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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If you were annoyed at the support being shown for state regulation of fashion modelling, check out what they want to do to cheerleading.
Texas Representative Al Edwards wants state funding of schools to be cut for those schools that knowingly permit “sexually suggestive” cheerleading performances. Because everyone knows how hard it is for a bunch of jailbait dancing around in mini-skirts and showing their underwear to be “sexually suggestive,” right? According to Edwards:
It’s just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they’re shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down…And then we say to them, ‘don’t get involved in sex unless it’s marriage or love, it’s dangerous out there’ and yet the teachers and directors are helping them go through those kind of gyrations.
That the state should not be instructing any children when it comes to sex, marriage, and love in the first place would no doubt never occur to this politician. More discouraging is the reaction from constituents.
J.M. Farias, owner of Austin Cheer Factory, said cheerleading aficionados would welcome the law. Cheering competitions, he said, penalize for suggestive movements or any vulgarity.
[…]
“I don’t think this law would really shake the industry at all. In fact, it would give parents a better feeling, mostly dads and boyfriends, too,” Farias said.
Gosh, if making dads and boyfriends feel better isn’t a good excuse to create more laws, what is?
Instapundit has already just linked to it, and to other responses to the same story, and copied and pasted the first two paragraphs. It being a CNN report about how Forbes has included Fidel Castro in its list of the world’s richest people, and about how Fidel Castro is not amused. This story will soon be everywhere, but I do not care. Count me in, if only as one delighted heckler among millions.
Funny as those first two paragraphs are, I think this sentence is my particular favourite:
Castro, 78, and in power since a 1959 revolution, said he was considering suing.
I cannot believe he really said that, but in the event that he did… you go grandad.
This reminds me of Danny de Vito’s line in Mars Attacks, where he says (if memory serves), to the invading Martians, something like: “You want to take over the world. You’re gonna need lawyers, right?”
Not that Fidel is trying to take over the world any more. It is just the idea of a hitherto unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist trying to protect what’s left of his revolutionary reputation by calling in the lawyers.
It is, alas, far too much to hope that he will really do it.
Various precincts of the US body politic are obsessed with Terri Schiavo, a young woman who has been at the center of an ongoing familial, legal, and now, sadly, political dogfight.
In very broad terms, Terri Schiavo is unable to make decisions for herself. She is apparently brain damaged, and has been in some degree of coma or “persistent vegetative state” for years. Her husband wants to withdraw artificial life support and let nature take its course. Her parents want her kept on life support indefinitely in the hopes that some day she will make some degree of recovery. As ever, you can find a medical expert to present just about any side of this that you want. This situation is, sadly, all too common.
The uproar around Terri Schiavo illustrates rather nicely the key distinction between libertarians and, well, everyone else. For libertarians, the critical question is “who decides?”, based on their belief that you should be able to make your own decisions in life. Most other folks, it seems, don’t care “who decides” nearly as much as they care about “what decision is made,” and particularly, “whatever decision is made, it damn will better be one I approve of.”
In Terri’s case, this means that all sorts of folks who you think would know better than to invite the state to participate in medical decision-making are doing exactly that, because Terri’s husband has made a decision that they do not approve of.
So, not only have we been treated the spectacle of the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, trying to elbow his way to Terri’s bedside so he can dictate what care she will receive, we also have various Florida legislators trying to insert the State of Florida into the mix. Now the US Congress, apparently not satisfied with embarrassing itself* in its ongoing investigation into steroid use in major league baseball, is preparing to abuse its subpoena power to block the decision made by Terri’s husband.
A fundamental principle of health care law, and one dear to the hearts of libertarians, is that you must give informed consent to any treatment before it is administered to you (with an exception in cases of emergency when you are unable to communicate, in which case the caregivers are allowed to assume you want life-saving treatment). A doctor who treats you without your consent has committed assault and battery. It is your right to refuse any treatment at all, even if it will mean your death, and so long as you are a competent adult no court or legislature can intervene to force treatment on you.
When the patient is not a decisional adult, someone who will make decisions on their behalf must be located. You can appoint your own surrogate decision-maker, via a health care power of attorney (which I strongly recommend). Some states have lists of “deemed” surrogate decision-makers on the statute books, such as spouses, parents, siblings, etc., in rank order so everyone knows who has authority in a given case. As a last resort, a court will appoint a guardian.
The whole process is focused on the proper issue of identifying “who will decide.” Once the decision-maker is identified/appointed, they stand in the shoes of the patient. The state retains (or should retain) only the most limited role, to ensure that the decision-maker does not abuse their power. Clearly, the decision to withdraw life support is a decision that Terri Schiavo could make for herself. Indeed, my wife has told me that if she were in Terri’s position, that is exactly what she would want. Her husband’s decision to make it in her stead is by no means an abuse of his power as her surrogate decision-maker – such decisions are made routinely, every single day, across the country by people charged with the heavy burden of making health care decisions for someone else.
What we have in the Schaivo case, then, is the legally appointed and recognized decision-maker making a choice that is well within his purview. Multiple court reviews have concluded that he is the right person to make the call, and his decision should be honored. To this libertarian, that is the end of the matter, because the very essence of being a libertarian is respecting the decisions of others even when you might decide otherwise. To a broad spectrum of conservatives, however, the fact that medical decision-making should be private is of no concern when the decisions made are decisions they disagree with.
*While at the gym yesterday, I caught a few minutes of the steroid hearings. It was painfully embarassing to see the solons of American governance earnestly seeking noted idiot Jose Canseco’s advice on public policy. A quick survey of the fellows in the locker room revealed that this latest Congressional exercise in nannying competent adults and chasing headlines is not being well-received by the public. The universal sentiment was, “Don’t they have anything better to do?”
I watched the beginning of Dirty Harry on the telly (before remembering that I already have it on DVD), and have just heard Clint Eastwood deliver the first version of the do I feel lucky? speech. And I just want to say something that I have long felt, which is that he delivers the line, at least on that first occasion, very badly. They should have done a retake. The actual “do I feel lucky?” bit is gabbled, and you can hardly hear it. There should have been a slight pause between “you’ve got to ask yourself a question” and “do I feel lucky?”, but there is no pause. The sentences just before are fine, but this particular bit sounds like an uncomprehending read-through, not a performance at all. I realise they did not want to upstage the rerun of the same lines later in the movie, when the real Bad Guy is asked the same question, but I reckon they downplayed it too much.
Not that I blame Clint Eastwood. Or, I blame him only if he was the one who chose this particular take. But I presume that this was the director, or maybe the producer. Actors are usually helpless in circumstances like these. Time and again, they get called bad actors, when it was really bad directing and bad editing.
Otherwise, excellent movie entertainment, full of good sense about the deterrent value of chasing and punishing criminals and the pointlessness of worrying too much about what makes them become criminals. The important thing is to hunt them down and lock them up, or worse. (One of the biggest reasons why they become criminals being that they do not expect this to happen.) This is a lesson which the USA’s rulers now seem to be learning fast but which our rulers here in the UK (see the comments on Tuesday’s murder posting) are still only groping towards.
Most of the mere people in both countries have of course always known this.
Thank goodness for the movies. On this particular issue, insofar as they have argued anything at all, they have mostly argued very sensibly.
And let no one kid you that movies like Dirty Harry are just “mindless” entertainment. When people call a movie mindless, it generally means that it is actually rather mindful, but that the mindfulness involved is something that the complainer would rather not face. So, he claims that there is nothing to be faced. It was the same with the (ridiculously titled) Death Wish series. Those movies are crammed full of ideas.
And mostly very good ones. When Bronson chalked up his first kill in the first of these movies, cinemas everywhere erupted with spontaneous cheering.
P J O’Rourke weighs in with a modest proposal on public transit in the Wall Street Journal. A choice tidbit:
The Heritage Foundation says, “There isn’t a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides.” Heritage cites the Minneapolis “Hiawatha” light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.
That, my friends, is a sound bite that can stop a light rail train (proposal) in its tracks if it gets in front of the voters before the referendum passes. Of course, as we all know, these kinds of facts emerge only after the horses have left the barn, so to speak, because of the bare-faced lying that always accompanies the run-up to large public works projects.
Like many others I have been watching events in the Middle East, hoping of the best, and remembering that it could still all turn very nasty, and hoping that the White House has that possibility at the front of its collective mind. So far so obvious, and I for one little to add to such responses as these.
But, it does occur to me that, what with all the agonising about, e.g., what the Syrians will do next, and what with all the pro-warriors crowing about how they must not crow, and the anti-warriors trying to talk their way out of giving President Bush any credit for what is happening, there is one significant consequence of these events which may have escaped immediate and widespread attention.
9/11 was bad, but almost worse was the amount of celebrating about it that seemed to be going on, and presumably was going on, in the Muslim world, and among Muslims generally.
These latest demonstrations have, surely, changed the idea that will from now on be held in the West of popular opinion in the Middle East. For the first time since 9/11, these people no longer look like “these people”, that is to say, utterly foreign and barbaric, all either exulting in the deaths of the innocent, or else silently acquiescing to such exultation, out of fear or out of semi-barbarism.
It is not that millions of people of the Middle East have spent the last month marching about with signs saying: “Sorry – We Were Wrong About 9/11 – It Was Horrible And We Should Not Have Celebrated It”. It is merely that a whole lot of different people are now getting their faces into our camera lenses and onto our front pages and magazine covers, with messages that we in the West can thoroughly relate to, like: “Let Us Govern Ourselves Intelligently”. My particular favourite in this connection was the one that went: “Let Muslims and Christians Unite Against The Syrian Occupier”. That sounds very Western to me.
Clearly, “these people” are not all barbarians, and from now on, any Westerners who persist in believing that they are will be in a small minority.
It may well be that this new message is almost as misleading and un-nuanced as the previous one. But it is very different. And in many ways, the big point here is as much the desire to communicate this new and dramatically more West-friendly message as the matter of whether the message itself is completely accurate.
The long term consequences of this different message now emerging from the Middle East are surely huge.
And talking of Muslims and Christians uniting against those damned Syrians, let us also notice that we are surely witnessing a come-back of a kind, and a rather interesting kind, for Arab nationalism. → Continue reading: Democracy in the Middle East: good news and bad news
Over the span of international and domestic flights covering some 11,000 miles in the past fortnight, I have spent a lot of time reading magazines. I tried to limit myself to fluff – gossip and pictures of celebrities wearing ugly clothes – because reading about wrong-headed business ideas and even more wrong-headed political ideas really is not my idea of a fun way to spend several hours in a confined space where screaming at the top of one’s lungs is frowned upon.
Alas, alas. I avoided idiocy but the idiocy sure did find me, and in Cosmopolitan magazine of all places. Okay, no surprise there: Cosmo articles telling women to wear animal prints if they want to make a guy attracted to them are hardly the height of intellect and good sense (or taste). But at least I could kick back with some mindless articles about makeup and men and not worry about being hit over the head with loopy politics.
Or so I thought.
An Israeli fashion photographer – coming from an industry that is surely the great unsung incubator of brilliant legislation – wants the Knesset to put a law on the books that would make it illegal to use women as fashion models if they are not deemed “healthy” enough by the government. The aim is to produce:
legislation insisting all models undergo an examination by a Government nutritionist. Those deemed healthy would get a licence while any who were too thin would be given nutritional advice and a two-month deadline to put on weight or be barred.
All this is based on BMI (body mass index), which is not a reliable way of determining health anyway. Even if it was, such a law would not magically make the population healthy. But junk science being accepted as gospel is hardly a shock. What did surprise me is that 53 per cent of polled Cosmo readers said that the US should introduce similar legislation of fashion photography.
In short: I would have been less enraged if I had watched a Michael Moore “documentary” festival on the plane. Thinking about it, though, I wonder how long it would be before such legislation would make any image of someone deemed unhealthy fall into the realm of the banned and illegal. The upside of that would be no more pictures of Michael Moore in our faces, but the price for such a benefit seems a bit steep.
There is a question concerning the relationship between guns and gangsterism that bedevils third world countries but the control of arms sounds suspiciously like that other ‘success story’: the war on drugs. Jack Straw’s keen attempt to follow the NGOs on this matter was publicised at a press conference today where he attempted to internationalise this issue through an “arms control” treaty. It is not surprising that this immoral act is perpetrated by the Blair administration: a clique that is unable to understand the simple connection between the rule of law and a well armed citizenry.
Straw argued that existing treaties covering chemical, biological and nuclear weapons should be matched by a new treaty covering smaller weapons. And he acknowledged that such weapons “account for far more misery and destruction across the world”. “The new treaty needs to include a wide range of signatories, including the world’s major arms exporters,” he said. “I certainly do not underestimate the difficulties of that. Many nations are concerned that a new arms trade treaty may restrict their defence industries; constrain their foreign policy; and lead to constant legal challenge of export licence decisions. Their approach may initially be one of scepticism, at best. “But in order for it to work properly, a new arms control treaty will need to include as many of the world’s nations as possible – especially those with strong defence industries of their own.
T
he NGO campaign for this solution stems from the revolutionary liberalism redolent of Enlightenment manure. Instead of undertaking the patient steps of building stable laws in these territories and defending property, these organisations prefer to build a bureaucratic edifice of controls, inspections and treaties, a job creation scheme for peace studies graduates.
The Control Arms Campaign is co-ordinated by Oxfam and Amnesty International. They view the proliferation of firearms as a key threat to peace and security. They are right in that technology has lowered the cost of owning firearms and has allowed the strong to plunder the weak; governments or gangs to maim, murder and steal. (although the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 did not require firearms, just edged weapons).
However, their solution is old-fashioned, insensitive to local conditions, and designed to reinforce the status quo in many states, rotten as they are. Their solution is global arms control:
Governments must introduce new laws and measures to incorporate the principles of the Arms Trade Treaty. They must also close the loopholes in their arms controls so that they can strictly monitor end use and effectively control arms brokers and licenced production overseas. They must stop the misuse of arms by security services and introduce systems of accountability and training for them, introduce measures for disarmament when a conflict has ended, develop good justice systems for prosecuting those who misuse arms, enforce all arms control legislation and develop and implement a national action plan to address and solve the country’s arms problems.
Communities and local authorities must help collect and destroy surplus and illegal weapons, introduce community education programs to end cultures of violence, provide assistance to victims of armed violence, and provide alternative livelihoods for those who depend on violence for a living.
Only the police are considered suitable to carry guns in protection of communities if they follow the requisite standards, set down by the United Nations:
International standards do exist to control the use of guns and other methods of force by police and other law enforcement officials, but in many countries they are not being followed.These standards centre on the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. At their heart is the principle of what constitutes legitimate force. Police must sometimes be permitted to use force or lethal force, in order to do their job of keeping communities safe and protecting themselves and the public from life-threatening attacks. But the force used must not be arbitrary; it must be proportionate, necessary and lawful. And, crucially, it must only be used in self defence or against the imminent threat of death or serious injury.
Self defence for the private individual in defence of life, liberty and property is not included within this ‘solution’.
“Other news today” in today’s Telegraph makes cheerful reading.
Here are the first four stories:
Convicted man who cooked victim’s brains admits killings
Teenager killed boy for his baseball cap
Elderly woman stabbed to death by thieves
Waiter accused of axe murder
And that last one was not just a murder, it was a decapitation. A few feet away from where her boyfriend works, apparently.
George Orwell wrote a famous essay called Decline of the English Murder. It would appear that England, has, murderwise, bounced back since Orwell’s time.
If you are at all interested in matters British and constitutional, or even in matters British or constitutional, you really should read this, the latest from Sean Gabb.
Final two paragraphs:
The headline news is grim. We have just had imposed on us a Prevention of Terrorism Act more subversive of due process than any law made in peacetime since the 1650s. Add to this the Civil Contingency Act, the abolition of the double jeopardy rule and the allowance of similar fact evidence made by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the Proceeds of Crime Act, and all the lesser invasions that have come and are yet to come from this current Parliament, and we might suppose all was already lost. And look before this Government, to the Thatcher and Major Governments – those, to be fair, laid the foundations on which the present structure of despotism is now being raised. But look beyond Parliament, to those quiet places where the lawyers gather and discuss what the politicians have in mind for us, and there is a counter revolution under way.
It may be worth giving our support and best wishes to those charismatic outsiders who are now beating on the doors of Parliament. It is still more worth while, though, to thank and support those old men in wigs, whose often pedantic and always long decisions about pounds of bananas and hunting bans are restoring to fact what once seemed the theory of a limited constitutional order.
“The Jaws of the Trap Are Closing” says Sean’s title, and that will almost certainly lead you to think that he reckons, as per usual, that we are all doomed, doomed, etc. But it is not that kind of trap. On this matter, Sean is guardedly optimistic.
I have just read the whole thing, and urge you to do so also, if for no other reason that Sean Gabb is one of the great unsung prose stylists of our time. I read him with pleasure about anything – which is why, in defiance of his oft-stated-to-me wishes, I wish he would become a blogger, instead of just a set-piece essayist.
The recent judgement to which Sean is referring to is to be found here (more disintermediation!), and Sean’s earlier (Feb 2002) piece on this same subject of judicial challenge to the politicians, about the Metric Martyrs case, is to be found here.
Stephen Pollard, a former member of Britain’s Young Conservatives who is now a New Labour guru, has an article in the Times called: My easy ride in the Senate seat.
Life after his easy ride is getting a little more tricky, with a savaging from Global Growth, the free-market NGO.
According to the New York Sun, most if not all of the Iranian exile organizations have come together at a Los Angeles meeting.
“After 20 years, this is the first time all Iranians are together,” said Sirus Sharafshahi, the owner of a Farsi-language daily newspaper for Iranian expatriates, Sobh Iran (Iran Morning). “We want to tell the administration of the United States, all Iran is together. If you want to change the government, come to us.”
Some of the delegates feel the current US diplomatic carrot and stick approach to Iran and its nuclear program are a mistake:
Several attendees at yesterday’s meeting of Iranian dissidents said Mr. Bush’s decision to back the European approach of offering concessions to Iran was a mistake. A leader of the Iranian Freedom Front, Dariush Hashempour, gave a PowerPoint presentation yesterday that highlighted Mr. Bush’s pro-reform remarks in his State of the Union address last month. In an interview, Mr. Hashempour said he was startled by the president’s new stance.
“All of a sudden he just flip-flopped and was willing to work with Iran,” Mr. Hashempour said. Asked if it was a mistake to try the carrot-and-stick technique the Europeans have advocated, he answered, “Definitely, for any period, even for 10 seconds. … Their approach not only didn’t help, it was a disaster for the last 20 years.”
This meeting and sense of co-operation is an important development for pro-freedom Iranians. The words of Benjamin Franklin, “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately”, are as applicable to Iranian Patriots’s today as they were to the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence two and a quarter hundred years ago.
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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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