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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 As I have recounted, on my way home to see family in Australia in December I stopped in South Korea for a few days. The trip was principally a city break: I had a look around Seoul. Seoul was in many ways very impressive, but it was also a city striking in its normality. It is a modern, technologically advanced city. The subway system works extremely well. There are McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets everywhere (this is a rare market where a local McDonald’s clone has apparently outdone the original. On the other hand, all Korea’s coffee shops belong to Starbucks). Buildings are modern. People love their mobile phones. Certain Korean brands are perhaps more prominent than they would be in a more balanced economy and they seem to realise this though. Samsung and LG, for instance, seem to market many of their products under local brand names, leading to iconic and very familiar Korean products being present in Korea only under unfamiliar brand names. The city feels extremely safe, it is very clean, and it is about as low stress a place to visit as can be imagined.
The only hint that complete insanity begins less than 50km to the north is only a small one: the fact that uniformed soldiers are to be seen regularly on the streets. There is nothing threatening or remarkable about this. These are just ordinary 19 year old guys in the middle of their compulsory military service. You see them catching the subway, or having lunch in fast food restaurants. These are just young guys going about their lives, who happen to be wearing fatigues. There are many other cities where you will see the same thing. However, now that most developed countries have abandoned compulsory military service, these cities are fewer than they used to be, particularly in countries as advanced as South Korea.
 But Korea has retained compulsory military service, and this is because the most heavily defended border in the world lies less than 50km north of Seoul. Of course, I had to go to see it. One can only go into the Demilitarized Zone by going on an organised tour. These are run by both the local USO and by local Korean tour companies. The guidebook recommended the USO tour as “the best tour” but the days on which it ran were not convenient with my schedule, so I booked myself on one of the locally run tours. This turned out to be just fine. However, perhaps because most English speakers go on the USO tour, English speakers were in a minority on this tour. Most of the people on the bus were Japanese. Only six of us were English speakers (myself, three Singaporeans, and an American engineer based in Seoul who was on the tour with his adult daughter who was visiting him for Christmas). There was also a Korean couple. This is apparently rare. Korean civilians are not normally allowed in the DMZ, and those that wish to go on the tour have to apply six months in advance, in which time a thorough background check is undertaken on them, apparently to make sure they are not the sorts of people who are likely to wish to defect to North Korea or otherwise allow the enemy to gain propaganda points (this seems like a deeply peculiar thing to do, but apparently once in a while someone is nutty enough to want to try it). In any event, their presence on the tour was apparently quite unusual, as the English speaking guide remarked upon their presence. And of course, there was no ‘Korean speaking guide’ (although the guides were both Korean and thus clearly spoke the language). The tour was conducted in Japanese and English, and the English and Japanese speaking guides took turns to speak.
When you drive north from Seoul, you realise what a huge metropolitan area the city is at the centre of. (It depends how you measure it, but there is a case for Seoul as the second largest city in the world, which is doubly impressive given that the population was reduced to a few hundred thousand during the Korean War). Urban areas and manufacturing centres are beside the road almost all the way to the border (the LG/Phillips LCD display factory is no more than 10km from the DMZ, so our flat screen television supply is one of the first things we shall lose upon the start of World War 3).
As we drove north the guides gave us various useful pieces of information, such as that we should not run off into the bushes “as there are many minefields”, and that it was very important that we not taunt or gesture at any North Koreans, as if we did they would take our photographs and use them for propaganda purposes against the free world (also, our tour would likely be terminated immediately).
Then we crossed the river Imjin,and normality ceased. → Continue reading: A trip to the DMZ
Longish article in the Telegraph today about the increasing domestic economic woes in Iran, which puts pressure on current leadership of that country. If such a country is this state when the price of crude oil has been so high, albeit off its peaks – Iran is a major oil exporter – then imagine how things may pan out if the price of the black stuff goes down even more.
And how do I know? It has passed Julian’s Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT).
A press release from the Association of Chief Police Officers, not surprisingly, welcomes the latest police-state measures. But it seems they were taken by surprise, too:
Ref:21/07 January 17, 2007
ACPO COMMENT ON SERIOUS AND ORGANISATED CRIME BILL
ACPO spokesperson said:
�Tackling serious and organised crime is a serious issue to the police service. ACPO welcomes any measures that support us in our endeavours to combat this from of criminality�.
(Sic. Really – a direct cut-and-paste from here)
The unnamed (conceivably fictitious, since no-one is offered for interview) spokesmanperson – PC being the only correct thing about it – can only be referring to the Serious Crime Bill.
Can the Home Office not even get its news management right? A huge and complicated Bill is launched which will tear up important parts of common law, create major data-mining powers of an unprecedented nature, and create severe sanctions backed by imprisonment for people who have done nothing wrong at all if their conduct is deemed potentially helpful to criminals anywhere in the world. It was not drafted over the weekend.
It is a surprise the department failed to get a Chief Constable briefed and ready to stand up to say how wonderful it is in glorious detail, complete with scary illustrative anecdote – preferably involving paedophile terrorists. ACPO are left not knowing what the Bill is called. Or how to spell what they think it might be called. Still, they are so desperate to kiss the governmental arse that something supportive is rushed out, regardless that it is gibberish.
At some point current ACPO members will have sworn to uphold the law and keep the Queen’s peace. Is that not incompatible with being political lapdogs?
[Thanks to PJC Journal]
So, Yates of the Yard has arrested another lacky of the Blair Regime as part of his investigation into the cash for peerages crimes. When will the Godfather himself be nicked? I hope that the boys in blue are forcibly taking blood samples from these perps. After all, as Blair himself would say, it is in the interest of all our security that suspects contribute samples to the National DNA Database. What if Levy or Turner or Blair’s criminality manifests itself in other ways? We must have samples in case they offend again.
– Charles Pooter
I came across the Moses Wine novels of US blogger Roger L. Simon after reading his blog a few months. Blogging has opened my eyes to authors I might never have encountered before, and I am sure many readers of this site probably had similar experiences. I am a fan of John Scalzi’s science fiction books, for example, and came across them after seeing favourable mentions over at Instapundit. And so on.
I have been enjoying Roger’s book, Peking Duck, which relates the tale of Moses Wine’s trip to China in the late 1970s during the years immediately after the death of Chairman Mao. Wine is persuaded to go on a trip with a bunch of liberal-leftist writers, publishers, fashion models and various other Californians by his Aunt Sonya, who is a sort of ageing communist straight out of central casting. The group with whom Wine travels are shits of varying degrees of ghastliness, egomania and falseness. The book flags up Roger Simon’s own gradual shift away from socialism and Wine’s own observations on China and his travelling companions are well observed, all the more so for not being overtly political. It is a fictional version of PJ O’Rourke’s wonderful article, ‘Ship of Fools’, which depicted a group of far-left travellers to the former Soviet Union in his book, Republican Party Reptile.
The fondness among a certain demographic for communist and repressive regimes has not died out. By coincidence, blogger Matthew Sinclair recently fisked an appalling piece of flim-flam by the British writer Will Hutton, who can still not bring himself to acknowledge the full scale of the slaughter perpetrated in Mao’s China. (Hat-tip, ASI blog).
Of course, in reflecting on such matters, we should not forget that on the other end of the spectrum, there were plenty of people, like the Mitfords and so on, who were only too happy to travel to places such as Italy in the 1930s and drool over the supposed efficiency and orderliness of Fascism, or more recently, to defend ‘strong men’ types such as Saddam Hussein. Human capacity for folly is not confined to the left side of the spectrum.
Democratic Undergrounder 1: “Dude, Bush is a god-damn fascist. I asked everyone I know and like no one voted for him! Patriot Act, wiretaps made easier, locking up people in Guantanamo Bay without a trial… he’s like some whacked out Christian dictator!”
Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Yeah man! It’s so good to see Chavez in Venezuela sticking it to Bush’s buddies in the oil business! He’s gonna make Venezuela totally free now!
Democratic Undergrounder 1: “That’s right! Did you hear? He’s been given powers to rule by decree and now he can close down opposition newspapers, silence non-socialist radio stations and throw his political enemy’s asses in jail if they don’t do whatever his decree says.”
Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Woah, cool! One day I hope we’re as free as that in the USA!”
Of course, I am just imagining that discussion. I am sure nothing like that ever happened.
It seems that the Tory Party wants less market forces and more local political planning of the economy in order to stop local shops from closing.
But if enough local people wanted local shops to survive at the expense of supermarkets and out-of-town shopping centres, they would indeed already be voting for them… with their wallets and credit cards. Yet that notion seems not to compute with ‘Conservative’ Nick Hurd, the MP for Ruislip-Northwood. Presumably what he wants to ‘conserve’ is the power of local political activists by giving them even more power to decide who can and cannot make money in local communities. More ‘direct democracy’, eh Nick?
I must say the Spanish solution to people who cannot restrain themselves from meddling in the lives of others who want to just go about their business starts to look more appealing by the day.
There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
Although no official statement has yet been given, the Guardia Civil have indicated that they strongly believe those responsible for the murder of the 50-year-old mayor bore a grudge over his policies in the village. There is no shortage of contenders. During his 12 years in office, the mayor, a member of the conservative Popular Party and the owner of the village’s only guest house, had been involved in almost four dozen individual court cases with homeowners in Fago. He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.
[…]
“He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible,” he said.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered.
Just to state the obvious, White Rose is inactive. This is due to a simple lack of time on the part of the main contributors. Work, life, other blogging… alas White Rose is currently a ‘blog too many’.
Quite possibly WR will be reactivated at some point in the future as Gawd knows the need for it has not gone away.
TTFN.
Producing a plausible TV show about international terrorism without depicting Muslims is like producing a plausible TV Western without depicting cowboys.
– The indispensable Robert Bidinotto
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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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