a fallacy typical of the statists that if only we had total surveillance, then no crime, threat or terrorism would be possible. Balls, balls, balls.
Sorry for the outburst, it is just one stupid statement by a state official too many… Sadly, I am sure there are many more to come.
Climate Alarmism Reconsidered
Robert L. Bradley, Jr.
Institute of Economic Affairs, Hobart Paper 146, 2003
This is a rather cautious riposte to the noisy consensus that seems to get all the publicity. Bradley follows Lomborg in pointing out that programs like Kyoto will make so little difference that the money notionally saved might just as well be spent elsewhere – dealing with poverty will do more to clean up the environment that instituting measures that will bear down more on the poor than on anyone else. Since their effect on climate will be minimal anyway, further, even more difficult negotiations must follow.
The free market has done more to solve problems of resource shortages and pollution than the activities of governments; a broad hint that these, defined as statism by Bradley, will be incorrect when applied to climate control. Perhaps unfortunately, he also coins the term stasism, to define the radical environmental position, basically “a wish to return to an idealised stable past” (p. 109).
He sees the current consensus as discounting the benign effects of greater warmth, which occur more in winter than in summer, at night rather than by day and where it is cold rather than hot. Also not taken into account has been the beneficent effect on plant growth of higher levels of carbon dioxide, the optimum for which is 800-1200 ppm, about two to three times what it is now (375) and twice what is forecast for the end of the century (522). He also notes that increased melting of the Antarctic ice sheet at one edge is balanced by thickening at another and by more precipitation onto its land-mass.
His non-polemical language makes it difficult to grasp his most salient arguments, and to some extent I feel that he assumes that the current fuss will die down and that it will become another scare to look back on.
There are three appendices, the first quoting forecasts that, over the years, have been falsified by events, the Ehrlichs being prominent here; the second, positive features half-buried in the latest Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published by the CUP in 2001; the third, extracts from Jevons, the first doomsayer on the subject of resources, in 1865.
I note that Bradley has written a book entitled Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (2000).
David produced a useful guide to Tranzian for beginners. I thought it apt to follow with a guide to Cultural Luddism – the language of those who reject modern cosmopolitan capitalism – for those who might otherwise be perplexed at the offerings of this group of pseudo-libertarians. → Continue reading: Cultural Luddism for beginners
Samizdata’s commentariat sometimes irritates, but I generally find that when I ask it a technical or factual question, then in among the waffle I get good and pertinent answers, and now I have another question, concerning copyright. It was provoked by a phone conversation between me and Findlay Dunachie (who is a real person and who does live in Glasgow) about culture (harking back to my posting about that talk I am to give), by which we both meant music, pictures, etc. (rather than the incoming tide of brown people that threatens to bring all of civilisation to a standstill). I said I was interested in … whatever it was, and Findlay replied that, on the other hand, one of the cultural things that particularly interested him was why, although we can all now own cheap CDs of great symphonies and concertos and operas and oratorios, we cannot drop into a museum and view full size, electronic reproductions of all the world’s great artistic masterpieces. Why cannot museums get that organised? Is it original object fetishism? Are we only staring at vast sums of money when we look at paintings, so would copies not count?
I do not know anything like all the reasons why this cannot or does not happen. But here are some guesses.
Good copies of great paintings are technically quite hard to contrive, especially at full size. There is a comment about that from Alan Little on this Brian’s Culture Blog posting, which was about colour variations between different electronic versions of the same painting on the internet, and about the closely related matter of colour variations between different computer screens.
Also, there does seem to be a difference between, say, my willingness to pay £5 or even £10 for an old recording, and my utter unwillingness to pay as little as 5p for an electronic copy of the Mona Lisa to stare at on my cheap computer screen. Maybe there are actually plenty of fabulously good copies out there, but at a price, and I am a cheapskate. And maybe I am not the only one. But even if all that is true, you would think that museums could do deals amongst themselves to get around all that. So maybe us punters do only want to see the originals, no matter how great the potential copies.
But, and this is where I have a specific question to which I seek a specific answer, I rather think that there is another inhibition at work here. Pictures stay in copyright for ever, unlike sound recordings.
It is perfectly possible for a business like Naxos Historical to flourish, and it does, no matter how much its very existence may enrage the great recording enterprises whose recordings it (perfectly legally) makes use of, after the passing of only a few decades (my understanding being three, but maybe the Europeans will change/are changing/have changed that to five). But no matter how many decades elapse, with pictures it is different. With recordings, after a few decades, all bets about the legality of copying are off. With paintings, no matter how long ago – how many centuries ago – they were painted, all those bets remain on. And it is the same with imagery of any kind, that is to say with photographs (which are a more exact equivalent of sound recordings than paintings are).
The central question to which I seek a definite answer is, simply: is that right? I have been running my Culture Blog now for well over a year, and I am rather ashamed that I still do not even approximately know the answer to this question about the legality of image copying, but better late than never.
There is also the question of whether the legal facts of image copying ought to be the legal facts. Is what now happens right? In general, and assuming that I am very roughly right about this, what on earth is the justification for treating imagery so extremely differently from sound recordings? I am sure that there are good reasons for this sharp difference, but I have never thought about what they might be, and it is time I did.
My thanks in advance to any commenters.
|
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.
|
