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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Whilst the media is interested in the Labour leadership struggle (the issue of when statist Blair is going and whether he is going to be replaced by statist Brown or statist Reid or statist someone else), my interest has been directed towards the latest antics of the ruling group within the Conservative party.
A couple of days ago some of Mr David Cameron’s senior people (Oliver Letwin, David W. and so on) came out with a ‘turning point’ for the Conservative party, a major policy matter. This was to state that the Conservative party would commit itself to much more taxpayer’s money for the ‘public services’ (i.e. the government education, health and welfare programmes). The “traditional Conservative hostility” to such things was wrong (although the idea that the Mrs Thatcher cut government spending is a myth – in reality its growth was just restrained, but even that is now considered a crime against humanity). Indeed it is “part of being human” to support government spending increases without limit – so anti-government types may look human, but we are really not human at all. Mr Cameron himself took time out from his trip to India to denounce the idea of tax cuts in an interview with BBC radio.
Of course Mr Cameron may be in India to learn how to create an even bigger budget deficit than Britain already has (rather than just go and try and get some reflected glory from visiting the tomb of Gandhi – much in the way as he tried to get some reflected glory from the Nelson Mandela stunt last month), but it would be nice if he noted that India has far lower taxes than Britain has (total taxes – as a percentage of the economy) which is one of the basic reasons that its economic growth is faster.
If India tried to have the level of government ‘public services’ spending that Mr Cameron and his people would suggest (even as a percentage of the economy) its government deficit would be wildly greater than it already is – and the economy would collapse (which, given how poor many Indians already are, would mean starvation).
But then Mr Cameron does not want economic growth, he wants economic “stability” – but then he does want economic growth because he wants to “share the proceeds” of it, in order to fight “social injustices” and support the cause of “social justice”. Not just in Britain – but by providing government aid to all the poor countries of the world (far more than this mean Labour government is giving). → Continue reading: Cameron’s ‘Conservatives’ – the madness continues
A British evangelical Christian, Stephen Green, has been charged with using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour’ after he handed out leaflet contained Biblical quotes critical of homosexuality at a homosexual event in Wales. The article indicates neither he nor his leaflets were abusive or threatening, just that they pointed out that the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin and so it urged homosexuals to ‘repent’ and stop sinning.
What caught my eye about this case was…
Several thousand people attended the event, which included a gay rugby tournament and a ‘top gayer motor show’, and which was addressed on the importance of tolerance by Liberal Democrat council chief Rodney Berman.
So as Rodney Berman is such a strong supporter of tolerance, presumably he will soon also be arguing for Mr. Green’s right to be tolerated for his views and behaviour. After all, tolerance does not imply acceptance or approval and so even if Mr. Green calls for gays to stop being gay (i.e. he does not approve of their sexual behaviour and wishes to convince them to act differently), unless there is more to this story unreported, there seems no evidence Mr. Green does not tolerate gays. Yet some homosexuals who disapprove of Mr. Green’s views of their behaviour are clearly unwilling to return the favour and tolerate him. They called for the law (i.e. force) to be used to prevent him peaceably expressing himself.
As the LibDems pride themselves on supporting (non-economic) liberty, will they come to Mr. Green’s defence and demand tolerance for everyone? I wonder what Mr. Berman has to say on this matter.
There is an article in the Independent called Another fatal day in the ‘war on terror’ in which Patrick Cockburn, the “award-winning journalist and author” states:
The real reason of the increasing violence in the Middle East is the return to imperial control and foreign occupation half a century after the European colonial empires were broken up. This is the fuel for Islamic militancy. This is why fanatical but isolated Islamic groups can suddenly win broader support. Governments allied to the US and Britain have no legitimacy.
It seems to me that “the real reason for the increasing violence in the Middle East” is a bunch of Saudi Arabian Muslims hijacked several aircraft flying over the United States and used to to commit mass murder in 2001 and thereby caused the US to defend itself. Forget that and nothing makes sense.
The Taliban, the government who sponsored and facilitated Al Qaeda’s attacks on the USA, did not take control of Afghanistan because of a “return to imperial control and foreign occupation”, except in the sense that foreign Arabs did indeed occupy parts of Afghanistan.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and the Taliban all pre-dated the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Pretending they were caused by unwise actions of western governments rather than by the development of anti-modern Islamist ideology centred on Iran and Saudi Arabia, puts the blame in the wrong place. If the US and UK have made any major strategic mistakes, they were not intervening in more force in Iraq and to have not started working to encourage ‘robust’ opposition to Wahabbism in Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite fascism in Iran decades ago.
A driver gets arrested for dangerous driving whilst… blind… and his lawyer, Timothy Gascoyne, argues that he should be acquitted because “the question is not whether his driving was dangerous, but whether being blind makes it dangerous”.
I am curious how many people in court were struggling to keep a straight face. Clearly Timothy Gascoyne missed his calling as a comedian!
Speaking of moonbats, Germaine Greer dusts off her keyboard to put the untimely demise of her compatriot, Steve Irwin, into some sort of perspective:
In 2004, Irwin was accused of illegally encroaching on the space of penguins, seals and humpback whales in Antarctica, where he was filming a documentary called Ice Breaker. An investigation by the Australian Environmental Department resulted in no action being taken, which is not surprising seeing that John Howard, the prime minister, made sure that Irwin was one of the guests invited to a “gala barbecue” for George Bush a few months before. Howard is now Irwin’s chief mourner, which is only fair, seeing that Irwin announced that Howard is the greatest leader the world has ever seen.
So there we have it. Driven to despair by the illegal encroachment, a member of the oppressed Alternative Species community hit back against the Irwinist-BusHitler-Howard cabal. They must adopt a different maritime policy.
On Saturday I got into a 4×4 and took part in a 460km road trip around rural Kenya. One of the most notable things in the journey were the frequent police roadblocks, each consisting of two rather sinister looking yellow metal strips on the road with spikes pointing upwards. These were accompanied by at least a couple of police officers.
Government sources tell me that they are essential in the fight against crime. On the other hand, ordinary citizens are rather more cynical, saying that criminals can bribe their way through them and that they are just a way of fleecing drivers who are made to pay fees. 99% of the time no receipt is given.
We were luckly. Apparently the police don’t like to try it on with 4x4s containing someone who is white and might be World Bank or a journalist. But for ordinary Kenyan drivers, the roadblocks are a menace, delaying journeys and breeding petty corruption.
(My visit to Kenya is being blogged here.)
If you love innovative photography, particularly of landscapes and modern, soaring buildings at day and night, go and have a look at this. Wow. (Hat-tip, Andrew Sullivan).
Even by the megalomaniac standards of modern Premiership soccer, this allegation, if true about former Chelsea player William Gallas, is astonishing:
Chelsea say they sold William Gallas because he threatened to score an own goal if he was selected for their first game of the season.
The Stamford Bridge club have released a statement explaining their reasons for allowing the French defender to join Arsenal on transfer deadline day.
Gallas, 29, allegedly refused to play again for the Blues.
Chelsea claim he said he would score an own goal if he was forced to play against Manchester City on 20 August.
This story has had the amazing effect of making me feel a tincture of sympathy for the charmless Chelsea football manager, Jose Mourinho.
The market for footballers and other sports remains a strange one. Footballers have, in the space of under 50 years, gone from the position of being treated almost like serfs with capped wages to swaggering characters thinking they are able to command whatever salaries they want, on any terms. But I suspect that this process is hitting the buffers. There has been a great boom in professional soccer and the surrounding business over the past two decades but one suspects that that has now reached a sort of plateau
Football has to compete with other forms of entertainment. The less-than-stellar performance of England in the World Cup, coupled with lingering sourness and the antics of certain players, may have sated the public appetite for shelling out vast sums for a season ticket to a game. And when a player becomes so deluded about his importance to a club that he actually threatens to damage it by scoring own goals and so on, then he has to be pushed out. Chelsea had no alternative. if this guy had been a bond dealer at a bank and had threatened to hurt the company if it failed to do what he wanted, that person would probably be sued to an inch of his life.
The creation of a super-democratic body created by central government called the Standards Board for England, which can exclude members of a local council who were elected on a specific issue platform because ‘their minds are already made up’ has been described in the Telegraph as ‘hampering democracy’. This is rather like saying having your head cut off ‘hampers thinking’… true but more than a tad misleading. British understatement is alive and well it seems.
The Standards Board’s function is to prevent single issue politics by simply disallowing a ‘difficult’ elected councillor from doing what they were elected to do so ‘hampering’ democracy is not an unintended consequence, it is what the Standards Board for England does.
Face it, the whole point of the Standards Board of England is to prevent councillors who are elected on the basis of views unpopular with the establishment from being allowed to disrupt business as usual by asking difficult questions and proving resistant to being pressured by established political groupings.
So let us call the Standard Board for England and their network of ‘ethical standards officers’ what they actually are: Commissars.
Yours truly got a mention in a whimsical New York Times article by William Safire in which he makes the point that “coiners can’t be choosers”… once an epithet, in this case Moonbat, escapes into the general meme-pool, the coiner has no control over how it actually gets used.
I don’t find taking my clothes off difficult, it’s the acting that’s really hard!
– so said Elena, who is a thespian, last night after dinner at Samizdata HQ
The solution to envy is not to tax the rich but to tax the envious…It’s envy which imposes an externality on the rich. Make the envious pay for their ugly preferences.
– Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution fame.
On the whole, I am not a huge fan of using taxation to eradicate any kind of human behaviour, irrespective of whether it is levied upon the rich or the envious. And this is obviously a frivolous prescription. However, I like the quote for two reasons. Not only is it a worthy inversion of the status quo; it also spots the principal (yet unspoken) justification for our “progressive” taxation structures in the minds of statists – envy.
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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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