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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Well, since people don’t want to talk about the really big issues (the mainstream media v. blogdom cage match), we might as well give ’em what they do want: the Kerry kerfuffle.
For agonizingly detailed analysis of the blow-by blow, then either Power Line or Captain’s Quarters is probably the place to go.
My take:
Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what Kerry did as a soldier in Viet Nam all those years ago, just as I don’t really care what George Bush did as a pilot in the National Guard. Both seem to have served adequately well, and I would be perfectly happy to let sleeping dogs lie. I am perfectly willing to stipulate that nothing either man did as a soldier has any relevance to their race for President.
End of story? Not really, because the Kerry kerfuffle is not really about what John Kerry did as a soldier. As far as I can tell, the Swifties are not accusing him of war crimes (Kerry handles that all by himself, not that anyone believes him). They are not even accusing him of incompetence, really. Even by the Swifties’ account, he brought all his men home, killed a few bad guys, and generally carried out his mission as well as most young officers. Plenty good enough.
No, the current controversy is not about what Kerry did as a soldier, its about what he has done as a politician. Kerry’s career as a politician predates and encompasses his brief military career. He was an anti-war activist before the war, something of a glory hound during the war, returned to anti-war activism after the war, and has been a professional politician just about ever since.
Once you put the Swifties’ attack on Kerry in this context, they raise some very troubling questions. Kerry’s entry into the military, framed as it is by anti-war and anti-military activity, begins to look like opportunistic ticket-punching. His medals look like more of the same, especially when you look at how they have been used by him as props for his political career ever since (he famously pretended to throw them over the White House fence, only he did not, and now hangs them on the wall of his office). Indeed, Kerry has built his career on the foundation of his four months in-country, and has done so in a way that highlights what many see as fundamental character flaws. Kerry has very characteristically tried to straddle the fence on Viet Nam, claiming on the one hand to be a war hero and on the other to be an anti-war activist.
The Swiftie attack is not on his service as a soldier, it is about how he has used that service (cynically and opportunistically, in their view) to advance his political career. The Swifties are saying that the anti-war side of the straddle disqualifies him from leading America in the current war, which is a purely political argument that does not touch on Kerry’s service as a soldier.
They are also saying that the war hero side of the straddle is a fraud. Note that their quarrel is not really with what he did on the ground, it is with what he claims he did (in the military paperwork that resulted in his medals, and in his admittedly exaggerated accounts since then). What happened in the actions that resulted in his medals will be hard to sort out, but I would say the Swifties have landed some telling blows. Principally, Kerry has abandoned “Christmas in Cambodia,” the critical turning point that allowed his brave soldier and anti-war activist personae to co-exist.
Good lawyers know that nothing is more important than framing the debate. The Swifties, in their rage at Kerry for, in their view, stabbing them in the back, have not done a very good job of clearly framing this debate as being about Kerry the Cynical and Opportunistic Politico, rather than being about Kerry the Brave and Noble Swabbie. That will probably, in the end, rob their campaign of much of its power.
The folks who want Kerry to take power want to frame the debate as being about Kerry’s service as a soldier, so they can delegitimize and confuse the issues raised by Kerry’s career as a politican. Just because the mainstream media, who are pretty comprehensively in the tank for Kerry, are falling for and enabling this strategy, does not mean you have to.
There are many annoying things about computing but one of those things that is most likely to reduce me to screaming at the monitor and firing up Google to hunt down the home addresses of certain programmers is rude software.
Yahoo is a particular offender. Download and install their Yahoo Instant Messenger (or better yet, do not) and you get, unasked for, an icon in the taskbar and two more in Internet Explorer, all without so much as a ‘by your leave’. Install the whole suite of Yahoo products and you get even more. This is ‘interruption marketing’ and contravenes the cardinal rule of ‘do not piss off the customer’. If I wanted the frigging icons taking up my screen real estate, I would have damn well asked for them. So if you find that as intolerable as I do, download Trillian and use Yahoo Instant Messenger’s services without actually having to sully your machine with Yahoo Instant Messenger. Hey Yahoo, my response to you trying to shove your products in front of me? Let’s try “Screw you, I am going to use your more congenial competitor”. I am willing to pay to be treated more to my liking. → Continue reading: Rude marketing deserves a rude response
James Lileks, riffing on John Kerry’s nomination speech last month:
My life today would have been much easier if I hadn’t been struck with the vision of a former president taking the podium in Boston to announce “I’m Bill Clinton, and I’m reporting for booty!”
I would guess not, because he was complaining bitterly about the regulatory nature of the British government, in an article which drew a dry smile.
After making the confident predicition that the world as we know it will end, on the grounds we are running out of oil, Monbiot presents for our admiration a commune in Somerset. But our hippy heroes found to their dismay that regulations thwarted them at every turn:
Peasant farming, the settlers have found, is effectively illegal in the UK.
The first hazard is the planning system. The model is viable only if you build your own home from your own materials on your own land: you can’t live like this and support a mortgage. So the settlers imposed more rules on themselves: their houses, built of timber, straw bales, wattle and daub and thatch, would have the minimum visual and environmental impact.
But the planning system makes no provision for this. It is unable to distinguish between an eight-bedroom blot on the landscape and a home which can be seen only when you blunder into it.
…Then the environmental health inspectors struck…
… Tinkers’ Bubble, which has never poisoned anyone, is now forbidden to sell any kind of processed food or drink: its cheese, bacon, juice and cider have been banned.
I think it is just hilarious that the hippies of Tinker’s Bubble, who have imposed all manner of self-regulations on themselves, find themselves so hindered.
The State is not your friend, even if you are a hippy on a commune.
One of the most enduring, and in some ways quite endearing, characteristics of the British left is their propensity to take themselves so deadly seriously. It is precisely this characteristic that lies behind their customarily ludicrous, nay comical, aggrandisements.
There is not, I submit, a single Trot journal or website that does not periodically feature a 48-point headline declaring that “The Revolution Has Begun” in response to an afternoon of industrial action by a group of clerical workers at a Job Centre in West Bromwich.
For these people, the steps of the Winter Palace are always on the verge of being stormed and they appear entirely unable to grasp the fact that, the more earnest and po-faced they are, the more pant-wettingly hilarious they become.
The latest recruits to this mythical army of restless proletarians are American sociologists who are about to cast off their chains:
More than 5,000 American sociologists, plus a few foreign scholars, held their largest and, many said, most vibrant annual convention for years.
Bush and Kerry were campaigning through nearby states. Their soundbites were rarely mentioned, but the lack of serious debate is one reason for US sociology’s new political engagement after decades of quiet since the 60s.
Be on notice you nattering nabobs of neo-liberalism! The sociologists are waking from their slumbers and soon the entire civilised world will quake to vibration of their sensible shoes on the warpath. → Continue reading: And the Earth shall tremble…
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
– P. J. O’Rourke
Robin Cook, the former Cabinet Minister, who resigned with aplomb on the eve of the Iraqi War, has proved a popular alternative for the anti-war brigade on the backbenches of the House of Commons. His speeches have provided illuminating insights into the mindset of those who view anti-terrorist actions as propaganda to expand the power of the United States. The debate on combating terrorism is structured as a conflict between freedom and security, balancing civil liberties against the need to pre-empt atrocities on innocent civilians. There is a case for arguing that the erosion of civil liberties in Britain has been accelerated by Blunkett the authoritarian using the ‘war on terror’ as a convenient excuse.
Robin Cook, in a speech at the Edinburgh Book Festival, personified the anti-war Left, and argued that the anti-terrorist activities of the British government was a conflict between multiculturalism and security. The necessity of combating Al-Qa’eda operatives was secondary to the importance of reinforcing and extending a multicultural society. Cook evinced some surprise at this recent development:
He said: “I’m deeply troubled by the increase in raids under the Anti-Terrorism Act which are now running, staggeringly, at 10 times the level of three years ago.
“There were 30,000 raids under the Prevention of Terrorism Act last year from which less than 100 individuals were charged with offences relating to terrorism.”
What was three years ago? In contrast to this omission, Cook made a veiled reference to the Muslim vote, now so important in certain constituencies. This has followed his recent courting of Muslim leaders, supping at the same stagnant reservoir of support that has attracted other midges, such as Respect and the Liberal Democrats:
Mr Cook, who quit the Cabinet over the Iraq war, went on: “There’s a real risk that if we continue with that we will end up alienating the very people we need for a successful multi-cultural society and a successful appeal to people around the world of a different culture.”
Although the speech was crafted for short-term political gain, Cook provides evidence that a proportion of those who demonstrated against the war, will continue to oppose measures that can be utilised to investigate and break up terrorist cells and sympathisers in the United Kingdom.
President Bush had a chance to make a ringing endorsement of free speech rights, and he muffed it big time. From the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web (which doesn’t seem to do permalinks):
Never murder a man who is committing suicide,” Woodrow Wilson once said. President Bush seems to be following that advice, refusing to be drawn into the controversy over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s allegations about John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Yesterday the president did, however, make a procedural criticism of the group, as the New York Times reports:
In response to reporters’ questions, the president once again condemned the so-called 527 groups, which can raise unlimited donations and run attack ads, but cannot directly coordinate their efforts with the campaigns. . . .
“All of them,” the president said, when asked whether he specifically meant that the veteran’s group’s ad against Mr. Kerry should be stopped. “That means that ad, every other ad. Absolutely. I don’t think we ought to have 527’s. I can’t be more plain about it, and I wish–I hope my opponent joins me in saying–condemning these activities of the 527’s. It’s–I think they’re bad for the system.”
For once we’d have to say Bush is actually vulnerable to criticism from civil libertarians. Does he really mean to suggest that no group except a campaign or a political party has the right to express its political views? And of course Bush is substantially to blame for the rise of 527s as an alternative to campaigns and parties, whose fund-raising and free speech are severely restricted by the McCain-Feingold law, which he signed.
Why couldn’t Bush have said “Hey, its a free country. If they want to exercise their right to free speech, put out a book, run some ads, who am I to say no?”
Its hard to say what Bush really believes should be legal campaign discourse – apparently, political parties should have their contributions choked off, campaigns should be subject to strict limits (after all, he signed the McCain-Feingold bill that did just this), and independent, unincorporated associations should be prohibited from saying anything political as well.
Who does that leave? Well, the media and bloggers, I guess. So far, in the cage match between Old Media and the Unwashed Masses (that would be you and me), the Masses are ahead on points, in my book.
God isn’t interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time! Forty three species of parrot! Nipples for men! Slugs! He created slugs! They can’t hear! They can’t speak! They can’t operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic? If I were creating a world, I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, Day One!
– from Time Bandits
Any regular reader of Samizdata.net has probably noticed that I am no enthusiast for the democratic process, which I just regard as little more than a system of legitimising proxy mugging. I can see a role for democracy as a countervailing force even in a limited-government minarchist state, but as currently practiced it is rarely more than just a way to try and appropriate the money of others, impose restriction on competitors and generally add the force of law to personal prejudices in ways that conflate state and society to the profound determent of the later.
However I could not help but laugh when I read how the Democratic Party, who by their name one might assume were very keen on democracy, have been pulling all manner of legal tricks to keep socialist Ralph Nader off the US Presidential ballots. I expect the Republicans might try the same sort of thing against the turgid US Libertarian Party if they ever become a significent threat (not something I can see anytime soon).
But then that approach to choice is American as apple pie in some circles… “You can have any colour, as long as it is black”. This is why so much effort goes into the making the small differences between the two parties in the US seem VASTLY IMPORTANT TO THE FATE OF THE WORLD… otherwise people might start to think it actually does not matter a damn which particular lying parasite gets sent to Washington DC and that election day would be a pretty good time to go to do something really important, like maybe go to the beach or look at the cost of relocating to New Hampshire where voting really might cause something interesting to happen.
The latest engagement in the file sharing wars is a victory for the forces of, well, file sharing.
The makers of two leading file-sharing programs are not legally liable for the songs, movies and other copyright works swapped online by their users, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday in a stinging blow to the entertainment industry.
So far, so good. Those using file-sharing software to violate property rights are, after all, personally responsible for what they do. File sharing software has legitimate uses, and its makers should no more be held responsible for illegitimate uses than a camera manufacturer should be held responsible for child pornography.
Among other reasons, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., unlike the original Napster, were not liable because they don’t have central servers pointing users to copyright material.
One begins to suspect that the court is straining a tad to distinguish its earlier decision shutting down Napster, but let that pass. One is always surprised to find the reliably statist Ninth Circuit signing paeans to the market, but whatever gets them through the opinion, right?
“History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player,” [Judge] Thomas wrote. “Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories.”
Finally, a quote from the Ninth Circuit that I hope to find cited in other cases. Full opinion here, and hat tip to Hit & Run.
During a very pleasant week in the island of Malta, I took a fair old mix of books to read while catching some rays on the beach. Among the books I had been meaning, out of curiousity. to read was Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. (A sort of upmarket version of Confessions of a Bored French Housewife). I read the novel in about three days and I can say that the book is one of the most overated pieces of crud it has been my misfortune to read for a long time. I have read a fair amount of famous French literature in my time (I love Dumas and Hugo) but this was poor.
I can see why the book appeals to a certain kind of reader. While it tilts at the vital issue of women’s liberation and the dangers of destructive relationships, it is in fact also deeply cynical and negative. It maintains a sustained sneer at a whole way of being for about 290 pages. While obsessed about the “hypocrisy” of 19th Century social mores, it utterly fails to suggest how a more “honest” value system would work. (Never mind the old adage that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue).
At times there is almost Woody Allenish message jumping from the page: “Life sucks and then you die”. It is also hugely conceited and snobbish about ordinary, middle class people. (Flaubert prided himself on not performing any productive work in his life). It set the precedent for a whole range of books and plays mocking the middle class and supposed stuffy convention. However, unlike the wonderful short stories of Saki or the plays of Osar Wilde, Flaubert is rarely funny.
Why worry now about a book by a diseased Frenchman penned 150 years ago? Well, as this fine short article by Anthony Daniels makes clear, we have been paying the price for sneering at the bourgois value system almost as soon as the word “bourgois” became part of our verbal lexicon. The greatest victims, invariably, are the poor and ill educated.
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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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