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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Perry de Havilland wrote in this post that
all insulting behaviour (short of actual incitement to violence), blasphemy and ‘holocaust denial’ laws are an intolerable abridgement of freedom of expression and must be abolished, now!
Why is incitement to violence an exception? When a violent act is committed, why should a citizen capable of standing trial be able to claim that they were incited as some kind of mitigating circumstance? Is there not a legal expectation in nations respecting the rule of law that an adult capable of standing trial is a thinking, responsible individual? And thus, if said individual claims to have been ‘incited’ to violence, surely the point is that at some stage that person has decided to physically remove the rights of another. Grandma’s favourite scold – “if someone told you to jump off a cliff…” – applies in spades.
I cannot see how an ‘incitement to violence’ is any different to racist ‘hate speech’ – something that is censured but not censored by most supporters of liberal values. Surely a liberal believes that personal responsibility is central pillar of liberty. Criminalising incitement to violence further divorces personal responsibility from individuals, thus further justifying the existence of an overmighty State.
Incidentally, I am sure I am not the only one who would like to know further details of Perry’s run-in with David Irving.
Interesting how these things get around. The word of these amazing photos of Mexico City got to me from him, who got it from him, who got it from him, who apparently found them here, which is where, for me, the trail went cold.
The picture Patrick Crozier chose to reproduce is particularly extraordinary. Talk about ‘fake but real’. Something to do with how the guy photoshops the pictures to make things clearer, I am guessing. I often do the same with shots I take from airplanes.
Architecturally, I think this is particularly bizarre. There are times, may the God Who Does Not Exist forgive me, when I yearn for a violent revolution in sleepy little Britain, just so that the planning permission (i.e. non-permission for almost anything remotely interesting except when the government wants it) system collapses, and people could build, in Britain’s still overwhelmingly green and pleasant land, whatever crazy thing they liked. Just as a for instance, why are there not more castles built nowadays, with cylindrical and pointy towers?
Mind you, extraordinary things are still being built in Britain, by the sort of people who are still allowed to do such things.
Clive Davis approvingly quotes a book by a fellow called Rod Dreher, a “crunchy conservative” (whatever that is) who is, we are told, a passionate environmentalist, a disliker of suburban sprawl, shopping malls (oh, the vulgarity!), television (ditto), McMansions (huh?) and other regrettable features of consumerist, dollar-obsessed America. Instead, this fellow, who sounds rather like an American Roger Scruton (of whom I am an admirer, at least in parts) is a fan of government restrictions and regulations, and mentions the case of the U.S. Pacific Highway, left pristine and free of crass development by land-use regulations.
There is nothing actually all that new in conservatives embracing controls on development. The very word, conservative, is based on the desire to conserve and protect what exists from the new. During the Industrial Revolution, conservatives like the Poet Robert Southey railed against what they saw as the ugliness of industrialism and the associated sprawl. (Some of the dislike was also based on snobbery and fear of an pwardly mobile and undeferential middle class). The trend has continued. It was that perfect symbol of cuddly English fogeyism, Sir John Betjeman, who took potshots at suburbia, penning one of his most famous verses about that place to the west of London known as Slough. (The former Poet Laureate asked Hitler to bomb it).
What is so striking is how unoriginal and old-hat all this sort of thing is. More interesting to me, however, are those writers who do not imagine that shopping malls or mock-Tudor mansions in Surbiton deserve our scorn. Virginia Postrel has recently written approvingly of a book actually describing sprawl rather than automatically condemning it.
And let’s face it, most of us, particularly those with children, live in suburbs or are moving there. It is a conceit, I reckon, of people who have no children, and who do not need the space, to take potshots at those who have decided to leave the supposedly hip inner city. It remains a mystery to me why the desire of people to live in a bit of space and comfort drives certain intellectuals nuts. Maybe it is the garden gnomes.
At the same time Jyllands-Posten in Denmark is valiantly establishing that freedom of expression is a core western value and that the right to say what you will does indeed include the right to say what some people may find offensive… a court in Austria has in effect sided with Islamic extremists by sentencing ‘historian’ and fantasist David Irving to three years in jail for upsetting Jewish sensibilities by making preposterous claims about the Nazi Holocaust.
Am I the only one who sees the sickening irony of protecting Jewish feelings ending up giving aid and comfort of Islamic bigots who want to prevent the publishing of anything they find offensive? I can just hear them now: “Oh, so upsetting the Jews gets you thrown in jail but anyone can upset the Muslims…”
Dr Romain, rabbi of Maidenhead Synagogue, said: “I welcome yet another public rebuff for David Irving’s pseudo-historical views, although personally I prefer to treat him with disdain than with imprisonment.”
And that, Rabbi, is the sign of a mature and freedom loving disposition. What a pity that more Muslim clerics do not take such a view when their sensibilities are offended and their community starts howling for the state to ban offensive remarks as Austria has done in the case of David Irving. Had Jyllands-Posten been an Austrian rather than Danish newspaper, it would be hard to make the argument that there was clearly a legal right to offensive (and therefore free) expression.
And before people in the USA get too smug, this is not just a European issue. Let me ask you this: do you support making burning the US flag illegal? If so, then clearly you agree with the Muslims that free speech does not include the right to offend people.
Time to clean house: all insulting behaviour (short of actual incitement to violence), blasphemy and ‘holocaust denial’ laws are an intolerable abridgement of freedom of expression and must be abolished, now!
Update: Stephen Pollard and Oliver Kamm have broadly similar views.
Look, I have got a cold coming on. I do not really want to post about this. But, for the record (and because this is Samizdata, dammit! We may not be able to stop the passing of liberty but we of all people should toll the bell) David Irving should not be jailed. Historical opinions, however deluded and malevolent, should not be criminalised.
A year ago, a headline like this was pure comedy. And this Evening Standard headline that I snapped last night even now has a slightly comic, Carry On Farming feel to it.
Alas, bird flu seems to be getting rather serious.
Governments thrive on infectious diseases, because only governments, or institutions that are very hard to distinguish from governments, can contain them. Which is why I always suspect that such “pandemics” (pandemic seems now to be the regular word for an “epidemic”) tend to be somewhat exaggerated. But if I were a politician, I would never dare to say such a thing.
The 2012 London Olympic Games could be hit by electricity blackouts as energy supplies fall off, according to a poll of scientists and other eminent folk in this story by the BBC. Well, pole vaulting and javelin throwing have not been done in the dark before, but I guess it might have a certain novelty.
Seriously though, how should one take these jeremiads about impending shortages to electricity generation? This excerpt from the BBC story makes it clear that many analysts believe that solutions must embrace technologies including nuclear power:
All 140 respondents to the survey said that the best way to ensure energy security for the future lay in a diversified mix of electricity generation, including renewables, coal, gas and nuclear
This story of a few days ago suggests the opposition Tories might, in their quixotic desire to appear Green, ditch the nuclear option. This seems rather ironic given that some figures in the environmentalist movement have started to embrace nuclear energy as a way to cut carbon emissions (while not being blind to the problems of nuclear waste disposal and the large capital outlays involved in building nuclear powers stations).
I am an agnostic on nuke energy. If it can, in a free market, hold its own compared with other energy sources, fine. But given the vital importance of electricity to our modern, information-age economy, it is madness to tempt disaster by shutting down options now.
There is an excellent article by Michael Totten, who is currently blogging from Iraq, about what quite a few people think is the inevitable end result: partition into three (or at least two) separate entities. It is interesting to see the facts on the ground seem to back up the view that we already have a de facto independent Kurdistan.
An Islamo-fascist Southern Iraq is not such a great outcome but an independent Kurdistan would seem to have much to commend it.
I really have no problem with that and wrote something on the subject myself called: to hell with nation building, lets see some nation wrecking!
You may have already heard this but I laughed out loud when I came across this: an officer involved in Dick Cheney’s recent difficulties is called Captain Kirk.
Phasers off, gentlemen.
It seems that despite their pathetic limp wristedness in some parts of the world, Carrefour’s solidarity with the Islamic and Egyptian community does not stretch very far, as they are happily selling Denmark’s splendid cheese here in Warsaw.
This still does not make me like them very much (although they are generally a well run business). It does lead to a question, which is what happens when a boycott and a buycott collide? Given that they stock it, is it okay for me to buy Danish cheese from Carrefour. Obviously it is better for me to go and buy the Danish cheese from a different shop down the road, but what if I can not?
Such is the dilemma I face as I head for the airport and the flight back to London from Poland.
I do so agree with what Madsen Pirie, who is now guest blogging at the Singleton Diet, says about mustard:
Second breakfast consisted of a croissant with the rest of the honey-roasted ham, this time with Florida mustard and fresh orange juice. After it came black coffee. As you might gather, I like mustards, pretty well all of them, wholegrain, English, Dijon, French, Florida, and so on. I even regard sausages as just an excuse for mustard.
I have a jar of Tesco wholegrain mustard on the go right now, and very tasty it is too. I also often eat meat just to eat mustard, but I never really spelled this out for myself before, so I am grateful to Madsen Pirie for doing this for me.
The Singleton Diet, as already reported here, started out as occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton blogging about what he was eating. The idea was for him to get slimmer. But after a while, Alex got fed up with blogging every day or even every few days about his dietary intake, and the Singleton Diet faded. (Whether Alex is now any slimmer, I am not sure, but I rather think he is.)
But now, the Singleton Diet has sprung to life again, with Madsen Pirie as a guest writer. I think this is a really good idea. Who wants to blog about everything they eat for ever? Almost nobody, and if anyone did, who would want to read that for ever? But a succession of different eaters is another matter entirely.
As regular Samizdata readers will know, if you have a pro-freedom attitude towards the world you will always have lots to complain about. But the economic rules and institutions that we favour have also poured forth a Niagara of good news, and in no area of life is this more true than in the matter of food. Thanks to the farmers and especially to the food retailers, we – especially we who live in London, as Alex Singleton, Madsen Pirie, and I all do – now have a world of exciting and exotic food products to choose between and to enjoy. What better way could there be for a man like Madsen Pirie, one of the most notable of London’s freedom mongers of recent decades, to demonstrate that he is capable of enjoying life and not just of proposing improvements for and regretting the derangements of it caused by others, than for him to do a spot of food blogging? It should be a lot of fun.
If anyone (or thing) is looking for a heaquarters from which to run the centuries old war between Vampires and Lycan, I do think the building is perfect, however.
(For people who are wondering, the building is the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, built in 1953-5 as a gift from the people of the Soviet Union to the people of Poland).
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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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