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]
|
Mick Hartley quoted at some length the other day from this TimesOnline piece by Sarah Baxter, but I have only just read the thing itself. The first few paragraphs, which Mick Hartley did not recycle, are particularly choice, and I do quote them here, now:
A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.
There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.
Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.
After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”
Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. …
LOL indeed.
I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.
Meanwhile, I cannot help noticing and rejoicing that those Islamists have such a genius for pissing off their potential allies. From what I have been reading, they have achieved this same feat in the last year or two with the people of Iraq, no less. Compared to that momentous own goal, if own goal it turns out to be, pissing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed.
Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: “That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA.” That would change things a bit.
I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:
I would like to thank you for writing this article.
Having a Muslim political activist call for American civilians to be disarmed in their own country is just about the best politically supercharged endorsement for civilian gun ownership I can imagine. If the NRA was paying you to write this, it was money well spent (that is just rhetorical of course, I am sure they did not and you probably actually believe what you are saying). Please, keep writing more along this line!
But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake”
I hope he is still writing such articles.
Sooner or later, every Marxist expresses his sense of public duty by first telling you and me what to say and then what to think.
– Henry Porter
He is speaking specifically of Ken Livingstone, but it is beginning to be clear that little of the former student left of the ’70s now in power has parted with the spirit of Howard Kirk. Mao may be the model more than Marx. The Long March Through the Institutions being near its end, we face an obsession with controlling the detail of other’s lives and eliminating the possibility of resistance. You will not escape by avoiding thought or being silent about dissident; it is necessary to act in the approved manner to show your enthusiasm for progress and democracy.
As you might have noticed, the Samizdata server crapped out in a major way… and just to make it menthol, we also lost all our back-ups after 24th September (quite how that happened is still a bit unclear).
Well at least I had a separate set of back-ups also made by someone else, so no problem, thinks I… so imagine my happiness when I discover that the back-up back-up server crapped out some time ago and we were not in fact being backed up. That would have been nice to know.
I will be manually reconstructing the posts as best I can from the full RSS feeds.
Oh joy.
Needless to say I shall be setting up some sort of full site backup myself now.
I wonder what conclusions French voters will draw from this:
Down in the Pays Basque, the young natives are disconsolate. Immobiliers (estate agents) with sharp English marketing techniques are sprouting like radishes in the towns. In the markets, one hears three languages: Basque, French and English. And, astonishingly, in a nation so protective of its culture, some houses this summer had signs advertising them For Sale instead of À Vendre.
It was my French niece who saw them, out on her travels as a veterinary surgeon, and she came home to her small, rented house and dropped her handbag with an exasperated clunk on the table. What hope do we have of ever being able to afford a house, she said, when the Brits are paying crazy prices and we can’t compete? It’s just so depressing.
Partly this is a story about French economic decline. Economic decline often happens without you realising it. And then, suddenly, you do realise it. That factory you thought you had a safe job in for life gets abruptly closed, because the government has decided that the subsidies to keep it going are becoming too huge. You suddenly realise that private education for your kids is going to be forever beyond you, that where you live state education is actually getting worse, and that also you can not afford to move to where it is any good. Multiply little dramas like that by a million, and you have an entire country in economic decline. Thus, economic decline often impinges upon an electorate not in the form of rather meaningless statistics moaned about by journalists even as life goes on happily, but rather in the form of dramatic vignettes like this one, of vulgar English people invading the formerly idyllic French countryside.
Another French vignette of decline is of clever sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, who can not seem to get jobs worthy of their obvious talents and superior educations, unless they go to vulgar England. Even there, they will have to start out as waiters and waitresses, but at least they’ll have a chance of better things soon. In France, education is obviously far better than in vulgar England, but in vulgar England, for some reason probably involving evil America, more stuff is actually being done.
Another force which I think France is on the receiving end of here is the enormous difference that the internet, e-mail, etc., has made to the nature of life in the formerly deep countryside, of which France has a great deal, but England relatively little. (In Scotland it is different.) Simply, you can now do a lot more with your life when physically cut off from everything than you could twenty years ago. Did Engels say something about the “idiocy” of rural life? Some smug townie did. Well, now, country life is not nearly so idiotic as it was. Outsourcing is not just taking work from Europe to India, it is taking it from European cities jammed with commuters to European rural escape havens. The big thing they now sell in the countryside of places like France is not what the countryside grows, so much as how beautiful and nice it is to live in, provided you don’t have to scrabble about in the rural mud for a living. Thanks to email and the internet, organising the switch from suburb to country has also got a lot easier.
Or, to put it another way, the suburbs just got a lot bigger.
So, will France’s voters try to make the symptoms of economic decline and of the new super-suburbanisation illegal? Probably. Good luck with that, mes amis. You will need it. A smarter attitude would be to stop fretting about these changes and to start profiting from them, as many French people are already doing, of course, not least by selling their rural shacks for silly English money.
David Attenborough is forever finding unusual creatures in the deepest parts of the ocean. He tells us how they can see down there in the murky depths and how they mate. He tells us where they live, how they raise their young and how they use their tentacles to find prey. But he never tells us the most important thing: what they taste like.
– Jeremy Clarkson, the newspaper columnist and lead presenter of Top Gear, the BBC motoring programme. For people who do not know who David Attenborough is, he is the famous maker of very serious but also wonderfully filmed television documentaries about nature.
In a recent visit to the local library I had a look at this week’s edition of the Economist. There was a forty page section on Central Banks (government, or government backed, authorities that control the money supply – such as the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Union Central Bank, the Federal Reserve system, and so on) and couple of other articles on the same subject.
In the few minutes I spent looking at the material there seemed to be little on the money supply. Neither proper definitions of the various measures of the money supply, or information on their growth rates in the various countries over time. Of course, as an arch reactionary, I do not support the existence of Central Banks, but if was to write about them I would give most space to the primary function of these things – rather than just writing about interest rates, price rises (the modern definition of ‘inflation’), unemployment and so on. Unsurprisingly the rate of growth in the money supply may well effect these other things, but to write about them, in the context of Central Banking, without much examination of the record of various Central Banks and Central Bank like institutions in controlling the money supply is rather like writing about a room without really dealing with the elephant standing in the middle of it.
Of course there were other things in this week’s edition of the Economist, but some of this content was also rather odd. For example, we were informed that the Democrats were presently taking a harder line on controlling government spending than the Republicans in the United States.
Now it is quite true that over the last few years the Republicans, led by President Bush, have increased government spending wildly. However the Democrats denounced them for not spending enough money on X, Y, Z, over the same period. Also the article was about now, not the last few years, and presently the Democrats are pushing for vastly more government spending. Not just the Democrat candidates for President of the United States, but the Democrat controlled Senate and House of Representatives as well. These demands for more government spending are far greater than what the Republican candidates for President of the United States or the Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are suggesting. The article said that the Democrats support a “pay as you go” rule. But this has nothing to do with limiting increases in government spending, all it means is that massive increases in government spending should be matched by massive increases in taxation, and, sure enough, the Democrats support both.
I can only conclude that the person or people who wrote the article either do not know very much about the current situation in the United States, or do not know what the “pay as you go” rule is about – or both.
There does seem to be a basic knowledge problem in the Economist, even on British matters. For example, only last week there was an examination of the pre budget statement. It was not really a big increase in taxation, the Economist declared, – for example there were “many winners” from the changes in Capital Gains Tax.
An examination of the facts should have told the writer or writers of the article that the changes in Capital Gains Tax would mean far higher tax for most payers of it – and that this and the other tax changes did indeed mean higher taxes overall.
Why does anyone buy the Economist when it neither understands the relation of Central Banks to monetary policy or understands the fiscal situation in the United States or even its home country?
If you are opening (say) a chain of casual clothing stores in Portugal, and you want to give them an English name that you hope provides an image of stylish people driving fast cars, you might want to check with a number of native English speakers whether the word you choose might not have other meanings or connotations in English.
As a minimum, I cannot see Throttleman conquering the world in the way that other clothing labels from cities nearby have been known to, and however good their supply chain management appears to be (Zara of course are masters of this).
“We all have to compromise,” says Walt Chalmers (played by Robert Vaughn)
“Bullshit,” replies Frank Bullitt, (Steve McQueen).
From Bullitt.
I have considered over the last couple of days whether or not to write about an event. I feared, and still fear, that many people will either think I am making the whole thing up or that, at least, I am exaggerating to make a more ‘entertaining’ story. I am not making this event up, and I am not exaggerating – but I have no way to prove this.
Anyway here goes…
On Tuesday I went to an event ‘East Midlands Expo’ organized by the ‘East Midlands Region’ government. These ‘Regional’ governments are not desired by the public – but they are forced to pay for them anyway. The event was supposed to be about the ‘environment’. It was held in the buildings that form part of the Rockingham Speedway. This is sporting facility that is on the outskirts of the town of Corby in Northamptonshire.
Why this site was chosen I do not know. If the public were intended to attend this event it was a very bad choice of site – but if the event, and the cost of it, was meant to be hidden from the public it was a good choice of site. I overheard someone pointing to the helicopters that seemed to be flying round the site and saying “they are to keep the public out” – but I do not believe that to be true (it was just a coincidence).
There were some members of the public at the event. Some confused looking children, some in yellow helmets, were led around to various places. A few of these children were brought in to be photographed when a government person presented a cheque [pdf document] to two women dressed as ‘Eco-Pixies’.
However, nearly everyone at the event was either a councillor, a Local Government Officer, or a representative of a commercial enterprise trying to sell something – via various stalls. There was one stall that did not seem to be trying to sell anything – it was from the Romania government and its function at the event seemed to be to publicise Romania. This led a Local Government Officer I talked with, to describe the event as “Eco-Pixies meet Romania” – although, as far as I know, the Eco-Pixies did not visit the Romanian government stall. There were some stalls, outside, that were selling actual products (bread, cheese and so on) but the main stalls inside the event were from various large enterprises trying to interest politicians and officials in their services (to be paid by the taxpayers). The objective seemed to be to ‘network’.
Outside there was also part of a building made of straw. Not panels made of straw, just bales of straw. There were also various ‘workshops’ which were conducted in the English language – but a highly distorted form of it. As I went around talking to people and visiting stalls I found myself having difficulty in suppressing high pitched involuntary nervous laughter (what British people call “the giggles” – which is not as pleasant as it sounds) and I had to retreat to the toilet to recover – in order to avoid being rude.
After I recovered I took the special bus back to Kettering.
However, the events of the day had disturbed me and I went shopping, buying lots of ‘bad’ things. For example, bread and cheese, which I could have bought from the stalls outside the “Expo” – but I felt uncomfortable buying things there, I intend no disrespect to the people at the food stalls – perhaps the most honest people at the event.
Bread is denounced because of carbohydrate, and cheese is denounced because of fat – especially the high fat ‘Danish Blue’ cheese that I bought. I also bought alcohol for the first time in months, partly because alcohol had just been denounced on BBC Radio 4 that morning “there is no safe lower limit” (this did not concern driving – it was meant as general health warning). The alcohol I bought was Yorkshire ‘Old Peculiar’ beer – which I thought fitted the peculiar nature of the day. My shopping the local supermarket which might be considered environmentally unsound, but many of the organizations at the ‘Expo’ were rather big so I suppose the organizers are not totally against big business.
Anyway I then ate some bread and cheese and drank my beer in an effort to calm my mind – but I was not totally successful.
One of the best debunkers of lazy, collectivist economic thinking is the blogger Tim Worstall, who lives in the sunny climes of Portugal. His take-down of Polly Toynbee is just too good to miss. I particularly cannot help noticing the point about Sweden; the country, often held up as a model of social democratic goodness, is in fact moving in liberal directions in areas like education (vouchers), although it remains shockingly heavily taxed.
The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in Britain does not appear to be having any very detectable effect upon the level of crime.
Well, actually, that is not quite right. Total surveillance does dissuade the law-abiding from straying across the line. Surveillance cameras do slow up speeding motorists, for instance. But with one exception. They do far less to slow up motorists who are already criminals. These persons have little further to fear from the criminal-processing system than the complications they already have to live with as a result of already being criminals. In the unlikely event that they are traced, driving a car that isn’t theirs or that they have not reported to the various authorities that the rest of us must keep informed about everything, they are processed slowly and clumsily by the criminal-processing system. It is noted yet again that they are criminals, which everyone already knows, and that, pretty much, mostly, is it. Any punishments they suffer are as likely to be badges of honour as they are to be truly feared.
A law abiding citizen, on the other hand, wants very much not to be tarred, even faintly, with the brush of criminality. Being law-abiding, he is not an expert on how the criminal-processing system works and cannot take being processed by it in his stride. He does not know how and when to lie to it, for instance. He does not know how to phrase the statement “Do you know who I am?” in at all the correct manner. So, the law does restrain the law-abiding. (And that is a not insignificant benefit, provided only that at least some of the laws make sense, as a lot of them do.)
The most spectacular and often newsworthy instances of this contrast between the law-abiding and the criminals occur when the law-abiding fight back against criminals when they are attacked by them. When this happens, and in those cases when both parties are scooped up by the police, perhaps because the law-abider summoned the police and the police actually turned up, the criminals often come off better, because they then know how to handle things. The criminal lies about having aggressed, and in due course walks away. The law-abider tells the truth about how he defended himself, and can land in a world of trouble.
The effect of total surveillance, then, when combined with the rest of the criminal-processing system, is not to abolish criminality, but rather to ensure that we all have to decide, as one big decision for each of us: Am I going to be a criminal, or not? If I am, that’s one set of rules, criminal rules, which I must obey. If I am going to be law-abiding, then I must obey the law, whatever that exactly is. (And at all times, now that all infractions can be photographed and recorded for ever, everywhere. If that is not the case now, it soon will be.) But, because the law is so very intrusive and annoying and so full of complexities and arbitrarinesses and injustices, that creates a constant pressure on people to say: To hell with it, I’m going to be a criminal. Meaning: someone who doesn’t care who else knows he’s a criminal, and who can accordingly relax about being totally surveilled.
Let me be clear. I do not recommend the abolition of the criminal-processing system merely because it has such severe limitations. There are not nearly enough prisons to accommodate all criminals, but there are some. And my clear understanding is that a much higher proportion of the people in them are what I understand by the word “criminals” than is the case out here in the big, progressive, open prison that total surveillance is creating for the rest of us. Becoming a criminal means buying, so to speak, an anti-lottery ticket. If you lose, that is to say if you become a criminal and the criminal-processing system decides to go after you, you can suffer, and I hope that this is not merely wishful thinking on my part, quite severe grief. But it is also now my clear understanding that the odds facing the purchasers of these anti-lottery tickets are now quite good, and that the anti-prizes, even if you are awarded one, are in many cases not that severe. None of which deters criminals very much. They have placed their bet. But it must surely deter a great many people from deciding to become criminals in the first place. It certainly deters me. (But then, I have a lot to lose.)
The above ruminations are a mixture of my own opinions and those supplied to me by Theodore Dalrymple in a recent City Journal article. If you want to read his opinions uncontaminated by mine, do.
|
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.
|
