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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Another election, another outrage, this time in Taiwan, where the President and his Vice President have been shot while out campaigning.
The injuries were not life threatening:
An unknown gunman fired at least one shot at Mr Chen’s campaign jeep as he rode in its open back alongside Vice-President Annette Lu, holding onto the vehicle’s roll bar and waving to adoring home-town crowds in the southern city of Tainan.
Mrs Lu felt a sharp pain near her right knee, then Mr Chen felt a blow to his lower abdomen, presidential chief of staff Chiou I-Jen said.
Mr Chen initially did not realise what had happened but realised he was injured when he felt blood seeping through his clothes. He ordered his motorcade to speed up and head for a hospital.
The Christian Science Monitor ponders what this might mean for the election. There is currently no word on the attacker, and what motives might be behind the attack. However, tensions in the area have been high, as President Chen is seen as a proponent of formally declaring Taiwan independent, a move that would infuriate China and possibly trigger a military confrontation.
The BBC reports that the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee has rejected the EU Commission’s agreement to automatically pass personal information about transatlantic passengers to US authorities. The committee concluded that:
“The agreement with the United States is not on a level that… gives enough protection to EU citizens”
Unfortunately, as the BBC article points out, the infamous EU democratic deficit means that “The parliament’s opinion has no legal force”.
It would appear from yesterday’s UK budget, before my accountant gets through the smallprint, that Gordon Brown has decided one million small UK businesses hold just too many awkward voters to browbeat in one go. So he has only smacked us with a light tap rather than the full hammer of state retribution he was muttering about earlier in the month.
There is still a Section 660 court case, with a judgement due in June, where he may yet succeed in fully wrecking the small business sector, just as he managed to do recently with the UK film industry, and the IT contractor sector several years ago, with his IR35 measure, but I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
What really puzzles me, however, is why whenever he deliberately introduces tax loopholes, to apparently encourage small businesses, instead of financial journalists just praising him in newspapers the damned small businesses actually take advantage of his faux largesse. Which means he has to get all moody and pompous before closing his own damned loopholes down again. → Continue reading: The cleverest man in the world
In the wake of the massacre in Madrid, and the subsequent election result, it has become the conventional wisdom that the election went according to al-Qaeda’s design. Robert Clayton Dean expressed this view concisely here at Samizdata a few days ago:
Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror.
However, there is in fact little direct evidence that such was the goal of al-Qaeda. It does sound rather logical, of course, but there may well be other factors at work. And it is not clear that logic is a useful tool in analysing the methods and aims of this enemy.
What follows is a purely speculative guess to make the case that the political goal of al-Qaeda was in fact the direct opposite- their goal may well have been to ensure the re-election of the Popular Party.
al-Qaeda as an organisation has been going through a rough couple of years, and it has not achieved much in terms of murder and mayhem in the West. If we consider al-Qaeda as a company, it would aim to market itself as the organisation of choice to the Islamic Fundamentalist section of the Islamic marketplace. → Continue reading: What is Al Qaeda up to? An alternative view
recoup (v.) recouped, recouping, recoups
v. tr.
To receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
To return as an equivalent for; reimburse.
Law. To deduct or withhold (part of something due) for an equitable reason.
v. intr.
To regain a former favorable position.
So when we are told that a committee of the Irish parliament will tell the Irish government that it should…
…use taxes or development levies to recoup some of the windfall profits made by property speculators when their land is rezoned.
… we are being told the Irish government should receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
Now how exactly does a property owner profiting from a change in the manner in which the Irish state abridges their property rights (i.e. land use zoning), thereby cause the Irish state a loss that needs to be recouped?
It should be clear that what we have here is an example of our old friend ‘meta-context’ at work again. Underpinning the suggested tax increase is the unspoken axiom that the economy exists for the purpose of allowing the state to acquire resources and any profits derived from the economy which benefit someone else other than the state are in fact a ‘loss’ for the state. That is to say, this is just a slight variation on the bizarre economic fallacy that someone else getting richer perforce makes someone else poorer. The self-evident concept of wealth creation simply does not register.
I wonder how many people sitting in that Oireachtas committee set to tell the Irish leader to increase those taxes would find the notion that the only reason the state ‘allows’ people to engage in economic activity for their own benefit at all is so that the state can tax them? My guess is that it would not be a commonly held overt belief but if you were to actually strap a number of mainstream Irish journalists and TDs to chairs and question them, teasing out the unspoken underlying assumptions within which they see the world, that is indeed what you would discover to be the case.
This morning I caught a train from south London into Waterloo, as I often do. There was a significantly larger police presence at Waterloo station than I am used to. It was not intended to be large enough to cause anyone to panic, but it there were certainly more police there than there were last week. Some of the police were carrying handguns. (Police in Great Britain are not normally armed). I then walked over one of the Hungerford footbridges that connect Waterloo and the South Bank Centre with Charing Cross Station on the other side of the Thames. Walking across the footbridge were two policement, one of who was carrying a sub-machine gun. (One normally only sees such things at airports, or outside the US embassy, or somewhere like that). At Charing Cross over the river there was again a more substantial police presence than I am used to, and again quite a few of the police were armed.
This was all actually clearly intended to be pretty low key, but I could feel the unmistakeable sense that the police and security forces are nervous at the moment. After the events in Spain last week, they should be. I am nervous. But seeing this kind of response on the streets is certainly something that makes me feel closer to it.
The BBC are broadcasting a series of documentaries purporting to show crises that could affect Britain over the next two to three decades. It is already clear from the subjects tackled: the dangers of gated communities, the bankruptcy of pension systems, the rise of obesity and the superiority of women, that they were written from a left-wing viewpoint that hypes up the modish problems of the would be regulators. The striking omission is the nightmares conjured up by the Greens but they will no doubt form the subjects of a second series.
If you do catch these, then try to spot the technological innovations that spice up the world of the future.
As part of this conversation, the BBC asks for views of the world in 2020 and I thought that it would be rude not to oblige.
By 2020, we will no longer have to pay the licence fee to watch substandard populist rot that masquerades as quality TV, notably, the series of poor documentaries called If.
If Iran or Al Qaeda obtain weapons of mass destruction, then we can expect them to unleash a second Holocaust, in order to remove Israel from the Middle East. Half of Europe will revile this, half will be relieved.
One or more countries will withdraw from the European Union due to its institutional inflexibility and inability to compete with the United States or the Far East.
There will be further wars in the Middle East involving the West (without a UN mandate) due to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in oil producing areas.
It was an antidote to some nauseating missives extolling peace in our time and a World Union (based on the European Union). One would have thought the barbarities of twencen would have extinguished this Fabian and Wellsian nonsense.
Yesterday I marvelled at the notion that David Blunkett had the gall to suggest that victims of miscarriages of justice should be charged for ‘room and board’. That this has not featured on the front page of every newspaper in Britain is also shocking to me. It seems to me that when there has been a miscarriage of justice, the state should bend over backwards to make amends as fulsomely as possible and make lavish restitution for damages done both directly and indirectly for the life it has unjustly disrupted. If justice is administered ‘in the name of the people’ then surely amongst the endless litany of grotesque uses of the public purse that consume billions and billions of pounds, this would be a rare legitimate public charge that few would dispute.
However what is even more baffling to me that the Tory Party is not queuing up in the Commons to denounce Blunkett in the most extreme language allowed in Parliament. Why are they not trying to use this latest affront to common decency and natural justice and using it to paint the Labour Party as the party which tramples over civil liberties? They should be relentlessly calling for Blunkett’s head over this and what do I hear? The sound of silence. Anyone who harbours delusions that the party of Michael Howard will be their champion for civil liberties against the ever more authoritarian Labour government really needs to see them for what they really are.
Regardless of whether or not the government manages to get this measure accepted or not, the mere fact Blunkett can even suggest such a thing without sparking clamourous calls for his removal from office is both a damning indictment of the moral and political vacuity of Britain’s political parties and a chilling measure of state of Britain’s culture. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong and see a ground swell of anger emerging in the press and polity in the next few days but I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to hear the views of some of Britain’s blogging Members of Parliament on this issue.
I should have gone on hunger strike for longer than 44 days: then the bill would have been less.
– Former prisoner Vincent Hickey, on the Home Office’s bizarre attempts to charge him for board and food for the time he spent imprisoned for a murder he did not commit.
Here is a new hack that has been making the rounds of the computer security community. It seems bluetooth lays many very common mobile phones wide open to one or more attacks. On at least one Nokia (the very one I have in fact), someone walking past you on the street can lift your entire address book and calendar even if your Bluetooth setting is HIDDEN. There are other sorts of possible abuse as well: read the article.
No, I did not get caught out. I spend too much time in bad company to trust any system which hasn’t been source-code audited by people I trust. Since mobile phones are all based on proprietary code, I have always taken the precaution of only enabling such features (on mobiles or other systems) during time of use.
For those of you who religiously follow slashdot, this is probably not news. Most of our readers are not engineers so this may be news to them.
If you have bluetooth, turn the bloody thing OFF!!!!
Michael Barone has an excellent antidote to the unending stream of nattering negativity on the Iraqi reconstruction.
What is remarkable about our occupation of Iraq is not that it has gone badly but that it has gone so well. Last week, crude oil production was above target level, the central bank signed up for the payment system used by central banks internationally, and 140,000 Iraqi police and law enforcement officers were on duty. A new Iraqi currency is circulating, and schools are open. Wages are rising, interest rates are falling, businesses are opening and hiring. Millions of Iraqis are buying cellphones, TVs, and satellite dishes. Attacks on Americans have greatly diminished, and attacks on Iraqis are likely to turn them against terrorists rather than against us.
Just so. The opponents of American intervention of Iraq have consistently played the expectations card. Rather than measure results of the war and reconstruction against any realistic yardsticks, they instead set impossibly high standards, and then carp when they aren’t met, or move the goalposts whenever the good guys achieve the nearly impossible.
The war itself was a stunning victory, unparalleled in the history of the world in the speed and precision of the coalition campaign, but throughout the fighting the Save Saddam types which populate the Democrat Party in the US, the BBC, and most establishment media, would have had us believe the coalition was on the brink of disaster and quagmire.
The reconstruction is following a similar pattern. Miracles are being accomplished on the ground in Iraq, but you won’t see any of it acknowledged by the anti-Americans in the establishment media or political opposition.
My advice? Study history. Don’t fall into the expectations game. Think about what needs to be done, and you will marvel at the speed and effectiveness with which it is being done.
Sure, the reconstruction hasn’t been perfect, but nothing in this world ever is. What is certain is that the Iraqis are much better off today because Bush and his coalition have forged ahead. Just remember, if the opponents of the Bush policy had their way, Saddam would still be ruling Iraq, Iraqis would still be subject to rape, murder, and torture, and Iraqi oil money would still be flowing to terrorists and their sympathizers. That, not some paradisical utopia, is the true benchmark for evaluating the Iraqi situation.
Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror. Electing a Socialist is bad at any time, of course, and the invisible hand will undoubtedly spank the Spanish in due time as the inevitably increased taxes, regulation, and rent-seeking drag down their economy.
However, this particular election rewards the terrorists by demonstrating to them that European voters can be bullied into doing what the terrorists want. As ever in human affairs, you get more of what you reward, and so the Europeans can expect to see more election eve bombings as time goes on. For this, they can thank the Spanish.
I don’t buy the line that voters punished Aznar for inept post-bomb spinning. Aznar jumped to the conclusion that it was Basque killers, when it was most likely an Islamist or Islamist/Basque joint op. Spanish voters mad at Aznar for not going after the Islamist connection early enough would not vote for the Socialist, who ran on a platform of Spanish disengagement from one of the main fronts in the war on Islamist terror.
No, the Spanish public has, by all accounts, never wanted to pull its weight in the war on terror. They were big backers of the Save Saddam strategy last year, and Aznar showed considerable courage by joining the coalition. Voting for the Socialist is of a piece with the overall appeasement apparently favored by many Spanish, so the bombings represent a timely push by the terrorists in the direction the electorate wanted to go anyway. The bombings made the war the top shelf issue again, and thus paved the way for Aznar’s defeat.
In the US, I have no doubt that election eve bombings like this would guarantee a Bush landslide, as the American public’s instictive reaction to being attacked is to elect the guy most likely to kick the shit out of our enemies. In Spain, apparently, the instinctive reaction of the majority to being attacked is something else.
Sad, really. And sure to be a sterling exhibit for the Law of Unintended Consequences. By electing a Socialist who promised to pull Spain back from the war on terror, the Spanish, by rewarding the terrorists, have guaranteed more bombings and other terrorist activity. After all, the Spanish election represents the first victory for the Islamists since 9/11. It will undoubtedly be taken as a model for many future operations.
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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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