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 is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:
Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the “flat-top crew cut,” “middle hairstyle,” “low hairstyle,” and “high hairstyle” – variations from one to five centimetres in length.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.
It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of “long-haired” men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.
In a break with North Korean TV’s usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.
Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?
“No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.
“People who wear other’s style of dress and live in other’s style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin,” it says.
Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation?
Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does.
And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet.
Via Natalie Solent, I got to this Guardian report that Waterstone’s has sacked one of its staff, for blogging:
A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his “sandal-wearing” boss.
Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone’s in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for “gross misconduct” and “bringing the company into disrepute” through the comments he posted on his weblog.
Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.
My main opinion about this case is that, in a form of wording that I often use on these occasions, an employer should have the right to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes, provided there is no contract which between them which says otherwise. It is their money. If they want to stop giving it to an employee, fair enough.
But what you are, or should be, entitled to do legally is not the same as what is managerially advisable. Which leads me to my second opinion about this case, again a generic one rather than specific to it, which says that there may be more to this case than meets the eye, and more reasons for the Waterstone’s decision than have so far been made public. This is also (in connection with my opinings here) what I think when I hear that some child has been chucked out of a school for flicking a rubber band at a another pupil. Maybe there was more to it than that, and the rubber band was just the final straw, so to speak. And maybe this blogger has been a pain in the arse to his bosses for years, and a useless bookseller, and they finally said: get rid of the tosser.
(And maybe – just maybe you understand – this chap really does need therapy.)
For me, one of the big arguments in favour of the free society is that people are allowed to make their own decisions about who they associate with, instead of having such decisions made for them by a mob, or by a tyrant, acting on the basis of more or less misleading scraps of information about the case that the contending parties have squirted into the public realm. As part of the mob, we in the blogosphere can beat our drums and argue about cases like this in loud voices, but in the end, we should not be deciding these things.
Nevertheless … (and you saw that coming a mile away, did you not?) … nevertheless … if a bookshop chain is not the kind of enterprise which ought to have employees blogging up a storm, about books, about the pleasures of literacy, and about anything else on their minds, with all the arguing and occasional public rows that this would inevitably involve when the storminess got too stormy … what I am saying is: bookshops and blogging ought to go very well together.
Maybe Waterstone’s regard employee bloggers as a menace to their interests far more profound any menace to their interests presented by this one blogger, and they made a huge decision of principle here. Maybe, but I doubt it. My guess would be that they had no idea what a s***storm would explode around them. I think they have no conception of what a force the Internet could be, for their business or against it.
I hope the blogosphere gets Waterstone’s to think through – rethink through – what they really think about blogging, and about the Internet in general. If they do not, they could find themselves at war with the Internet out of sheer carelessness. And thus miss a big chance to sell lots of books.
As it is, I can see a lot of people switching to Amazon because of this, and that too would be their perfect legal right.
Well, a couple of weeks have gone since the usual festival of excess generally known in these parts as Christmas. When I turn on the television, the radio, or look at the adverts plastered on the walls of the London Underground, it is hard to escape the messages urging us all to lose weight, give up X or Y, go to the gym, blah, blah. Well I do my best to stay in some form of shape by attending a gym fairly regularly, but I must admit there is almost something rather reassuringly predictable about this annual burst of puritanical preaching about the need to turn over a healthy leaf and get into shape. It is like the passing of the seasons.
However, I realise that many of the fine Epicureans who read and write for this blog take a more robust view of these matters and have no time for such asceticism. Well, I have great news. Medical research reveals that you can lose weight by sleeping longer.
That is what I call good news.
We have said it before, but it bears repetition, that the coming EU referendum campaign will be the first internet campaign in our history and I remain convinced that the material on the net will have a decisive impact on the course of the campaign.
– Richard North, already quoted and linked to by Patrick Crozier as a response to my gloomier posting here
One of the current controversies around the war on terror is how to treat the prisoners. Dale Franks at the excellent Questions and Observations blog gets it pretty much right, I think.
My preferred method of dealing with these terror prisoners would be to get two captains and a major together as a tribunal, declare them to be unlawful combatants, and put them in front of a firing squad. Now, maybe, because we’re nice guys, we could let them know that if any of them give us verifiable, useful information, then we’ll commute their sentences, and won’t shoot them. Otherwise, however, it’s a blindfold and a last cigarette for the lot of ’em.
The difference of course, is that doing so would be legal. It would be part of the accepted customs of warfare that have been generally agreed upon for over a century. Torturing or beating them to death, without even the convenient fiction of legality, is not.
I found very little to quibble with in his excellent essay on the subject.
Nothing gets the political class to lying their faces off like the chance to spend your money on their legacy.
I saw it in Madison, Wisconsin when the new Frank Lloyd Wright convention center was being pushed through. The lies included (a) we will not build a new hotel next to this facility (it was built a year or two later (b) this facility will not block views/access to the lake it is built on (it does, in spades), and (c) this facility will not be a drain on the public purse (it requires a taxpayer subsidy ad infinitum.
I am seeing it again in Dallas, where the legacy project revolves around the Trinity River that runs through downtown Dallas. Jim Schutze, the excellent political writer for Dallas’ alternative newsweekly (the one with the sex ads) details the lies now on offer from the City of Dallas and its allies and puppets.
For example, recently arrived on my desk is the slickly produced special D magazine Trinity River edition, just out, called “The Trinity: How the river will change Dallas forever.” This magazine–a collection of preposterous whoppers, fibs, prevarications, exaggerations, subterfuge, propaganda and Orwellian doublespeak–is an omen of things just ahead.
The D magazine special edition goes on and on about the recreational amenities the Trinity River project will create: “…the Trinity River will accommodate small sailboats and paddle boats,” the magazine tells its readers. “More interestingly, a reverse-flow lake is planned with a 17-foot drop where it curves back to the river, creating rapids and a perfect whitewater course for winter kayaking competitions…
“But the most visible benefit will be on the Oak Cliff side, which will have easy access to downtown, great views and–most important of all–along the levee, direct entry into the country’s largest urban park.”
All of this is a lie.
Read it and weep.
I have been on the road for the last week and God only knows how much longer. Right now I am backstage doing edits on the webcasts from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco. Twelve hour plus days… but the pay is good. A few minutes ago the Surgeon General of the United States spoke and I took a photo, not of him, but of the video monitors and the backside of the scrim.
I imagine this is a slightly different view of things than the media out in the Grand Ballroom are getting!
 Photo: D. Amon, all rights reserved
I was so struck by the hostility expressed inthe comments section of my previous post about Virgin airline boss and entrepreneur Richard Branson, in some cases for quite valid reasons, that it got me thinking of whether there is, in today’s business world, any entrepreneur who would pass the kind of harsh ideological standards we libertarians might want to set and be able to become a major business player.
I doubt it, sadly. If I am wrong about that, comment away.
While driving down Virginia’s crowded Route 28 this afternoon, I heard a radio spot from our good friends at UNICEF that almost caused me to drive right off the road. The announcer solemnly intoned that with your help, UNICEF would create “a tsunami of love, a tsunami of hope” for children affected by the Dec. 26th disaster in the east Indies.
A “tsunami of love?” Even if these people have their hearts in the right places, just how tone-deaf is this organization? Apart from the fact that “tsunami of love” sounds like it could be the title of a song by Def Leppard, who actually thought that this was clever? Somehow, I cannot imagine soldiers liberating the German death camps of WWII telling prisoners, “We are going to build you a concentration camp of compassion!” or Amnesty International offering “a gulag of love” to political prisoners.
UNICEF must have gotten complaints about this, because the downloadable version of the ad available on their website now says “a wave of love.” Which isn’t a huge improvement, actually.
Of course, that still is not as bad as this Seattle Times column, from Saturday which dismisses tsunami victims as “clutter” apparently worthy of a tsunami of scorn for deigning to develop beaches into tourist attractions.
(A tip o’ the hat to Jesse Walker of Reason Online for the Seattle Times link.)
Al-Muhajiroun was the extremist organisation that recruited or converted young Muslims and British men to their political goal of a worldwide Islamic state, starting with the Emirate of Great Britain. It was never clear whether they would recognise England, Scotland and Wales but the overall objective was clear. A troublesome development was the disbandment of this organisation which appeared to portend greater underground activity on the part of the radicals.
Hannah Strange, UK correspondent for UPI, was attending a women’s conference where Sheikh Omar, the former head of Al-Muhajiroun, was setting out his philosophy: Since Britain had invaded Iraq, the covenant of security that protected these islands from Islam was now broken, and as a consequence, war was declared. No doubt these sentiments weighed heavily on his heart since his patriotism was not in doubt:
Either withdraw your own forces or don’t expect Muslims not to support the Muslims abroad,” said Sheikh Omar, adding that the West supports dictators abroad when they see fit.
If the government met those conditions, Muslims could continue to live peacefully in Britain, he said.
“After that there will be no need to fight anybody, we’ve been living in peace here for years, and we can continue to live in peace,” he said. “We love Britain.”
However, the usual epithets on 9/11, killing all non-Muslims and blaming the Jews outweighed his love of bully beef and the Queen. It was the story that they always tell themselves. They are not to blame. They were invaded. They are merely defending themselves against the hand that is raised against them. Indeed, their pathology is a puzzling outpouring of delusional bombast reinforced by the blood of innocents. → Continue reading: Who will rid us of these turbulent kuffaar?
I find this all too persuasive. George Trefgarne sketches out how Tony Blair could win not only the next election by a mile, but then the Euro-referendum by enough to settle the matter for ever.
Key towards-the-end paragraph:
As the polls start to switch, other arguments are deployed by the pro-constitution lobby, of which the most potent is that the real choice is between ratifying the constitution, with all its disadvantages, or being reduced to a colonial outpost of George W Bush’s America. Scare stories are spread that withdrawing would also mean the end to cheap flights to France and Spain. Then, in March 2006, a referendum results in a Yes vote, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent – and Teflon Tony will have done it again.
At the heart of Trefgarne’s view of Britain now is the utter and continuing hopelessness of the Conservatives.
I confess that once upon a time I expected that America would be an issue to unite the Conservatives while still dividing Labour. But for many months now the Conservatives have been as split about America as they are about everything else. This means that they will remain a shambles for the foreseeable future, and that they will be in no state to argue persuasively against all that “colonial outpost of Bush’s America” stuff, as and when it comes on stream. Even more than now, I mean.
Our hosting company has been under sustained DOS attacks from some worthless scrotes over the last couple days and if you have been finding it hard to reach samizdata.net, that is why.
It is also why there has been a low volume of posts here as we have frequently been unable to access our blog’s ‘back-end’. The good folks at Hosting Matters have been doing their best to keep things operational under difficult circumstances.
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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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