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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Hard to believe! That Tory leader Michael Howard, the second most repressive Home Secretary in living memory, should support mandatory ID cards is hardly a revelation, but that up to 40 Tory MP’s, including some on the front bench, might vote against or abstain regardless of the demands of the whips, well that is quite a pleasant surprise.
Mr Howard has come down in favour of the Government scheme because he was preparing to introduce an ID card Bill himself when he was Home Secretary in 1997 and fears charges of hypocrisy if he does not support it now. Some MPs complained that he has been heavy handed in whipping the issue. One said: “I think it is disgraceful. I don’t know where our leadership is heading.”
I know exactly where it is heading…
You get used to your favourite sort of coffee, and I have now become completely used to my favourite brand: Nescafé Gold Blend. Nescafé is, so they claim, the biggest selling instant coffee in the world.
Originally I started buying Nescafé Gold Blend because I had been told by my television that it would cause a very attractive young actress called Fiona Fullerton to become friendly with me, but now I buy it because I like it.
However, I have a serious complaint to make about the size of Nescafé jars. There is a lot of talk out there in Internetland and Blogland about how market researchers are trawling the blogs to find out, on behalf of the business enterprises who hire them, what the masses think of the latest products of these business enterprises. Well, let the Nescafé market researchers trawl this.
I have no problem with the coffee itself. It is the jars that concern me.
There is much about Nescafé Gold Blend jars that I like a lot, quite aside from liking their contents. They are very fine in their own right, both aesthetically and structurally. When people first emerged from the Communist Yoke into the Light of Capitalism, they found themselves confronted with packages and pots and containers containing branded Capitalist products that were so beautiful (the packages and pots and containers I mean) that they could hardly bear to throw them away. These Nescafé jars were an excellent embodiment of this dilemma. When archaeologists dig up something like these jars made by ancient Romans or Greeks or Etruscans they celebrate for a century and build entire new museums to accommodate these items and all their worshippers. Yet we Westerners just chuck them out with the rest of the rubbish.
And I do too, for reasons I will get to, but first let me explain what I like – or would like – to do with these jars. I like (and would like) to use them for shelving. Thus:
When I die, I expect all my various Internet scribblings to be forgotten utterly, very quickly, and that the last thing about me that anyone will really remember will be my kitchen, with all its CDs, and the fact that many of the shelves (for CDs and for general crap) involved Nescafé jars. → Continue reading: Nescafé jars are the wrong size!
Democracy is a remarkable thing. It gives an illusion of a state being governed ‘by the people and for the people’ whilst at the same time entrenching a ‘public service’ class (with ‘service’ being very much used in the farming sense of the word) that operates almost entirely for its own benefit. That this can go on in nation after nation in much the same manner is a testament to the dementing and infantilising effect that democratic politics has on a large proportion of the population of the planet.
And so when we get an article in The Times called Purge of e-mails will deny the right to know (people outside the UK may not be able to access this link due to the idiotic policy of the Times), which alerts us that it just so happens that 11 days before freedom of information laws come into force, millions of e-mails will be deleted from government servers, it should be clear to all but the most wilfully blind that the state will always place its institutional interests before those who are comically led to believe ‘own’ the state: that mythical thing called ‘the people’.
The Cabinet Office, which supports the Prime Minister and co-ordinates policy across government, has ruled that e-mails more than three months old must be deleted from December 20, The Times has learnt.
[…]
It will be up to the individual which e-mails are printed, with no monitoring from heads of department. Many officials, who receive about 100 e-mails a day, will have at least 3,000 items in their mailboxes. These include officials in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the Delivery Unit, and the offices of Alan Milburn and Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary. Although the deleted e-mails will be stored on back-up systems, these have been declared off limits to freedom of information requests because of the cost of accessing them.
[…]
Constitutional experts called the introduction of an “opt-in” system, where civil servants are proactive in preserving information, a blatant contradiction of the Act’s “presumption of disclosure”.
And that is why it cannot be pointed out too often that the state is not your friend.
It is very instructional to see what happens when Islamic institutions are confronted directly with the barbaric realities of their faith. The Prince of Wales has been in discussions with leaders of the British Muslim community about the fact Islamic law demands death for any guilty of apostasy (i.e. when a person who was a Muslim converts to another faith). This is not an idle intellectual issue of interest only to the theologically inclined as in many Muslim countries around the world people are indeed executed every year for turning their back on Islam.
One expects enthusiastic support for violently imposed Islam from groups like Al-Muhajiroun (which has allegedly ‘closed down’, though ‘re-branded’ would probably be more a accurate description) but what of so-called moderate Muslim leaders? Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these ‘moderates’ insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these ‘moderates’ prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little ‘problem’ or would they be proscribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight?
Islam is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread ‘moderate’ support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Islam’s savage excesses, then ‘Islamophobia’ (literally ‘a fear of Islam’) is the only rational response to their religion by any who are not Muslims (or who wish to stop being a Muslim).
Taking a military approach to dealing with the political manifestations of their faith will increasingly be the response they get from the rest of the world given that there is clearly no serious mainstream internal desire to see Islam change in ways to make it compatible with a broader pluralistic secular society. They have no one to blame for that but themselves, though of course they will continue to blame everyone but themselves.
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective.
And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons.
Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish ‘accessible credibility’ and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about.
For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as ‘Brown Sugar’. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau.
There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog.
The Evening Standard published a letter to the editor by me today in the print version of the newspaper (in slightly edited form). Here is the full text:
The resignation of David Blunkett may give some holiday cheers to those with the wits to see that this man has presided over the greatest abridgements of civil liberties in Britain within living memory… and given that we had the dreadful example of Michael Howard’s tenure in that office to compare him to, that is quite an achievement.
Yet before too many people start popping Champaign corks at the downfall of a truly repressive Home Secretary, I hope they will realise that nothing that Blunkett did was without the support of Tony Blair and his cabinet. Do not be so caught up with the individual personalities that you are blinded to the fact that the real threat, in fact the gravest threat to the liberty of British people since World War II, comes from both the authoritarian mindset that is alive and well at Number 10 Downing Street and the acquiescence to most of Blunkett’s excesses by the inept Tory party.
Perry de Havilland
Samizdata.net
“We are not gods. We cannot create wealth out of thin air. Western wealth is just a function of colonialism or, in its current form, neo-liberalism – of taking resources from countries like Ethiopia. Neo-liberals then try to justify this by pretending that they have ‘created’ the wealth they have.”
– Left-thinker
I said that the power of detention [without charge or trial] is at present confined to foreigners and I would not like to give the impression that all that was necessary was to extend the power to United Kingdom citizens as well. In my opinion, such a power in any form is not compatible with our constitution. The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.
Lord Hoffman’s opinion in A(FC) and others (FC) (Appellants) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent), also reported by the BBC.
We interrupt your regular blogging schedule to bring you an important government announcement:
Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, starts his new job vowing business as usual and refusing to reconsider plans for the controversial and expensive ID cards.
Mr Clarke promised “continuity” of his predecessor’s policies.
Thank you for listening and have a nice day.
I have not read Michael Crichton’s latest novel, State of Fear, but I have just read this review of it, which I found via Arts & Letters Daily. It is a story with heroes and with villains, but here is the twist:
We soon learn that such skulduggery is being coordinated, or so it seems, by Nick Drake, a Ralph Nader clone – intense, single-minded and (apologies to Mr. Nader’s many fans) unhinged. He is president of the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), an organization founded by lawyers, not scientists, and devoted to pushing a radical environmental agenda. The fund is clearly modeled on the real-life Natural Resources Defense Council, whose annual budget is about the same: $44 million.
To keep the donations rolling in, Drake is trying to induce a perpetual state of fear in the public by marketing the hell out of predictions of catastrophic global warming. Global warming – as we are all too well aware these days – results from burning fossil fuels that load the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Drake’s problem is that people just aren’t alarmed enough to send in those vital checks. But Drake has a plan; he’ll force nature to cooperate with him.
To get his plan rolling, Drake needs seed money, so he wheedles millionaire playboy George Morton, heir to a forklift fortune, into donating $10 million to NERF. But Morton has the audacity to withdraw his gift when a scientist at MIT apparently sets him straight about the science behind Drake’s claims. Drake is livid. Shortly after Morton takes his money back, he crashes his Ferrari through an oceanside guard rail and plunges down a cliff to his presumed death. No body is found. Is this an accident or yet another murder?
It will be extremely interesting to watch what happens to this book. Will it be picked up and run with by anti-environmentalist types like me? Well, here I am doing my bit for that process. Will this book perhaps be made into a movie? More generally, will the idea which it embodies, that greenery can be combined with villainy, be echoed in other stories, including the stories that emerge from Hollywood?
Hollywood has to have villains, and I have been willing to accept that the profusion of environment-destroying capitalist in the movies in recent years is caused at least partly by the fact that to get drama you need bad guys, and, well, environment good, people harming it bad, right?
And if you do not have a human villain, then you must have an inhuman force for the heroes to battle against, such as: environmental disaster.
But now that Crichton has explained – and in a best seller type book that will be sold in airports, that there can also be enviro-villains, and that environmental disasters might be lies told by enviro-villains, then we ought in due course to be seeing at least some Hollywood heavies who are decked out in green plumage. And it might well happen. All I am saying is: let us keep our eyes and ears open, and track this story as it unfolds.
Yesterday President Chirac proudly opened the Millau Viaduct, to universal acclaim, not just in France, but from anyone in the world who has seen any of the photos.
It is a truly magnificent structure. Yesterday I foolishly speculated that they might have saved billions had they been been willing to build something smaller and wigglier, but since this bridge in fact only cost an amazing €394 million that is flat wrong. And what is more, the entire cost of the bridge was paid by a private company, the same one that built the Eiffel Tower.
This bridge gives the world perhaps its biggest and juiciest taste so far of just what a huge impact on road transport the era of road pricing, now getting seriously underway, is destined to have. At first, environmentalists favoured road pricing, because they thought it would discourage cars. Alas for vain hopes. Road pricing make it possible for the private sector to build more and more magnificent roads. This bridge could never have been contemplated, let alone built, had the French not long been in the habit of paying to use their fastest roads.
It also illustrates perfectly just how amazingly bridge technology has progressed in recent years. The French had long known that they needed this bridge, and that it needed to be this high and this direct. It was just that until now, bridge technology did not permit its construction. And then … it did! With truly wonderful results.
The only tiny doubt concerns the fact that the architect (whatever exactly that means of what is essentially an engineering triumph) is the same architect as presided over the construction of the (aesthetically very pleasing) Millenium footbridge, in London. That famously wobbled when it was first opened. This was quickly fixed of course, and it was only a wobble, not a catastrophe. But I bet when that happened, the clients for this new whopper felt a teeny bit of a wobble themselves. I so assume, however, that all is completely well structurally with the new bridge.
The Internet is now quite properly awash with imagery of this masterpiece, and I have linked to many such views. In addition to all the regular pictures, I particularly like this one.
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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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