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.
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Fresh from his humbling at the hands of Hillary Clinton and following on from a statement indicating his willingness to invade Pakistan, Barack Obama ladles on credence to the increasingly ubiquitous assertion that he’s inexperienced:
I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance…involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.
Desperately wrong answer to (what should be) a deal-breaking question, Mr Obama. Sure, waving the threat of one’s nuclear weapons capacity around like a pair of chopsticks in a cheap Chinese restaurant is not sensible, because it ultimately reduces that capacity’s deterrent value – which is the only practical reason why a sane nation would field a nuclear arsenal in this world of other nations who also possess The Bomb. A wise leader does not even refer to his country’s nuclear weapons capacity, because the widespread knowledge of that capacity speaks for itself more effectively than any politician could ever hope to.
Conversely, it is sheer lunacy for a US President (or hopeful) to declare that he will never press the button, because such statements completely undermine the deterrent value of these weapons. Mr Obama, if you are not running on a platform of nuclear disarmament, you never take the nuclear option off the table. Ever. You made a most elementary strategic blunder – you are not a suitable candidate for the role of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.
A few months ago a student called Oli Cooper wrote to me to say that he was setting up a Libertarian Society at University College London. I took him for lunch and he explained his plans and I explained how such groups had worked elsewhere. The society does not officially launch until September but there is already a website and a feisty blog called The Torch.
I learn from the blog that since 1997, there’s been the equivalent of one new criminal offence a day. He beats up the UK government’s plans for extending punishment without trial. In one post he agrees with the hard-right Tory clique the Cornerstone Group but explains, lest readers get the wrong impression, that normally the Group “represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite.” Ouch.
I suspect we will be hearing a lot more from the UCL over the next couple of years.
For those here determined to hate the BBC and all its works, here is a reminder that it does do some useful things. That it isn’t quite in the mould of the fawning state broadcaster found almost everywhere in the world. Along with a reminder that some would like it to be.
This week File on 4 did the first really serious, probing investigation into HM Government’s National Identity Scheme that there has been in any media yet. You can listen to it here, and it is full of fascinating things for the attentive listener.
The most extraordinary is this testimony from IT consultant Peter Tomlinson:
The meetings were called by people in the Cabinet Office. There were topics on the agenda that were set by people in the Cabinet Office and we kept on thinking: why are we not seeing people from the Home Office.
Why are we not seeing technical people from the Home Office, or people involved in technical management? Eventually they began to come along but they never produced anyone who had any technical understanding of large-scale systems. We were just completely puzzled.
This is the first really solid public evidence I have seen that the scheme really is [or was?] intended by strategists at the highest level as a complete population management system and revolution in the nature of government, rather than being one by accident. That it is the emanation of a philosophy of government. It is it is not always good to have one’s analysis confirmed. In this case I would prefer not to have been vindicated.
Remember Philip Gould? He’s one of those high-level strategists.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
The philosophy is probably best summed up by a word from Foucault: governmentalism. Christopher Booker to the contrary, it is not a ‘mental’ creed of “The Mad Officals” but a pervasive pragmatism – using the natural history of humanity the better to shepherd it. The better shepherd is a member of the new innominate politico-bureaucratic class: maybe a civil ‘servant’, maybe a politician, maybe officially neither.
And just today a new example of the sage. A strategy memo has leaked to the Daily Mirror’s sharp political editor Kevin Maguire. Lord Gould allegedly writes:
No-one in Britain should have any doubt about what you stand for, what you want to achieve. You should position yourself as a powerful, muscular modernisation politician with the power and the determination to change Britain. You should aim to be a great reforming PM.
You have to meet this mood for change. You have to exemplify renewal and a fresh start.
Your Premiership has to have a dynamism and an energy that pulls people along in its slipstream. You must become the change that Britain needs.
There is a name for this, too. It is one of the most widely used populist techniques in world politics: Strong Man government, tribal leadership, caudillismo. A national security state, presided over by a Big Man – has “a nation of freemen, a polite and commercial people” (Blackstone), really come to that? When exactly did liberty become such a minority taste in Britain that it were possible?
[Just a footnote on the BBC below the fold.] → Continue reading: A modern Macchiavel
James Porter, the headmaster of a private school, has been convicted over the death of a three year old child who fell from some playground steps and died. The implications of this monstrous and truly idiotic ruling are that soon visits to the playground will become a thing of the past unless the students are wearing safety helmets and body armour and are supervised by a team of lawyers at all times.
It is a tragedy that a young child died after jumping down a few stairs but that is just the way life is… sometimes it ends in premature death for no good reason other that children are wont to act like children. That is sad but it is also not just no one’s fault, it is entirely acceptable as life has its casualties and to blame this teacher is truly, truly monstrous.
Of course it cannot have helped that James Porter made the supremely sensible but very politically politically incorrect statement that “[Children] need to learn how to move in any given situation in a way that will protect them from injury. If they don’t have that facility, if we simply wrap them in cotton wool, they will never learn that lesson.”
But never mind that everyone seems to agree that there was nothing unusually unsafe or in any way exceptional about this particular flight of steps, this man has been found guilty under some preposterous health and safety regulations regardless. We seem to be heading down the enervating and idiotic path blazed by the United States in which every mishaps has to be someone else’s fault regardless of common sense or natural justice. Appalling.
Stephen Pollard, the UK writer and BBC Newsnight anchorman Jeremy Paxman may not agree about everything, but these two are certainly on the same page when it comes to a dismissive view of so-called “arthouse” movies. In particular, Paxman appears to have triggered a mini-storm when he said recently less than complimentary things – Paxman is not exactly what I would call a diplomat – about the late director, Ingmar Bergman. Quite right too. On Tuesday evening’s show, Paxman, journalist Toby Young and some film reviewer fellow from the Financial Times were having a right old argument about whether art house films are worth the effort. I tend to side with Toby Young: long after people have forgotten about the likes of Bergman, they will be watching the films made by Hitchcock, John Ford, Coppolla and the rest.
I think the problem are the words “art house”. It conveys the idea that the benighted viewer is not just watching a film, but is having some wonderfully clever experience which is likely to be lost on the plebs. There is a lot of anti-bourgeois posturing in such films. Worse, they are self-indulgent. I find most of them unwatchable. I’d rather watch Bruce Willis in Die Hard any day of the week than this stuff. And the point that the FT writer – I forgot his name – seemed to overlook is that films that lack plots, strongly defined characters, a sense of life and drama, do not achieve the lofty goal of somehow making us “think about the big lessons of life”. (He probably regards films with a beginning, middle and an end as “popcorn movies.”) Arguably, you are more likely to learn a bit about humanity if you watch The Simpsons or The Incredibles rather than some dreary French art flick.
Talking of witch, Die Hard 4.0 is on. I must get some tickets.
We should really ban oxygen as well: bullies use that also. That would take care of the problem, right and proper.
– Greg Lorriman, Leatherhead, UK, a commenter on a Times (of London) article about the supposed terrors of bullying via such sites as YouTube. Amazing what people find to get alarmed about, isn’t it?
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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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