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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Great article in American magazine Reason here about the arrest of David Carruthers, CEO of the BetOnSports online gambling business. Following hard on the heels of the arrest of the three Natwest bankers on charges connected with the collapse of Enron, it seems the British state is steadily losing the ability to protect its citizens from being grabbed by U.S. authorities for arrest for offences which are not offences in this country and where the domiciles of a person’s businesses are outside the United States.
Carruthers was on his way from London, where his company is headquartered, to Costa Rica, where its online betting operations are based. The business is perfectly legal in both of those places, but not in the United States. And since most of its customers are Americans, Carruthers is guilty of about 20 different felonies.
Or so the FBI and the Justice Department say, and they are the ones with the guns and handcuffs. Catherine Hanaway, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, accuses Carruthers and 10 other people associated with BetOnSports, including company founder Gary Kaplan, of violating the 1961 Wire Act, which prohibits using “a wire communication facility” to accept bets on “any sporting event or contest.”
Despite the talk of fraud, BetOnSports is not accused of ripping off its customers. This case has nothing to do with consumer protection, except in the sense of protecting consumers from their own desire to bet on sports.
These cases present a number of difficulties. I think American authorities are entitled to crack down on crimes of theft, fraud and violence even if those crimes have not occured on U.S. soil but involve injury to a U.S. citizen. That is fair. But the BetOnSports case suggests that, in this internet, globalised age, the writ of the U.S. legislature seems to run across the whole planet (well, most of the planet. I do not think extradition will work any time soon in North Korea).
Besides the legal niceties, there is also hypocrisy of nanny-state legislators at work here. America boasts the ultimate gambling city on the planet: Las Vegas, not to mention hosts of other places in Reno, Atlantic City and various Indian reservations. Not to mention the various state lotteries from which the U.S. tax-eaters gain a hefty income. And that is what this arrest and closure of on-line gambling is about. The faux moral scolds who decry gambling are not concerned about people pouring their hard-earned cash down the drain. No, they are worried that a nice source of tax revenue is passing them by.
Our own political masters in Britain are scarcely better in their approaches to the various ‘sinful’ activities that need to be regulated to protect a benighted populace. Drinking hours are liberalised and super-casinos are encouraged and yet smoking in a private member’s club is banned and cultivation of cannabis plants in your back yard for medical use will get you sent to jail or hit with a hefty fine. What a great world we live in.
Most people believe that poor people should be free to trade with each other, and they should be free to buy and sell from us in the West. If people want to buy cheaper goods from abroad, and spend the money they save on food or medicines, they should be free to do so. Saving a few cents when buying a bag of rice makes little difference to you or me, or to the rich elite in poor countries. But to a poor family it could make the difference between eating at night, or going without.
– Andrew Mitchell MP, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, speaking Monday at the Globalisation Institute.
Monday’s Globalisation Institute event had Andrew Mitchell MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, speaking about trying to get African countries to be more open to trade, not just with the developed world (he said sub-Saharan Africa’s share of world trade was only 2%, or a mere 0.6% if you do not count South Africa), but also to trade more between African nations. Currently African trade tariffs are amongst the highest in the world, leading to such absurdities as African countries imposing tariffs on Tanzanian-made anti-malarial bed nets. Mitchell described these correctly as quite literally ‘killer tariffs’. So far so good.
Yet strangely the Right Honorable Member for Sutton Coldfield was also very keen to point out that taking an interest in African development is a cross party ‘British’ thing, not just a Tory thing and that his party fully supports increasing the amount of British taxpayers money the state wishes to generously give away in foreign aid to 0.7% of GDP. Why are Tories so desperate to make it clear that they represent continuity with Labour policies and sensibilities, even when addressing a room with a very high proportion of free marketeers? Mitchell was positively effervescent with enthusiasm about the stream of new and creative ideas being generated by Tory thinkers on the subject of international aid and yet I came away with the sense that this was just tantamount to saying “we have new and innovative ways to give away your tax-money and ‘engage’ with NGOs because we are just as clever as new Labour at thinking up ways to do that!”. Be still my beating heart.
In short the event did little to change my thinking about the pointlessness of Andrew Mitchell’s party. But like all GI events, the company was congenial, the champagne delightfully cold and the venue most agreeable…
Tim Blair updates the Australian version of the English language.
Last night, I snapped photos at the Globalisation Institute gathering at the Foreign Press Association, Carlton House Terrace, just off Trafalgar Square. Alex Singleton used a few of the snaps I took at the GI Blog, and several more of my snaps have also already appeared at Guido Fawkes.
Said Guido:
The totty quotient was high . . .
Indeed it was. Here are some further snaps that Guido might have used, but didn’t.
It was an impressive gathering, high both in quantity and quality of attendees, all chatting away merrily and sipping pink champagne.
Also. a bloke spoke:
The bloke, a Conservative Shadow Minister, spoke about how free trade in Africa would be a good thing. NGO persons and other enemies prowled about, gnashing their fangs and wondering how to denounce this well-disposed and well-organised event. Potential donors also mingled, impressed. The GI is definitely going places.
The Tate Modern gallery, built in an old power station, hosts art which is frequently of no aesthetic value whatever, in my opinion, other than to demonstrate the vacuity of much that passes for Modern or post-Modern, art. Apparently, this giant sculpture is to be built:
London’s Tate Modern, the world’s most popular modern art museum, unveiled plans on Tuesday to build a giant glass pyramid-style extension which its creator described as a “pile” of boxes.
Unlike the uniform glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris, the planned extension to the converted power station on the southern bank of the Thames is asymmetric.
The new building, which aims to ease visitor congestion, should be ready in time for the Olympic Games in London in 2012 and will cost around 165 million pounds to complete at current prices.
Makes the heart swell with patriotic pride, does it not? I love the line about the Olympics. Expect more stunts like this, paid for by the taxpayer, as the Games approach. Do not say you were not warned.
While on the subject of the dreadfulness of post-modernism, I can recommend this book.
I suppose one of the main reasons that airshows are held is that actually seeing the thing fly can temporarily remove the sense from people who in their rational moments think that an A380 or some other aircraft may not have much of a practical role, or may not be worth the money.
And as it happened, on Sunday, I was impressed by the A380, and I was again impressed by the V22 Osprey, which if nothing else can certainly put on an impressive display.
Alas, I didn’t get a good picture of it in “aeroplane mode”, but for a helicopter it was certainly quick in getting from A to B. This is the best I can do.
On the other hand, it is quite impressive what a proven, useful, and big helicopter can do when it only has the tiny fuel load needed for a ten minute display.
It was something of a day for the helicopters. As well as the Chinook, the RAF sent a Merlin for an aerobatic display, and this was also really impressive. Of course, there were lots and lots of jet fighters, too (the highlight of which was probably a MiG-29), but in order for photos of them to not look like a black spot in the distance, you really need a lens like this one, which I did not have.
Still, I am sure Brian will give me points for the billion monkeys shot.
Nature seems rather inventive in the creation of parasites. Virtually every species on the planet has several and they can be specialized to the point where a single species is almost an eco-system unto itself.
Life requires energy and there are quite a number of ways to get it. There are primary producers that take solar or chemical energy and use it to create biomass; there are species which eat the primary producers and others which in turn eat them. The most common terms for these are plants, herbivores and carnivores. There are animals which feed on dead plants or animals and there are animals which have discovered the trick of extracting energy from their host without quite killing it.
Parasitism has a number of advantages to a species. The host does all the work. Since the parasite does not kill the host like a carnivore it can continue feeding for so long as the host lives. It is clear the host would be better off without the parasite in the vast majority of cases, but since all of its neighbors are also hosts, it has no particular relative disadvantage to them.
As in any other biological niche, there will be competition. If a parasite extracts too little from its host, another which takes more will produce more offspring and take over. On the other hand, if it extracts too much, the host will weaken and a competitor who takes just a little bit less will again be able to extract more energy and produce more offspring.
In economics we call this the Laffer curve.
Diana Hsieh, a hardline objectivist of the Big-O variety, thinks libertarians like Tom Palmer, whom she cites in an article on her Noodlefood site here, are losing their nerve if they worry about attacks on civilian targets in places like Beirut. She writes:
Obviously, wars cannot be fought without harm to civilian populations. Governments and their militaries do not exist in some separate dimension from civilians, such that they might be uniquely targeted by an invading force. Enemy governments are thoroughly integrated into the territory over which they rule, depending upon its wealth, hospitals, roads, factories, trains, farms, ports, industry, people, and more. That’s why quickly and decisively eliminating the threat posed by an enemy nation cannot but require the bombing of so-called “civilian” targets.
Moreover, without active support and/or tacit submission from a majority of the civilian population, no government could maintain its grip on power. That’s why the vast majority of the population of an aggressive enemy nation are not morally innocent bystanders. The sometimes-awful luck of genuine innocents in wartime, such as young children or active dissidents, is a terrible tragedy. However, the party responsible is not the nation defending itself but rather all those who made such a defense necessary, particularly the countrymen of the innocents complicit in or supportive of the aggression of their nation.
I am very troubled by that last paragraph. Hsieh seems to be saying that civilians in a country that is led by a brutal government are, unless they do everything to rebel, more or less complicit in the crimes of that government. Therefore, they have little or no excuse to complain if bombs come raining down on their homes.
This way of reasoning involves, by an ironic twist, to a sort of collectivist “guilt” shared across a whole populace. If a family living say, in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany have not actively sought to overthrow those governments, then they are somehow not terribly deserving of our compassion (Hsieh, to be fair, seems to exempt children and one or two other groups from this).
I entirely defend Israel’s right to do what is necessary to defend itself from terror groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, and alas, its actions may lead, inevitably, to the loss of civilian life. I consider myself pretty much pro-Israeli and have nothing but contempt for the bogus moral equivalence drawn in certain parts of the media between the actions of the Israeli armed forces and terror groups. But I have a real problem with the line of argument presented here by Hsieh. The ends do not always justify the means, and as moral agents, it is surely right to minimise loss of innocent life as far as possible if that can be done. For consider this: if the western powers had really thrown off all moral constraints about foreign populations in the recent past, then much of the Middle East would be a radioactive wasteland.
In whatever shape England emerges from the war […] The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture
– George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn
But we live further from Orwell than Orwell from Bismarck. The current rulers of England are keen on uniforms, inspectors, permits and controls. (In 48 hours: “Ports and airports to get to discipline young offenders: Home secretary considers community work uniform.” The replacement for the Child Support Agency [not authoritarian enough], “will wield extra powers to punish parents who fail to pay, including evening curfews to prevent fathers going out after work, and having their passports confiscated to stop them taking foreign holidays, and even the threat of prosecution and prison”.) Law is treated with contempt if it gets in the way of the state’s priorities. (Last week the Home Office revealed its ideas for Serious Crime Prevention Orders, to be used to control the activities – such as telephone, travel, banking or internet use – of “known criminals” without the evidence necessary for an actual criminal prosecution.) The prohibition of suet puddings has yet to be ‘put out to public consultation’ (which is how we would know the matter had been determined). But it can only be a matter of time.
I saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil again last night. I had not for a long while. Seen just now, its aptness to New Britain is shocking. More surprising, I think than the utter submergence of Orwell’s gentle, un-Prussian England. We knew, in petto, we had lost that.
How long before we see official signs pronouncing “Suspicion breeds confidence” and “Help the Ministry of Information help you”? Eh?
I would like to begin this, my maiden article, by extending my sincere thanks to the Samizdata Editorial Team for affording me the considerable privilege of posting rights. In return, I will put my best endeavours to the task of justifying their faith in me.
On to matters at hand. It appears that a George Romero fantasy is playing itself out for real in the corridors of national power but, instead of laying siege to a shopping mall, the flesh-craving zombies are turning on themselves:
A 19-year-old female candidate for the police service recently learnt a hard lesson in diversity awareness. She had passed her written tests, and in her interview was asked what she would do if she needed advice. She replied: “I would go to my sergeant and ask him for help.” She failed the interview for referring to the sergeant as “him”, thus revealing her lack of gender awareness.
I hope that she was one of the brightest and the best.
Perhaps it is for lack of easily-available prey (the hunting grounds having been exhausted) that the predatory ruling class has turned on itself. Much like a deranged, ravenous beast that chews off its own hind leg, the demented state is ripping into the very mechanisms by which it effects control. In time, capability will be whittled away, morale will lie bleeding and purpose will be lost.
In case you think I am complaining, let me say here and now that I wish this process Godspeed. Having all but abandoned any hope that some externality will bring much-needed relief to this monstrously overgoverned patch of clay, the sight of the beast now doing us the favour of devouring itself brings a holiday to my heart. May the sinuous, thorny tendrils of enforced, prescriptive ‘diversity’ grow luxuriant in every corner of Whitehall. May its choking, poisonous emissions billow wildly and uncontrollably over the kleptopots of political control.
For ever and ever. Amen.
Yesterday, the skies over London were often dark and threatening torrential downpour. These were particularly ominous as I and fellow Samizdatistas Antoine Clarke, Perry, and Adriana had received our innoculations and taken our passports to suburbia for a barbecue at the home of our friend Scott Norvell, European bureau chief of Fox News.
You know you are at a higher class of barbecue when the host leads guests in chugging fine wine instead of beer.
Recently acquired Samizdata party fixture (and Huffington Post blogger) Greg Gutfeld is laughing now, but has no idea that an assassin lurks.
Sadly for we overextended Samizdata party throwers, Scott’s cooking sets a new, much more elevated standard for barbecue fare.
Adriana collects evidence to support Perry’s future ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ pleas.
It was a splendid evening with delicious food, lots of laughs, and the usual plans for world domination. (Don’t worry – you are in safe hands!) More photos at Flickr.
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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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