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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Spain’s socialist government is turning its back on the post-Franco ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ approach with regard to the Spanish civil war. It plans to prohibits any political event at the location of Franco’s tomb in the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid. Yet whilst I am hardly a fan of Franco, the notion that a socialist government has any moral authority to suppress pro-Franco sentiments strikes me as absurd. There were no ‘good guys’ in the Spanish civil war and if the current Spanish socialists see themselves as the heirs of those who fought Franco then they see themselves as heirs to despicable would-be tyrants who were in no way admirable just because their enemy was little better. It was a war between mass murderous collectivist socialists of various dispositions against mass murderous collectivist national socialists.
In many ways the one thing Franco had to commend him was that his system of government was always unlikely to outlive him whereas a socialist system might have lasted longer… which is to say it might have lasted until the late 1980’s and in which case more the mass graves being dug up now would be filled with falangists and their families as opposed to socialists and their families (not that the left was shy about slaughtering its civilian enemies during the war).
People who get misty eyed over the resistance to Franco in the Spanish civil war are fools. It did not really matter who won, Spain was going to lose regardless. A pox on both sides of that terrible war.
There is an very commendable article on the LFB blog which applauds an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that economic development is not a sufficient reason under the state constitution to justify taking homes, in other words overturning Kelo in Ohio. However what makes the article so interesting is that it correctly identifies the poor thinking behind Justice O’Connor’s interpretation of the issues:
I need not merely infer that O’Connor is one who believes in “balancing” the interests of victims and thieves. In her formal opinion, available at the web site of the Ohio State Supreme Court, O’Connor states that the Norwood case is about “the constitutionality of a municipality’s taking of an individual’s property by eminent domain and transferring the property to a private entity for redevelopment. In doing so, we must balance two competing interests of great import in American democracy: the individual’s rights in the possession and security of property, and the sovereign’s power to take private property for the benefit of the community.”
But, as the Founders themselves should have better understood and stated in framing the Constitution, the only “benefit of the community” that may properly be attended to in most possible cases has to do with the actual rights of the individuals who make up that community. The community is best off, in fact, if no member of it may ever be robbed by government and at the behest of “the community,” whether that “community” is a group of home owners who want to forcibly prevent a mall from being built on somebody else’s property by the persons who own that property, or a group of developers who want to forcibly impose a mall on the property of home owners.
Excellent article.
Following from my post here, which produced a lot of heated comments (including, I am sorry to say, a few from yours truly), and Perry’s ‘proportionality’ post yesterday, it might be worth taking a few minutes to read this long but worthwhile essay by Christopher Hitchens. Hitch writes about the Allied bombing offensive of the Second World War, the obliteration of cities like Dresden, Hamburg and the subsequent – and controversial – vilification of Bomber Command leader Arthur Harris. I will not try to summarise what Hitchens has to say, which revolves around a new book by English writer A.C. Grayling, but here is a bit towards the end to give some of the flavour:
However, if we are to be allowed alternative historical courses and speculations, there is a “moral” that Grayling overlooks. What if the RAF had been in good enough shape to inflict “terror” on Berlin in the fall of 1939? What if the United States had determined to strike the Imperial Japanese Navy first? What if the League of Nations had decided to stand by the Spanish Republic and Abyssinia, and had pounded Franco’s and Mussolini’s armies before they could get off the mark?
Those who oppose violence on principle are called pacifists. Those who oppose it until its use is too little and too late, or too much and too late, should be called casuists. Those who try to resist their own despotisms, and who appeal in vain to lazy democracies who are also among the potential victims, and who welcome the eventual arrival of the bombs and planes–I am thinking of some courageous Serbian and Iraqi democrats–should be called our allies now, and in Europe should have been our allies no later than 1933.
Moral crisis is the vile residue of moral cowardice, and Grayling has fully proved this without quite intending to do so. His book is a treatise, not on the dubiety of the retributive, but on the urgency and integrity of the “preemptive.”
On a personal note, it enrages me how the area bombing of German towns, for example, was denounced by people with the wisdom of hindsight, although it should be noted that the bombing was questioned at the time and not just by lily-livered peaceniks. As a son of an RAF navigator, I also have to recognise that in Britain, a country isolated in the early years of the war, having lost Singapore, Trobuk, fighting a terrible campaign to avoid starvation against U-boats, that the bombing of German towns and cities was seen as a vital way to hit back. Hitchens does not mention another very good reason: the bombing tied up hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft that would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern front, and forced the Nazis to tie up a lot of manpower and material to deal with air attacks.
Where does all this take us to what is going on in the Middle East now? To repeat a point made in my previous article, countries like Israel are entitled to do what is necessary to prevent their own extinction. For to be clear about this: Hizbollah and their backers want Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. So it is only right that the country should do what is deemed necessary to prevent its destruction, even if that involves loss of civilian life. But I make no apologies for re-stating my revulsion at those who claim that there is “no such thing as an innocent civilian” in order to justify use of massive military force. There are plenty of good arguments for using massive force, however awful, but dehumanising millions of victims beforehand by claiming “Muslims are all alike,” or whatever, is not one of them.
Commentators who have been lambasting Israel for reacting ‘disproportionately’ in its military reaction to Hezbollah strike me as making a mistake as to what ‘proportionality’ really means within the context of a war. If a man hiding behind a wall fires a rifle at you, proportionality does not mean you must only fire a rifle back at them… it means you should only attack them with enough force to kill the enemy hiding behind a wall, which may well mean returning fire with a 120mm tank round or a 500 kg HE bomb. A nuclear warhead would be ‘disproportionate’.
I would argue that Just War Theory’s notions for ‘proportionality’ only makes sense as meaning proportional to the imperative of effectively attacking a legitimate target, not proportional to a legitimate target’s specific actions.
There are a bunch more photos from inside the Genesis 1 space station prototype with all sorts of fun stuff floating about. I would have loved to have been sitting in the meeting where they came up with the idea of flying a container full of Mexican Jumping Beans!
The external shot is also far clearer then the post-launch quick look shot I posted a week or so ago.
My career in student politics lasted approximately 2 minutes. Recollected, hazily, over a distance of 25 years, it went like this:
GH to Conservative stallholder at fresher’s fair, eagerly: Is this where I join the FCS?
Student hack (horrified): Oh no, we don’t have anything like that here!
So I never did join the FCS. Unlike, I suspect, many of blogistan’s more venerable residents. Now Tim Hames is doing a radio history for the BBC. I am not sure how to read this. Are people like us now history? Or has Hames persuaded someone in the commissioning department that the FCS generation is about to come to power, as a generation of 70s New Lefties did under Blair, in heavy disguise, but with their ideals intact?
That would be a lovely thought, but there is a problem with that theory. Part of the reason the Tory Party was in such an appalling mess by the 90s was the foolhardy destruction of the FCS which drove out of the party a generation. Old Labour, in the 70s, on the other hand, clasped the New Lefties to its bosom: paid for fraternal trips to Cuba and Bulgaria, gave them speechwriting and policy jobs, helped them in the Long March Through The Institutions that was achieved by the turn of the century. The New Left base is strong. The New Right are even now outcasts. They (we?) are not close to power, unless I am much mistaken. Not even in alliance with the RCP…
Still Hames’ piece is full of delightful quirks. I liked in particular his treatment of Marc Glendenning, whom he insisted on giving the full grandeur of Marc-Henri, “a philosopher-king among politicians”. I did not meet Marc until quite recently, and though I have thought of him up to now as a conspicuously pleasant and interesting chap, I will look at him now in a whole new light. Would bended knee be appropriate, I wonder?
On the surface, the news that the former President of Malawi has been arrested and charged with pocketing £5.5 million of developing aid is good news. It has been a consistent complaint of Africa-watchers for a long time that African elites have been pocketing Western aid-money, and getting away with it, while their subjects suffer and starve.
However, closer examination of this story does make me wonder.
“The former president denies all the charges, and he has invoked his constitutional right to remain silent,” said Fahad Assani, Mr Muluzi’s lawyer. He expressed confidence that the ex-president would be found “very, very innocent”.
Mr Muluzi became president after Malawi had endured 30 years of misrule from Hastings Banda.
He promised to turn Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, into a prosperous democracy. But scandal and corruption marred Mr Muluzi’s decade in power. After failing to remove term limits from the constitution, he was forced to hand over to a new president, Bingu wa Mutharika. The two men have been bitter rivals ever since. Mr Muluzi’s allies claim he is being persecuted by the new president.
So I wonder, is this a genuine effort to bring a malefactor to book, or is it a case where Mr Mutharika is using the forms of modern political parlance to the very unmodern ends of getting an old rival out of the way?
Whenever we are told that the state needs new powers for whatever reason, we are constantly reassured that there will be ‘safeguards’ and ‘accountability’ to protect citizens from the intrusions of powerful government agencies.
You did not have to be a Brazillian living in London to have some doubts about that. And it is not just in such high profile cases that government agencies misuse their powers.
For example, here in Australia, a rather colourful lawyer, one Michael Brereton has found that details of his messy private life have found their way into newspapers after a tax investigation against him failed to provide the state with enough legal ammunition to prosecute him.
Investigator inquiries have appeared to focus on the details of the financial structure behind Mr Brereton’s latest theatre venture, the musical Jolson.
… But Mr Brereton and a number of his Jolson investors maintain it was a bona fide musical and not a tax scam, despite being a flop. He says that in the absence of evidence of any wrongdoing, the ACC moved to shame him.
The original Melbourne newspaper article that fingered him, headlined “Drug, sex claims in tax probe”, described Operation Wickenby’s Mr X and appeared to derive straight from court affidavits provide by his ex-wife.
She declined to repeat her claims that Mr Brereton endangered his daughter but labels him “a nasty and vindictive man”. She said the newspaper leaks must have come from the ACC, which had “subpoenaed a lot of my files”. The ACC has denied being responsible.
A longstanding friend, former cabinet minister Alan Griffiths, said the ACC had “potentially ripped up the rule book in relation to lawyer-client privilege”.
The Australian Crime Commission has suffered a massive blow to its credibility by getting entangled in a domestic spat; but it might also demonstrate just how far government agencies are willing to go to ‘get at’ people its officials take a dislike to.
So much for those ‘safeguards’, hey.
I suppose it had to happen. As global temperatures supposedly rise – and it is not difficult to accept that claim right now in my sweltering apartment – certain groups are playing the victim card by suing governments and other agents for causing global warming and hence hurting their livelihoods.
On page 31 of the August edition of the BBC History magazine, Mervyn Benford writes that, in Britain, “it was the demands of industrialisation that made the government educate the masses” an interesting statement considering that the industrial revolution occurred before even the tiny government subsidy to education in 1833. Benford goes on to write that, in 1862, “just 1 in 20 children went to school” – an absurd statement of the sort that E.G. West exposed more than forty years ago in Education and the State.
An historian should not say to themselves “I will pretend that every child who has not been to school for X number of years, without a break, has never been to school”. This is ‘history’ as in “first there was darkness, but then the state moved into the darkness and said let there be light”. As Ludwig Von Mises (and many other people) have pointed out, it is not the most stupid students or the most lazy (not always the same people of course) who become collectivists – on the contrary it is often intelligent and hardworking students (whether children or adults), people who seek out knowledge.
For the wells of knowledge have been poisoned. The above is one example, but it is one example from a legion. A child or an adult who seeks knowledge from the media or the ‘education system’ is betrayed.
The welfare state is the engine of so many of the problems that the people who run this country complain about you would think its inherent problems would at least be a topic of discussion by the political class. But no. Yet a culture of entitlement without responsibility is not just a consequence of the welfare state, it is pretty much the objective of the welfare state. As a result it seems odd that the political class who presided over the growth of the all encompassing nanny state should decry the fact that people do not take responsibility for their health or behaviour when the very system they created is designed to prevent people paying directly for the health consequences of their life styles.
Yet because the welfare state is sacrosanct, it is not permitted to even suggest that it is the system itself that has produced the overweight chav generation that seems to irk the Islington set and their Tory imitators so much.
Blair said the government was banning the sale of junk food and fizzy drinks from vending machines in schools. He said if voluntary moves to limit advertising of junk food to children had not worked by 2007, new laws would be introduced. The government was also encouraging supermarket chains to adopt a single-system of labelling to identify healthy options.
“It will be much better if the industry comes together voluntarily around this scheme but once again, we are prepared to act if the voluntary system does not work”
And so if the threat of force does not work, yet more regulations will follow. Sure, that is it, we need more regulations. Yet all this dances around the issue that people buy what they want not because the labelling says this or that, but because they like it and there is no clear economic motivation to worry all too much about long term medical consequences when the NHS takes care of all that stuff. It is almost as if the Tories, LibDems and Labour are shouting at each other across the floor of Parliament, all pretending not to notice the large and very hungry elephant standing in their midst who is crapping all over the statist paradise that we would all live in if only we had a few more regulations.
The jury, at least, did not convict. A pity we shall never know (their deliberations being secret) whether this was that they found the evidence lacking, or the whole prosecution ludicrous. But it is perhaps some comfort, that if you are entrapped by a newspaper into discussing the purchase of an entirely fictional substance, and prosecuted with the Attorney General’s permision on inchoate Terrorism Act charges drafted to be hard to rebut, you can still escape gaol.
Whether this will be of much comfort for the three men just acquitted in the red mercury trial I doubt. They have been in custody as “terrorist suspects” since 2004, and had to find the funds to defend a trial that cost the prosecution £1,000,000 in taxpayers money. I only hope they have a million or so left to sue the News of the World and its “fake sheikh” agent provocateur, Mazer Mahmood.
Even if they were successful in that, of course the police, prosecutors, and their secret witness, B, are likely to go unpunished. It will be said they acted in good faith. It will be ignored that the waste of public resource and the injury to the defendents’ lives, was dealing with a ‘threat’ that could only ever have been fictional. It will be said that this is valuable and valid because it “sends a message” to all the real terrorists (200… 2,000… whatever the estimate is this week) that they were not investigating while they were wasting their time – and three families’ lives.
I have noted before that British justice (in a number of areas, not just terrorism) has started to take on the characteristics of a witch-hunt, with accusation the philosophers’ stone that transmutes ordinary objects and actions into evidence of guilt. But at least the persecutors of the witch-crazes purported to believe in witchcraft.
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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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